Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, January 1850, pg. 41l. Model cottage in Roman villa style. Designed for a middle-class household, it includes a central hall, symmetry, and white exterior.
LIVING ON WHITE BREAD
Class Considerations and the Refinement of Whiteness
It was back in 1823, Quentin Compson says, that Thomas Sutpen was sent on the errand that changed his life. In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Sutpen marks for posterity the moment its history was made: he is sent to deliver a message at the plantation mansion, home of his father’s employer. Although poor, Sutpen is unaware of poverty’s importance as he passes the numerous status markers of the grounds, “following the road and turning into the gate and following the drive up past where still more niggers with nothing to do all day but plant flowers and trim grass were working, and so to the house, the portico, the front door” (229). As he stands at the front of “that smooth white house and that smooth white brass-decorated door” to be told by the black butler “never to come to that front door again but to go around to the back,” his innocence of class and race hierarchy dissolves and his life becomes a means to avenge this insult (233, 232). Suddenly, the adolescent boy understands the resentment his sisters have against the better-housed plantation slaves, the urge his father has to strike the slaves and the futility of doing so, and he concludes that the only way to fight the wealthy plantation owner is with his own weapons: “land and niggers and a fine house” (238). The bitterness of his poverty strikes him as he returns from the errand, not having delivered the message, to look upon his own house in a new light. He views its “rough partly rotten log walls, the sagging roof whose missing shingles they did not replace but just set pans and buckets under the leaks, the lean-to room which they used for kitchen” and he thinks, with despairing laughter, “Home. Home” (236; 228, 235, italics in text).
In this 1936 novel, Faulkner provides a scene from the early nineteenth century; even more importantly, he provides the material clues that foretell the conclusion of Sutpen’s vengeful ambition. Sutpen’s project is doomed from the start because he fails to read the message built into the plantation house and grounds, so that when he imitates it he constructs only its shell without its signifying power. Sutpen is a member of the poorest class of whites in the South; approaching the front door of the plantation mansion, he trespasses on a view designed only for other wealthy planters. The front door stands as a final barrier to him but as an invitation to the proper visitor, whose gratified self-importance is proportional to the impressiveness of the grounds (Upton, “Imagining” 78). Sutpen notes, although he does not heed, the previous barriers: the first is the gate, which requires passage from the public access of the road. Sutpen then follows the drive “up past” the flowers and grass, but fails to comprehend the superiority suggested by its elevation. In the early nineteenth-century, formal drives were designed around careful landscaping, both of which demonstrated order and symmetry; often the view of the house from the road manipulated rules of perspective, so that the house appeared higher and larger. The house in Absalom, Absalom! stands a stark white, separating it from its natural surroundings and from the crude cabins that Sutpen’s peers call “home.” The final barrier between the house and door is a portico, marking the white house as most likely Roman classicist. Such a balanced, symmetrical style emphasized “public order and republican virtues,” while insisting on the proper placement of all aspects of society—wealthy and poor, black and white, male and female, child and adult (Clifford Clark 43). When Sutpen is sent from there to the back of the house, to the undecorated working grounds used by slaves—he comes to glimpse the system that establishes and sustains the white plantation owner in his hammock. And when he returns to view his own one-doored house, he can then comprehend how that system denies him the planter’s whiteness.
To understand his lower-classness, Sutpen must pass by the black gardeners and be rejected by a black butler because he has trespassed to the mansion’s front door: though his rejection is based on class, it is couched in racial terms. Sutpen admires the white mansion, but he compares his own home to the neat slave cabins, and only then does he feel the depth of the insult. Class, race, and gender, at base, were constructed by one’s relationship to material things in the early nineteenth century, and one’s blackness or whiteness depended on access to white goods. Only upper- and middle-class white citizens were entitled to a racial “whiteness,” therefore, since they could possess and maintain refined white things. Gender was displayed largely in one’s attitude towards these things: “masculine” meant overtly ambitious and competitive, while the proper “feminine” attitude required one to pretend not to desire material things, but to value sentimental or spiritual or domestic comfort instead. Up to this point, Sutpen has been contentedly excluded from the capitalist economy of the South, neither having wealth nor wanting it. But his lack of desire marks him as poor white trash, beneath even the slaves who are provided finer housing and clothes. When Sutpen determines to acquire the significant things—in his mind, “land and niggers and a fine house”—he assumes an overwhelming desire for money and things, joins the marketplace, and creates an excessively masculine household—wild slaves and himself, mostly unclothed, engaging in hunting parties and then sleeping inside an unfurnished shell of a mansion.
