Paradise of bachelors and tartarus of maids analysis

Bartleby the Scrivener and The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids
Subject
Humanities

Question Description
The attached is my essay that was used for the assignment. The following is a follow up question to that essay. Please just answer (in a paragraph or 2 and include in text citations, if necessary) the BOLD question(s) at the bottom. Please have knowledge of the stories "Bartleby the Scrivener" and "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids."

While reading your essay it occurred to me that the narrator of “Bartleby” makes a number of choices, whereas the narrator of “Paradise” doesn’t seem to make any choices at all. The Wall Street lawyer is disturbed by Bartleby, wants to help him, and tries one thing after another—lots of choices being made in this story. But the seed merchant in “Paradise” seems simply to look upon the worlds of the bachelors and the maids. The merchant is an *observer* rather than a chooser and an actor. I think the merchant keenly feels the injustice of it all, but rather than trying to do something about it he seems to just throw up his hands. At least that’s how I interpret the words with which he ends the story: “Oh! Paradise of Bachelors! And oh! Tartarus of Maids!”

Even the Wall Street lawyer, who *does* make an effort to help Bartleby (but sees all of them fail), seems in the end to throw up his hands in a similar way: “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”

Maybe what we’re seeing here are two characters who (1) find themselves faced with the new kinds of misery inflicted on workers by industrial capitalism and (2) find themselves so overwhelmed they feel they can do nothing else but decry it. If so, then maybe we can read the stories as an expression of a kind of helplessness before the juggernaut of industrial capitalism.