ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the meaning of the motherless creation in Herman Melville’s short story The Bell-Tower, later republished as part of The Piazza Tales. The so-called iron slave (also known as Haman or Talus) of Melville’s short story exposes the purpose of the author’s repeated use of the term slave throughout his work: to plead the case of artists whose work is threatened by the industrial economy. The Bell-Tower was published during an inflection point in Melville’s career, when he struggled to make a living from his writing. The motherless creation of The Bell-Tower is a clock automaton, and working with machines means the loss of humanity, sexuality, and the future in Melville’s fiction. Melville’s story shares British and European Romantics’ skepticism about pursuing perfecting humanity through technology but builds a self-reflexive allegory that eschews either family or romance. The sarcastic moral lesson of The Bell-Tower teaches readers that pursuing great art without an appreciative audience will result in killing machines that destroy true artists. Thus, the iron slave serves as a surrogate to contemplate the white artist’s plight and ingenuity. The Bell-Tower disguises the true horrors of slavery in nineteenth-century America by applying the term to express the anxieties of white professionals. This chapter supports this argument by reflecting on Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination and interpreting The Bell-Tower in the context of Melville’s other fiction: Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!, Moby-Dick or the Whale, Benito Cereno, Tartarus of Maids, and Bartelby, the Scrivener.
