Melville, Dickinson, Twain, Du Bois, Hughes

THE PARADISE OF BACHELORS AND THE TARTARUS OF MAIDS

short story, 1855

It is a combination of two sketches, one set in the center of London's legal industry and the other in a New England paper factory. In the first sketch there are London bachelors enjoying a meal in a cozy apartment near the Temple Bar; in the second sketch, the New England "maids" are young women working in a paper factory. We can say that this story is a paradox of two environments existing side by side, and very interesting are the differences in how the narrator described both environments' physical traits and how they relate to each other. The Paradise of Bachelors is described in detail as a lush, decadent place with a warm atmosphere; so where the bachelors live is expressed as the ultimate paradise. To be a bachelor, according to this text, means that a man lives this carefree indulgent life without responsibilities of domestic life, like having a wife or children; basically if a man

doesn’t have such domestic duties, he lives a great life. On the contrary, when the narrator describes his journey to the paper mill, he accounts of a very different atmosphere than what he had noted in the Paradise of Bachelors. He travels in harsh blizzard conditions, riding through treacherous areas of the woods and deep valleys. He finally comes upon a large building seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and he is overpowered by the environment he sees when he goes inside: rows of girls like zombies making paper. The blank paper symbolizes how frighteningly empty the girls are, they seem to be robbed of what makes them human. The irony between the bachelors and the maids is that the source of much of the paper they make comes from old clothes and rags from the bachelors and Melville expresses the economic reality between both environments: the maids make the paradise for the bachelors, and the bachelors make the tartarus/hell for the working women. The story was written while

Industrialization was peaking in America and the division between upper and lower classes was becoming more evident through factory labor. Melville was not a political man, but the story makes a clear cry out for the impoverished, tortured women who worked at the factories. The psychological aspect of the story, examining the slave-like being of the women and the domineering nature of the men, shows Melville's distaste of industrialization and man's nature of taking advantage of their own kind for their profit.

MOBY-DICK novel, 1851. The narrator is the sailor Ishmael, who narrates the story of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, who wants revenge on Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that on a previous voyage bit off Ahab's leg at the knee.

EMILY DICKINSON 1830-1886

Emily Dickinson is recognized as one of the Greatest American poets. She produced an enormous canon of poetry while locked in her room, but her personal life and its mysteries have sometimes overshadowed.

Her achievements in poetry and her extraordinary innovations in poetic form. She used dashes and syntactical fragments to convey her pursuit of a truth that could be best communicated indirectly; her use of enjambment (the technique of running past the conventional stopping place of a line or a stanza break) forced her reader to learn where to pause to collect the sense before reading on, often creating ambiguities.

Her complex lyrics explore a wild range of subjects: physic pain and joy, the relationship of self to nature, the spiritual and the ordinary. In her poems about religion she expressed piety and hostility. Writing about religion, science, music, nature, books and contemporary events both national and local, Dickinson often presented her poetry in a highly abstracted moment or setting, often at the boundaries between life and death; the result was a poetry that focused on the speaker's response to a situation rather than the details of the situation itself. Her many love poems seem

to have emerged in part from close relationship with at least a woman and several men, but she was not a confessional poet; rather, she used inverted first-person speakers to dramatize the various situations, moods and perspectives she explored in her lyrics. Her poems are individually short, but when collected in one volume, her nearly eighteen hundreds poems, produce the feel of an epic work created by a person who devoted much of her life to her art.

Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. She was surrounded by New England Calvinism, but she refused to join her family's church and she was also a good student until she had to leave the school because of health problems. In the years prior to her cloistered existence at the house in Amherst, she was quite social until something changed in her life, and that change is one of the greatest mysteries surrounding Dickinson's legend. Sometime around 1850 she began writing poems, which at first were traditional and followed

The established forms; but then she began experimenting with the form and structure of the poems, and many of her innovations form the basis of modern poetry. During the following decades Dickinson became even more reclusive, she dressed only in white and locked herself in her room for days at a time; moreover, a number of people close to her died in quick succession, including her mother. In 1886 her health began deteriorating and she was only fifty-six when she died.

