Suffering and Protesting in Bartleby

In the novella, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” Herman Melville writes about a defiant and eccentric scrivener who ceases to work for his frustrated, yet seemingly sympathetic employer, known as the Lawyer. Many critics argue that Bartleby is the embodiment of Melville’s own frustration with the contemporary capitalist labor system, which became more hostile towards workers as cities across the country embraced industrialism and mechanization that displaced human labor. Indeed, the tragic outcome of the Lawyer’s most curious employee, Bartleby, is a direct result of the impersonal and exploitative working conditions that the Lawyer establishes. Incapable of improving detrimental working conditions, Bartleby resorts to protesting employer-employee disparities by committing suicide.

A major contribution to Bartleby’s fate is his low prospects for advancing to a higher job position. For instance, the critic David Kuebrich points out that “Turkey is still a copyist in his old age,” (386). If the oldest of the Lawyer’s employees has not risen to a more significant job position, then certainly Bartleby, who has less job experience, will be unlikely to rise up the social ladder as well. This is further evident when the Lawyer describes his youngest employee, Gingernut. Gingernut, whose father wanted to see him “on the bench instead of a cart,” (9) had aspirations to become a lawyer, just like his employer. Yet his “aspiration for advancement seems unrealistic,” (386) notes Kuebrich who argues that he “eagerly absents himself” (386) from his employer’s errands as he slowly assumes the role of an errand-boy. While quitting their jobs may have been the scriveners’ first instincts, it was unlikely to find work elsewhere in the rapidly industrializing cities of the time, where machinery displaced human labor across many fields. Melville himself resided to commercial sailing and whaling, occupations that were certainly impossible to mechanize, after his...