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In chapter 96 of Moby-Dick (“The Try-Works”), we recall, Ishmael undergoes the unnerving experience of allowing the nocturnal scene of the pagan crew’s trying-out of whale blubber to lull him into a demon-haunted trance in which he momentarily reverses his direction while standing at the helm of the Pequod and, as a result, nearly capsizes the ship. The ensuing correction in his vision and orientation leads to a brief disquisition on the need to attain psychological balance in one’s perception of good and evil in the world, avoiding extremes of self-destructive obsession and naïve ignorance. As Ishmael goes on to note, this balance should not blind one to the fact that the world’s evils generally outweigh its goodness, just as the ocean, the figurative “dark side” of the earth, composes a majority of its surface. “So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true-not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows [i.e., Christ], and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe” (424). Consequently, the man who deliberately avoids the spectacle of human suffering in hospitals and prisons, or the thought of death evoked by graveyards, or the more somber writings of such authors as Cowper, Young, Pascal, and Rousseau; the man who “throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;-not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon” (424).
In perhaps no subsequent literary work of Melville’s is the overall message of “The Try-Works” more directly relevant than in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” a pair of complementary sketches in which the narrator undergoes a concentrated moral education akin to that advocated in Ishmael’s narrative homily. Like the other two so-called diptychs, “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs” and “The Two Temples,” “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” dramatizes a series of ironic contrasts and hidden correspondences between American and English cultures. With its titular juxtaposition of English bachelors and New England maids identified as inhabitants of heavenly and hellish realms,...