Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 133

July 15, 2021: Summer Camp Contexts: Playing Indian

[This summer my sons return (after a frustrating Covid hiatus last year) to their favorite sleepaway camp. As ever that gives me serious empty nest syndrome, but more relevantly it also gives us an opportunity for some Summer CampStudying! Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the summer camp experiences, stories, and perspectives of fellow AmericanStudiers.]

On the camp tradition that embodies a troubling American trend, and what we can do about it.

I’ve tried from time to time, mostly in the posts collected under the category “Scholarly Reviews,” to cite works of AmericanStudies scholarship that have been particularly significant and inspiring to me. But it’s fair to say that I’ve only scratched the surface, and I’ll keep trying to find ways to highlight other such works as the blog moves forward into its second (!) decade. One such work is Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian (1998), a book which moves from the Boston Tea Party and Tammany Hall to late 20th century hobbyists and New Age believers (among many other subjects) to trace the enduring American fascination with dressing up as and performing exaggerated “Indian” identities in order to construct and engage with individual, communal, and national identity. In one of his later chapters, Deloria considers Cold War-era practices of “playing Indian” through which children’s social experiences and burgeoning American identities were often delineated—and right alongside the Boy Scouts and “cowboys and Indians” play, Deloria locates and analyzes summer camps.

In the example cited in that last hyperlink, Missouri’s Camp Lake of the Woods held an annual “Indian powwow” for its campers—the tradition dates back at least to the 1940s, and apparently continued well into the late 20th century. (I’m assuming it no longer occurs, although I haven’t found evidence one way or another.) By all accounts, including Deloria’s research and analysis, such summer camp uses of “Indian” images and performances were widespread, if not even ubiquitous, as camps rose to their height of national prominence in the 1950s and 60s. Even if we leave aside the long and troubling history that Deloria traces and in which these particular performances are unquestionably located, the individual choice remains, to my mind, equally troubling: this is childhood fun created out of the use of exaggerated ethnic stereotypes, community-building through blatant “othering” of fellow Americans, and a particularly oppressed and vulnerable community at that; to paraphrase what I said in my post on the racist “Red Man” scene in Disney’s Peter Pan (1953), I can’t imagine these camps asking their campers to “play” any other ethnic or racial group. The performances were obviously not intended to be hurtful, but it’s difficult, especially in light of Deloria’s contextualizing, to read them in any other way.

So what, you might ask? Well for one thing, we could far better remember these histories—both the specific histories of playing Indian in summer camps, and the broader arc of playing Indian as a foundational element in the construction of American identity and community across the centuries; Deloria’s book would help us better remember on both levels. For another thing, it would be worth considering what it means that so many American children experienced and took part in these performances, how that might impact their perspectives on not only Native Americans, but ethnic and cultural “others” more generally. And for a third thing, it would also be worth examining our contemporary summer camps and other childhood communities—certainly the most overt such racism has been almost entirely eliminated from those space; but what stereotypes and images, performances and “others,” remain? Summer camps are fun and games, but they’re also as constitutive of identities as any influential places and material cultures can be—as Deloria reminds us, play is also dead serious, and demands our attention and anaylsis.

Last camp context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Summer camp stories you’d share or histories you’d highlight?

July 14, 2021: Summer Camp Contexts: Jewish Summer Camps

[This summer my sons return (after a frustrating Covid hiatus last year) to their favorite sleepaway camp. As ever that gives me serious empty nest syndrome, but more relevantly it also gives us an opportunity for some Summer CampStudying! Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the summer camp experiences, stories, and perspectives of fellow AmericanStudiers.]

On ethnicity, community, and the preservation and revision of tradition.

