Of a sudden, Factories burst upon him, or their windows did,--hundreds of bright windows, illuminated every night in honor of Toil,--and which neither darkness of night, nor wilderness of storm, could obscure, and which never bent or blinked before rage and violence around. Factories, and life,--how it glowed at moment to his eye! And even his own ideal notions thereof were more than transfigured before him, and he envied girls, some of whom he knew, who, through troubled winter night, were tending their looms as in warmth, and quietness of a summer-day. --Sylvester Judd, Richard Edney and Governor's Family (1850) Why is it, sir, narrator of Melville's 1855 Harper' Monthly piece The Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids asks owner of paper mill he is touring, that in most factories, female operatives, of whatever age, are indiscriminately called girls, never women? (1) proprietor's answer, operatives are unmarried, all maids, has informed a tradition of critical commentary reads Melville's story in terms of desexualizing effects of industrial labor. Marvin Fisher, for example, finds the world of paper is antithesis of sex, and Michael Rogin glosses story's dominant image as white-faced humans reduced to sterility. (2) According to such views, desexing of adult women into factory represents Melville's critique of dehumanizing power of industrial modernization and his concern that, as Fisher puts it, machine production is not reconcilable with human production. images of female sterility in The Tartarus of Maids would, then, seem to contrast unfavorably with riotous fecundity of men represented in its companion piece, The Paradise of Bachelors. Sex appears to stand for a kind of fertile personhood, ability to produce oneself in health and beauty through acts of free will, as Fisher would have it. (3) In this dichotomous scheme, bachelors possess such power, while factory do not. But loss or rejection of a particular form of sexuality--and, by implication, humanity--need not imply loss of all. What Fisher and Rogin perceive as desexing may, in fact, be read as resexing--the reconfiguration of sexuality, and hence personhood, into forms consonant with modern social, economic, and technological environment represented by conditions of labor and production in factory. Tartarus' many images of fertility--from tour guide named Cupid to menstrual Blood River runs through mill--undermine notion of a clean dichotomy between sexless maids and over-sexed bachelors, and point instead toward a more uncertain and fluid relationship between different versions of sexuality. (4) And if sex really does stand, synecdochically, for personhood, then this uncertainty about sex must imply a deeper ambiguity about just what sort of persons these mill workers might be. factory represent experimental sketches of modern personhood, efforts to imagine what a human being might look like if established notions of health and beauty, or even free will, were to be abandoned or lose their currency. As such, they embody pattern of contradiction Leo Marx identifies in Melville's response to modernization. (5) If, as Marx argues, Americans at midcentury felt conscious of two kingdoms of force, technology and nature, then Melville's girls incorporate both America's celebration of technological progress and its deeply felt attachment to an anti-technological pastoral ideal into their own inscrutable bodies. story's full interest as an exploration of America's conflicted attitude toward modern forms of production has largely been missed in existing scholarship because of an unacknowledged assumption journalistic and other nonfictional accounts of labor constitute its only possible literary context. …