A Story of Wall Street

Herman Melville
(1819-1891) Elaborated by:
Ghinda Cristina
“Bearing Down on the Lone
Wolf”
by J.D. McGraw
Ouachita Baptist University
English Class Publications
12-3-2015
 Society
Keywords

Dichotomy
Contrast

Individual
THESIS STATEMENT

“[…] incongruence
with society will
unavoidably lead to the
degradation of the
individual.”
Transcendentalist movement
A progressive society “validates individuals who
are confident in the integrity of their uniqueness”

Greatness = nonconformity

“inner peace can’t be reached without

utmost faithfulness to one’s own principles”

“to be great is to be misunderstood”

Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803 - 1882)
“individual is always right”
 Proving the thesis statement…

Bartleby Individualism
“nonconforming individual”
“rebel”

“refuses to “he’s declining to

engage in almost even eat”
any interaction
with another
person”
 Proving the thesis statement…

Bartleby Individualism

“non-action”

“absurd determination
to abstain from
participating in
anything”
 Proving the thesis statement…

Bartleby Individualism

“emotionally and spiritually alienated”

“emotionally
inaccessible stranger”

“dejected
loneliness”
 Proving the thesis statement…

Bartleby Individualism

“physically blocking off his face from the

surrounding world, Bartleby’s screen placed
between him and the narrator closes himself off
into his own separate world”

“outside the bounds of normality”

“a pessimistic outlook on life”

Bartleby
The narrator, a Wall Street lawyer Society

“The narrator describes himself as “an eminently safe man” in a

claim to present himself as an agreeable and inconspicuous unit of
his society.”

“The namelessness of the narrator serves to qualify him

as a sort of Everyman in this society”

“becomes increasingly distressed at

conformist Bartleby’s otherness among his
surrounding work-obsessed
scriveners.”
Society and individual at Hawthorne & Melville
Puritan setting(doctrines of church) contemporary Wall Street(capitalism)

Society(good) and individual(evil)

society(materialistic) and individual(refuses to
turn a profit)
Society and individual at Hawthorne & Melville

They both call into question the benefits

of being a nonconformist?!

Does it make you Does it make your

a powerful life miserable?
individual?
Society and individual at Hawthorne & Melville
“The discussed works by Melville and Hawthorne don’t directly oppose
ideas of individualism or Emerson’s writing, but they depict the
world as being harshly resistant to Emerson’s claim that one must
completely reject worldly customs in order to follow their gut.”

They both depict “a society embedded with hostility

toward the different and nonconformist.”

“These stories, end with the melancholy deaths of these characters

to illustrate the less than fortunate long lasting effects on anyone
resistant to what disagrees with their preferences.”
 Conclusions
– The individual capacity to stand apart from
the crowd proves to unsustainable;

– society bears down on the nonconformist

with an incredible force.