-
1. Becoming Media in An American Tragedy
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Maggie works in a collar factory. The eponymous heroine of Stephen Crane’s 1893 novel is responsible for “turning out” collars— at her sewing machine, this factory girl participates in the routine transformation from cloth into collar, or from raw material into product . Her role in the transformation and the factory scene she inhabits are familiar enough as the raw material of American naturalist fiction. For Maggie has good company among other characters—especially women—who populate these texts and who perform acts of routinized mechanical labor resulting in the production of objects: for a time, Maggie makes collars, just as Theodore Dreiser’s Carrie Meeber is briefly employed in a shoe factory, and even Frank Norris’s Trina McTeague creates her own one-woman production line making wooden animals, at least until her lack of fingers prevents it.1 Like Trina, Maggie has a slightly more intimate relation to the thing produced than factory work might otherwise imply, because she holds something called a collar in her hand when she finishes her piece 43 1 BECOMING MEDIA IN AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY She perched on the stool and treadled at her machine all day, turning out collars, the name of whose brand could be noted for its irrelevancy to anything in connection with collars. —Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets Montgomery Clift comes to town, the poor relation of a rich family that finds him a job at the local factory, where he meets and sleeps with Shelley Winters despite stern orders not to fraternize with the other workers. At a party he sees Elizabeth Taylor, the most beautiful of the local rich girls. —Steve Erikson, Zeroville of its construction, when she had previously held something other than collar. And like Carrie, she does not abide this work for long, exchanging the hourly wage for the sexual marketplace. The affinities between these women start to resonate more powerfully when another of Theodore Dreiser’s factory characters is included in their company—the doomed Roberta Alden of his 1925 novel An American Tragedy. Not only is Roberta’s departure from the factory met with consequences as disastrous for her continued existence as Maggie’s, but like Maggie she too works in a collar factory. It is precisely in the otherwise remarkable coincidence of collar factories in these two texts that the divergence between them becomes most acute. Located within the shift of interaction with collars that these novels mark is also a shift in the kinds of objects considered the appropriate subject of the modernity being described, as well as the kinds of persons that inhabit it. In An American Tragedy, Roberta Alden may work in a collar factory , but her assignment to the factory’s stamping room results not only in her disastrous acquaintance with the novel’s equivocal protagonist Clyde Griffiths, but also an interaction with the collars themselves quite different from that experienced by Crane’s Maggie at her sewing machine. Roberta, in a process I will discuss in greater detail, stamps her collars with the company information and brand. Although her labor contributes to the production of a packaged and sellable collar, her most direct and profound engagement with what might be considered an object happens as she imprints an ink stamp on the collars (a convergent process involving the stamp, the metal hand-stamper used to place it, and the human stamper employed to execute that action), rather than with the collars themselves. By contrast, consider the brief allusion to this stamp offered by Crane’s novel: what begins as a clinical description of the conditions of Maggie’s employment becomes slowly infected by a bemused narrative voice that remarks that the brand name of the collars she sews “could be noted for its irrelevancy to anything in connection to collars.”2 While Roberta is identi- fied with the stamp, for Maggie, the collar is the thing that matters. This is made more explicit when she reflects that “the air in the collar and cuff establishment strangled her,” thus assigning to the entire factory the properties of the garment it produces, and also in the poignant reminder that when she faces rejection soon after her escape from her factory machine, her rival’s “linen collars and cuffs were spotless.”3 As 44 becoming media in an american tragedy [44.193.11.123] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:50 GMT) readers of the novel and the large body of American...