SOURCE: "The Alternatives of Melville's 'Bartleby'," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 31, No. 2, September, 1976, pp. 170-87.

In the following essay, Emery explores themes of freedom and limitation in "Bartleby," particularly emphasizing the doctrines of Jonathan Edwards and Joseph Priestly.

In recent years Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" has attracted its share of critics, many of whom have rightly proclaimed the tale to be an ingenious treatment of the theme of freedom and limitation. Nevertheless, two questions of preëminent importance remain unanswered: What is the precise nature of Bartleby's revolt? And how ought we to characterize the narrator's response to his mysterious clerk?

It seems to me that we can most easily answer these questions if we approach Melville's tale contextually. The Herman Melville of 1853 was, after all, hardly an illiterate sailor; and no small portion of his knowledge of philosophy, theology, and literature appears to have gone into the...