Isolation Effects on Melville and Hawthorne Characters

The effects of isolation of characters in the Melville and Hawthorne stories are relatively the same. Bartleby, Beatrice, the lawyer, Parson Hooper, and Hester to name a few. The isolation all felt by these characters is being shut off from the world for being different or making different choices in life.

Bartleby is a copywriter for a lawyer. He is the type of person that has been looked over and ignored for most of his life. Just thought of as weird and needs to be left alone. When the lawyer asked him to do some work, he said, “I would prefer not to.” The lawyer chose to move the business and leave Bartleby in the office where the lawyer found him to be living. This just increases his isolation from human to human contact. As the underlying model in the story is “walls”, as suggested by the many walls in the story, he eventually dies walled in a prison, coming full circle with his isolation.

In Hawthorne’s