Benedick
On three separate occasions, the narrator refers to the bachelors holed up in the paradise of the Temple Inn as Benedick, including Samuel Johnson as a “nominal Benedick.” Melville is here referencing the character Benedick from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. The humor of this character derives from the irony of his avid pursuit of Beatrice even as he positions himself as committed to the concept of lifelong bachelorhood. Thus he becomes an accessible symbolic incarnation of bachelorhood.
Nine Months
The number “nine’ here has great symbolic meaning. It is the time—precisely—that it takes for the process inside the mill to transform from shapeless pulp into a perfectly formed sheet of paper. The number of minutes coincides with the gestation period for a human baby and within the context of all the female workers inside the mill being unmarried—and, so, presumably virgins—the symbolism is made complete with the addition of an older new employee whose work as a nurse is no longer required. The machine is the new mother of mankind.
Capitalist Clones
At the paper mill, the narrator makes the connection between the blank pieces of paper that is produced by the machine every nine minutes with John Locke and his famous concept of the human mind being a tabula rosa (blank slate) at birth. Placed in context to his description where at “blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper” this allusion to Locke serves to transform the girls into symbolic pieces of paper. Foreseeing the idea of clones by about a century, Melville here brilliantly conceives a symbol of the perfect employee: soulless copies with a blank mind onto which has been written only the instructions for the job they need to do.
Work is Hell
The narrator describes his great adventure taking him to the paper mill in deeply symbolic language, commencing with the looking out upon the path leading to the mill as “Dantean gateway.” A valley formed by a ravine is called Devil’s Dungeon while the land rise above the hollow are termed Plutonian mountains. Pluto is the equivalent of Hades in Greek mythology and so the symbolism created right from the start is one of the narrator descending into the Underworld and the paper mill being a business straight out of hell.
Seeds
The narrator reveals what he does for a living in the second part of the story when he divulges his reason for going to the paper mill is purchase envelopes for distributing seeds. His job, then, is to sell seeds which is a traditional symbol of fertility. This becomes an ironic symbol juxtaposed against the bachelors back at the Temple who seem incapable of producing anything or leaving behind any contemporary stamp on the legacy of their forebears. More tragically ironic is the symbolism of seeds within the paper mill where the female workers have been stripped of their sexuality and it is the machine they tend which is the only thing capable of giving birth.
