论文总字数：43163字

摘 要

赫尔曼·麦尔维尔的短篇小说《抄写员巴特比》是对底层人民艰辛生活的真实写照。这篇小说以第一人称叙事，讲述了一个生活在华尔街的抄写员巴特比的故事。从发表以来，这篇小说就广受关注，诸多批评家从象征主义、资本主义经济和宗教等角度对该小说进行解读。然而，对于主人公生存空间的研究却不多见。本篇论文以法国哲学家米歇尔·福柯的空间和权力理论为依托，对《抄写员巴特比》进行解读，分析小说里的空间与权力关系，揭示小说中制约巴特比的权利机制。

除去引言和结论以外，本篇论文包含三个章节。第一章分析了封闭的空间屏障和权力运作的关系，指出巴特比生活的空间——律师事务所和华尔街，实际上成为了禁锢巴特比的“圆形”监狱。第二章从空间和话语角度讨论了巴特比对权力的反抗，分析了巴特比对于构建自己空间的渴望和尝试。第三章主要关注巴特比在反抗后的命运。在与这个世界的被动对抗中，巴特比逐渐封闭了自己的内心世界并被社会所抛弃，最终死在了监狱。巴特比的悲剧揭示了普通人深陷权力之网中的无助和绝望。

关键词：赫尔曼·麦尔维尔；《抄写员巴特比》；空间；权力

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements i

English Abstract ii

Chinese Abstract iii

Contents iv

Introduction 1

Chapter One Power in Enclosed Space 6

1.1 Man-made Prison in the Lawyer's Office 6

1.2 Wall Street, an Intangible Prison for Bartleby 9

Chapter Two Bartleby’s Resistance to Power 11

2.1 Spatial Resistance in the Lawyer’s office..........................................................11

2.2Bartleby’s Discursive Resistance to the Lawyer’s Commands...........................12

Chapter Three Bartleby's Fate in the Space 14

3.1 Self Enclosure of Bartleby 14

3.2 Death in the Prison 15

Conclusion 18

Works Cited 19

Introduction

1.Herman Melville and Bartleby, the Scrivener

Herman Melville(1819-1891), a great novelist, writer and a poet in America in 19^th century, was not only one of the representative writers in the American Renaissance of literature but also an outstanding philosopher who closely paid attention to the social changes. Melville was a prolific writer whose representative works include Typee, Omoo, Moby-Dick, Pierre, White Jacket, etc. Piazza Tales, a collection of short stories, is also a highly valued. Though best known for his sea adventure Typee and his whaling story Moby-Dick, Herman Melville was almost forgotten during the last thirty years of his life. He was born to a wealthy family in New York and well educated in his childhood. However, his father was bankrupt in 1832, therefore, Melville had to do hard manual work in order to make a living. During his adolescence, Melville worked as a whale killer and served the army. Melville’s rich experiences on the sea during his early years widened his horizon and provided material for his works. However, it was not until 1920s when the value of Melville’s works was again explored. The critics showed great interest in Melville’s late works, especially Moby-Dick.

Bartleby, the Scrivener, is a short story first published anonymously on Putnam's Magazine, and reprinted with other short stories in his The Piazza Tales in 1856.

The story Bartleby, the Scrivener, tells about a scrivener Bartleby who works in a lawyer’s office in the Wall Street. The narrator, a Manhattan lawyer, has already employed two scriveners at the beginning of the story. As the business increases, he hires Bartleby, the third scrivener, with a hope that his calmness will comfort the irritable temperaments of the other two scriveners.

At first, Bartleby works really hard and produces a large amount of high-quality work. But one day, when asked to help check a copy, Bartleby replies with “I prefer not”, which soon becomes his response to every request. Eventually Bartleby refuses to do any work, which upsets the lawyer and other employers. One day the lawyer accidentally discovers Bartleby has started living in the lawyer’s office. The lawyer is afraid that Bartleby would bring negative impacts on his business but feels guilty expelling him, so he moves out. However, not long after that, the new tenants come to ask for help: Bartleby still lives in the building and refuses to leave. The lawyer visits him and asks Bartleby to try other jobs, but Bartleby “would prefer not to”. Later the lawyer finds that Bartleby has been imprisoned in The Tombs and not long after that, Bartleby dies of starvation as he prefers not to eat.

2. Literature Review on Bartleby, the Scrivener

After the 1920s when Melville’s work regained people’s attention, the research of Melville’s work has increased a lot. According to Yang Jin Cai in his research of Melville’s works, most essay are focused on Melville’s Whaling Story Moby Dick(195) and the short story Bartleby, the Scrivener reflects Melville’s reflection on the society and his concentration on the exploration of the inner world(206).

At present, critics concentrate on the following aspects when it comes to the research of Bartleby, the Scrivener. Firstly, critics concentrate on the images in the novel, including the walls, dead letter, the Wall Street, prison. For instance, in the essay The Symbolism in Bartleby, the Scrivener published in 2004, Guo Zhaolan gives detailed analysis of the images in the story. The wall is an important image which represents the enclosure of people from the outside world while the Wall Street, the place where the story happens, represents the whole capital world (81-82).