Though a twentieth-century invention, Sutpen participates as an antebellum man in his material environment, without being fully aware of its import. As American consumers chose whiter and whiter products from the time of the American Revolution to the time of the Civil War, they created ways of marking and color-coding class as well as race. Those products that became whiter and that stand out in the archaeological record—dishes, house paint, and gravestones—were also becoming more specialized, demanding elaborate rules for their proper use. Homes that were painted white were also divided into several use-specific rooms, with a formal room designated for display—the parlor—becoming widespread. Gravestones became white at the same time their form became smoother, and the cemeteries lodging them gained a purposeful order and design. Whiteness implicated class distinctions, in that white paint and porcelain were among the more expensive options. Also, however, these white goods demanded a specifically upper- and middle-class mode of behavior: a new rigor in cleanliness for the body and household, the material and social tools for polite dining, the ability to succeed in a workplace that demanded time-discipline and specialization. To be “white” required these disciplines, and the poor or dissipated who rejected them forfeited whiteness and thus their white complexions, appearing in literature with faces that are “swarthy,” “blotched,” “red,” or possibly “sallow.” Those white-skinned people who could not afford refined white things settled instead for less expensive, out-of-fashion, or home-made items—creamware dishes, fieldstone gravemarkers, unpainted or dark-colored houses—unspecialized and nonwhite material markers. Their things and their use of things reflected back upon their skins to create racially liminal, off-white citizens.
In Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” for example, the office workers illustrate the means to whiteness through work discipline, but also reveal its cost. The narrator, an elderly and “prudent” lawyer, suffers in his office from unpredictable, undisciplined workers. The first, Turkey, sports a “fine florid hue” after noon, at which time his behavior becomes characterized by a “strange, inflamed, flurried, flighty recklessness” (41). Indeed, his darkening complexion corresponds to his economic uselessness: “exactly when Turkey displayed his fullest beams from his red and radiant countenance, just then, too, at that critical moment, began the daily period when I considered his business capacities as seriously disturbed” (41). The second clerk, Nippers, is a “whiskered, sallow, and … rather piratical-looking young man” who suffers from “ambition and indigestion” and fidgets with “nervous testiness” and “unnecessary maledictions” in the first half of the day (43). Both workers are useful for only half the day, the narrator claims, and both by their personal habits threaten the respectability of his office. In contrast, the narrator praises Bartleby for being a “motionless young man,” “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable,” as he works “silently, palely, mechanically”—the narrator repeatedly pairs Bartleby’s dependable discipline with his pallor (45, 46). The narrator values Bartleby’s “steadiness, his freedom from all dissipation, his incessant industry,” arguing that “his great stillness, his unalterableness of demeanor under all circumstances, made him a valuable acquisition” (53). Even his polite, incomprehensible “ ‘I would prefer not to’ ” seems a manifestation of proper bodily control and delayed gratification: in fact, his increasing reserve is merely an extension of industrial discipline as it gains a greater and greater hold on the employee.1
The terms defining class were also segregated according to gender, following a strict delineation of spheres, which, no matter how they were violated in individual instances, managed widespread mandates limiting professions and means of earning money according to gender. Women could not, for the most part, sell their labor and still remain “feminine.” Women writers and some women performers provide one exception—provided they followed strict rules about subject matter in their writing, disavowing scholarly or economic ambition, or even wearing specific clothing styles for public appearances. In general, women’s pursuit of class improvement involved domestic discipline as a form of training, of preparation for wealth, and the utmost display of the refined goods already possessed. For men, the formula for upward mobility was simpler and readily defined from Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography through Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches plots: discipline, work, integrity. The “ ‘horrors of idleness’ ” as “denounced from a thousand pulpits, and in publications both ecclesiastical and commercial” in the nineteenth century were a simple application for class mobility, but even leisure activities were gendered (Dimock 81). The connection between masculinity and labor was made clear: John Adams was eager “ ‘to prevent riches from producing luxury,’ and to prevent luxury from producing ‘effeminacy intoxication extravagance Vice and folly,’ ” and his caution remained the standard until the end of the nineteenth century.2 Effeminacy, here—the first among the great evils imaginable—is clearly a lack of production, a failure of proper exertion and labor, a passive having and a lack of active ambition and acquisition.
