Venturing More Than Others Have Dared: Representations of Class Mobility, Gender, and Alternative Communities in American Literature, 1840-1940

Home , Abram Wood, Bicycle cooperative, Bookbinding, Boxcar Bertha, Harriet Hanson Robinson, Sarah Bagley

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Heather Joy Thompson-Gillis, MA

Graduate Program in English

The Ohio State University

2012

Dissertation Committee:

Susan S. Williams, Advisor Jared Gardner Andreá Williams

Heather Joy Thompson-Gillis

2012

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, alternative communities composed of men and women outside of the traditional biological family began to form not only in the many utopian projects inspired by the transcendentalist movement, but also in factories, settlement houses, and on the road. These alternative communities, which I define as social constructions apart from the middle class home, were often composed of individuals from different socioeconomic class positions and disrupted traditional ideas about gender and labor. Ultimately, they proved the difficulty of defining socioeconomic class in

American culture. In this dissertation, “Venturing More Than Others Have Dared: Class

Mobility, Gender, and Alternative Communities in American Literature 1840-1940,” I argue that the literature written about these alternative communities shows them to be liminal spaces of attempted social mobility where socioeconomic class and gender roles are constantly redefined in a way that challenge social norms. I specifically analyze literature emerging from the Fruitlands utopian community, the Lowell factory system, the Hull-House settlement house, and female hobo narratives. Communities outside middle class culture are especially important to analyze because of the ways they illuminate tensions in defining social positions in American society. While I am concerned with the representation of the role of women in these alternative communities, my dissertation primarily seeks to trouble the elision of socioeconomic class studies in nineteenth-century literary criticism. In this work, I use conversations about gender to ii provide insight into issues of labor and tensions in defining socioeconomic class in accounts of these alternative communities. The literature emerging from these communities, including journal entries, short stories, newspaper articles, folk tales, and novels, provides insight into the constant struggle to find an empowering identity for workers, and women workers in particular. As unrest over socioeconomic disparity continues to be a driving force in American culture, it is more important than ever to understand representations of socioeconomic class in our past and the ways that alternative communities have used literature to envision a more just society.

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This document is dedicated to the women of Franklinton, Ohio.

Acknowledgments

This project was completed with the support of many communities. I would like to thank my dissertation committee, Jared Gardner, Andreá Williams, and especially my advisor

Susan S. Williams, for their help in completing this document. They consistently offered me encouragement and invaluable advice throughout the drafting process. I am profoundly grateful to Susan Williams for sharing her high academic standards and for understanding and encouraging my personal connection to this work. My writing group,

Karin Hooks, Anne-Marie Schuler, Annette Dolph, and Leila Ben-Nasr also offered instrumental feedback and motivation. Their thought-provoking scholarship drove me to produce my best writing. The Coca-Cola Critical Difference for Women grant provided necessary research funds during a pivot moment in the drafting process.

I would not have been able to complete this project without the emotional support and unwavering encouragement of my family, especially my parents, Melanie and Dennis.

Melanie Kopacsi’s dedication to social service and Dennis Thompson’s love for the academy are sustaining. Though he did not live to see the completion of this dissertation, my stepfather, Richard Kopacsi’s, faith and dedication to hard work still inspire me.

Sharon Gillis, Jim Gillis, Shane Thompson, Jen Graham, Adam Graham, Melissa

Graham, and Paige Graham all provided welcome distractions from my work. My own

v alternative community in Franklinton shared their wisdom and ideas as I considered issues of socioeconomic class privilege and mobility. Kelly Young, Ashley Laughlin, and Patience Livermore inspire me daily with their love for women, poetry, and community. Brian Gillis has devotedly shared each step of my academic progression, from helping me move to my first college dorm room to taking over more than his fair share of household chores as I revised this work. I hope this dissertation reflects the energy and joy I find in all of these communities.

Vita

2001...... Westerville South High School

2005………………………………………….B.A. English and Women’s Studies,

Denison University

2007...... M.A. English, Miami University

2007 to present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department

of English, The Ohio State University

Fields of Study

Major Field: English

Graduate Minor: Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgments...... v

Vita ...... vvii

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………1

Chapter 1: Alcott’s Alternative Families in “Transcendental Wild Oats, Under the Lilacs and Jack and Jill ………………………………………………………………………..20

Chapter 2: Rethinking the Industrial Utopia: Factory Work and Class Mobility……….74

Chapter 3: Literature and Community Formation at Hull-House………………………129

Chapter 4: The Hobo New Woman and Communities on the Road……………………178

Coda: (Luck Is) Beauty with Torture…………………………………………………...233

Bibliography ...... 24Error! Bookmark not defined.

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Introduction

“To insure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor than now exists; to combine the thinker and the worker, as far as possible, in the same individual; to guarantee the highest mental freedom, by providing all with labor adapted to their tasks and talents, and securing to them the fruits of their industry; to do away with the necessity of menial service by opening the benefits of education and the profits of labor to all; and thus to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons, whose relating with each other would permit a more wholesome and simple life than can be led amidst the pressures of our competitive institutions.” –George Ripley’s goals for Brook Farm

“To dancing in a circle of love. To living in beloved community.” –bell hooks, Epigraph to Belonging: A Culture of Place (2009)

In 1841, George Ripley established Brook Farm, the most famous American utopian community, with the goal of creating “a society of liberal, intelligent and cultivated persons, whose relation with each other would permit a more wholesome and simple life than can be led amidst the pressures of our competitive institutes” (qtd. in

Swift 7). Utopian communities of the mid-nineteenth century were concerned with forming self-sufficient societies that balanced manual and intellectual labor.

Unfortunately, many community members soon realized that the manual labor necessary to maintain their vision did not allow time to relate their experiences in print, leaving a dearth of literary representations of these experiments. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The

Blithedale Romance (1852) was inspired by his time at Brook Farm and is one of the few novels exploring utopian communities. Though the text shows how the community is eventually destroyed by individual goals and desires, Hawthorne’s preface suggests that important lessons can be learned from these social experiments. He states, “the author 1 cannot close his reference to this subject, without expressing a most earnest wish that some one of the many cultivated and philosophic minds, which took an interest in that enterprise, might now give the world its history.... both the outward narrative and the inner truth and spirit of the whole affair, together with the lessons which those years of thought and toil must have elaborated” (3). Hawthorne’s distinction between the

“outward narrative” and “inner truth” suggests the possible difference between the goals of the communities and the actual results. Ripley’s and Hawthorne’s use of the word

“cultivated” is also significant. Though they appear to use it to mean refined or cultured, it also refers to land tilled and prepared for raising crops. The dual meaning of this word alludes to the tension in defining and valuing different forms of labor in these communities. Though Ripley hoped to create a community that respected both manual and intellectual labor equally, it proved to be a difficult task.

In the preface to The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne also reflects on the process of drawing on his experiences at the utopian community to write his novel. He states,

“the Author has ventured to make free with his old, and affectionately remembered home, at Brook Farm, as being, certainly, the most romantic episode of his own life-essentially a daydream, and yet a fact-and thus offering an available foothold between fiction and reality” (2). As Hawthorne notes, these communities existed in a liminal space outside of mainstream society as they struggled to reconcile the idealism that inspired them and the reality of their existence. The literature they produced recognized the tensions between the real and ideal, which often resulted in conflicts surrounding the roles of men and women, the value of manual versus intellectual labor, and the relationships between the

2 rich and poor. While the communities strove for social equality, it was a difficult goal to attain. Like Hawthorne’s novel, the literature inspired by these communities often mix fiction and reality in their complex portrayal of these issues. Hawthorne famously disliked his time at Brook Farm, stating that the strenuous manual labor impeded his ability to write (Kolodny xiii). However, he ultimately realized that these alternative communities provided insight into issues of socioeconomic class, labor, and reform in

American culture.

Scholarship has already addressed the importance of The Blithedale Romance’s commentary on Brook Farm, but the literature emerging from many other communities is yet to be critically analyzed. In this dissertation, I analyze representations of these communities in selective texts of nineteenth and early twentieth century American literature. I argue that literary representations of alternative communities show they facilitate class mobility, or change in class position, in a way that redefines gender and socioeconomic class status and challenges social norms. Moreover, the literary representations of these communities prove the overall difficulty of defining class in this era. Exploring the literature of these alternative communities gives us a more nuanced understanding of the construction of gender and socioeconomic class in American culture. I define alternative communities as groups composed of members outside of the biological family and apart from the middle class ideal. These formations include utopian communities, groups of factory workers, settlement houses, and transient hobo communities. Liminal spaces that fall outside the normative middle class are especially important to analyze because of the ways they illuminate tensions in defining social

3 positions in American culture. The literature emerging from these alternative communities, including journal entries, short stories, newspaper articles, folk tales, and novels, provides insight into the constant struggle to find an empowering identity for workers, and women workers in particular. As Wai-Chee Dimock notes, women often became the symbols of class tension in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, making their position particularly important to study (86). In this work, I analyze representations of gender to provide insight into how to define labor and socioeconomic class in alternative communities.

Today, many studies of nineteenth-century American literature concerned with gender or socioeconomic class are focused on the home, especially the middle class home, as representative of the larger American culture. Historical research often analyzes the experiences of the middle class because of the large amount of cultural artifacts they left behind in terms of letters, journals, and other written accounts. Specifically, mid- nineteenth-century female authors produced a wealth of sentimental literature that generally reinforced the importance of the domestic sphere and biological family.1

However, throughout this era, many people were also interested in communities apart from the middle class home. Utopian communities were dispersed throughout the United

States as more and more individuals grew concerned about the corruption of wage labor they believed was inherent to the growth of the American urban landscape. In these utopian communities, women and men worked together to create self-sufficient cultures

1 Most sentimental fiction ended in a marriage. The most famous examples of this genre remain Maria Cummins’ The Lamplighter (1854) and Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850). Domestic manuals reinforcing the importance of the home included Lydia Maria Child’s The American Frugal Housewife (1829) and Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The American Woman’s Home (1869). 4 where both manual and intellectual labor were valued. These utopian experiments are arguably the most well-known examples of alternative communities, but their ideals transferred to a host of other communities I examine in this work.

Of course, any study concerned with socioeconomic class must acknowledge the slipperiness of this term. Scholarship focused on the other two corners of the eternal triangle of gender, race, and socioeconomic class proves that gender and race identities elude straightforward definitions. For example, some women pretended to be men during the Civil War, or, more subtly, defied traditional gender roles to engage in paid labor before it was an accepted aspect of American society. Even more common was the decision for African American men and women to “pass” as white in order to escape slavery or find employment in the North. While these are important examples of the difficulty in defining social identity, socioeconomic class status is even more challenging to determine. It is often predicated on an individual’s family name, wages, type of paid labor, social position, and educational status. As Stuart M. Blumin notes, even though there was often a stigma against physical labor, individuals working in manual labor jobs could be considered upper-middle class if they earned enough and had skills that were valued in their specific social setting.2 Likewise, educators and authors highly regarded in society were often comparably poor. The Alcott family is a clear example of the difficulty in defining socioeconomic class in the nineteenth century. The Alcotts, whose family included the well-known transcendentalist educator Bronson Alcott and his eventually even more famous daughter Louisa May Alcott, struggled financially for most

2 See Stuart M. Blumin’s The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760- 1900 (1989). 5 of their lives until Louisa published the commercially successful Little Women (1868) and was able to support her family through her writing. While they were materially very poor before Louisa’s best-seller, they moved in elite transcendentalist social circles with respected men like Emerson and Hawthorne, who also had disparate class standings, and lived very different lives than families with similar incomes working in urban factories.

Their experiences show that socioeconomic class standing is more complex than an individual’s income. In the chapters that follow, I define socioeconomic class position in different ways according to the specific communities represented in the literature, allowing for the recognition of the complexities of this term.

Further complicating definitions of socioeconomic class was the desire of many nineteenth-century women and men to change their class positions. While the American

Dream of upward mobility is a popular, if often impractical, ideal with roots in eighteenth century rationalism as well as nineteenth-century social thought, this study is more concerned with the individual’s constant shifts in class in these alternative communities.

This can also include downward shifts in class mobility for people seeking to simplify their lives or live in solidarity with the poor, like Jane Addams and followers of the settlement house movement. These scenarios ultimately shed light on the complexities of class. Authors and reformers in a privileged position who were concerned about socioeconomic class inequality also raise concerns about the ethics of writing about and engaging personally in scenes of poverty. Almost all examples analyzed show the inability to truly understand poverty from an outsider’s perspective. For instance, I discuss the women working at the Lowell textile factories in Massachusetts, who often

6 attempted to better their social position through their waged labor and engagement in intellectual pursuits like writing the periodical the Lowell Offering and going to lyceum lectures. While the Lowell Offering appears to be a discussion of upward class mobility, most factory literature was concerned with the engagement of upper class women with poor workers, as exhibited in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Silent Partner (1877). As

Phelps often points out in her factory texts, the privileged women fail to create equal relationships with poor women because of the differences in their experiences. Likewise, as the century continued, reformers like Jane Addams engaged in a highly intellectualized process of “slumming” in the inner cities in order to enact social reform, though the work of immigrant author Hilda Satt Polacheck suggests Addams was also unable to completely understand the reality of life on their street. While the desire for upward social mobility is easily explained through an individual’s wish to seek better living conditions, the process of downward social mobility sought out by these female authors and reformers is more difficult to explain and shows the difficulty of creating cross-class alternative communities.

Although these privileged individuals attempted to form relationships with members of different socioeconomic classes and engage in a process of downward social mobility, I intentionally avoid the term “passing” as much as possible in my work.

Passing is often utilized in scholarship concerned with individuals attempting to take on a social position that they don’t completely identify with, such as enslaved African

Americans “passing” as white in order to gain their freedom. It suggests a complex process of disguise and assimilation into a culture other than an individual’s own. While

7 scholars like Gwendolyn Audrey Foster suggest that a similar process goes on in class passing, the inherent permeability of class makes even assigning an initial position difficult in these situations.3 When an individual’s original class assignment is unclear, it is impossible to say whether someone successfully passes. Passing also suggests a level of success that I am uncomfortable with assigning to individuals in the literature analyzed in this dissertation. If someone successfully passes into another culture, those around them are not able to tell that the individual does not completely identify with this group.

None of the characters or individuals I analyze successfully class-pass. While I provide many examples of middle and upper class individuals attempting to identify with the working class, none are able to be completely immersed into their culture. Their original social position always informs the power dynamics within the alternative community.

The literature also shows that class mobility is constantly in flux, while passing implies a linear shift in position.

While I am concerned with the role of women in these alternative communities, my dissertation primarily works to correct the elision of socioeconomic class studies in literary criticism. Debates about men and women’s role in the public and the private spheres have dominated feminist literary criticism while conversations about socioeconomic class are often tacitly recognized but avoided. The absence of class discussions in scholarship concerning gender and the home is in part due to the difficulty in understanding how nineteenth-century Americans themselves viewed class. During the nineteenth century, class definitions were in flux as more and more Americans left

3 See Foster’s Class Passing: Social Mobility in Film and Popular Culture (2005). Foster claims that class- passing is considered normative behavior in American society. 8 their rural homes for city life. The nineteenth-century shift from a self-sustaining rural life idealized in the American imagination to a system of financial exchanges in the city was drastic and unsettling for many individuals. Poverty became a threat and a way to define social others. 4 Historian Robert Bremner sums up the nineteenth century attitude towards poverty as the belief that “poverty is unnecessary (for Americans), but the varying ability and virtue of men make its presence inevitable; this is a desirable state of affairs, since without the fear of want the masses would not work and there would be no incentive for the able to demonstrate their superiority; where it exists, poverty is usually a temporary problem and, both in its cause and cure, it is always an individual matter” (17).

America’s growing devotion to capitalism and belief in the American Dream of social mobility sought to place the responsibility of class position in the hands of the individual.

According to this idea, poverty was a threat to all, but primarily a punishment for those unable to achieve financial success in the growing era of professionalism in the United

States, as people were increasingly defined by their careers.5 The fact that poverty was considered a temporary issue also ignores the systemic problems creating economic inequality and the reality that the poor could not often escape their family history, a theme explored by many naturalist authors.6 However, the many alternative communities that formed around socioeconomic class issues challenged the idea that poverty was an individual matter. Workers created groups based on shared experiences and the desire

4 As Nicolas Bromwell notes, labor historians have been the most engaged in this field of study. His study, By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America (1993) give a useful overview of how these changes relate to the representation of work in American literature. 5 See Burton J. Bledstein’s The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (1976). 6 For example, see Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) or Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906). 9 for class mobility. Social reformers throughout the nineteenth century built communities based on their desire to alleviate class inequalities. These communities extended beyond the biological family and challenged the widespread idea that poverty and issues of socioeconomic class were an individual concern.

Critics are currently working to correct the elision of socioeconomic class issues in literary scholarship. This project intervenes in current discussions in the field already pursued by Nicholas K. Bromell [By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in

Antebellum America (1993)], Amy Schrager Lang [The Syntax of Class: Writing

Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America (2003)], Xiomara Santamarina [Belabored

Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood (2005)], and especially Eric Schocket’s Vanishing Moments: Class and American Literature (2006), which is also concerned with cross-class interactions. These studies reclaim the voices of the working class by finding new archival research and re-examining the complexities of representing labor in American literature. This dissertation expands these projects by focusing on the experiences of women, primarily authors, workers, and reformers, across class lines and looking specifically at how the literature of alternative communities challenges not only how we imagine the nineteenth-century home, but the permeability of class during this era. The texts I explore are not canonical works and many have not garnered much critical attention. Looking at these understudied texts provides a voice for women and workers that has often been ignored in scholarship.

Each of the following chapters looks at a specific alternative community and are ordered chronologically in terms of the historical moment that produced the site of

10 inquiry.7 They also implicitly trace the development of the New Woman ideology as the women in the communities move farther away from the domestic sphere. Interestingly, this progression corresponds with a movement west as the communities shift geographically from Harvard, Massachusetts to Lowell, Massachusetts, which are relatively close together, to Chicago, to the Western frontier. This geographical movement ultimately mirrors the women’s increased mobility. Chapter One explores the experiences of Louisa May Alcott while living in the Fruitlands utopian experiment and its influence on her later children’s fiction. This chapter also establishes important foundational explorations of utopian community traditions for the subsequent chapters.

Utopian communities set the foundation for my study of alternative communities during this era, but did not produce a lot of literature besides The Blithedale Romance, which has already been widely discussed. Louisa May Alcott’s fiction has garnered more scholarship in recent years, but few critics take into consideration her time at Fruitlands since she was so young. Reading her later work in relationship to her time at the utopian experiment provides a new critical lens into how she defines family and community in her popular novels. The Fruitlands community, started by Bronson Alcott and Charles

Lane, was an attempted return to an idealized rural environment in the face of the growing industrialism of the mid-nineteenth century. Inspired by the transcendentalist movement, Fruitlands was one of the many communities where philosophers attempted to meld intellectual and manual labor to create a just, well rounded society. The realities of

7 The communities in Chapters One and Two take place at nearly the same historical moment, but an understanding of the utopian community tradition is necessary before analyzing how it was represented at Lowell. 11 the experiment in downward class mobility placed the majority of the work in the hands of women, namely Abba Alcott, a trend that continued in most utopian experiments.

Louisa May Alcott’s experience at Fruitlands, as represented in her short story

“Transcendental Wild Oats,” shows the tensions between her parents’ views of family and community. My analysis reveals that Abba Alcott did the majority of the labor on the farm, while her devotion to her biological family was tested by the male philosophers’ vision of a consociate family that included the entire human race. I argue that Louisa May Alcott’s children’s novels, especially Under the Lilacs (1877) and Jack and Jill (1880), attempt to reconcile both ideas by creating fictional alternative communities headed by women but assimilating those outside of the biological family, including members of different socioeconomic classes.

While the utopian experiments are the most famous alternative communities of the nineteenth century, I show that many different communities created by people who are related by experience and not biology surfaced during this era. Chapter Two explores the less-studied community of female factory workers in Lowell, Massachusetts. I analyze how the writings produced by these women, which appeared in a well-known periodical, the Lowell Offering, shed light on issues of gender and social mobility. The

Lowell Offering remains one of the few mid-nineteenth century examples of working class women creating their own literature, making it an important inclusion in a study concerned with representations of socioeconomic class. In their articles, the women factory workers portrayed themselves as ladies rather than workers, and the factory as a sort of finishing school that allowed for intellectual growth as well as the ability for

12 women to earn money to support their families. However, middle class authors writing about the factory, like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, often failed to represent the workers as such. While Phelps attempted to create sisterly bonds across class lines in her factory fiction, she ultimately had to recognize the difficulty in achieving social mobility and facilitating genuine relationships between members of different social positions.

Chapter Three analyzes the function of literature in the settlement house movement of the late nineteenth century. The settlement house movement was an experiment in downward class mobility that attracted many reform-minded, middle class women and men, most of whom were college educated and chose to live in working class neighborhoods to use their privileged position to advocate for social change. Examples of attempted downward class mobility were rare, making this community a unique site for analyzing relationships between the different classes. Using Jane Addams’ account of her life at Hull-House as the definitive example of downward class mobility, I analyze her changing relationship to literature and how it connected to her work building a community of women across socioeconomic class lines. I identify three specific stages of

Addams’ understanding of literature, reclaiming her importance to the field of literary studies, though she is more frequently referenced in studies of history, sociology, philosophy, and political science. The second half of the chapter turns to the writing of

Polish immigrant Hilda Satt Polacheck and her interpretation of the Hull-House project and Addams’ interactions in the working class neighborhood. Though her memoir, I

Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl was finally published in 1989, it has garnered little critical attention. However, it allows readers to analyze Addams’ project

13 from the standpoint of a working class woman. Furthermore, Polacheck’s social commentary about life in the slums is an important contribution to literary and cultural studies even without the connection to Hull-House. I ultimately conclude that Polacheck provides a new way of looking at cross-class female relationships, particularly in her redefinition of the famous Hull-House Devil Baby story, which was a narrative circulated throughout the neighborhood suggesting that an infant who looked like a demon lived at the settlement house.

In Chapter Four, I explore the representation of women in the hobo community and argue that their lives exhibit cultural concerns about the increasingly visible New

Woman.8 Female hobo narratives are rarely analyzed, but their portrayal of the poor provides a searing social critique. Like the New Woman, female hoboes unsettle social conventions regarding gender and class mobility. The New Woman emerged in the late nineteenth century and was socially mobile, had a profession, and often rejected marriage. Hoboes, homeless individuals who wandered and worked throughout America, had similar characteristics although very different cultural associations. However, the

New Woman and the American hobo occupy the same historical moment and both raise concerns about socioeconomic class mobility. I specifically look at two understudied texts, Ethel Lynn’s The Adventures of a Woman Hobo (1917) and Ben Reitman’s Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha (1937). I argue that the hobo population of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century formed communities that

8 An overview of the scholarship interested in analyzing the New Woman is provided in Chapter Four. The term was introduced by Sarah Grand in 1894 and soon became a widely represented character in English and American literature. However, the New Woman was a complex figure that often elided issues of race and ethnicity. Her representation changed meaning according to the literary and historical context. 14 challenged assumptions about the middle class home, although they were often viewed as solitary wanderers. These novels represent the female hobo as a type of New Woman and draw attention to American society’s concerns about women’s entrance into the public sphere. As the most alternative of all of these communities because of the mobile nature of hobo life, they culminate my study.

Several themes emerged during the process of writing this dissertation. One pervasive theme is the tension between manual and intellectual labor in these alternative communities and how it relates to class definition. In By the Sweat of the Brow:

Literature and Labor in Antebellum America, Nicholas K. Bromell claims that the distinction between mental and manual labor was key to defining work in the first half of the nineteenth century (7). Though my study extends beyond his in terms of the historical period analyzed, this distinction remains important to defining the representations of labor and socioeconomic class I analyze in this dissertation. My research shows that the idea of class mobility is predicated on the ability of individuals to engage in forms of labor different from their chosen profession or their original social location, as well as the permeability of class. For example, the women factory workers writing the Lowell Offering used the magazine to show that they were able to engage in intellectual labor as well as work in the factories. Their ability to do both gave them access to upward social mobility and suggested that they were well-rounded individuals because they were able to work with both their hands and their minds. On the other side of the social spectrum, Jane Addams was raised in a family that privileged intellectual labor, especially reading and writing. In her quest to identify with the poor, Addams felt

15 that she needed to separate herself from her literary pursuits and privilege manual labor.

One of her first accomplishments at Hull-House was to build a labor museum that valorized the abilities of those who work with their hands.9

A person’s or character’s attitude towards labor and socioeconomic class also often depended on his or her definition of education. Many individuals discussed in the following pages, including Addams and “Boxcar Bertha,” eventually rejected formal education in favor of learning from life itself. This type of education privileged doing rather than thinking. Fruitlands was predicated on the idea that farming and writing could be collapsed into one form of spiritual labor. This tension between intellectual and manual labor and how it relates to formal education is still relevant in the academy today.

A February 2012 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education echoes the desires of transcendentalists like Bronson Alcott to create a society that merges all forms of labor.

In “The Future of American Colleges Might Lie, Literally, In Student’s Hands,” Scott

Carlson bemoans the fact that the university system usually does not teach students practical skills. Citing work study colleges like Warren Wilson College, College of the

Ozarks, and Deep Springs College as examples of the possibility of combining different forms of labor in the academic setting, Carlson suggests that imparting intellectual knowledge today is not enough to create critically engaged citizens.10 Students must

9 As Stephen Conn notes, the late nineteenth century was the first golden age for museums (1). Scholars interested in analyzing museums debate whether or not they are forms of “cultural and political hegemony” (3). See Conn’s Do Museums Still Need Objects? (2010). The Labor Museum at Hull-House was meant to provide a space to showcase the skills and values of the working class, in part protecting it from the scholarly claim that museums are elitist. 10 These colleges’ work programs require all students to engage in labor, making them responsible for the upkeep of the university and providing them with tuition breaks in return. Carlson admires this model because it provides students with practical knowledge about farming and construction. Though 16 learn to work with their hands and embrace practical life skills in order to be successful.

These current debates show the importance of looking at America’s past in order to understand the roots of the culture’s complex relationship to work and how it translates to definitions of socioeconomic class.

Literature plays an important role in all of these forms of labor; however, who has access to the literature, who reads it, writes it, and how it is used varies extensively according to the community analyzed. Another reoccurring theme in this dissertation is the struggle to make literature accessible to all individuals and its ability to work for social change. The alternative communities studied here were all concerned with creating a more equal society, and the texts emerging from them reflect this commitment.

However, many communities are self-conscious or even critical of the ability of literature to achieve their goals. Some upper class reformers, like the participants of the settlement house movement, considered reading and writing literature a bourgeois pursuit that has little application to real life. In opposition, workers, especially working class immigrants like Hilda Satt Polacheck, reclaimed the social function of literature by showing how their appreciation of it helped them achieve upward class mobility. Just as it is difficult to provide a concise definition of socioeconomic class, this dissertation shows that the ability of literature to enact social reform is historically specific and dependent on issues of access and audience.

socioeconomic class is not discussed in the article, I can anecdotally speak to the fact that this university model also serves to at least partially erase class divisions in the student population by requiring that everyone work. My father and aunt graduated from Warren Wilson as first generation college students from a working class background. While they needed to work in order to fund their education, their financial necessity did not separate them from more privileged students since everyone had to engage in manual labor. 17

Before beginning my analysis, I believe it is important to acknowledge how my current social location has influenced this dissertation. Eric Schocket states that the process of disidentification is needed in order to write responsibly about socioeconomic class issues.11 He posits that a close identification with your subject impedes critical research through a process of fetishizing sympathy with the working class. I would like to believe that the opposite is true and that identification with your subject allows for a more nuanced critical stance. However, it is essential to recognize how my personal experiences have altered my perception of the material covered in these chapters. My friends and I are part of an intentional community with the goals of living simply, sharing resources, and working for social justice. In many ways, our values and lifestyle are a mix of the utopian projects of the mid-nineteenth century and the settlement house movement. I began this work while I was in the process of moving to Franklinton, Ohio, a working class neighborhood on the west side of Columbus, and my choice of chapter subjects directly relate to my life. As I was studying working conditions in the Lowell factories, my partner was employed doing research for his labor union. The Fruitlands chapter was written as our community garden, Franklinton Gardens, produced 7,000 pounds of fresh produce for the neighborhood and local food pantry. I discussed my third chapter with social workers at our local settlement house, Gladden Community House, and deeply identified with Jane Addams’ struggle to make literature useful to her neighbors. While I wrote about hobo culture, my best friends managed a local bike co- op, Franklinton Cycleworks, to provide reliable transportation for the poor, especially the

11 See Vanishing Moments: Class and American Literature (2006). 18 homeless community.12 I soon realized that this dissertation has been my attempt to shorten the distance between two defining elements of my life, namely, my passion for the Franklinton community and social activism and my love of literature. My constant struggle to conceptualize the role of my own privileged position in my life in Franklinton has made me sympathetic to the alternative communities I explore in these chapters and perhaps less critical of their failures. However, it has also encouraged me to consider the power dynamics inherent in these cross-class communities and how they apply to our current American culture.

During the drafting of this work, I have often felt like Bronson Alcott, who decided to go lecturing instead of doing the arguably more exigent labor of harvesting the fields at Fruitlands. Nearly every day I chose to engage in academic labor rather than aiding my friends with the social justice projects they lead in our neighborhood. My choice reflects my faith in the ability of literature to represent and inspire social change and the necessity of excavating marginalized voices from America’s past in order to plan for the future. We are living in an era where labor unions are under attack, protestors occupy Wall Street, and foreclosed houses send families outdoors. As unrest over socioeconomic disparity continues to be a driving force in American culture, it is more important than ever to understand representations of socioeconomic class in our past and the ways that alternative communities have used literature to envision a more just society.

12 For more information about these organizations, see www.franklintongardens.org, www.franklintoncycleworks.org, and www.gladden-us.org. 19

Chapter 1: Alcott’s Alternative Families in “Transcendental Wild Oats,” Under the Lilacs and Jack and Jill

“Miss Page made a good remark, and true as good, that a woman may live a whole life of sacrifice, and at her death meekly says, ‘I die a woman.’ A man passes a few years in experiments in self-denial and simple life, and he says, ‘Behold a God.’” –Abba Alcott’s Journal, July 18, 1843

“Give me one day of practical philosophy. It is worth a century of speculation and discussion.” –Abba Alcott’s Journal, November 29, 1842

In “Transcendental Wild Oats” (1873), Louisa May Alcott’s short story based on her family’s experiences during the Fruitlands utopian experiment, she recalls a visitor to the community asking if there were any beasts of burden on the farm. The mother, Hope, states ruefully, “only one woman” (47). In fact, the use of oxen to work the farm was rare as the family strove to live without unfairly taking the labor or meat of any animal, as well as avoiding any material potentially harvested by slaves. As Louisa’s mother,

Abba Alcott, noted in the quotes above, the experiment resulted in tensions in defining labor, especially according to gender roles. Women’s “practical philosophy” often included the self-sacrificing manual labor needed to run the farm, while the men in the community engaged in intellectual discussions. This ultimately led to conflicts within the

Alcott family and the broader Fruitlands community. Though Louisa May Alcott was only eleven while living at Fruitlands, her record of the experience in “Transcendental

Wild Oats” offers a searing critique of the community and the tension between her

20 parents’ competing visions of family. “Transcendental Wild Oats” was published as a short story in the Independent on December 18, 1873. Subtitled, “A Chapter from an

Unwritten Romance,” it was supposed to be a section in a larger treatise about Bronson

Alcott’s philosophy called The Cost of an Idea, which was never completed. Written over thirty years after the experience, the story must be taken not necessarily as fact, but as a commentary on the always perceptive Louisa May Alcott’s views about gender, family, and labor.

Alcott’s belief system and therefore her fiction were influenced by the stringent philosophy of Fruitlands. Besides holding firm views on animal labor, the community also ate a strict diet of fruit, vegetables, and simple breads. Some accounts of the community even claim (incorrectly) that the members refused to eat any vegetable, like potatoes, that grew downward in the earth, deeming them impure for not striving for the light like everyone else at Fruitlands. The community was designed to be an experiment in righteous living where individuals could blend manual and intellectual labor and be exempt from the corrupting forces of American industry and commerce. Co-founders

Charles Lane and Bronson Alcott explained in the Dial that their goal was to “initiate a

Family in harmony with the primitive instincts in man,” a family that transcended the bounds of biology to include all people (qtd. in Francis Fruitlands 166). The importance of family in this experiment is highlighted by the fact that the word is capitalized, although, as Fruitlands historian Richard Francis points out, an exact definition of family is never provided.

In his study of Louisa May Alcott and her father’s relationship, John Matteson aptly describes Fruitlands as “a saintly community of scholars in which money would be unknown, where no creature would profit by the suffering of any other, and where every participant would be received and loved as a member of an enormous family” (10). The fact that money would be unknown speaks to the ultimate goal of the community, which was to create a social arrangement that transcended socioeconomic class. Unfortunately, this classless, expanded family was never realized. The community was faced with crippling poverty and the Alcotts almost starved after the majority of their harvest was ruined. The members of Fruitlands were faced with physical challenges, but their largest concerns were ideological. Though confronted with disastrous material threats to the society, what actually caused its demise as a community was the failure to reconcile different ideas about the family structure. Among the adults of the community, there was a constant struggle between the biological family, consisting of the Alcotts, and the consociate family, which was defined as a partnership among the larger community and included all who decided to live at Fruitlands.

Within this complicated family structure, conflicts over gender and labor often plagued the Fruitlands experiment. The male members’ quest to find heaven on earth often left the majority of the material labor to female community members. Abba Alcott, the only adult female member of the community that was present during the entire experiment, is repeatedly described by biographers as fiercely devoted to her husband

22 and daughters.13 Certainly, her allegiance to her husband was tested by his repeated failures as an educator and transcendentalist philosopher who never made money or reached the same level of fame as his better-known contemporaries like Emerson and

Thoreau. Bronson Alcott’s inability to maintain small county schools foreshadowed his overwhelming failure at the Temple School, a progressive institute in Boston where he was eventually run out of town for allegedly teaching sex education to the children

(though scholars generally agree that records of school lessons show that the accusations were greatly overstated). Fruitlands was bound to be another failure, but Abba appears to have supported her husband throughout all of his utopian idealism, although journal entries like the preceding epigraphs suggest that feelings of anger occasionally simmered below her surface devotion.14 Her dedication to her daughters remained even stauncher.

Though often positioning herself as a true woman in her letters and journals, Abba constantly transcended traditional gender roles to provide financially for her family.

Working as a seamstress, social worker, boarding house owner, and at a water cure resort,

Abba was the family’s primary source of income before Louisa May Alcott’s overwhelming success as an author. Though Abba worked primarily in manual labor jobs, she imagined a life of intellectual labor for her daughter, a dream that was realized with the publication of Little Women (1868).

Abba Alcott’s desire to hold the family together was at times in conflict with

Bronson’s utopian idealism, but in fact was also a type of idealism in itself. As her

13 See Cynthia H. Barton’s useful biography Transcendental Wife: The Life of Abigail May Alcott (1996) and Madelon Bedell’s The Alcotts: Biography of a Family (1980). 14 Unfortunately, most of Abba’s journals were destroyed at her death, leaving only tantalizing fragments like this behind. The fragments of her journal are housed at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. 23 biographer, Cynthia H. Barton, notes, “family, of course, was Abby’s microcosm for an unselfish society guided by love, respect, and duty” (119). At first, this statement seems to be a reiteration of the often debated role of women in the domestic sphere of the nineteenth century. It is almost universally recognized that women gained a sort of power in the private sphere through their perceived moral influence, though the fact that they were constrained by traditional gender roles undermines the extension of this power to the public sphere by constraining them to the home. This quote, however, speaks to more than the importance of the biological family. For Abba, the family was a utopian construction in itself, and one that was endangered in the Fruitlands experiment. The needs of her family constantly challenged the goals of the utopian community. Rejecting the desire of the male philosophers at Fruitlands, Abba was never able to disconnect herself from the realities of the need for financial support during her experiences at the community. Because of the material needs of her children, she was forced to consider the necessity of money and the pressure to engage in America’s financial system in order to keep her family from starving. In Fruitlands, family became a microcosm to discuss larger issues of class, labor, and the idealism surrounding utopian projects.

The tensions between Abba and Bronson’s definition of family haunt Louisa May

Alcott’s fiction. In the first section of this chapter, I argue that Louisa May Alcott’s

“Transcendental Wild Oats” is more of a defense of the biological, but female-headed, family than a satire of her father’s idealistic alternative community, as it is often read.

While this apparent defense of the biological family initially appears to be a regressive argument in terms of feminist politics, I suggest that the most alternative family in the

24 world of Fruitlands is the biological one, led by Abba Alcott and focusing on the radical potential of maternal devotion as well as the necessity for women to confront issues of labor inequality and financial compensation. The Alcotts’ constant financial struggle also sheds light on concerns about class mobility. The Fruitlands experiment itself was an attempt to remove the group from America’s economic system and enter a classless state.

Abba’s eventual takeover of the family, both emotionally and financially, places class mobility and alternative families in the hands of women. The second section of this chapter turns to two of the novels in Alcott’s more famous Little Women series, the collection of eight books that begin with her blockbuster hit Little Women and end with the final account of the March family, Jo’s Boys. These widely-read children’s books, specifically Under the Lilacs (1877) and Jack and Jill (1880), focus on domestic themes and are necessarily concerned with the construction of the family. Though they may appear to highlight a coherent biological family, Alcott’s fiction provides a wide array of alternative families, often headed by the mother. I suggest that Louisa May Alcott’s children’s fiction is an attempt to mediate between her parents’ views of the importance of a biological and consociate family. She ultimately creates an alternative family structure in her fiction that was no doubt influenced by her time at the Fruitlands community.

Fruitlands: The Utopian Speculation

A brief overview of the utopian community movement and its relationship to

Transcendentalism is necessary in order to understand the Alcotts’ experiences at

Fruitlands. The 1840s saw the birth of many utopian communities inspired by the

25 transcendentalist ideal of the possibility of human perfectionism. A redefinition of the home and family is at the crux of the utopian movement. Adherents to this philosophy believed that broadening the definition of the family would lead to a more compassionate society where everyone felt responsibility for others. In his 1870 study of the growth of the utopian communities during this era, Strange Cults and Utopias of the 19th Century,

Oneida community leader John Humphrey Noyes defines the movement as providing

“the enlargement of home--the extension of family union beyond the little man-and-wife circle to large corporations” (23). While this enlargement of home often included the desire to liberate women from domestic duties and allow them time to engage in intellectual labor, the opposite result often occurred. As Noyes points out, because of socially prescribed gender roles, many women living in utopian communities found themselves caring for a much larger family. In fact, this extension of home was threatening to many women as it diminished their power over their biological family without really allowing them the freedom to pursue intellectual work. While some communities did successfully make advances towards women’s education and equality, most notably Brook Farm, others threatened their very source of identity.15

Though the utopian community movement was inspired by transcendental philosophy, the transcendentalists most well-known today, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, were skeptical of the efficacy of utopian communities.

Thoreau wrote in his journal that he would rather keep a bachelor’s hall in hell than live

15 For a useful survey of women’s experiences in intentional communities, see Women in Spiritual and Communitarian Societies in the United States (1993), edited by Wendy E., Chmielewski, Louise J. Kern, and Marlyn Klee-Hartzell. 26 in one of the “heavens” being created, and Emerson was critical of the idea that social groups large enough to sustain themselves could be called “families” (Salt 36; Matteson

127). However, other adherents to the philosophy, like George Ripley, believed that human perfection could only be achieved in community, where members could isolate themselves from the corrupt forces of capitalism in the increasingly industrial American society and work together to form an ideal melding of intellectual and manual labor. The two different translations of transcendentalist thought, one focused on inward self- reflection and the other concerned with outward social action, were a major ideological difference in the movement, as noted by Philip Gura.16 While Ripley’s transcendentalist community is the one most referenced today, as noted in my introduction, the Alcotts’ utopian community also relates the tensions between gender, labor, and social mobility.

Bronson Alcott’s strict adherence to his ideals and the ideological fight over the definition of family ultimately led to the failure of the project.

It is important to appreciate Bronson Alcott’s enormous optimism and dedication to the possibility of reform in the face of numerous personal and professional failures.

Bronson Alcott is one of the least studied transcendentalists, probably because his strength was in the more transient art form of oral expression. Unlike his more famous contemporaries, Alcott left behind few clear written documents, although his journals amassed sixty-one volumes and he left copious records of his experiments in education and observations about his daughters’ growth. Alcott lurks in the margins of many famous nineteenth-century texts. He visited Thoreau at Walden Pond, is referenced as a

16 See Gura’s American Transcendentalism: A History (2007). 27 dreamy philosopher by Hawthorne, and constantly traded ideas and manuscripts with

Emerson. In some ways, his devotion to transcendentalist thought and its inherent idealism surpassed his more famous contemporaries. Though the Fruitlands community was ultimately another failure, and a near disastrous one for his family, it stemmed from half a lifetime of inspiration from transcendentalist thought and a marked dedication to the idea that individuals are inherently good.17

While Fruitlands was the first communal experiment the Alcott family officially embraced, poverty often forced them into alternative living situations. They occasionally took on boarders in order to make ends meet, but Abba Alcott rebelled against the idea of communal living, stressing that her own family demanded all of her attention. When

Emerson suggested that the Alcotts move into his home to form their own small scale utopian community (and save money), Abba resisted, stating, “I cannot gee and haw in another person’s yoke. I know that everybody burns their fingers if they touch my pie- not because the pie is too hot, but because it is mine” (qtd. in Bedell 161).18 Using the language of the domestic, the very arena she would be forced to protect during the

Fruitlands experiment, Abba recognized the inherent difficulty of living with other people and her concerns over interference within her realm of the home. After refusing to share

17 Unfortunately, Bronson Alcott’s journals and papers during his time at Fruitlands were lost when a mail coach left without him in 1844. All of his writings were on the mail coach and were never recovered despite his many efforts. They remain missing to this day. This historical omission places even more responsibility on Louisa May Alcott’s translation of the experience. See Richard Francis’ Transcendental Utopias: Individual and Community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden (146). 18 While Louisa May Alcott offers extremely flattering portrayals of her mother in her fiction, recent historical accounts suggest that Abba’s fierce devotion to her family and strong will may have made her difficult to get along with. See Claudia Durst Johnson’s “Discord in Concord: National Politics and Literary Neighbors” in Hawthorne and Women (1999) for a convincing account of Abba’s difficult relationship with the Hawthorne family. 28 a home with one family, the consociate family structure posited at Fruitlands was a shocking adjustment to someone raised in an era where a woman’s primary source of power was through her rule in the domestic sphere. Interestingly, Margaret Fuller’s response to Emerson’s proposed mini-community was also stated in domestic rhetoric.

Hearing that the Alcotts would not move in, she comforted him by saying, “let others cook the potage and you examine the recipe” (qtd. in Francis Fruitlands 56). As Fuller recognized, Emerson was certainly a more astute observer than participant in the utopian communities of this era, although the Fruitlands experiment showed that it was Abba who literally had to cook the potage. These quotes suggest the important ways that utopian experiments showcased broader issues about labor and gender, especially in terms of the tension between intellectual and manual labor. While Emerson’s strengths as a philosopher undoubtedly influenced American culture in permanent ways, someone needed to cook the “potage” in order for the culture to survive.

