[In this week
leading up to Labor Day, one of our most
poorly understood national holidays, five posts AmericanStudying texts and
moments related to work in America. For many many more, check out Erik Loomis’
ongoing This
Day in Labor History series at the Lawyers, Guns, and Money blog!]
On two distinct
but complementary ways to give literary voice to working women.
One of the most unique and
effective American short stories has to be Herman
Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”
(originally published in Harper’s in
1855; Tartarus is a hellish underworld in Greek mythology). Melville’s story
features two seemingly distinct and unconnected halves in which the unnamed
first-person speaker visits, and describes at great length, the two titular
communities: in the first half he attends a refined and luxurious dinner party
in the London club of a group of wealthy and unmarried male lawyers; and in the
second his business pursuits lead him to the hellish gorge that houses a paper
mill and the community of pale and silent young women who work there. As my
parallel summaries have probably already highlighted, the story’s overall
structure, as well as a number of specific choices and phrases in each, brings
these two disparate worlds together in very clear and provocative ways, forcing
Melville’s readers to confront the realities of their new industrial age; such
realities include not only the conditions and environments necessary to produce
in bulk the items used by the London bachelors, but also the differences in
class and gender and identity that accompany such distinct settings. It’s a
great story, much more explicitly social than many of Melville’s works without
sacrificing any of his stylistic strengths, and well worth a read.
In order to make his comparisons
and contrasts work, though, Melville does have to render the mill’s working
women overtly and fully silent; and while that makes for a compelling metaphor,
it also elides one of the more interesting (if relatively brief) literary
experiments in American history. In 1840, fifteen years before Melville
published his story, Abel
Charles Thomas, pastor of the First Univeralist (Unitarian) Church in
Lowell, Massachusetts and a mentor to many of the young women who had come to
work in Lowell’s textile mills, founded and began editing The Lowell Offering, a literary magazine consisting entirely of
contributions (in a wide variety of genres) from mill workers. Although Thomas
had a strong hand in the magazine’s first four issues (published between
October 1840 and March 1841), not only as editor but in soliciting
contributions from the improvement and reading circles that he organized and
ran, by April 1841 it had begun to receive numerous unsolicited pieces (enough
to require the monthly publication schedule that would continue from then on),
and in 1842 Thomas turned over the editorship to two of the women themselves, Harriot
Curtis and Harriet Farley; they served in that role until the magazine
ceased publication in 1845 (not for lack of success, but for what Curtis and
Farley called “reasons of a private nature … in which the public is not
interested”), and Farley later collected some of the magazine’s best pieces in
the book Shells from the Strand of the Sea of Genius
(1847).
There are lots of such great
pieces waiting to be discovered, both in the complete issues from 1840-1841
that are collected at this
online database and in these
two Google books versions
of the Offering; as is often the
case with literary magazines, it helps to read them in context and in
connection to one another, to look through an issue or two and see the
interconnected identities of the magazine and the mills begin to emerge. But
it’s worth noting that the first piece in the first (October 1840) issue,
“History of a Hemlock Broom: Written by Itself,” exemplifies many of the
magazine’s great strengths. The piece is witty and touching, with the broom
(speaking through its “amanuensis” Hannah because it “cannot hold a pen”)
guiding us through its tumultuous life, from its “first distinct recollections”
as “the lowest branch” of a tree through its service to multiple masters and
mistresses (but especially the aforementioned and supportive Hannah) in a house
down the hill to its final retirement in the backyard, with a “full prospect of
[its] former companions on the hill beyond.” But it also engages, subtly but
clearly, with the kinds of broad and significant issues of work and identity,
of the ways in which we define ourselves and how those definitions evolve in
relation to our personal and professional roles and the settings and
controlling forces that influence them, that would be at the heart of the Offering throughout its run.
Life in the mills
was indeed far from paradise, and the writers in the Offering didn’t hesitate to engage with the most dark and difficult
sides to their world and experiences there. The fact that they did so through
their impressive and eloquent voices makes their work, to my mind, less a
contrast and more a complement to Melville’s story; together, these unique and
rich American Renaissance texts can help reveal the new world of
industrialization in all its complexity—and, for our 21st century
world of sweatshops and high-end retailers, migrant labor and billions in
bonuses, its ongoing relevance. Next labor post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other work-related texts or moments you’d share?
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