Taratus of the Maids

Aside from "Bartleby" my favorite short story of Melville's is "Taratus of the Maids." Written during his down period it resonates with gloom, grim fantasy, and dark symbolism; and for people like me who wallow in symbolism, I find it dramatic and fascinating, very playful and way ahead of his time. I suppose you could say the imagery is, if you will,  overcooked, somewhat like his novel Pierre. But that's why these stories of his down period are so intriguing: the images and language may be exaggerations but they are meant to suggest there is a mystery hidden behind the facade of ordinary reality; they are also meant to implicate the inhumanity of the Industrial revolution. As an example of what I mean the man on his way to the paper mill in "Taratus" is called a "seedman" and the mill itself is found by traveling through "the black notch" which is described as "a Dante gateway," which runs along side "the Blood River" into the hollow called the "Devil's Dungeon," in the "invisible low-lands." The mill itself is described as "some great whited sepulchre, against the sullen background of the Woedolor Mountains." A guide named Cupid takes the seedman through the factory/mill to see the vast machine that never shuts down and wears out a pathetic tribe of virgin girls taken from nearby villages. Having worked in five factories myself, I get the picture. One summer I worked in a small punch press factory. There wasn't a guy in the place who wasn't missing a finger.  Melville draws a picture of a frozen place, or what he calls "all-stiffening influence." The seedman" hustles to get away from this cold, dead place. He gets on his horse named "Black" and goes through "the Mad Maids Bellow-pipe" and "the Black Notch" away from "the inflexible iron "animal." "The Taratus of the Maids" draws a very negative picture of the all-encompassing influence of the Industrial enterprise rolling across America. To an extent, the story anticipates the tales on Franz Kafka.

Another book that I told S.B. she had to read to get an essential grasp of what Melville was all about, the changes he went through as an author of fierce honesty, is The Feminization of American Culture by Ann Douglas who teaches at Columbia University in NYC. Most of the book is devoted to the idea that most readers of fiction in the 19th century were of the genteel class, that is to say, they were women and their taste in literature was shaped by sentimental values and sappy religiosity. These are the values hawked in public by preachers and were accepted by the mainstream of readers. Preachers and holier-than-thou-critics teamed to push these values on the reading public, values that Melville increasingly despised. His first few books received a decent reception, although he received plenty of criticism for his anti-christian stance toward missionaries, who he felt were corrupting, not helping, the native islanders. Then he wrote Moby Dick which summed up what he had learned up to that point, a monumental novel in which he transcended everything he had done before, although Typee is a book so fresh, original, and singular it still rates highly as far as I am concerned. It reflects the birth of his power of thought and imagination. The book was well-received among the intelligentsia but not the general public who saw the book as bloated, far-fetched and too pro-natives, plus a tad racy. Think of Faraway, his lovely companion. The poor reception and sales of what he knew was an epochal book crushed his spirit, so then he wrote the rash and somewhat loony novel Pierre. It is a tale about a son who follows the sentimental culture his dominating mother ardently believes in, a son who then turns to a father that was unfaithful to his mother and fathers a girl with another woman, and son takes up with her, Isabel, the dark female, with whom he commits incest with, while dropping the girl, Lucy, (which means Light) who no longer his female of choice, the girl his mother wanted him to marry. They run away to NYC to live like "Bohemians" to write as he will. The novel ends tragically with a scene that will remind many of the end of Romeo and Juliet.

The public was outraged over the book, calling it filthy, shocking, and worse, which is exactly what Melville intended. Ann Douglas contends that HM from this point on writes 
to irritate the sentimental  public who can't comprehend a serious artist who has profound insight and skill. Being unwavering in his own convictions, he threw his stories into the face of the genteel crowd who never again would buy his books or stories. He fed off the hostility till he finally dropped out, forsaking his ambitions as a public figure. He had had enough of "snivilization." When the public asked why don't you write pleasant tales about the sea and exotic lands, HM would say, like Bartleby, "I would preferred not to."