Living in the Past
The bachelors whom the narrator meets during dinner at the Temple are presented as living in the past and external to actual experience. Discourse during the meal is filled with imagery that cements their existence as alienated from the active life which characterized their forebears. The imagery presented as topics of discussion—old Flemish architecture, antiquities in the British Museum, a trip to Old Granada, an anecdote from the life of the Duke of Wellington—all serve to implicate these latter-day Templars as disengaged from life and the concerns of the present.
A Trip to Hell
The description prose presented at the beginning of the narrator’s trip to the New England paper mill is filled with allusive imagery that creates the sense that this will be a trip into hell. The topographical descriptions of the regional geography references Dante’s Inferno and Pluto, the Greek god of the Underworld. The hellishness of these allusions is intensified with names for landmarks like Devil’s Dungeon, Mad Maid’s Bellows’-Pipe, Blood River and the Black Notch.
Birth Imagery
The process of creating paper which is handled by virginal maids is laden with sexually suggestive imagery that compares it to the period of gestation resulting in birth which the women will never actually know. The entire process takes exactly nine minutes—an image related to the nine months gestation period of a human being. The process commences with pulp described as “white, wet, woolly-looking stuff, not unlike the albuminous part of an egg, soft-boiled” and climaxes with the paper arriving fully formed in looking “not unlike a water-fall” and accompanied by a sound like “some cord being snapped.”
Blankness
The word “blank” or a variation of it occurs sixteen times over the course of the “Tartarus of Maids” section of this work by Melville. In addition, the narrator alludes to though does not directly mention John Locke’s concept of the human mind coming into existence as a tabula rasa; a blank slate upon which experience writes knowledge. So vital is the imagery of the girls working in the paper mill being themselves as blank as the sheets of paper they work to create that Melville is moved to write a sentence so loaded with its significance that it is practically impossible to miss: “At rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper.”