POEM 39 1858

This poem deals with some of the many deaths that plagued her life. It is a ballad composed of two stanzas of four lines each, which have a rhyming pattern of A-B-C-B. The protagonist, as in many of her poems, is Emily.

The first stanza tells us that she has lost two people that had been very important to her; we know that they died by the word which refers to the upper layer of soil. She goes on saying that she has prayed and begged God twice, to give her some relief for her loss.

The second stanza opens with the image of

angels descending to reimburse Emily, God has answered her prayers, maybe sending a new relationship. But Burglar-Banker-Father in the third line the words means that God has played all these roles: he acted as a father sending angels to reimburse her, as a banker because the reimbursements were only loans, and as burglar when stealing poor once more. another important person from her, and thus she is

POEM 112 1859

In this poem, Dickinson uses great images of a winning army and a dying soldier to illustrate that only those who have experienced defeat can understand and acknowledge the real value of success, and people require failure to fully appreciate something.

In the first stanza, the speaker expresses that in order to fully and truly understand victory, one must know failure, it will create more appreciation for the success that is earned.

The second stanza explains that even though technically they have won, the winning soldiers do not understand the meaning of success because they have not

experienced failure. Finally, in the third stanza, the speakers uses the dying soldier as an example of somebody who has failed, and yet understand what truly feels like to win. Dickinson emphasizes on how the fallen soldier understands and appreciates the value of success more than the victorious soldiers, because he has been defeated; he hears them celebrating their victory and it makes him want it more.

POEM 124 1859

This poem focuses on the resurrection of those who have led humble Christian lives and it has strong religious and natural imagery. The syntax is unusual, some lines end with a dash, others with a comma, indicating a pause for the reader.

The poem considers the dead safe in their tombs, nothing can affect the dead, not the coming of morning or the heat of the noon, nor the passing of years, Diadems-drop the fall of kings or queen, as the words suggest. These events make as little impact on the sleep of the dead as raindrops falling on snow. But safe: Dickinson seems to be implying

something else with the word this idea suggests someone tucked up safely in bed, protected from the dangers of the Alabaster Chambers outside world. The imply wealth, and so do other words Grand, Diadems, Doges, used throughout the poem, as so we can say that the Meek poem is about a certain class of dead. Plus, the word is ironic, because Jesus said that the meek are blessed because they will inherit the world, but there is little that is “meek” in the rich dead that inhabit those alabaster chambers

POEM 202 1861

Faith is a term that can be considered in many different ways, but usually the first thing that comes to mind when someone says “faith” is something of religious connotation, and indeed that is how Dickinson is using it here. For some, faith is a tool used to explain their own lack of interest in facts, while others simply look at faith as a powerful energy that allows them to face their Faith is a fine invention, see fears. So that helps the men who in difficult

times, Microscopes while the term refers to science in general which, based on facts, is prudent in an emergency. So the main idea Dickinson is suggesting in this poem is that there should be a balance between religion and science in our lives.

POEM 207 1861

In this poem, Dickinson uses the metaphor of drunkenness to describe her intoxication with nature. Enjoying the richness of the natural world is like tasting an alcohol drink more good than has ever been brewed out of tankard made from pearl.

But the speaker is drunk on air and on dew found all around her in the natural inns of molten blue world. The description of the clear sky as is especially vivid, endless summer days with the "endless" of suggesting the infinite nature of the heavens above.

And nothing will stop her from taking such delight in nature: even when bees no longer gather nectar from the foxglove, an image that remind us that bees get drunk on the nectar they collect, she will still be found getting drunk on its joys.

The final stanza she wrote that when seraphs (angels) make the clouds move (suggesting rain), and saints run to the window to see such a sight, they will find her, the "little Tippler" (habitual drinker), leaning against the sun, drunkenly enjoying it.

POEM 225 1861

In a society that values marriage highly and spinsterhood not at all, Emily Dickinson sometimes finds herself profoundly lonely, and in this poem she imagines what it would feel like to put girlhood and spinsterhood behind (by the time this poem was written she was 31, so she would surely have been considered a spinster). The frustration she has with her current status comes through loud and clear when she calls it "In comparison, to be a wife Czar Woman" is to be a "and a The change is put in cosmic terms, it's an Eclipse, which means that as a wife.