Elegy for a Heroic Age
Throughout the first section, the narrator ironically situates the modern day inhabitants of the Temple with the original Knights Templar. Early in the narrative, he poses the rhetorical question “do these degenerate Templars now think it sweeter far to fall in banquet than in war?” The story’s conclusion is an ironic answer to a question no longer merely rhetorical. His sardonic observation that the modern Temple is “the very Paradise of Bachelors” is the punctuation mark to an essay delineating how far from glory the modern day incarnation has fallen from their inspiration.
Marxism
The strangely unclassifiable work of Melville reveals the strong influence of a work which was published shortly before the real-life visits to the Temple and a paper mill which inspired it: Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. The pale, bloodless girls who work in the paper mill foreshadow Marx’s characterization of capitalist ownership class within the metaphor of vampires, but perfectly illustrate his contention that industrialization has made the worker “an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required” of them.
Gender Inequality
The lawyers enjoying the pleasures of robust meals, comfortable furniture, benches beneath shade trees upon which to lounge and enjoy friendly repartee are placed in juxtaposition to the pale girls working every day in a room “stifling with a strange, blood-like, abdominal heat.” The lawyers produce nothing, but reap all the benefits, while the girls produce paper like clockwork and are destined to die unknown, unmissed, and unloved. To suggest that Melville was well ahead of his time on the issues of women’s rights and sexism is to state perhaps an obvious fact as to why he died with his the bulk of his work unknown, unmissed, and unloved.
