In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

In Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall, the eponymous heroine, an impoverished widow, is cast off by her male relatives after her husband’s death and must work as a seamstress to support her two young children and herself . In a scene midway through the novel, Ruth gazes out the window of her boardinghouse at a “large brick tenement” across the street—a “prospect,” Fern notes, not designed to inspire “cheerful fancies” (90). A different kind of window scene from the type commonly found in domestic ¤ction, Fern’s Ruth observes not the stuff of “life”—meditated experience to compensate for the deprivations of domestic privacy (Brodhead 65–66)—but the makings of a cautionary narrative. Although Ruth surveys several poor residents, “emigrants and others,” inhabiting the tenement’s dingy rooms, the ¤gure that arrests her attention (and commands her sympathy) is a young seamstress, wanly and wearily performing her painstaking labor. Notably, Ruth readily constructs a narrative for the image before her: “There . . . sat a young girl, from dawn till dark, scarcely lifting that pallid face and weary eyes—stitching and thinking, thinking and stitching. God help her!” (90). Underscoring the tragic fatalism of the seamstress’s conventional story, Fern makes a point of emphasizing the tenement’s proximity to the neighborhood brothel— the unfortunate conclusion, the text implies, of many such poor women ’s tales (91). In Ruth Hall, Fern both borrowed from and contributed to a growing 2 Representing the “Deserving Poor” The “Sentimental Seamstress” and the Feminization of Poverty in Antebellum America Lori Merish body of “seamstress literature” (Reynolds 355) that gained widespread popularity in the 1840s and 1850s.1 In this essay, I examine the construction of the ¤gure Christine Stansell terms the “sentimental seamstress” (110) in three emerging, and overlapping, textual sites: the discourses of poverty, evangelical moral reform, and popular ¤ction. While most writers in Jacksonian America defended white male economic equality and had increasing dif¤culty imagining men as guiltless victims of capitalism and, thus, deserving objects of charity, they regularly depicted working women as overcome by uncontrollable economic forces. The era’s predominant example of the “deserving poor,” the seamstress was a ¤gure whose economic dependency was seen to be dictated by the laws of capital as thoroughly as the “natural” strictures of femininity.2 Referred to as “poor helpless females” in the proceedings of the National Trades’ Union and denominated “poor and sickly” in the pages of the Advocate (the publishing organ of the New York Female Moral Reform Society) (Sumner 141), seamstresses were conventionally, and melodramatically , portrayed as beings hemmed in on all sides. Sympathy played a key role in representations of impoverished seamstresses . Indeed, sentimentalism, usually understood as a “feminine” language of racial reform in antebellum America, was also central to discourses of class and, especially, poverty. The seamstress was the privileged object of sympathy in the writings of reformers concerned with moderating what was perceived to be a growing gap between rich and poor. The sentimental seamstress was decisively in®ected by the literature of evangelical reform, which merged evangelical conceptions of the redemptive value of sympathy for the weak with traditional conceptions of social interdependency, and a paternalist “moral economy,” that had historically provided a vocabulary of working-class resistance to laissezfaire capitalism and individualism (Thompson).3 As a code for representing and managing class differences, sympathy was used in seamstress stories to negate the threat of class con®ict and violence—ultimately, by translating class differences into gender.4 In depictions of the sentimental seamstress, class victimization was representationally submerged within increasingly in®uential gender norms: seamstress stories fashioned an eroticized image of what was increasingly perceived to be an inherently feminine condition of economic dependency and embedded that image within a highly conventional narrative structure. The in50 Lori Merish scription of the sentimental seamstress’s economic downfall, as a progressive condition narrated through time, became a gendered locus of particular forms of economic determinism, and a means of managing deep-seated cultural anxieties about workingwomen’s (sexual and economic ) autonomy. Like her working-class contemporary the “factory girl,” the seamstress was the subject of substantial debate about women’s roles in the emerging industrial economy. However, unlike female mill workers, seamstresses had few opportunities to engage in acts of literary selfde ¤nition: there were no established media, such as the Lowell Offering or the Voice of Industry, in which needleworkers could articulate their experiences and publicly voice their concerns. Perhaps because of this discursive absence...

Share