If there is anyone heroic or admirable, it is Hunilla, of “Sketch Eighth,” who, abandoned on an island, endures her husband’s and brother’s death, and years of torture, to be seen, at the story’s end, riding “upon a small gray ass ...” and eyeing “the jointed workings of the beast’s armorial cross.” When Melville, the unbeliever, finds a character heroic, he finds that character Christlike, or at least crucified—Billy Budd, for example, and Ahab.

It is noteworthy that in describing an apocalyptically ugly wilderness like the Encantadas, Melville called them “cinders” and described them as a waste product of industry. Like all sensitive men and women of his time, and as a former sailor and a farmer, he was aware of the cruel encroachments of industrial process upon the countryside. His Harper’s story of 1855, “The Tartarus of Maids,” is often read as an attack upon nineteenth-century industrial despoliations. It is that, surely. But it is equally concerned with sexuality, and with fiction, and is as much about isolation and long silence as The Encantadas.

The stories of this period, when examined in their collections, The Piazza Tales (1856), abound in vertical images, phallic shapes—lightning rods, masts, chimneys, and the high building that houses “The Paradise of Bachelors” in the story that was published along with “The Tartarus of Maids.” As characters in Bartleby were paired, the two stories here are paired, the Pickwickian “Bachelors,” the Dantean “Maids.” The number nine—does Melville think of the Ninth Circle of Hell?—is echoed in each: nine carefree bachelors dine, and paper production in “Maids” takes nine minutes. We might remember that the nine months of gestation would be significant to Melville as well around this time.

So, in “Bachelors,” the men dine at the top of a high building in London. They eat and drink in great quantity, are courtly to one another, and are “a band of brothers,” with “no wives or children to give an anxious thought.” Melville is stating his dream of freedom from the domestic responsibilities that stalk him (and which he cannot easily meet); he also expresses his desire to be free of the sexuality that, as his fiction demonstrates, he copes with uneasily: it is Apollonian youth or bachelor brothers, who most please the narrators who speak for him. Here, the men take snuff together from a silver goat’s horn; they remove the snuff, which they will stuff into themselves, by “inserting ... thumb and forefinger into its mouth.” Melville goes to some length to create images that have to do with orifices and infantile pleasure. The bachelors are boys, and their aim is self-gratification, which exists in opposition to the cycles of biology represented in “The Tartarus of Maids,” another Melville tale of the underworld.

To enter that story’s world, one enters a woman’s body at her loins—the “Dantean gateway” at “the Black Notch” in a “Plutonian” hollow called “the Devil’s Dungeon” that leads to “Blood River.” Melville employs Gothic images of ruined and decaying structures past which we are led to a paper mill. So we are dealing with female biology, male fear of it, hell, gothic terror, and paper.

Our narrator tells us that he is a “seedsman,” that when the seeds he mails out are in paper folded into envelopes—he has come to buy more paper—the packets of seeds “assume not a little the appearance of business-letters ready for the mail.” And we are back to letters, dead letters, the fiction that constitutes Melville’s correspondence with the world.

The story starts out in whiteness, the menacing whiteness of Moby-Dick, for all is white vapor, the snow of January, the white walls of the mill, the paper itself. In a factory scene that Kafka might have envied and that Dickens could have written, the narrator confronts this sight: “At rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper.” It is an industrial nightmare, and a writer’s nightmare—especially if he is compelled to write because of inner need, or economics, or both.

If the writer thinks of the mailing-out of seeds as, at once, an artistic need, an economic coercion, an expense of spirit, and an invitation to the production of babies who whip the cycle of responsibility round again, he might at this point tie the paper and seed images to the sexual toils he escaped in “Paradise” and slunk through at the Eve’s opening of “Tartarus.” Melville does. In the very next paragraph we get “some huge frame of ponderous iron, with a vertical thing like a piston periodically rising and falling upon a heavy wooden block. Before it—its tame minister—stood a tall girl, feeding the iron animal with half-quires of rose-hued notepaper....”

Thus, animal or biological pistoning—the act of sex itself—and the ceaseless sexual cycle our narrator (and Melville) cowers before, becomes an “iron animal,” a force that cannot be resisted—and it is a product of nature and of thinking man. The paper it prints bears a wreath of roses, like the frightening birthmark on the pink cheek in Hawthorne’s story. Cruel scythes cut paper (as cruel saws have made stumps of the trees in the valley), paper pulp is a white river suspiciously sperm- and egglike as it flows into a room “stifling with a strange, blood-like abdominal heat.”

In the confusion of biology and writer’s imagination, writer’s need and domestic requirements, in the final room of the production process (it is presided over, as if a delivery room, by a woman who was a nurse), the narrator speculates about what could come to be written on all the blank paper he sees. These ruminations evoke those of the narrator of Bartleby, for he considers “love-letters, marriage certificates, bills of divorce, registers of births, death-warrants”: much, in other words, that might have been on Melville’s mind; these documents are the skeleton of what he works at. And then the narrator cites Locke and his comparison of the human mind at birth to a blank sheet of paper—at which point the writer is not only harassed bread-winner, but a mother as well, since his writings are babies as much as babies become the world’s blank paper to be scribbled upon.

“Time presses me,” the seedsman puns as he leaves: it makes him jump to its bony tune, but it also writes his history upon his own soul. He speaks as all men—the “Ah, humanity!” of Bartleby-and as the writer, printed upon even as he imprints his inventions on paper, wraps his seeds (both art and life) and mails them out, hoping for mail in response.

If these are stories of the interior Melville, perhaps the triumph of this period is Benito Cereno (1855), a story that is very much about externalities—or seems to be. Like Bartleby, Benito Cereno excites great writing by Melville, and, like Bartleby, it suggests that the obvious is really enigma.

It is 1799, and an American merchantman, commanded by Captain Delano, lies near an island off Chile. The sea is “gray,” the swells “lead,” the sky “gray”; the “gray” fowl fly through “troubled gray vapors,” and the scene is summarized by “Shadows present, foreshadowing shadows to come.” So the reader is alerted that he will have to read this world and interpret the grays. He is further warned that what he sees are shadows; what casts them is hidden and the reader must peer: the story is an exercise in, and an essay about, dramatic irony. As much as the subject is slavery and revolution, it is also perception and invention; it is about fiction, the successes and failures and tactics of which are very much on Melville’s mind.

Delano is described from the start as having a “singularly undistrustful good-nature,” and is virtually incapable of “the imputation of malign evil in man.” From the start, Melville wants us to know that Delano misreads the world. So he resorts to the language of Gothic romance. The slave ship looks like a “monastery after a thunder storm”; figures aboard her resemble “Black Friars pacing the cloisters”; the vessel is reminiscent of “superannuated Italian palaces,” and her galleries evoke “tenantless balconies hung over the sea as if it were the grand Venetian canal.” Delano is placed among the settings in which virgins are pursued by fright-figures, and he should be at home—for he is, in terms of the evil and cruelty that Melville wishes to note, quite virginal.

Gothic conventions not only easily signal fright—we may perceive them; Delano cannot—but can serve to remind us at every turn that dying Europe, the worst of it, encounters the most naive and imperceptive rawness of the New World. Apocalyptic thoughts bring out the best in Melville, who swims in them as in the sea. So we have such poetry, about a ship, as “while, like mourning weeds, dark festoons of sea-grass slimily swept to and fro ... with every hearse-like roll of the hull.”

Messages do not get through. And so Delano, maddeningly, scarily, cannot overcome his racism and innocence and see past the virtual tableaux vivants arranged for his benefit by the rebel slaves under Babo. The clues that strike us at once are misinterpreted in multiples by Delano.