Work and Slavery

English 239
Written Assn. #1
October 6, 2003

Herman Melville’s short story “The Tartarus of Maids” and Deborah Boe’s poem “Factory Work” are both literary texts of significantly different time periods dealing with significantly similar social issues. Both literary works establish a bond between the roles of women involved in factory work, and both provide a similar unsettling representation of how meek such an existence must be. Nonetheless both texts have many denoting qualities about their structure and context that must be brought to attention in order to accurately compare and contrast these two fine literary works. In this paper the “The Tartarus of Maids” and “Factory Work,” will be scrutinized against one another in an attempt to comprehend the underlying morals of both written texts.
It is easily seen the homogeneity these texts share to the relationship between women and factory work, but there lies many different attributes to these text...