In the nine first-year writing courses I taught as an adjunct at both Boston University and UMass Boston, I focused on one aspect or another of immigration and American identity; as a result, I found that the conversations and work in those courses circled around again and again to some key topics and themes. Many were what you would expect: the old and new worlds; assimilation and acculturation; hyphens and hybridity; multi-generational continuities and changes. But nearly as frequent were our discussions of ethnic communities and neighborhoods in the U.S., the areas early scholars of immigration dubbed ethnic enclaves—we talked a good deal about the limitations and strengths of such enclaves, the ways in which they can on the one hand foster isolation and separation (and even ghetto-ization), sub-standard living conditions and inequal schools, prejudice and ignorance toward immigrant groups, and other issues; but at the same time can preserve specific cultural identities and customs and languages, build community and support across generations, become potent new world homes for immigrant communities.

In the late 19thand early 20th centuries, following the era’s sizeable waves of Jewish immigration to the United States, many of those arrivals settled in such ethnic enclaves, most famously in the tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan (as described at great length in early 20th century literary works such as Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky [1917] and Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers [1925]). While some of those neighborhoods and communities persist to a lesser degree, they have mostly dissipated over the subsequent century, as Jewish Americans have spread out across the country. Yet like members of most ethnic and cultural, as well as most religious, communities, many Jewish Americans have worked for continuity despite these historical and social changes, particularly by passing along customs and beliefs, traditions and ideals, to their younger generations. Education and activities, schools and community and cultural centers, have provided vehicles for such preservation of culture—but another, complex, and I believe more easily overlooked, such vehicle has been the Jewish summer camp.

For well more than half a century, Jewish schoolchildren (and of course some non-Jewish schoolchildren) have spent portions of their summers at sites such as Wisconsin’s Camp Ramah, Camp Woodmere in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, and New Hampshire’s Camp Tevya, among many others. In many ways these camps have facilitated and continue to facilitate a preservation of Jewish culture and community across the generations: with Hebrew and Talmud instruction, historical and social lessons, and other communal activities and connections. Yet at the same time, if we parallel such camps with those attended by American schoolchildren from all cultures and communities (and it seems clear that these camps have also featured all of the stereotypical camp activities: boating and hiking, capture the flag and campfires, and so on), we could argue the opposite: that they have offered another avenue through which Jewish American kids have connected to a broader, non-denominational American society and experience, one shared by all their peers. A tension between ethnicity and acculturation, tradition and revision, the Talmud and campfire sing-alongs—what could be more American than such dualities?

Next camp context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Summer camp stories you’d share or histories you’d highlight?

July 13, 2021: Summer Camp Contexts: Hello Muddah

[This summer my sons return (after a frustrating Covid hiatus last year) to their favorite sleepaway camp. As ever that gives me serious empty nest syndrome, but more relevantly it also gives us an opportunity for some Summer CampStudying! Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the summer camp experiences, stories, and perspectives of fellow AmericanStudiers.]

On the very American afterlife of a classic camp (sorry) song.

In 1963, comedy writer and TV producer Allan Sherman wrote (along with musician and songwriter Lou Busch) the comic novelty song “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh (A Letter from Camp).” The hyperbolic lyrics were based on the less-than-ideal experiences of Sherman’s son Robert at New York’s Camp Champlain (Robert had such a miserable camp experience that he was eventually expelled!), and captured pitch-perfectly both the exaggerations and extremes (and vicissitudes) of a young person’s perspective and the mythic presence of summer camp in our childhood and national imagination. The song was such a hit (occupying the #2 spot on the Billboard singles list for three August weeks) that Sherman wrote and performed a sequelon the Tonight Show with Johnny Carsonless than a year later, cementing the song’s status as the nation’s unofficial summer camp anthem.

It was in 1965, however, that the multi-faceted American story of “Hello Muddah” began to unfold in full. In that year Milton Bradley released a Camp Granada board game, advertised by a TV commercial featuring yet another version of the song performed by Sherman himself. Moreover, the 1965-66 TV schedule featured the first and only season of Camp Runamuck, an NBC sitcom based on the song (including character names and plot details drawn from the lyrics). Those cultural and material extensions of the song have been amplified, in the decades since, by a children’s book, an acclaimed Off-Broadway musical revue, and numerous pop culture allusions and references. Indeed, while the original version of the song continues to exist (even in the pre-YouTube days of my childhood I remember hearing it somewhere), it’s fair to say that “Hello Muddah” has become in many ways more of a brand than a text, revised and reframed and made new for all these distinct cultural and commercial purposes.

