The Lowell Mills

3/5/97

The Readings:

W 3/5 Lowell Offering pp. 13-112

Strongly Recommended: "Women's Roles and Rights" (Bedford Cultural Edition Blithedale Romance) pp. 457-84

F 3/7 Lowell Offering 133-59, 197-210

Sandi Fox, "Literary Influences" (Small Endearments: Nineteenth -Century Quilts for Children and Dolls, pp. 111-127)

Other Resources:

1. For more information on childhood and children's literature during this period see "American Childhood: Essays on Children's Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries" (on reserve), Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood and Elizabeth Peabody, Record of a School.

2. For those interested in more information on Lowell (or material culture resources) see John Coolidge's Mill and mansion, a study of architecture and society in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1820-1865. NA735.L9 C7 (on reserve)

3. For more information on women's magazines during this era you might return both to Godey's on line and read Isabelle Lehuu's "Sentimental Figures: reading Godey's Lady's Book in Antebellum America," Culture of Sentiment ed. Samuels. PS 217 S55 C85 1992.

Arguments about Canon:

There is an excellent introduction to the Lowell Mill writings (which I have assigned), but I would like you to be thinking as well why these writings have been traditionally been excluded from the canon of the American Renaissance and what it means to include them (either within the traditional structure or within what some feminists have called "the Other American Renaissance--women's writings during this period). Can we include them without being merely "maternalistic"? (And is there anything wrong with maternalism...)

In her article "Canons and Canon Fodder" (The [Other] American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers), Joyce Warren notes that while women's writings were usually more popular in the nineteenth-century, they were often dismissed as "unAmerican." She quotes an article from the August 1853 edition of the United States Review which posed the following question:

Where is American genius? Where are the original, the brilliant, the noble works, in whose publication we might take a lasting and national pride, from whose perusal we might delight, instruction and elevation?

Where are the men to write them?

American authors, be men and heroes! Make sacrifices,...but publish books...for the hope of the future and the honor of America. Do not leave its literature in the hands of a few industrious females (Warren quotes USR 1).

On some level this call for a national literature will seem quite familiar to us; yet, what Warren notes, is that it is not an accident--or unusual--that for this critic that "the major criterion for being a 'good' writer in American during most of the nineteenth century was that the writer be a man" (Warren 1). Warren goes on to question why--up until very recently--this has remained the case. She suggests the following general reasons:

1. Class, race, and gender biases influence literary judgments (2)

2. Specific historical periods provide different literary criteria (2)

3. Ideological preconceptions determine what will be chosen (2)

She also suggests that in the case of this particular era women writers were excluded because

1. most of their literature "either implicitly or explicitly rejects th[e dominant]...construction of American life: the assumption that the white male individual occupies center stage and that all 'other' members of the cast are only supporting players--if they are even allowed on stage. Most of the literature by nineteenth-century women writers focuses not on the male individualist but on the 'other' members of the cast, moving them to center stage (3).

2. As a consequence, these works not only "challenge the gender of American individualism, they challenged the concept of individualism itself" (4).

3. This challenge can be seen in the focus on the domestic narrative in which the necessity of selflessness and the repression of will in emphasized, as well as religious devotion and moral superiority (7-9).

4. Women's challenge to the status of the male individualist came by not only insisting that men be a part of the "domestic identity" (selflessness, repression of will) but also by questioning the relationship between men and women (12).

As you read the writings of the Lowell women, I would like you to pay attention to whether the women are challenging the notions of individualism, self, and relationships that have been pronounced "American" by Emerson and the other male writers we have read. What sort of vision of America and the self do they offer instead? Is this enough of a reason why these writings have been excluded from the canon? Also, how do their messages compare to that of Godey's Lady's Book or Margaret Fuller? How does their self presentation compare to the way that Brownson and Parker characterized the "laboring classes"?