This May Day I prefer not to....

[alice wellintown]

Melville used the double Title in his works:

Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846)
Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847)
Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (1849)
Redburn: His First Voyage (1849)
White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (1850)
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)
Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852)
"Bartleby the Scrivener; A Story of Wall Street" (1853)
"The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles"

We can ignore the fact that Melville named his story, A Story of Wall
Street, but it seems a foolish thing to do for a bunch of reasons.
And, if we ignore the fact that the story is called, A Story of Wall
Street, we miss all the ironies in the story. That is, we take
everything the lawyer narrator says at face value and therefore fail
to see the double title and the fact that the story is about putting
these doubles together, so Bartleby & Wall Street. At the end of the
tale, the lawyer narrator argues one more point in the hopes of saving
his soul. He tries to argue that Bartleby's humanit was lost in the
dead letter office; that Bartleby was dehumanized by his work, not as
a human copy machine, but as a human document shredder. But as he
finishes his argument he comes to understand that it Wall Street that
has taken Bartleby's humanity and has taken the lawyer's as well.
> I agree with you, Mark, that it IS about Wall Street.  If Bartleby just
> worked at a small village apothecary shop, the story wouldn't be so
> profound.