[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 the striking
novella that asks us to empathize with some of our worst work conditions.
If I had to identify one factor
that can almost instantly change our perspectives (individually and communally)
on any issue or story—no matter how entrenched our existing beliefs might seem to
be—I’d have
to go with empathy. Not just sympathy, ‘cause while that’s nice it’s still
somewhat distant, regarding what’s happening to someone else and feeling badly
about it. But the moment when we can empathize with them, the second we start
imagining ourselves in that identity and situation and set of experiences, that
to me is the lever that can force some daylight between our biases and the
genuine and complex details of what these others are dealing with, making it
possible, at least potentially, for us to see and understand the latter without
being blinded by the former. That’s why, whatever else he did or does with his
career, I’ll always be very grateful to Everlast for his song “What It’s Like,” which
articulates the necessity of and stakes in such empathetic connections, even to
some of the most controversial figures among us (an alcoholic homeless man, a
girl getting an abortion, and a gangbanger), with perfect clarity and power (it
also includes, in its bridge, one of the truest lines in American music: “You
know where it ends, yo it usually depends on where you start”).
One of the most striking requests
for an audience’s empathy in all of American literature comes in the opening
paragraphs of Rebecca Harding Davis’s novella Life in
the Iron-Mills (1861). The twenty-nine year old Davis was working as a
reporter and occasional editor for her local newspaper, the Wheeling (WV) Intelligencer, when Life appeared in the April 1861 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, and had published no works in any genre on a
national level (her first novel, Margret Howth, would appear
later in the year); so this incredibly dense and evocative work would have
likely caught readers by surprise in any case. But the direct inclusion of
those readers in that first sentence—“A cloudy day; do you know what that is in
a town of iron-works?”—, and moreover the central role played by “you” in
almost every sentence of the story’s first four paragraphs, represents a even
more thoroughly surprising and immediately engaging element. And Davis asks her
audience to do a great deal more than just envision a cloudy day; in the fourth
paragraph’s culmination of this introductory section, she requests your empathy
much more overtly and brazenly: “Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This
is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your
clean clothes, and come right down with me—here, into the thickest of the fog
and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this story. There is a secret
down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain dumb for centuries; I want to
make it a real thing to you.”
As the somewhat melodramatic
language and tone there might suggest, the story that Davis proceeds to tell
for us is certainly not without its sentimental and gothic extremes: from its
heroine, a hunchbacked worker named Deborah who suffers from a lifelong
unrequited love for the story’s hero, Hugh Wolfe; to Wolfe’s own conflicted
identity as an iron worker who produces tragically beautiful works of art in
his spare time and with spare materials; to the at times heavy-handed use of
symbols, including a caged and soot-covered bird in the opening and the angel
sculpture that represents both Wolfe’s masterpiece and, in the story’s main
plot thread, his undoing and destruction. Yet of course one could argue quite
successfully that such emotional and symbolic extremes represent purposeful
choices on Davis’s part to help bring us in, to engage with her audience’s own
emotions and ideas—and thus, paradoxically but crucially, that in these
melodramatic elements, just as much as in the striking second-person opening,
she is in fact working precisely to “make it a real thing” for us. And that
argument could be made successfully because she most certainly succeeds in that
goal: I’ve never been anywhere near a town of iron-works, and when I first read
this story as a freshman in college had never even seen photographs of them,
yet Davis’s text captures every sensory detail, every corner, of that setting
and world with clarity and power; so much so that when we come back to the
narrator’s voice and room in the final paragraphs, the circular structure
reminds us of the first sentence’s question, and our answer now, wherever and
whoever we may be, is “Yes.”
As with
anything, even the best of things, empathy has its limits, and that’s not at
all a bad thing; not every identity is healthy for us to imagine ourselves
into, and I certainly have no desire to empathize with (for example) a
Jeffrey Dahmer. But when it comes to defining experiences and places and
issues in American history, especially those that are far removed from most of
our 21st-century lives—and the world of industrial labor in the 19th
century, before such things as the weekend or work hours or child labor laws or
safety regulations were even matters for debate, is most definitely one of
them—there are few things that can be more productive and important than
imagining ourselves into them. And that’s a lot easier with a guide like Davis.
Next labor post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other work-related texts or moments you’d share?
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