Self-motivated work, the discipline demonstrated in factory work, and the ability to earn a living from it were so central to masculine class mobility that they were, at times, regulated against by slaveholders. Governor James Hammond spoke before the South Carolina Institute in 1850 claiming that “ ‘whenever a slave is made a mechanic, he is more than half freed.’ ” Many Southerners concurred, blaming the uprisings led by Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and Prosser on “industrial slavery,” since these leaders were artisans (Shackel and Larsen 25–26). Although a letter in the American Farmer in 1827 sees industrial labor as a positive source of work-discipline “ ‘training the slave to habits of industry, in a business which will tend to prepare him for a state of freedom,’ ” Southern states enacted laws in the 1820s to the 1840s restricting free blacks from craftsman or factory occupations (Shackel and Larsen 24). Therefore, visible, regulated, self-motivated wage labor could distinguish not only the masculine worker, but also the white worker. Clearly, the distinction between waged and non-waged separated slave from citizen; for the most part, the visibility of the labor separated the masculine from the feminine.
The gendered nature of class was most powerfully asserted in the figure of the female factory worker, who embodied in the propaganda the contradictory distinctions of femininity and working-classness. Amal Amireh examines this figure as a manipulation by manufacturing interests: factories invited temporary female labor by promising an insulated, familial environment. Amireh argues that positing feminine workers as representatives of the factory system could protect industry, since to attack the system was also to attack a lady (10). Early industrial efforts recommended women working in the factory as a way to free men to work in the fields, and before the 1850s, women made up the majority of mill workers (4). With Lowell Mills as an exemplum, observers commented upon the women’s “clean attire” and “healthy and cheerful faces” (7). Captain Basil Hall describes “ ‘the whole space between the factories and the village speckled over with girls, nicely dressed, and glittering with bright shawls and showy-colored gowns and gay bonnets, all streaming along to their business, with an air of lightness’ ” as the mill women walk to work. Anthony Trollope comments that “ ‘They are not sallow, nor dirty, nor ragged, nor rough’ ”; the idea that these women worked not from need but for adventure was also emphasized (qtd. in Amireh 6, 7).
The mill girls’ femininity was spectacularly illustrated in a procession in 1833 celebrating the Lowell Mills, when nearly a mile of female workers paraded past Andrew Jackson: “ ‘2,500 of them, each in an white muslin dress with a blue sash carrying a parasol over her bare head … he bowed to each couple as they came abreast of him until fatigue forced him to stop’ ” (qtd. in Amireh 1). The women’s white dresses and parasols mark them as undoubtedly feminine, an upper-class designation as well as a denial of class as a consideration: the women are clearly not impoverished, but also not extravagantly dressed according to the latest fashion. The president’s response to them is of a gentleman to a lady, although attempting 1,250 bows seems a hyperbolic attempt to establish gender. The effort and the display involved in “feminizing” female factory workers reveals the project as a merging of unrelated terms—feminine and worker—but also reveals the stakes involved. Outsiders’ observations of mill women emphasize the women’s contentedness, cleanliness, and appearance, so that industry could be seen as disconnected from the lower-classness of manual labor. However, observations generally stop outside the factory door: in many pro-factory representations, women are described going to work and leaving it, but not actually laboring, and mainly in this way could their “femininity” be retained. Furthermore, the women on parade mark their femininity by the simple white dress, thereby disavowing a desire for goods, so that their low wages and inability to gain wealth become not a mark of capitalist abuse, but rather a sign of their gender. In general, femininity participated in the marketplace not through visible labor, but as a preparation and training for economic success. “Feminine” women were called to display and enact an upper- or middle-class status through fashion and maintenance of refined goods, to enable class mobility by ordering a successful home and training family members in self-discipline and ambition. Outside of manufacturing propaganda, lower-class workers and manual laborers would have been viewed as neither “feminine” nor “masculine” but merely male and female.
