The figure of Bartleby The Scrivener is one of the most enduring characters in American Literature. He features as the title character in Hermann Melville’s short story. Throughout this story he is employed by a lawyer on Wall Street to copy out legal cases and transcriptions; which he occasionally completes frantically and at other times refrains from doing entirely. This paper will investigate how the narrator of the story relates Bartleby’s physical appearance and how this physiognomy can be seen to relate to over arching themes of the novel such as the nature of work, death and the arbitrariness of modern life. All of these themes are encapsulated in the descriptions given of Bartleby’s physical appearance. This rest of this paper will explore this, especially in relation to Bartleby’s supposedly ‘cadaverous’ appearance.
Before Bartleby is first introduced the narrator recalls him as ‘pallidly neat pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn.’ (Melville, 2008. 11) This forlornness remains throughout all descriptions of his physiognomy as the story progresses, although initial description focus more of his frenetic activity than on his physical appearance. It is not until Bartleby ceases working that the narrator begins to focus again on physical presence. It is made clear that this presence is mediated and inflected by certain aspects of Bartleby’s character. On one occasion Melville of how, after intending to confront Bartleby about his lack of action, the narrator is both frightened and disarmed in the same instant:
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"Physical Characteristics of Bartleby in His Final Portrait".
‘The utterly unsurmised appearance of Bartleby tenanting my law chamber of a Sunday morning, with his cadaverously gentlemanly nonchalance…had such a strong effect upon me that incontinently I slunk away…Indeed it was his wonderful mildness, chiefly which not only disarmed me but also unmanned me.’ (Melville, 2008. 20)
On this occasion, then it is clear that Bartleby’s cadaverous appearance is, to some extent, presented as being entirely at home within social convention. The power of this is such that he is able to convince the narrator to leave his own office simply because he has suggested that he do so.
This combination of physical deathliness with a a complete sense of being at the home in the social world is repeated at other points throughout the story. At one point, when the narrator reaches a peak of frustration, Bartleby’s response is both reasoned and obstinate. The narrator begs him to ‘say now that in a day or two you will begin to be little reasonable.’ Bartleby replies with the words: ‘At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,’ and this reply is described as being ‘mildly cadaverous.’ (Melville, 2008. 30) This ‘cadaverousness’ serves to present Bartleby as dead within the world. This is mirrored in his thought processes. He appears to be able to think clearly and to respond calmly to situations, although this response is almost aways entirely arbitrary and bears little or no relation to a possible action.
The connection between a dead individual and a social world is made clear in the final section of the story in which the narrator learns of Bartleby’s death and discovers that he was previously employed in the dead letters office. The narrator exclaims: ‘Dead letters! Does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitting to heighten it than that of continually handling those letters, and assorting them for the flames?’ (Melville, 2008. 38) Bartleby’s physical deathliness combines, in his final portrait, with the reality of his previous occupation. In this sense then it becomes clear that his cadaverous appearance earlier in the novel is one which is fitted to his occupation in the social world and which also suggests that he is, himself, entirely dead to it.
In conclusion, this paper has argued that Bartleby’s physical appearance can be seen to tie directly to his final appearances in the novel. It does through suggesting a deathliness which is both disarming and, paradoxically, entirely at home in the world in which it finds itself.
