Biography, Autobiography, and Anti-biography: Melville’s 'Bartleby the Scrivener' and the Discourse Community of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine
Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street" first appeared in the November and December 1853 numbers of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine. Though the story has already caused significant critical commentary, no extended consideration of this tale within the context of the Putnam’s discourse community has been undertaken. Such a study can shed light on a number of questions raised by the story. In both the comments by the story’s earliest reviewers and the opening paragraph of the story itself, we see our first indications of the American magazine biographical tradition in shaping Melville’s tale of the mysterious scrivener, providing him with a means of complicating his story and questioning prevalent values and assumptions without alienating his readers.
On one level, “Bartleby” is the biography of a “singular” man, an interesting character. However, in narrating the tale, the Lawyer not only recounts the events in the life of his employee, he also inadvertently reveals his own autobiography. In doing so, he unconsciously constructs himself as a magazine biography hero and thus a trustworthy narrator of the tale, one who holds values and assumptions recognizable to the tale’s original readers. The interplay between the conscious biography of Bartleby and the unconscious autobiography of the narrator adds depth and irony to the story. In addition to the “mirrored” biographies of the Lawyer and Bartleby, Melville’s tale provides a further complication. When seen in the context of the magazine biography tradition and the Putnam’s discourse community, the biography of the scrivener must be seen as an anti-biography that serves to call into question many of the basic assumptions of the genre. Finally, as critics have long recognized, “Bartleby” is also an autobiographical tale for Melville himself, an autobiographical meditation on the writer who prefers not adapt to the norms and requirements of his own discourse community.
While employing many of the conventions and assumptions of the tradition, “Bartleby” also serves to call into question the basic values and assumptions associated with nineteenth-century American biography and autobiography.
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