That process, by which an individual and isolated artistic work gets adopted into the multi-faceted, multi-media mélange that is American popular culture and society, is anything but new, as my Dad’s pioneering website Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culturemakes clear. But as that website itself illustrates, this kind of American cultural evolution has become significantly more visible, and more exactly recordable and traceable, in our 21st century digital moment. I won’t lie, I didn’t know anything about the “Hello Muddah” board game and TV show until I started researching this post—but now they, like the many permutations of the song itself (which I have a dim memory of singing during my own, thankfully far less extreme and far more positive, experience at Virginia’s overnight Camp Friendship as a middle schooler in the late 1980s), have become part of my own evolving American perspective and identity.

Next camp context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Summer camp stories you’d share or histories you’d highlight?

July 12, 2021: Summer Camp Contexts: Camp Virginia

[This summer my sons return (after a frustrating Covid hiatus last year) to their favorite sleepaway camp. As ever that gives me serious empty nest syndrome, but more relevantly it also gives us an opportunity for some Summer CampStudying! Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the summer camp experiences, stories, and perspectives of fellow AmericanStudiers.]

On the unique summer camp without which there’d be no AmericanStudier.

The van was, to the best of my recollection, entirely ordinary. Just a van. The movies that we watched while driving in that van were, although I can only remember one specific title (the forgotten ‘80s classic Space Camp [1986]), nothing earth-shattering either. Just mediocre kids’ entertainment. The lunches that we ate at our various destinations, likewise. The counselor to camper ratio was, while probably well within state requirements, nothing special; I think there were around 12 of us at a time, and just the one counselor. As summer camps go, these basic details might make this one sound pretty average at best. But Camp Virginia most definitely changed my life.

Over the years a number of folks have asked me what inspired my dual passions for American literature and American history, and in my answer I often focus on a couple core elements of my childhood: being raised by two parents who cared deeply about reading and writing; and growing up in Virginia, surrounded by all that history (especially, at least in what was highlighted during my childhood, of the Revolutionary and Civil War eras). But when it comes to the latter influence, of course many tens of thousands of kids grew up in Virginia during the same period as I, and I doubt that many of them were similarly inspired by its treasure troves of historical goodness. And while my parents without question would have introduced me to those troves, the most foundational introductions were those provided by Mr. Kirby. Ronald Kirby was my fourth-grade teacher at Charlottesville’s Johnson Elementary School, and I’m sure he did a great job in that role, but for me he’ll always be the founder, sole counselor, chauffeur, lunch maker, movie selector and starter, 7-11 bathroom demander (a long and funny story that I can’t possibly replicate here, but it’s a good one, trust me), and above all guide and teacher and historian and mentor, of Camp Virginia.

Every summer (well, I did it for two straight summers, but I think he ran it every summer for many years before and after that as well), Mr. Kirby would offer week-long camps, each one focused on a different historical topic (mainly the Revolution and the Civil War, but I imagine there were variations and other topics too). Each day we’d drive to a couple of historical sites, and while I do still (kinda) remember the van and the movies and the lunches, it’s those visits and sites that really stand out for me. But not even the sites, many of which I’ve been to numerous other times as well. It’s the aura that stands out for me, the ambience, the ways that Mr. Kirby could, with a well-chosen anecdote or detail, with attention to a particular spot or artifact or story, with his very enthusiasm and passion and interest, undimmed after however many years and visits and campers, make the history come alive for me and, in so doing, make me come more fully alive as a student, a historian, a Virginian, an American. It’s no exaggeration to say that at the end of those weeks I was hooked, was destined for a life (in whatever profession or discipline) in which history would always be a major destination.

Next camp context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Summer camp stories you’d share or histories you’d highlight?

July 10-11, 2021: Pop Culture Workers

[Later this month I start teaching a new online class, a variation of my Ethnic American Lit course that will focus on representations of work in American literature. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of such representations, leading up to this special weekend post on some of my favorite pop culture worker-characters!]

