Bartleby The Scrivener Essay

Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” was written in the mid-nineteenth century, during a time of economic revolutions across Europe and class struggles in New York. The context of the story and the environment in which it was written encourages an analysis from the lens of a Marxist criticism. This form of criticism perceives literature as a reflection of class struggle and materialism. It tends to view literature as a product of the economic and ideological elements particular to the era in which they were written and maintains that authors project their own analysis of class and class relations into their writing.
Barbara Foley argues, in her critical article “From Wall Street to Astor Place: Historicizing Melville's
Reed argues that Bartleby’s refusals are firstly due certify relations of equivalence. Bartleby not only prefers not to work, but prefers to remain in the office indefinitely and not receive the wages rightly owed to him. Indeed, a refusal of circulation is necessarily a refusal of equivalence, for as Marx illustrates through the expanded form of value, circulation is predicated on the infinite substitutability of one commodity for another: ‘‘‘there can be no exchange without equality.’’’ In resisting circulation, what Bartleby avoids are these relationships of equality. Thus, Bartleby should not be understood as an alienated worker unless we understand alienation itself as his complaint. Alienation is the representation of one thing’s value in something else, which is possible only if these two things can be equated and thus substituted; Bartleby’s desire to escape these relations of equivalence, though never overtly declared, is evident in the common core of his various refusals. (Reed
This riot began as a dispute between two actors, Edwin Forrest and Charles Macready, but quickly escalated into a class struggle between the lower class that largely supported Forrest, and the upper classes, who supported Macready. Although this riot is not mentioned in “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, it is arguably important to the genesis of Melville’s short story because he resided only two blocks away from the theater. Melville was also a follower of Macready; therefore in the context of the riot, he allied himself with the upper class (Foley 102). Considering that a class distinction is evident within the story itself and the issue of property is clearly addressed it seems only logical that these events affected Melville’s writing in that class is one of the central themes in “Bartleby, the