Besides, many scholars are interested in the characters’ psychological activities. These researches can be mainly classified into two types, one is the research upon the lawyer’s characters, the other is upon Bartleby’s character. Todd F. Davis points out in his essay “The Narrator’s Dilemma in ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’”(1997) that the lawyer on the one hand, out of kindness, wishes to help Bartleby while on the other hand, tries to get rid of him as he realizes that Bartleby cannot create any value for him. Besides, in the essay Form and Meaning in ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’” published in 2002, Anderson Walter E expressed the idea that the lawyer has good in his heart while Bartleby is actually a monster (384-385). In another essay, Bartleby’s Autism, Wandering along Incommunicability published in 2011, Amit Pinchevski makes a detailed analysis of Bartleby’s loneliness and his inability to integrate into the whole society (27-56)

The third main focus on Bartleby, the Scrivener is the exploration of religious element involved in the novel. For instance, Steven Doloff has made some research on the religious dilemma the lawyer is facing. His essay The Prudent Samaritan: Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ as Parody of Christ’s Parable to the Lawyer in 2003, compares the lawyer to the Samaritan in the Bible. Moreover, some have focused on the alienation of Bartleby. However, few researchers have paid attention to the relationship between space and power. Therefore, in this essay, the novel will be explored from the perspective of space and power. The space where Bartleby lives will be studied and the power and restrictions in the space will be analyzed.

There are some critics concentrating on the source of inspiration of the story. Michael H. Friedman published the essay “Pickwick Papers as a Source for the Epilogue to Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’” in 2003 and compared Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener.(147) Besides, in another essay Sympathy for the Lawyer: A Source for Bartleby and Nineteenth-Century Prison Reform published in 2008, the author Wilson, Robert Andrew analyzed the models Melville used to create the characters.

3. Michel Foucault’s “Space-power” Theory

The space became a subject that interests many philosophers in 20^th century. Lefebvre Henri (1901-1991) raised the concept of social space in his book The Production of Space (1974) but did not answer the question of how space influences the formation of a system, a organization or a society. Michel Foucault (1926-1984), a contemporary French thinker, was also a philosopher, a psychologist and a historian and one of the most outstanding and most controversial thinkers in the 20^th century. He mainly concentrated on the topic of power and the relations between individuals, groups, institutions and the society. Foucault discussed the topic of power in many publications like Madness and Civilization(1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1973), Discipline and Punish (1975) and three volumes of The History of Sexuality (1976,1984,1984) and he also made some relevant philosophical statements about power in many articles, presentations, interviews and lectures. Besides, Foucault introduced another important concept to further analyze and explain his idea of power. To him, space is not just a place. More importantly, it shows the relations between the individuals and the society. According to Foucault, in the modern world, a person’s life is characterized by the space that person has occupied (153). Space is the key to understand Foucault’s concept of power which he conveys in his publications. According to him, the arrangement of the space reflects the power mechanism of an institution. Besides, Foucault also points out that, aside from the spacial control, discipline is an important method to realize power.

In order to further explain the relations of space and power and disciplinary power, in his book Discipline and Punish, Foucault has set the example of panopticon, a type of institutional building in architecture designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18^th century and made detailed explanations of the principle of panopticon. The panopticon is composed by two parts, one is the periphery, an annular building which is divided into cells, another is a tower at the center. The tower is equipped with wide windows, which allows people in the tower to see the cells. Jeremy’s design allows a single watchman to supervise all the other people enclosed in the cells while they are unable to tell whether they are being watched or not. By clarifying Jeremy Bentham's design, Foucault illustrates his idea of the “disciplinary society” and points out that in order to achieve the disciplinary society, one effective way is to perform the control over space by the use of panopticon’s suveillant capacities. And the exploration of the space of Jeremy’s panopticon, a typical model of the “disciplinary society”, makes it clear that space is closely related to the power and the power decides the arrangement of the space. In his book Discipline and Punish, Foucault explains that in the disciplinary society, “‘discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution or with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a physics, or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology” (215). Therefore, he sets a list of examples of institution where “discipline” can be identified: some specialized institutions like “the penitentiaries or ‘houses of correction’ of the nineteenth century”; the institutions using discipline “as an essential instrument” for a particular end like “schools” and “hospitals”; “pre-existing authorities” employing discipline as a means of “reinforcing or reorganizing their internal mechanisms of power”; and the institutions can even be “intra-familial relations” like “the parents-children cell” (215).

In his essay “Heterotopia”, Foucault has also put up another important concept: heterotoipia. In his analysis, Foucault points out that “heterotopias describe spaces that have more layers of meaning or relationships to other places”(1). In general, a heterotopia is a physical representation or approximation of a utopia, or a parallel space (such as a prison) that contains undesirable bodies to make a real utopian space possible. He also classifies heterotopias into two types, the heterotopia of crisis and heterotopia of deviation.

