raw material for paper stands before a “vertically thrust up . . . long, glittering scythe . . . . The curve of the scythe, and its having no snath to it, made it look exactly like a sword.”16 (It is these scythes which chop up the rags, thus creating the particles the women inhale.) The sexual imagery here is obvious.17 But Melville’s narrator draws a conspicuously legal analogy: Yes, murmured I to myself; I see it now; turned outward, and each erected sword is so borne, edge-outward, before each girl. If my reading fails me not, just so, of old, condemned state-prisoners went from the hall of judgment to their doom: an officer before, bearing a sword, its edge turned outward, in significance of their fatal sentence. So, through consumptive pallors of this blank, raggy life, go these white girls to death.18 The narrator’s description of his dinner with the lawyers starts with its location (“not far from Temple-Bar”19), evokes the Knights Templar and their ambiguous history, plays with the conceit of the Templars alive in contemporary London, and finally identifies their successors (not just in tenancy): But the iron heel is changed to a boot of patent-leather; the long two-handed sword to a one-handed quill; the monk-giver of gratuitous ghostly counsel now counsels for a fee; the defender of the sarcophagus (if in good practice with his weapon) now has more than one case to defend; the vowed opener and clearer of all highways leading to the Holy Sepulchre, now has it in particular charge to check, to clog, to hinder, and embarrass all the courts and avenues of the Law; the knight-combatant of the Saracen, breasting spear-points at Acre, now fights law-points in Westminster Hall. The helmet is a wig. Struck by Time’s enchanter’s Wand, the Templar is to-day a Lawyer.20 First, the factory machinery is associated with swords; second, swords are associated with legality; and third, legality is associated with (is the successor to) 16 Id. at 2288. 17 DIMOCK, supra note 4, at 85. 18 Tartarus, supra note 4, at 2289. 19 Id. at 2277. 20 Id. at 2278.
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Perspectives (2011) Journal of Law and Interdisciplinary Studies