On five pop culture characters (presented in their representations’ chronological order) who reflect the range and complexity of work in early 21st century America.

1)      Nick Rinaldi: No American filmmaker has been more consistently interested in representing work than John Sayles, and many of his characters are defined more centrally by their labor than is Vincent Spano’s Nick in City of Hope (1991). But from our first glimpse of Nick, hardly working on a construction site due to his status and role within his labor union, to our fraught last images of him, bleeding (perhaps fatally) atop another abandoned construction project in the arms of his father (a construction workers turned developer and real estate entrepreneur), he, like the hugely underrated film he headlines, reflects many of the complex realities of work, labor, urban settings, and American society in the late 20th century (all of which have endured and deepened in the early 21st).

2)      Zulema L.: While construction work seems in part like a remnant of earlier periods of American history, migrant labor very much embodies the fraught world of 21st century work (and global community). I don’t know of any cultural text that more thoughtfully and powerfully portrays that community of workers and Americans than does the Academy Award-nominated 2010 documentary The Harvest (La Cosecha). The film follows a number of workers and families, but at its heart (in every sense) is Zulema, a 12 year old girl working as a strawberry picker. Nothing I write here can humanize the realities, the lives and identities, and the horrors of 21st century migrant labor as well as does this young girl’s voice and perspective.

3)      Janette Desautel: While migrant labor reflects some of the most extreme and brutal sides to work in 21stcentury America, it’s important to note that virtually every American has connections to, and is at least partly defined by, the world of work. That includes what might seem on the surface to be far more stable and supported forms of work, such as the roles of chef and restauranteur occupied by one of Treme’s central characters, Kim Dickens’ Janette. Many of the challenges Janette faces in the course of the show’s four seasons are tied to the show’s overarching topic, New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; but many others (such as all those Janette experiences when she briefly moves to New York City to work as a chef there) reflect far more widespread, gritty realities beneath the glamour of the 21stcentury culinary and restaurant worlds.

4)      Dre Johnson: As I highlighted in this post on using Black-ish in my Writing II classroom (an assignment that worked just as well this last semester), the sitcom does a wonderful job (not just for that genre, but for any type of cultural work) portraying the manifold realities of race in 21st century America. That its protagonists work in white-collar jobs—Dre is an advertising executive and his wife Rainbow a physician—not only doesn’t lessen those themes of race and community, it reminds us that both they and other issues such as work (among other themes) don’t go away depending on the social status and neighborhood. Moreover, as the first hyperlinked video above demonstrates, we get to see a good deal of Dre in the workplace, a world that is vastly different from, and I would argue even in these brief glimpses more multi-layered and realistic than, Mad Men’s 1960s advertising offices.

5)      Destiny (Dorothy): I haven’t seen the 2019 based-on-a-crazy-true-story film Hustlersyet, so I can’t speak specifically about Constance Wu’sDestiny/Dorothy nor any of its other exotic dancer-turned-con artist main characters. But I wanted to make sure to include her in this list nonetheless, both because sex work is work (and a hugely prominent 21st century form at that) and because Asian American sex workers in particular are at the heart of one of 2021’s most horrific events. Hustlers might tell a pretty sensational story, but it nonetheless helps us think about those important layers to work and life in 2021 America.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other representations of work you’d share?

July 9, 2021: Work in American Literature: Imbolo Mbue and Behold the Dreamers

[Later this month I start teaching a new online class, a variation of my Ethnic American Lit course that will focus on representations of work in American literature. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations, leading up to a special weekend post on some of my favorite pop culture worker-characters!]

On two takeaways from a compelling creative reading and talk.