Though Emerson was skeptical about the utopian projects formed at this time, his offer to the Alcotts and the fact that he was constantly trying to establish a community of intellectuals in Concord shows his attraction to this alternative life. Emerson was not alone in his curiosity. The utopian community movement fascinated individuals of a variety of different social positions, leading to the belief that the experiments would be able to remove themselves from the American financial system and transcend socioeconomic class. By the time the Fruitlands community was established, there were at least one hundred utopian communities in America (Bedell 195). American culture has always been invested in the idea of community and the idealism derived from the idea

29 that people can work together for the common good. At the beginning of the American experiment, John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity” (1630) posited the new world as an ideal community, a city on the hill where the rich and poor worked together to create a new Eden. Today there are still intentional communities striving for similar utopian goals as Ripley and Alcott.19 The desire to belong to a community is a pervading influence in American culture, making its various nineteenth century manifestations even more significant.

It was this desire for human connection and the hope of reaching a higher spiritual plane with others that launched the Fruitlands experiment, although the family’s dire financial state may have made the classless system sound even more attractive. Though inspired by years of transcendentalist musings, Fruitlands was officially born after

Bronson Alcott’s trip to England in 1842, which was financed by Emerson due to the family’s lack of funds. After a series of failed attempts as an educator, Bronson sailed to

England to see the Alcott School, named after him and inspired by his educational treatises, Record of a School (1835) and Conversations with Children on the Gospels

(1836). Two of the school’s founders, Charles Lane and Henry Wright, proved to be like-minded individuals who were eager to go to America and start a utopian community

19 The Fellowship for Intentional Communities website currently lists 1,948 intentional communities registered in the United States. They define intentional communities as “an inclusive term for ecovillages, cohousing communities, residential land trusts, communes, student co-ops, urban housing cooperatives, intentional living, alternative communities, cooperative living, and other projects where people strive together with a common vision.” While the term “intentional community” is a recent one, the goals of many current communities match the nineteenth-century ideals of the utopian communities. See http://ic.org.

30 of their own. Lane, the former editor of the London Mercantile Price Current, invested his savings of $1,888 into the experiment, making him the primary financial backer although Abba’s brother Samuel also helped fund the project. Together, the three sailed back to America and to an initially enthusiastic Abba Alcott, who provided a home and support for the philosophers as they worked to materialize their vision. Her journal entry for October 21, 1842 suggests her enthusiasm as she writes, “happy days these! Husband returned accompanied by the dear English- men; the good and true. Welcome to these shores, this house-to my bosom!” (Alcott Family Additional Papers, Item 1). Abba figuratively takes the visitors into her heart and family. However, even at this early stage of the experiment, Abba was the one providing the material necessities for the project, asking for her brother’s financial assistance and maintaining a home for the philosophers.

Conflicts over the definition of home and family marred the experiment from the very beginning. Though Bronson Alcott was devoted to the idea of a utopian community organized around a consociate family, he was also tied to his biological family.

Biographers describe him as being more involved in the domestic sphere than most men of his era, and he clearly delighted in his role as a father and recognized the importance of Abba’s practicality as a balance for his impetuous ways. While Bronson began the experiment committed to his own family, his fellow philosophers had conflicting ideas.

Lane was already a divorced father with custody of his son, William, and started the experiment with doubts about marriage and the biological family. When Wright’s young wife and son refused to immediately follow him to America, he left them behind in favor of his utopian vision. Once in America, Wright immediately started a romantic

31 relationship with the radical woman’s rights supporter, Mary Sargeant Gove. Alcott and

Lane disapproved, and Wright abandoned the Fruitlands experiment. These events only solidified Lane’s belief that the ideal community would call for celibacy and the elimination of the biological family.20 For Lane, the realities of family life were a distraction from creating an ideal society and those committed to their biological family would never be able to feel responsibility to a larger community.

As Sandra Harbert Petrulionis notes, the failure of Fruitlands hinged on the conflict between Abba Alcott and Lane’s competing definition of family (79). While I agree with her claim, it is important to note the complexities of each definition and how

Bronson fluctuated between the competing ideals. Lane consistently believed that Abba would be converted to the consociate family lifestyle, but Abba remained fiercely devoted to Bronson and her four daughters. However, for the Alcott parents, child rearing and achieving a tranquil domestic sphere was a type of reform in itself, an idea that Lane was never able to understand. Abba found Lane’s strict adherence to his principles off putting (Louisa would later refer to him as the dictator in “Transcendental

Wild Oats”) and his ideas about the family threatening, especially given his close relationship with Bronson. After a month of living together, Abba wrote in her journal,

“circumstances [have] most cruelly driven me from the enjoyment of my home and life. I am prone to indulge in occasions of hilarity-But I seem ground down into stiff and

20 While some nineteenth-century utopian communities, most notably the Shakers, were devoted to celibacy, Lane’s ideas were fairly extreme. Most communities called for the extension of the family so that everyone involved was considered connected. However, despite popular nineteenth-century opinion, few communities espoused either celibacy or “free love,” although many Oneidans practiced a form of complex marriage where all adult members were considered husbands and wives. For more information, see Robert H. Lauer and Jeanette C. Lauer’s The Spirit and the Flesh: Sex in Utopian Communities (1983). 32 peaceless order. I am always suffocated in this atmosphere of restriction and form”

(November 29, 1842, Alcott Family Additional Papers, item 1). When she welcomed the

“dear men” into her home, they ultimately prevented her enjoyment of it. For his part,

Lane constantly wrote about Abba in his correspondence during their time living together. To his friend William Oldham he complained, “under all this it should be stated that Mrs. Alcott has no spontaneous inclination towards a larger family than her own natural one, of spiritual ties she knows nothing, though to keep all together she does and would go through a good deal of exterior and interior toil” (qtd. in Sears 120). For Lane, spirituality and devotion to a higher ideal was key, and Abba’s sense of family loyalty problematically interior. Abba’s focus on exterior toil was also problematic for Lane, who never was able to understand the domestic and manual work that went into the

Fruitlands experiment. The drudgery of household chores was a distraction from a higher spiritual state, but clearly a necessity in order to survive.

Ensconced in Fruitlands, Lane went on to write, “Mrs. Alcott has passed from the ladylike to the industrious order, but she has much inward experience to realize. Her pride is not yet eradicated and her peculiar maternal love blinds her to all else-whom does it not so blind for a season?” (qtd. in Sears 121). This quote speaks to key issues that

Louisa May Alcott addresses in her narrative of the community. Abba’s passing from

“ladylike” to the “industrious” order shows the community’s concerns with destabilizing the boundaries between manual and intellectual labor. This issue is inextricably linked to gender, especially as we learn that most domestic labor was still performed by Abba. It also suggests that ladylike and industrious are competing definitions of femininity that

33 cannot overlap. A type of class erasure did take place in the community, as the philosophers attempted to create a new Eden by working the land during the day and having intellectual conversations at night. The attempt to erase class differences ultimately failed, though, as concerns about gender roles replaced class distinctions. The community’s goals allowed for a shift between class structures, but its attempts to create a classless society was never realized. More importantly, though, Lane notes Abba’s dedication to the biological family, a concept he wanted to abolish during his time at

Fruitlands. Though he seems to optimistically look towards a new “season” where Abba would move towards the consociate family, his dream ultimately failed.

Despite Lane’s eventual plea for Bronson to dissolve his biological family and model their community after the Shakers, a celibate but very financially successful community where men and women lived and worked separately, the Alcott family lasted much longer than the Fruitlands experiment. The Fruitlands community was formally established when Lane purchased land and a large brick house at Harvard, Massachusetts in June 1843, and dissolved in January 1844 when he removed his financial support in order to move in with the Shakers. Despite the philosophers’ idealistic aims, the community seemed doomed from the beginning. Fruitlands was marketed in the Dial, the transcendentalist periodical, as a more ascetic version of Brook Farm, which was a community Emerson referred to as being a “perpetual picnic” (qtd. in Francis Fruitlands

128). Lane and Alcott essentially thought people were enjoying themselves too much in

Ripley’s experiment and not focused enough on the spiritual improvements that would allow for the creation of a consociate family and therefore imagine society itself as a

34 united community. However, they were unable to draw enough capable adult members to the community in order to make it survive. Besides the Alcott and Lane family, there were only passing and somewhat eccentric members like Samuel Bower (a nudist who felt clothes were repressive), Abram Wood (a nature-loving friend of Thoreau), and

Abraham Everett (who was previously institutionalized by relatives hoping to access his finances). Anne Page, a minor poet and the only female member, is briefly mentioned in

“Transcendental Wild Oats” but soon left the community with hurt feelings after being reprimanded for eating a piece of fish at a neighboring farm. Only the good sense of neighboring farmer, Joseph Palmer, who was famously persecuted for refusing to shave his beard in the early nineteenth century, saved the farm from a swifter destruction through his practical knowledge of farming. The community planted the crops too late and was constantly taken away from farm chores to entertain curious visitors more interested in hearing Alcott’s philosophy than working towards it. After the crop failed in part because of poor planting, but also because Lane and Alcott chose to go on a lecture tour during harvest, the family faced starvation. When Lane left, Abba Alcott took over and found lodging for her family with nearby neighbors, the Lovejoys, where she took in sewing and Bronson chopped wood for funds.

Insights into the threats against the Alcott family during the Fruitlands experiment are noted in the journals of Louisa and Anna Alcott, the two oldest daughters, and Abba Alcott. These fragments of writing provide insight into the family’s experiences that help contextualize the short story. Again, it is important to note that

Louisa was eleven at the time of the Fruitlands experiment. She re-read her journals

35 throughout her life and it is likely that they provided material for her translation of the family’s experience in “Transcendental Wild Oats.” The entire Alcott family kept journals and all family members read them. We have fragments of the women’s journal entries from Fruitlands, but unfortunately they have all been edited, presumably by

Bronson Alcott, with large passages removed.21 Abba was initially optimistic in regards to her husband’s scheme. On June 1, 1843 when they arrive at the farm, she notes in her journal, “we are living for the good of others and that tho we may fail, it will be some consolation that we ventured more than others have dared” (Alcott Family Additional

Papers, Item 1). However, her enthusiasm quickly dampens after she is faced with the reality of life on the farm. In the autobiography she wrote in 1872, Abba rushes past her time at Fruitlands. She writes,

In 1842 Mr. A. went to England and returned six months later with two Englishmen Lane and Wright and a library of some books, all intent on forming a community and trying the true life. After much discussion a farm in Harvard was bought and we left the cottage where for three year I led a happy rural life in spite of hard work and [ ]. For a history of this experiment see Louisa’s story “Transcendental Wild Oats.” At Fruitlands, my labors were excessive, for I was the only woman on the place during most of the time. In the autumn, finding the plans a failure and my family left destitute, I hired a small house in Still River, a part of Harvard and with all that was left of my worldly goods and my four little girls we went there in January 1844.

This version of Abba’s manuscript was copied by Louisa, and her handwriting is tauntingly obscured in the elision above. In her own copy of her autobiography, Abba

21 One example of Bronson’s journal editing is especially telling. During the time the Fruitlands experiment was being formed, Abba wrote about how the men in the community did not seem to understand her frustrations over sharing her household. She wrote, “they all seem most stupidly obtuse.” After her death, Bronson scratched out the “all” and replaced it with “friends,” removing him from the blame. Louisa May Alcott also added her two cents, writing sympathetically in the margins, “poor dear woman!!!!” (Francis Fruitlands 109). This suggests Bronson’s guilt over Abba’s dismay during this era, and Louisa’s bond with her mother. 36 omits the reference to hard work, but says that her “labours were excessive” (Alcott

Family Additional Papers, Folder 27). This brief description of the Fruitlands community gives little insight into Abba’s experiences. Her devotion to Bronson remains staunch throughout her writing, and it is difficult to determine her real feelings. Abba’s brief reflections mirror the beginning optimism Louisa May Alcott captures in “Transcendental

Wild Oats,” although they also note the difficulty of her work on the farm. More importantly, she defers to Louisa’s account, defining “Transcendental Wild Oats” not as a romance but as a history of the experiment based on fact.

The first, hopeful journal entries by Louisa and Anna also seem to bode well for the community. Anna Alcott, then thirteen, constantly wrote about the peacefulness of their farm life. On June 11, 1843, she describes a walk, stating, “it was quiet and beautiful there and I felt a calmness in myself. The sun was shining and the birds were singing in the branches of the high trees. It was so beautiful it seemed as if God was near me” (qtd. in Sears 88). Although this encounter sounds like the transcendentalists’ ideal communion with nature, it becomes clear that Anna’s enjoyment of the community is hinged on her commitment to her family. Earlier she states that she would be “happy anywhere” that her family resides and most remaining journal entries focus on domestic scenes she shares with her mother and sisters (qtd. in Sears 86). As the family unit is threatened, her journal entries become increasingly bleak. By the end of Louisa May

Alcott’s Fruitlands journal, she reflects on a tense discussion about the definition of the family and writes, “In the evening father and mother and Anna and I had a long talk. I was very unhappy and we all cried. Anna and I cried in bed, and I prayed God to keep us

37 all together” (LMA Journals 47). Clearly, the threat of the family’s disruption was traumatic for the children and suggests that there is a darker message about family life implicit in “Transcendental Wild Oats.”

The Consociate vs. the Biological Family in “Transcendental Wild Oats”

“Transcendental Wild Oats” gives a gently satirical overview of the Alcott family’s time at the farm, although real names are not used. Bronson’s and Abba’s characters, Hope and Able Lamb, are portrayed as idealistic, innocent dreamers, as inherent in the names.22 However, as the story continues, it becomes clear that Hope is actually the “able” one, as Able’s main strength is in his hopeful nature and willingness to believe that society can be perfected. This satiric switch in their names mirrors the eventual transition to opposite gender roles as Hope takes control of the family at the end of the text. In contrast, Timon Lion (Lane’s character) is clearly the villain of the story, a strict vegetarian who is nonetheless always ready to metaphorically swallow up the innocent Lamb family through his overthrow of their previously cozy domestic life.

Joseph Palmer, the reliable farmer next door, is named Moses, a fitting moniker for the man who led the family to safety many times through his practical knowledge of farming.

Other characters are superficially disguised, as Abram Wood becomes Wood Abram and

Anne Page is labeled Jane Gage.

22 Perhaps the best description of Abba is given by herself in a journal entry dated “The Last Sabbath of 1872.” She writes that she is “ impulsive but not vindictive-I love long-love much and hope to be forgiven-my education was defective- my married life has been filled with trials I was not prepared for, and hardships I resented rather than accepted, or mitigated- I writhed under the injustice of Society and mourned my incompetency to live above it.” (Alcott Family Additional Papers, Item 1). The experiment documented by Louisa May Alcott in “Transcendental Oats” reflects the strength of Abba’s character during the trials of her marriage, but may romanticize the more difficult aspects of her personality.

Louisa is the implicit narrative voice and her sensitive representation of her mother mirrors her annotations throughout her journal. Because the narrative voice focuses on Hope Lamb’s experiences and seems most sympathetic towards her challenges, she quickly becomes the heroine of the text. Hope is consistently skeptical about the philosopher’s vision, does the entire domestic work and much of the manual labor herself, and eventually saves the family when Able goes into a bout of crippling depression when the experiment fails. Despite Hope’s central role in the text, critics have tended to focus on how the story shows the failure of utopian principles rather than specifically analyzing her character. Claudia Durst Johnson suggests that

“Transcendental Wild Oats” is ultimately about the breakdown of the transcendentalist ideals and Louisa May Alcott’s disillusionment with her impractical father. Likewise,

Jean Pfaelzer argues that the story shows the fact that utopian projects ultimately failed for women as they increased their labor rather than freeing them to pursue philosophical ideals.23 While both of these readings offer important insight into Louisa May Alcott’s vision of the community, my analysis suggests that the text should be read not as the failure of transcendentalism and the ideals of community living, but as the success of a different type of alternative community, a female centered family that empowers the mother. This family is successful in part because it is so close to the accepted nineteenth- century ideal, only replacing the mother as the true head of the household. In the world

23 See Claudia Durst Johnson’s “’Transcendental Wild Oats’ or ‘The Cost of an Idea’” (1998) and Jean Pfaelzer’s “The Sentimental Promise and the Utopian Myth: Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘The Harmonists’ and Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’” (1989). Sandra Harbert Petrulionis’s “By the Light of Her Mother’s Lamp: Women’s Work and Men’s Philosophy in Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’” also makes the argument that utopian experiments like Fruitlands ultimately did not result in sexual equality since women were still required to do the majority of the domestic labor. 39 of Fruitlands, the only family that can survive is the one headed by Hope Lamb (or Abba

Alcott). This alternative family challenges the middle-class ideal by displacing the male as the central provider and shows the ability of women to support themselves and their children. Considering Louisa May Alcott’s interest in the suffrage movement during the time she was writing the short story, this revision of the family speaks not only to her views on her own parents, but the role of women in American society as a whole.

An understanding of Louisa’s relationship with her parents also sheds lights on the quietly sarcastic tone of “Transcendental Wild Oats.” Though never mean-spirited,

Alcott’s narrative voice is quick to critique the clueless philosophers and showcase the practical abilities of her mother. In his introduction to the 1981 edition of the text,

William Henry Harrison writes, “surely the Muse of Comedy presided over an old red farmhouse serenely situated at the foot of Prospect Hill in the remote and rural town of

Harvard, Massachusetts” (3). Invoking the Muse of Comedy, however, ignores the very real problems facing the Alcotts at Fruitlands. While Alcott’s narrative tone may be ironic, she recognizes the family’s dire situation. The narrator mixes the comedic with the tragic, showing Abba’s strength and Bronson’s idealism, but ultimately capturing the failure of the social experiment. Many critics focus on the close and sometimes unstable relationship between Louisa and Bronson Alcott, who shared the same birthday and died within days of each other. Biographer John Matteson recently published a study of their relationship, Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father (2007), where he discusses their complicated connection and Louisa’s desire to provide for her family and gain her father’s approval. Yet even Eden’s Outcasts seems focused on the

40 bond and similarities between Abba and Louisa.24 Both women were relentlessly devoted to their families and were hard-working with a fiery temper. Abba seemed to identify with Louisa throughout her life. Bronson problematically recognizes this bond in a journal entry from Louisa’s childhood, stating that “two devils, as yet, I am not quite divine enough to vanquish-the mother fiend and her daughter” (qtd. in Matteson 189).25

Considering Bronson’s calm persona and spiritual strivings, this is a shocking quote to precede his vision of the utopian community. It is these “devils” who are able to bring success to the experiment. Abba physically saves her family from starvation and Louisa metaphorically reclaims the experience as a source of insight in “Transcendental Wild

Oats,” although these two acts are very different in regards to the material labor involved.

“Transcendental Wild Oats” does not begin by praising the philosopher’s utopian desires, but the strength of Hope, suggesting that she will be the protagonist of the text.

Hope is described as “an energetic-looking woman, with a benevolent brow, satirical mouth, and eyes brimful of hope and courage” (25). Her energy will constantly be juxtaposed with that of the male philosophers, who “said many wise things and did many foolish ones” (52). The story starts by heralding the biological family and showing how

Able is slowly removed from it through his utopian strivings. On their way to the farm, the Lamb girls sing “lullabies to their dolls in soft, maternal murmurs,” showing both their commitment to the traditional family and the idea that the community experiment

24 Richard Francis also points out how much Abba identified with Louisa (Fruitlands 108). 25 Interestingly, in her journal Abba makes a less than flattering reference to Bronson using similar language. In a March, 1842 entry she writes that he, “wanders to and fro on the face of the earth not like Satan (blank), but to seek and save mankind…I would willingly forego his presence here tho I sometimes feel as if it were robbing my dear children of their birth-rights” (Alcott Family Additional Papers, 1707-1904, Item 1). Louisa then inscribes “Patience enduring” over the entry. It appears that Abba’s concern that Bronson was not valuing her family predated the Fruitlands experiment. 41 will force them to take on responsibilities beyond their years (26). While the girls’ maternal lullabies uphold the nuclear family, Able is immediately displaced from it.

Moses, the responsible farmer next door, looks upon him and Lion as “promising boys on a new sort of lark” (34). The new family created shows young girls becoming caretakers and the older men demoted as boys having fun rather than responsibly providing for their family, their traditional role in mid-nineteenth century America. Louisa’s narrator notes that Hope is both “wistful” and “rebellious” when she enters the new home and realizes the sacrifices her family is asked to make (30,33). Instead of using the language of the philosophers to describe the venture, the narrator notes that Hope now has “a little family of eleven” that she must care for (37). This sets the stage for a new alternative community that is actually a re-creation of the biological family, as Hope Able is the only one who is able to clearly see the faults of Fruitlands and save her family from destruction.

The primary work of the farm, planting and harvesting the crop, bookends

“Transcendental Wild Oats” and shows the increasing tension over definitions of family and the role of labor in Fruitlands. Each member’s competing definition of the community becomes evident in the sowing of the different grains. After all working on the fields, the philosophers realize that they have planted three different crops, each one sowing a different type of seed. While the mistake causes “much perplexity,” the community members decide that nothing can be done about it and hope that something will grow (41). Besides speaking to the general disorganization of the community, this early event represents the different philosophical ideals attempting to gain dominance at

Fruitlands. Just as every member sows a different crop, each major adult member of the community views the Fruitlands experiment in different ways. Louisa May Alcott demonstrates these differences when she shows the various ways the members initially conceptualize their home. She writes,

Here Timon Lion intended to found a colony of Latter Day Saints, who, under his patriarchal sway, should regenerate the world and glorify his name for ever. Here Able Lamb, with the devoutest faith in the high ideal which was to him living truth, desired to plant a Paradise, where Beauty, Virtue, Justice, and Love might live happily together, without the possibility of a serpent entering in. And here his wife, unconverted but faithful to the end hoped, after many wanderings over the face of the earth, to find rest for herself and a home for her children (29).

While Able Lamb desires to plant a paradise, what is actually planted are different crops, none of which are entirely successful, in part due to the philosophers’ refusal to use animal waste as compost. Lion’s dictatorship is also never realized, since Hope is able to see through his monomaniacal personality. Hope’s dream is realized at the end, but only with the destruction of the community.

The discrepancies in sowing the field also show how ill-equipped the philosophers were regarding manual labor. Many individuals drawn to the utopian experiments of the mid-nineteenth century seemed to envision it as a form of downward class mobility, where they could simplify their lives and escape the corruption of the financial system by embracing voluntary poverty through simple living and farm labor.

This romanticization of poverty was unsustainable once the philosophers were faced with the material realities of farm life. As Louisa May Alcott demonstrates throughout

“Transcendental Wild Oats,” the community members were not prepared to create a successful farm. During the experiment, Able appears to have forgotten his youthful

43 experiences working on his own family’s farm. He plants his crops too late and seems incapable of getting anything to grow. This experiment in downward class mobility would have failed earlier without the help of Moses, the helpful next door neighbor who is not interested in social reform, but offers practical assistance in farming. Though he is often described as looking like an old fashioned patriarch, his first entrance in the short story positions him as feminine. He is initially described as “a regenerate farmer, whose idea of reform consisted chiefly in wearing white cotton raiment and shoes of untanned leather. This costume, with a snowy beard, gave him a venerable, and at the same time a somewhat bridal appearance” (31). Moses’s bridal appearance and general benevolence throughout the text implicitly positions him as one of the women able to create community and successfully work the farm when the labor of the male reformers fails.

Hope and Moses are able to recognize the romanticism behind the idea of voluntary poverty and downward class mobility, and how it is unsustainable at Fruitlands. They are the ones who often do the physical labor on the farm, especially when Hope harvests the crop.

The utopian site is important because it allows for a redefinition of the family structure that would often be ignored in mainstream American society. In the absence of the male philosophers, Hope creates her own family and negotiates the needs of the community. Ultimately, the only food that comes out of the crop is harvested by Hope, showing the need for women to head the community and their unique ability to negotiate different social position through class mobility. Despite their desire to blend manual and intellectual labor and to reject the upper-class lifestyle of the philosophers in Concord,

Lion and Able Lamb ultimately choose intellectual labor in the form of a lecture tour at the time when the crops need to be harvested. Unable to resist the “call of the Oversoul,” the men leave Hope and the children to gather the crops before an incoming storm ruins them (53). Though her situation is overwhelming, Hope does not break any of the rules of the community regarding the use of farm animals as she successfully harvests what grain survived the haphazard planting. Although, “three little girls, one boy (Timon’s son), and herself harnessed to clothes-baskets and Russian-linen sheets, were the only teams she could command,” she does not use animal labor (53). The only available workers are a female-headed family of a mother with children, and they are the ones who are ultimately the most successful at surviving Fruitlands. It is clear by this point in the text that the male philosophers are incapable of providing for and heading a family.

Their utopian vision has completely blinded them to the needs of any family, biological or consociate. This is an important revision of the nineteenth-century ideal as Alcott challenges both the definition of family and the assumption that men are the ones most able to provide for it in the public sphere of commerce.

“Transcendental Wild Oats” shows the reality of what happened at home while

Bronson rejected money as corrupt. While the Fruitlands community was an experiment in downward social mobility and simple living, it is ultimately up to Hope to stabilize the family’s finances since Able disavows waged labor and is unable to produce enough food to provide for the material needs of the community. On the lecture tours, Able is offered money but refuses it saying, “you see how well we get on without money” (51). His breezy statement elides the reality of the Fruitlands community, which is in fact not

45 getting on well. Implicit in Alcott’s narrative is the idea that the men of the community are provided for during their lectures. She notes that they are fed at “well-spread tables” where they preach vegetarianism and “haunt” reform conventions of all kinds (52). They can reject money because they are given food, shelter, and transportation by an admiring public that is eager to hear about their idealistic pursuits. In the meantime, the family is struggling on the farm. Alcott’s representation of the trip reads as an ironic reference to an often-told family anecdote where Bronson went on a lengthy lecture tour and returned with only a dollar. According to family lore, Abba welcomed him home lovingly and without reproach (Stern 68). Alcott’s recognition of the ineptitude of the philosophers reads as a defense and recognition of her mother’s constant patience and support. Abba’s foray into paid labor at the end of the text shows the female head of the family working for upward socioeconomic class mobility out of necessity. The story’s conclusion speaks to Louisa May Alcott’s firm belief that women should be able to engage in paid labor to support themselves and their families because the husbands and fathers may not be reliable.

The realization of his inability to care for his family and the failure of the community eventually psychologically breaks Able, paving the way for Abba’s assertion of control. The community begins to formally deteriorate shortly after the harvest. Able

(who once again fails to live up to his name) takes to his bed after Lion leaves to join the

Shakers. His refusal to eat anything is ultimately a mockery of the extremity of the

Fruitlands lifestyle. Not only will he not eat any animal products, he will starve to death because of the failure of his ideal. In his introduction to the text, Harrison suggests that

46 this scene is a fabrication, and primarily Louisa’s attempt to write a deathbed scene that appealed to Victorian audiences (5). If it is a fictionalized scene, it only serves to reassert

Abba’s importance to the survival of her family and Louisa’s admiration of her mother during this difficult epoch in their lives. Hope takes over all family responsibilities while

Able is in bed. In his absence, she provides food for him and their children and makes plans for the family to relocate to a nearby boarding house. She also secures paid labor for her family, finding work as a seamstress and a promise that Able will be able to make money chopping wood. The end of the short story also shows the removal of all of the male community leaders. Their vision has failed, leaving only the original goal of Hope to secure a home for her family. In their absence, she reclaims the biological family from the promise of the consociate one. However, this family is still an alternative vision since it is headed by a woman, the mother figure who is able to engage in all forms of labor to provide for her family. The women of Fruitlands are the ones who are able to work for a better life for their children, a theme we will see continued in my analysis of the factory work completed by the Lowell women in the next chapter.

Ironically, Able realizes his commitment to his biological family and position as male breadwinner at the time when he is least needed by them. At the moment that Able accepts his own death, he realizes his obligation to survive for his family. Alone in his room, he offers his longest speech in the short story, which is actually a monologue about the importance of the biological family. He states,

My faithful wife, my little girls-they have not forsaken me, they are mine by ties that none can break. What right have I to leave them alone? What right to escape from the burden and the sorrow I have helped to bring? This duty remains to me,

and I must do it manfully. For their sakes, the world will forgive me in time; for their sakes, God will sustain me now. (59)

Facing the failure of the consociate family, it is the dedication to his biological family that redeems him. While he claims he will do his duty “manfully,” he still acknowledges that he will be redeemed through his family, and that they will be the ones who allow the rest of the world to forgive him. The Lamb family is the only one still intact by the end of the short story. Calling for Hope, he realizes that she has already made plans for the future, and it is his job to follow her out of Fruitlands as dutifully as she followed him in.

“Transcendental Wild Oats” proves that it was Hope’s maternal instincts that were able to keep the family together, creating a female-centered family out of the male- dominated utopian one. Abba is consistently represented as the strongest and most efficient member of the community throughout the narrative. Charles Lane largely blamed the fall of the real life Fruitlands on Abba Alcott. In retrospect, he wrote to

Oldham stating, “Mr. Alcott’s constancy to his wife and family and his inconsistency to the Spirit have blurred his life forever” (qtd. in Bedell 231). He never stopped blaming

Abba for claiming that “her own family are all that she lives for” (qtd. in Sears 122).

Although Lane did not last long in the Shaker community (and eventually remarried and returned to his career in finance), he believed throughout his time with the Alcotts that the only way to reach spiritual perfection was to dismiss ties to the biological family and claim a connection to the larger community. For her part, Abba triumphantly wrote to her brother, the Rev. Samuel May that “all Mr. Lane’s efforts have been to disunite us.

But Mr. Alcott’s conjugal and paternal instincts were too strong for him” (Bedell 231).

However, “Transcendental Wild Oats” suggests that it was the strength of Abba’s 48 maternal instincts that ultimately redeemed the Alcott family. Eventually, Bronson himself was won over to Abba’s commitment to the biological family. Years after the failure of Fruitlands he wrote, “The family is the unit around which all social endeavors should organize if we would succeed in educating men for the true ends of existence.

And the cooperation of women in the practical working out is indispensable” (qtd. in

Elbert 71). Although belatedly, Bronson appears to have recognized that the practical cooperation of women is essential to the creation of any reform.

After the Fruitlands experiment, Abba Alcott went on to support her family by working as a type of social worker to the poor in Boston.26 Though certainly still impoverished herself, she was sponsored by rich patrons and a “Dr. Huntington’s

Society” to administer food and financial aid to the poverty-stricken in the inner city.

Interestingly, during this time she extends the Fruitlands experiment by imagining an enlarged family structure where the rich and poor work together to form an alternative community, a vision ultimately reclaimed by the late-nineteenth-century settlement house movement. In her journal, she constantly rebukes the ways the city spends money on charitable aid. Instead of financial assistance from the state, she states, “how simple and true if each family better conditioned by education and prosperity would adopt one or two families. Helping the Mother to economy and house- the father to labour, thereby promoting industry, extending a protective care for the masses-that justice abide in the bargain and providence looks well to its results” (January 1, 1849, Alcott, Abigail (May)

26 Joseph Palmer (Moses) bought Fruitlands from Emerson, who was trustee of the land after the breakup of the community. Palmer renamed it “Freelands” and turned it into a kind of safe house for the wandering poor and others in need (Harrison 20). 49

Papers, 1800-1877. Folder 4). This vision of an extended family including the rich and poor would ultimately be realized in her daughter’s novels, as would the complications arising from the idea that those in a privileged position should exert a paternalistic

“protective care” over the “masses.”

Reconstructing the Family after Fruitlands: Under the Lilacs and Jack and Jill

The Fruitlands debate over the definition of family continued in important ways in

Louisa May Alcott’s fiction. When Jo gushes, “I do think that families are the most beautiful things in all the world,” at the end of Little Women (1868-9), readers assume that she is referring to the March family, a tightly-knit biological family that was famously modeled after the Alcotts (489). In letters to fans, Louisa May Alcott even referred to her family by their character names.27 The popularity of Little Women, both in the nineteenth century and today, suggests that Alcott succeeded in portraying an ideal, middle-class American family, and certainly not one that challenges the definition of family itself. As Cyrus Bartol notes, Louisa May Alcott “unlatches the door to one house, and…all find it is their own house which they enter” (qtd. in Stern Louisa May

Alcott ii). However, the March family ultimately does not include just the biological family, but also their rich next door neighbor Laurie, who is a part of the family long before he marries a March sister, as well as the poor Hummels, and their servant,

Hannah. More importantly, this extension of the family continues throughout Alcott’s

27 For example, see Louisa May Alcott’s letter to Florence Hilton on March 13, 1874. She writes, “You may care to know that the Marches are all well, Mr. M. preaching to churches, schools, and divinity students as a peripatetic philosopher should. Marmee sits in her easy arm-chair and makes sunshine for the family. Meg still broods over her babies, doing double duty now that her John is gone. Daisy and Demi are trying school for the first time, and it is unnecessary to say that they are the most remarkable children in America” (LMA Letters 182). Alcott goes on to refer to herself as Jo. 50 fiction, not just in the often-discussed Little Women trilogy. Louisa May Alcott’s children’s fiction rarely defined family in terms of biology, but rather a complex web of social relationships formed through mutual respect and affection.

A closer look at Alcott’s children’s fiction suggests that her experience at

Fruitlands had an important impact on how she defines the domestic sphere. All of

Alcott’s children’s fiction expands the notion of family beyond biology. While the role of the mother is key, Alcott often extends her definition of family to include those from different socioeconomic class positions. Critics who analyze Alcott’s children’s fiction generally gloss over her experiences at Fruitlands and its implicit influence on her work, but its impact emerges in the many alternative families that she creates in her novels.

Louisa May Alcott’s fiction is partly an attempt to come to terms with the tensions between the biological and consociate family that were raised at Fruitlands.

Though Alcott was young during the Fruitlands experience, it influenced her understanding of socioeconomic class and the construction of families, especially since she references it throughout her writings and found it an important enough event to write about years later. During her time in the utopian community, she faced the threat of hunger and the rejection of the general population due to her family’s unconventional beliefs. However, she also experienced in her youth the affluence and elitism of her connection to the May family (one of the oldest in America) through her interactions with

Abba’s father, Colonel Joseph May. Her parents’ marriage gave her an early glimpse into the possibility of social mobility in America as Bronson initially rejected his poor, farming background to move in the elite Boston social circles and marry Abba. The

51 competing experiences of her mother’s upper-class background and the Fruitlands experiment showed Alcott social extremes and caused her to fear poverty even as she occasionally romanticized it in her writing. The fact that her mother was born into an affluent and powerful family, only to struggle to support her family after her marriage, proved to Louisa the fact that class remained a constant and fluid construction in

American culture and that women needed a way to support themselves. Fruitlands’ failed attempt to erase class distinctions introduced Louisa to the material realities of poverty even as it affirmed the importance of a woman’s role in her family.

Besides shaping her understanding of class and gender issues, the tensions surrounding the consociate family at Fruitlands defined how she viewed the domestic sphere, especially the construction of families. In this section, I suggest that Alcott’s children’s fiction, specifically the often overlooked Under the Lilacs and Jack and Jill, display the impact of Fruitlands on Louisa May Alcott’s writing. Her representation of the domestic sphere shows the influence of Fruitlands’ idealistic vision of class-merging and the difficulty in defining family. I suggest that her children’s fiction is Alcott’s attempt to meld the domestic vision of both her parents. The Fruitlands experiment showed Bronson’s attraction to the consociate family and Abba’s devotion to a female- centered biological family. In Louisa May Alcott’s work, she attempts to meld the philosophies of both parents, creating alternative families that include people of different socioeconomic classes but centered in the middle class home and led by women.

However, like the family formed at Fruitlands, these alternative social groupings prove to be unstable.

The poverty of Louisa’s childhood was perhaps as much of an impetus for her writing as her creative genius. As previously noted, Abba Alcott was the primary breadwinner for the family throughout the Fruitlands experiment. However, she prophetically looked forward to passing the torch to Louisa, whose talent she immediately recognized. She encouraged her writing, dropping her a note on her fourteenth birthday saying “Lift up your soul…to meet the highest for that alone can satisfy your great yearning nature…[B]elieve me you are capable of ranking among the best” (qtd. In Matteson 188). At the age of twenty-two, Louisa May Alcott wrote to her older sister Anna of her desire to support the family, saying, “Don’t laugh at my plans;

I’ll carry them out, if I go to service to do it. Seeing so much money flying about, I long to honestly get a little and make my dear family more comfortable. I feel weak-minded when I think of all they need and the little I can do” (LMA Letters 9). Charles Strickland suggests that the humiliation she felt over her family’s poverty continued to influence her writing (42).28 It was her family’s constant economic instability that caused her to embrace Thomas Niles’ commission to write a book for girls, despite her dislike of the subject matter.29 Even after the overwhelming success of Little Women, Alcott’s journals and letters are fraught with references to money and concern over her family’s economic well-being. Always pragmatic, she rejected her publisher, James Redpath’s, suggestion

28 See Charles Strickland’s Victorian Domesticity: Families in the Life and Art of Louisa May Alcott. Strickland is also interested in the construction of families in Alcott’s fiction, but focuses on the influence of sentimental literary tropes and ideals in her work. 29 In May 1868, Alcott wrote in her journal, “Mr. N wants a girls’ story, and I begin “Little Women.” Marmee, Anna, and May all approve my plan. So I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.” Alcott later annotated this entry, writing “good joke” (Alcott Journals 165- 166). 53 that part of the proceeds of Hospital Sketches (1863) go to support war orphans, firmly telling him that charity begins at home. Her brother-in-law, John Pratt’s, death in 1870 while she was travelling abroad encouraged her to write Little Men (1871) so that she could help support her widowed sister and two nephews. Alcott even adopted her nephews, John and Frederick, so that they would have access to her copyrights after her death, successfully ensuring the future financial stability of her family.30

These examples of Alcott’s concern over money suggest that she was constantly aware of socioeconomic class, especially in terms of her family’s precarious social position. However, the publication of Little Women and the subsequent “moral pap” tales she wrote for children ensured both Alcott’s reputation as an author and her family’s financial security.31 These enormously popular children’s books undoubtedly influenced readers of many social locations, making their construction of alternative families across class lines even more significant because of the large audience. Alcott often referenced the fact that she referred back to her own childhood and experiences with her sisters in order to write stories for the young. Fruitlands was a significant part of her own childhood, and may implicitly be an influence on her novels.

All of Alcott’s children’s fiction focuses on strong female characters. In her analysis of Alcott’s domestic fiction, A Hunger for Home, Sarah Elbert suggests that

Louisa May Alcott’s feminism was inspired by the gender roles she observed in the

30 See The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott (1987). 31My analysis does not include Work (1872) because it was written for adults, although it is an often-cited example of the power of female community across socioeconomic class lines. Cynthia Barton points to Work as another example of the fact that Louisa May Alcott rarely portrays a self-contained family (69). John Matteson makes a similar observation, stating that in Work “Alcott redefines family according to shared mission rather than bloodlines” (380). Strickland suggests that Louisa sought “a loving league of sisters that transcended class lines” in Work (83). 54

Fruitlands experiment (56). As previously discussed, this experience showed her the ineffectiveness of her father as the primary financial supporter of the family, and therefore, the need for women to be able to provide financially for themselves and their children. In her fiction, this is represented through the construction of alternative families that are headed by women and transcend class boundaries. Elbert states that

“Alcott can offer model domesticity only in utopian settings where cooperative communities reappear in sexually democratic forms” (204). These cooperative communities define Alcott’s children’s novels, although, like Fruitlands, they are rarely completely successful. An intact biological family is hardly ever described, and when it is it is often corrupt, like the Shaw family in An Old-Fashioned Girl.

Interestingly, tragic family events produced and influenced many of her novels, likely causing Alcott to think more critically about the construction of family in her texts.

Just as Little Men was written as a response to her brother-in-law John Pratt’s death,

Under the Lilacs was completed at the deathbed of Abba Alcott, clearly the strongest female influence in Louisa Alcott’s life. Jack and Jill was finished after hearing news of

May’s death and the realization that Alcott would now raise her infant niece. Alcott notes the effect of these conditions on her writing style in a letter to Mary Mapes Dodge on January 20, 1880, stating, “I never get a good chance to do a story without interruption of some sort. ‘Under the Lilacs’ was finished by my mother’s bedside in her last illness,

& this one [Jack and Jill] when my heart was full of care & hope & then grief over poor

May. I trust the misery did not get into the story, but I’m afraid it is not as gay as I meant most of it to be” (LMA Letters 244). These disruptions to her own family through death

55 undoubtedly influenced her work’s content and style, as her own family was being reconstructed during her writing process.

Alcott attempted to fulfill the needs of all of her family members, effectively assuming the roles of provider, advocate, and emotional supporter as well as the biological ones of sister, daughter and aunt. In some ways, she was an alternative family all in her own as she negotiated the different positions that each family member demanded of her. An unidentified, undated newspaper clipping in the Louisa May Alcott

Papers suggests that she recognized her unique position in her family. It states, “in speaking once of her experiences, the late Miss Alcott remarked that it had seemed to be her destiny to fill the gaps in life; that she had been a wife to her father, a husband to her widowed sister, a mother to the orphaned daughter of her sister May; while still daughter and sister and friend as well” (Series 4, Item 290). In her journal she often noted the strain this took on her health, writing in 1869 that she was, “very poorly. Feel quite used up. Don’t care much for myself, as rest is heavenly even with pain, but the family seems so panic-stricken and helpless when I break down, that I try to keep the mill going”

(LMA Journals 171). The mill continued with Under the Lilacs, written as Alcott was contemplating the death of the strongest female influence in her life, Abba Alcott, whose role in the Fruitlands experiment showed Louisa early on the importance of women taking control of the family and being able to support it both emotionally and financially.

Though Louisa May Alcott noted in her journal that her “brain is squeezed dry,” she was convinced to write the novel when she was offered three thousand dollars in advance, money that again would allow her to provide for her loved ones (Alcott Journals 200).

Under the Lilacs traces the growth and moral development of Ben, a young runaway circus performer who believes that his father is dead until the elder Ben Brown’s miraculous return at the end of the story. Ben is saved from starvation when he befriends sisters Betty and Bess Moss, whose widowed mother takes him under her wing and finds him employment with their neighbor, the rich Miss Celia. Miss Celia educates him and takes him to church, so that when his (also circus performer) father returns Ben is able to in turn reform him and convince him to take more respectable employment. Not surprisingly, considering the pressure Alcott always felt to arrange happy marriages for her characters, the narrator hints that Mrs. Moss and Ben’s father marry at the end of the story, creating an alternative family that transcends traditional social mores.

Under the Lilacs, which first appeared in St. Nicholas in monthly installments between December 1877 and October 1878 before it was published as a book, continues

Alcott’s theme of creating alternative families headed by strong women and transcending class boundaries.32 A widow, Mrs. Moss has to take on the role of providing for her children by default. Miss Celia is also unmarried until the very end of the text, and her father is dead. Both women take Ben, and, to an extent, each other, into their families.

What is significant about this alternative family is the melding of three distinct class lines. Ben, a homeless circus performer, represents a position almost completely outside of the American class system due to the lack of respectability surrounding the circus and his itinerant status. Although he is too proud to beg himself, he survives at the beginning

32 St. Nicholas was a respected and popular children’s periodical published monthly and edited most famously by Mary Mapes Dodge. See Frank Luther Mott’s A History of American Magazines 1885-1905 (1957) for more information about periodical culture. 57 of the story by having his dog, Sancho, steal food from students while they are in school.

He is constantly dependent on the charity of those in more privileged positions. Beggars are almost always classified by Alcott (and the greater American public) as being the undeserving poor, so far from middle-class respectability that they will never become immersed in traditional society, which I will discuss in more detail in Chapter Four. As

Robert H Bremner points out, in the mid nineteenth-century, “respectable folk looked upon ‘tramps’ a numerous but ill-defined group, as pariahs deserving only ‘the toe of a boot by day and a cold stone floor by night’” (14).33 Although Ben is a child, he is represented as being dirty and outside the social system until he is assimilated by the

Moss family and Miss Celia.

Even more interesting is Ben’s status as a circus performer, an identity that immediately marks him as a social other. Rosemarie Garland Thomson notes that middle-class Americans were fascinated with the circus, especially freak shows, in the nineteenth century. Circus performers allowed the middle-class to define themselves in opposition to social others and ensured their own respectability.34 Throughout the novel,

Ben struggles with his affinity for the circus. Though he finally decides that it is an unhealthy career path, his desire for the freedom associated with the life is an inherent threat to the middle-class respectability Alcott preaches throughout the text. Early in the novel, Ben notes, “I’d like to stay here and be respectable; for, since I came, I’ve found out that folks don’t think much of circus riders, though they like to go and see ‘em. I

33 See Bremner’s classic study of poverty, The Discovery of Poverty in the United States (1956). For a more recent study, see Gavin Jones’s American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840- 1945 (2009). 34 See Garland Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (1997). 58 didn’t use to care about school and such things, but I do now” (90). Ben’s seemingly innocuous remarks are revealing. Although the middle class characters constantly look down on his former profession, they perpetuate the culture they disapprove of by continuing to go to the circus when it comes to town. Their disapproval appears to be not with the circus itself, but when performers attempt to insert themselves into the quiet town. Ben atones for his past by assuring his new family that he now cares for “school and such things,” showing that he can be assimilated into their value system.

Alternatives to traditional middle-class lifestyles are attractive to many Alcott heroes and heroines, but they usually chose the quiet domestic life instead. The insertion of Ben into the complex family structure created in the novel disrupts notions of the accepted middle class ideal and creates a unique alternative family.

The Moss family initially represents the middle-class ideal, as they appear to be comfortably off but without the support of a father or husband. Miss Celia, who owns the property of the Moss house, is able to encompass both the lower and middle class characters into her benevolent home, creating an alternative family structure that disrupts all boundaries of socioeconomic class. When Miss Celia returns to her property after a long time away, she clearly articulates the creation of this new family when she comes across Bess, Bab, and Ben (already united by their similar names) playing on her property. Miss Celia admits that she doesn’t have a family of her own, and Bab says that they also lost their father. Miss Celia immediately disrupts class lines, saying to Ben,

Bab, and Bess, “you are a rich boy, and you are happy little girls to have so good a mother; I’ve found that out already” (66). Though Miss Celia is literally the rich one, she

59 purports to be envious of the mother’s love. In Alcott’s children’s fiction, this love has a moral worth unsurpassed by financial riches, especially since it was the only dependable source of wealth in her own childhood. Betty responds that they are willing to share their mother, an offer Miss Celia immediately accepts, adding “and you shall be my little sisters. I never had any, and I’d love to try how it seems.” The narration goes on to state that “Miss Celia took both the chubby hands in hers, feeling ready to love every one this first bright morning in the new home, which she hoped to make a very happy one” (LMA

Under the Lilacs 66). With this statement, Miss Celia immediately elides any class distinction, suggesting it is actually the mother, not material wealth, which makes the children rich. She may own their home and property, but true wealth is found in having a superior mother, and all she has is an invalid brother to support. By adopting Mrs. Moss, the girls, and Ben as her own, an alternative family is immediately created that erases all class barriers and includes only adult women and children.

However, Alcott’s experiences with poverty, especially during the Fruitlands experiment, do not allow her to so casually dismiss the material effects of financial wealth. Though Miss Celia claims to join the Moss family, she really enfolds the children, especially Ben, into her own home. More importantly, though Ben is considered part of the family, he is also paid and expected to fulfill certain work obligations around the house, which he does gladly. Ben maintains an outsider status throughout the novel. Thorny, Miss Celia’s biological brother, is initially suspicious of

Ben, and their relationship is shaky throughout the text. When they first meet, Thorny calls Ben a tramp, a moniker he gives him again later in the novel (74 99). This is a label

60 that Ben is never truly able to transcend. Even at the end of the text, the children at school tease him by calling him a tramp or beggar (228). As I will discuss in Chapter

Four, tramps represented a threatening rejection of the middle class home during this era.

Ben proves the impossibility of true social mobility in his small town life. He is never able to escape his disreputable past and is therefore unable to truly become a part of the family. Though Miss Celia’s upper-class vision of social charity compels her to adopt

Ben as both a worker and a family member, her pragmatic brother Thorny consistently recognizes their differences in upbringing and never truly accepts him as a brother. As in the Fruitlands experience, biological families are difficult to expand and class labels are unable to be eradicated.

The significance of the fact that Ben is not truly assimilated into the upper class family appears during an incident where Miss Celia finds that she is missing eleven dollars. Confiding in Thorny, she reluctantly suggests that Ben may have taken it. Ben, who is innocent, is horrified when Thorny confronts him on the issue. When he questions Miss Celia’s lack of trust, she states, “what could I do? It was gone, and you the only stranger about the place” (LMA Under the Lilacs 193). While previous conversations positioned Ben as a surrogate family member, when there is something awry in the household he becomes a stranger. The mystery is solved when they eventually find out that a mouse shredded the bills in order to make a nest for her infants.

The chapter ends macabrely as the cat eats the mouse family in an act of “summary justice” for unknowingly causing Ben to be a suspect. Ben states that the baby mice have to be killed since their mother was already caught by the cat. However, the destruction of

61 this small family mirrors the threat of Miss Celia’s family being disrupted. Though the incident is supposed to be dismissed as a lighthearted bump in the road to family cohesion, the eleven dollar mouse home turns out to be “a pretty expensive house” indeed

(198).

This scene shows that money will always be a factor in the creation of the family, even as class lines appear to be disrupted. Ben will never completely be assimilated into the family, in part because he will never be able to reach their level of wealth. If he had money of his own or a respectable social position, he would not have been a suspect in the “robbery.” Miss Celia never suspects her biological brother of subterfuge and Ben remains aware of the family’s distrust throughout the following chapters. In order to appease Ben after the incident, Thorny suggests that they buy him some cuff-buttons and a whip in order to facilitate his ambitions to be a “tip-top groom” (200). Though the gesture is offered in good spirits, readers can’t help but notice that these gifts will only improve Ben’s appearance as Miss Celia’s family groom. His social standing is inextricably linked to theirs and Thorny can only imagine presents to Ben that will make him seem more respectable to their neighbors. Miss Celia’s charitable response is that she will give him a set of books as a present in order to facilitate his schooling, stating that “an education is the best present we can make him” (200). These dual responses to the unfortunate incident show different approaches of assimilating the poor into the middle class family, through manual or intellectual labor. Neither one seems terribly effective in the text as Ben is still made fun of at school and his labor as a groom seems to help the family more than him.

The idea of a family member who also engages in paid labor for the family speaks to Alcott’s experiences at Fruitlands. Ideally, the utopian community her father created was supposed to include people across class lines, joined by the ability to work together to maintain the farm. Louisa May Alcott witnessed the difficulty of obtaining this ideal, especially as her mother’s labor was devalued even as it ultimately saved the family. In her newly created alternative families, people are fairly compensated for their work.

However, this financial compensation, especially in the face of the claim that maternal love is compensation in itself, creates an uncomfortable balance of power between the characters. Ben is never Miss Celia’s brother in the same way that Thorny is because he is unable to share her past experiences of privilege and is financially indebted to her for his own survival. Alcott’s own pragmatic awareness of the necessity for financial security makes her alternative families as unsustainable as Fruitlands.

Just as lack of funds and the debate over the definition of family caused Fruitlands to fail, the family created in Under the Lilacs meets a polite but unsatisfying end, again proving the instability of these alternative communities. The female-centered family crumbles when Miss Celia marries and brings a new head of the household (interestingly, a pastor) to take over the estate. The fact that a religious leader is now in charge of the household suggests the victory of the middle class moral values Alcott preaches in the text. Throughout the novel, Miss Celia encourages Ben to go to church, assuring him that

“the poor are as welcome as the rich” (88). Ben is consistently uneasy during the services, and with the arrival of Miss Celia’s pastor husband, the church can now come to him instead. Ben’s father, Ben Brown Sr., also reappears, providing a male patriarch for

63 not only Ben, but Bess and Betty as he marries Mrs. Moss. When Ben Sr. returns, he jovially states to Mrs. Moss, “I don’t forget, ma’am, these children shall never want a friend while Ben Brown’s alive,” which Betty explains by suggesting, “I s’pose he means that we shall have a piece of Ben’s father, because we gave Ben a piece of our mother”

(288). Though the family is still pieced together, it begins to take a more traditional form. The male heads of household regain their places and the alternative family shifts back to separate class positions. However, this happens in the last chapters of the novel, suggesting Alcott’s difficulty in presenting this traditional family in the light of her own personal experiences. Though the circus is forgotten, the middle and working class characters combine to form their own family and leave Miss Celia to her own upper socioeconomic class position.

Louisa May Alcott’s vision of alternative families, and the tensions regarding class inherent in their construction, continues in her later novel, Jack and Jill. Jack and

Jill, also written at the death of an important female family member, extends Alcott’s idea of an alternative family created beyond the structures of class and headed by a woman. Based on the children’s nursery rhyme, “Jack and Jill Went Up a Hill,” it tells the story of two best friends, Jack Minot and Jill Pecq, who injure themselves sledding.35

35 The rhyme that prefaces the novel goes “Jack and Jill went up the hill/ To coast with fun and laughter;/ Jack fell down and broke his crown,/ And Jill came tumbling after” (1). However, the traditional rhyme replaces “to coast with fun and laughter” with “to fetch a pail of water.” The traditional rhyme was first published in 1795 (Jack 76). This suggests that Alcott would be familiar with the traditional form of the rhyme but chose to replace the reference to manual labor with a leisure activity. This fits with the plot of the novel since Jack and Jill injure themselves sledding. However, Alcott’s revision elides the reality of manual labor and how it divides the children into different socioeconomic classes. Throughout the novel, Alcott works to reclaim Jill into the middle class. See Kate Greenaway’s illustrated compilation Mother Goose or the Old Nursery Rhymes (republished in 1979) for the original form of the rhyme. Albert Jack’s 64

Their long road to recovery teaches the impetuous children patience and ushers in their passage to adulthood. It is a novel defined by sickness and infirmity, topics that consumed Alcott in her later life as she struggled to overcome the health problems caused by the treatment of opiates administrated to her while she was a nurse in the Civil War.

While Jack and Jill’s future marriage is briefly alluded to, the focus of the story is their education and improvement, as well as Jill’s adoption into Jack’s family after the accident.

Issues of finance and socioeconomic class are central to the novel, which was written primarily as an attempt to make more money in the face of Alcott’s continued illness. Jack and Jill disrupt social boundaries by forming friendships beyond class lines.

Just as in Little Women and Under the Lilacs, children’s friendship is able to erase class differences. Like the Mosses and Miss Celia, families of different social position live right next door to each other, and differences are bridged through genuine affection between the children. The children are initially described in a way that both affirms their connection and their differences as the narrator notes that “gay Jack and gypsy Jill, always together” will be the focus of the text (4). However, the subversive potential of this connection is immediately erased as Jill is enfolded into the Minot family. As Maude

Hines notes, “Jill's class status is transformed by her adoption into the Minot family, an event that is possible because of her dependent and vulnerable position” (389).36 Before

Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meaning of Nursery Rhymes (2009) also provides several possible origins of the poem. 36 See Maude Hines’s “Missionary Positions: Taming the Savage Girl in Louisa May Alcott’s Jack and Jill” (1999). Hines argues that Jill disrupts social boundaries regarding gender, race, and class, but that her illness ultimately immerses her into normative American culture and trains her to be a proper wife for Jack. 65

Jill and her mother move into the Minot house and form an alternative family, the class lines are clearly drawn between the two households. After the accident, the narrator describes the two families. Readers learn that

Mrs. Pecq was an Englishwoman who had left Montreal at the death of her husband, a French Canadian, and had come to live in the tiny cottage which stood near Mrs. Minot’s big house, separated only by an arbor-vitae hedge. A sad, silent person, who had earned her bread by sewing, nursing, work in the factory, or anything that came in her way, being anxious to educate her little girl. Now, as she sat beside the bed in the small, poor room, that hope almost died within her (14-15).

The homes of the rich and the poor are located right next to each other, in close enough proximity to form friendships across class lines. The Minots’ status as working class is solidified in the description of Jill’s mother, whose devotion to work marks her as the deserving poor even as she is described as sad and silent. Her silence, both literally and metaphorically, becomes a key issue in the novel. In contrast, across the hedge, “that other mother sat by her boy’s bed as anxious but with better hope, for Mrs. Minot made trouble sweet and helpful by the way in which she bore it” (15). “Poor and sad” and

“sweet and helpful” define the two mothers as contrasts throughout the text. Of course,

Mrs. Minot’s “better hope” is also inspired by the availability of resources that allows her to make her son’s convalescence easier. In chapters entitled “Ward No.1” and “Ward

No.2” the contrasting houses are described and it is suggested that the shoddiness of the

Pecq household will deter Jill’s recovery. Jill claims that the unattractive wallpaper spots look like spiders and “make her nervous” (36). The house of the poor is unwelcoming to all, and Jill has fewer visitors than Jack. Once Mrs. Minot realizes the poor living

66 condition of the Pecq house, she encourages the family to move into her home in order to facilitate Jill’s recovery.

The alternative family formed through this move problematically erases class lines, though it is defined by the mother. The fact that the alternative family is headed by women is unquestionable, as fathers have small roles to play in the novel. Mr. Pecq’s death is mentioned, but the erasure of Mr. Minot is unreferenced. However, his absence allows Mrs. Minot to take over as the head of the household in a socially acceptable way.

When the Pecqs move in, Mrs. Pecq assumes household chores and allows Mrs. Minot to focus on educating and caring for the invalids. Like in Under the Lilacs, a family member is once again engaging in paid labor. Through her focus on domestic labor, Mrs.

Pecq is almost completely erased from the story. Children ask her for housekeeping advice, but go to Mrs. Minot for more important spiritual matters (221). She is not included in family trips and the relationship between her and her daughter is rarely referenced. In fact, Jill begins to call Mrs. Minot “mamma.” Mrs. Pecq does not really change class positions through this creation of the alternative family. However, her daughter’s social position is uplifted, especially through Jill’s briefly mentioned eventual marriage to Jack.

Mrs. Minot tells the story of Jill’s immersion in the family in an allegorical fairy tale that clearly defines the position of each member of the alternative family according to their class position. At the beginning of the chapter, “St. Lucy,” Mrs. Minot seeks to share the news with the children that the Pecqs are moving in permanently and that Jill will be well again. Both mothers know the news before the children, and their reaction is

67 telling. Setting the scene, the narrator states that Mrs. Pecq “seemed so delighted that she went about smiling as if she did not know what trouble meant, and could not do enough for the family. She was downstairs now, seeing that the clothes were properly prepared for the wash, so there was no one in the Bird Room [the sick room] but Mamma and the children” (192). Mrs. Pecq is not the one to share the good news with her daughter.

Instead, she is removed from the scene, gratefully doing housework while Mrs. Minot

(significantly referred to as Mamma) spends time with the children. Even domestic labor is assigned levels of privilege and the poor are resigned to household drudgery, implicitly suggesting they are unworthy of raising their own children. In order for Jill to achieve middle class status, she must be raised by a middle class mother. Mrs. Pecq and Mrs.

Minot’s position in the household is literarily a mirror for their socioeconomic position.

Even within this alternative family structure, Mrs. Pecq takes a lower position, in the basement doing laundry.

The class status is further solidified as the fairytale begins. Mrs. Minot refers to herself as the Queen with two sons, the Princes, who find a “damsel,” Lucy, lying sick in the snow and take her home (194). In this story of royalty, Mrs. Pecq is referred to again as the poor mother. In this rendition of the children’s actual experiences, the Minot mansion is initially a prison where Jill, “beat her wings against the bars, like a wild bird in a cage,” suggesting not only the difficulty of the always active child’s physical recovery, but the tensions in cross-class family assimilation (195). As the story continues, the damsel becomes patient and attention turns to the young princes, who have their own moral battles to fight. Even though the novel itself is concerned with cross-

68 class assimilation and forming alternative families, Jack’s moral temptation is, oddly enough, being too generous, especially to the poor. The queen admonishes him that “he lacked judgment, so he often got into trouble, and was in such a hurry that he did not always stop to find out the wisest way. As when he gave away his best coat to a beggar boy, instead of the old one which he intended to give” (197). This anecdote within an anecdote provides telling insight into Alcott’s vision of socioeconomic class. By telling this as a fictionalized story, Mrs. Minot is able to share commentary about class under the guise of storytelling, much as Alcott does in the writing of “Transcendental Wild Oats.”

As in the rest of her novels, there is a distinction between the deserving poor who can form connections with the upper class, and the undeserving poor who are unable to be assimilated. Because the beggars will never be able to be a part of the Minot family, Jack is admonished for giving them his best items. However, the deserving poor like Jill is welcomed into the family and given much more.

At this point in the fairytale, the threat of Lucy’s expulsion from the family is posed as a threat posited by her own mother but solved by the benevolent queen. Mrs.

Minot continues, stating, “Lucy’s mother thought she ought to go, and said so, but the queen told her how much good it did them all to have her there, and begged the dear woman to let her little cottage and come and be housekeeper in the palace, for the queen was getting lazy, and liked to sit and read, and talk and sew with Lucy, better than to look after things” (198). Here, class appears to be disrupted as it is the rich woman, Mrs.

Minot, who is now begging the poor family for a favor. As this passage clearly states, it is Jill who is welcomed in the family as the one who improves it. The fact that Mrs.

Pecq’s character initially seeks to return to her own home suggests that she senses the precariousness of her role as a mother. Essentially, this passage assigns her the role of a housekeeper as Mrs. Minot raises Jill. More disturbingly, at this moment in the storytelling Jill yearns for this dispossession of her mother, stating, “’And she said she would?’ cried Jill, clasping her hands in her anxiety, for she had learned to love her cage now” (198). Even though Jill may love the cage, the alternative family is still positioned as a kind of trap that captures the working class into the world of the upper-class by removing all of their autonomy. The “queen” may dismiss herself as lazy, but what passes as laziness is actually the leisure to pursue genteel activities like sewing and educating children while the poor attend to household matters. Only after Jill has accepted her new position, rejecting her mother and accepting Mrs. Minot as the new

“mamma,” is she told that she will soon be well and join the family on a trip to the seashore. Mrs. Pecq stays at home and takes care of the house.

Like Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane at Fruitlands, Mrs. Minot creates a consociate family focused on education and spiritual experiences while transcending class boundaries. However, it is never truly feasible, even though it is headed by a woman. The specter of the Fruitlands experience haunts the text. As the story continues,

Mrs. Minot begins to directly mimic Bronson Alcott in her plan for her children’s unconventional education. The novel ends with her removing the children from the formal school system. She outlines her educational plan, stating,

For the next two or three years I intend to cultivate my boys’ bodies, and let their minds rest a good deal, from books at least. There is plenty to learn outside of school-houses, and I don’t mean to shut you up just when you most need all the air and exercise you can get. Good health, good principles, and a good education 70

are the three blessings I ask for you, and I am going to make sure of the first, as a firm foundation for the other two (305-306).

Mrs. Minot’s plan begins to sound like the goals of the Fruitlands community. Just as she has created a consociate family that crosses class lines, she seeks to meld physical and intellectual labor, as were the goals of most of the utopian communities. Bronson’s dream of philosophers working the fields during the day and discussing great ideas at night is realized in Mrs. Minot’s plan for the children, who are to commune with nature and occasionally study the lessons most fitted to their personalities. While this failed at

Fruitlands, Louisa May Alcott suggests that Mrs. Minot’s plan will be more successful, potentially because this female-centered alternative family is headed by a woman, not the garrulous male philosophers who lacked the common sense to succeed at Fruitlands.

Because of her role as a mother, Mrs. Minot is presumably more fitted to educate her children in this unconventional way.

However, Mrs. Minot still displaces Mrs. Pecq in the text and uncomfortably reminds readers of the precarious role of mothers in alternative families. All responsibility for household chores is assigned to Mrs. Pecq, recalling Abba Alcott’s experience at Fruitlands. Though Mrs. Pecq all but disappears from the text, we know that her family’s immersion into the Minot household is contingent on her working as a housekeeper and completing all of the domestic labor even though it is unrecognized as being valuable. In her invisible story, we see the darker side of Fruitlands emerge. Like

Abba (and Hope in “Transcendental Wild Oats”), Mrs. Pecq is left to do the dirty work as the other individuals pursue their intellectual labor. Even more disturbingly, Mrs. Pecq’s position as a mother is threatened as she no longer interacts with her daughter, who 71 continues to call Mrs. Minot “mamma.” One of the problems of Fruitlands was the fact that Abba felt that her power as a mother was constantly challenged by the formation of the consociate family. With Bronson and Charles Lane overseeing the education of her daughters and advocating for a consociate family that transcended the biological one, her position was continually diminished, leaving her to the drudgery of household chores without the privilege associated with nineteenth-century motherhood. Likewise, Mrs.

Pecq becomes increasingly removed from her daughter through the creation of the alternative family. Though the alternative family formed by Mrs. Minot appears to be a positive one, the threat of the consociate family and its erasure of a mother’s natural rights mar the image that Louisa May Alcott creates. The unstable ending of Jack and

Jill, which eliminates Mrs. Pecq within the confines of the newly formed consociate family, brings us back to the Fruitlands experiment.

Conclusion: The Judicious Mother

While Louisa May Alcott was a child at Fruitlands, Lane told her a parable about poverty and families called “The Judicious Father.” She recounts it in her journal, stating that it told of

How a rich girl told a poor girl not to look over the fence at the flowers, and was cross to her because she was unhappy. The father heard her do it, and made the girls change clothes. The poor one was glad to do it, and he told her to keep them. But the rich one was very sad; for she had to wear the old ones a week, and after that she was good to shabby girls. I liked it very much, and I shall be kind to poor people (LMA Journals ).

Interestingly, Alcott does not identify herself as one of the poor, even though her family was facing starvation and a complete lack of resources at this point in the Fruitlands experiment. This journal entry is indicative of Alcott’s general attitude towards poverty, 72 which she constantly faced in her childhood but never completely identified with.

Though the Alcott family struggled with poverty throughout most of Louisa’s childhood, their genteel family history and place in the elite transcendentalist circle protected them from being truly marginalized. Their experience shows the difficulty in assigning class positions, as money, social standing, and labor all play determining factors in socioeconomic class standings. The slipperiness of class is reinforced throughout Louisa

May Alcott’s fiction. As Elbert notes, Louisa May Alcott’s “fiction gives us perhaps the fullest picture of the struggles over sexual relations and domestic life at Fruitlands-and for that matter, at other intentional communities in which reformist, middle-class men tried to impress their values upon community as a whole” (73). The class mobility portrayed in the journal story continued in her fiction, as characters constantly looked over the fence to their wealthy neighbors but were welcomed with open arms. As the

Alcott family assumed the guise of poor workers during the Fruitlands experiment,

Louisa May Alcott would metaphorically show the poor being enfolded in the families of the rich throughout her fiction. It is not surprising that Lane would focus on a “judicious father,” since that was the role he struggled to perform with Bronson Alcott as the heads of the Fruitlands consociate family. Louisa May Alcott revised the position from the father to the judicious mother in her children’s fiction after seeing the failure of the male philosophers at Fruitlands. After the destruction of the utopian experiments, the judicious mothers succeed through their practical philosophy.

Chapter Two: Rethinking the Industrial Utopia: Factory Work and Class Mobility

“There is an entire absence of all pretension in the writers to be what they are not. They are factory girls. They always call themselves ‘girls.’ They have no desire to be fine ladies, nor do they call themselves ‘ladies,’ as the common fashion is of most American females. They have no affectation of gentility; and by a natural consequence they are essentially free from all vulgarity.” –Charles Knight, editor of Mind Amongst the Spindles (1844)

“In the mills the girls have quite the appearance of ladies.” –Harriet Martineau, Introduction to Mind Amongst the Spindles

“I think I always respected a good blacksmith more than a lady of leisure” –Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Chapters from a Life (1896)

The three preceding quotes speak to the nineteenth century’s growing recognition of the tensions surrounding issues of gender, labor, and socioeconomic class. The first two quotes appear concomitantly in the British edition of Mind Amongst the Spindles, a compilation of the writings of the factory women of Lowell, Massachusetts. The third appears in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ memoir, Chapters from a Life, which provides a revealing look at the personal and professional goals informing her writing and social reform work. Read together, they suggest some of the major concerns regarding the representation of gender and manual labor in nineteenth-century American literature, especially in the Lowell Offering (1840-1845), a literary magazine composed wholly of the writing of the female Lowell workers. The women working and writing in the factories were difficult to place in a nascent American culture increasingly concerned

74 with class mobility and the desire to assign clear social positions. They were what we would now call blue-collar workers, toiling for twelve or more hours at the looms in order to support themselves or their families. They were also scholarly and inquisitive writers embedded, as Sylvia Jenkins Cook points out, in the emerging intellectual life of

America, interested in transcendentalism and attending lecturers by Emerson and other literary lions of the era. The Lowell Offering, which enjoyed a larger readership than

Emerson’s and Fuller’s transcendentalist musings in the Dial, sheds light on the growing divisions between intellectual and manual labor and the socioeconomic class structures associated with them, issues that captured the interest of the leading scholars of the era as well as the female operatives writing the magazine (Cook 74). As the Alcott family strove to balance the two forms of labor in their utopian experiment at Fruitlands, the women of Lowell lived out the transcendentalist ideal of blending literature and work.

Nineteenth-century readers of the Lowell Offering, like the British editor of Mind

Amongst the Spindles, were unsure how to categorize the writing, and more importantly, the women themselves. While Knight praises the freshness of the prose because it is free from the affected gentility of the upper socioeconomic class, Martineau is quick to point out that the women seem to position themselves as “ladies,” if only through their (well- documented) neat physical appearance. While Martineau focuses on their appearance, the distinction of “lady” was also earned through the women’s proper mannerisms and dedication to the fine arts. In these writings, the Lowell Offering and the factory itself becomes an unstable site where socioeconomic class is constantly in flux. The labels of

“lady” and “worker” were too facile to define the Lowell women and show the difficulty of assigning a class position to the writers of the magazine.

Concerns regarding gender and work also emerged in the writings of middle-class female authors struggling to place themselves in the new American society. The literature of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, one of the few relatively well-known authors to engage in issues of factory life, also appears torn between her respect for manual labor and desire to provide workers with access to middle class culture. As the preceding quote comparing ladies and blacksmiths suggests, Phelps appreciated the labor of the working class, privileging it over the stagnant and self-absorbed life of many society women.

However, her factory literature is riddled with scenes where she attempts to introduce workers to middle and upper class culture, especially works of art. Likewise, in her texts, workers often appreciate, but rarely create, art. High culture functions as a site where class lines are blurred and the possibility of class mobility is considered, but this ideal is never truly reached in Phelps’ work. While both Phelps and the workers value the labor of the other, the differences in their experiences show the difficulty of truly bridging the class divisions separating them. When considering representations of gender and labor during this era, the words of the workers themselves are needed to give an accurate picture of factory life. The preceding literary accomplishments of the Lowell workers in the Lowell Offering challenge Phelps’ perception of the working class and provide insight into how the social location of the author influenced the representation of factory work in nineteenth-century fiction.

The literary accomplishments of the Lowell writers also encouraged their audience to reconsider the social position of factory workers. Despite questions regarding their social location, the Lowell writers wrote like most women of the mid- nineteenth century. Critics today often note the Offerings’ adherence to sentimental and genteel themes, even though Knight praised their apparent rejection of gentility. Knight and Martineau implicitly suggest the underlying irony informing the Lowell Offering: the fact that the writers unconsciously positioned themselves as ladies by writing genteel prose for the magazine even as they repeatedly claimed their identities as working women.37 Explicitly, the writers of the Lowell Offering seem more interested in creating a community marked by intellectual pursuits and tightly knit boarding house families, often praising sisterly bonds between the workers and their ability to pursue knowledge through the creation of lyceum programs and moral improvement societies rather than grappling with more exigent issues like working conditions or their places in the

American social hierarchy. Therefore, class is always an unstable construction in their work. The factories ultimately emerge as alternative communities where nontraditional families are formed. In this chapter, I use the term alternative communities to encompass both home spaces and the nontraditional families that dwell there, positioned outside of the biological family. As demonstrated throughout my dissertation, these communities are often female-centered but may include male members. Alternative communities challenge the prevailing critical assumption that the middle class home was the moral

37 Michael Denning suggests that the Lowell workers’ texts predated most sensational literature, so their writing reflects their reading of the sentimental texts of their era. See Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class. Culture in America (1987). Sentimental writing of this era often focused on the domestic concerns of women and relied on an emotional connection to the reader. 77 center of nineteenth-century American culture and the dominant site of women’s literature during this era. These spaces are often portrayed more in terms of their potential for class mobility rather than a place for hard labor or commentary on working conditions, although the material conditions facing the worker are important to the construction of these communities.

In this chapter, I explore the construction of gender representations in the Lowell writers’ creation of alternative communities in the factory, and their relationship to class mobility. I argue that the women writers engaged in conversations about class, but were often more concerned with increasing social mobility for male family members than with attempting to elevate their own positions through their manual or intellectual work. This is perhaps because they saw factory work as a respectable social position in itself, one that eluded easy classification. Although they initially do not seem concerned with discussing their own labor, their work is often a searing critique of social pretensions and the increasingly visible chasm between the classes in America as they portray the factory as a female-centered alternative community separated from the middle class ideal. In their work, the women often reference the utopian projects of the era, which were also concerned with creating alternative communities centered on the fusion of intellectual and manual labor. By engaging in questions of home, community, class, and gender, the female writers ultimately complicate the easy labels of either “ladies” or “workers.”

These questions also emerge in important ways in the factory literature of the mid- nineteenth century. In the second section of my chapter, I discuss the factory work texts of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, a middle class writer greatly invested in issues of gender

78 and social reform but lacking the lived experiences of the writers of the Lowell Offering.

Phelps’ work shows both popular concerns about factory labor and the difficulty of representing working class homes, culture, and issues of class mobility without defaulting to middle class cultural values. Throughout her work, her vision of social reform and factory labor changes. While Phelps initially suggests the need to absorb workers into the middle class home, she ultimately redefines that home as an alternative space ripe for class mobility, attempting to create a community that includes members of different socioeconomic classes. Read together, the Lowell Offering and Phelps’ factory texts show America’s burgeoning concerns over class mobility and women’s increased presence in the conversations about labor, along with their interests in creating alternative communities apart from the middle class ideal.

The Lowell Offering’s Recreated Community

Both common sense and the work of feminist historians and literary scholars suggest that women have always worked, whether in domestic or paid labor, and that working class women needed to engage in paid labor in the public sphere even when it challenged the ideal of the nineteenth-century “true woman.”38 Socioeconomic class standing, though difficult to define, is almost inextricably tied to the work pursued by individuals. In the nineteenth century, a woman’s socioeconomic class was often directly related to the labor of her husband or father, the male family member who controlled her social position. However, Francis Cabot Lowell’s creation of the Lowell mills after a visit

38 Barbara Welter famously coined the term “True Woman” in her article “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860” (1966), identifying four cardinal virtues that identified the true woman: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. While this ideology has been challenged as critics like Charlotte Rich and Laura Laffrado expand this definition to include a larger network of women, it still remains a useful way to consider prevailing gender roles in the nineteenth century. 79 to the manufacturing districts of England in 1810 both provided New England women the opportunity to work for wages in the public sphere and challenged the idea that a woman’s social position was dependent on her male relatives.39 In fact, female mill workers often worked to elevate the social position of the men in their families even as they created new communities in the mill. Antebellum conversations about the Lowell mill workers often raised anxieties over whether women could claim a social position of their own through their economic self-sufficiency. The debates of the period also occasionally challenged the respectability of the women by suggesting that the mills tarnished the reputation of workers. These conversations were often complicated by the women in the Lowell Offering as the authors celebrated their ability to support themselves financially but often positioned themselves as genteel, temporary workers who never completely identified with the working class.

Though the working conditions of the mills became increasingly worse as the century progressed, Lowell’s first employees appear to have had relatively fair working conditions. The popular representation of mill life in the 1830s and 1840s was an almost utopian vision of fair labor.40 In fact, British author Anthony Trollope called the Lowell factory an “industrial utopia” where women were treated well and had access to intellectual pursuits like lyceum lectures and Moral Improvement Clubs. In her memoir

39 Lowell is well known for his revitalization of the factory system in America. As Benita Eisler and Philip S. Foner note, however, Lowell actually stole the system from his English counterparts after memorizing their design during a visit (13, xv). This example of manufacturing plagiarism is interesting to note in terms of the increasing call for a unique American culture in the early nineteenth century, which would appear most visibly in the desire to create an American literary canon. Though Lowell plagiarized the design of the mill, the factory workers in the Lowell Offering would play a part in creating this literary canon. 40 The first academic study of Lowell, Hannah Josephson’s The Golden Threads: New England’s Mill Girls and Magnates (1949) immediately asserts this view (6). 80

Loom and Spindle: Or Life Among the Early Mill Girls (1898), mill worker and Lowell

Offering contributor Harriet Robinson describes the workers as “a people living in almost

Arcadian simplicity, at a time which, in view of the greatly changed condition of factory labor, may well be called a lost Eden for that portion of our working men and working women” (1). Using nearly the exact same language Bronson Alcott employed in his vision of his Fruitlands community, Robinson’s description of the mills focuses on its ability to create an ideal working environment. Robinson also recalls her engagement in reading and writing groups where she was able to express her creativity with a group of like-minded women. In Robinson’s memoir and in the Lowell Offering itself, Lowell was positioned as a female-centered community where women worked in unison, lived together in corporation boarding houses, and formed close relationships that informed their vision of mill life. In creating this female-centered community, the women of

Lowell redefined the family away from the patriarchal middle class structure informing much of American culture.

The Lowell Offering shows the idealistic promise of the ability to merge intellectual and manual labor, a goal considered in both the factories and the utopian communities of the time. The Lowell Offering emerged out of the moral improvement clubs when a group of women decided to publish their writings with the initial support of

Universalist minister Abel Thomas. The Lowell Offering is a striking collection of short stories, poems, and essays on a wide variety of subjects including science and history. It is now recognized as the first magazine written completely by women in the United

States, and possibly the world (Ranta 47). The approximately 32 page magazine was

81 usually published monthly, with a subscription cost of a dollar a year. Its goals, as expressed by co-editors Harriet Farley and Harriott Curtis, were “to encourage the cultivation of talent; to preserve such articles as are deemed most worthy of preservation; and to correct an erroneous idea which generally prevails in relation to the intelligence of persons employed in the Mills” (qtd. in Alves 149). While its most famous contributor, poet Lucy Larcom, would later agree with a critic that stated “it has plenty of pith, but it lacks point,” readers across the globe were impressed with the literary accomplishments of the mill workers (211). As Larcom also realized, it was only a small percentage of the women workers at Lowell who were motivated to write in their free time, and few workers even subscribed to the Lowell Offering, suggesting that literary labor was low on the list of priorities even at the historical moment where industrial labor seemed the most balanced and fair.41 However, that any literary texts arose from the Lowell workers is notable given their long work days and the lack of known writings emerging from laborers in the nineteenth century.

Perhaps their own assumptions about the intellectual capabilities of working class women made the praises of literary giants like Dickens, Whittier, and Martineau more condescending than flattering, a position that would be slightly revised by Elizabeth

Stuart Phelps in her factory texts. The fact that they were surprised by the literary accomplishments of the women suggests that they believed manual workers were unable to think critically about their experiences. For example, in her preface to Minds Among the Spindles, Martineau seems amazed by the realization that she was more interested in

41 Benita Eisler, who compiled a collection of the Lowell Offering writings in 1980, suggests that about seventy women operatives contributed to the magazine (211). 82 the work of the Lowell operatives than Emerson (xvii). While the authors visiting Lowell appeared shocked at the strong writing of the female operatives, Phelps’ work suggests that an appreciation of art can transcend socioeconomic class, though her working class characters rarely create art themselves. However, all of the authors appear to have been reluctant to critique the women’s writing. As Larcom points out in A New England

Girlhood, “we did not receive much criticism; perhaps it would have been better for us if we had. But then we did not set ourselves up to be literary; though we enjoyed the freedom of writing what we pleased and seeing how it looked in print” (221). Although not an unusual rhetorical move for female authors of this era, Larcom seemingly undermines the women’s literary accomplishments by suggesting that they were more interested in publishing their work than creating lasting works of art, and in fact much of their prose is marked by sentimental rhetoric often dismissed by critics in nineteenth- century scholarship. However, as scholars like Jane Tompkins have long pointed out, the cultural work accomplished by the text is often more important than its style.42 Like

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, the writers of the Lowell Offering use sympathy for a broader social purpose. The Lowell Offering may often be overlooked as yet another example of the sentimental prose associated with women’s literary works of the mid-nineteenth century, but embedded in the text is a vision of the mills as a female-centered alternative to the middle class home with the potential to facilitate class mobility through the extension of the family.

42 Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860 (1986), Jane Tompkins’s well known defense of popular fiction, argues that sentimental novels often shed light on important ideas about American culture. Although she does not discuss The Lowell Offering, it is an important example of writing previously ignored by literary critics because of its style. 83

Critics analyzing the Lowell Offering often discuss the ways the magazine was genteel without interrogating the slipperiness of the women’s class position or their creation of alternative communities. In Michael Newbury’s Figuring Authorship in

Antebellum America (1997), he notes that “through the Offering the operatives seek to imagine themselves as middle-class women devoted to intellectual self-culture rather than as an exploited proletarian class, even as they become an industrialized workforce” (71).

Though their writing was genteel and sentimental, a style often associated with domestic fiction during this time, it is oversimplifying their work to suggest that the operatives merely sought to imagine themselves as middle class women. The application of this domestic style of writing to factory literature works to reimagine the factory as an alternative community, rather than expressing a desire for the middle class home. As

Cindy Weinstein notes, sentimental novels often rupture the traditional family structure through the death or relocation of parents, forcing the heroines to create alternative families of their own.43 The Lowell Offering revises this trend, while also employing the language of sentiment. Instead of their parents leaving them, the women creating the

Lowell Offering chose to leave their homes, also creating a new family through adopting fellow workers. However, they have more agency since they are not the passive victims of a disrupted home. Like the middle class heroines in sentimental novels, the writers of

Lowell used sympathy and friendship to build a new community for their own personal and intellectual advancement.

4343 See Weinstein’s Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2004). 84

Even as they appropriate the writing style and themes of the middle class, the instability of the women’s class position seems to make them eschew any mention of class at all. As primarily the daughters of land owning farmers, the usually well-educated women flocking to the mills during the era of the Lowell Offering often did not think of themselves as working class. Though many workers stayed for years, some of the female operatives viewed their time in the factory as short term, planning to return home after saving enough money to accomplish their various goals. While the work in the mills was long and grueling, it was often preferred to the unpaid farm labor that was the alternative for most of the women. During the publication of the Lowell Offering, there was a set time to end mill work and the women were relatively independent and able to have the satisfaction of earning their own wages. The women appear to reject any attempt to assign themselves a class position based on their manual labor that would undermine these accomplishments. Moreover, they vehemently opposed reformers who suggested that their identities as mill workers tarnished their reputations and associated them with the lower socioeconomic class, as evidenced by “Factory Girls,” the Offering’s response to Orestes A. Brownson’s “The Laboring Classes” (1840). In his essay, Brownson critiqued working conditions in the mill and their effects on female workers. His claim that “she has worked in a factory, is sufficient to damn to infamy the most worthy and virtuous girl” incited an outcry among the writers of the Lowell Offering (Eisler 187). In

“Factory Girls,” the anonymous author supports the reputation of the workers by giving examples of their moral fortitude, constant church attendance, and work in the lyceum and moral improvement societies. The essay is a careful and impassioned defense of the

85 female operative’s ethics, but the author’s defensiveness implicitly suggests the precarious social class of the workers. It is this shared understanding of work and class that allowed the women to form a new community within the factory system.

As Newbury also notes, Lowell was positioned as a home away from home for the young female operatives who arrived in the city in droves after leaving their country homes for the first time (40).44 The corporation managers portrayed themselves as paternalistic figures in advertisements attempting to draw women to the mills. They assuaged nervous parents by assuring them that workers lived in boarding houses, where they had a curfew and were mandated to attend religious services. While the boarding houses were a new construction of the domestic sphere for the women, they replicated many of the traditions of the homes they left behind with their shared meal times, curfews, and mandated attendance at religious services. What was new, however, was the redefined family structure created in Lowell. While the managers attempted to portray themselves as father figures ensuring the operatives’ moral behavior, the boarding houses were run by women, often widows, and were portrayed in the Lowell Offering as female-centered environments. The new female operatives left their traditional farm homes, which were largely headed by their fathers, for this new woman-centered family life. Years later, Larcom wrote fondly of the boarding houses, suggesting that the tight quarters and the relationships fostered there ultimately made her a more compassionate person. In her memoir she states,

44 Amal Amireh also discusses the idea of the factories as an extension of home in The Factory Girl and the Seamstress (2004) (15). 86

one great advantage which came to these many stranger girls through being brought together, away from their own homes, was that it taught them to go out of themselves, and enter into the lives of others. Home-life, when one always stays at home, is necessarily narrowing. That is one reason why so many women are petty and unthoughtful [sic] of any except their own family’s interests. We have hardly begun to live until we can take in the idea of the whole human family as the one to which we truly belong. To me, it was an incalculable help to find myself among so many working-girls, all of us thrown upon our own resources, but thrown much more upon each other’s sympathies (179).

In this passage, Larcom almost directly echoes the critiques of the builders of utopian communities like Charles Lane, who felt that the traditional biological family was damaging because of its focus on the well-being of an individual group rather than the world at large. According to Larcom, moving the women away from the middle class home and creating an alternative community allowed them to depend on each other rather than male family members and expanded their understanding of family. While many conversations about nineteenth-century women reflect the idea that their experiences were isolated in the domestic sphere, Larcom notes that factory life allowed them to think globally about the entire human family and their position within it, although the fact that most Lowell operatives were white women from rural areas certainly limited the scope of this definition. However, this redefinition of home and family broadened the women’s interests, allowing them to be concerned with those outside their biological family and draw on their own intellectual capabilities to eventually create the Lowell Offering. The new community created by the female operatives included a more diverse mix of women with different experiences and family backgrounds. Removing themselves from the traditional middle class home was an important step in their own self-definition.

Sarah G. Bagley, who would later become a well-known labor reformer and one of the most vehement opponents of the Lowell Offering because of its refusal to engage directly in a debate about working conditions, echoes Larcom’s observation in her early defense of Lowell in “Pleasures of Factory Life” (1840). After listing the many virtues of the mills, including a nearly transcendentalist discussion of the inclusion of nature in the work rooms, she states that one pleasure of factory life is its ability to expand the women’s social network to include those outside of the biological family. She writes,

“another source [of pleasure] is found in the fact of our being acquainted with some person or persons that reside in almost every part of the country. And through these we become familiar with some incidents that interest and amuse us wherever we journey; and cause us to feel a greater interest in the scenery, inasmuch as there are gathered pleasant associations about every town, and almost every house and tree that may meet our view” (qtd. in Eisler 64). Because their new community derives from different locations, the entire nation is imagined as a familiar home. In a time when many were migrating from the farms to the city, Bagley neatly exposes and dismisses one of the central threats to the middle class family in the mid-nineteenth century, namely, that the corruption of youths who abandon rural life will lead to the breakdown of the biological family. In her defense of the mills, Bagley assuages this concern by repositioning the entire country as a new home with origins in the alterative community created in factory life. By forming relationships with women from all parts of the country, the entire nation is positioned as a familiar haven. Through imagining the nation as home, women are given permission to travel freely through this familiar “scenery” since it is made

88 accessible through stories shared in the boarding house. Bagley uses domestic rhetoric to both defend mill life and allow women social mobility through imagining “every house and tree” as an extension of home.

The vision of the factory as an alternative, female centered community that encourages women to enlarge their idea of family also appears in Eliza J. Cate’s “Leisure

Hours of the Mill Girls” (1842). The story traces how the mill workers spend their free time, critiquing those who read unedifying novels and go shopping instead of saving money for their families, as well as those who work too much and don’t take time for any innocent pleasures. It ends with the constantly morose Alice and the petty Ellinora agreeing to attempt to learn from the morally upstanding Isabel to reach a healthier balance in their own lives. The women eventually become “as intimate as sisters” as they attempt to break their bad habits (111). Though the story is seemingly devoted to critiquing the bad habits that emerge when women are separated from their family and begin to rely on their own desires to make choices, it ultimately shows a vision of a reconstructed community where women learn from each other in order to become well- rounded individuals. The women are ultimately “sisters” who hold each other accountable for becoming morally upright, a position that would have been filled by fathers or ministers in the middle class home. As Larcom noted, the boarding houses give the women the opportunity to expand their definition of the family by removing themselves from the traditional home and depending on each other for their moral and intellectual growth. Many articles in the Lowell Offering nostalgically relate their childhood experiences with their biological families. In “Home,” by Mary Anne

Spaulding, the narrator claims the word home “thrills through my frame like an electric shock” (qtd. in Eisler 134). However, she goes on to note that she “thirsted for knowledge” and needed to leave home to accomplish her goals (qtd. in Eisler 134). Like in “Leisure Hours of the Mill Girls,” the middle class home is not completely rejected, but redefined in order to accommodate the unique needs of the female workers struggling to live well balanced lives in the midst of a demanding work schedule. Though manual labor seems initially absent from the text, it looms in the background as the common thread binding the new sisters together. The shared experiences in the mill allow them to form the community.

As evidenced in Chapter One, the potential for class mobility most often occurs in spaces outside of the middle class home, as portrayed in the creation of the alternative communities. These alternative communities emerge as liminal spaces where normative ideas about class, and often gender, are disrupted. The mills unsettled assumptions about who was able to work certain jobs, and displaced the middle class family as the most important construction in a woman’s life. Significantly, though, the women writing in the Lowell Offering often seemed more concerned with facilitating upward mobility for their male family member than changing class positions themselves. Working in order to secure an education for brothers or even sons is a constant theme in the stories. A survey of other mill stories written during this era shows that the majority of texts portrayed female workers who ultimately married professional men like ministers or doctors, suggesting that most factory texts besides the Lowell Offering were invested in proving

90 that mill workers were upwardly mobile and made respectable wives.45 However, in the extant Lowell Offering, this plot is noticeably absent. While the lack of focus on marriage can be viewed as subversive in an era where much of women’s fiction showed wedlock as the final goal, the displacement of the desire for class mobility onto male members of the family reinforces the self-sacrificing persona expected from women of the nineteenth century. The stories show that the alternative community of the mills is a site for class mobility, but mostly for the men in the texts. While the workers are able to create new family structures in the mills, their connections to their biological family constantly threaten their autonomous project and show that they are ultimately unable to escape their perceived responsibilities to their kin.46

The writings of the Lowell Offering that discuss women working to educate their brothers and sons focus on the sacrifice of the women, not the potential personal advantages of their work, suggesting that ultimately the greatest benefit will not be their own. In the already discussed “Leisure Hours of the Mill Girls,” both Isabel and Alice are working to send their brothers to school. Isabel’s sacrifice is especially noteworthy since her brother is ill with consumption and not expected to survive to put his education to use, and is therefore unable to change the family’s class position. Regardless, as the male family member he is viewed as most likely to benefit from formal education. The

45 See Judith Ranta’s Women and Children of the Mills: An Annotated Guide to Nineteenth-Century American Textile Factory Literature (1999). 46 While most mill workers remained unmarried during their time at the mill, many still shared their wages with their biological family. Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller briefly mentions the Lowell mill employees in her study of “The Cult of Single Blessedness” in Liberty, A Better Husband: Single Women in America, The Generations of 1780-1840 (1984). In this text, she argues that many women in this era chose to remain single to have more personal agency, although they were still often responsible for serving their families. Chambers-Schiller notes that 97% of Lowell workers were unmarried during their time at the mills, but 85% eventually married (30). 91 fictional experiences shared in these texts mirror the actual situations of female mill workers. Approximately one-fourth of the men at Harvard were put through school by the work of their sisters, a fact that undermines the idea that the wages of the working women were theirs to keep (Selden 17). In Martineau’s introduction to Mind Amongst the Spindles, she notes “many a clergyman in America has been prepared for his function by the devoted industry of sisters; and many a scholar and professional man dates his elevation in social rank and usefulness from his sister’s, or even some affectionate aunt’s entrance upon mill life, for his sake” (xx). Martineau fails to discuss the implications of the women working in the mills to elevate their male family member’s “social rank.” Of course, if the male relatives’ social status is elevated, the women will presumably benefit, but this concept is minimized in the women’s work. These texts also ignore the informal educational resources available to mill workers at this time. Even as the women were laboring to educate their male family members, they were expanding their own intellectual capabilities through the lyceum clubs and the writing of the Offering itself.

The women operatives were also gaining skills to make socially advantageous marriages if they so desired. As the anonymous author of “Factory Girls” notes, many women decide to “return again to become the wives of the free intelligent yeomanry of New

England, and the mothers of quite a proportion of our future republicans” (qtd. in Eisler

188). Asserting their potential identities as wives and mothers allowed the workers to define themselves through traditional gender roles, not class positions. Though the factory workers vehemently opposed Brownson’s suggestion that factory work ruined

92 their reputation, their social position was precarious and not often directly discussed in the Lowell Offering.

The sacrifice of female workers for their male relatives is perhaps most clearly exhibited in “The Widow’s Son” by Orianna, the pseudonym of Hannah Johnson

(Noyes). In the story, a widowed mother decides to work at the mills in order to support her pious son’s education. Although he begs her to quit the mills, saying that he would prefer to do manual labor himself rather than cause her to toil, she has a relatively pleasant experience working and bonding with the other women until he becomes a minister and she leaves the mills to live with him. The story sets up a strong division between manual and intellectual labor, even as the writers of the Lowell Offering challenged this dichotomy through their work. As the widow and her son part for the first time, the narrator states that the one goes “to the halls of learning, and the other to the powerlooms” (Mind Amongst the Spindles 185). Of course, it is the labor of the looms that facilitates the halls of learning, but they are portrayed as opposites in the text.

The narrator also elides the fact that learning takes place at the looms and in the Lowell community. At the end of the story, the mother claims to have loved the mills, stating

“have I not been blessed with health and strength to perform a great and noble task in this place?” (187). Her love of the mills derives from the benefits it gives her son, and the noble task is providing her son’s social mobility, not her work in itself. In fact, the work is viewed as a sacrifice because her previous class standing would have removed her from any paid manual labor. Though she creates strong relationships with the other

93 female workers, she happily leaves her constructed family to be reunited with her son and establish a traditional middle class home.

Though it is only a brief mention in the text, the division between the “halls of learning” and the “powerlooms” is an important source of tension for the women writers as they struggled with their identity as artists and laborers. Individuals throughout antebellum American culture considered the dichotomy between intellectual and manual labor, and the utopian experiments of the era show the desire to blend the two as well as create alternative communities of their own.47 Even as the women of Lowell were creating their own alternative communities and considering issues of class mobility, they were aware of the utopian projects arising from the transcendentalist visions of the 1840s.

While Sylvia Jenkins Cook notes how the women were in conversation with transcendentalist thought, most scholars have not analyzed how the vision of the utopian projects may have influenced the Lowell worker’s ideas about their own relationship to labor and their alternative community.48 The magazine was published during the era of the most famous utopian experiment, Brook Farm, as well as the previously discussed

Fruitlands experiment. Certainly the women were interested in Brook Farm founder

George Ripley’s belief that individuals could combine manual and intellectual labor in order to create a balanced society, and studies suggest that the utopian projects were a constant source of conversation for the mill workers (Selden 19). For the women working long hours while attempting to pursue literary endeavors, Ripley’s dream must

47 See Nicolas Bromell’s By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America. 48 Hannah Josephson briefly notes the connection between the workers and the utopian reformers, suggesting that they eventually tried to work together to advocate for a ten-hour day, but the reformers quickly lost interest in the cause. See The Golden Threads. 94 have seemed like a nearly impossible vision. As Larcom noted, “we often heard the

Brook Farm Community talked of and were curious about it as an experiment at air castle building by people who had time to indulge their tastes” (qtd. in Eisler 33). As Larcom was well aware, the workers at Lowell had little time and few resources to engage in such utopian ventures.

Though Brook Farm may have appeared as an impossible dream for women experienced in the rigors of manual labor, even Larcom, who left the factories to pursue an education, suggested that physical and intellectual labor could coexist in a mutually beneficial way. In her reflection on her early foray into manual labor, Larcom wrote, “it was a pity that we were expected to begin thinking upon hard subjects so soon, and it was also a pity that we were set to hard work while so young. Yet these were both inevitable results of circumstances then existing; and perhaps the two belong together. Perhaps habits of conscientious work induce thought” (9). For Larcom, as for many mill workers who considered the utopian projects of the 1840s and 1850s in relationship to their own lives, manual labor had the potential to induce, not hinder, ideas. After learning how to run the looms, women were able to use their time at work to converse with each other and to ponder the intellectual issues of the day, forging bonds that strengthened their relationship in their reconstructed family community. Although Hawthorne famously decried his Brook Farm experience by suggesting that manual labor crushed any intellectual musings, as discussed in my introduction, the women at Lowell memorized poems and even wrote their own while working. Coverdale, the narrator of Hawthorne’s

The Blithedale Romance, was unable to blend poetry and work, but historical data suggests that the Lowell mill workers could and did.

Along with its position as a site for class mobility and reconstructed families, this melding of intellectual and manual labor suggests that Lowell can be discussed as an alternative community in conversation with other, more famous projects like Brook Farm and Fruitlands. Beyond being a home site for the women of Lowell, the mills of this era were fueled by a utopian desire to meld different forms of labor. The creation of the

Lowell Offering, as well as the more radical operative’s magazine that followed, The

Voice of Industry, speaks to this desire, as do the moral improvement societies and lyceum tours springing from the mills. The women themselves proved to be invested in the utopian projects of the day, suggesting that these social experiments informed their vision of mill life. Sarah Bagley was famously interested in Fourierism and was elected vice president of the Lowell Union of Associationists in 1846. This organization studied the ideas of Charles Fourier, the utopian philosopher who inspired many reform communities of the era, including Brook Farm (Foner 59). Bagley’s interest and the fact that there was an organization devoted to Fourier’s principals in Lowell draws another connection between the mills and the utopian projects of the time. In fact, Robert Owens, eventually credited with creating the Owenite communities, began his career creating an ideal factory community in Scotland, where he provided fair working conditions and education for his operatives. The factory and the utopian community are both sites that allow for reconstructed communities and a redefinition of work and socioeconomic class

96 in mid-nineteenth century America, and their representations in literature ultimately unsettle assumptions about the distinctions between manual and intellectual labor.

The interest of the Lowell women in these communities provides a new framework for reading their experiences at the mills, imagining their own community as a utopian project melding intellectual and manual labor. One mill worker, Mary Paul, left

Lowell to join the North American Phalanx, a New Jersey community organized after

Charles Fourier’s vision. Even after the Association was destroyed after (ironically) the loss of their mill, she wrote to her father “I do not know how long I can stay here but I shall not leave until I am obliged to do. The life here has many attractions & advantages which no other life can have, and imperfect as it is I have already seen enough to convince me that Association is the true life” (qtd. in Dublin From Farm to Factory 143).

For Paul, who also describes in detail her work in the phalanx in earlier letters, the utopian community must have been a natural extension of her life at Lowell. Like

Lowell, the society offered a mixture of manual labor with the opportunity to learn and study, but worked towards a more balanced distribution of different forms of labor.

Former Lowell employee Marie Howland was also interested in the idea of utopian communities. In her novel The Familistere (1874) she represents a utopian project where the mill workers are eventually assimilated into high society after a rich baron creates a community where workers labor moderately, eat well, and have the opportunity to expand their mind through reading and recreational activities. The novel ends with a banquet that mixes members of the community with the upper class members of the town, showing the elites the benefits of the utopian project.

The Lowell Offering, though often critiqued for being overtly supportive of the corporation and less progressive than other labor magazines like The Voice of Industry, offered its own vision of the type of utopia that could be created in the mills. In “A New

Society,” (1841) “Tabitha” offers an overview of an ideal culture that reconciles issues of gender and economic discrimination that plagued America throughout the nineteenth century (and continue to do so to this day). In the story, the narrator is spending a quiet

Saturday evening at home alone when a young boy comes in the room and hands her a paper entitled the “Annual Meeting of the Society for the promotion of Industry, Virtue and Knowledge.” The article states that the Society has resolved nine main points to improve American society, including equal educations for men and women, eight hour work days, and the idea that “industry, virtue and knowledge, (not wealth and titles,) shall be the standard of respectability” (Eisler 210). The Society mandates that all laborers should spend three hours a day in intellectual pursuits, and even more remarkably, that all writers will spend three hours a day engaged in manual labor to benefit society before anyone will read their work. The narrator is puzzled by the date of the newspaper, which is April 1, 1860, twenty years in the future. Dismissing her confusion, though, she rushes upstairs to share the paper with her boarding house companions, but stumbles and wakes before she can spread the good news.

Thanks to the impressive scholarship of Judith A. Ranta, we know that “Tabitha” is the pseudonym used by Betsey Chamberlain, a woman of Native American descent

98 who is possibly the only woman of color who wrote for the Lowell Offering.49 The only known description of Chamberlain comes from Harriet H. Robinson’s memoir, Loom &

Spindle; or Life Among the Early Mill Girls, where she gives a brief account of frequent contributors to the Lowell Offering. In her discussion of Chamberlain she writes,

Mrs. Chamberlain was the most original, the most prolific, and the most noted of all the early story-writers. Her writings were characterized, as Mr. Thomas says, ‘by humorous incidents and sound common sense,’ as is shown by her setting forth of certain utopian schemes of right living. Mrs. Chamberlain was a widow, and came to Lowell with three children from some “community” (probably the Shakers), where she had not been contented. She had inherited Indian blood, and was proud of it. She had long, straight black hair, and walked very erect, with great freedom of movement (86).

Despite “Mr. Thomas’s” (probably Abel Thomas, the minister who first organized the operative’s writing) claim that Chamberlain’s writing was humorous, her vision of a new society is a searing critique of the present one, where manual labor is not appreciated and women are discouraged from claiming the same educational and cultural rights as their brothers. The idea that Chamberlain came to Lowell from a utopian “community” is also compelling. Dissatisfied with her previous life with the Shakers, Chamberlain imagines

Lowell, or even America in general, as an alternative community where the potential to be free from gender and class discrimination exists. Her experience with both communities shows the link between the goals of the utopian projects and the idealistic moment in the mills that birthed the Lowell Offering and writing like “A New Society.”

49 Ranta’s Women and Children of the Mills: An Annotated Guide to Nineteenth-Century American Textile Factory Literature (1999) is a valuable guide for scholars of the field. An appendix to the text is the first to match the writers of the Lowell Offering with their pseudonyms. Chamberlain’s failure to mention race in “A New Society” is significant given her social location. 99

As previously mentioned, the Lowell Offering was critiqued for its lack of involvement in the Ten Hour Movement, the predominant labor movement of the 1840s which worked for a ten hour work day, and its general silence regarding working conditions in the mills. However, Chamberlain’s call for equal wages for men and women, one of the resolutions of the new Society she envisions, and the stated need for an eight hour work day and sufficient wages to allow workers to pursue an intellectual life surpass the goals of labor reform of the era.50 The new Society extends the aims of utopian movements like Brook Farm and Chamberlain’s own Shakers to the mill towns, giving workers opportunities originally accessed by the intellectuals stemming from the transcendentalist movement. It imagines Lowell as a place where all individuals need to engage in intellectual and manual labor and be adequately compensated for their time.

Through this vision, the mills become a utopian society where the female operatives are equal to their male counterpart and members of the upper socioeconomic class. In “New

Society,” Lowell becomes a site for social mobility for all members of society.

Chamberlain’s vision is shattered at the end of the text, which is foreshadowed by the fact that the date of the article is listed as April Fool’s Day, slyly undermining the sustainability of the entire project.51 The vision itself is a joke in the context of a workforce that was increasingly concerned with unfair working conditions and realizing

50 Unfortunately, Chamberlain’s vision of an eight hour work day was not legally enforced in America until 1938 (Eisler 199). 51 April Fool’s Day was celebrated in England since the 1600s and brought over with the settlers to America. It is thought to originate from the medieval “Feast of Fools,” a chaotic festival where individuals abandoned their prescribed social roles, making the date on the newspaper even more interesting (Thompson 21-22). Chamberlain’s date is oddly prescient. On April 1, 1867, Lowell operatives joined with spinners throughout the textile manufacturing district to go on strike for reduced working hours (Josephson 10). 100 that they were not being adequately compensated for their labor. The narrator trips and wakes up before being able to share the good news with the rest of the women in her boarding house, and is ultimately unable to extend the message to the rest of the female community. The exclamation of the one person she is able to tell about the society, a gentleman seeking subscribers for a different periodical, also shows America’s inability to create this ideal society. He states, “Oh happy America! Thrice happy land of

Freedom! Thy example shall yet free all nations from the galling chains of mental bondage; and teach to earth’s remotest ends, in what true happiness consists!” (Eisler

210).52 Any mention of bondage in the antebellum era is fraught. Though the mill workers problematically referred to themselves as slaves, Philip Dray suggests that they were sympathetic to the abolitionist movement and often signed petitions speaking out against slavery.53 While mill workers were invested in freeing themselves from mental bondage, readers potentially made the connection to the actual bondage facing many

African Americans at the time. The looming presence of slavery made any type of

American utopia ultimately unsustainable during this era, although any mention of race is noticeably absent in the text. Readers today will note that by 1860, America was racing towards the Civil War, the bloody opposite of the vision of utopian communities of the

52 It is also significant that the narrator’s audience is male. Again, it is the woman who is sharing the creation of the alternative, utopian community with a male audience. 53 The most commonly cited reference to slavery I’ve located is the song that the women sung during the 1836 strike. It was a parody of the song “I won’t be a nun” and stated, “Oh! Isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I-/Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die? / Oh! I cannot be a slave, / I will not be a slave, / For I’m so fond of liberty/ That I cannot be a slave.” Susan Alves is one of the few scholars to discuss the function of race in the Lowell Mills. She suggests that there is no evidence saying the African Americans worked in the mills, but that there was a thriving free black population in Lowell (152). Also see Philip Dray’s There is Power in a Union: The Epic Struggle of Labor in America (2010). 101

1840s. Chamberlain’s narrator recognizes the difficulty of creating a utopia in Lowell, although she is able to imagine the possibility.

While Chamberlain’s work was one of the first published in the Lowell Offering, critics, including scholars today who study the magazine and labor activists of the nineteenth century, suggest that the magazine became progressively conservative as the labor movement working for the ten hour day gained momentum. The magazine finally dissolved in 1845 after a well- documented debate between Harriet Farley and Sarah

Bagley. Bagley accused the Lowell Offering as being the “mouthpiece of the corporation,” an accusation that Farley vehemently denied but one that eventually destroyed the magazine.54 Bagley, who became one of the most active members of the ten hour movement, suggested that the Lowell Offering was controlled by the mill operatives and censored articles that brought to light poor working conditions. Ranta suggests that the Lowell Offering did receive $1,028 from the corporation for back issues, which the editors used to pay debts and supply themselves with a small salary (Ranta

“Harriot E. Curtis” 343). However, this is the only evidence of funds received from the corporation, and Bagley’s accusation appears to be an overstatement. Despite the fact that the writers may have been aware of their precarious relationship to factory owners while publishing their texts, claiming that they were merely “mouthpieces of the corporation” ignores their important contribution to literary history by focusing on their

54 Recent scholarship makes similar critiques. In his important study on the female mill workers, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860, Thomas Dublin writes, “just as the Offering writers tended not to question the actions of mill owners and agents, so they most frequently accepted a subordinate place for women” (129). Certainly the women’s apparent subordination of their own desires for class mobility and the overall lack of critiques of gender or work relationships seem to support Dublin’s claim. However, their constant assertion of their own intellectual pursuits suggests that they were unwilling to accept a subordinate place for women. 102 politics rather than their writing. The stories in the Lowell Offering are not overly concerned with any critique or praise of the corporation. Instead, through their creation of alternative communities and their engagement with utopian thought attempting to do the same, the female workers/writers of the Lowell Offering destabilized the dichotomy of manual and intellectual labor and shed light on pressing issues of socioeconomic class mobility. It is necessary to recognize and analyze their own unique literary voice before moving to a discussion of the representation of the factory in more often studied nineteenth-century texts.

Phelps’ Changing Representation of the Factory

Despite their sometimes conciliatory attitude towards the factory, what distinguishes the writers of the Lowell Offering is their lived experience with factory work, as opposed to other utopian reformers who saw manual labor as a novel enterprise or middle class writers who viewed the factory from a critical distance. The mill fiction of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps lacks the actual experience of factory work exhibited by writers of the Lowell Offering, although she was a friend of Lucy Larcom and one of the first American authors to seriously engage with issues of socioeconomic class.55 The shifts in representing workers in Phelps’ factory writing can be read as the gradual development of her class consciousness and is important for understanding her growth as a writer. These shifts also serve as a useful case study on how middle class authors represented class and labor in their work. In her memoirs Chapters from a Life, Phelps discusses how her position as a middle class woman explicitly removed her from factory

55 Phelps briefly discusses her relationship with Larcom in Chapters from a Life, stating that she “had the sincerest respect both for her personality and for her work” (179). 103 life and implicitly influenced her representation of it. One of Phelps’ first forays into writing factory life is “The Tenth of January” (1868), a short story inspired by the collapse of the Pemberton mills.56 Phelps notes that before the Pemberton mills collapsed in Lawrence on January 10, 1860, she primarily saw the town as a place for “dry goods and restaurant ice-cream, and a slow, delicious drive in the family carryall through sand flats and pine woods, and past the largest bed of the sweetest violets that ever dared the blasts of a New England spring” (88). Phelps’ roseate experiences, which completely ignore the physical presence of the mills themselves and are marked by leisure and the enjoyment of upper-class conveniences like restaurants and the time to appreciate nature, is a stark contrast to the lives of the mill workers, a disparity she acknowledges herself.

In a moment that is similar to the beginning of Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861), she goes on to note that she “looked up from the restaurant ice-cream to see the ‘hands’ pour out for dinner, a dark and restless, but a patient throng; used, in those days, to standing eleven hours and a quarter-women and girls-at their looms, six days of the week, and making no audible complaints” (88-89).57 While Phelps sits and dines on a luxury item inside the protected space of the restaurant, separated from the factory workers, the mill “hands” are constantly in movement outside, presumably rushing to eat a simple meal before returning to the mills for more work.58 Part of Phelps’ luxury is the time

56 Because “The Tenth of January” focuses on an individual love story rather than factory work itself, I will not be discussing it in detail in this chapter. However, it is important to note Phelps’ writing process when working on this text because it so clearly positions her as middle class and calls into question the value of an author’s personal experience with their subject matter. 57 In her memoirs, Phelps acknowledges the creative debt that she owes Rebecca Harding Davis, claiming that her famous short story inspired much of her labor reform fiction. 58 In fact, the short breaks for meals were one of the major complaints of factory workers during the ten hour movement. 104 allowed to sit and observe, whether it be the violets on the drive to Lawrence or the mill workers themselves. Phelps’ factory texts increasingly acknowledge this luxury as she moved from writing about the role of religion in the mills to the responsibility of the upper socioeconomic class in the factory system, and ultimately the ability of the workers to speak for themselves. Phelps’ final factory novel, The Silent Partner, ends where the

Lowell Offering begins, with the working class characters representing themselves in the public sphere. Like the writers of the Lowell Offering, Phelps imagines the potential for alternative communities in the mills, communities that don’t completely reject the standards of the middle class but translate them for a wider audience. Phelps’ alternative communities often include members of different socioeconomic classes, especially in her later work. However, her dream of a new, inclusive community ultimately fails as she realizes the difficulty of merging people of different social locations into a homogenous domestic group.

Phelps’ vision perhaps began with the collapse of the Pemberton mills, an event that sparked her interest in the working class and highlighted her belief in the importance of experiential knowledge. Out of the seven hundred and fifty workers in the mill, eighty-eight were killed instantly and many more lost their lives when the wreckage caught fire during rescue attempts. Hannah Josephson notes that this event symbolized the end of the utopian potential of the mills and ushered in an era of exploitative and dangerous factory work (308). This collapse ultimately educated Phelps about the increasingly dangerous working conditions in the factory and caused her to consider her role as a female author engaging in social justice issues. When the Pemberton mills

105 collapsed, Phelps was unable to join her brother as he journeyed to the site to see the devastation for himself. Instead, she relied on interviews with first hand observers to write “The Tenth of January.” As Eric Schocket notes, many authors, particularly in the last half of the nineteenth century, felt experiential knowledge was necessary in order to accurately represent the working class (130). This ultimately led to a fad of slumming, which I will discuss in the next chapter. As a female author, Phelps was unable to access this experiential knowledge, which led her to represent workers in terms of her sympathetic attitude towards their plight rather than a nuanced understanding of the reality of their lives. This ultimately influenced her authorial choices in regards to the settings of her texts, causing her to draw heavily upon her experiences in the middle-class home when representing cross-class interactions.

Though Phelps claims to have spent a month researching experiences in the mill,

“The Tenth of January” is primarily set in the home of the mill worker and invested in a description of a romantic relationship rather than workers’ rights. It follows the story of the main character, Senath’s, growing realization that her fiancé, Dick, has a fraternal rather than passionate love for her. In the end, she sacrifices herself for her beautiful but flighty friend Del by insisting that Del be saved instead of her after the collapse. Del lives to marry Dick while Senath perishes in the factory. It is ultimately a story of a ruptured family relationship that fails to thrive in the mills, but representations of labor are noticeably absent. Phelps’ desire to see the mills for herself is admirable as an attempt to lend authenticity to the text. While she is unable to completely identify with the workers, experiencing the scene would have helped her understand at least in part the

106 reality of the tragedy. However, because she was not able to experience the mill collapse first hand, the focus of her story is on the domestic sphere. By highlighting the home,

Phelps is able to elide the realities of manual labor and present her presumably middle class audience with a familiar setting. Though the audience may not have a greater understanding of factory work after reading the text, or be able to accurately visualize the collapse, the setting allows them to forge ties of sympathy with the characters and perhaps translate that sentimental attachment to work for labor reform.

Phelps’ experiences with the Pemberton mills and writing of “The Tenth of

January” speak to the key conflict facing middle class female authors attempting to relate the experiences of working women: while their social position often afforded them the time and resources to address the inequalities facing the working class, it also effectively barred them from the mills themselves, preventing them from gaining the first hand experiences necessary to accurately present factory life. Instead, Phelps is forced to rely on interviews to represent working class culture, and the elision of the worker’s actual experiences engaging in labor in her texts speaks to her acknowledgement of her inability to accurately portray the details of their lives. Phelps’ decision to focus on portraying family life in her story is relevant considering the domestic is the material she could most readily access, although her eventual redefinition of family structures into an alternative community shows her dissatisfaction with remaining in the realm of the private sphere.

Like the writers of the Lowell Offering, Phelps seeks a broader reach of influence for women in her work.

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However, having little experience with the factories apart from hearing of horrific tragedies like the Pemberton mills collapse, Phelps is unable to share the Lowell Offering writers’ vision of the mills as a potential utopian project. Similar to how Davis focuses on the artistic potential of Hugh rather than describing his manual labor in “Life in the

Iron Mills,” the fact that Phelps sets the scenes of most of her factory texts, including Up

Hill; or Life in the Factory (1865), “Jane Gurley’s Story” (1866), “The Tenth of January”

(1868), and The Silent Partner (1871) outside of the working environment ignores the mills as a potential site for an alternative community of female workers. Phelps’ focus on the domestic is not surprising given the scope of female authors’ work in this era. The middle class home was a space her audience would find familiar, and focusing on it allowed Phelps to share her message about social reform in a palatable way. As William

Lynn Watson notes, many writers like Phelps were unable to imagine workers creating their own communities, especially those that were formed outside the boundaries of the middle class (14).59 However, by the end of her final factory text, The Silent Partner,

Phelps comes closer than many middle class authors to recognizing a working class community driven by the workers themselves.

When analyzing Phelps’ representation of the mills, it is also important to note the fact that she was writing at a time when the factories were becoming increasingly unstable as working conditions worsened and the organized labor movement gained

59 Watson refers specifically to the working class culture that thrived in the increasingly popular saloons of the nineteenth century. 108 strength.60 The historical context lends legitimacy to Phelps’ dire portrayal of the factory, but her near constant elision of any discussion of workers organizing to improve their own lives until the end of The Silent Partner suggests that she ignores, or is blind to, key aspects of working class culture. Instead of imagining the factory as an alternative to the middle class home and family created by the workers themselves, she often brings the factory workers into the middle class domestic sphere, revising it to be at least somewhat accessible to a broader audience without fully recognizing its potential for class mobility. While her vision may initially appear limited because of her inexperience with the material hardships facing the workers, it is ultimately similar to the project of the

Lowell Offering. Just as the writers viewed their work as enabling them to broaden their definition of family to a global experience, as noted by Larcom, Phelps also expands the idea of family to include people of disparate lifestyles. Phelps’ ideal is also a type of utopian dream, but one where people are brought together across the divisive lines of socioeconomic class. However, like the Lowell Offering’s vision of a perfect new society that is shattered when the narrator awakes, it is ultimately unsustainable in the face of material issues facing laborers.

Chapters from a Life arguably provides the best insight into Phelps’ political and artistic motivations for her work since it was written late in her career and shows her reflections on her writing. It begins with a family history where she notes her relatives’ tendency towards either academic or reformist work. She states, “the reformer’s blood

60 With the influx of cheap and easily exploited immigrant labor in the last half of the nineteenth century, factories increasingly demanded more hours and offered less compensation for workers. For an overview of the labor movement in American culture, see Philip Dray’s There is Power in a Union (2010). 109 and the student’s blood have always had an uncomfortable time of it, together in my veins” (24). This quote is an important recognition of Phelps’ own internal civil war between her desire to create art and her need to enact social change, an essential aspect of her work that Susan S. Williams discusses in “Writing with an Ethical Purpose: The Case of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps” (1999).61 As Williams suggests, the majority of Phelps’ writing seems torn between her artistic integrity and the solitude it demanded and her desire to speak about social injustice.62 Phelps ultimately uses this tension to explore issues of socioeconomic class previously ignored in much of women’s fiction, although her work never transcends her middle class values (Williams “The Case of Elizabeth

Stuart Phelps” 166). The following analysis takes into account “the need to give more attention to the ways in which such class formations undergirded women’s writing in the nineteenth century” by exploring Phelps’ struggle to represent factory work and class mobility through her construction of alternative communities (Williams 166).

While The Silent Partner is Phelps’ most sustained discussion of factory life, earlier works speak to her growing concern over socioeconomic class inequality and the lives of workers. A series of stories published in the 1860s create a vision of factory life steeped in Christian rhetoric, where the narrative voices seem more concerned with the workers’ souls than their blighted lives. For Phelps, as for many reformers and writers during this era, Christianity offered both an impetus for working to correct social inequality and a solution to the problem in a shared home for all in heaven. Religious

61 Jane Addams, whose relationship with literature I analyze in Chapter Three, also struggled with this debate. 62 Also see Reclaiming Authorship, especially Chapter Six: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Ethical Authorship. 110 faith was an avenue for social reform for Phelps and many nineteenth century women, though her factory texts become increasingly cynical regarding the roles of middle and upper class Christians who show a superficial concern for factory workers while still exploiting their labor. Her earliest factory novel, Up Hill; or Life in the Factory focuses on the struggles of Kate Bradley and Mary Kirkas as they attempt to be good Christians in the face of the vile language and corruption of the factory. The working poor portrayed in the text are described as industrious and even their labor is romanticized as the narrator suggests “perhaps they were happier than if they had less to do, and more time in which to think about themselves” (15). Their lives and homes are described as simple but largely praiseworthy. Phelps’ language here borders on condescending as she suggests that the workers benefit from their distance from middle class recreations like self-analysis and perhaps cultural work like art. The dangers in the text come primarily from the few mill workers who mock those trying to live a Christian life in the factory system, not from the factory itself.

Central to the text is the importance of family in defining the moral lives of the workers. Because they are not brought up with a strong religious faith, Kate and Mary struggle with the decision to become a Christian until the sudden death of their young and impetuous friend, Ella, a “gay and careless girl…who seldom came to Sunday school unless she had something new to wear,” provides the impetus for their conversion (17).

Their families ultimately influence their spiritual life, as Mary’s mother desires for her to become a Christian even though she seems incapable of offering moral instruction since she is busy raising her children alone after her husband’s death. Kate, whose alcoholic

111 father and rough working conditions take a toll on her morality, still “could never fail to notice anything beautiful,” setting the framework for a long string of Phelps’ working class heroines who are artistic and sensitive to high culture despite their rough upbringing

(54). However, Kate’s artistic potential is never developed as the text focuses primarily on her religious growth, as facilitated by middle class characters and her brother. The families portrayed are well meaning but dysfunctional, unable to truly support their daughters’ moral growth. In the end, even the promise of Christianity is unable to change the material lives of Kate and Mary.

The disastrous home life in the factory system is completely removed from the middle class ideal. Phelps unsurprisingly focuses on the few mismanaged working class homes corrupted by factory life. Kate describes her home as “hell on earth” because of the abuse of her alcoholic father and asks herself (and implicitly the readers) “how could she do right in such a home?” (58, 67). Phelps’ solution in Up Hill, however, is less about rewriting the laborers’ homes and families by middle class standards than positing an alternative home in heaven, a shared community of believers that can supposedly bridge the socioeconomic divide. This heavenly home is posited as the answer to the

Lowell workers’ concerns about upward mobility, creating a utopian community that is accessible to everyone but actually privileges the poor. The narrator frequently breaks into the story line to suggest, “I should have liked to whisper to them (the workers) that the harder the toil is here, the sweeter the rest will be when the night shall come, and God shall bid all labor cease in the home to which he shall call his faithful ones” (81). Labor itself has no redeeming potential other than leading to heavenly rest. The middle class

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Sunday School teachers in the text are constantly offering up this heavenly alternative community as the answer to the problems of labor instead of advocating for material change. As implicitly noted by Kate, though, this reward is delayed and does not posit any real solution to their current situation.

Though Phelps is primarily concerned with positing heaven as the ideal home for the factory workers, Up Hill is also an early representation of her interest in class mobility in the mid-nineteenth century. Her texts often portray moments where working class characters are invited into the homes of the upper class, or refined ladies or religious leaders venture into the tenement houses and are enlightened about how the other half lives. These moments of cross-class encounters are often strained and exhibit the real difficulty of class mobility in American society. While the intentions of all of the characters are good, they ultimately do not posit a lasting solution for social inequality.

Up Hill ends with the girls’ tireless Sunday School teacher, Miss Grant, taking them into her middle class home in the country to discuss their religious growth through the year.

Because their families seem unable to offer moral guidance, Miss Grant takes on a motherly role throughout the novel, always lurking in the background but appearing at important moments to give advice. Her Sunday school class is positioned as an alternative community, although modeled after a fairly traditional family, where the girls are able to finally gain a strong parental figure. Miss Grant’s invitation to her own home is the final culmination of the removal of the girls from their own families as they are ushered into the middle class ideal.

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While the girls are just visiting Miss Grant, not moving in with her, the fact that the novel ends with this encounter suggests that it is the culmination of Phelps’ goals.

After the girls have a lavish meal and walk through Miss Grant’s hothouse, the story concludes with the group admiring a picture of Pilgrims’ Progress in her study. Looking at the picture, Kate explicitly notes the class differences between the mill workers and their Sunday School teacher. She states, “it’s easy for people to be Christians in fine homes, with good people all about them; but for us- it does seem as if it was all rocks and all hill, and never any easy places” (316). Comparing the corruption of factory life to the trials faced by Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Kate notes the tensions between the fine house and her work in the factories and implicitly challenges Miss Grant’s heavenly solution to unfair factory labor. Miss Grant replies, “I know it, girls. Christ has called you to a thorny road, but he trod it before you.” She goes on to promise that “to him that overcometh, the great rewards are promised” (316). Though there are tears in Miss.

Grant’s eyes, she again is only able to imagine heaven as a possible solution to the trials of factory life. Miss Grant’s didactic response to Kate’s question suggests Phelps’ early inability to come to terms with class inequalities and her default reliance on Christian doctrine to explain class difference.

Miss Grant’s invitation to her home initially reads as an attempt to posit the middle class home and family as the ideal, implicitly suggesting that religious growth and hard work will lead to upward class mobility. After all, while Kate’s and Mary’s own families toil in their homes and the mills, they are able to engage in a cozy relationship with Miss Grant in her middle class home after adhering to her religious advice.

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However, the asides made by the omniscient narrator throughout the text suggest that heaven remains the alternative, utopian community posited by Phelps in her early factory works. After the previously mentioned exchange about the potential for rest in heaven, the girls “thought just then it mattered little how steep the upward path, or how long and toilsome the journey, which ended in such a home” (317). Kate’s recognition of their difficult working situation is immediately quieted through religious rhetoric. Like in her famous Gates Ajar series, those most marginalized in their lives on earth will find the greatest reward in heaven. The factory work and setting of the mills is an avenue to a larger message about Christian salvation, an idea that is complicated in Phelps’ later work. Phelps maintains her religious references throughout her narratives, but in her final factory text, The Silent Partner, Christianity is used as an impetus to work for social equality.

A harsher vision of the realities of factory life and the homes it creates is presented in “Jane Gurley’s Story” (1866). Phelps’ text was serialized in eight installments in Hours at Home: A Popular Monthly Devoted to Religious and Useful

Literature. The story is rarely discussed in literary criticism, but is useful for tracing

Phelps’ changing attitude towards factory work and her vision of the alternative communities necessary to create a more equitable society. Key themes in The Silent

Partner, like the necessity for cross class social mobility and the importance of creating alternative home sites to foster these interactions, are present in nascent form in the text.

The story is also noteworthy for its refusal to dismiss the material effects of poverty through the promise of a heavenly community, although the protagonist’s spiritual

115 growth is still a major theme. While in Up Hill, Sunday School teachers and evangelists are represented sympathetically, their ability to productively engage with the workers is questioned in “Jane Gurley’s Story.”

“Jane Gurley’s Story” follows the life of Jane, a factory worker whose alcoholic father forces her to gamble and swear. Like Kate, Jane’s life experiences have hardened her so that she feels little connection to her own home or family. Instead of widening her definition of family, like in the Lowell Offering, factory life has caused her to become fiercely independent and reject nearly all human connections. The only redeeming forces in her life are her baby brother and Reuben, her fiancé, a “manly” worker who shows the possibility for virtue in factory life. While it seems as if they will create a more traditional home through their union, his murder by another factory worker destroys this dream. Jane eventually escapes her abusive father and starts a new life with her brother in the country. The beginning of Phelps’ story seems primarily concerned with showing the corruption of the homes of workers whose social position alienates them from middle class morals. Jane’s home is filled with “dank vapors and foul odors” and her parents are either emotionally absent or abusive (407). Like Kate and later Sip, the protagonist in The

Silent Partner, Jane is artistically driven and inspired by beauty. Art teaches the characters the emotions and sensitivity their own families are unable to model and allows them to form connections to an alternative community through a shared love of beauty.

After saving his meager wages, Reuben gives Jane a portrait of a Madonna and child, a gesture later mirrored in The Silent Partner when Perley gives Sip a picture of Beethoven to hang in her tenement house. The shift from a religious image to the secular also shows

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Phelps’ changing conception of the labor issue as she realizes that spiritual intervention will not be enough to improve the lives of the workers. Jane and Sip are both inspired by the artistic images, but it is important that in this story Reuben, a member of Jane’s own socioeconomic class, is the one who gives her the portrait, as opposed to upper class characters bestowing a higher culture on the working class characters. The high art portraits initially appear to be a step to remaking the tenement houses in the image of the middle class home, but Reuben’s role in the transaction positions him as an alternative family member who can provide what Jane’s biological family cannot. Their connection offers the hope of another familial bond that is able to combine the love of art with labor, but is shattered when he is murdered by a jealous fellow worker also in love with Jane.

Just as writing is an avenue for social mobility for the women of Lowell, art provides a glimpse into the upper socioeconomic class and eventually the possibility of individual mobility for Jane. Jane first meets Miss Granger, a middle class woman who helps her establish a new life, when they are appreciating a piece of artwork in a storefront window. Art facilitates their cross-class interaction and eventually allows

Jane to escape the slums. When Jane finally reaches the country, she moves into Miss

Granger’s home and is eventually able to find a job painting wallpapers. Though she is not creating original art, she uses her skills to produce domestic art to provide for herself and her brother. A love of beauty and art is a redeeming virtue for most of Phelps’ working class characters and the inclusion of it in their homes creates a vision of class equality through the appreciation of upper class culture. Phelps acknowledges distinctions between working class characters based on their sensitivity to art and high

117 culture. While all are defined as factory workers because of their manual labor, those who appreciate beauty are considered more worthy of upper-class aid, as Jane eventually receives.

Phelps’ analysis of the working class home in “Jane Gurley’s Story” comes to a head when an evangelist enters the tenement house to share religious tracts with the mill workers. While in Up Hill Christianity serves as a class fusion that allows characters to transcend differences and imagine a new community united through an ideal, shared home in heaven, Jane’s narrative takes a cynical look at the desire of religious reformers to feign downward class mobility to enter the homes of workers to share the gospel. His actions are ultimately another type of slumming. The evangelist does not share an idealized vision of heaven as rest for the poor and overworked, but warns Jane that she will be eternally punished if she does not convert (502). The shift from the reward of heaven to the damnation of hell only serves to remind the readers of the dire description of the tenements that begins the story. It becomes clear that Jane already perceives her surrounding as a type of hell and her laughter in the face of the reformer’s warning is a small sign of resistance of the working class against the proselytizing of the rich. After the man leaves, Jane does read the tract and is momentarily touched by it, but the narrator notes that she needs “a wise as well as kindly hand” to guide her to the path of religion.

The working class home is a site of cross-class interactions, but the interaction ultimately fails as the narrator notes the inability of the upper class to understand the needs of the poor, even through the unifying lens of religion. Again, the apparent hope for the poor is the promise of a shared home in heaven, but it cannot be realized because of the

118 evangelist’s inability to imagine a common experience on earth. It is eventually

Reuben’s spirituality and his death that inspire Jane’s faith, not the works of upper-class evangelists. However, the story ends with Jane forming a cross-class alternative community with Miss Granger and Ben in the country. The necessity of cross-class communication and the idea of creating alternative communities to foster the connection remains a theme in Phelps’ most famous factory novel, The Silent Partner.

While in the Lowell Offering the women positioned the mills as providing an alternative community with utopian potential, including the opportunity for upward mobility (even though it was not always for themselves), in The Silent Partner Phelps seems to suggest that the answer to class tensions is to make the rich aware of social inequality and introduce mill workers into the middle class home, revising it into an alternative domestic space that is more open and inclusive than usually imagined in nineteenth-century novels. In doing so, she reveals the dire working conditions of the mill even as she occasionally preaches middle class values. As Amy Schrager Lang points out, Phelps’ vision of women’s friendship transcending class ultimately fails.63

The Silent Partner tells the story of Perley Kelso, the privileged daughter of a mill owner who becomes class conscious after her father’s death, and her growing understanding of the mills she owns. She befriends Sip Garth, a mill worker whose life is wrapped up in her deaf/mute sister, Catty. Perley unsuccessfully attempts to save Sip from the mills by introducing her to other work while simultaneously alienating herself from rich friends by trying to educate them about working class struggles. The end of the novel, though,

63 See Lang’s discussion of The Silent Partner in The Syntax of Class (2006). 119 reinforces the impossibility of transcending class differences as Sip works as a street preacher as Perley, who recently quelled an uprising of workers by telling them to be patient until conditions improves, watches from a distance. Their friendship seems ruptured and the alternative community Perley strove to connect in her middle class home is not intact. Lang notes that the function of the heroine in domestic novels is to elude class by appearing to be outside of any social classification (18). However, in The Silent

Partner, Perley’s acknowledgment of her own class standing is what makes her exceptional, although she is unable to achieve class transcendence that would allow her to truly enter into an equal partnership with working class characters.

Critical readings of the text often focus on the fact that Perley repeatedly rejects marriage proposals, first breaking ties with her fiancé and business partner Maverick

Hayle and then dismissing the much more likable Stephen Garrick, a mill manager who worked his way up from an inauspicious beginning as a mill operative.64 This is not only a rejection of marriage in favor of a more independent lifestyle, as many critics suggest, but a rejection of the middle class definition of family in general. Like many of the reformers creating utopian communities, Perley realizes that a marriage would result in the formation of an isolated biological family that would not be able to engage in the needs of the broader society. As a mill owner, Maverick represents the corporation and a marriage to him would necessarily stifle Perley’s interactions with the operatives. His general attitude is that, “the lower classes could not bear any unusual attention from their

64 See Lori Duin Kelly’s The Life and Work of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Victorian Feminist (1983) and Judith Fetterley’s “Checkmate: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner” (1986), which were among the first critical readings of the text. Fetterley also discusses the importance of Perley’s revision of the home, but in less detail. Although not central to my analysis here, I would argue that Perley’s refusal of Garrick is tinged with class bias as well, as he is clearly not of the same social standing. 120 betters, without injury,” which completely negates Perley’s desire to create cross-class alliances to work for social change (31). Aligned with him, the corrupt authority figure,

Perley would be unable to gain the trust of the workers. Maverick is portrayed as an entitled capitalist so invested in profit that he refuses to care about the living situations of his workers. By breaking ties with him, Perley is able to in part separate herself from her family legacy of earning money from the labor of the operatives.

While Maverick is clearly aligned with the corruption of the factory, Garrick is also interested in reform, which makes Perley’s rejection of his proposal more complex.

Though Garrick lurks at the margins of the text and is undeveloped as a character, he is a former operative who seems to fully understand and sympathize with Perley’s efforts to form relationships with the workers. In fact, Garrick is said to have stood “heart and soul and hand in hand with her” in all of Perley’s efforts (255). However, when he expresses his love for her, Perley states that marriage would mean that she must give up her work with the poor and focus on her own family, an undesirable narrowing of her sphere of influence. Switching roles, Garrick is described in romantic, almost feminized terms. At the time of his proposal he has “hungry eyes” and a quivering “blanched face” (260).

His emotionalism is coolly tempered by Perley. While he bursts out “you ought to love me. Before God, I say you ought to love me!,” Perley calmly responds, “the fact is, that I have no time to think of love and marriage” (260). Perley’s focus on facts over Garrick’s pleas about love challenge assumptions about women’s emotionalism and investment in the institution of marriage. By rejecting both proposals, Perley chooses to imagine a more inclusive family that attempts to include the factory workers she cares about most.

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Less critical attention is paid to Phelps’ revision of the middle class home to include the working poor, destabilizing its original function as an isolated domestic haven and imagining it as an alternative community even as she rejects a similar project for the factory. This alternative reconstruction of the family is important because of the ethical currency afforded to the domestic sphere in nineteenth-century literature. Most studies of women’s sentimental fiction during this time focus on how the domestic sphere is the moral center of the family, and implicitly the nation. By reconstructing the middle class home to be headed by a woman and include a larger family of workers, Phelps is making an important revision to a well-known literary trope and appealing to her middle class readers to consider expanding their definition of community to include the poor. Unlike in the Lowell Offering, the boarding house where Sip and Catty live is not a utopian site of sisterly bonding. It is situated as yet another place Sip must constantly work to keep clean and to feed herself and Catty. Sip’s primary problem is that she has to function as a mother, father, and sister to Catty as she provides for her emotionally and financially.

However, Sip lacks Louisa May Alcott’s resources when she encompassed the same role in her family. The boarding house is unable to be a utopian community because the nontraditional family there does not succeed. Sip’s boarding room only becomes bearable when Perley gives her Aime de Lemud’s picture, “Beethoven’s Dream” that Sip had previously admired. As Buhle and Howe note, “the painting speaks to Sip across the gulf of class, as Beethoven’s music speaks to many who cross Perley’s threshold, even as the voices of Sip and of the child Bub among others, are meant to speak to the middle-class reader of the novel” (380). Art, a staple of middle class domestic culture, once more

122 becomes a connection between the upper and lower socioeconomic class characters, but primarily because it signifies the inclusion of Perley into Sip’s family. Once Sip can share the burden of Catty’s care with Perley, she is able to think more critically about her life as a worker. They are able to form a family that includes disparate individuals and allows for a broader vision of the domestic sphere.

Phelps’ revised vision of the home is again predicated on the shared appreciation of art as a means to connect people across disparate life experiences. Sip sees the picture at her first visit to Perley’s house, which also marks Perley’s growing recognition of her material excesses and the fact that it is selfish to exclude others from her privileged lifestyle. As Sip marvels at the luxury of the room, Perley paces about marking how much everything costs. Perley notes, “we are born in a dream, I tell you! Look at these rooms! Who would think-in such a room as this-except he dreamed it, that the mothers of very little children died for want of a few hundreds and a change of climate? Why, the curtains in this room cost six!” (127). The dream motif continues as Perley suggests the rich “are not cruel, we are only asleep” (128). As in Lemud’s image, the rich are asleep as a tempestuous chaotic mess brews above them in the lives of the workers their excess oppresses. This scene displays Perley’s growing awareness of this excess and the need to revise her vision of home to share her privileged position with the working class. She realizes that the interior life she previously lived was focused on amassing material wealth and that in order for society to thrive, the rich must be able to imagine the poor as an extension of their own families who deserve to share their resources.

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While responsibility for the creation of the alternative community falls on Perley, it is Sip who inspires the formation, suggesting the increased agency of workers in

Phelps’ later factory fiction. Perley asks Sip what she would do if she had such a luxurious house, and Sip responds that she would invite in those who don’t have access to such luxury. It is important to note that Sip makes this suggestion, which Perley eventually takes up when she invites the workers to her house along with her upper class friends, attempting to create an alternative community that includes all classes. These parties for the mill workers include food and a cultural event, like music or a discussion of a literary text. While some critics, including Wendy B. Sharer, note that this appears to be a way to elevate the workers to a middle class mentality by including them in the domestic space, Perley’s experiment actually transforms the domestic sphere into what her friend Fly calls a “lovely, Quixotic, queer venture of a home” (222).65 Fly’s use of the word Quixotic shows both the idealism and the impracticality of Perley’s mission.

The home does, in fact, become “queer” by most middle class standards through its inclusion of a diverse mix of people, who by entering the home create an alternative community that threatens most of Perley’s upper class friends. As the party continues, the upper class women’s critique of Perley’s apparent transcendence of class boundaries takes the form of criticism of her new alternative community. Fly’s mother, Mrs. Silver, notes in disdain that “this superb house has been more like a hospital or a set of public soup rooms for six months past, than it has like the retiring and secluded home of a young lady” (236). The middle class home, a symbol of refinement and traditional gender roles

65 See Sharer’s “Going Into Society or Bringing Society In? Rhetoric and Problematic Philanthropy in the Silent Partner” (1997) 124 throughout nineteenth-century American literature, is expanded to include a larger population. This is inherently threatening to the upper class society that Mrs. Silver, as suggested by her name, represents. While ladies are supposed to be isolated, Perley inserts herself in the broader community of workers. Moreover, this alternative community is headed by an unmarried woman, another revision of the middle class ideal.

With the redefinition of her home and family, Perley is also given access to a broader role in the public sphere. The alternative home space she creates becomes a place where class mobility is, at least temporarily, in flux and traditional gender roles are questioned.

The conclusion of The Silent Partner shows the evolution of Phelps’ ideas about class mobility, gender, and alternative communities. The text ends in the street, not in the traditional middle class home portrayed in Up Hill. Phelps recognizes the difficulty in maintaining the alternative community created in Perley’s bimonthly social gatherings.

Ultimately, although the domestic sphere provides a utopian vision for class mobility and subversive gender ideologies, Phelps seems to suggest that real social change needs to take place in the public sphere where the family is more broadly defined to include all socioeconomic classes. By the end of the story, Sip, instead of Perley, is working as a street preacher mobilizing the workers and the two women’s relationship seems ruptured.

Much critical attention is paid to the fact that Perley prevents a strike through her speech near the end of the text, a fact that seems to undermine the subversive potential of the novel. However, it is important to note that the story ends focused on Sip’s potential as a leader, not Perley’s. Like in the Lowell Offering, a working woman is circulating her ideas in the public sphere. In her sermon, Sip notes that many factory workers refused to

125 accept what they viewed as the religion of the upper class, but suggests, “rich and poor, big or little, there’s no way under heaven for us to get out of our twist, but Christ’s way”

(299). Heaven is again the only solution for both the poor and the rich to solve their problems, which could be read as acquiesce to the upper-class religious doctrine.

However, it is the voice of the worker instructing them. From a distance, Perley watches

Sip with her rich friend, Fly. In an important personal realization, Perley notes that her reform efforts were not complete because she was “only among them at best; Sip is of them” (293). Phelps’ italics show her new recognition of where reform work must begin.

While Phelps’ earlier factory texts posited various forms of Christianity as a solution to social injustice, here Christianity is appropriated by the working class to create change in their own way. While the final message of rest in heaven may appear to be the same, the speaker of the message has shifted in important ways. Instead of upper class Sunday school teachers or evangelists spreading Christian thought, Sip is the one empowered to spread the religious doctrine, suggesting the time has come that the workers can speak not only for themselves, but for God. Because Phelps’ vision for social justice is so entwined in her religion, this is an important shift.

Phelps and the writers of the Lowell Offering portray factory life in very different ways and their social positions are clearly key to this difference. However, both recognize the need to interrogate factory life and its potential to create alternative communities where class is in flux. It is often the female characters or writers who are able to create these spaces, rejecting marriage and male leadership and reimagining a more equitable society based on the potential of class mobility or the redefinition of

126 factory labor that allows space for cultural pursuits. Although Phelps’ early factory texts appear to offer a facile solution to labor problems based on Christian faith, her creation of

Sip’s character in The Silent Partner shows her ability to imagine workers who speak for themselves and challenge injustice. Like the writers of the Lowell Offering, Phelps is also invested in portraying working class characters that have an appreciation for art and culture usually reserved for the upper echelons of society. Perley’s party scene is a later articulation of the Lowell Offering’s claim for the need to balance both intellectual and manual labor. Only when both forms of labor are appreciated and blended will social equality take place. This blend requires a type of social mobility where the upper class is called to appreciate manual labor and the workers given access to cultural opportunities.

Alternative communities, whether they are in the factory or expanded middle class homes, are necessary sites for the production of these values.

Rethinking the Factory in Mid-Nineteenth Century American Literature

Access to literary and artistic culture and the development of alternative communities are crucial to the project of class mobility in the representation of the mills in mid-nineteenth century narratives. The crux of the difference between the writing of the mill workers in the Lowell Offering and Phelps’ factory novels is that the female operatives enable their own class mobility through their creation of alternative homes, families, and literary pursuits, while Phelps primarily views class mobility as a project facilitated by the upper socioeconomic class until her final factory novel. Though

Phelps’ representation of the factory becomes more nuanced in her later work due to her growing understanding of social inequality, she is slow to acknowledge the potential of

127 an alternative community of workers. For Phelps, upward class mobility for the factory workers ultimately fails, and Perley’s attempt at downward class mobility through her relationship with Sip is also tenuous even at the end of Phelps’ final factory novel.

Though the texts discussed in this chapter cover over thirty years in the history of factory life in America, they work together to shed light on shifting ideas about gender, social mobility, and alternative communities. An analysis of the understudied Lowell

Offering and the representation of the factory in Phelps’ work expand our understanding of socioeconomic class and labor, issues often ignored in literary study. The voices of the female operatives themselves are a necessary inclusion in the study of factory literature, in part because they provide insight into the struggles of authors to represent the mills without having first-hand experience with the work. Even more importantly, studying the Lowell Offering shows the ability of workers to create meaningful art that is valuable both for its literary merit and for its social critique. Through their writing, the women workers were able to envision a global and community oriented redefinition of family unable to be imagined by middle class authors. This redefinition of family and the social mobility it offers has important ramifications for how we view gender and labor in the mid-nineteenth century.

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Chapter Three: Literature and Community Formation at Hull-House

“This is what we were all doing, lumbering our minds with literature that only served to cloud the really vital situation spread before our eyes ...I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning. This, then, was the difficulty, this sweet dessert in the morning and the assumption that the sheltered, educated girl has nothing to do with the bitter poverty and the social maladjustment which is all around her, and which, after all, cannot be concealed, for it breaks through poetry and literature in a burning tide which overwhelms her." -Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House

“Whatever the outcome, the fact that I had put my thoughts down on paper made a deep impression on me.” –Hilda Satt Polacheck, I Came a Stranger

In her autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Jane Addams shares the reaction of one woman at the Chicago Woman’s Club after hearing a paper on the settlement house movement, a cultural phenomenon carried from England in the late nineteenth century where privileged, college-educated men and women “settled” in the slums to develop relationships with the working class and advocate for better conditions for the poor. Addams states that the woman

said that when she was a little girl playing in her mother’s garden, she one day discovered a small toad who seemed to her very forlorn and lonely, although she did not in the least know how to comfort him, she reluctantly left him to his fate; later in the day, quite at the other end of the garden, she found a large toad, also apparently without family and friends. With a heart full of tender sympathy, she took a stick and by exercising infinite patience and some skill, she finally pushed the little toad through the entire length of the garden into the company of the big toad, when, to her inexpressible horror and surprise, the bit toad opened his mouth and swallowed the little one. The moral of the tale was clear applied to people who lived ‘where they did not naturally belong’ (Addams Twenty Years 197).

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The woman sharing this parable was clearly skeptical of the settlement house movement and Addams’ work in the slums of Chicago. However, more important than the woman’s reaction is the fact that Addams relates this parable in her text, showing her faith in the ability of stories to share a message, even when she did not personally agree with the moral. Instead of directly stating her critiques of the settlement house movement, the woman shares a tale to prove her point, a rhetorical move Addams often made in her own writing. This story also shows how Addams incorporated the voices of other women in her texts, including her working class neighbors, making her published work a complex account of the experiences of women from different socioeconomic classes. Addams shared narratives from her poverty-stricken neighbors and the upper-class Chicago clubwomen, often in the same text. This collaboration resulted in accounts that were able to create a community of women on the pages, even as she literally created such a community at Hull-House. Through this process of writing women’s stories, Addams was able to reclaim for herself the ability of literature to be socially useful through its ability to form connections between people and empower the working women of

Chicago.

In this chapter, I analyze the function of literature in the Hull-House settlement, referencing different genres of literature, including plays, novels, and urban folk-lore.

Addams, whose relationship with the written word went through three distinct stages, states that “it has always been the mission of literature to translate the particular act into something of the universal, to reduce the element of crude pain in the isolated experience by bringing to the sufferer a realization that his is but the common lot” (Addams The

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Long Road of Women’s Memory 43). For Addams, literature is defined through its ability to represent common experiences and bring people together, and that is the definition I adhere to in this chapter. According to this definition, in order for literature to be effective it must be applicable to real life. First, I discuss how Jane Addams used literature to facilitate a cross-class community in the slums of Chicago. For Addams, like the women of Lowell, literature was a way to encourage class mobility and form alternative communities. Addams’ interpretation of literature led her to embrace a form of downward class mobility and was a way to connect with the immigrant population eager to pursue the cultural opportunities available at Hull-House. While previous chapters have looked at the representation of class mobility, gender, and alternative communities in fictional accounts, in this section I suggest that the individual act of reading literature was a necessary precursor to a community at Hull-House formed through what I call literary slumming, bringing canonical books into working class communities that did not usually have access to them.

In the second section of this chapter, I analyze the function of literary access in

Hilda Satt Polacheck’s writing, especially I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House

Girl (1989), the only known memoir written by an immigrant woman involved in Hull-

House. Like many in her community, Polacheck credits Hull-House’s cultural activities for improving her life by giving her access to high art, especially literature. While she expresses her appreciation for Hull-House, her memoir also shows that she was capable of developing a literary voice on her own. Polacheck also critiqued Addams’ work when she felt it did not accurately portray life in the slums of Chicago. Her text emerges as an

131 important, though understudied, account of socioeconomic class issues in the late nineteenth century. Read together, Addams’ and Polacheck’s works show the power of literature to form female-centered alternative communities across class lines. However, they also demonstrate the tensions in trying to create cross-class communities of women.

Hull-House and the Settlement House Movement

The Chicago clubwoman’s previously stated concerns about the settlement house movement were shared by many. Settlement house workers’ decision to embrace a type of downward social mobility puzzled many members of society, including their poverty stricken neighbors. Toynbee Hall, started by Samuel and Henrietta Barnett in London,

England in 1884, was the first recognized settlement house. It encouraged college- educated men and women to come live in the slums with the goal of being good neighbors and sharing their time and material resources with those in need. Residents were encouraged to work “with, not for” their neighbors (Knight Jane Adams 62). Most of the residents had recently graduated from college and were looking for a way to meaningfully contribute to society. Even if the residents did not remain in the slums, they were encouraged to take their lived experiences with poverty into their future occupations in order to continue to work for a more equitable society (Bremner 66). The settlement house movement was predicated on the idea that it was necessary for those in positions of privilege to actually live in the slums in order to see the real needs of the working class. Also called “college settlements,” these houses soon grew popular in

America. Though settlement house residents were often praised by the press and churches, many individuals were puzzled by their decision to live in the slums. In The

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Discovery of Poverty in the United States, Robert H. Bremner relates the story of a society matron visiting a settlement house. At the end of her visit she states, “‘I do think you young ladies down here are doing a magnificent work-whatever it is!’ As Bremner points out, it was difficult for many to understand that there was not a distinct goal of the settlement house movement beyond “providing an atmosphere in which ties of understanding and sympathy could be established between people of very different backgrounds and material conditions” (62).

Jane Addams became interested in the settlement house movement when she visited Toynbee Hall in 1888. During her time in England, she realized the lack of direction she faced after graduating from Rockford Seminary. Though she had a prestigious education, Addams felt ill-prepared to face the real world, especially given her growing recognition of poverty and social inequality. Her European tour solidified her desire to become involved in the settlement house community. The position of the

European tour in American society was nearly the polar opposite of the slum tourism that was also popular during this era, where the upper class visited the ghetto for educational or entertainment purposes. Europe represented high culture for many Americans, and the fact that her experiences overseas ultimately led Addams to the settlement house movement suggests her burgeoning understanding of her privileged position. The settlement house she began with Ellen Gates Starr in 1889, Hull-House, eventually expanded to thirteen buildings and was considered the most successful settlement in

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America.66 Addams resided at Hull-House for the rest of her life and was soon widely acknowledged as the spokesperson for this movement, both in the United States and abroad. Hull-House’s projects included traditional avenues of social reform, like providing language classes and childcare for immigrant mothers and advocating for improved living standards like regular garbage collection and fair working conditions at the factories. Residents, the middle-class individuals living at the house, conducted research on conditions in the slums, work that led to factory reform and improved sanitation guidelines, among other projects. The privileged residents of Hull-House living in the slums were able to see for themselves the problems facing their neighbors and had the resources to draw attention to and correct them.

Though concerned with alleviating poverty, Hull-House also offered popular college-extension classes, debating clubs, lectures, reading and theater groups, and art clubs that were also embraced by their neighbors. Though they did not meet the material needs of the community, these culture-oriented clubs provided a much appreciated space for education and entertainment after long days at a factory or doing domestic labor. The marriage of these practical and cultural projects places the Hull-House as the seemingly perfect example of the balance between intellectual and manual labor and the ability of the arts to create genuine relationships between members of different socioeconomic classes. Hull-House created a community of diverse individuals of different classes who worked together to create social change.

66 Hull-House remained a uniquely female centered space with few male residents throughout its lifespan. The historical importance of this community of women has been well documented by scholars. See Eleanor J. Stebner’s The Women of Hull House: A Study in Spirituality, Vocation, and Friendship (1997) for a discussion of the complex relationships between the upper-class women formed at the Hull-House. 134

As Allen F. Davis notes, a search for an enlightened community was at the crux of Addams’s work (102). In her texts, Jane Addams positions her project as the natural conclusion of the various utopian communities I have explored thus far. While the connection to these utopian communities is not directly stated in her work, the settlement house movement is an offspring of those projects, and ultimately outlasted all of the other alternative communities discussed in other chapters. In fact, the first visitor to the Hull-

House was a member of Brook Farm, the most widely recognized utopian community of the mid-nineteenth century. Like the utopian communities, the members of Hull-House sought to combine intellectual pursuits and physical labor that met the material needs of the people. However, unlike most utopian communities, Hull-House genuinely attracted members of the working class and created an environment where relationships could form between individuals of disparate social backgrounds through concrete social action and cultural pursuits.67

Like the female workers at Lowell, the neighbors who attended Hull-House events believed in the power of art and culture to elevate their social position. By the late nineteenth century, factory conditions had deteriorated from the utopian ideals of Francis

Lowell. One of Addams’ first encounters with poverty was visiting the mills with her father and seeing the impoverished living conditions of the workers. She stated, “I remember launching at my father the pertinent inquiry why people lived in such horrid little houses so close together, and that after receiving his explanation I declared with much firmness when I grew up I should, of course, have a large house, but it would not

6767 For more information about Addams’ interest in organized cooperation, see Louisa W. Knight’s “Jane Addams’ Theory of Cooperation” in Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy (2009). 135 be built among the other large houses, but right in the midst of horrid little houses like these” (2). Hull-House was the result of her childish claim. Throughout her life, Addams did not completely reject her privileged status as an educated white woman. Even as a child, she did not envision herself living as the poor lived. A large mansion settled among tenements and saloons, Hull-House at first seemed aberrant in the poor neighborhood. Like Perley in The Silent Partner, Addams invited the workers into her upper-class home in hopes of creating community alliances that transcended class boundaries through sharing cultural pursuits like art, literature, and music. Unlike Perley,

Addams was largely successful. Twenty Years at Hull-House and texts written by former residents of the settlement, like Hilda Satt Polacheck’s I Came a Stranger: The Story of a

Hull-House Girl (eventually published by her daughter in 1989), praise the relationships formed between the settlement workers and their neighbors.

Lumbering Our Minds with Literature: Literary Slumming at Hull-House

The relationships between the settlement workers and their neighbors could have easily been compromised by the fact that slum tourism was also on the rise during the

1880s and 1890s, when Addams started Hull-House.68 Rich individuals paid to take slum tours into the ghetto to vicariously experience the drama of poverty without having to actually live it. However, because slum tourism was such a varied and popular activity, embraced by students, the very rich, and the middle class, it is difficult to make a generalized argument about the motivations of the audience and its effects on the poor. It

68 For more information on slum tourism, see Robert M. Dowling’s Slumming in New York (2007), Chad Heap’s Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940 (2009), Seth Koven’s Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (2004), and Catherine Cook’s Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850-1915 (2001). 136 is likely that Hull-House neighbors assumed that the settlement house workers had similar motivations, although Addams claimed from the start that her goal was to develop a permanent presence in the neighborhood. Social reformers engaged on “friendly visits” to the slums in order to identify specific needs of the poor, which was also a type of slumming (Dowling 25). Upper-class women especially paid “home visits” to the poor in order to educate them about proper housekeeping and childcare (Heap 4). While the motives of some slum tourists were altruistic, although they certainly attempted to assimilate the poor into middle class values, many tourists specifically sought out the dramatic and often sexualized scenes they encountered in working class neighborhoods.

While reformers and social workers focused on elevating the homes and working conditions of the poor, tourists in search of entertainment ventured into red light districts to watch bawdy shows and occasionally buy sexual favors they would be unable to attain in their own section of the city. Police officers and sociologists began charging for tours of the seamiest urban blocks. By the start of the twentieth century, saloons and bars quickly replaced the home as the most popular stops for slum tourists (Heap 18).

With the advent of literary naturalism during this era, American literature also went slumming. Naturalist literature sought to extend realism’s goal of accurately portraying life as it is, including the lives of the working class. Authors like Stephen

Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Lincoln Steffens turned to working class neighborhoods for inspiration.69 Seth Koven suggests that “when elites wrote about slums, they tended to

69 Francesca Sawaya also claims that Addams uses realist principles to guide her writing. See “The Authority of Experience: Jane Addams and Hull-House” in Women’s Experience of Modernity, 1875-1945 (2003). 137 romanticize and exoticize them as sites of spectacular brutality and sexual degradation to which they were compulsively drawn” (4). These images, both fascinating and repelling, reappear throughout the works of authors, reformers, photographers, and social elites who ventured into the slums. One of the best known examples of slum tourism in literature is

Jacob A. Riis’s photo diary of the ghetto in How the Other Half Lives, which was published in 1890, a year after Jane Addams moved to Hull-House. As an immigrant who became financially stable in the United States, Riis’s position as a slum tourist is a unique one. Though he remained sympathetic to the plight of the poor, especially poor immigrants, he was horrified by the brutal scenes he experienced in urban neighborhoods and the tone of his work is often moralistic.

Riis’s work on slum tourism is especially important because of the images he includes in his text, which often provide more insight than his writing into the lives of the poor and how they are represented by those in a privileged position. As Alan

Trachtenberg suggests, “the camera made visible what unrecognized social boundaries and, often enough, plain ignorance and myopia kept invisible” (201).70 The photographs

Riis took during his time in the city allowed readers to go slumming from the comfort of their homes, but also showed the dire situations of the urban poor. Besides relating the experiences of factory workers and struggling mothers, Riis tells horrifying stories about abandoned and murdered infants, diseases, and alcoholism. The images of the slum that he combines with textual commentary in How the Other Half Lives function as an

70 See Reading American Photographs: Images as History Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (1989). Eric Schocket’s Vanishing Moments also provides useful analysis on this subject. Schocket claims that such voyeurism “allows us to experience our own economic fragility, our own position within relations of exploitation, in a manner that is not endangering” (10). 138 educational tool about poverty and a warning to the upper class that violence will ensue if the poor are not aided. 71 For example, in his discussion of “Bandit’s Root,” Riis pairs a chart of death rates in the tenement with a picture of men and women standing in the back alley of the street he discusses. The street is foggy and the faces of the standing men are obscured, making them look mysterious and threatening to their middle class audience. Near the end of the text, Riis tells the story of a “man with the knife” who, after comparing the wealth of Fifth Avenue to the dire situation facing his family in the ghetto, started slashing people around him with a knife (233). Though the man was immediately stopped and institutionalized, he provides a warning about the excesses of the rich, as well as a commentary on slum tourism. While the upper class may be able to venture into the slums to experience the life of the poor as a type of entertainment, the mobility of this type of tourism is limited. When the poor venture into the space of the rich and see the wealth they are unable to access, violence ensues.

Overall, slum tourism was and is generally viewed as being exploitative to those who live in working class neighborhoods. Early twentieth-century poet James Clarence

Harvey pointed out that “slumming usually means paying a price to see others do things you wouldn’t do yourself for the world, and which perhaps they wouldn’t do except for the price you pay” (qtd. in Heap 129). However, slum tourism and slumming narratives also had the potential effect of unifying the city by upsetting the boundaries between different socioeconomic classes. In this way, slumming became a type of class mobility in itself. As Robert Dowling suggests, “there exists a ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’

71 David Leviatin points out in the preface to the Bedford Edition of How the Other Half Lives that Riis probably did not take all of the images portrayed in his text. 139 sensibility in much urban realism, and therefore slumming narratives become a means of unifying, for better or worse, and otherwise fragmented urban environment” (11).

Though slumming tours, narratives, and photographs were often predicated on a voyeuristic search for sensationalism, they exposed social ills like poverty and sexual exploitation to those who were in a privileged position and may have had the power to work for a more equal social situation. Ben Reitman, whose novel Sister of the Road:

The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha (1937) I will explore in the next chapter, often led sociology students on crime tours through the slums, showing them the gathering places of hoboes and prostitutes. He described the experience as enlightening for the college students because it showed them the real effects of the social ills they studied in the classroom (Poirier 165-166). Reitman’s crime tours actually embraced the form of education Addams found most successful because it destabilized the boundaries between theory and practice and put a face on the statistics students read in class. Slum tourism by this definition was more educational than voyeuristic, although it still had the potential to objectify the poor by mapping abstract numbers and sociological principles onto individuals in the slums.

Some would argue that Addams herself was engaging in a type of slumming through her attempt at downward class mobility, although a type that lacked much of the voyeuristic tendencies of most slum tours.72 However, her inclusion of literature in her slumming experience had important implications for her time in the settlement house and

72 Addams intended to settle permanently in the slums of Chicago and she resided at Hull-House for the rest of her life. However, she also took vacations from the settlement house and travelled extensively. Although Addams’ slumming was more permanent, she always had the resources to leave the neighborhood if she chose to. This is what ultimately separated her from her neighbors and made it impossible for her to fully assimilate into the working class. 140 separated her from those seeking to merely watch instead of interact with the poor.

Unlike the naturalist authors who went slumming for literary inspiration, Addams’ form of literary slumming allowed the poor to access literature. Addams demonstrated equality between the different classes brought together at Hull-House through their shared appreciation for literature. Through incorporating literature into her “slumming” experience, Addams ultimately was able to help facilitate a literary voice for working class women as they developed literacy skills and confidence through participating in the cultural clubs offered in the settlement. However, as Polacheck proves, the voice they developed was drawn from their own unique experiences that involved their lives outside of Hull-House.

Before Addams could create Hull-House, she needed to come to terms with her own ideas about education, community, and the role of the financially privileged in enacting social reform. Her vision for the high-culture programs at Hull-House was born from a lifetime of privileged educational pursuits that she occasionally found meaningless. In the chapter “The Snare of Preparation,” in Twenty Years at Hull-House,

Addams recounts the eight years she spent after graduating from Rockford Seminary trying to find a social purpose. The years after her college graduation found her depressed, overwhelmed by family pressures, and seeking some kind of fulfillment outside the traditional path of marriage. Although she was highly educated and an avid reader, she began to see her educational advantages as a hindrance to future success because she was unsure about how to apply them to real life. While she had all of the

141 intellectual knowledge to succeed in a career, she felt disconnected from the broader community and without a sense of purpose.

Addams realizes this on her first trip to Europe in November 1883. Looking down on a working class neighborhood from her heightened and removed position as a (slum) tourist on an omnibus, she recalls a De Quincey reference, “The Vision of Sudden

Death,” from one of her favorite books, Confessions of an Opium Eater (1821). She notes that she recalls this passage rather than feeling a sense of empathy or connection to the suffering people. The De Quincey reference is a philosophical statement of the same issue, as he remembers a time he almost contributes to a young couple’s death because he is trying to think of the exact lines from the “Iliad” where Achilles alarms the militants instead of just shouting a warning. He ultimately concludes that he has been so involved in literary study that he is unable to relate to real life. Rather than immediately warning the young couple, the scene reminds him of a book and he is unable to relate to others outside of a literary framework. This triple-layered literary reference shows how

Addams is embedded in an insulated interior life of art that does not directly translate to the world around her.73 Thinking about her college educated contemporaries, she realizes, “this is what we were all doing, lumbering our minds with literature that only served to cloud the really vital situation spread before our eyes” (46). While literature in the early nineteenth century was commonly viewed as serving a pedagogical function that fostered ties between individuals, Adams felt that reading fiction for entertainment

73 In Twenty Years at Hull-House, Addams also recounts a time at Rockford Seminary where she takes opium with her classmates in order to better understand De Quincey, showing her early concern about experiencing life directly and not through the pages of a book. 142 purposes prevented her from recognizing society’s needs.74 Her privileged position allowed her to use literature as a substitution for experiencing poverty and injustice for herself, a problem with literary texts her Hull-House neighbors did not face. Addams needed to redefine literature as once again socially useful, primarily as a method of making connections between individuals of all social classes. As Barbara Sicherman points out in Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women

(2010), literature read purely for its entertainment value often took the place of real experience for women in the nineteenth century. She suggests that ultimately “Addams’s success at synthesizing and applying what she read to the gritty world she inhabited helped her become the preeminent interpreter of the settlement movement and one of the foremost intellectuals of the era” (7). However, in her youth, it was the disconnect between art and reality and her inability to apply her literary knowledge to the real world that concerned Addams. She believed the value of literature was diminished in the face of real suffering. Hull-House was her attempt to use her education to facilitate social change.

At Hull-House, Addams only rejected literature as entertainment for herself, not for the immigrant neighbors she formed a community with at the settlement. As Allen F.

Davis points out, Addams first attempted to create a college environment at Hull-House

(69).75 Many of the immigrants forced into the poor working conditions of the slums

74 For example, critics often note that one function of sentimental literature was to form affective bonds between the readers and characters. The process of sentimental identification allowed readers to feel sympathy for social others by recognizing a common humanity. Abolitionist writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe capitalized on this in their fiction in order to foster their goals of ending slavery. 75 Maurice Hamington makes a similar point in The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams (2009), although he views the college environment composed of all women as a sign of Addams’ feminism (51). 143 were well educated in their native land. Her neighbors apparently welcomed the opportunity to join book discussions, reading groups, and theater troupes. Even young children joined in the classes. In her account of her time at the Hull-House, Hilda Satt

Polacheck recalls that “there were always plays being given by the Hull-House Players and by the Children’s Dramatic Club. It was sheer delight to see young children perform plays by Moliere, Shakespeare, and Schiller. The little boy of ten still stands out in my memory when he said: ‘Here is my dagger and here is my naked breast’” (105).

Apparently, even the children in the community readily embraced complex literary influences like Shakespeare.76 Adult members also utilized the theatrical opportunities at

Hull-House. Polacheck eventually wrote and directed a performance of Leroy Scott’s labor novel The Walking Delegate (1905) with the encouragement and financial support of Jane Addams.77 Scott was a resident of Hull-House before devoting all of his energies to the labor movement. In her memoir Polacheck refers to it as the culmination of Hull-

House goals, stating, “here was a perfect setup. A book written by a resident; dramatized by a student of Hull-House; and performed by its own actors” (119). This “perfect setup” shows the interlacing relationships between members of different socioeconomic classes working together to create art, which was at the crux of Hull-House’s success. The dual

76 Lawrence W. Levine points out that Shakespeare was considered popular entertainment in nineteenth- century America (4). See Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988). However, by the late nineteenth century, Shakespeare was beginning to be viewed as highbrow culture less accessible to the working class (33). Regardless of its position on the cultural hierarchy, it is still noteworthy that children in the slums of Chicago were performing Hamlet. 77 The Walking Delegate tells the story of a man trying to be elected to the position of his union’s walking delegate because the person holding the position is corrupt. Tom, the protagonist, ultimately falls in love with Miss Arnold, an upper-class woman interested in labor issues, but their relationship fails because of their different social positions. Polacheck may have rewritten the novel to portray a more optimistic vision of class issues. 144 performances of Shakespeare and Scott also show that literature was considered valuable at Hull-House because of its appeal to a broad audience. While Leroy Scott is an extremely minor literary figure and Shakespeare arguably the preeminent English author, both shared the stage at the settlement house because of their ability to relate to people’s lives. The plays performed at Hull-House were all considered valuable literature because they were able to bind together a diverse audience of neighbors and residents through common experiences.

It was literature’s ability to transcend social boundaries that allowed Addams to reclaim it for herself as an important social force. While she rejected literature on her trip to Europe, realizing its futility in the face of suffering, the establishment of literary programs at Hull-House showed her the real power of literary works to create community bonds. Later in her life, she turned again to literature to describe her experiences in

Chicago, both in passing references in her articles and on larger scales, like in “A Modern

Lear,” her discussion of the Pullman Railroad Strike where she compares players in the controversy to Shakespeare’s characters. Jane Addams did not just go slumming when she moved to Halsted Street; she went slumming with the goal of bringing literature to the working class neighborhood.

Critics are beginning to recognize the importance of studying Addams in terms of her relationship to literature as well as sociology.78 In Jane Addams: A Writer’s Life

78 In fact, there has been a general renewed interest in Addams since the late 1990s. Her first biography, Jane Addams: A Biography (1935), was published by her nephew James Weber Linn. Addams provided him access to many of her personal records and approved the first eight chapters before her death. The next important study, An American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (1973) was published by Allen F. Davis. Davis’s critical approach to analyzing Addams inspired future scholarship, although some of his claims seem outdated in light of more recent feminist analyses. For example, he calls S. Weir Mitchell 145

(2009), Katherine Joslin argues that Addams was a sophisticated writer in her own right, one who was in constant conversation with the literary forces of the day, including

Howells, Dreiser, and Sinclair.79 However, what is most important to my project is the community that she formed through literature with the working class women in her neighborhood. Through Hull-House, Addams not only offered a venue for workers to study literature but provided a space where women could share their own literary culture and orally compose their own stories. The fact that Addams often wrote down these stories in her published books does bring up questions of translation and the influence of the authorial voice, but her transcription of the women’s stories secures them a place in literary history that they may not have accessed otherwise. This cross-class community of women at Hull-House ultimately produced a rich literature of the working class, shared orally and through Polacheck’s memoir.

Jane Addams’ writings show that her relationship with literature went through three distinct stages. In her first stage, after graduating from Rockford Seminary, she rejected literature because it distracted individuals from the more exigent needs of the community. She viewed her understanding of literature as a hindrance to her future goals and it was only her denial of it in her own life that allowed her to start Hull-House. Her denunciation of the knowledge gained from books was also in part a rejection of a “brilliant physician” (27). More recent works, like Louise W. Knight’s Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (2005) and Jane Addams: Spirit in Action (2010), Victoria Bissel Brown’s The Education of Jane Addams (2004) and Eleanor J. Stebner’s The Women of Hull House: A Study in Spirituality, Vocation, and Friendship (1997) situate Addams within her historical context and provide a more balanced approach to analyzing her undeniably inspiring life work with her privileged position and relative blindness to issues of race. 79 Maurice Hamington also implicitly acknowledges Addams as an author of literature, although he is more concerned with reclaiming her as a philosopher. He challenges readers to think of Addams as writing in both the romantic and realist literary tradition (30). 146 traditional gender roles. As Barbara Sicherman notes, “because of their subordinate position in society and their traditional consignment to the home, women more than men have had to learn about lives from books” (2). Addams’ realization that she wanted to learn from experiencing life itself is a mark of the changing role of women in the late nineteenth century, especially as the first generation of newly minted female college graduates decided what types of careers to pursue. During her second European tour she realized that her life, as defined by her literary and cultural pursuits, lacked meaning.

Addams then decided to “rent a house in a part of the city where many primitive and actual needs are found, in which young women who had been given over too exclusively to study, might restore a balance of activity along traditional lines and learn of life from life itself” (Twenty Years at Hull-House 55). As this quote suggests, the settlement house residents gained as much from their work as the neighbors using their services. Addams’ major critique of literature is that it allows readers to escape into a fantasy world and experience life only through others’ words, instead of their own experiences. She recognized this in Europe after watching a gory bull fight that fascinated her because of its adherence to “all the glories of the amphitheater” (Addams Twenty Years at Hull-

House 56). While her friends left because of its brutality, Addams took an academic interest in the fight because she had read so much about it in advance. Her desire to acquire cultural capital and connect life to what she has read blinded her to the violence of the encounter. Addams’ reaction is to solidify her plans for the settlement house instead of continuing as a “dupe of a deferred purpose” who relies on literature to provide experiences (Twenty Years at Hull-House 56).

147

The second stage of Addams’ relationship to literature took place once she established Hull-House. Although she rejected her own study of literature, she devoted herself to bringing literature to her new neighbors in the slums. The first program enacted at the settlement was a “reading party” where Ellen Gates Starr performed

George Eliot’s “Romola.” This was followed by five consecutive readings of Hawthorne by their first resident, the former member of Brook Farm.80 Reading clubs soon became a key aspect of the Hull-House activities. Making literature more accessible to her neighbors reclaimed the value of literature for Addams since she was able to use it in a practical way, not just as an escape from the realities of social injustice. For example, she used Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860) in her lectures about Rome (Knight

Citizen 224).81 Through these lectures, Addams was able to use fiction to share concrete information about the world, a function she felt was missing in most higher education settings. At Hull-House, literature itself became a social action through the reading groups designed to provide culture and entertainment to the lower socioeconomic class.

In fact, when Addams and the Hull-House residents finally wrote a mission statement in

1895, culture was key to their purpose in the neighborhood. They wrote that the mission of the settlement was “to provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to initiate and maintain education and philanthropic enterprises; and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago” (336). The workers could read literature without having it obscure reality because they came to it with their own unique

80 Residents of Hull-House lived in the settlement, while neighbors had their own homes in the tenements surrounding the house. Becoming a permanent resident involved a lengthy trial period and a house vote. 81 See Susan S. Williams’s “The Photography of Travel: Reading The Marble Faun” in Confounding Images: Photography and Portraiture in Antebellum American Fiction (1997) for a discussion of how this novel was not only used for “textual sightseeing,” but literally functioned as a guidebook for tourists (148). 148 perspective and combined their appreciation of it with manual labor. While young college students may be blinded to the real world and hide behind their books, the threat of literature rendering real life meaningless was not relevant for the neighbors who came to Hull-House.

Though Addams devoted herself to bringing high culture to her working class neighbors, it is impossible to ignore how her upper class upbringing influenced her changing conceptions of literature and culture. As biographer Louise W. Knight notes,

Addams maintained a belief in a type of evolutionary process that suggested that “those who had read the best literature and acquired a higher, universal, selfless ethic were superior to those who had not” (Citizen 222). Her desire to bring canonical literature to the working class can easily be interpreted as an attempt to meld them into a middle-class ideology. Despite their idealistic views and the fact that the reading clubs were largely successful, books also had the potential to divide the residents of Hull-House from their neighbors. For example, shortly after beginning the settlement, Ellen Gates Starr took a course in bookbinding with the intention of making literature more accessible. However, after returning to Halsted Street she realized that her neighbors were unable to afford the high quality books she learned to bind (Stebner 88). At this point in the Hull-House daily life, Addams and the upper class reformers were devoted to bringing high culture to the workers. However, the settlement residents staunchly believed that “art and literature and music were the best instruments for cutting across class and reaching into the universal human experience,” an experience that transcends the bounds of the middle class and creates a community formed by cultural pursuits (Brown 236). The idea of neighbors in

149 the nineteenth ward creating their own art or literature was yet to be realized by Addams in the second stage of her relationship with literature.82

In the final stage of Addams’ relationship to literature, she realized that her neighbors were capable of creating their own culture. Hull-House opened a museum to display the art work and industrial activities of the different nationalities represented at the settlement. Neighbors like Hilda Satt Polacheck wrote plays to be performed by the theater troupes. Though Addams admitted that she still did not have much time to read works of fiction for purely entertainment purposes, her attitude towards literature became less negative because she was able to recognize how it can be a vivid reaction to life instead of a way to avoid reality. While she used literature as a form of escapism in her early life, Addams now realized that it served to capture the life experiences of those around her. Her experiences at Hull-House and increased exposure to the lives of the poor and how they embraced literary arts encouraged her changing perspective. The complex relationship between life, stories, gender, and class became evident to Addams when she first heard the tale of the Devil Baby who supposedly visited Hull-House.