Factory work was closely linked with slavery throughout the North and the South, connecting lower-classness to nonwhiteness through employers, material conditions, and labor. Shackel and Paynter find that 15 to 20 percent of slaves were employed by urban industry, about 5 percent worked in “industrial enterprises” by the 1850s, and about 80 percent of these slave workers were owned “directly by industrialists” (23). The connections between black slavery and wage slavery were well understood in Northern industrial towns; Charles Sumner denounced the alliance between the “Lords of the Lash” and the “Lords of the Loom” in the 1848 Whig Convention (O’Connor 45). The textile mills, upon whose leadership industrialism was developed in America, maintained multiple connections with the slavery concerns of the South. While cotton was bought from plantations, it was often also sold back to them after being processed in cotton mills, in the form of “negro-cloth”— “at least several mills producing negro cloth could be found in virtually every Northern state from New Hampshire to Pennsylvania and west to Ohio,” including the model of industrial progress, the Lowell Mills of Massachusetts (Stachiw 36). Ronald Bailey traces the relationships between leading industrial manufacturers and slaveholders and finds marriage and family relationships between Northern factory owners—the Cabots, the Browns and Samuel Slater, the Lowells—and Southern planters; the Hazards of Rhode Island, also leading manufacturers, were involved in the slave trade before it was outlawed, and Rowland Hazard married the daughter of a planter at the end of the eighteenth century (Bailey 3–4; Stachiw 37). In 1860 a Massachusetts minister maintained that “ ‘Not one dollar in fifty passes through our hands that is not probably derived from this source [slavery]” (Stachiw 41).
The links between slavery and wage slavery traveled throughout the factory hierarchy. Comparisons of material conditions of factory workers and slaves helped both the “wage slavery” movement and slavery advocates, the latter arguing that black slaves enjoyed superior conditions and treatment compared to Northern factory workers. Use of the term “white slavery” was “fiercely rejected” by abolitionists, however, argues David Roediger; living and working conditions did not weigh as heavily as the freedom to earn a living or leave an employer, and such rhetoric weakened the straightforward legal evils of slavery (Roediger, “Race” 173). In a material sense, having fine goods was not as important as the ability to get them, and industrial workers agreed. During a shoe strike in 1860, a female worker said, “ ‘We know we are not a quarter as bad off as the slaves of the South,’ ” and William Craft stated that “he never met a poor person in Britain who ‘did not resent it as an insult’ when his or her circumstances and those of American slaves were compared” (Roediger, “Race” 177). Instead, white workers established as much ideological distance as possible between the two types of laborers: lower-class whites rejected the terms “servant” and “master” for referring to household laborers and master craftsmen, as these were too racially charged (Roediger, Wages 41, 50). Asked for her “master” in 1807, a New England maid responded that “ ‘none but negers are sarvants’ ” (Roediger, Wages 47). The relation between lower-class whites and slaves, couched in material terms, was a desire to gain things and a current lack of them. The distinction was in ability—white men could sell their time and get things, while slaves could not. The existence of a permanent class at the bottommost rungs of society made whites’ temporary poverty more tolerable and enabled the working class to imagine that the important social distinctions were white and black rather than rich and poor.
Blackness, in this system, represents a lack of potential, a barrier from achievement and from upward mobility. Accordingly, blackness became a way of deflecting class tensions, of defining this mostly imaginary underclass, and of developing rules of civility that would produce disciplined workers among those who chose whiteness (Roediger, Wages).3 Lower-class and undisciplined workers could not be “white”—they could not afford white things, nor use them properly, nor hide the physicality of their labor—and these lacks signified racially as nonwhite skin. Whiteness was expensive to gain and laborious to maintain, and downward class mobility signified also a racial danger. Blackness, revealed through black skin and dark-colored goods, was more than simply a stabilizer to the fluctuations caused by class mobilities or discrepancies; it was also a threat, the darkest place on a continuum of class, characterized by a series of negations—not able to have, not able to get, not able to use.
