Factory Labor and Literary Aesthetics: The “Lowell Mill Girl,” Popular Fiction, and the Proletarian Grotesque

Herman Melville’s 1855 Story “The Tartarus of Maids” both enacts and ironizes the phenomenon this essay aims to explicate: the pervasive sexualization of antebellum working-class women in cultural representation. The story recounts the January visit of the male narrator, a “seedsman” who seeks supplies for his growing business, to a paper mill in the remote, treacherous, “shaggy-wooded” mountains of New England (324). The paper mill’s Dantean setting helps introduce the story as industrial allegory and sets the stage for the encounter that follows (324–25). Melville’s narrator “take[s] in” the “scene” in one “sweeping glance,” and—as in many accounts of male visitors to the Lowell mills—the scene is infused with eroticism; that the narrator’s guide is called “Cupid” suggests Love’s reign in the factory, while the first machine the narrator sees produces “rose-hued note paper” impressed with a “wreath of roses”—seemingly the stuff of “love-letters” (327–29), perhaps the pink and white Valentines (often decorated with Cupid’s image) mass produced by the 1840s (Shank). However, contrary to the “romance of labor” penned by factory celebrants, the narrator’s re-presentation of factory work is characterized not by the idealized portrayal of “factory Queens” but by images of female servility and dehumanization. In “Tartarus,” the factory appropriates the women’s sexuality, draining the pale, “blank-looking” women of erotic and reproductive vitality; for Melville, the figured contrast between the “rosy paper” and the “pallid cheek[s]” captures the tragic reversals that mill work entails (328–29). Indeed, the paper factory is explicitly designated a realm of perverse coupling: phallic, “piston-like” machines (called “iron animal[s]”) are tended by “passive-looking” women, “pale virgin[s]” who serve as the machines’ “tame minister[s]” (328, 334). This motif culminates in a startling image of industrial reproduction: the paper making machine is located in a “room, stifling with a strange, blood-like, abdominal heat,” where the “egg-like substance” of pulp is “developed” into “germinous particles” of “paper” (331). If the mill is a realm of sexual coupling and reproductivity, it is seemingly devoid of female desire: Cupid, “gliding about among the passive-looking girls—like a gold fish through hueless waves,” is not the emissary of a voluptuous, impetuous goddess but an errand-boy among “unresisting” female servants (329). Remarking that “the human voice was banished from the spot,” the narrator drives home the story’s industrial critique: “Machinery—that vaunted slave of humanity—here stood menially served by human beings, who served mutely and cringingly as the slave serves the Sultan. The girls did not so much seem accessory wheels to the general machinery as mere cogs to the wheels” (328). The constellation of figurative imagery—the paper mill is a “great whited sepulchre,” mill work is a “fatal sentence,” the girls are their own “executioners” and their complexions signify “consumptive pallors”—is meant to underscore the devastating effect of mill work on the female laborer (324, 330). At the same time, by figuring the millwomen’s “slavery” (albeit in Orientalist terms) while giving their whiteness an emphatic, hyperbolic presence, Melville at once evokes and contains the ways in which millwomen’s bodily presence could trouble the nativist icon of the “mill girl” (routinely opposed, in early defenses of American industrialism, to her degraded counterpart in Manchester) and the discourses of “respectable” white working-class womanhood that gave that icon symbolic legibility.

In the “Valentine Offering,” a “beautiful little sheet” (qtd. in Foner, Factory Girls 143) issued by the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association for a special gathering on St. Valentine’s Day, 1846, Lowell women writers addressed the central irony of Melville’s story.¹ While the remote, rural setting of Melville’s story intensifies both the women’s isolation and the misery of their industrial “slave[ry],” Lowell women’s texts link urban factory work to a novel, vibrant female peer culture, and they give rise to new forms of social subjectivity. Unlike the millwomen in “Tartarus” who produce the raw...