In Melville's short story, "The Tartarus of the Maids," Melville creates a contrast with the previous tale, "The Bachelor's Paradise." Melville juxtaposes these two stories as if in imitation of Blake's contrasting poems with a theme of balance. One such theme in the narratives is modernization and mechanization in the two places. The former has little mechanical or technological presence. He has too much of the fleshly and earthly body. However, “The Tartarus of Maids,” the representative hellish life of a maid, is governed by machinery. Melville creates a hell where machines rule women's lives instead of the other way around, to warn against this dangerous slavery to machines and to condemn the loss of humanity. Melville uses the cold and whiteness of the setting along with paper to symbolize this loss of humanity and the path to emptiness. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Melville sets the story high in the mountains full of cold and snow. It is no coincidence that at the location of the paper mill “you wouldn't believe it now, but it is colder than at the top of Mount Woedolor',” according to Mr. Bach (286). Even the names of places in the setting reflect this coldness and desperation. The mountain's name has "woe" as part of the title, the river is "Blood River," and the mill valley is "Devil's Dungeon" (272). These names immediately create a sense of foreboding, evil and desperation. Melville once again foreshadows the overall horror of the story. He also does this on the journey to the paper mill. The narrator describes the trees and plants as “feeling the same stiffening influence, their innermost fibers penetrating with the cold” (273). This cold seems like nothing more than cold weather for now, but the image created by the frozen trees and some “stiffening influences” leaves the reader with a certain uneasiness. The cold seems somehow unnatural, a little too cold for the forecast. Then the narrator describes the wind howling “as if it were laden with lost spirits bound to the unhappy world” (273). Howling winds and lost spirits are warning signs for the reader. We know something is wrong when the wind sounds unearthly and sad. The first sight of the paper mill itself is through “a pass of Alpine corpses” when “suddenly a whirring, whirring sound” alerts the narrator to the site of the paper mill (274). The area is dead, “a step of corpses”, apart from the hum of the paper mill. The noise is not that of humans, but of machinery. It doesn't get much more alive than the cold landscape and dead mountains. The narrator declares that the paper mill is “'the same counterpart as Bachelor's Paradise, but covered with snow and painted with frost on a tomb'” (275). The snow on the paper mill symbolizes the cold and death associated with machinery. It is no coincidence that he describes the place as a tomb covered in ice and snow. Immediately thoughts of death, isolation and coldness are associated with the paper mill building itself. The people at the paper mill, all maids except two men, show the same coldness and death of the environment, they reflect the blank paper they are making surrounded by white snow. The first girl he meets is "blue with cold" and has "an unearthly eye with unrelated misery" (276). Once again, the cold is full of unhappiness and the girl is as cold and unhappy as the mountain wind. Melville implies that the paper mill and its machinery steal the lives of the girls who work in the factory. The connection between white paper and white girls is ruthlessly emphasized in the passage: "In rows of empty-looking counters sat?