Marxist Response To Bartleby

Two Familiar Responses to “Bartleby”: One Internal and One External Perspective

Herman Melville’s "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story describing the Narrator’s encounter with the titular character, a mysterious man hired by the Narrator as a copywriter. In class, we looked at the Marxist response to “Bartleby”. Upon my first read, I must admit that “Bartleby” didn’t appear to me as prime material for a Marxist response. Later, I realized that what I had done was accept the superficial explanation of Bartleby’s misfortunes as offered by the Narrator. By comparison, the critiques by David Kuebrich and Naomi C. Reed forwent some of the explicit suggestions of the text and instead focused on aspects of the character of Bartleby offered by circumstance and their own expertise as literary critics. It’s unsurprising that Kuebrich and Reed would view the story through a different lens than the Narrator based

Compared to the Narrator, Kuebrich and Reed belong to similar literary communities. The two essays, “Melville 's Doctrine of Assumptions: The Hidden Ideology of Capitalist Production in ‘Bartleby’” and “The Specter of Wall Street: ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ and the Language of Commodities” were written in 1996 and 2004 respectively, long after Marxist critique had become an established literary response. Kuebrich’s essay offered the information that he was, at the time, an Associate Professor of English at George Mason University while Reed’s essay has a mention of Colombia University, with no status as a professor or student articulated. We can conclude from the information provided that the Kuebrich and Reed would be in overlapping interpretive communities of people with university education and a specialization in English and Marxist literary theory. The tools of reader-response allow us to understand why these two critics’ schools of thought would vary so wildly from that of the