The Devil Baby story is perhaps the clearest example of Addams recognizing the voices of her female neighbors and their ability to create a literary culture of their own.83

82 Knight also notes that Addams could have been a fiction writer based on her prose style. When writing about Addams’ Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1910), Knight claims, “Addams’ voice here is that of the novelist she might have become” (Jane Addams: Spirit in Action 157). 83 For a discussion of how Addams used her lectures and sociological writings to give a voice to working women, see “Feminist Pioneer” in Maurice Hamington’s The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams. Hamington interestingly posits that Addams was engaged in standpoint theory and believed that “recognizing alternative standpoints was necessary for promoting lateral progress through sympathetic understanding” (56). Although he is relatively unconcerned about Addams’ place in the literary canon, Hamington’s observation can be read in light of women authors’ use of sympathetic identification throughout the nineteenth century. 150

Addams related the tale of the Devil Baby in slightly revised forms in The Second Twenty

Years at Hull-House (1930), The Long Road of Women’s Memory (1916), a brief statement in the American Journal of Sociology (1914), and an article in the Atlantic

Monthly in 1916. In The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, she apologized for constantly repeating the story, but claimed that “it gives a certain aspect of life at Hull-

House which nothing else so adequately conveys” (50). For Addams, life at Hull-House is defined by stories by women. The Devil Baby Hull-House saga, which ultimately lasted six weeks, began when three Italian women come to the settlement searching for a baby that looks like a small devil that they heard was being sheltered by Addams. The devil baby reportedly had “cloven hoofs, pointed ears and diminutive tail; the Devil Baby had, moreover, been able to speak as soon as he was born and was most shockingly profane” (Addams The Second Twenty Years 50). The Italian version of the story held that a pious Italian girl married an atheist who had torn a holy picture from their bedroom wall, claiming that he would rather have a devil in the house than the religious image. As punishment, she gave birth to a devil child who chased his father until the baby was caught and brought to Hull-House. The residents at the settlement apparently tried to baptize the child, who was unable to touch holy water and ran across the pews of the church to escape. Jewish women shared a slight variation, saying that a father of six daughters claimed that he would rather have a devil in the family than another girl, causing his wife to give birth to the devil baby. This story, often repeated, became representative of Addams’ time at the settlement. Although Addams soon grew annoyed at the many visitors trying to see the baby, she was fascinated by the old women who

151 began and circulated the tale. She ultimately realized that the story was the women’s attempt to protest the unfair treatment they received at the hands of their husbands, and their subjugation in the slums.84 Addams notes that the story “exhibited all the persistence of one of those tales which has doubtless been preserved through the centuries because of its taming effects upon recalcitrant husbands and fathers” (Addams

The Second Twenty Years 63). The Devil Baby story emerges as a literary narrative, more specifically, a form of legend told by working class women whose voices take center stage in order to protest their subjugation.85 By claiming that the Devil Baby story is representative of Hull-House, Jane Addams overhauls her youthful assumption that literature is too detached from everyday life to be useful and showed how working class women can create stories that ultimately protest their experiences in the slums.

Noting the literary tone of Addams’ work, Katherine Joslin claims that “Addams sets on her stage a polyphony of voices from the Chicago streets, those of charity workers, immigrants, laborers, and tenement dwellers. Her writing, as a result, often has the look and sound of fiction” (61). Though most of Addams’ work is read as sociology or, more recently, philosophy, she directly stated that the Devil Baby story is a form of literature, more specifically, a genre of literature defined by working women. In her closing analysis of it she defines literature as exhibiting universal experiences and says

84 For a discussion of how this story also establishes Addams’ theory of memory as an identification tool to relate to immigrant women, see William Duffy’s “Remembering is the Remedy: Jane Addams’s Response to Conflicted Discourses” (2011). 85I refer to the Devil Baby story as a form of literature because that is how Addams conceptualized it. For Addams, literature served a social function because it spoke to common experiences relatable to all people. However, it is perhaps more accurately defined as a legend, a type of folk narrative that “focus on a single episode, an episode which is presented as miraculous, uncanny, bizarre, or sometimes embarrassing” (Oring 125). 152

“this mission may have been performed through such stories as that of the Devil Baby for simple, hardworking women who at any given moment compose the bulk of the women in the world” (Addams The Long Road of Women’s Memory 43). This statement also concludes the Atlantic Monthly article. The story becomes a fictional account that is able to bind together people of different socioeconomic classes because of its origins in the working class and its discussion of universal themes of family relationships and spirituality. Addams noted that the story does not reach the newspapers until five weeks into the saga at Hull-House, yet visitors continue to come based only on the telling of the story by older women in the community (The Second Twenty Years 52). The multiple layers of sharing this story makes it a complex narrative told first by the working women, then by the newspapers, and finally by Jane Addams with the voices of the women. The story becomes a democratic form of literature because it is able to be shared in different voices with different audiences.

The story is also solidified as a form of literature because Addams treats it as such in her written accounts. After sharing the story, she performs a close reading of the text, analyzing its cultural significance in her neighborhood as well as the narrative. Her ultimate conclusion about the story, namely that it provides a way for the old women in the neighborhood to reclaim a voice and show that men who are cruel to their wives are punished, is important, but even more important is the literary weight she gives the tale in her analysis. By treating it as a text deserving of a close reading, Addams solidifies the idea that the elderly women in her neighborhood are capable of creating literature.

Addams also makes the story literary by constantly quoting literary references in her

153 analysis of it. She directly cites Euripides classical play “Medea” (first produced in 431

BC), Robert Browning’s “Paracelsus” (1835), and several other unreferenced quotes throughout the story, alongside the voices of the women in the neighborhood. “Medea,” which tells the story of a woman betrayed by her husband, is referenced in Addams’ text as merely another female voicing the wrongdoings against her.

By quoting these diverse sources alongside each other, Addams elevates the declarations of the women to the level of more established authorial voices. Making sense of literature through using more literary references is a classic analytical move; however, it also displays her changing relationship with the literary canon. As Louisa W.

Knight points out, Addams was a youthful devotee of Emerson, who is inextricably linked with the transcendentalist call to create a uniquely American literary voice that rejects the European tradition. Her constant references to other authors are a direct assault on his claims that “imitation is suicide” and “Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare,” even as it elevates the women’s position in the literary canon

(Emerson 134). Addams may need to draw on literary references to understand the tale, but the women do not need to in order to create it. While Addams notes that the story

“might have been fashioned a thousand years ago,” it emerges as a tale uniquely positioned in a moment where elderly women needed to make their voices heard in the settlement house and broader community (The Second Twenty Years 51).86

86 The idea of marginalized individuals being the most capable of creating a uniquely American form of literature is not a new one. Many critics argue that slave narratives were the first authentically American expression of literature. 154

The story also performs the unique function of bringing together individuals of different socioeconomic classes. However, it ultimately begins with the elderly women.

Addams states that “during the weeks of excitement it was the old women who really seemed to have come into their own, and perhaps the most significant result of the incident was the reaction of the story upon them. It stirred their minds and memory as with a magic touch, it loosened their tongues and revealed the inner life and thoughts of those who are so often inarticulate” (The Second Twenty Years 54). The story provides a voice for women who are often silenced and its circulation provides them a level of power in their community. While it is the old women who begin the story, using it as an example of what can happen when men are abusive, people of all socioeconomic classes become invested in the tale of the devil baby. Addams states that people come from the city and the suburbs to see the devil baby in person. Visitors included “persons of every degree of prosperity and education, even physicians and trained nurses,” who, of course, claimed professional interest in the tale (Addams The Long Road of Woman’s Memory 8).

The tale binds together people of diverse experiences and socioeconomic classes, all presumably meeting at the Hull-House in a shared interest in the story. The settlement house, because of this story, again becomes a meeting ground for people of different social locations.

While the majority of the lectures and reading groups were intended for their

Halsted street neighbors, the Devil Baby story provides an opportunity for the upper-class to visit the slums and meet with the workers. In this way, the story becomes another opportunity for both literary and touristic slumming, since the story transmitted by the

155 poor ultimately draws the rich to the working class neighborhood. The upper-class individuals who come to Hull-House seeking the Devil Baby are motivated by the inherent voyeurism of the slumming experience. They hope to vicariously experience a shocking and profane abnormality not unlike what was found in the ghetto brothels catering to a rich audience. However, once the upper-class comes to the tenements, they immediately become the audience for the women to share their story. Instead of showing them the lurid entertainment usually highlighted in slum tours, the Devil Baby narrative educates privileged readers/listeners about the exigent issues facing women in working class neighborhoods.

The story also becomes an opportunity for women to collectively gather in order to air grievances against the men in their lives. Addams collects the stories the women share about their abusive husbands and sons in her published accounts of the tale, showing that the experiences of the women are not uncommon. Even more importantly, like the three elderly Italian women who initially come to see the Devil Baby, the story telling creates a space for women to gather together to share their experiences under the guise of their interest in the Devil Baby. The men in the community recognize the potentially subversive effect of the women gathering together to tell their stories and to share the wrongs committed against them. Addams writes that “the legend exhibited all the persistence of one of those tales which has doubtless been preserved through the centuries because of its taming effects upon recalcitrant husbands and fathers.

Shamefaced men brought to Hull-House by their womenfolk to see the baby, but ill- concealed their triumph when there proved to be no such visible sign of retribution for

156 domestic derelictions” (The Second Twenty Years 63). The men may initially triumph because there was no Devil Baby, but the fact that the women continued to circulate the stories of their abuses questioned their patriarchal power. The story of the Devil Baby itself becomes secondary to the stories of the women that emerge from the narrative.

As Charlene Haddock Seigfried points out, the Devil Baby narrative ultimately surfaces stories about the women that show the difficulties of poverty and the abuses they suffered throughout their lives. The Devil Baby story “loosens their tongues,” but the stories they share do not ultimately seem empowering. The women tell tales of being abused by their alcoholic husbands, ignored by neglectful sons, and having their daughters succumb to prostitution because their husbands refused to move out of the ghetto. One woman explains that her face has had a “queer twist” for sixty years after she watched her father stab her mother to death. Another confesses that she had fourteen children, and the only two who grew to adulthood were killed in the same factory explosion (Addams The Long Road of Woman’s Memory 11). While the picture they paint is grim, their collective voices show their resilience in the face of their poverty.

Though husbands and children may be absent, in jail or dead, they have survived to tell their tragic family tale, inherently implicating those responsible, like violent men and a brutal factory system. Telling their stories to Addams and the rest of the Devil Baby visitors, and having Addams record them in her published works, allows them to share a narrative of survival that would be otherwise ignored. The fact that many women refused to believe that the Devil Baby did not exist shows their persistence to their ideals. The

Devil Baby story and the women’s reaction to it ultimately confronts two universal fears:

157 the fear of abandonment, as it is transmitted by elderly women who feel ignored in their community, and the fear of poverty. The women telling the story of the Devil Baby and their life experiences managed to survive in the face of both of these debilitating factors.

The story that emerges from the Devil Baby is ultimately one of survival in the face of oppression through the coming together of a community of women in order to share their experiences.

In her study of nineteenth century women’s relationship to reading, Sicherman states that “for all her criticism, Addams never rejected literary culture. How could she, when it provided ideas and a vocabulary with which to develop her own insights into class divisions, democracy, and the role of art and literature in human experiences?”

(137). While I agree that Addams never rejected literature despite her fraught relationship with it, it is important to acknowledge how she continually worked to expand access to literature and eventually recognize the ways the working class could create an alternative literary culture of their own. The different stages of her relationship with literature tell the story of her attempt to overcome the class privilege haunting her life’s work in the slums of Chicago, privilege she could only justify through granting that the working class was as literarily savvy as the upper-class residents of Hull-House. This ability of the working class to record and create literature is expanded in Hilda Satt

Polacheck’s memoir I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl.

The Worker’s Voice: The Literary Life of Hilda Satt Polacheck

The story of Hilda Satt Polacheck exemplifies the symbiotic relationship between

Hull-House residents and their neighbors and shows how working class settlement

158 neighbors created a literary culture of their own. While Addams shows the utopian potential of literature to connect people of different socioeconomic classes, Polacheck’s work exhibits possible tensions in Addams’ project, particularly the idea that the neighbors at Halsted Street gained their appreciation for high culture from Hull-House.

Polacheck’s memoir and contributions to the Federal Writer’s Project also shows the importance of working class immigrants translating their own experiences into text.87

The fullest account of her life is portrayed in I Came a Stranger. Given the birth name

Hinda, Satt came to Chicago from Poland in 1892, when she was twelve, and soon changed her name to the more Americanized Hilda. After the death of her father in 1894, she dropped out of the public school and went to work at a local knitting factory with her sister. Polacheck first visited Hull-House with a friend for a Christmas party in 1894 or

1895. Despite her initial misgivings about attending a Christmas celebration as a young

Jewish woman, Polacheck was immediately enamored of the settlement and Jane

Addams, whom she describes as having “kind, understanding eyes” and as being the second person to make her feel welcome in America (52).88 Polacheck gradually grew more involved in Hull-House activities, taking literature classes and eventually teaching an English class of her own. Despite the fact that she had to drop out of school after fifth grade, in 1904 she attended the University of Chicago after being recommended by

Addams, where she studied English literature, German, and composition. On her application, Polacheck listed Hull-House under the education section, underscoring the

87 See Werner Sollors’s anthology Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature (1998) for a discussion about the importance of language politics regarding the immigrant experience in America. 88 The first is her school teacher. 159 role it played in helping her pursue intellectual growth. Growing more confident in her literary ability, she went on to write and produce a theatrical version of Leroy Scott’s The

Walking Delegate at Hull-House. Though the volume of her writing decreased after her marriage to William Polacheck and the birth of her four children, she remained active in the labor reform movement and eventually worked for the Federal Writers’ Project after her husband’s death in 1927. Before her own death on May 18, 1967, she wrote a memoir of her life, I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl. It remains the only complete account of a neighbor woman’s experience at Hull-House.

The publication history of I Came a Stranger shows how class issues continued to define the Hull-House legacy. Polacheck wrote her autobiography in 1953, after the demise of Hull-House as Addams envisioned it.89 The celebrated Hull-House physician,

Alice Hamilton, agreed to write the introduction, but no publisher was interested in documenting the life of an “obscure woman.” Instead, they suggested that Polacheck write a biography of Jane Addams. Polacheck revised her account to add more information about Addams, and decided to end the memoir with Addams’ death in May

1935, but was still unable to find a publisher. Although Addams and Hull-House residents were committed to providing a space for their working class neighbors to establish their own voices and talents, more people were interested in Addams’ own

89 After Addams’ death in 1935, Hull-House began to emulate the ideals of the social work profession, which often focused on offering aid and job skills without the time to develop reciprocal relationships with working-class neighbors. The new “Jane Addams Hull-House Association” claimed to be the current version of Addams’ project. The association had forty sites around Chicago with the goal of improving “social conditions for underserved people and communities by providing creative, innovative programs and advocating for related public policy reforms” (see www.hullhouse.org). Unfortunately, Hull-House formally closed its doors in January 2012 due to a lack of funding. However, volunteers continue to maintain many of the Chicago programs. 160 legacy. Discouraged, Polacheck gave up on the idea of publishing her memoir. After her death, family members pieced together different copies of her work and finally published

I Came a Stranger in 1989, when the voices of immigrants and “obscure women” were more valued. 90 I Came a Stranger is dedicated “In Humble Gratitude to the Memory of

Jane Addams to whom I Came a Stranger.” While the influence of Addams is still an important aspect of the text, as suggested by the title and dedication, the focus of the memoir is on Polacheck’s own growing appreciation of literary culture and how it was enmeshed with her social consciousness.

While Polacheck’s admiration for Addams is clear, the memoir is actually a chronicle of the growth of her appreciation of literature and high art, and how it is entwined with her increased involvement in social reform movements and Hull-House.

Hull-House provides a stage for this intellectual growth, but is not necessarily responsible for it. In my analysis of Polacheck’s work, I suggest that her appreciation of literature is encouraged by the settlement house movement but that her writing shows the development of a unique literary voice inspired by her own experiences and concerned with issues of socioeconomic class tensions. Though she appears to espouse many ideas of the middle-class residents of the settlement, she does not blindly assimilate their values. Polacheck remains committed to the working class and works to reclaim the experience of immigrant women in her narrative. Her retelling of the Devil Baby story is

90 See Lynn Y. Weiner’s introduction to I Came a Stranger for a complete discussion of its publication history. 161 devoted to sharing the voices of the immigrant workers and how they sometimes challenged the vision of literary culture created by Hull-House residents.91

Significantly, it is Polacheck’s involvement in the labor movement, not Hull-

House, which spurs her desire for literature. Polacheck first begins to thirst for intellectual stimulation after she is fired from her knitting job for speaking at a union meeting, an event that takes place when she is in her teens. At this point in her life, she had attended the Christmas party at Hull-House but was not yet involved in their activities. After she is released from her job, she spends the day wandering around

Chicago. Though she passes some time at Marshall Fields department store, what really interest her are the cultural opportunities the city offers. She ends her day at the Chicago

Art Institute and the public library. Polacheck views this as a turning point in her life, stating, “I began to rebel against a life that offered only food and warmth and shelter.

There were all those books in the public library, and I wanted to read some of them” (60).

While she was living near Hull-House, she had not yet participated in any of their cultural activities when she decided that she wanted to continue her education. The union meeting she attends causes her to realize the unfair working conditions that do not allow time for literature and culture. When she is fired, she has the leisure time, at least for a day, to explore the cultural offerings of the city. The factories of the late nineteenth century were a shocking departure from the utopian factory system imagined by the

Lowell corporation in the 1840s. Women workers were no longer encouraged to combine manual and intellectual labor in order to become more well-rounded citizens.

91 It is important to note that Polacheck’s retelling of the Devil Baby story is not found in her memoir, although she discusses her work in the WPA. 162

Polacheck is only able to recognize her need for literary culture by leaving the factory system.92

It is her own interest in literature and art that draws her to the museum and public library, not the urging of a middle-class settlement worker. When she returns home from the library, Polacheck realizes that she must find a job to help support her family. She takes another factory position, but is more critical of working conditions after her involvement in the union meeting that originally caused her to lose her job. Furthermore, her desire to read and pursue academic work has not diminished and leads her to use the resources available to continue her education. Her desire for culture and fair working conditions grow together. At the factory, she begins to read novels by Bertha M. Clay, a purveyor of sentimental romances. These novels were passed around by the women working in the factory and served the function of providing a form of escapism.

Polacheck notes that “the first Bertha M. Clay book brought a sort of glow. For a little while I could forget cuffs” (63).93 However, she soon realizes that “the only difference in

[Clay’s] books was a change of name and locale” (63). Polacheck’s first access to literature is provided by the other female workers, but she soon identifies the novels as too formulaic with little literary value.94 In fact, in her memoir she claims that she does not remember the titles of any of Clay’s work. One novel which is concerned with “an elegant lady, dressed in silks and satins and laces, who was having an awful time with her lover” particularly does not speak to Polacheck's own life experiences or the necessity of

92 As Upton Sinclair demonstrated in The Jungle (1906), Chicago’s factory system was particularly brutal. 93 See Jan Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984) for a discussion of how twentieth-century romance novels also serve as a form of escapism for women readers. 94 Of course, sentimental literature can also provide valuable insight into the culture. The formulaic plot seems to be Polacheck’s primary concern in this passage. 163 making enough money to provide for her family (63). While the books may be entertaining, they provide little intellectual stimulation and are difficult for workers to identify with, or perhaps appear trivial compared to the more exigent concerns of surviving the factory system.95 Like Addams, Polacheck’s first phase of her relationship with literature shows her that literature has to be socially useful in order to be valuable.

Literature must be applicable to real life in order to be meaningful for Polacheck. She also rejects reading literature for entertainment purposes only. Polacheck then decides to visit Hull-House after a “particularly boring day at the factory” because she hears that they provide literature classes and she wants to continue her education and gain access to more books (63).

Hull-House is often critiqued for its method of distributing high art to its neighbors. Critics suggest that the residents of the settlement were indoctrinating the workers with literature and art that matched their own middle class values, not the interests of the immigrant neighbors. However, Polacheck’s narrative tells a different story. Jane Addams is not responsible for her desire for literary pursuits and does not provide her with a method for determining the value of literature. Polacheck determines the standards of literary value herself. A middle-class charity worker, like Addams, does not tell her that Bertha Clay’s novels are predictable and sentimental; she makes the

95 Though Polacheck is unclear about the title of the text, I assume she is referring to Charlotte M. Brame’s work. Brame (1836-1884) was an English author who wrote romances for working class audiences. Interestingly, Bertha M. Clay was also the pseudonym of John Coryell, an intimate of Emma Goldman. Goldman calls Coryell a person of “advanced ideas” who was one of her “dearest American friends” in her autobiography, Living my Life (1931) (335-336). While Coryell was primarily interested in health issues, it seems odd that a close friend of Goldman’s would ignore issues of labor in his texts, which leads me to the conclusion that the real author of the referenced works is Brame. Coryell also wrote the popular Nick Carter series and gave most of his large profits to those in need (Goldman 336). 164 distinction on her own. Addams does not go to her house and recruit her for Hull-House reading clubs. Instead, Polacheck decides to visit Hull-House out of the desire to continue an education that was necessarily thwarted by her family’s needs. Polacheck remains in charge of her own intellectual pursuits, which are eventually aided by Hull-

House activities but do not originate with them.

It is Polacheck’s ability to combine her factory work and intellectual pursuits that leads to her future success. Addams immediately takes Polacheck to the Labor Museum when she visits Hull-House. The Labor Museum was one of the settlement’s most successful undertakings. It showcased manual labor like weaving, knitting, woodwork, and spinning, and exhibited the value and history of these skills. By suggesting that this skilled manual labor was an art, the Labor Museum attempted to forge bonds between the immigrant parents accomplished in this work and the children who often looked down on their older family members who did not speak English. After her tour of the museum,

Polacheck is invited to learn to weave, and immediately produces a small Navaho-style blanket, again highlighting the cross-cultural interactions taking place at Hull-House.

Before Polacheck is introduced to the literary pursuits of Hull-House, she first gains an appreciation for the manual skills showcased at the Labor Museum, something she particularly valued because of her concern about working conditions in the factory.

Hull-House is the site of Polacheck’s introduction to formal literary study, but she soon takes control of her educational pursuits. She joins a literary club and the “daily monotony of making cuffs was eased by thinking of these books and looking forward to evenings at Hull-House” (67). At the club, she reads “Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, Louisa

165

May Alcott, Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, and many others” (67). Interestingly,

Alcott is the only American novelist that Polacheck acknowledges, again highlighting the importance of cross-cultural interactions at the settlement house. However, Polacheck quickly moves from studying literature to leading her own literary group, named the

Ariadne Club. Under her leadership, the club becomes an ideal site of melding the study of literature and the pursuit of social reform issues. Though Polacheck is not actively involved in any social reform movement at this time, she encourages club members to write about “the collection of garbage, grand opera, clean streets, single tax, trade unionism, and many others.” While these topics were undoubtedly influenced by Hull-

House projects, the literary club members discuss them on their own terms, giving themselves a voice in current political conversations. They debate questions like “which is mightier, the sword or the pen? Should women be allowed to vote? Which is stronger, the desire for fame or riches?” (94). These subjects show the combination of social reform and high art that was central to the project of Hull-House. The community attempted to increase access to culture to the working class, but also to advocate for positive social change in the slums of Chicago. Polacheck notes that the subjects were influenced by the actions at the Hull-House, but the club is independently led by the

Halsted Street neighbors, not settlement residents.

The literary club also shows the direct correlation between the study of literature and increased social awareness. While doubts about the social function of literature plagued Addams throughout her life, Polacheck accepts as a fact the premise that studying literature can lead to concrete social change. In other words, Polacheck is quick

166 to embrace the final stage of Addams’ relationship to literature and immediately views it as a powerful tool for people of all social locations because of its ability to enact ties of sympathy. At one club meeting, she shares her review of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which is her first introduction to slavery. Polacheck is shocked and horrified that “people could be bought and sold on the auction block; that children could be taken from parents; that fathers could be sold, never to see their families again” (94). The book review leads to a discussion about racial issues that lasts well into the night and is continued at the next meeting. Many club members admit their ignorance about the current discrimination facing African Americans, especially since there were few black residents of the neighborhood at this time.96 The discussion leads to a greater understanding of racial tensions. Polacheck notes that many residents of Halsted Street were also afraid to pass a Chinese laundry because they were told that the owners would come out with a long knife and kill people walking by. The discussion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is extended to various current discriminatory practices and afterwards Polacheck realizes that she is

“being cured of this disease of intolerance” through her reading and book discussions

(95). While Addams was concerned that reading literature blinded people to issues of injustice, novels serve as a way to introduce these issues to Polacheck’s literary club.

Though she went on to work at a book publishers and as a playwright before her marriage, once Polacheck moves to Milwaukee with her husband she seems less interested in pursuing literary knowledge. Polacheck describes her time in Milwaukee as

96 Most scholarly accounts of Hull-House suggest that Addams primarily sought to work with the immigrant community, overlooking the multiple reforms organized by African American activists. Mary Jo Deegan’s “Jane Addams on Citizenship in a Democracy” (2010) seeks to correct this popularly held view, arguing that Addams was involved with African American activist work. 167

“years of a good life; years of love, fulfillment, and service” (160). At this point, Jane

Addams and Hull-House largely disappear from her narrative. Instead of writing, though,

Polacheck uses the organizational and cultural skills she honed at Hull-House to become an active member of her community, hosting writers and lecturers like Carl Sandburg and chairing the Peace Committee of the National Council of Jewish Women. She becomes an important social force in her neighborhood and is considered a cultural expert because of her constant presence at plays and operas and because her new neighbors know about her involvement in the theater and literary clubs at Hull-House. Polacheck also devotes a chapter of her memoir to her involvement in the suffrage movement. Although she does not go into much detail in her narrative, Polacheck aligns herself with the more radical

National Women’s Party, led by Alice Paul, an alliance that Addams never formed. She is also involved in the Socialist party. The broader understanding of the world and social issues that she attained through reading books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin are used for a social purpose, Addams’ ideal use of literature. However, Polacheck expresses disappointment in herself for putting her family and community work before her writing.

When Addams reassures her during a rare visit that “one baby is worth a dozen books,” she is expressing her own philosophy of literature, not Polacheck’s (149). For Addams, the material work of literally and figuratively raising the nation’s children and providing for their needs overshadowed artistic labor, which she still feared could be used to distract people from more pressing social issues. Polacheck consistently placed a higher value on literature, tracing her own social consciousness in relationship with her literary pursuits.

168

Polacheck’s Revision of the Devil Baby Story

When her husband died in 1927 and the Great Depression hit two years later,

Polacheck turned again to writing in order to support her family. The Federal Writer’s

Project, a program enacted to employ out of work writers during the economic downturn, hired Polacheck to interview the men and women of her neighborhood and she ultimately wrote down the Devil Baby story on April 13, 1939 as part of the Folklore project. At this point, Addams had already published the story four times, in nationally read periodicals and in successful books. Polacheck was familiar with Addams’ rendition of the story and even cites it in her work, which contains similar language to Addams’ text.

However, she still felt the need to write down the story in her own words after spending time interviewing her neighbors for the Folklore project. Polacheck’s revisions of the tale shows her confidence in her writing and an understanding that the story needed to be told from the perspective of the Halsted Street neighbors themselves. Bridget K.

O’Rourke notes that Polacheck’s first-hand accounts of life on Halsted Street have a credibility lacking in much Hull-House writing because of her position in the neighborhood.97 As a Jewish woman from a working class neighborhood, her social location contextualizes the story in a way that Addams cannot. The Devil Baby narrative is rooted in women’s understanding of marriage, motherhood, and religion, social positions largely outside Addams’ personal experiences.98 Polacheck’s own family background serves as a personal connection to the story that allows her to share it with a

97 See O’Rourke’s “Hilda Satt Polacheck and the Urban Folklore of Hull-House Settlement” (2002). O’Rourke omits a discussion of the Devil Baby Story. 98 Addams had a complicated relationship with religion. She refused to make a public declaration of her Christian faith at Rockland Seminary, although she was constantly pressured to do so. Eventually, she joined a church in Chicago but did not make organized religion a key part of Hull-House culture. 169 different perspective than Addams. In the Jewish versions of the Devil Baby story, the child is born a fiend because fathers reject daughters in favor of sons. I Came a Stranger begins with Polacheck saying, “I have been told that there was great consternation in the family when I was born. There were no boys in the family at the time, and I was the fourth daughter to arrive” (1). She goes on to note the grandiose celebration in the family when a son is finally born. The story of the Devil Baby speaks to Polacheck’s own experiences in a way that Addams is unable to grasp. Indeed, the overall tone of

Polacheck’s writing is more sympathetic than analytical. While she briefly cites

Addams’ close reading of the story, she focuses instead on the experiences of women without giving a sociological perspective on the underlying issues the story surfaces.

Addams’ version of the Devil Baby Story shows her growing understanding of letting the voices of her female neighbors speak for themselves. However, she is unable to resist commentary on their words and actions and occasionally belabors their victimized stance in the neighborhood. Her account surfaces the grievances of the elderly women in the neighborhood but describes them as “pitiful” and in need of understanding and assistance (15). Polacheck resists much of this commentary and focuses on including more stories of the origin of the Devil Baby. Unlike Addams’ account, she includes multiple renditions of the Jewish version of the tale, and an Irish version. The stories are organized by nationality and the moral derived is for children, not about the function of elderly women in the community.

The lesson for the children is the necessity of maintaining a connection to the community’s native culture. The stories that Polacheck includes and Addams omits warn

170 against rejecting religious or regional traditions and losing a connection to the past. One version reads, “there is a law among orthodox Jews that if a husband dies and does not leave any children his widow must marry his brother, if there is one, or get a special dispensation from the Rabbi. The story concocted by one old woman was that a young widow married a man without getting the dispensation. When first child was born, it was the Devil Baby.” Another version states,

the law decrees that if a first child is a son, and his father is not a Cohan, or the child's maternal grandfather is not a Cohan, that the child must be redeemed by the payment of any sum of money to the Rabbi, one month after the birth of the child. The story in this instance was that when the Rabbi asked the young mother whether this was her first child, she said yes. But the mother was really concealing the fact that she had given birth to an illegitimate child. When her next child was born, it was the Devil Baby.99

Both of these versions are unknown or omitted by Addams and show Polacheck’s knowledge of Jewish tradition and concern about losing ties to the past.100 The women in these stories are not victims of men, but are punished for willfully going against religious traditions that are often forgotten in America. Polacheck herself often accounts for times when she did not keep kosher or failed to observe religious holidays, but also notes that she tried not to write or work on the Sabbath and showed respect for her mother’s religious traditions. The Devil Baby stories she includes show the implicit fear of immigrants of losing a religious identity in the new world. Addams never fully understood the nuances of the cultural traditions surrounding her, which is perhaps unavoidable given the many nationalities represented on Halsted Street and her own

99 A Cohan is a priest. 100 It is difficult to discern whether Addams purposely omitted the stories or did not have access to them. Either way, their absence is significant considering how many times Addams retold the Devil Baby story in print. 171 social location. In her memoir, Polacheck recounts the pride Addams expressed for serving the family kosher chicken, not realizing that the butter, coffee creamer, ice cream, and cakes she also served were not kosher (126).101 This example, along with the stories

Addams omits, shows the difficulty of the settlement house workers in understanding and fairly representing cultures outside of their own experiences. Polacheck’s correction of

Addams’ elisions adds more women’s voices to the Devil Baby story and shows its concern with religious traditions.

Another story that Polacheck includes and Addams omits suggests the first generation of immigrants’ mistrust of the high culture shared with their children at Hull-

House. In this version a Halsted Street neighbor claims that “her daughter and a friend who was about to become a mother had gone to the opera Faust. The daughter had told the mother all about the devil in the opera. She was sure that the expectant mother had looked at the devil too intently, and when her baby was born, it was the Devil Baby.”

The daughter’s exposure to the opera house is ultimately punished when she gives birth to the Devil Baby. Her attention to and eager description of the opera results in an evil child, insinuating that the next generation, overly concerned with upward class mobility, will be even more corrupt. The children of immigrant families often expressed annoyance with their parents’ refusal to engage in the cultural offerings of Chicago, a phenomenon noted in both Polacheck and Addams’ writing. In this story, cultural pursuits are ultimately dangerous, exposing the daughter and baby to the force of evil.

101 Danuta Romaniuk also notes this example in “How ‘The Other Half’ Eats: The Cultural Significance of Foodways in an Urban Context as Reflected in the Writing of Jewish Americans” (2010), stating that reformers often tried to control the diet of immigrants and were uneducated in regards to kosher laws (37). 172

Addams would understandably want to omit a story that blames the kind of cultural pursuits shared at Hull-House for creating a Devil Baby, but by including the story

Polacheck shows the difficulty some families had in understanding the lure of opera, theater, and literature for the younger generation. As Addams feared, as a purveyor of middle-class high culture, Hull-House may have played a role in the division between the generations.

Hull-House is also vaguely critiqued in the final story that Polacheck shares, an anecdote that Addams also relates but in a different form. In this account, an elderly woman from the poorhouse convinces a bartender to give her ten cents for the streetcar fare to get to Hull-House to see the Devil Baby. She is motivated by the idea that she will be the center of attention for weeks at the poorhouse, constantly asked to give a description of the baby to the other inmates. The residents delay telling her that the baby doesn’t exist because they know how disappointed she will be. Addams does not give an account of her reaction and ends the story with “her misshapen hands lying on her lap fairly trembled with eagerness” (13). However, Polacheck goes on to note that “it was a crushing blow when she was finally told that there was no Devil Baby. She sat for a while mumbling to herself. Then we took her to the street car, gave her a little money and sent her back to the poorhouse.” The failure of Hull-House to satisfy the curiosity and emotional needs of the old woman is indicative of its inability to ever completely meet the needs of all the residents of the community. Polacheck’s entire account ends with the old woman going back to the poorhouse, a sign of the at least partial failure of the settlement house mission. The woman is still alone and poverty stricken and the little 173 money the settlement can provide will not dramatically change her life. Class boundaries have not been crossed and the cultural offerings of Hull-House do not compensate for the dire poverty facing the residents of the slums. While Addams’ account leaves the woman in a state of anticipation, thinking her desire to see the baby might still be gratified,

Polacheck follows the story to the bitter end.

I Came a Stranger ends with Polacheck briefly referencing the work she did for the Federal Writer’s Project and then giving a more detailed description of Addams’ death and funeral. When discussing the Devil Baby story she states that, “I do not know what became of the things we wrote. They were filed and forgotten” (177). Immediately after she claims that her own writing was forgotten, she discusses Addams’ many admirers, suggesting that her work will not suffer the same fate. Of course, she was right.

Though critical interest in Addams lagged during the 1950s-1980s, Twenty Years at Hull-

House has never been out of print while Polacheck was unable to see her own work published during her lifetime. Her rendition of the devil baby story was mislabeled in the

Federal Writer’s Project records. Though Polacheck’s rendition of the Devil Baby story is cited at the end of I Came a Stranger, it has not been reprinted or analyzed by scholars.

Portions of Polacheck’s WPA writings are published digitally by the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. Due to an indexing error, the Devil Baby story does not show up in the digital edition. The manuscripts reference librarian sent me a digital copy of

Polacheck’s transcription, which is labeled “Little Grandmother,” a different story, after I sent in a request. The difficulty in accessing Polacheck’s work may explain the lack of

174 critical attention to her writing.102 However, Polacheck’s writing is worthy of study in its own right, not just as an account of Hull-House from a Halsted neighbor’s perspective.

While she claims in the last line of her memoir that Addams “belonged to all creeds, to all races, to humanity,” Polacheck herself belonged to an important subset of American culture, a self-made writer able to tell the story of working-class immigrant life at the turn of the century from her own perspective (178).

Conclusion: Swallowed and Digested

As the Chicago Woman’s Club member quoted at the beginning of this chapter noted, Jane Addams’ attempted plunge into downward social mobility seemed odd in the face of gilded age politics as many individuals were concerned with acquiring and keeping wealth. Addams’ reaction to the toad story shows the reality of her choice to engage in a process of downward social mobility. After the clubwoman warns against people living where they do not “naturally belong,” Addams notes that her greatest desire is to, like the toad, “be swallowed and digested, to disappear into the bulk of the people.”

She goes on to say “twenty years later I am willing to testify that something of the sort does take place after years of identification with an industrial community” (Twenty Years at Hull-House 197). Addams’ writing and the voices of the female workers that emerge in her text are another example of attempting to disappear in the bulk of the people. As she notes, “something of the sort” may have taken place, but as Addams’ and Polacheck’s

102 When I Came a Stranger was published, several academic journals reviewed it. Most cited it as a useful rendition of the immigrant experience, but it is rarely referenced in scholarly articles or books. As previously mentioned, O’Rourke’s article discusses Polacheck’s experience at the WPA but does not reference the Devil Baby story, possibly because it was mislabeled. 175 competing versions of the Devil Baby story show, it is nearly impossible for a woman of privilege to completely disappear into the bulk of the people, just as it is difficult for anyone to fully comprehend representations outside of her or his own lived experiences.

Nor is it necessarily desirable. Addams’ unique position of a middle class woman living in the slum helped create a community of women who were able to work together beyond class lines, even if she was unable to fully understand or accurately represent the lives of her neighbors. She did not need to write their lives. As Polacheck showed, they could share their own experiences whether through written or orally transmitted stories.

Addams’ slumming tendencies seem so illogical that even critics today seek to explain them in a way that fits with the broader American ideology of upward social mobility. Katherine Joslin suggests that “Jane Addams preserved the sacred myth at the heart of American culture: the upward mobility of the individual. In the process of reinvigorating the myth, she told, in essence, two stories-one about herself and the other about her Halsted Street neighbors. For the little girl who was rich to begin with, mobility had nothing to do with money; rather, she moves upward in moral growth”

(107). Joslin’s attempt to replace financial success with moral growth suggests American culture’s need to constantly be striving for some sort of upward mobility. While Addams may have acquired spiritual growth during her time in the settlement, this moral mobility does not ignore the material realities of her choice to live in the slums and use literature to create a community of women across class lines. The stories that she told are important; they shed light on the politics of socioeconomic class and literature’s role in the settlement house movement. However, her stories also show the need for working- 176 class voices like Hilda Satt Polacheck, whose lived experiences in the slum portray a different vision of the role of class, art, and the settlement house movement. Read together, Addams and Polacheck’s stories show the complicated relationship between art and life for women who attempt to use literature to create community beyond class lines.

177

Chapter Four: The Hobo New Woman and Communities on the Road

“The Hobohemian life begins by breaking ties. First with the family and then the community. It ends by severing all associations with static people and roving over the face of the earth. The hobo thus becomes not only a ‘homeless’ man but a man without a cause, without a country, without, in fact, any type of responsible associations.” –Frank O. Beck

“Pull up a log and have a seat. When the light of the hobo fire shines on your face, you will become a part of our community!” –Steamtrain Maury, 21st Century Hobo

Episcopal minister Frank O. Beck claimed in Hobohemia (1956) that the process of becoming a hobo required breaking ties with the family and community, then eventually leads an individual to eschew any affiliation or personal relationships (76).103

Most scholarly studies of itinerant life portray it as a uniquely individual experience and suggest that the homeless were, and are, predominately-male isolated rebels or social outcasts. These studies also tend to homogenize the homeless into one group. While hoboes, tramps, and bums were often lumped together in critical studies as solitary social deviants, “hoboes” self-identified as individuals who wandered and worked, while

“tramps” were mobile but didn’t work, and “bums” neither wandered nor worked.104 Far from being insulated individuals, the itinerant population, which I define as tramps and

103 Beck regularly interacted with the Chicago Hobohemian community, making his study particularly useful even though his privileged position as a respected minister influenced his interactions with the hobo community. Each chapter of his text explores a member of the Hobohemians, a loosely defined group of the homeless, anarchists, and political radicals. Oddly, his text ends with a chapter praising Jane Addams. 104 I adhere to the term “hobo” throughout my chapter since it is the language used in my primary sources. 178 hobos, formed its own alternative communities on the road or by gathering at hobo jungles, which were camps where they could rest and share stew and stories. As

Steamtrain Maury’s quote suggests, hoboes create communities based on interpersonal relationships and the equal distribution of resources, ultimately building a family on the road that alludes to but transcends the biological family and home. His reference to pulling up a log and sharing a fire conjures up images of cozy domestic scenes represented throughout American literature.105 The fact that this scene takes place at a hobo camp rewrites a familiar narrative to draw attention to issues of socioeconomic class inequality.

In fact, itinerant women and men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century often created communities during their travels, sometimes as a survival mechanism as they joined together to engage in manual labor or solicit food and shelter.

While hoboes are often represented as solitary male wanderers, female hobo narratives show how women create female-centered alternative communities throughout their travels.106 In this chapter, I analyze women hobos’ creation of alternative communities in the early twentieth century, looking specifically at two of the only published narratives about female hobos, The Adventures of a Woman Hobo (1917) by Ethel Lynn and Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha (1937) by Ben Reitman. Both of these

105 Interestingly, Hawthorne also begins his description of Blithedale with a discussion of the “cheery blaze upon the hearth” of the utopian community in The Blithedale Romance (9). 106 For first person representations of male hobo life, see Josiah Flynt Willard’s Tramping With Tramps (1893), Jack London’s The Road (1907), Glen H. Mullin’s Adventures of a Scholar Tramp (1925), and Dean Stiff’s (Nels Anderson) The Milk and Honey Route: A Handbook for Hobos (1930). Nels Anderson, a friend of Reitman and part of the Chicago School of Sociology, also wrote the first academic studies on hobo life, including The Hobo (1923). A collection of his research on hoboes was recently republished as On Hobos and Homelessness (1998). 179 novels privilege the voice and experience of the female hobo by telling the story in first person. As women hobos, Ethel and Bertha use their narrative voice to shed light on pressing social concerns regarding women’s roles and socioeconomic inequality in

American culture. However, their experiences on the road are very different, which is expressed through the overall tone of the two novels.

While both of these works were published during the literary era of modernism, they adhere to generic conventions of sentimental and sensational literature respectively, which were popular literary forms throughout the nineteenth century. The Adventures of a Woman Hobo provides a searing social critique, but through the voice of a highly respectable female protagonist who constantly espouses her moral and religious values.

The plot varies dramatically from nineteenth-century sentimental fiction, which would rarely portray a woman so completely rejecting the middle class home. While female protagonists in most sentimental fiction found power in the domestic sphere through their roles as sisters, mothers, and wives, Ethel, the main character is The Adventures of a

Woman Hobo, eschews the traditional home through the communities she creates on the road. However, Ethel extends sentimental fiction’s ideals by remaining the moral center of the text but wielding her influence over a broader group. Sister of the Road, however, portrays shocking accounts of vice and extra-marital sex to titillate readers, and presumably sell books to aid Reitman’s precarious financial situation. His writing style mirrors the sensational texts popular throughout American literary history that allow their audience to vicariously experience dangerous situations and non-traditional forms of sexuality. Though their styles differ, both novels use the adventures of the protagonist to

180 highlight concerns about class inequality and show how female hoboes build alternative communities on the road.107

Though the other alternative communities analyzed in this dissertation were located at a specific physical place, the hobo communities in these novels were mobile, like the hoboes themselves, and constantly changing. As the most alternative community analyzed because they are shifting and disengaged from a specific space, they are ultimately the culmination of all of the other alternative communities I explore. The hobo communities completely unsettle traditional visions of gender and socioeconomic class status. However, like the examples in previous chapters, literary representations of these communities show how they form based on shared experiences rather than biology.

These communities also shed light on cultural anxieties regarding the ability of marginalized individuals to attain socioeconomic class mobility. As liminal spaces rejected by mainstream society, the hobo communities provide the ideal setting for social critique.

