Radical Mothers: Maternal Testimony and Metaphor in Four Novels of the Gastonia Strike

Radical Mothers: Maternal Testimony and Metaphor in Four Novels of the Gastonia Strike Lisa Schreibersdorf When publisher Horace Liveright distributed the first edition of Strike!, Mary Heaton Vorse's 1930 novel based on the Gastonia, North Carolina textile mill strikes, the company wrapped the book in a band displaying Michael Gold's praise of the novel as a "burning and imperishable epic." Reviewing Strike! for The Nation, Sinclair Lewis took issue with this marketing technique, saying, If I were a publisher named Horace Liveright I would not talk about anything so vague as 'burning and imperishable epics.' I would, day after day, by the crudest modern ways of advertising, by newspaper page and radio and billboard, demand: 'Your Excellency, Mr. Hoover, have you read "Strike!" by Mary Heaton Vorse? And if you have, what do you think of evicting families in which there is a child with smallpox, of policemen blackjacking unarmed old women, of whole American communities receiving an average wage of twelve dollars a week?' (474) In his response to Liveright's publicity tactic, Lewis objects to the language which associates the book, as he says, with ancient authors like Homer or Milton. Once labeled "imperishable," like these classics, this JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 29.3 (Fall 1999): 303-322. Copyright © 1999 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 304 JNT novel might be removed from its immediate historical, material situation and be evaluated on the basis of a "vague" universalizing idea of aesthetic worth instead. He then opposes this concept of literary representation by insisting on the novel's connection to its historical referent, pointing to the novel's connection to living families and specific wages. Lewis would bring the novel into the realm of politics and action, recommending it to Hoover and fantasizing that the president might "do anything" about the workers. In these ways, Lewis envisions the novel functioning as testimony —a declaration, evidence, or proof of a given material reality learned through personal experience—and he dreams that the testimony will inspire action. Through his objections to classifying Strike! as epic, Lewis sets up a dichotomy between abstractness and political engagement. However, the opposition that he sets up here does not hold as he moves to call on an abstraction to inspire a specific political action, and the two modes of representation —testimony and universalizing myth—converge within his own piece. This convergence happens around his use of the maternal figure. Later in the essay, Lewis insists that Hoover must at one time have respected "the Mothers in Zion: the honest, earnest, kindly, quiet women who bore children, who worked sixteen hours a day, who had always a bowl of milk for the wayfarer, who went for days or weeks to help neighbors in their need" (474). He declares that these women still exist, saying that if Hoover will "read 'Strike!' and have such genius as to believe that it may be true, he will learn . . . that the intolerable state of labor . . . has less to do with Socialists and Bolsheviks than with the slavery of just such women as once mothered a little boy named Herbie and gave him cookies " (474). Lewis introduces the maternal figure in order to contrast her earthly reality with the abstract radicalism of Socialists and Bolsheviks. The Mother represents tangible, bodily pleasures like eating cookies and drinking milk, pleasures that stand opposed to the remote epic scope of Homeric or of Marxian history.1 But, in the way that he introduces the maternal figure, Lewis himself asks his reader to make several leaps between the material and the abstract. In his call to take the book out of the realm of Homeric myth, he introduces another legend, the Mothers in Zion, a reference to religious myth that ties a Biblical past and promised future to a present reality through a seemingly timeless figure. And in fact, this abstraction is what enables the connections between the mothers represented Radical Mothers 305 in the story, the mothers striking in Gastonia, and the mothers working in similar mill towns across the region. Through the matrix of this mythical, hardworking and generous Mother figure, Hoover, or any reader, can identify the women in...