Power and Passivity in Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener

Introduction: Comedy, Tragedy, and the Workplace

Herman Melville's story "Bartleby the Scrivener" is an alternately comedic and tragic look at the relationship between an employer and his employee. Examining how this relationship plays out reveals the complexities of managing a workplace and the sometimes overlooked nuances of the power dynamic present in this kind of relationship.

Character Dynamics and the Decision to Hire Bartleby

The character of Bartleby represents the inversion of the narrator's own character and ideals, because he offers what is essentially the perfect challenge to the narrator's pride in both his business acumen and his self-assured sense of generosity. The major players in the story are Bartleby and the narrator, although the minor characters of Nippers, Turkey, and Ginger Nut serve to explain and partially justify the narrator's decision to hire Bartleby in the first place. The fact that Nippers is never productive in the morning and Turkey is never productive in the afternoon leads the narrator to choose Bartleby to fill the position suddenly made available by the narrator's increased business, because he believes that "a man of so singularly sedate an aspect [...] might operate beneficially upon the flighty temper of Turkey, and the fiery one of Nippers" (Melville, 1853, p. 549).

While the narrator is not at all likable or sympathetic at the beginning of the story — due to the fact that he spends an inordinate amount of time puffing up his own reputation — Bartleby initially appears in a sympathetic light, portrayed as "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!" (p. 546–7, 549). However, this initial impression changes as the story continues and the narrator is confronted by Bartleby's intransigence. Even then, the narrator cannot bring himself to truly dislike Bartleby.

Passive Resistance and the Realignment of Power

For almost the entirety of the story, the narrator is completely at a loss as to how he should respond to Bartleby's refusal to work, because "nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance" (Melville, 1853, p. 551). After a few failed attempts to get Bartleby to do anything other than copy texts "at the usual rate of four cents a folio," the narrator simply gives up, and even comes to appreciate Bartleby, at least because he is always there (p. 552–553). He has sympathy for Bartleby because of the latter's ability to remain wholly unfazed by the world around him, something the narrator assumes is born out of deep-seated depression.

However, this is where the narrator makes his first mistake. Rather than realizing that Bartleby's successful refusal has caused a fundamental realignment of the power dynamic between employer and employee, the narrator's pity for Bartleby means that Bartleby has almost total control over the narrator's thoughts and emotions — as evidenced by the fact that the narrator cannot even escape his memories of Bartleby after the latter man's death. The narrator should either fire Bartleby immediately following his first refusal, or else expect absolutely nothing of him; instead, he continuously tries to get Bartleby to open up.

Conclusion: Consent, Authority, and Economic Ideology

In "Bartleby the Scrivener," Herman Melville discusses the relationship between employee and employer through the characters of the narrator and Bartleby, and in doing so implicitly argues that the power of the employer is only born out of the implicit acceptance of the employee — in the same way that governments may ultimately only gain their power from the explicit or implicit consent of the governed. The more that Bartleby refuses to work, the more the narrator finds himself inextricably under Bartleby's spell, because Bartleby's passive resistance serves to undermine the narrator's assumptions regarding what drives human beings.