The Metaphorical Meaning of Industrialism in Herman Melville's The Tartarus of Maids

In the short tale "The Tartarus of Maids," author Herman Melville portrays a world completely mastered by machinery. As he describes the paper mill which churns out its product: "Nothing was heard but the low, steady overruling hum of the iron animals" (215). All human life is subjugated to the production of this "iron animal." The machinery in the paper mill factory becomes both an instrument that creates life and destroys it at once. 

Melville's allegory of the impact of Industrialism on humanity is given breadth and feeling through its metaphorical and imagistic implications. Melville uses the factory and its machinery as a human womb that produces products that keep men like its narrator well employed and wealthy, while stealing the very lives and souls of the women who keep the machinery well-oiled. The imagery feeds on the metaphorical ideas of birth, life, death, and production.

In the story, the industrial machinery which governs the lives of the women who keep it running has qualities that are not dissimilar to that of human reproduction. Melville uses a number metaphorical signifiers which suggest a relationship between the machinery of industrialism and the labor of childbirth. The first indication of this comes with a sly nod toward the menstrual cycle. When the narrator travels to the Devil's Dungeon, the valley in which the paper mill exists, he notices that the currents running through the hollow is called Blood River because of its brick-color consistency. When the narrator is taken to the room where the machinery is actually kept, it is described as having a "stifling [with a] strange, blood-like abdominal heat" (218).