Suppression and Subversion through Walls in Bartleby the...

Suppression and Subversion through Walls in â€Å"Bartleby the Scrivener† In â€Å"Bartleby the Scrivener† an elderly lawyer recounts the tenure of a scrivener, Bartleby, from his office. The progression of this employer/employee relationship depicts disengagement between opposing social classes and its consequences. The presence of the subtitle of â€Å"Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street† has been given much consideration. The subtitle carries the baggage of the emerging capitalistic culture, but it also alludes to the confinement that walls enable. Melville strategically uses architecture in his short story, â€Å"Bartleby the Scrivener† to demonstrate the disengagement between social classes that capitalism produces. In the story, the†¦show more content†¦As Karl Marx writes in The Communist Manifesto, â€Å"the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles† (13). Melville’s short story, â€Å"Bartleby the Scrivener† explores the walls between social classes that capitalism encourages and their effective erasure of the individual member of the working class. There are two windows present in the lawyer’s office; one window depicts a light, white wall, while the other a grimy, dark, brick wall, representing the potential for each opposing end of the social class system. The lawyer confines Bartleby to a space in the office that faces a wall near the dark brick wall window, reminiscent of the dead ends that the working class faces in terms of social mobility. Barnett writes of Bartleby’s office placement, â€Å"Conveniently placed to answer his employer’s summons with alacrity, he must inhabit a circumscribed and isolated cell whose lack of outlook mirrors the lack of prospects of his menial occupation† (380). Melvilles depiction of a uniform brick wall facing Bartleby highlights the lack of individuality that Bartlebys presence in the working class faces. Just like each identical brick in the wall, the lawyer sees Bartleby as an uniform member of the proletariat class. Bartlebys presence in the story is strictly to fulfill the lawyers need for copying. The lawyer would be satisfied to never even notice Bartleby, as long as he is producing copies. In fact, the