Sometimes a literary work becomes more and more relevant in the years after its release, perhaps in ways that would surprise even the author. I think that’s the case with Cameroonian American author Imbolo Mbue’s wonderful debut novel Behold the Dreamers (2016). Mbue’s overt focus is on recent social and economic histories, specifically those of the 2008 financial crisis and recession; one of her two central families features Clark Edwards, a high-ranking official at Lehman Brothers, and his disaffected wife Cindy and their two children. She thus initially contrasts and compares the experiences, perspectives, and versions of the American Dream of the novel’s other central family, Cameroonian immigrants Jende and Neni Jonga and their own two young children, to those of Clark and his family (for whom both Jende and Neni end up working in different capacities). But it is more than class or wealth that separate these families—throughout the novel the Jenga’s are fighting to avoid deportation and gain legal (or at least permanent) status in the United States, and it is those battles, always part of our history of course, that feel even more frustratingly salient three years after the novel’s publication, in the age of Trump.

I conceived of the above opening line about this evolution of Mbue’s book surprising even her before I had the chance to hear her read from and talk about Behold the Dreamers at NeMLA 2019’s opening night creative event. But interestingly enough, in that presentation Mbue likewise emphasized that she was her book and its characters mostly through the lens of class; she was specifically responding to a question about the relative absence of race from the book’s thematic engagements, and noted that for her class has been the dominant issue in both her own life experiences and her perspective on the world. Of course there’s no one identity issue or theme that informs human experiences and societies, and certainly the financial crisis in particular both reflected and affected class and social status in America in particular and striking ways. Yet the truth is that immigration status is at least as significant a factor in the experiences of the Jonga family as anything related to the 2008 crash—and if it’s ever been possible to see immigration status as separate from racial and ethnic communities and identities (and I’ve argued in many places that that’s never been the case), the last couple years have made clear just how intertwined those themes are. That doesn’t mean there aren’t multiple ways to read Mbue’s multi-layered novel, but I’m hard-pressed to imagine a 2019 reading that doesn’t engage with these themes of race and ethnicity.

Hearing an author speak about her own work is even more illuminating when it comes to topics like process, and on that note Mbue offered a particularly striking story. I knew this book was her first novel, but of course many writers have multiple projects in development before that first book is published, publish a number of short stories before landing a book deal, or in other ways have established careers or bodies of work prior to that debut novel. Yet in Mbue’s case, the opposite was true—not only had she not published any short stories, but if I understand her correctly she really hadn’t written any (and certainly hadn’t written any other novels). Instead, this novel emerged from her personal experience of the financial crisis on multiple levels—she was laid off from a job in New York City, was walking down the street out of work and increasingly impoverished, and saw a line of chauffeurs waiting to pick up Wall Street executives from their offices. Out of that combination of personal situation and social observation was born the initial idea for Behold the Dreamers, the first extended creative writing Mbue had ever worked on. Of course, she would then work on it for five years and have it rejected by (in her words) “every agent in America other than [her] agent,” which just goes to show that the road to an amazing, “overnight” success might be unique but still has some common threads across many writers.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other representations of work you’d share?

July 8, 2021: Work in American Literature: “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper?”

[Later this month I start teaching a new online class, a variation of my Ethnic American Lit course that will focus on representations of work in American literature. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations, leading up to a special weekend post on some of my favorite pop culture worker-characters!]

A quick but stunning literary representation of work today, Martín Espada’s magisterial poem “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper” (1993).

I love “Perfection” because it lays bare (literally as well as figuratively) the hidden labor that constructs and sustains our society, especially at its highest and most seemingly rarefied levels. I love it because it’s not a political treatise about those realities but a visceral engagement with them, through the lens of a single speaker’s journey, identity, and evolving perspective on himself and his worlds. And I love it because I’ve heard Espada read it, and can say (as proudly as possible) that I share the same public university system with this immensely talented poet.

Last literary work tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other representations of work you’d share?

July 7, 2021: Work in American Literature: Depression Novels

[Later this month I start teaching a new online class, a variation of my Ethnic American Lit course that will focus on representations of work in American literature. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations, leading up to a special weekend post on some of my favorite pop culture worker-characters!]

On two unique novels that together help us remember the Great Depression’s effects on America’s urban settings and workers.

