The Paradise of Bachelors
The narrator describes a visit to the Inns of the Court located near the ceremonial entrance to the city of London known as the Temple Bar. Within this cloistered halls only men—no women are allowed—who mostly represent the judicial milieu of the city. The social alienation of the men within is counterpoised to the legends of the Knights Templar and their legendary exploits in the Holy Land. From these hallowed origins, the offspring of the Temple has led to men who know better how to shake another’s hand with congeniality than act the role of a warrior-priest.
The narrator describes the luxuriousness and sumptuous of the Temple which is like a city itself, complete with a park and even a riverside. Portraits of famous Templars from the past line the halls before telling of his specific appointment at the Elm Court Temple where he joined nine bachelors for dinner. To get there requires interminable stairs to get an apartment old, but comfortable furniture situated beneath a low ceiling. Dinner commences with a bowl of ox-tail soup and a glass of sherry before getting to the meat of the matter roast beef, turkey, mutton, chicken pie and flagons of ale. After a dessert of tarts and pudding, the men engage in discourse on remembrance of things past. Their knowledge of this past is based somewhat on events from their youth, but more dependently upon museum visits and history books.
Finally, after a long night of shared company, food, drink and discourse, the discourse breaks up, having notably accomplished nothing and leaving the narrator with nothing more than he brought with him. The lingering narrator is moved to observe that the Temple is, truly, “the very Paradise of Bachelors.”
The Tartarus of Maids
The same narrator now tells of a visit to a New England paper mill for the purpose of purchasing envelopes. The trip is highly symbolic, taking his buggy through areas with names like Mad Maid’s Bellows’-pipe, Black Notch, Blood River and the Devil’s Dungeon as he makes his way to a location not far from Woedolor Mountain.
The paper mill is juxtaposed to the Temple most obviously by virtue of all its workers being women with two exceptions. Old Bach, the overseer and a boy named Cupid who acts as his guide. The narrator observes the process by which chopping rags are converted paper. Notably symbolic, it takes just nine minutes for the maidens in charge of this process to give birth to a type of paper called foolscap. The process for the women themselves seems to have the opposite effect; they have all become pale and bloodless, as though near-death or already ghosts. Throughout the demonstration, the only dialogue which takes place is between the narrator and Cupid; the women just go on silently working.
Before he leaves, the narrator inquires as to why all women who work in factories—not just this one, but seemingly every factory—are always referred to as “girls” regardless of how vast the span might be of the actual age of employees. Cupid answers that that he never really thought about it, but surely in the case of the paper mill it is because only unmarried women are ever hired. Pained by this new fact, the narrator makes haste to leave, heading out into the cold to find his horse shivering. He wraps blankets around the animal and departs from the Devil’s Dungeon thinking back to the Temple Bar, exclaiming to no one, “Oh! Paradise of Bachelors! and oh! Tartarus of Maids!”
