Literature and Composition 1
Alice Cabille
Thompson Rivers University

ENGL1001 Literature and Composition 1
Assignment 3
Student #: T00552179
9 May 2016

Lois and Bartleby’s Isolation
Isolation… having more than one hundred friends on Facebook and feeling lonely, is very common nowadays. With time, our life style has changed so much and even if there are more than seven billion people on Earth we still continue to feel more and more lonely and isolated. Isolation is a theme which inspires a lot of writers. Margaret Atwood in “Death by Landscape” and Herman Melville in “Bartleby, the Scrivener” illustrate the topic of isolation. Lois and Bartleby, who are the two main characters respectively, have created their own isolation, and are negatively affected by it. We will see how they are both physically and socially isolated, the reasons and the consequences of these isolation.

First, from the beginning of “Death by Landscape” we can see that Lois is isolating herself physically and socially when the narrator says: “Now that the boys are grown up and Rob is dead, Lois has moved to a condominium apartment in one of the new waterfront developments” (Atwood 25). She is closed off from the outside world, in her “safe” condominium. She does not want to go up north again, even anywhere near. She just wants to stay safe and avoid her fears. Also, Lois “was living not one life but two: her own, and another, shadowy life that hovered around her and would not let itself be realized” (Atwood 35). Moreover, she was socially isolated for a long time, “she can’t remember, now, having her two boys, …or what Rob looked like” (Atwood 35).
Similarly, in “Bartleby, the Scrivener” the antagonist is isolating himself. We know nothing about him, but apparently he has no family and no friends. He works and lives at his office and after a few days of work he decided not to do anymore: “I would prefer not to” (Melville, 1091). Furthermore, the narrator explains in detail what he did to isolate Bartleby: “I placed his desk close up to a small side-window…I procured a high green folding screen, which might entirely isolate Bartleby...” (Melville 1090). Bartleby is extremely isolated, physically and socially. Now let us analyse why those two main characters are isolated.

In “Death by Landscape” Lois is isolated first because of the trauma she experienced when she was younger: the disappearance of her friend during a summer camp when she was a teenager, and the culpability she has lived because she was blamed for it. It was her choice to not let it go, and keep it in her mind all this time. After this loss, she decided to isolate herself as a punishment, and this bad experience made her frightened of the wilderness. Also the loss of her husband and the fact that her boys left home increase her isolation.
In “Bartleby the Scrivener”, the narrator does not tell us why Bartleby is so isolated. But we can assume that his physical traits described as “motionless” (Melville 1090) and “cadaverously” (Melville 1096) have pushed him to be excluded. Moreover, the conflict with his employer and the fact that he prefers not to do anything, show us that he is isolating himself because he looks very frustrated about how life is in Wall Street. He wants to fight the system.

Finally, as a consequence of isolation, they suffer. Lois is deeply affected by her isolation but she chooses to go on living in depression, loneliness, sadness and surrounded by wilderness paintings that always remind her of Lucy’s disappearance: “She is here. She is entirely alive” (Atwood 36). By contrast, being more isolated, Bartleby has chosen to let himself die, he “lives without dining” (Melville 1111) and becomes a “silent man”. He died in a prison, alone in a fetal position.

Margaret Atwood and Herman Melville used different ways to show us how their main characters become isolated and how they deal with it. Depression, loneliness, sadness are common traits in both Lois and Bartleby’s character, but the reasons and consequences of their isolation were really different. Lois decided to live a lonely sad life, and Bartleby decided to leave Wall Street and his apathetic work by ending passively his own life. Can we ask ourselves if loneliness is killing us?

Works Cited:
Atwood, Margaret. “Death by Landscape.” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. 7th ed. Ed. Richard Bausch and R.V. Cassill. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. 24-36.

Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. 7th ed. Ed. Richard Bausch and R.V. Cassill. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. 1085-1111.