The Freedom to Starve: Melville, Marx, and the Trans-Atlantic Political Discourse of the Starving Laborer

Abstract

From a New Historicist approach, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is situated within the political and economic discourses of the 1850s where chronic hunger and starvation plagued the free laborer. The newspapers of the 1850s document countless free laborers that died of starvation. In fact, Karl Marx, while working for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune catalogued victims of “social murder,” or death by starvation, in the city’s newspapers at the same time Melville was gathering materials for his tale (Engels 70). Death by starvation was the central and most damning critique levied against the northern economic system and was expressed everywhere except within the discourse of free labor itself, where it is conspicuously absent. To this end, Melville constructs a protagonist who is a perfect republican operative. Indeed, Bartleby’s unbending commitment to republican virtues – honesty, industry, and frugality – do not lead the laborer to wealth, but result in chronic malnutrition and, finally, outright starvation. Bartleby’s fidelity to capitalist ideology is also evidenced in his preference not to perform unpaid labor like chattel as well as in his ideologically acculturated refusals of charity. Finally, Melville’s complex critique of hunger and the virtuous poor comes sharply into focus with the discovery of Bartleby’s savings’ bank – the core republican artifact of the period – which signals the scrivener’s desire to participate in the capitalist economy as disseminated in 1850s economic and political discourses. However, Bartleby’s savings’ bank – scraped together through rigorous asceticism – not only causes him to deny the needs of his body, but also results in a “general distorting of individualities which turns them into their opposite and confers contradictory attributes upon their attributes” so that the “perfectly honest” Bartleby who “frequently restored sixpences and shillings” to the wealthy lawyer, is by tale’s end, viewed as a “gentleman forger” and “a vagrant” (Marx Economic 61; 44, 42). “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is an exploration into the dominant political and economic ideologies of the period and the perspectives they shape that interpret poverty as vice in order to legitimate the ruthless social divisions that define the antebellum period.