In 1818, a Southern traveler notes that “ ‘a journey from New Orleans to the mouth of the Sabine, exhibits man in every stage of his progress, from the palace to the hut’ ” (qtd. in Bushman 383). Although his emphasis is on the uncivilized state of the frontier, he reflexively equates civilization with palaces and barbarity with huts. This evolutionary outline was illustrated in the emerging popularity of standardized white houses and specialized architecture among the middle and upper classes, which contrasted with the vestigial log cabins and unpainted, one-room houses, or parts of houses, afforded by lower classes. Throughout the country, people with the means began “improving” their outdated architecture by creating parlors, front halls, and landscaping—and this organization was usually accompanied by an exterior white paint. Richard Bushman describes a house, owned by the Bixbys in Massachusetts, that underwent improvement in the late 1830s, when the oldest daughter reached marrying age. Their first project was to enclose the front hall, keeping the rest of the house hidden, and then to create a parlor from the former “best room.” At the same time, the Bixbys removed unpainted clapboards and painted the house white; they also stopped scattering garbage throughout the yard and began collecting it into ordered, rectangular pits. Apparently, the Bixbys were among the last in the neighborhood to make these adaptations. In the central Massachusetts area, “virtually every house underwent changes much like those at the Bixbys” (Bushman 255). Among the improvements that David Goodale made to his 140-year-old house in 1841 was also the requisite coat of white paint. In addition to painting the house, he planted flower beds along the front drive, papered the downstairs rooms, and bought a sofa, an organ, and carpets (381). An “imposing house” constructed by William Brinton in Pennsylvania in 1704 also needed improvement by the nineteenth century. In 1820 it received a porch, and by the 1860s “the brick had been painted white, windows had been enlarged, shutters added, and a picket fence enclosed the foreyard” (261–262).
The trend that saw so many houses converted to white enjoyed dominance from the beginning until the middle of the nineteenth century. This popularity, which produced “ ‘assemblages of white boxes thrust as near as may be upon the street’ ” and made the white house with green shutters “almost a cliché for middling houses” carried changes in hygiene and etiquette in their wake (qtd. in Bushman 248, 258). When the Bixbys became concerned with social appearances, they did not merely coat the house’s exterior. They removed the parent’s bed and the dining ware from the “best room” to create a parlor. They collected household garbage into out-of-the-way trash pits instead of throwing it haphazardly into the yard. They created the initial barrier of a front hall, indicating that entrance into the family’s life was excluded except for the select. With the addition of a few walls, the family’s mode of life was changed; pathways through the house must be redirected, daily activities relocated, and disposal habits rethought. These changes called for more purposeful planning of activities, a more disciplined approach to household tasks, a more ordered organization of domestic time and space. They assigned a geographical space to people and events and helped accommodate the family to a social realignment that assigned a specific place to people as well. These improvements, not merely of house but of behavior and therefore social ambition, were indicated without by the whiteness of the walls.
