Patriarchal Oppression in the Industrial Gothic Anonymous College

American Gothic literature arose during the early years of America’s founding, adopting some characteristics from the European tradition and establishing others in order to capture the turmoil and anxiety present in revolutionary America. As with any great literature, it changed with time, and these traditional tropes began to present themselves in new and unique ways that had to be interpreted by the reader. Two tropes that remained in Gothic texts but were utilized far differently than when the genre arose are the woman in distress and the dominating, tyrannical male.

In his short story, “The Tartarus of Maids,” Herman Melville employs these characteristics of the Gothic in order to highlight the mistreatment of women in an industrialized society. In his work, Melville employs the Gothic trope of the woman in distress, and applies it to laboring women who have become slaves to the patriarchal forces that permeate society. Traditionally, the woman in distress is depicted as a powerless woman who lacks agency and control over her distress and physical reactions, often caused by a male (Hamilton 8/31/2016). In Melville’s “Tartarus of Maids,” the women lack agency because they are at the mercy of the mill owner, and therefore...