It is important to explore the representation of hobo women of this era because the character type also surfaces America’s concerns about changing gender roles, specifically in regards to the emergence of the New Woman of the late nineteenth century. Though the division between the public and private spheres was always fluid, by the end of the century women moved more directly from the home to become active in the workforce.

Representations of the New Woman emerging in literature and popular culture often

107 Obviously these are not novels regularly discussed in the academy. However, literary scholarship has already proved the importance of analyzing non-canonical texts. Popular fiction, like sentimental and sensational texts, often highlights the values and concerns of its historical era. See David Reynolds’ Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (1988). 181 showed her to be white, college educated, employed in the public sphere, socially mobile, and eventually more open about her sexuality. Caroll Smith-Rosenberg concisely calls her a “symbol of disorder and rebellion,” a definition that could also be applied to the itinerant population (247). New Women and the itinerant both eschewed social standards and drew attention to inequalities regarding gender and class privilege. Revising the New

Woman ideology to include working class women expands our understanding of shifting gender roles in this era by considering how this figure was conceptualized by women who already rejected the traditional home and needed to work to support themselves.

The era of the hobo was also the era of the New Woman; however, literary representations of the latter often elide issues of socioeconomic class inequality while representations of the former showcase them. In the following pages, I argue that the hobo narratives I explore represent female hoboes as a type of New Women who highlight interlocking cultural concerns about changing gender roles and socioeconomic class mobility in America as they form alternative communities on the road.

The Hobo Community and the New Woman

Hobo women who dared to create a life on the road were considered threatening to conventional society because they rejected the idea that women should remain in the domestic sphere and challenged the importance of the biological family by creating alternative communities. Though data is subjective because of the difficulty of getting an accurate count of itinerate workers and wanderers, Richard Wormer suggests that 1 in

200 hoboes were women before the stock market crash of 1929 and 1 in 20 after (113).

Female hoboes were especially difficult to count because many researchers assimilated

182 them into the category of sex workers, highlighting the incorrect belief that all women who rejected the traditional home were sexual deviants (DePastino 13). Though the

New Woman became a central figure during this era, popular gender conventions still confined white middle-class women to the home while men had more freedom to seek adventure in the public sphere. Discontented men were encouraged to “Go West” and sow their wild oats in an attempt to find material prosperity when their home towns became economically unstable, especially after the depression of 1873. As Ethel Lynn notes in The Adventures of a Woman Hobo, female itinerates were often castigated by the middle class men and women from whom they sought assistance. They were less likely to be given jobs, and more likely to be reported to local police authorities. Women drawn to the road also had to face the very real threat of sexual abuse in the sometimes seedy underworld of hobo life. These threats led to a smaller population of women hoboes, but did not stop women from taking to the road.

Hobo women were not the only ones flouting convention during this era in

American history. Just as the hobo was a threatening reminder of socioeconomic class inequality, the New Woman was a figure who challenged social mores and demanded recognition of changing gender roles, although she is often problematically characterized as white and middle class. 108 The term “New Woman” was coined by author Sarah

Grand in 1894. As Martha H. Patterson notes, “the phrase could signal a position on

108 For more information about the New Woman, see Ann Heilmann’s New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (2000), Jean V. Matthew’s The Rise of the New Woman: The Women’s Movement in America, 1875-1930 (2003), Martha H. Patterson’s Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895- 1915 (2005), Lyn Pykett’s The “Improper” Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (1992) and Charlotte J. Rich’s Transcending the New Woman: Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era (2009). 183 evolutionary advancement, progressive reform, ethnic assimilation, sexual mores, socioeconomic development, consumer culture, racial ‘uplift,’ and imperialist conquest”

(2). The definition of this character type was constantly in flux, making her especially unsettling to many who feared that her presence in American culture would lead to the breakdown of the traditional home and biological family. Like the hobo woman, the New

Woman challenged assumptions about gender and class mobility as she proved that women could be independently socially mobile. However, while the New Woman character tended to elide discussions of socioeconomic class when appearing in literature, the hobo woman focused on the issue (Heilmann 59). Lynn Weiner suggests, “especially before the 1930s, the female tramps who chose to defy sex role conventions symbolized a criticism of cultural mores as great as any other presented by women of that time”

(171).109 Weiner also points out that women who travelled from city to city in search of employment, usually at a factory, were also considered a type of transient labeled

“women adrift,” although ones who could be re-immersed into society if they eventually married and settled down (179).110 The New Woman was also a woman adrift, suspended in a liminal space between social conventions and her new role in the public sphere. It was difficult for the American public to define both the female hobo and the New

Woman. Reading the hobo as a New Woman complicates the definition of this character type to include a critique of socioeconomic class inequality and recognition of the difficulty of achieving upper class mobility.

109 Weiner identifies both women tramps and hoboes as “women adrift” and uses all three terms throughout her essay. 110 This definition would include the female laborers at the Lowell factories in the mid-nineteenth century, who would have certainly objected to being labeled tramps. 184

While the era of the New Woman was the 1890s-1920s, Richard Wormser suggests that the hobo was most visibly present in American culture from the end of the

Civil War to the beginning of World War II (1). During this time, men and women displaced by the Civil War and unsettled by the depressions of 1873 and 1893 wandered

America looking for temporary work. Some scholars claim that Civil War camp life created the social context for hobo jungles and their mobile culture (DePastino 17). The hobo phenomenon increased in the late-nineteenth century as railroad growth reached its peak and individuals could jump trains and quickly traverse the countryside. Though train jumping was extremely dangerous, it formed the foundation of hobo culture by providing access to transportation and the setting to form a mobile hobo community.

While some hoboes were protective of boxcar space, many welcomed newcomers and used their travel time to exchange stories and advice about hobo life.

Hobo jungles also provided the setting for the creation of hobo communities and were often represented in fiction as alternative communities similar to the utopian projects of the nineteenth century explored in Chapter One. Todd DePastino describes hobo jungles as utopian spaces where people could tell stories and form bonds, although they were constantly threatened by outside forces (70). While there were still ethnic, racial, and gender barriers in the hobo community, many descriptions of the jungles suggest that they were spaces where most travelers were welcomed. Removed from traditional social expectations, the hoboes in the camp created a community where labor was shared. Everyone who could contributed food to the common “mulligan stew,” a soup combining ingredients gathered by the hoboes which was then shared with all jungle

185 residents. If a community member did not have food to share, the individual could take over cooking or cleaning up after dinner. Also creating community, “hoboes and tramps often sang songs and recited poetry in a jungle gathering. There was a rich tradition of songs and poetry in the hobo/tramp world. Many hoboes knew the poems of Kipling and

Tennyson by heart. Harry Kemp, probably the most famous of the hobo poets, always carried a volume of Keats’s poems with him when he traveled” (Wormser 42). Though they were considered social outcasts, hoboes were able to discuss literature and poetry along with strategies for survival, unsettling class boundaries by appropriating upper and middle class culture. 111 Perhaps so many itinerant women and men were well read because their respect for literary ability was linked to their survival. Tramps and hoboes relied on their storytelling abilities to get food and prided themselves on their skills.

Soliciting aid often depended on creating a believable narrative that inspired sympathy in their audience. Their knowledge of literature perhaps encouraged their own storytelling ability.112

By highlighting how the New Woman hobo sheds light on anxieties regarding gender and socioeconomic class mobility, my discussion provides an alternative to the

111 In fact, hoboes even appropriated the formal education becoming highly valued during this era. In 1913, Michael C. Walsh and Irwin St. John Tucker re-opened the Chicago branch of Hobo College, an educational center for the homeless population, and turned over management duties to Reitman. The Hobo College phenomenon was originally started by James Eads How, the “Millionaire Hobo” who rejected his family’s upper-class lifestyle in favor of the tramping life. How used his inheritance to fund branches of the institution throughout America, although the Chicago center was the largest organization. Hobo College stationary claimed that it was a “service station, clearing house, and educational institute for homeless men. A laboratory for the study of unemployment and all other factors that tends to make men ‘down and out’” (Bruns Knights of the Road 177). Students at Hobo College could take classes on philosophy, religion, and literature as well as panhandling, venereal diseases, the rights of itinerates, and vagrancy laws. Guest lecturers included professors from the University of Chicago as well as self- identified hoboes. 112 Concurrently, authors appropriated the idea of the tramp in their own literature. Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad (1880) discusses his travels around Europe. 186 individualization of hobo culture in contemporary scholarship and the focus on male subjects. It also recognizes the challenges of attempting to avoid a romanticization of hobo life. Most studies about nineteenth and early twentieth century hobo life tend to view the culture as a progressive departure from Victorian morality and the stifling expectations of the middle class. Though critics like Wormser, Roger Bruns, and most recently, Todd DePastino and Mark Wyman, all identify the dangerous and traumatic aspects of hobo life, their work remains focused on the ways hoboes helped build

American society.113 Their careful scholarship provides the foundation for my own work and gives voice to a group often marginalized in literary and historical studies. As Eric

Schocket warns, though, a too-sympathetic analysis of the poor may hinder social change by fetishizing their lives and ignoring the structural inequalities creating their situation

(32). As he states, “we like to like the poor” because it allows us to feel sympathy about social injustices and reaffirms our own privileged position (10).114 However, “liking the poor” is a problematic critical stance when analyzing hobo narratives because it combines them into a homogenous group and impedes a careful reading of their lives and how they critique social inequality in American culture. This is an important recognition before beginning my analysis. Hobo women’s position as homeless places them in a more precarious socioeconomic class position than any other characters or individuals I

113 Interestingly, most of the scholarship on hobo life has been written by men and focused on the male tramping experience. See Roger A. Bruns’ Knights of the Road: A Hobo History (1980), Richard Wormser’s Hoboes: Wandering in America, 1870-1940 (1994), Todd DePastino’s Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (2003) and Mark Wyman’s Hoboes, Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West (2010). Some exceptions are Stephanie Golden’s study of homeless women, The Women Outside (1992) and Lynn Weiner’s “Sister of the Road: Women Transients and Tramps” (1984). However, Golden’s study focuses on late-twentieth century homeless women, not hoboes. 114 By “we,” Schocket refers to those analyzing poverty, particularly through viewing photographs or other images. 187 analyze in the rest of my dissertation, and recognition of this fact is necessary before discussing what these literary characters represent.

I share the previously mentioned critics’ admiration for the hobo community’s survival strategies and agree with their overall claims about the hobos’ importance in

American society. My choices of novels to analyze suggest that I also share the critics’ class bias through my own investment in portraying an affirmative hobo culture. Though

Adventures of a Woman Hobo and Sister of the Road are the only female hobo narratives

I found in my research, I did omit a reading of The Adventures of a Female Tramp (1934) by A. No. 1 (Leon Ray Livingston), a sensationalist itinerant author who claimed to write from his own experience.115 My omission of this work is in part due to the fact that the story is concerned with female tramps instead of hoboes, but also because of the degrading portrayal of women in the novel. However, I believe it is important to temper the positive portrayal of itinerant life by recognizing, at least briefly, the realities of poverty in the community. The factual recording of the daily life of a homeless woman would probably not garner a large reading audience. The texts I analyze use literary devices like building suspense and creating colorful characters to appeal to the reading public. Because this is ultimately a literary analysis, I focus on what cultural concerns about gender and class mobility the female hobo characters represent, not the accuracy of

115 The Adventures of a Female Tramp tells the story of Nellie Gordon, who is seduced into a wandering life by her lazy husband. During her time as a tramp, she has to completely reject her family and comfortable middle-class life to cross-dress and eventually abandon her baby. After her husband’s death, she settles down and eventually is reunited with her adult son. The novel primarily serves as a warning against the dangers of life on the road and what happens when women reject the traditional home. It also tells the story in third person, while the texts I analyze highlight the female hobo voice by giving a first person perspective. This is another reason it is less useful in my study. Another narrative, Born in Captivity: The Story of a Girl’s Escape (1931) by Barbara Starke (pseud.), is not discussed because Barbara is also considered a tramp, not a hobo. 188 their portrayals. The experiences of Ethel and Boxcar Bertha may not be indicative of the average female hobo. Their characters make a choice to embrace the hobo community while many others were forced into it for economic reasons. Because of this, it is important to address the material realities of hobo culture in order to understand its precariousness before considering what Bertha and Ethel’s experiences represent. The very term hobo obscures the fact that the men and women were homeless and often at the mercy of cold, hunger, and hostile citizens. While the original definition remains unknown, there are many explanations of its meaning. The Latin terms homo bonus, which means “good man” has been offered as a definition of hobo, as has the French term hautbois, which literally means “oboe” but was used to describe wandering troubadours.

Others claim that it is an abbreviation of the common greeting “hello brother” (Wormser

11). The various meanings assigned to the term “hobo” suggest the multitude of ways they were interpreted during their era and today. It also highlights the focus on the male hobo experience.

These definitions intellectualize hoboes by connecting them to a rich cultural history of romantic wandering experiences. Many itinerant narratives embrace the intellectualism implicit in wandering life by portraying themselves not as homeless victims but intelligent women and men who reject an American society that increasingly exploited workers. Glen H. Mullin’s Adventures of a Scholar Tramp begins each chapter with a quote from a literary text and discusses the reading habits of men on the road. In

The Milk and Honey Route, Dean Stiff (Nels Anderson) notes hobo’s natural love of learning (121-122). These texts point out that working women and men during this era

189 labored for ten or more hours a day and barely made enough to survive, while hoboes reject capitalism, have leisure time for cultural pursuits, and work when needed or beg for food and are provided for. However, hobo narratives were written by a wide variety of individuals, many of them middle class or sociologists interested in slumming. Their representation of hobo life is meant to provide social commentary on class inequality, not necessarily give an accurate portrayal of the culture. Even authors who actually identify as permanent hoboes have somehow been able to embrace authorship and are not necessarily representative of the larger community. It is important to understand the material realities of poverty along with the potentially empowering freedom of the hobo community in order to fairly analyze its literary representation.

It is this tension between the critical and literary tendency to romanticize the hobo experience and its material reality that makes the narratives of female hoboes especially important to analyze because they offer an incisive social critique about gender and class inequality. The representations of women hoboes like Ethel Lynn and Bertha Thompson surface the threats of hobo life as well as its possibility to challenge lines of class division and create alternative communities on the road. Likewise, as symbols of “disorder and rebellion,” the New Women hoboes also raise the threat of socially mobile women who challenge middle-class values.

“Remember What You Are”: Ethel Lynn’s Life on the Road

Josiah Flynt Willard’s memoir of itinerant life, Tramping with Tramps (1893) was widely read when it was published and is cited by critics today as one of the first detailed descriptions of life on the road. Although it focuses on tramps, not hoboes, it provides

190 useful background information for understanding the representation of socioeconomic class mobility, community formation, and gender in itinerant culture. Willard, who was born into a middle class family, was fascinated by the wandering life and spent his formative years experiencing it first-hand. His aunt, Frances Willard, was the most influential leader of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, an organization devoted to ending alcohol use in America, and his untraditional habits were a source of embarrassment for his middle-class family. Willard’s life, and his memoir, show the permeability of class in the itinerant culture as he disguised his class position and fully immersed himself in life on the road.

Tramping With Tramps also provides a useful introduction to interpreting women’s place in itinerate culture because it exhibits how hobo women create alternative communities but also how they are marginalized in this genre. Like most hobo and tramp narratives that followed, Willard’s text primarily focuses on representing middle class, not hobo, women. He portrays middle class women as easy “marks” who are solicited by the itinerant because they are more likely to provide travelers with meals and clothes than their male counterparts. The middle class women are kind and sympathetic, disrupting class boundaries by inviting Willard into their homes and listening to his (often fabricated) tales of woe, again suggesting how this culture was romanticized by those outside of it. Though this appears to position these women as naive and gullible, the tramps and hoboes exhibit respect for those who provide them services. Their insertion into the middle class home creates a cross-class alternative community on the road,

191 although a fleeting one.116 Willard also notes that middle class women used their interactions with travelers to gain access to life outside of the domestic sphere, speaking to the emerging role of the New Woman. The tramp and hobo stories connect women to the broader society beyond their families and allow them to vicariously experience life in the public sphere. Moreover, by providing meals and clothing for the itinerant, women are able to take on the role of producer, often exhibited by their husbands. In their everyday lives, most of the women confined to their homes needed to ask their husbands or fathers for money or services. Their interactions with the itinerant give them the power to provide these services themselves. The eagerness to extend aid most females portray in late nineteenth and early twentieth century hobo and tramp narratives speaks to the resistance middle class women felt against their confinement in the private sphere. These cross-class interactions were often mutually beneficial because they allowed women to try on a new social role even as they provided the tramps and hoboes the food they needed.

While it is important to note that middle class women played a role in popular tramp and hobo narratives because it exhibits the fact that gender is key to defining cross- class relationships and shows the emergence of the New Woman ideology, like most authors, Willard fails to fully explore female hobo life. Only one chapter is dedicated to

Old Boston Mary, a gypsy immigrant who embraced hobo culture for thirty years before settling down to open a shanty house way station that provides services for traveling

116 This is a theme many tramp and hobo authors commented on, most famously Jack London, whose narrative The Road (1907) shows his early attempt to experience life directly through train jumping across America. Like many realist and naturalist authors, London felt that this experience with poverty ultimately allowed him to more accurately portray the life of the marginalized in his writing. 192 itinerants. While her frequent mutterings of “bughouse, bughouse” suggest the common perception that this home is as unstable as she is, Mary is able to use the experience she gained as a hobo to relate to and care for the “knights of the road,” as itinerant men were referred to by their admirers.117 Mary essentially creates an alternative community for hoboes and tramps where they can gather for food and care before continuing their journey. However, Willard only defines this community by comparing it to a middle class home. Mary is considered “bughouse” (mentally unstable) by Willard, and her house takes on the characteristics of any comfortable middle class home as she “did everything she could to make her shanty comfortable and her guests happy” (Willard

326). She assigns each tramp or hobo a place to sleep and bandages their wounds after making them a meal. Mary’s shanty is an alternative community that meets the needs of its members, but Willard is only able to represent it in relationship to the traditional domestic sphere.

While Willard gestures towards the complex role of women in itinerant culture, he does not devote much time to representing female hoboes and focuses on middle class characters and immersing hoboes and tramps into the traditional home. Ethel Lynn’s The

Adventures of a Woman Hobo is one of the few itinerant narratives to portray a detailed representation of how women on the road are a type of New Woman and to discuss their ability to build alternative communities. Lynn’s presumably true text is written in the form of a diary account of her adventures traveling from Chicago to San Francisco after

117 The term “knights of the road” also shows the romanticization of the culture and the elision of the female hobo experience in nineteenth and early twentieth century vernacular and critical scholarship today. While the term elevates the homeless to a type of royalty, it completely ignores the possibility of female itinerants. “Knights” do not have a female counterpart. 193 her doctor informs her she needs to move west for her health. Her account shows some of the major issues facing female hoboes: the dangers of riding the rails (jumping trains), the difficulties of getting food and safe shelter, and the risk of sexual assault. More importantly, though she espouses her own respectability, Lynn’s narrative exhibits her unique ability to create an alternative community on the road and her implicit critique of traditional gender roles as she constantly symbolizes women’s ability to be independent.

She represents the female hobo as a New Woman, with agency to be mobile, find her own work, and define her identity on her terms. However, she expands the definition of the New Woman by offering a critique of socioeconomic class inequality in American culture.

In her position as a New Woman hobo, Ethel begins her journey with important advantages not readily available to many female itinerants. Even though she is a New

Woman, Ethel is married and spends most of her travels with her husband, Dan. While many female tramps and hoboes travelled with companions, often male, the fact that Dan and Ethel are married legitimizes their relationship within the value system of their middle class patrons. It also suggests that the families they form on the road begin with a traditional partnership between a wife and husband. Dan goes so far as to carry their marriage license with him to use as proof of their relationship when questioned.

However, Ethel challenges the traditional construction of marriage by forming family attachments with other women throughout her narrative and taking a leadership position in her relationship with Dan. While most New Women in the late nineteenth century were unmarried, believing that they needed to completely eschew the domestic in order to

194 be successful, Ethel represents the second phase of the New Woman who often sought to combine a career and family. As Patterson notes, early twentieth century representations of the New Woman often promised the potential of marriage and a family (37). The fact that Ethel is married does not preclude her from being a hobo New Woman. Instead, it adds another layer of complexity regarding her creation of alternative communities on the road.

Ethel’s educational advantages also shed light on the class disparity elided in most representations of the New Woman. Though they are very poor, Ethel is a doctor and Dan a master electrician, suggesting that they have a privileged formal education and professional identity not readily available to most hoboes.118 Comparing Dan and Ethel’s real and perceived class statuses shows the difficulty in defining socioeconomic class in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While they are highly educated, their inability to find work places them in a lower socioeconomic class position. People on the road perceive them as beggars and often treat them as such. As Burton J. Bledstein notes, the mid-nineteenth century found the middle class turning to a cultural of professionalism

118 Cathy Luchetti gives an overview of women’s entrance into medical schools in the chapter “Medicine by Degree” in Medicine Women: The Story of Early-American Women Doctors (1998). Though women have always practiced medicine in the home, they were not allowed entrance into medical schools until Elizabeth Blackwell was accepted into the Geneva Medical College in 1847. Luchetti notes that seventeen women’s medical schools and nine women’s hospitals were founded in America between 1848 and 1895, providing women with the ability to be formally educated in the medical field (21). By the early twentieth century, licensed female doctors were no longer an anomaly in American culture. However, women physicians were by no means common, making their literary representations important to study in relationship to the emerging New Woman. An estimated 3,500 women graduated from medical school by 1900 (More et. al. 2). By 1920, women still only accounted for 5% of practicing physicians in America (More et. al. 5). 195 in order to define themselves “without the support of a community” (ix).119 According to Bledstein, this culture focused on the individual’s ability to be socially mobile. During this era of economic instability and increased immigration, the middle class “found itself compelled to consolidate its social position and turned to professionalization to make itself indispensable to the new social and economic order” (Sartisky 264). This process of professionalism included college degrees and licensures and was a way to convey exclusive social and political power (Sartisky 264). Ethel’s and Dan’s training places them in a burgeoning class of professionals even as their inability to find work forces them into the hobo life, further complicating definitions of socioeconomic class status.

However, their reliance on creating community in order to navigate their time on the road sets them apart from the middle class culture of professionalism primarily focused on the individual. Lynn shows this process of professionalization to fail within an unstable economic system where even the middle class are unable to find jobs. Ethel’s precarious social location makes her a unique commentator on issues of gender and class. Through her creation of alternative communities, she ultimately challenges New Women to reconsider and redefine the culture of professionalism to consider the well-being of the community instead of just the individual.

Ethel’s profession places her as a New Woman, but her unstable class position suggests that even women’s increased access to the professions will not ensure financial

119 Burton J. Bledstein defines professionalism as “a culture-a set of learned values and habitual responses-by which middle-class individuals shaped their emotional needs and measured their powers of intelligence” (x). In regards to the burgeoning medical profession, Bledstein points out that by 1899, nearly all medical school programs were four years in length, as opposed to two years in 1875 (84-85). See The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (1976). Michael Sartisky also discusses how the process of professionalism applied to the emerging medical profession in his afterword to Doctor Zay. 196 stability. Ethel shows that while women’s entrance into the public sphere is an important step to equality, the unequal economic stratification in America needs to be corrected so that all can access a measure of success.120 Women in the medical profession proved that females could embrace respected work in the public sphere, but it was a career embraced mostly by the middle and upper classes.121 Ethel shows the instability of America’s class system by suggesting that even respected professionals like doctors can be unemployed and uses her hobo experiences to subtly critique the medical profession. Throughout the nineteenth century, the general philosophy of the medical profession “was to charge as much as the public would pay, and physicians actually banded together to crusade for less charity work and less public medicine because they feared that Americans with means would take advantage by viewing medicine as a free commodity available in public dispensaries and clinics to every person” (Bledstein 108). In opposition to this idea, as a

New Woman hobo Ethel embraces both giving and receiving charity and uses her skills to help women and children who live in the country and don’t have access to medical facilities. In this way, Ethel’s position as a New Woman doctor and hobo allows her to comment on the scenes of starvation, inequality, and greed she finds on the road, as well as prove the instability of America’s class system.

120 This era also saw the female doctor represented in novels like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ Doctor Zay (1882), William Dean Howells’s Dr. Breen’s Practice (1881), and Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor (1884) and The Country of the Pointed Firs (1910). 121 There is a wealth of scholarship on the emergence of women in the medical field. Ellen S. More, Elizabeth Fee, and Manon Parry provide a concise overview of current scholarship in the introduction to Women Physicians and the Cultures of Medicine (2009). Cathy Luchetti’s Medicine Women: The Story of Early-American Women Doctors (1998) traces the development of the field primarily by sharing case studies of individual female physicians. 197

Ethel solidifies her position as a New Woman by constantly mentioning the need for women’s rights throughout the text. Noting the ignorance facing women in rural poverty, Ethel claims, “if I had a daughter, I should see that she was fully equipped to become a self-supporting, self-respecting member of society, a woman who would not look upon marriage as the only possible solution to life’s problems” (Lynn 189). Ethel comments on women’s role in the domestic sphere and claims that women need to be educated and self-supporting, traits that she embodies. Moreover, Ethel also traverses the countryside on her bicycle, a popular image associated with the New Woman and her increased mobility.122 As Ellen Gruber Garvey notes, “the new mobility that bicycles offered was both attractive to feminists and the target of attack by conservative forces”

(7). The popularity of bicycles during this era spoke to changing ideas about gender and socioeconomic class. Bicycles provided transportation to the middle and working classes who could often not afford horses (Garvey 107). They also allowed women to travel the streets of the public sphere without male help or supervision.123 Although Ethel doesn’t directly state her identity as a New Woman, her independence and use of the bicycle serves the symbolic function of identifying her with this group.

The Adventures of a Woman Hobo begins with a challenge to the male medical profession and the traditional home. The appropriately named Dr. Graves tells Ethel that

122 For more on the bicycle and its association with the New Woman, see Patricia Marks’ Bicycles, Bangs and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press (1990) and Ellen Gruber Garvey’s The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (1996). Marks notes that the New Woman movement “may take as its emblem the two-wheeler” (175). Frances Willard, Josiah Willard’s famous aunt, gives a late-nineteenth century perspective on bicycling as a New Woman in A Wheel Within a Wheel; How I learned to Ride the Bicycle (1895). 123 Garvey also notes that critics of bicycles argued that they promoted masturbation in women, speaking to the concern of the New Woman’s increased awareness of her own sexuality. See Chapter Four of her study, “Reframing the Bicycle: Magazines and Scorching Women.” 198 she is in the beginning stages of tuberculosis, a diagnosis that she initially rejects by citing her strength and abilities, and that she needs to move west in order to preserve her health. As Joanne Hall points out, this opening appears to suggest Ethel’s lack of agency, even in the medical field (218). Ethel’s experience with the brusque Dr. Graves shows the need for women to take control of their medical treatment. She ultimately believes his diagnosis after a “still voice whispers” in her heart that it is true (7). This innate knowledge suggests an inner voice and connection to her own body that she can trust apart from the more rigid institutionalized medical practice.124 Social historians Barbara

Ehrenreich and Deirdre English both note that the professionalization of the medical field moved the power of medicine from the home, where women facilitated healing, to the public sphere where it became institutionalized by men to serve the upper class.125 The fact that Ethel is also a doctor, but initially goes to a male professional, suggests the difficulty New Woman had being accepted in the medical field. While this was a time in

America’s history where female doctors were emerging but controversial figures, Lynn primarily asserts her independence through her ability to freely travel as a hobo, not

124 Female doctors also often intervened in debates about the less traditional homeopathic medicine, a theme that is also present in Phelps’ Doctor Zay. 125Again, Michael Sartisky gives a useful overview of this debate in his introduction to Phelps’ Doctor Zay (267). Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English have contributed several studies regarding women’s role in the medical profession. In their early pamphlet, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (1973), they note that women’s medical practices have been most successful in working class movements (5). They state that “in the late 19th century the American public suddenly developed a healthy respect for the doctors’ scientific knowledge,” and moved the practice of medicine from the home to the public sphere of the professions (21). This conversation is continued in their following study, Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness (1973) and expanded in For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women (1978, 2005). 199 through her highly skilled and respected profession.126 Immediately after the doctor scene, Lynn abruptly switches from a brief assertion of her medical knowledge to a discussion of the poverty of the cities. Giving a description of the lives of those around her, she states, “months of idleness, a diet of bread and coffee, all the horrors of shivering nights in the open or in vermin-infested flop houses, the morning rush for the ‘help wanted’ pages of the daily papers, the standing in line for hours waiting to apply for a job-a hundred men for a single position-would these things not take the heart, nay, the very soul itself, out of a man?” (9). Ethel’s grim portrayal of daily life for those around her reminds her readers of the material realties of poverty. Although she interestingly only refers to men, her inability to find well-paying work aligns her with the mass of people trying to find jobs.

Ethel further rejects her privileged identity by trading in her opera coat for money to buy a discarded bicycle from a friend to escape the slums and move to California. The coat is clearly a luxury the working classes are unable to afford and suggests that high cultural pursuits like opera are a privilege only few can access. While she gives the rest of her items away to her working class neighbors once she decides to become a hobo,

Lynn sells this item because it still has material value to a middle class audience who has the time and money to appreciate opera. By trading it in to buy a bicycle, a symbol of the

New Woman, Ethel gives herself greater access to social mobility. Though inextricably linked to the New Woman, the bicycle also becomes a marker of her class identity.

126 Sartisky notes that the medical profession enjoyed increasing prestige in the late nineteenth century, suggesting “most social historians are in agreement that the success of the medical profession in attaining social prestige and consequently power was in fact virtually unrivalled by any other” (265). 200

Because “cycling is out of date,” the tandem bicycle is discarded by her wealthier friend

(15). Garvey notes that the “bicycle craze” ended around 1898, when the average cost of a bicycle dropped from $150 in 1890 to $10 (134). In Lynn’s narrative, bicycles can now be purchased by the poor because they have been rejected as luxury items by the middle class. While her friend presumably used the tandem bike as a form of entertainment,

Ethel and Dan use it for transportation. It first signifies downward class mobility as they become hoboes but ultimately allows them to improve their socioeconomic class position in California. As a marker of both the New Woman and socioeconomic class status, the bicycle is a complex symbol of mobility in the novel.

Ethel is the one who actually purchases the bicycle, taking charge of her family situation and persuading her husband to join her in her new adventure moving west.

When Dan expresses his disbelief, she states,

You’ll be glad enough to take your seat on a bicycle built for two as soon as I’ve explained my perfectly scrumptious scheme to you. We’ll fix up a light cooking outfit, tie our blankets on behind, and away we’ll glide out into the west. We’ll work along the way and have lots of interesting experiences; I’ll get rid of this tiresome cough, and after awhile we’ll get home--home, do you hear? Back to California” (17-18).

Ethel’s proposition sounds similar to that of many wandering tramps and hoboes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The call of the west appealed to many who believed economic security could be found on the frontier. Unfortunately, most who tramped their way west during America’s economic recessions found only more hardships, including the difficulty of finding work along the way. By the time Ethel and

Dan are ready to take their journey to California, the frontier had already been declared closed. Because they had already lived in California, their motivation is not the get-rich 201 scheme that motivated many western adventures. Their journey succeeds because they are ultimately searching for a home. As Annette Kolodny notes, American women historically “claimed the frontiers as a potential sanctuary for an idealized domesticity”

(xiii).127 However, while dreams of other generations of frontier women ended in a

“nightmare of domestic captivity” because they were still confined to the home, Ethel’s decision to reject the traditional home and form alternative communities throughout her journey allow her to escape this legacy (Kolodny The Land Before Her 9). Her definition of home becomes more complex during her trip because of her “interesting experiences.”

Because of this, Ethel’s hobo narrative is largely a story about the possibility of women using their new independence to create alternative communities through the shifting homes she finds on the road.

Dan and Ethel also have to go west because life in Chicago means death and disease. Their tenement life has none of Hull-House’s redeeming hope but represents the destructive trap of poverty. Before beginning their trip, Ethel recalls an example of a woman who dies of consumption in her husband’s arms because they are too poor to seek treatment, another critique of a medical profession catering to the wealthy and ignoring the poor. Ethel states, “before I go I want to see the open field, feel the soft earth beneath my feet, draw a few breaths of real air. Since I’ve lived in this slum I’m getting so I can’t even believe in God” (19). While the slum represents death, the open road is an

127 See Annette Kolodny’s The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630- 1860 (1984). Though her study ends in the antebellum period, it is a helpful conceptualization of women’s relationship to the west. Kolodny argues that fantasy allowed women to claim the west as an idealized community while men focused on conquering it. Kolodny’s earlier study, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (1975) is not specifically a study of the west, but provides useful background information about the “pastoral impulse,” the American desire to relate to the land as feminine, that informs her scholarship on the west. 202 opportunity to reconnect with nature and even God. The home they leave is not even considered a home or community; the slums are so alienating that everyone is focused on their own survival and Ethel has lost all faith. In order to survive both literally and spiritually, she must take to the road. The alternative communities she creates on her journey often valorize the rural landscape as the answer to the crowded, urban spaces that promote class division and social inequality, although she soon realizes that country life does not necessarily mean an escape from the trap of poverty.

After they begin their trip, Dan and Ethel first create an alternative community in a barn where a farmer provides them with food and shelter before inviting them into his home. The farmer’s wife is shocked to realize Ethel is a woman, stating, “dear me, dear me, a lady tramp! Bless us, if they haven’t gone to running in pairs like animals entering the ark” (36). The woman misidentifies Ethel, suggesting the relative ignorance of most middle class women in regards to the itinerant community. Because Ethel and Dan are willing to engage in manual labor like farm work, they are actually hobos, not tramps, who are mobile but don’t work. The farm woman retracts her previous statement and says that they must not be tramps since they are riding a bicycle (and presumably not the rails). She immediately expresses disappointment because she had always wanted to meet a female tramp, again suggesting how the culture is romanticized by those outside of it. For her, the tramp represents a sense of adventure she is unable to access. Like most middle class women in hobo and tramp narratives, she is more willing than her male counterpart to offer food and assistance to the itinerant wanderer. As previously stated, the itinerant often identified middle class women as easy marks eager to feed and house

203 those who appeared to be less fortunate. However, I suggest that the attraction to tramps and hoboes for middle class women went beyond sympathy. The itinerant represented the promise of mobility unknown to most women of the middle class. Though the hobo’s personal situation was actually quite precarious and dangerous, its freedom was attractive to women continuing to challenge their role in the home. As a New Woman hobo, Ethel represents women’s increased mobility, while the middle class benefactors who aid her journey are tied to their role in the domestic sphere.

Although focused on the home, the female hobo benefactress gives herself a degree of power by bestowing aid to the homeless. While traditional gender roles suggested that the men of the house were providers and the women consumers who purchased items with their husbands’ money, the role shifts during the hobo food exchange. In this interaction, the woman of the house can be the provider who makes and gives the needed resource (food) away to the tramps or hoboes, giving her a sense of power often denied to her. However, the threat that the hobo suggests about socioeconomic class barriers is also present during these interactions. For the farmer’s wife, this threat is personified in their conversation about chickens. This scene exhibits the class tensions raised within the larger narrative. The farm woman first says that the chickens are like humans, and in fact gives a class status and identity to all of the animals on the farm. This intricate community is the only one she has access to in her isolated rural life, and her pleasure in naming and defining them shows the narrow sphere of her influence. She directs one of the hens to “get right away from here, you impudent, upstart Dominick. Go back with the lower clawses (sic) where you belong and don’t try

204 to crowd in here with your betters” (37). This seemingly innocuous remark to the chickens is implicitly directed to Ethel, who appears to be attempting to cross class lines through her interactions on the farm. The New Woman hobo presents an implicit threat to the middle class because of her position outside of the domestic sphere. Although

Ethel makes friends with the farm woman and is invited into her home, the threat of the hobo’s class position is a barrier between them. This is further exemplified when the farm woman extends her barnyard parable, stating

There’s a hog over yonder. He’s stuffed so full he can’t swallow another mouthful, yet he keeps wallowing over the food so the shoats can’t get any, and they stand back and first one tries to get a bite and then another, when if they’d all rush him at once they’d get aplenty. When he grunts like that he’s telling them to be contented and industrious little pigs and that if they just started rooting early every morning, after awhile they’ll be eminent and respected like he is and able to wallow in the feed trough. And Father’s got the big kettle all ready, and Saturday he’s going to butcher him (Lynn 38-39).

As becomes clear throughout Ethel’s journey, the hog represents those in power, especially the rich who preach the American dream of upward class mobility by telling the workers that they will succeed if they work hard enough. As the unnamed farmer’s wife notes, if the workers organized they would be able to take on those in a position of power. In her example, though, the hog is about to get butchered whether or not he is challenged by others in the barnyard, suggesting that those in power are ultimately in an unstable position. While the fact that it is the Father, the woman’s husband, who will butcher him suggests the dominance of men rather than women in this potential uprising, the fact that the farmer’s wife is giving this commentary shows the ability of women to provide social criticism. Though Ethel is eventually invited into the farmer’s home and

205 treated as a family member, creating a cross-class alternative community, the implied threat of her position as a New Woman hobo is unsettling to the family.

The alternative community Ethel forms while jumping trains also exhibits the power of the working class and brings attention to issues of socioeconomic class inequality. During her first experience train jumping she meets fellow hoboes who impress her with their intelligence and incisive social critique. She states, “I was amazed at the mentality displayed by the smallest fellow, a member of the I.W.W. He seemed conversant with all the questions of the day and expressed in excellent language clear cut opinions on industrial subjects that were both novel and startling” (68). They form a small community on the train based on their similar experiences, sharing stories and information about life on the road. One man talks about how he continued riding the rails because he was unable to find a job to support the woman that he loves and raise a family. He claims, “wages are set for single men, I reckon. And after a bit a fellow can’t earn a living for his family, so the wife and kiddies have to rustle out and work. Easy enough for them to get a job” (70). The hobo’s alternative community on the train is a product of his refusal to marry and establish a more traditional home when he is unable to find a job to support a family. His monologue is really an outcry against the factory system Ethel and Dan left behind in Chicago that exploits women’s and children’s labor.

His rejection of the middle class home is necessary because he is unable to find the work to maintain it; however, he also raises concerns about the class inequalities evident within the current economic system. The unnamed laborer shows how the middle class home is denied to the working class because manual labor is not compensated with a living

206 wage.128 The alternative community on the train provides a forum for Ethel to discuss unfair working conditions in American culture.

Issues of labor and compensation become key as Ethel and Dan try to find work, also highlighting how the hobo New Woman has the power to showcase socioeconomic class inequality. Though common chores and manual labor are the primary type of work for itinerants, Dan eventually feels like these jobs are beneath him because he is a skilled electrician. He states, “ever since you were bit by the crazy bug and started out to be a lady hobo you have lost all your natural pride, Ethel. It was bad enough for me, a high- class electrical engineer with a paid-up union card, to stoop to the job of a common labourer (sic) as I did last week for your sake” (Lynn 73). Despite the reality of their situation, Dan believes his “high-class” position should preclude him from manual labor.

His admonishment that Ethel is “crazy” shows how New Women and hoboes were often disregarded by a society that explained away their challenges to social norms by suggesting that they were aberrances and his reference to “natural pride” suggests his innate feeling of class privilege based on his profession. However, as a New Woman hobo Ethel understands the instability of their class position. Ethel “cheerily” replies,

“the interesting hour of noon approachetch (sic). Will you please be so kind as to furnish me with exact information regarding your financial standing?...No doubt you can dine off your natural pride, served up on our paid-up union card, while I eat a dime’s worth of doughnuts or something” (Lynn 73-34). She has no qualms about doing manual labor,

128 While it is interesting that the laborer is unnamed, it is important to note that many characters in the novel are described by their personalities or professions rather than given a name. Ethel lists many different people that she meets on the road and seems unconcerned with naming them all. 207 even though she is a physician, because she realizes that even her privileged position as a

New Woman professional does not protect her from hunger or want. Dan and Ethel may be professionals, but they are still poor and in need of any type of job possible. Like many other women in America in the early twentieth century, professional or not, Ethel is willing to do any kind of work she can to support herself.

However, as soon as Ethel engages in manual labor, cooking a meal for a physician in town, Dr. Loane, she is subjected to the threat of sexual assault. This showcases the vulnerability of hobo women and how cross-class interactions did not always result in affirming alternative communities. Though Dr. Loane invites her into his middle class home, it is to exploit her, not form bonds of mutual understanding. Dr.

Loane believes that Ethel will be sexually promiscuous because of her position as a woman hobo, a charge often issued to New Women as well. When she resists his advances, he says, “you, you keep quiet now. Remember what you are” (77). Because of his perceived vision of her as a woman hobo, he assumes that she will not have the power or the resources to bring his assault to public attention. She is further dehumanized when he reminders her “what” not who, she is. This interaction shows the threat of sexual assault facing women on the road and the lack of respect afforded to working women.

The female hobo, like the New Woman, is assumed to be sexually promiscuous. This assumption allows her critics to ignore the threat she poses to social conventions by claiming she is immoral. Ethel disrupts these claims by resisting Dr. Loane’s advances and writing about them in her text. Like the sentimental heroines preceding her, Ethel’s face “grows hot” when she realizes Dr. Loane assumes she is sexually promiscuous. His

208 proposition is also never defined as sexual, as Ethel demurely notes that he invites her into his “private office” (76). However, she asserts her identity as a New Woman by resisting his advances herself and not informing Dan about the incident until after they are removed from Dr. Loane.

The fact that both Ethel and Dr. Loane are physicians is also another commentary on the medical professions’ exploitation of the working class, and the way the New

Woman doctor has the power to intervene in this problematic relationship.129 As medicine became professionalized in the late nineteenth century, doctors abused the poor by using their authority “both to rationalize the containment of the poor in the ghettos and to justify the freedom of movement of the middle class” (Bledstein 93). Physicians often suggested that the poor must stay confined in tenements in order to contain the spread of diseases like tuberculosis (93). While Dr. Loane represents the threat of physicians abusing their power over the poor, as a New Woman doctor with hobo experience, Ethel offers an alternative, compassionate vision of the medical profession. As previously discussed, Ethel witnessed firsthand the suffering of the poor in the tenements. Her entire

129 As Michael Sappol notes, the medical profession rapidly expanded in the nineteenth century and became a marker of bourgeois identity (2). The presence of physicians in both female hobo narratives analyzed in this chapter speaks not only to the rising inclusion of women in the medical field as New Women chose to enter the profession, but the implicit debt physicians owe to hoboes and other itinerants. Throughout the nineteenth century, the medical field was dependent on the bodies of hoboes for its research. “Anatomy Acts,” the first of which passed in Massachusetts in 1831, gave medical institutions access to the corpses of paupers and unclaimed bodies to use for dissection (Sappol 2). Supporters suggested that it provided paupers the opportunity to pay their debt to society and discouraged the use of public welfare. While members of the working and middle classes found the acts disturbing and worked for their repeal, the passages of the acts and the fact that the bodies of the itinerant were often stolen for medical schools shows the ways America’s medical knowledge was created through the exploitation of hoboes and the working class, not to mention people of color and the disabled (Sappol 3). Dr. Loane’s exploitation of Ethel implicitly references the way hobo bodies were constantly used to benefit the medical community. The sexual nature of his exploitation shows how the bodies of female hoboes were most at risk. 209 trip is motivated by a desire to regain her health in the country after it is destroyed by her time in the slums. Because Ethel is a New Woman hobo who understands the problem of poverty, it is possible that she will use her experience to help the poor, unlike Dr. Loane.

