Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids and Other Stories Literary Elements

Short story fiction; social commentary; diptych

Setting is essential to the construction parallel construction of the story which places its two distinct and separate parts in opposition to each other in nearly every way. “The Paradise of Bachelors” takes place in London during the sunny spring arrival of warmth in May inside the gaudy revelation of well-financed brotherhood of modern day Templars inside a London gentlemen’s club. “The Tartarus of Maids” is set during in the bleak frigid winter of New England at an isolated paper mill.

The narrator is the same in both stories. He is not identified by name in either and is portrayed as something of a man of leisure during his visit to London. The opening of the second section quickly reveals more specific information, however: he is a very successful seed distributor.

The tone of the story is surprisingly journalistic considering the far more emotionally intense mood. Language is precise, observational and deceptively objective and aloof. This tone is one of the few literary aspects that is maintained in both stories. The two stories taken together are what produce the singular mood which is best describes as a mixture of outrage and disillusionment at the turn American capitalism was taking under the auspices of the Industrial Revolution. When tone and mood are combined, the result effective allows the text to be identified as a work steeped in ironic narrative.

Protagonist: the narrator. Antagonist: patriarchal capitalism as a consequences of the Industrial Revolution.

The primary conflict at work in the story may be very difficult for some readers to ascertain as it lacks a distinct plot or storyline. Working in tandem to present the world of privileged males in the first part and exploited women in the second, the story becomes an example of thematic conflict: the inequitable social, economic and gender consequences of industrial capitalism.

The climax occurs as a subtle epiphany arriving at the conclusion of both parts. Part one ends with the narrator observing to his friend about the Temple that it “is the very Paradise of Bachelors.” Part two concludes with parallel observation that directly ties the first to the second: “all alone with inscrutable nature, I exclaimed— Oh! Paradise of Bachelors! and oh! Tartarus of Maids!” The climax is thus the narrator’s awakening to class consciousness of the inequitable gender division associated with the capitalist superstructure.

“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.” This description of the “maids” who work in hellish conditions of the demonic paper mill essentially foreshadows every dystopic 20th century story ever written. It foretells the coming of the metaphor of the mind-numbing deadly vacuous of industrialized factory work as well as the emptiness that is the consequence of the vain pursuit of wealth simply through hard work in a system fixed against that approach.

Foreshadowing and metonymy collide with understatement in the third sentence of the story. The narrator simply notes with no expansion of meaning that he has arrived at the paradise that that is the Temple Bar "soiled with the mud of Fleet Street." This is understated way of saying his work is somehow related to the printing business. What that business is will not be explained until he several months and an entire continent away from London at the beginning of the second section of the story.

Although often mistakenly confused with the concept of Christian hell, Tartarus is actually a very specific place of torment designed for a very specific reason in Greek mythology. Tartarus is portrayed a torture dungeon located deep within an abyss set aside solely for the tormenting the wicked in general, but as a prison where the Titans were made to suffer. It is placed in juxtaposition to paradise, which is also technically an allusion, but not one which really needs any explanation.

The dominant imagery in the section about the bachelor paradise is one constructed of conversation, allusions, and objects related to the past. This imagery situates the men and their lifestyle as outdated and out of place in the modern world of industrialization affording heretofore unknown opportunities. By contrast, the dominant imagery associated with the maids is not related to history, but economics. The women are drained, mute, lifeless and constantly moving zombie-like in service to the infernal machine: “Machinery—that vaunted slave of humanity—here stood menially served by human beings, who served mutely and cringingly as the slave serves the Sultan.”

The ironic inversion of the expected consequence of the rise of the machine at the dawn of the Industrial Age provides the story with not just an example of paradox, but one of its most memorable images: “Machinery—that vaunted slave of humanity—here stood menially served by human beings, who served mutely and cringingly as the slave serves the Sultan.”

The entire story is an exercise in parallelism. Privileged bachelors are placed in parallel juxtaposition with exploited maids. The warmth and excess of the Temple stands in stark parallel to the cold sterility of the paper mill. Even the narrator is paralleled against himself: he is almost a completely mystery in the opening second with the mysteries of his identity solved in the second.

An example of foreshadowing within the text of something that actually occurs within the text is made in the third line of the story through the subtle use of metonymy. The narrator informs the reader he has arrived as the Temple Bar with his shoes still stained by the “mud of Fleet Street.” Fleet Street is a very recognizable metonym used to describe the fact that so much of the printing business (and later the British press) was located in that section of London. “The Tartarus of Maids” will pay off this foreshadowing when it is finally revealed that the narrator’s line of work is tied to the mass production of paper.

The system of machinery which eventually produces the final product at the paper mill reaches its climax at the end of the line with its personification into one of the mill’s female workers itself through imagery which is highly suggestive of the machine actually giving birth to the foolscap which is the ultimate purpose: “I saw a sort of paper- fall, not wholly unlike a water-fall; a scissory sound smote my ear, as of some cord being snapped”