PARTISAN REVIEW
167
narrator, who visits
it;
is,
significantly, a seedsman. He has, he' tells
us,
distributed his seeds "through all of the Eastern and Northern
states," and even let some fall "into the far soil of the Missouri and
the Carolinas." He requires paper for the 'envelopes into which he
puts his seeds. The narrator
is
the same American who visited the
London Templars, of whom he
is
strongly reminded when he visits
this
place in America which has been ,assaulted by mechanization.
Blood River through "inverted similitude"
calls
to mind "the sweet,
tranquil Temple garden with the Thames bordering its green .rn:ead–
ows." And he involuntarily asks himself: "Who are the gay bache–
lors?"
Melville makes us fed .that
this
vignette of the American Maids
in
their factory which withers their spontaneous life
is
the "identiCal
opposite" of the sumptuous abode of the Bachelors of the Temple
Chambers:
At rows of blank-looking counters sat roW'S of blank-looking girls,
with bl.ank, white folders in their blank hands,
all
blankly folding
blank
paper.
'
Every action of the Maids
in
the factory
is
seen as the destruc–
tion of their innocence. The machinery
is
a hideous parody of the
sexual act. A "vertical thing like a piston periodically rising and
falling"
is
fed by a girl, whose cheek is pale and bloodless, with paper
on which it stamps the impress of a wreath of roses.
In these somber parables Melville appears to envision the op–
posites of a luxurious, selfish, sterile England and an America de–
sexed by the combination of American puritanism and imported
European technology. Connecting English castrated stifling bourgeois
luxury and American withered innocence
is
the fact that the director
of the paper factory, like the Templars, is a bachelor. The puritan
industrialized American
is
the identical opposite of the decadent gay
London Templar.
Americanization
is,
as I say, Europeanization gone to America
where it flourishes, yet the American fear of Europe
is
not the coun–
terpart of the European fear
of
America. Americans fear the Euro–
pean past; Europeans fear the American future. It
is
true that this
future
is
felt to be almost as concrete and palpable as the past, being
