"What Factory Girls Had Power to Do": The Techno-logic of Working-Class Feminine Publicity in The Lowell Offering

ELIZABETH FREEMAN "What Factory Girls Had Power to Do": The Techno-logic of Working-Class Feminine Publicity in The Lowell Offering In melville's "The Tartarus of Maids," the narrator goes on one of the factory tours that were fashionable in the mid-nineteenth century to see a paper mill, where he observes "rows of blank girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding paper."1 In this deeply Foucauldian allegory, the factory both emblematizes and participates in some new social technology of gender wherein "through consumptive powers of this blank, raggy life go these white girls to death."2 "Consumptive" registers the pathology ofboth the factory system and the consumerism that feeds it, and Melville's antipathy to both. The reproductive and heterosexual symbolism in "Tartarus" has also been amply documented by its critics: to pick only a few examples from the text, during a complicated nine-minute process one machine "germinates" rag particles, finally giving birth to paper pulp attended by an operative who was once a nurse, and the visiting narrator tells us that he is a "seedsman" who distributes nationally. Central to "Tartarus ," of course, is the way the "maids" have been sexually and technologically "made," the way that female sexuality is conscripted for (re)production.3 But what has not been critically explored is the way Melville's ostensibly progressive social commentary also resonates with anxiety about the power of the factory operatives to produce, or reproduce, without Arizona Quarterly Volume 50 Number 2, Summer 1994 Copyright © 1994 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 1 1 o Elizabeth Freeman any white men present. The only males in the factory are a "dark-complexioned ," elderly boss and a little boy, neither ofwhom seem spermatically equipped to service the ranks of maids. The boss, "Old Bach," personifies a racial thematic that has already been inaugurated by the tale's description of the narrator and his horse "Black" driving through "Black Notch" to reach the wintry white landscape surrounding the factory: the tale's racializations register anxieties about the symbolic miscegenation of Anglo-Saxon women and black men as women suddenly become laborers en masse. Finally, the fact that Melville's women are working in a paper factory seems crucial, for it foregrounds anxieties about laboring white women as potential writing subjects—not just bodies written upon, but consciousnesses writing, organizing, creating reading publics of their own. The narrator's repeated queries as to whether or not the girls are "all maids" echo his earlier anxieties about whether or not the girls can make paper that is anything but "blank" (as opposed to written upon, or even "black" like slave narratives, we can surmise). In fact, the narrator's uncertainty serves to undermine his role as white middleman, a role that was later to become crucial to naturalist literature's management of the anxieties about production and reproduction that industrialization engendered.4 These aspects of "Tartarus" suggest that the girls are not so much the pure objects of technology as a more volitional part of some terrifying new process of social production imagined as sexually, racially, and textually perverse. It seems too simple, then, to say that Melville's proto-feminist or class-conscious political visions engendered "Tartarus," or that Whitman 's, Thoreau's, or Emerson's occasional interest in factory women was an expression of anti-industrialism. Similarly, the mid-nineteenthcentury interest in touring New England mills cannot be viewed as simply a national desire to oversee the republican ideal of community transported to an industrial setting, as John Kasson argues. Instead, I see this surveillance as an attempt to manage two possibilities raised by the introduction of thousands of women into an extra-familial, industrial , and homosocial environment. The first of these is the aforementioned symbolic linkage of white women and slaves. The second is the prospect of female homosocial reproduction—something like "urban feminine conversion"—utterly disjoined from home and family, in which women became "Lowell girls" by imitating other women in a The Lowell Offering1 1 1 process that blurred property and identity, consolidating both in the hands of women. 5 The remainder of this essay will focus...