In this essay, Foucault’s theory of panopticon will be adopted in chapter one to analyze the lawyer’s office where Bartleby works and the Wall Street where he lives. It is concluded that the lawyer’s office and the Wall Street are actually panopticons which imprison Bartleby. Foucault’s theory of space and power will be used in the second chapter to help analyze Bartleby’s resistance to the power. And in the third chapter, Bartleby’s death in the prison will be analyzed by using the theory of heterotopia.

4. Structure Layout

This thesis will be divided into three chapters. In the first chapter, Bartleby’s working and living space, the lawyer’s office and the Wall Street, will be analyzed, which reveals that Bartleby lives under the power of the lawyer and the value system of capitalism society. He is enclosed in the “prison” made by the lawyer and the intangible prison of the Wall Street. The second chapter mainly focuses on Bartleby’s resistance to the power. According to Foucault, wherever there is power, there is resistance and resistance takes various forms. In this part, Bartleby’s passive resistance will be analyzed. The last chapter will discuss Bartleby’s fates. Unable to fight against the power of the lawyer and the Wall Street, Bartleby turns to enclose himself from the outside world and finally he is abandoned by the society and dies in the prison.

Chapter One Power in the Enclosed Space

Space and power is the main topic Michel Foucault has discussed. In the book Foucault Reader (1984), he puts that “People have often reproached me for these spatial obsessions, which have indeed been obsessions for me. But I think through them I did come to what I had basically been looking for: the relations that are possible between power and knowledge.” (69). In his work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault sets the prison as an example to show us the mechanism of power on the base of space. A typical example is the panopticon where power exercises through observing, supervising, examining and normalizing to make people obedient. According to Foucault, power is prevalent and exists everywhere; and when it comes to the space and power, “Space is fundamental in any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power” (252).

1.1 Man-made Prison in the Lawyer’s Office

The story of Bartleby, the Scrivener is set in a lawyer’s office in the Wall Street and it is old but rather “pleasantly remunerative”(Melville 2). The lawyer, who enjoys the supreme power in the office, in his narrative, gives a description of the office.

I should have stated before that ground glass folding-doors divided my

premises into two parts, one of which was occupied by my scriveners,

the other by myself. According to my humor I threw open these doors,

or closed them. (Melville 8)

By this arrangement, the lawyer separates himself from the employees while he is still able to observe the performance of his employees. Therefore, the movements of the employers are under the surveillance of the lawyer.

Besides, the lawyer tries to discipline the employers so that they would better complete their work and meet the lawyer’s needs. When Bartleby joins in, the lawyer sets him a special place:

I resolved to assign Bartleby a corner by the folding-doors, but on my

side of them, so as to have this quiet man within easy call, in case any

trifling thing was to be done. (Melville 8)

The lawyer also places “a high green folding screen”(Melville 8) between himself and Bartleby because he would like to “entirely isolate Bartleby from”(Melville 8) his sight so that he can enjoy an exclusive private space while on the hand, the screen would not “ remove him from my voice”(Melville 8) so that Bartleby can hear his command when necessary. In the perspective of the lawyer, he is quite satisfied with and proud of this arrangement. In his view, “privacy and society were conjoined” (Melville 8). About the corner Bartleby owns, the lawyer adds some details:

I place his desk close up to a small side- window in that part of the room, a

window which originally had afforded a lateral view of certain grimy back

yards and bricks, but which, owing to subsequent erections, commanded at

present no view at all, though it gave some light. Within three feet of the

panes was a wall, and the light came down from far above, from two lofty

buildings, as from a very small opening in a dome. (Melville 8)

Under this kind of arrangement, Bartleby has no choice. He is isolated in a small space where the wall and the screen block his sight, and this space, though owned by Bartleby, is under the control of the lawyer. To some extent, Bartleby is imprisoned in this narrow space. Like the other two employees, Bartleby cannot fully satisfy the demand of his boss and the lawyer never gives up his efforts to discipline him.

According to Michel Foucault, discipline is “a type of power, a modality for its exercise”; “a ‘physical’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology”. (215). Discipline is not limited to any specific form or institution like prison, school or the factory. In the story Bartleby, the Scrivener, “discipline” is practiced in the office. Trying to discipline others, the lawyer has performed his supreme power in the office. In addition, his power is also realized in the space arrangement, which to some extent, imprisons his employees.

Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, has explained the “space-power” theory. As the western countries experienced massive social changes during the modern age, the penalty systems have also changed a lot and Foucault analyzes the social mechanisms of power and its developments. He first analyzes the violent and chaotic public torture and execution which was a method used by the sovereign in the mid-18th century to exercise its power, then he explains that with the development of the discipline, the prison, a much less violent form of punishment for the criminals, took over the excessive power of the sovereign. He has given two examples of the spatial partition , the enclosed and segmented space in exercising power over people in a disciplinary society. When it comes to the principle of panopticon, Foucault explains:

At the periphery, an annular building; at the center, a tower; this tower

is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring;

the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the

剩余内容已隐藏，请支付后下载全文，论文总字数：43163字