James C. Scott’s work on relations of domination and the possibility of autonomous social action or resistance by subordinates provides the theoretical basis for this analysis of the central characters in Herman Melville’s short novel Bartleby, the Scrivener and Eugene O’Neill’ s play The Hairy Ape. These two emblematic characters are seen here as illustrative of acts of insubordination. Stigmatized by powerholders, they are able to bring into the public sphere the fact that “a cabbage is not a rose.” In this study, a discussion on the issues of public and private also adds the possibility of looking at both Bartleby and Yank from the perspective of the translation of cultural languages insofar as we are able to look at their apparently unusual behavior, from the point of view of social communication, as a “failure’ of translation. To the latter approach, the theoretical starting point is the study of the Brazilian anthropologist Rubem César Fernandes in his work Privado Porém Público: o Terceiro Setor na América Latina.
