The Effects of Non-Productive Work in Bartleby, the Scrivener and Life in the Iron Mills
In “The Communist Manifesto,” Marx and Engels argue that “The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones” (445). Modern authors confront these new struggles through stories about workers, dramatizing the physical and psychological effects of their situation within the capitalist system. Two American stories, Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills,” present protagonists who are proletariat workers. In both cases, these laborers find humanity at odds with proletariat work. As their labor is exploited to increase capital, Bartleby and Hugh Wolfe are, in a sense, erased as individual humans.
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