[To continue the
Labor
Day remembrances, for the rest of this week I’ll highlight and analyze
images and narratives of work in American literature and culture. Please share
texts, images and narratives, or histories and issues you’d highlight for a
crowd-sourced weekend post that’ll do work!]
On a short story
that combines local color and sentimental fiction—and becomes much more.
I’ve written two
posts about one of my favorite 19th century authors, Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps: this
one on the overall arc and significance of her multi-faceted literary career;
and this
one on her best novel, the feminist, realist, and powerfully affecting The
Story of Avis (1877). Throughout her career, Phelps wed sentimental
writing (as in her spiritual Gates
trilogy) to local color fiction (as in the New England regionalism of Avis), focusing consistently on the
experiences of women within those different frames and settings; she also
published a number of young adult and juvenile works, including the very popular Gypsy Brenton books (published when
she was only in her early 20s). In the course of that long and successful
career, she became one of the century’s best-selling novelists, inspired prominent
subsequent writers like William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Edith
Wharton, and deserves to be far better remembered and more widely read in our
own era.
Yet with all of
that said, it’s quite possible that Phelps’ most interesting and important
piece of writing was her first published work of fiction for adults: “The Tenth of
January,” a short story published in the Atlantic Monthly’s March 1868 volume (when Phelps was only
twenty-three years old). “Tenth” fictionalizes one of the worst industrial and workplace
disasters in American history, the January 10th, 1860 collapse
of the Pemberton Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts. That famous and horrific historical
event offered Phelps a perfect chance to combine her two most consistent literary
genres in this debut short story, and she does so to great success—opening with
an extended portrayal of this Massachusetts mill town and its unique culture
and community (“it would be difficult to find Lawrence’s equal,” the narrator
notes), and then gradually building a sentimental and highly emotional story
about a particular young female worker (nearly all those killed in the collapse
fit that description, with most of them recent immigrants), Del Ivory, whose tragic
fate (along with those of many other characters, some only children) becomes intertwined
with that of the mill.
Those elements
alone, in the hands of a master like Phelps, would be enough to create a compelling
and moving story out of this striking historical material. But in the voice of
her narrator, at once a detached observer and a fiery critic, Phelps adds
another complex and vital layer to her story. Consider these back to back
moments in the story’s introductory section. First the narrator concludes a
descriptive paragraph on Lawrence with these angry lines, “Of these ten
thousand [workers] two thirds are girls: voluntary captives, indeed; but what
is the practical difference? It is an old story—that of going to jail for want
of bread.” And then she transitions into the body of her story with this
elegiac paragraph: “My story is written as one sets a bit of marble to mark a
mound. I linger over it as we linger beside the grave of one who sleeps well:
half sadly, half gladly—more gladly than sadly—but hushed.” This narrative
voice is not unlike that of another Atlantic
Monthly story from earlier in the decade, Rebecca
Harding Davis’ “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861)—but by wedding this engaging
narrator and her multi-faceted literary genres to a real and horrific
historical event, Phelps add yet another layer of power and pathos to this
unique short story.
Next work work
work work work tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Texts or histories you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment