Cultural Sweat: Melville, Labor, and Slavery

Cultural Sweat: Melville, Labor, and Slavery PAULA KOPACZ Eastern Kentucky University I n “Letter Fourth” published in The Lowell Offering of 1844, Susan, a mill worker in Lowell, Massachusetts, writes to friends back home about the varied reasons young women come to the textile mills to work. Among the expected explanations—a mean stepmother, a tight-fisted Yankee father, an overly strict household moral code, religious differences with family members—Susan gives another reason: “The next [girl] has left a good home because her lover, who has gone on a whaling voyage, wishes to be married when he returns, and she would like more money than her father will give her.”1 Just as Robert K. Wallace in Douglass and Melville: Anchored Together in Neighborly Style urges us to explore the intersecting worlds of the black slave and the white seaman, by publishing her 1844 “letter,” Harriet Farley long ago reminded us that the lives of the New England girls working in the mills and of the young men who might be found in Melville’s seafaring and whaling stories also intersect. And just as the personal lives and the public writings of both Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville have been studied extensively but “separately,”2 so, too, have the lives and writings of the young farm girls who headed to the mill towns been studied separately from those of the farm boys who headed off to sea. However, looking at the historical similarities between these groups helps us clarify Melville’s perspective on work. Although it has been often acknowledged that Melville was writing in Moby-Dick the epic history of whaling, his intense concern for the common laborer and the contingent development of the textile and whaling industries in this period argue that he was perhaps more profoundly engaged in writing the epic history of the American Worker. Furthermore, Melville’s deep empathy for these laborers’ work constitutes the foundation for his opposition to slavery. Rather than rail against the South’s “peculiar institution,” Melville makes a clever but indirect tactical move: he makes his readers sympathize c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 Harriet Farley, “Letter Fourth,” The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (18401845 ), ed. Benita Eisler (New York: Norton, 1977), 61; hereafter cited as Lowell Offering. 2 Robert K. Wallace, Douglass and Melville: Anchored Together in Neighborly Style (New Bedford, MA: Spinner Publications, 2005), 3. 74 L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S C U L T U R A L S W E A T with other forms of exploited labor, namely the mill workers and common mariners, and from that position opposition to a worse abuse of labor, Southern slavery, follows inevitably. For Melville, the labor of mill workers and seamen provided the physical base upon which American economy rested, as well as the moral and philosophical underpinnings of the country’s debate over slavery. Melville’s well-known interest in labor has provoked significant critical commentary especially from Marxist critics such as H. Bruce Franklin, who locates the station of the common seaman as “about midway between wage and chattel slavery.”3 Critics have examined Melville’s labor politics, his antebellum republicanism , and his connection to the Democratic party through his brother Gansevoort. David S. Reynolds in Beneath the American Renaissance situates Melville squarely in the New York labor reform movement and fully cognizant of both American antebellum working-class writing as well as the city-mystery genre that frequently uses the working class as its subject.4 Ian McGuire’s “Who Ain’t a Slave?” argues that Ahab’s quest reveals Melville’s ambivalence regarding an optimistic outcome for antebellum free labor ideology.5 However, missing in these studies of ideology and politics is a recognition of Melville’s passionate concern for the individual man and the individual woman whose labor defeats, demeans, and devalues human dignity, and whose highly gendered work paths ironically intersect and unite white men and women with black slavery of the South. Not only...