To my mind, the most famous artistic works to emerge out of and chronicle the Great Depression are almost entirely focused on its impacts on rural American communities and lives: the Dust Bowl farmers of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and John Ford’s subsequent film version(1940); the sharecropping Southern farmers of James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941); the rural African American communities of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); and even, if more symbolically and allegorically to be sure, the Kansas that Dorothy seeks to escape and then learns to value in (especially) the film version of The Wizard of Oz (1939). Even the most prominent voice in a musical soundtrack to the era, Woody Guthrie, focused much of his attention, as in “the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling” of “This Land is Your Land” (1940), on those kinds of rural settings.

I don’t begrudge any of those their spots in our national consciousness, and if anything I think that we could probably think more fully about most of them. But today I want to add two other late 1930s novels to the conversation, two books that, while entirely different in almost every way (from size, style, and structure to focus and themes), can combine to help us engage more fully with how both the decades leading up to the Depression and the era itself were also deeply felt in and connected to the nation’s urban centers and their working communities. Focusing on those preceding decades is John Dos Passos’ sprawling historical trilogy U.S.A. (1938; previously published as the individual novels The 42nd Parallel [1930], 1919 [1932], and The Big Money [1936]), which narrates (in over 1300 pages) much of American history between 1900 and the Stock Market crash of 1929 through multiple stylistic lenses, including biographies of significant historical figures, “newsreel” collections of headlines for key events, “camera eye” portrayals of his own evolving identity, and the fictional narratives of a dozen representative characters (all of whose experiences unfold in major cities). Focusing on the Depression itself is Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete(1939), which tells the story (in about 200 pages) of one Italian American bricklayer (modeled on both Donato’s father and his own experiences in the profession from a very young age) whose struggle to provide for his family in 1930s New York ends tragically.

Again, two texts that are different in almost every way, but for both it is the cities—already home by the opening of the 20th century to a huge range of ethnic, national, racial, and work and economic identities and communities—where both the Depression’s causes and its effects can be seen and narrated in all their scope and complexity. For at least the prior half-century numerous astute observers, from sociological reporters like Jacob Riis (in How the Other Half Lives [1890]) to social reformers like Jane Addams (as captured in her Twenty Years at Hull-House [1912]), had focused on America’s cities, and particularly the lives and communities of impoverished immigrant and ethnic city residents, as a key site in which to find, analyze, and attempt to strengthen the nation’s evolving and fragile social fabric. And while Dos Passos’ tone is largely cynical and Donato’s largely elegiac, and both books deeply biting in their portrayals of class and politics in America, their existence themselves serves precisely as an artistic attempt at such strengthening of our social fabric; both books, that is, demand that their audiences confront and attempt to understand the lives and experiences that they represent, and thus to recognize what has happened and is continuing to happen in the nation and most especially (in their lens) in its cities.

I don’t in any way want this to read like a blue-state/red-state, coasts vs. flyover kind of dichotomy—for lots of reasons, but mostly because, in this equation as in most every other one, it is in no way either-or. The Depression hit the Joads and the sharecroppers and the Janeys and Tea Cakes and the Auntie Ems just as hard as it did New Yorkers and Chicagoans and Pittsburghers and Angelinos. We should remember and read and engage with Dos Passos and Donato not in place of those other works, but alongside them, and in so doing, hopefully, come to a fuller and more layered sense of what the Depression was and meant, and how the era’s artists sought to capture and respond to those complex realities. Next literary work tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other representations of work you’d share?

July 6, 2021: Work in American Literature: Phelps’ “Tenth of January”

[Later this month I start teaching a new online class, a variation of my Ethnic American Lit course that will focus on representations of work in American literature. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations, leading up to a special weekend post on some of my favorite pop culture worker-characters!]

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 literary work tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other representations of work you’d share?

July 5, 2021: Work in American Literature: Melville and the Lowell Offering

[Later this month I start teaching a new online class, a variation of my Ethnic American Lit course that will focus on representations of work in American literature. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations, leading up to a special weekend post on some of my favorite pop culture worker-characters!]

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 literary work tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other representations of work you’d share?