ABSTRACT
“Charity and its Discontents” discovers the sense of sin and society that looms large in the magazine fictions to which Melville retreated after the embarrassing failure of Pierre. Famously, “Bartleby the Scrivener” scrupulously details the slow and partial, yet real enough, sympathy a Manhattan lawyer feels for his hapless, yet strangely intransigent scrivener. A thematic of will and prefer rises inevitably enough—unless we prefer the powerful if reductive political alternative: It’s Wall Street, for God’s sake, the Capital of American Capitalism; the scriveners are all underpaid; and if you went looking for alienated labor, what better than making copies of rich men’s financial instruments. But if “Bartleby” permits a Marxist reading, “Cock-a-Doodle Doo” appears to be about Marx, who rightly held that “Religion is the opium of the people”—and also, less famously, “It is the cry of the heart in a heartless world.” Witness the family of wood-sawyer Merrymusk: his employer (along with just every elite person in the first half of the nineteenth century) takes opium for all that ails him, but the Merrymusk family, dying of malnutrition, has only the hope of their otherworldly fantasy. And then there’s the poor deserted Marianna: what charity or social program could help the woman who has only shadows for friends and accidentally names her shadow dog Tray, after one so called in King Lear. What could the Narrator do—except perhaps buy her a ticket to Lowell, Massachusetts, where a kindly capitalism had established a Tartartus of Maids? Are some ills truly “excessive and organic”?
