Tom Blaich

Prof. Warren Rosenberg

14 November 2013

English 219

Incidents in the Life of a Scrivener: The Similarities Between Two Different Cultures

When you look at two works, one of the first things that you can see with a critical eye are the

obvious similarities and differences in character, setting, plot, and language, which often can set two

works rather far apart. But when we dig deeper into these works, we can find some rather surprising

parallels that we would have otherwise labeled as very different. Take for example the Herman

Melville short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” and Harriet Jacob's “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”.

On their surface, these are two, very different stories. One is fiction, one is non-fiction. One relates the

life of a girl growing up in slavery and her escape from that life into one of a fugitive, and the other is

about a copywriter in a law office with a penchant for “preferring not to”. One is set in the slave

owning south, and one is set in Manhattan. One ends with a man dying in prison, and one ends with a

woman finally escaping slavery. But within these stories, there is much attention paid to the ideal of

freedom, and the struggle for each of these characters to grasp it in their life, with the public perception

of this choice weighing heavily upon the characters.

The way that this freedom is shown is seemingly different in each story, but really, it all boils

down to a refusal to accept the orders of the “master”. In Bartleby, this comes through his preference

not to engage in certain tasks, which allows him to grasp his freedom, and in “Incidents” this comes

from her refusal to allow the master to govern her life to the degree that he wanted, particularly within

the realm of sexual relations and her family, “Sometimes, when my master found that I still refused to

accept what he called his kind offers, he would threaten to sell my child.” They both refuse their orders,

but what happens next is where the stories perceptions of freedom become different, and that is much

the fault of the setting of each story.

“Bartleby” is set within the northern city of Manhattan, which we can see as a critique of the

increasingly industrialized nature of our cities. But “Incidents”, on the other hand, is set within the

slave owning south, which we can see as a more direct critique of the manner in which we remove

freedoms from different members of our country. The interesting thing about both is how they portray

their characters as “slaves” either literally or figuratively towards those that they work for. In this way,

we can see the rapid industrialization and the rise of the working class s the rise of a new kind of

slavery that our country will have to deal with after the end of the civil war.

However, they both manage to grab their freedom, which is of different levels of obviousness in

each story. In “Incidents”, she grabs her freedom by running away from her master, a task made simple

in summarization only, as within the story, the task is much more arduous. “I could sleep quite

comfortably on one side; but the slope was so sudden that I could not turn on the other without hitting

the roof. The rats and mice ran over my bed; but I was weary” (Incidents – 935) She lived in the attic of

a shed, scarcely seeing the outside except through a small hole drilled in a wall for seven years until she

could flee to the north. She endures a prison to gain her freedom in the north.

On the other hand, we have Bartleby, and his freedom is much, much different. His freedom is

found in prison, which he is sent to after the next occupant of the building does not appreciate his

passive resistance as much. The mental hospital that he is enrolled into cannot have been a pleasant

place, as up until the twentieth century, the state of mental institutions within our country was

laughably poor. Yet he still manages to find his own way of claiming his freedom. He had not been

owned like Jacobs had been, but he was still a slave to his industrial master in the city. And when the

lawyer goes to visit him in the tombs and finds him in the yard dead, the way in which the scene is

described reiterates the fact that he had found his freedom. “But a soft imprisoned turf grew under foot.

The heart of the eternal pyramids, it seemed, wherein, by some strange magic, through the clefts, grass-

seed, dropped by birds, had sprung.” (Bartleby - 1252) He has found a place where he can die lying in

nature, having fought hard for himself just like the grass-seed in the yard, and here he has bloomed,

finally free of the responsibilities of the world in which he lives, driven mad by his work with the dead

letters.

While the magnitude of their situations are much different, one cannot say that the situations

differ that greatly between one story and the other. Both of the main characters of the stories, Bartleby

and Jacobs, are being forced to work in a society in which they are expected to work without question.

And both of them subvert the expectations of their masters, in vastly different ways. But you can say

that the success of the two characters is very different. Bartleby does grab his freedom, even if it is only

for a few short weeks before he dies in prison, but Jacobs is much, much more successful, in that she

manages to escape after seven long years of waiting inside of an attic for her chance. They both fulfill

the american ideal of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to take what they want, even if it might

not seem like it at first. Jacobs grabbed her freedom through hard work and perseverance, the very

definition of the American dream, but Bartleby took his by denying the orders of an overseer and living

his own life in the way he wished, with the rebellious spirit of the founding of the country beating deep

within his heart.

The one thing that does remain the same between the two characters is the public's perception of

the choice that they make. In both situations, those that surround the characters, outside of those

characters that are more integral to the development of the plot, like the family in “Incidents” and the

lawyer in “Bartleby”, disapprove strongly of their actions, with one character stating “I'll catch any

nigger for the reward. A man ought to have what belongs to him, if he is a damned brute.” (Incidents,

937), and as soon as the lawyer moves away, Bartleby is arrested on order of the next owner of the

building. They chose to get their freedom, but through the actions of the bystanders, and the general

lack of compassion towards this ideal by the general public, we can get a sort of litmus test to what the

public opinion was at the time. They each have their own supporters, with the lawyer ready to go to

court for Bartleby and paying off the cook so that he might have something good to eat, and Jacobs had

Mrs. Bruce standing firmly at her side to help her to get her freedom, but this does not change the way

the rest of the people around them acted towards their choices. Slaves were not treated as people who

could make choices, and the working class was gradually gaining that impression in the minds of the

“other”, or those who stood outside of their situations looking in at them.

What is sure when these two stories are compared is that they were both written to have a

certain effect on their readers, to convince them of the terrible situations in which these people, slaves

and the working class, would find themselves in the world that we live in. Only one was owned, but in

their own way, both of them had lost their freedom, and over the course of the story, took it back by the

force of their own choices against a society that would love nothing more than to hold them back.