In Melville's short story, 'The Maids' Tartarus', Melville creates a copy of the previous short story, 'The Bachelors' Paradise'. Melville juxtaposes these two stories as if to imitate Blake's contrasting poems on the theme of balance. One such theme in the stories is modernization and mechanization in both places. The first has little mechanical or technological presence. There are too many fleshly and earthly bodies. However, “The Tartar of the Handmaids,” the representative hellish life of a handmaid, is governed by the machine. Melville creates a hell in which the machine manages women's lives and not the other way around, in order to warn of this dangerous slavery of machines and to condemn the loss of humanity. Melville uses the cold and whiteness of the setting as well as the paper to symbolize this loss of humanity and this path towards emptiness. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay. Melville sets the story in the high mountains filled with cold and snow. It is no coincidence that, at the location of the paper mill, “it would be hard to believe it now, but it is colder than at the summit of Mount Woedolor” according to Mr. Bach (286). The names of the locations in the setting also reflect this coldness and despair. The name of the mountain has "misfortune" in the title, the river is "River of Blood", and the paper mill valley is "Devil's Dungeon" (272). These names immediately create a feeling of foreboding, evil and despair. Melville once again foreshadows the overall horror of the story. He also does this despite the bad weather on the way to the stationery store. The narrator describes the trees and plants as “feeling the same influence that stiffens everything, their innermost fibers being penetrated by the cold” (273). This coldness appears for the moment to be nothing more than cold weather, but the image created by the frozen trees and a certain "all-stiffening influence" leaves the reader with some worry. The cold seems somehow unnatural, a little too cold for the forecast. Then the narrator describes the howling wind “as laden with lost spirits linked to the unhappy world” (273). Howling winds and lost spirits are warning signs for the reader. We know there is something wrong when the wind seems unearthly and sad. The first view of the stationery itself is through “a parade of Alpine corpses” when “suddenly a whirring and buzzing” alerts the narrator to the location of the stationery (274). The neighborhood is dead, “a parade of corpses,” except for the hum of the stationery mill. The noise is not that of humans, but of machines. It's not much more alive than cold landscapes and dead mountains. The narrator declares that the paper mill is "the very counterpart of the bachelor's paradise, but covered with snow and painted with frost on a sepulchre" (275). The snow on the stationery symbolizes the cold and death associated with machines. 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 stationery building itself. The people in the paper mill, all servants except two men, show the same coldness and mortality as the setting, they reflect the white paper. they are surrounded by white snow. The first girl he meets is “blue with cold” and has “a supernatural eye with unrelated misery” (276). Once again, the cold sets in with misfortune and the girl is as cold and miserable as the mountain wind. Melville suggests that the?