As a former hobo, she will enter her new profession in the west with a greater understanding of the problems facing the poor and homeless.130

After her disturbing interaction with Dr. Loane, Ethel goes on to meet many diverse, supportive farming families, often headed by women. She ultimately uses her experiences to connect other women across class lines and form alternative communities based on mutual aid. For example, Ethel informs upper class farmers about scenes of poverty she encounters in their village hoping that they will work to alleviate the suffering. In one scene, she encourages a rich woman to adopt a poor farmer’s daughter in order to educate her. Ethel’s goal is always to create female-centered communities.

Her diverse experiences prompt Ethel to try to define a good home. She states, “A good home. What is it? Food and shelter? Yes. But it is something more. Personal comfort, the exercise of individual taste in the choice of one’s intimate surroundings, the joy of ownership, the privilege of entertaining one’s friends, a sense of privacy, a certain liberty of habits-all these, added to that greatest of all great gifts, love, and the presence of loved

130 While the above mentioned sources argue that the medical profession was becoming increasingly prestigious during this era, John M. Barry notes that the American field of medicine continued to have lax educational standards for entering medical school. He suggests that as late as 1900, at least one hundred medical schools accepted any man who applied and that at most 20% of schools required a high school diploma (6). See The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (2005). Likewise, Paul Starr points out that many doctors before 1900 also struggled to make a living (7). However, medical doctors increasingly occupied a place of high social standing at the time the hobo narratives were published. For more information about the growth of America’s medical profession, see James H. Cassedy’s Medicine in America: A Short History (1991), Paul Starr’s The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982), and W. Bruce Fye’s The Development of American Physiology: Scientific Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (1987). 210 ones, make a true home” (102). Like Willard’s description of Mary’s house, this initially reads as a sentimental middle class definition of home, particularly in regards to the ideas of ownership and privacy. However, these two facets of home life were exploded throughout Lynn’s travels as she sold her possessions before her journey and rarely had privacy in the alternative communities she created on the road. The fact that Ethel apparently adheres to the middle class definition of the ideal home even as she creates alternative communities shows its dominance in America and is perhaps an appeal to a middle class audience liable to be unsettled by her adventures and social commentary.131

Ethel’s attention to upholding her own moral standards and proving the legitimacy of her relationship with Dan throughout the text suggests that she has not fully escaped social norms even as she challenges them. In fact, in order to bring attention to the realities of the life of the New Woman hobo to the middle class, Ethel perhaps had to uphold some of their values to maintain her respectability and ensure that her message was not easily dismissed.

However, Ethel’s experiences on the road suggest that she implicitly critiques this ideal middle class home. Ethel goes on to discuss the many homes she is invited into, saying that after staying overnight, “the next morning the family assembles to see us start. We exchange names and addresses, and as we ride away, we feel that a new bond of friendship has been established” (144). While individual families are discussed throughout the narrative, the names of many of these families are withheld and glossed

131 I was unable to find any biographical information about Ethel Lynn or research regarding the reception of her text, but her tone and references to conventional morality suggests she was appealing to a middle- class audience. 211 over even though Ethel presumably cares enough to take their addresses and continue to correspond with them. By quickly relating many homes she visits, Ethel creates this bond of friendship throughout her travels, exhibiting the potential to form relationships and alternative communities everywhere. These alternative communities formed by a woman hobo give Ethel the power to expand the idea of family and the reach of women’s influence to include the public sphere as well as the domestic.

Ethel and Dan eventually make it to California, providing a hopeful end to the narrative and highlighting their overall positive experience on the road. At the completion of the journey Ethel is healthier and happier than before, now that she has acquired the skill of “making myself at home in unusual places” (208). Ethel describes herself as not only healthy, but more trusting of individuals. She writes,

but physical benefit is not the greatest gain. A change has taken place in my psychology. My belief in the inherent kindliness and unselfishness of the human heart has been strengthened. In cases of cruelty I recognize an outside influence or pressure that warps natural instincts…Never again will I think it necessary to change human nature before we can improve social conditions. I am conscious of a deeper human sympathy; a wider vision; a greater understanding of the problems of the underdog and a closer sense of fellowship with him. I feel that I am learning the divine lesson of human unity, which is rooted in the Fatherhood of God and manifests itself as the Brotherhood of Man” (295-296).

Though Ethel loses her faith in the slums, it is regained through her wandering experience and the alternative communities she finds there. Her time on the road allowed her to understand and comment on issues of socioeconomic class inequality, an understanding she will presumably bring to her new career in the west. Ideally, her

“closer sense of fellowship” with the “underdog” will make her a more compassionate physician. Moreover, Ethel used her trip to define her ability as a New Woman.

212

Rejecting Dr. Graves’ dire outlook on her health, she shows that she is able to traverse the country on a bicycle and make connections with people across America before finally returning to California and establishing her practice. Using her experiences as a female hobo, Ethel is able to comment on changing gender roles and class inequality in the early twentieth century.

“No Tragedy in Our Household”: Boxcar Bertha’s Community on the Road

While Ethel maintains some social conventions, Sister of the Road: The

Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha is a sensationalist account of hobo life that highlights the allure of the freedom and independence found on the road and, like the author himself, often appears to have the goal of shocking the audience. The author, Ben

Reitman, spent much of his youth wandering across America before training as a doctor and eventually opening a practice in the slums of Chicago where he treated the homeless, sex workers, and other social outcasts. His experiences on the road as well as his relationships with a diverse group of hoboes, reformers, and radicals provided the inspiration for his novel, and his flamboyant personality and status as a womanizer certainly preceded his authorial reputation and influenced his representation of women in the text. His heroine, Bertha, flagrantly disregards all social standards as she relates fifteen years of her hobo life as the narrator of Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of

Boxcar Bertha. Born to the unmarried Mother Thompson and abandoned by her father,

Bertha grows up in a series of alternative communities based on sharing resources. When she is sixteen, she decides to take to the road in order to fully experience life. Her adventures are triumphantly accounted throughout the narrative as she optimistically

213 views even challenging experiences as an opportunity to learn more about human nature.

Like Jane Addams, Bertha felt that she needed to live an adventurous life rather than reading about it. Her comments on formal education mirror Addams’ concerns that schooling only hindered women and men from understanding the realities of life.

Reflecting on her haphazard education, Bertha states, “school did not matter a great deal, anyway. It seemed ridiculous to study Latin grammar when the whole exciting world was waiting outside” (20). Studying life on her own terms, Bertha works as a housekeeper, criminal, prostitute, medical assistant, and social reformer before giving up her hobo life to raise her daughter.

In his novel about Bertha, Ben Reitman offers an uncensored account of a radical community that defies gender and class expectations. Bertha constantly flouts sexual conventions as she shares lovers with her mother and sister and minutely describes her time as a prostitute.132 More importantly, she is able to associate with the rich and the poor alike and ultimately to create alternative communities on the road that transcend class boundaries. As a New Woman hobo, Bertha comes to represent American society’s fears about increased gender and class mobility. She is not only metaphorically socially mobile because of her work in the public sphere; she literally travels around America in search of employment and adventures without relying on male financial support. Bertha does not just challenge sexual norms; she openly takes pleasure in her sexuality. She embodies the threat of the hobo female who represents the potentially dangerous extreme

132 The text is remarkably uncensored, although Martha Reis and Joanne Hall note that a rape scene that violently portrays African American tramps assaulting Bertha, who is white, is omitted in perhaps a tacit attempt to reject the devastating myth of the black rapist being perpetuated during this era (Hall 231). 214 of the New Woman ideology, a woman who rejects the traditional biological family in order to create her own alternative community outside of the domestic sphere.

Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha is the most critically cited text on female hoboes and was even translated to film in 1972 by Martin Scorsese, making it particularly important to analyze in terms of its representation of gender, community, and class.133 Before beginning my analysis, however, it is necessary to point out that the text is now believed to be a work of fiction compiled from various stories

Ben Reitman picked up during his time on the road.134 Despite decades of scholarship claiming otherwise, Boxcar Bertha is not a real woman but an imagined representation of unconventional female life in the early twentieth century.135 In her unpublished dissertation, Martha Reis carefully documents the lives of the women who inspired

Bertha’s character, including a female pickpocket, anarchist, and ex-patriot poet.

Although all of the women eschewed traditional homes and families, they did not necessarily define themselves as hoboes. The fact that Reitman chose a female hobo to encompass their nontraditional lives suggests the rhetorical power of this character type.

133 The film, which focuses on Bertha’s relationship with a labor organizer, bears little resemblance to the novel. 134 Reitman’s tendency to blur literary genres is a common element of his writing. In the preface to his unpublished autobiography he notes, “I find that I have mixed fiction and fact so much that it is no easy matter now to distinguish one from the other” (qtd. in Poirier 33). The same could be said about Sister of the Road. 135 In the most recent edition of Sister of the Road, Barry Pateman clearly states, “In this, the fourth time that Boxcar Bertha has been reissued, we feel obliged for the first time to make it plain that this is in fact a work of fiction. This takes nothing away from the book as far as we’re concerned; it just makes it more worthwhile to know something more about the true author, who was a highly unusual and fascinating fellow” (201). Before this publication, and even occasionally after it, critics assumed that Bertha was a real individual even though no data was found on her life. 215

As an outsider to the socially accepted American culture, the hobo woman was in a unique position to offer social commentary.

The drafting process of Sister of the Road was also a woman-centered community effort. Reis notes that Reitman originally intended the work to be a sociological study of homeless women entitled Wandering Women. Instead, Bert Lippincott, his publisher, instructed him to write a “captivating novel” that would reach a broader audience (Reis

172). Presumably, the “captivating” novel would appeal to the adventures of hobo life and not dwell on the harsh reality of life on the road, further causing the itinerant life to be romanticized by the general public. Lippincott also insisted that a Chicago social worker, Marjorie Peters, help Reitman rewrite the manuscript in order to correct his grammatical errors and provide a female perspective on the narrative. One of Reitman’s many romantic partners, Eileen O’Connor, also helped with final revisions (Carpenter

118).136 The project became Sister of the Road, a text Reis accurately describes as “an elaborate mixture, including equal parts sociology, novel, radical history, hobo ‘ghost story,’ and covert autobiography or confession of Ben Reitman” (159). Likewise,

Suzanne Poirier calls it a “sociological novel” that intersperses fictional events with statistical information about social outcasts (76). By revising his sociological account of hobo women into a fictional text and using the skills and perspectives of a community of women, Reitman was able to use his discussion of transient women to speak to a wide array of social issues, including the role of the New Woman.

136 In her diary, O’Connor refers to the novel as her “precious baby” (Carpenter 146). 216

Though the drafting of the novel was a female-centered community effort, most academic studies are primarily concerned with Reitman’s position in the text. Joanne

Hall’s recent article, “Sisters of the Road?: The Construction of Female Hobo Identity in the Autobiographies of Ethel Lynn, Barbara Starke, and “Box-Car” Bertha Thompson”

(2010) gives a useful overview of the critical attention paid to Reitman’s work. 137

Roger Brun, Reitman’s biographer, suggests that the work is actually an autobiography, noting the similarities between Bertha and Reitman’s lives. Most scholars agree with this interpretation, which places the critical focus of their work on the male author rather than female character. 138 While I am primarily concerned with analyzing the representation of

Bertha, Reitman’s decision to write about a female hobo is worth some investigation.

Reitman, who was infamous for having many lovers and for being constantly unfaithful to women, appears to use Bertha to create his ideal sexually uninhibited woman. After the novel was printed, he wrote to the publisher, “and out of the land of prayers and desires there came a beautiful, strong, passionate woman. She put her arms around me and all else was forgotten. My soul was seduced. It was Box Car Bertha. She had just gotten out of jail and was as lovely and virile as ever. When I looked at her I said, ‘Box

Car Bertha, take me. These other women were my sweethearts and the men my friends,

137 Hall fails to note Martha Lynn Reis’s unpublished dissertation Hidden Histories: Ben Reitman and the “Outcast” Women Behind Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Box-Car Bertha (2000). Reis’s appears to be the first complete study on Sister of the Road. It includes impressive archival research and gives a detailed history of five women who may have been the inspiration for Boxcar Bertha. 138 Ben Reitman is a fascinating historical figure who played a major role in the formation of the Chicago School of Sociology as well as the anarchist and birth control movement in the early twentieth century. Reitman was never truly accepted in any social circle and is perhaps most well known as anarchist Emma Goldman’s lover. His womanizing and extreme devotion to his mother certainly influence his representation of women in his writing, but I am not interested in giving a psychoanalytical reading of the text. For more information on Reitman, see Emma Goldman’s Living my Life (vols. 1 and 2, 1931), Roger Brun’s The Damndest Radical (1987), and Mecca Reitman Carpenter’s No Regrets (1998). 217 but you are my heart’” (qtd. in Carpenter 147). Reitman admits to creating Bertha, not necessarily in his image, but as the perfect partner he was never able to find. Unlike the real women in his relationships, Bertha is as comfortable having multiple sexual partners as he is. Her rejection of marriage and the traditional family matches his own philosophy, but she is ultimately successful and happy while his inability to settle down and raise the children he had with three different women was a source of regret late in his life. Reitman’s fetishization of Bertha’s character in part explains her almost superhuman ability to survive and thrive in any environment.

Reitman’s liminal position in society as a privileged doctor and social reformer who nonetheless chose to associate with hoboes and prostitutes also makes his account ripe for an investigation of issues of socioeconomic class mobility in the wandering community. For the purpose of my chapter, I am interested in reading the text as a novel, a fictionalized account of hobo women in the early twentieth century.139 My reading is informed by the fact that Reitman referred to the text as a novel, as did his daughter,

Mecca Reitman Carpenter, whose study on her father No Regrets: Ben Reitman and the

Women Who Loved Him (1998) also explores the publication history of Sister of the

Road. While these studies carefully research and prove that the text often drew on real- life events, because I am reading the text as a novel I am less concerned with analyzing the veracity of the work and more interested in its representation of hobo women and how they speak to the New Woman ideology while creating alternative communities

139 Reitman also identified himself as a writer as well as a physician. He belonged to the prestigious League of American Writers, where he shared work with well-known authors like Upton Sinclair, Langston Hughes, and Sherwood Anderson (Poirier 50). 218 across class lines. Sister of the Road is the most critically-cited text regarding female hobos. Its shifts in setting, inspired by Bertha’s constant movement as a hobo, build suspense throughout the novel and keep the readers invested in Bertha’s journey. Like

Lynn’s text, the novel consistently introduces new, colorful characters that are generally undeveloped but appeal to the audience’s taste for sensation. By reading the text as a popular work of fiction that appealed to a broad audience, my study shows that it is important to analyze it in terms of its social critique and representation of gender and class.

Bertha immediately introduces the cultural fear of changing gender roles in her narrative. She says that growing up in a small community by the train line, “we girls dressed just like the boys, mostly in hand -me-down overalls” (9). Bertha describes the female hoboes that she meets as a child as “agitators” who “wore their hair bobbed” (13).

This description could be used to discuss early twentieth century New Women who challenged gender specific dress codes and experimented with alternative forms of clothes and hairstyles. As Patricia Marks notes, increased social involvement outside of the home caused women to embrace “‘rational’ dress more appropriate for walking or riding in public,” changes that often caused critics to call them “manly women” (ix, 2).

Class issues also influence the hobo New Woman. Though the female hobo is a type of

New Woman, it is often her socioeconomic class status that determines her attitude towards gender. The women in Bertha’s youth dressed like men and worked outside of the home, but often out of necessity because of their financial needs. As many critics point out, poor women have always had to engage in paid labor and the women in Sister

219 of the Road are no exception. By noting the reality of poor women’s labor early in the text, Reitman suggests that working women were New Women long before the term gained currency in American culture.

Although her socioeconomic class status may initially force Bertha to engage in the New Woman identity out of necessity, she embraces it as a choice female hoboes make to find personal freedom and mobility formerly denied women. This is especially clear when Bertha meets two female hobo college students on one of her first train trips.

New Women had greater access to a college education and career, often choosing a professional life instead of marriage and children, and it is significant that college women quickly enter Bertha’s narrative once she begins her travels. Her first friends on the road are college girls who are train jumping across America over their school break. Claiming to be doing sociological research for their classes, the girls are really looking for adventure on the road. Like Jane Addams’ ideal scholar, they apply their academic knowledge to their real life. Bertha notes that “both of them had their hair cut short like men’s and at first glance they didn’t look much like women” (28). Her observation speaks to America’s growing fear about “manly women” who would become unsexed and unfit for domestic life if they received an education. The women college hoboes challenge both class and gender lines. As college students with privileged families, they admit that they could afford a train ticket but would rather ride the rails. Their adventurous life suggests that they embody America’s concerns about New Women. Not only are they getting an education and rejecting (at least temporarily) the domestic sphere, they are socially mobile and able to travel across the country “without a single

220 unpleasant experience” (29). Upon reflection, they “decided that the life of a woman hobo was as safe as the life of a college student” (29). Blurring the lines between a privileged college education and life on the road becomes a theme throughout the novel.

Bertha takes to the road to get an education that she feels she cannot get from books and formal study, but her family lacks the financial and social privileges associated with college students. In this way, her identity shows that New Women can include the poor.

The fleeting presence of the college students shows the increased possibilities for New

Women in the early twentieth century, women who can not only get a formal education but also have adventures in the public sphere without men. The threat of the New

Woman who is socially mobile without a husband is embodied in the women who are literally mobile as they travel through America on their own, although Bertha notes that their class position affords them a sense of security not accessible to most hobo women.

The early twentieth century was marked by changing standards of sexuality and

Bertha responds to the fears the culture shared regarding women’s new access to sexual expression. The early-twentieth century New Women were considered more sexually aware than their late-nineteenth century predecessors (Pykett 140). As the public debated the idea of sharing birth control information and worried about women’s increased sexual freedom, Bertha does not just say that she has the same sexual desires as men, but meticulously details a long line of lovers. In the narrative, her attitude towards men and sex is shaped by her mother, but actually reflects Reitman’s own philosophy regarding gender relationships. When Bertha turns sixteen and first notices men, she asks,

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“Mother, what should I do when some man tells me he wants me?” Forthrightly addressing the question, Mother Thompson replies,

Babe, if a man wants you and you want him, just take him. There isn’t much to it. I have had all kinds of lovers, and it never did me any harm. Don’t be afraid of life and love and nature. Anything you want to do is all right with me. Men can’t do you any harm. Nobody can hurt you but yourself. Every experience you have makes you all the more fit for life. Men are wonderful. When you get tired of them, or they of you, leave them without bitterness or regret. No matter what happens to you, I’ll stand by you (22).

Mother Thompson’s focus on life experience and her “anything goes” attitude towards sexuality references the cultural fear that changing gender roles would lead to women’s increased sexual desire, which in turn would cause the breakdown of the home and institution of marriage. Her claim that every experience is valuable is shared by Bertha and is an echo of Reitman’s own values. Bertha’s success throughout the narrative after accepting this philosophy encourages readers to reexamine their own views about sexuality and the traditional marriage. Bertha does reject marriage throughout the text and takes her mother’s advice, looking at each sexual encounter as a learning experience that teaches her something about herself or those around her. This ultimately gives her the freedom to create her own alternative communities outside of the middle class home.

Mother Thompson’s speech advocates the controversial idea that women have the same sexual desires as men and that they also can have multiple sexual partners, advice Bertha takes to heart.

In following her mother’s advice, Bertha goes as far as becoming a prostitute as a way to fully understand sexual desire, particularly in men and the women who become

222 sex workers.140 After her first day on the job, she claims, “I knew I would go back again and again until I had learned what I wanted to know about them [the male patrons] and about the girls who received them” (128). This marks the formation of Bertha’s most controversial alternative community as she analyzes the relationships between men and women in the brothel. Reitman’s first book, The Second Oldest Profession (1931) was a study of prostitution in the early twentieth century. Some of the same charts and examples are written into Sister of the Road, presumably to increase the validity of the fictional account. For example, Reitman includes a chart entitled “A Classification of

Prostitutes and Female Immorals and the Number of Pimps They Utilize” (139). This detailed chart is shared by a researcher Bertha meets on the train, and speaks to popular conception of sex workers as depraved women, a classification generally challenged in the novel. The concrete data shared blurs the line between fact and fiction and ultimately shows how the text can be used as an educational tool informing readers about gender and class inequalities, especially since Bertha shows how poor women are most likely to be sexually exploited as prostitutes. Instead of merely advocating for women’s sexual freedom and mobility, Bertha embodies these ideals is a train-jumping hobo who eventually has 1,500 sexual partners during her short time as a prostitute. In showcasing the community of prostitutes, Bertha also shows the instability of the traditional home.

Considering the critique of the biological family throughout the novel, Reitman may be commenting on the claims of some New Women that marriage was a legalized form of prostitution by showing women’s eagerness to engage in this profession and their

140 Although “sex worker” is the current acceptable term for women who engage in sex acts for money, I will use prostitute in my discussion of the text since that is the term embraced in Sister of the Road. 223 blindness in regards to the true motivation of their pimp (Pykett 18). All of the women who are “hustling” for their pimp, Bill, claim, “I’m his heart. He loves me, and when he gets a bankroll he’ll give them [the other prostitutes] the kick, and then we’ll get married and have a home” (113). However, it soon becomes clear that the conventional home envisioned by the women is an elusive dream that will never be realized.

Bill goes on to say he makes “money-makers” out of the girls, seemingly satirizing the debate about New Women being able to earn wages outside of the home.

Prostitution is portrayed as a profession, but one that is not ultimately dependable or lucrative for women. In the absence of being given any other skills to make their own living, Bertha shows that when women use their bodies as their only capital they are ultimately destroyed both emotionally and financially. All of the prostitutes in the brothel form a community of women, but are routinely cheated out of their wages by their male counterparts. Like most New Women, Bertha shows the need for women to take control of their financial wellbeing. However, she suggests that it is especially true for the poor whose financial situation is already precarious. During her time as a prostitute,

Bertha keeps a series of charts keeping track of her earnings and expenditures. After she tallies up the cost of protection, lingerie, the maid, roper, runner, and towels, she is left with forty dollars, and Bill takes thirty-eight (Reitman 128). She notes that the profession is ultimately not lucrative for women and expresses a general frustration for women who are unable to understand the reality of their situation. Bertha’s time in the brothel is just as much an argument for women’s financial knowledge as they begin work in the public sphere as it is an expose of life in the red light district. Her representation as

224 a hobo New Woman draws attention to the material realities of poor women who don’t have the resources or social connections to earn a living apart from using their body as a source of capital. Ultimately, Bertha is deeply unsettled by this community and its exploitation of women and leaves when she finds out that she is pregnant.141

However, the news of her pregnancy does not cause Bertha to seek a more traditional family life. As a hobo New Woman, she redefines home and family, rejecting the middle class domestic sphere for a self-defined alternative community. Throughout the novel, Bertha lives in a variety of alternative homes and communities. She begins the text by saying “my first playhouse was a boxcar,” immediately positioning herself in a space that shows her mobility in the public sphere (7). In fact, her first playhouse is a jail cell, where she is born after her mother and father are imprisoned for refusing to marry after having a child together. After Bertha’s birth, her father, Walker C. Smith, leaves the family. The traditional family structure fails because of her father’s inability to commit to a home and family, not necessarily because her mother gives birth out of wedlock. In the midst of cultural concerns over women leaving the home for employment in the public sphere, Bertha suggests that it is really the father’s inability to enter the domestic that is a problem. She eventually finds Walker operating a radical book store in New

York. When she asks him if she looks familiar, he “finished writing a sentence to its end” before answering her question, signaling the priority of his work over personal relationships (89). Revealing her identity, Bertha castigates Walker for leaving her. At this point in the novel, Bertha’s solution to public unrest over changing gender roles

141 Bertha does not know the father of her child. 225 suggests that men need to commit to the private sphere as women enter the public. By balancing labor inside and outside the home, the family structure will flourish. When only one partner commits to the traditional home, it fails. Walker not only envisions an alternative home, but expands the definition of family. When Bertha blames him for abandoning her, he tells her “all men are your fathers and your brothers…and all children will be your sons and daughters” (90). Like Bronson Alcott and the utopian philosophers of the early nineteenth century, Walker rejects the biological family in favor of one that includes the entire world. His suggestion that some men and women are domestic and others are not content in their role in the home is also an implicit argument for changing gender roles. Just as he is not a “home lover” or “monogamist,” some women are maternal types and some are not (92). According to Walker, the problem comes when society tries to force people into roles that are against their nature. He calls for a redefinition of home and community that allows both men and women to choose to embrace or reject the domestic sphere.

While her father posits an alternative community, it fails because it does not include women. Though Bertha stays with her father for awhile, she eventually feels uncomfortable living with him and hits the road again to find a new adventure. Part of the reason she leaves is because of her unease in his house, again critiquing the traditional family structure. Her father lives in his bookstore with another male friend. Bertha feels unable to thrive in this environment, where she is essentially confined to the private sphere but removed from relationships with other women. Christine Photinos notes that

“Sister of the Road is more progressive than most female hobo narratives because it

226 situates the protagonist within a community of women” (659). During the narrative,

Bertha seems most content and successful when she is around other women. More abstractly, Bertha as a character represents a community of women unto herself. As previously stated, Martha Reis carefully outlined many of the women who inspired

Reitman’s portrayal of Bertha. Reitman’s time on the road lecturing with anarchist

Emma Goldman and his practice treating prostitutes and the homeless in Chicago exposed him to a wide variety of women whose experiences he drew upon when creating his protagonist. The cacophony of voices used to create Bertha’s varied life allows marginalized women’s experiences to be memorialized in print. This cacophony also includes the many women who helped Reitman revise the manuscript. Bertha as a compilation of hobo women and editors comes to represent an empowering alternative path for New Women based on access to careers and social mobility. Though Bertha is often in precarious positions, overall her life is represented as diverse and positive. Her mother’s motto, “there is no tragedy in our household” becomes Bertha’s and she embraces even negative experiences as part of life (136).

Bertha’s rejection of the traditional home and family provides space for her to create a plethora of female-centered alternative communities. These communities include the Home Colony (a utopian community where individuals share jobs and resources), a mob of grifters (thieves), a hospital and its staff, hobo women jumping trains, a hobo jungle, bohemian clubs, a halfway house, and a brothel. While these communities are diverse, what binds them together is the importance of independent women in their creation and survival. Even the most male-centered community, the gang

227 of grifters led by Bertha’s lover, Otto, is equally composed of men and women. When the men of the mob discuss women, it is only in terms of their “grifting ability or something else that had to do with their accomplishments or sense,” never as sexual objects (81). This is a wide departure from the representation of women in most tramp and hobo narratives and shows how the alternative communities allow space for a greater respect between women and men. As Heather Tapley points out, “the production of the female tramp as sexual object represents the most significant way in which these women have been erased in hobo history” (“In Search of the Female Hobo” 60).142 In Sister of the Road, however, women are rarely viewed as only sexual objects. Even the prostitutes, the most apparently victimized women in the text, seem to have made a conscious choice to engage in what they view as a profession, even if that choice has been influenced by men and is a problematic option. Bertha consistently forms relationships with other women that allow her to thrive in her unconventional community. Her relationship with her mother becomes the most consistent one throughout the text. Women keep her company as she is jumping trains, teach her how to steal food to survive, and take care of her child when she is traveling the country. Life on the road revolves around a constantly changing woman-centered community that shows their ability to navigate the public sphere. The women Bertha meets on the road are capable and resourceful and educate her on the variety of paths available for the New

Woman.

142 Tapley does, however, problematically conflate the tramp and hobo experience in this quote. 228

Like the other examples I have explored in this dissertation, the alternative community is also important because it facilitates class mobility. Bertha’s constantly changing community on the road allows her to associate with people of various socioeconomic classes and shows how they all contribute knowledge and inspiration in different ways. She freely and equally joins together with the homeless and prostitutes as well as lawyers and doctors, collapsing the boundaries dividing socioeconomic class in

American society.143 Her associations with people on polar ends of the social spectrum vary from chapter to chapter and show the ability of the hobo New Woman to comment on socioeconomic class inequality as she relates a litany of abuses of the poor. Bertha’s story is not one of a slow descent into the seamy side of American society. Rather, she moves effortlessly from rich households to the underbelly of the streets and back, showing the permeability of class in American society and, like in the brothel example, the exploitation of the poor. In one chapter she goes from being a prostitute working at an established brothel to hobnobbing with doctors and taking a leadership position at a medical center where she does bookkeeping. Her quick movement from prostitute to bookkeeper, facilitated by the novel’s constantly shifting form, is not viewed as exceptional by those around her as she gracefully includes herself in all the communities she joins.

Bertha’s shift from manual worker to medical assistant also uses the figure of the professional New Woman to destabilize class boundaries and draw attention to class inequality. She takes a job at the Polyclinic Pathological laboratory where she is hired as

143 Reitman was also well known for his ability to hobnob with the rich and poor alike. When he was unable to find work as a doctor, he also conducted slum tours throughout Chicago (Carpenter 157). 229 a janitor but soon starts developing labs and assisting the doctors. Like Ethel’s, Bertha’s role in the medical field is important to note. Tapley claims that “in bourgeois medical discourse, she [the female hobo] is denied movement on the evolutionary scale because she is deemed overtly sexual and produced as excessively masculine” (65). By becoming active in the medical field, Bertha and Ethel subvert the upper class medical discourse and give voice to the poor. When Dr. Maximilian Herzog, Bertha’s employer, is late to a lecture she has heard often, the other doctors suggest that she takes over, claiming, “you know as much about it as he does” (151).144 Hesitating for a moment, she thinks, “why not? I had entertained plenty of men in more difficult ways than this” and begins the presentation until she is quickly interrupted by Dr. Herzog (151). Rather than being exploited by the medical profession, Bertha engages in it, a fact that Dr. Herzog apparently finds unnerving based on his quick usurpation of her authority. Bertha quickly moves from prostitute, to janitor, to medical assistant and lecturer, suggesting that she is a quick study in the American dream of upward mobility. However, her constant shifts in class status work to draw attention to the instability of the system and to question the value placed on different careers. Bertha slyly compares her work as a prostitute to a lecturer, suggesting that her task of “entertaining men” in the brothel was more difficult labor than that of the medical field. Through this interchange, she calls into question how society values different forms of labor, communities, and class statuses, especially for women. Her wit and ability to verbally banter with the doctor

144 Maximilian Herzog was a real physician who researched syphilis in the late nineteenth century. Reitman was his laboratory assistant at the Chicago Polyclinic Hospital in 1898 (Poirier 33-34). 230 revise Ethel’s problematic relationship with medical authorities and put the female New

Woman hobo on equal ground with medical professionals.

Conclusion: Bigger and Better Things

At the end of the text, Bertha, like Ethel, appears to move towards a more traditional definition of home and family as she decides to return to her now eight year old daughter and devote herself to motherhood. However, her allegiance is to her child, not a husband or male partner, and as a New Woman hobo she still plans to engage in work in the public sphere. In an evening reverie, Bertha states that “I had been running away from something and suddenly I realized what it was-I had been trying to escape my own natural need to be responsible for someone, to live for someone else, some special individual person who belonged peculiarly to myself” (198). She goes on to say, “oh, I would go on with my work, with my plans. I would do bigger and better things for the poor and the homeless than I have ever foreseen, but first I would set my own house in order” (198-99). This monologue appears to be a decided shift towards the traditional home. Instead of having her daughter raised by a community, she suddenly belongs solely to Bertha. Likewise, Bertha decides to devote her energy to setting her own house in order before meeting the needs of the community as a whole.

Her brief final convictions aren’t enough to overthrow her entire narrative, though. At the end of the novel, readers must remember that Bertha’s mother also eventually came to a point in her life where she felt like she needed to settle down and create a more traditional home for her family. She moves to a farm house and forms a permanent relationship with one man. However, as soon as Mother Thompson decides to

231 have a traditional home, she is erased from the story. Eventually, Mother Thompson is burnt to death in that home in a tragic house fire. As Bertha’s most powerful female influence is literally consumed by the private sphere, it seems difficult to imagine a fulfilling future for her in the traditional home. Even if Bertha decides to settle down and raise her child, her position as a single mother who shifts class identities precludes her from the middle class ideal. She will have a job and a home led by a single working mother and ultimately use the knowledge gained during her time on the road to help those in financial need like the poor and homeless. Bertha remains a hobo New Woman who is able to support herself and her child and use her unique position to comment on socioeconomic class disparity. Like Ethel, her experiences on the road have permanently changed her. Ethel and Bertha ultimately portray a positive representation of female hoboes as socially mobile New Women who challenge traditions and create woman- centered communities on the road. Their characters encourage readers to expand the definition of the New Woman to include the working class, challenging the popular conceptualization of this literary figure.

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Coda: (Luck is) Beauty with the Torture

“Luck is beautiful./ So let us praise our beautiful/ White neighbor. Let us write poems/ For she who found that wasp nest/ While remodeling the wreck./ But let us remember that wreck/ Was, for five decades, the nest/ For a black man and his father./ Both men were sick and neglected,/So they knew how to neglect.” –Sherman Alexie, “Gentrification” (2009)

“I am beautiful/ I wonder if I am good enough/ I heart whatever I want/ I want a lot of money/ I am beautiful/ I pretend to not care/ I feel lovely inside/ I touch certain things/ I worry about family/ I cry when I’m upset/ I am beautiful/ I understand what kind of person/ I am/ I say what I mean/ I dream about the world/ I try to better myself/ I hope I live for a long time/ I am beautiful” –Middle/High School Girls Group at Gladden Community House (2012)

Nineteenth-century train-jumping hoboes flouting social conventions are often represented as romantic figures by scholars safely ensconced in the academy, but today’s homeless usually are not. Though critics may make distinctions between the freedom- loving hoboes of the past and the dire situations faced by itinerant women and men today, many Americans in the nineteenth century viewed hoboes as a social ill that needed to be eradicated.145 While some families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century opened their doors to hobo itinerant workers, providing meals and the chance to earn money, others publically suggested violent ways to rid America of the wandering women and men. In 1877, the Chicago Tribune wrote a plan for poisoning hoboes by putting

145 There were many dangers facing hoboes and tramps in the late nineteenth century. Gilbert Geis suggests that 32,276 women and men were killed in train jumping accidents from 1890-1910. See “Ben L. Reitman, MD: colorful critical criminologist.” 233 strychnine or arsenic in the meat passed out to beggars. Following suit, The New York

Herald suggested in 1878 that charity meals should include lead in order to eliminate the hobo population. A Westchester County, New York law was passed stating that the poorhouse should be filled with water so that the tenants could either bail themselves out or drown (Wormser 61-63).146 Although this law was not enforced, it speaks to the most extreme and brutal conceptualization of the American dream of upward mobility, an ideology gaining recognition in the late nineteenth century. While the American Dream suggests that hard work will equal success, in Westchester, failure to work hard enough to keep the water away literally would equal death.

Today, hobo culture is dying out and hostility towards the homeless takes more subtle routes. Cities, including Columbus, Ohio, are increasingly building public park benches with dividers so the homeless are unable to sleep on them. Laws prohibiting loitering and vagrancy are often targeted towards the itinerant community. More problematic and damaging is the aura of invisibility surrounding the homeless as many individuals of a more privileged class are able to avoid the realities of life on the street.

Hobo narratives detailing the lives of the itinerant have fallen out of fashion with the

American reading public. No longer knocking on doors asking for aid as they did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the homeless occupy spaces of social aid and poverty that many people can choose to avoid. The cross-class interactions key to defining all the communities analyzed in this dissertation are now difficult to create.

146 See Richard Wormser’s Hoboes: Wandering in America, 1870-1940 (1994) for an extended discussion of these examples. 234

The romanticism surrounding hobo culture has also nearly disappeared. One of the most recent studies on hobo life, Cliff Williams (Oats)’s One More Train to Ride: The

Underground World of Modern American Hoboes (2003) highlights the dangers and violence of life outside the traditional home even as he discusses some of the freedoms.

One self-identified hobo, Adman, notes that dirtiness is associated with life on the road, but finds beauty in the broken glass he sees everywhere on his trips. He says, “if you look at it as sparkle as opposed to broken glass, you can see some of the beauty with the torture” (156). A similar critical move must be made by scholars concerned with analyzing representations of the poor both in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and today. It is essential to recognize the agency of men and women on the road, but to balance it with the realities of homelessness and an understanding of how the lives of the itinerant are used by authors to critique mainstream American society. Representations of hobo women like Ethel and Bertha raise concerns about gender and socioeconomic class in American society, particularly in regards to the New Woman, and showcase the positive potential of the itinerant to create an alternative community. Because of this, their representations often took the form of social commentary rather than a real-life exhibit of homelessness in American society. This makes these texts essential to understanding ideological changes in the early twentieth century, but it is equally important to understand the realities of hobo life that these texts elide. The broken glass of the hobo jungles can be beautiful, but still dangerous and possibly deadly.

The same dangers lurk at the periphery of the literature of all of the alternative communities analyzed in this dissertation. The Alcott family nearly starved at Fruitlands.

235

The Lowell workers faced long hours at the mills and the increasing corruption of the factory system. Jane Addams and Hilda Satt Polacheck attempted to define their relationship to literature in the slums, where reading was often displaced by the necessity of providing or accessing food, safe water, and medical treatment. Members of all of these alternative communities struggled to define women’s role within them and how the upper socioeconomic classes could work with the poor in an affirming, non-patronizing way. Literature, broadly defined, often seemed secondary to these struggles, yet the literary representations of these communities provide readers today with insight into shifts of gender and class throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More importantly, they showcase the overall difficulty of even defining socioeconomic class.

Literature preserves the idealism inherent in the creation of the communities, as well as exhibits the occasionally harsh realities of their ends. It gives voice to those daring enough to defy social conventions and imagine alternative communities that extend the idea of family beyond the limits of biology. Moreover, as Hawthorne discussed in his preface to The Blithedale Romance, the lessons they teach “for the behoof of future experimentalists” allow us to imagine an American society where the needs of the broader community come first and divisions between women and men, and the rich and the poor, are collapsed.

This ideal America is yet to be realized, but Hawthorne’s “future experimentalists” are creating cross-class alternative communities today. As previously stated in the introduction, my own intentional community in Columbus, Ohio ultimately inspired this work. One current revision of the hobo communities is Franklinton

236

Cycleworks, a bicycle cooperative my friends started in our neighborhood. A few times a week, middle-class cycling enthusiasts and the homeless join together to swap stories and work on their bikes. My friends occupy a middle space between these two groups as highly-educated activists who have largely eschewed traditional career paths in order to run nonprofits in a working class neighborhood. It is difficult to know what the individuals in this cross-class community think about each other. Certainly their different experiences and social expectations often cause tensions and misunderstandings. Though their common interests join them together in a communal space, their reasons for being there are very different. Most of the middle-and-upper-class cyclists ride for fun or exercise, while the homeless members of this alternative community depend on their bicycles as their only form of transportation. Privilege causes divisions, but engaging in manual labor is one way this group has found to negotiate these differences. Like the workers in Lowell, their experience working with their hands joins them together in an affirming alternative community.

Still, it is my friends, not the homeless, who facilitate Franklinton Cycleworks.

Basic principles of social change theory suggest that the ideal type of reform is when the marginalized join together to work for social change themselves, without assistance from the upper-class. That is not necessarily happening in my Franklinton alternative community. The bike shop, community garden, housing justice committee, youth organizations, homework help centers, and reading programs are all run by individuals from a middle-class background who recently moved into the neighborhood or live in more affluent suburbs. That means these programs are informed by values and

237 experiences not necessarily indigenous to the neighbors utilizing them. In my alternative community, all our interactions in Franklinton are informed by our privileged social location. I am constantly challenged by the same questions I ask when analyzing representations of the poor by upper and middle class authors. Perhaps because of the difficulty I have coming to terms with cross-class interactions in my own life, my dissertation has often raised more questions than it has answered. For instance, do you have to experience poverty first hand to responsibly represent it in literature and/or work for social change? Did the Alcotts identify themselves as poor during their time at

Fruitlands? Should Elizabeth Stuart Phelps have talked to more mill workers before writing her factory fiction? Was Jane Addams really “swallowed and digested” by her neighbors, or was she always set apart from them because of her background? What were Lynn’s and Reitman’s motivations for portraying the female hobo experience?

Despite the years I spent researching this project, I am still not sure. Just as I wish that the social justice programs in Franklinton were initiated by our neighbors, I would prefer that the literary works I analyzed in this dissertation were all written by the multi-faceted working class. The voices that we need to recognize and better understand both in literary criticism and in our lives outside of the academy are those that have been silenced in the past. Focusing on their perspective would alleviate some of the critical messiness that comes when responsibly analyzing representation of cross-class interactions.

However, I would be undermining both my professional and personal identity to say that those in the middle and upper socioeconomic classes are unable to comment on scenes of poverty and working class culture. Though the creation of cross-class alternative

238 communities can be difficult and painful, both in literature and in real life, they ultimately enrich the lives of all involved.

I am constantly confronted with how my social location informs both my scholarship and work in my neighborhood. One of the ways I assert my middle class values in Franklinton is by telling the children I tutor about college and the importance of continuing their education. I continually ask the students at Gladden Community House, where I volunteer in the Homework Help Center, about their future careers. One day, I asked an elementary school girl what she plans to be when she grows up. She answered,

“very, very angry.” I was upset with myself, because rather than analyzing the important commentary she was making on her living conditions and hope for improving them in the future, I immediately thought of Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson” (1972) and Linda

Grasso’s The Artistry of Anger (2002). In Bambara’s short story, the protagonist recognizes social inequality in American culture when she goes to F.A.O Schwartz and realizes that some people spend more on toys than her family spends meeting their basic needs. The protagonist, unsurprisingly, responds with anger. Grasso’s text discusses how nineteenth century women used representations of anger in their writing to express frustration at their marginalization in society. Like Jane Addams in her youth, literary references frame how I experience and analyze the world.

In general, I find this world view sustaining. It means that I have lived in a world of books and ideas, and that, as Alexie states in the epigraph, I am very, very lucky.

Recognizing this luck and privilege shows me the importance of reading and teaching literature in a responsible way. When I teach “The Lesson” in the college classroom, it

239 provides space for students who are often in an equally privileged position to recognize the inequality of the American economic system and discuss the problem of poverty.

This positions the classroom as an alternative community, too, and one where students can become critical thinkers and engaged world citizens. Just as Perley Kelso claimed in

The Silent Partner that the “rich aren’t cruel, they are only asleep,” I believe that many of my students are not aware that Ohio State’s campus is located ten miles away from a community where 45% of the adult population does not have a high school degree and the average household income is under $10,000 (Phelps 128).147 Recognizing the problem of poverty is the first step to imagining the solution, and college students will likely hold the power to make important changes in the world. Likewise, Grasso’s work ultimately reclaims anger as a powerful political force and asks scholars to make connections between literary texts and how women are still marginalized today. A social worker at Gladden talked with the “angry” girl about why she was upset and how to redirect her emotions in a positive way. When the students at Gladden are a little older, maybe I will read them “The Lesson.” In the meantime, I am angry too. Almost every day I see the cycle of poverty take the form of drug addiction, sex trafficking, and physical abuse. However, I also see my neighbors sharing resources, planting gardens, and swapping news on front porches. The children in the neighborhood write their own poetry about how they “dream about the world” and recognize they are beautiful, despite the unstable living situations some of them face. That is finding beauty among the

147 See Franklinton Reads Tutoring Manual (2010). 240 torture. Theirs is the next story worth telling, and one that I hope they will grow up to share themselves.

Literature may not always concretely solve social problems, but it provides a window into other life experiences and the opportunity to understand our own. The stories explored in this dissertation capture moments of pain and difficulty, but also the idealism that urged individuals to form cross-class alternative communities with the goal of social improvement. All of the characters and reformers struggled to build relationships with people unlike them and to create a more equal society. Though their experiences were diverse, they all challenge readers to reconsider how they define gender roles, class mobility, and ultimately home. As American society continues to be divided over questions of cultural differences and fair distribution of resources, their struggles are now our own. The literature emerging from these alternative communities provides a glimpse into this common struggle and an opportunity to learn from the past to create a more equitable future.

241

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