These segmented, white houses appeared throughout New England, the Middle Atlantic, and the lower Chesapeake in regional but standardized forms. Architectural historian Fred Kniffen’s interest extends from 1790 to 1850 and considers vernacular architecture only—mostly rural, middle- and lower-class houses.4 His study, therefore, considers not the grand whitened mansions that dotted the landscape, but rather the imitative smaller houses that blanketed it. All classes of houses could be subject to the advice of architectural reformers, but the guidebooks agreed that one’s class status demanded a specific style of home. And despite a lingering mythology of classlessness, qualifications for houses were explicit: “villas for the rich, cottages for the middle class, and farm houses for the laborers” (Clifford Clark 46). Middle-class respectability seeped into the architecture and emerged in the form of I-houses, a compromise between vernacular structures and Georgian architecture. Like the Georgian mansions of the eighteenth century, I-houses showed the bilateral symmetry with a central front door, usually one-room deep and two or more long, with a passage and stair fronting the entrance (Bushman 252). Viewed as a mark of “economic attainment” and of middle-class respectability, the I-house became a standard bearer of the clichèd white housefront throughout the country (Kniffen 16). Kniffen argues that although regional differences existed, all regions recognized the same version of respectability.5
James Fenimore Cooper marks the class-based distinction of whiteness in The Pioneers (1823), where he describes a frontier village caught between wilderness and civilization. Among the stretches of wilderness in eastern New York can be seen occasional “spots of white”—clearings that reveal “the commencement of agriculture” which may grow into settlement (38). In town, some fifty buildings appear multi-colored from a distance—a few painted white on the front and rear, but more bearing “that expensive color on their fronts only, while their economical but ambitious owners had covered the remaining sides of the edifices, with a dingy red” (39). The front of houses receives the expensive whiteness before any other side; this color is intended for public viewing and public interpretation. Here Cooper iterates the ambition that can be marked by whiteness, even while combined with the cheaper red paint of a lower-class lack of means. In his fictional Templeton, the “better sort of buildings” are uniformly white, and fitted with green shutters (40).
MODEL COTTAGE.
Fig. 1.
Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, January 1850, pg. 41l. Model cottage in Roman villa style. Designed for a middle-class household, it includes a central hall, symmetry, and white exterior.
Judge Templeton’s mansion stands apart because of its awkward architecture less than its grandeur—its surrounding fruit trees and path leading from the gate to the front door. Templeton’s house has a “composite order,” made up of the ambitious misdirections of the town’s architects and ultimately covered by an enormous painted roof. Scholars point to the house’s architecture as an illustration of Cooper’s vision of a unified society that can successfully combine many different ethnicities beneath the same superstructure.6 Cooper’s use of the term “composite,” however, requires that the various elements co-exist separately. Using fictional architecture and dining ware, Cooper presents in The Pioneers a vision of an economically mobile society with potential to be ethnically united. The town, a reflection of the nation’s possibilities, uses the material messages of white things to reinforce a strictly classed, raced, and gendered order: in Cooper’s vision, black and white, lower and upper class, Native Americans and civilized Americans never do unify, but merely find their proper place together. Templeton’s house demonstrates the Judge’s ideal of unity—different traditions and viewpoints might be brought together under one roof. But Cooper does not believe in indiscriminate integration: the foundation of the house is separate from its structure. The harsher reality of Cooper’s vision, illustrated and enforced by the novel’s white things, allows co-existence for disparate groups only when all characters inhabit their proper place—in society, in the household, and at the dinner table.
In Judge Templeton’s late eighteenth-century town, black slavery informs class distinctions only tangentially, but it colors the entire lower class. Non-slave servants to Templeton’s household include Ben Pump, a former sailor whose fair complexion is “burnt to a fiery red”; Remarkable Pettibone, with a “saffron” face and yellow teeth, and “three or four subordinate menials, mostly black” (59–60). Judge Templeton’s black slave is the first person to appear in the story, and he determines the course of the narrative both by his legal silence and by his exploitation by white men. Andrew Doolen writes of Cooper’s treatment of this slave, Agamemnon, as an answer to contemporary discussions of the African colonization movement; the appearance of this slave and the free black man Freeborn demonstrate “an underlying current of racial violence that unsettles the formation of an ideal republic” (133). Neither black character has recourse to the law for protection, and therefore both become pawns in the struggle for social dominance between white men. Templeton society allows no agency for its black characters. Their blackness instead serves as an ideological threat to characters such as Natty Bumppo who refuse to participate in the capitalist economy.
Indeed, class-based whiteness will become a prerequisite for agency in the novel. Although the racially white servants insist on their distinction from the “black menials,” they are aware of their economic and architectural nearness to them. Remarkable bristles when Benjamin suggests that Elizabeth Temple will be her new mistress—“ ‘don’t make me out to be a nigger, Benjamin. She’s no mistress of mine, and never will be’ ” (175). She then turns the racial insult back upon Benjamin, accusing him of belonging more to the kitchen than the “keeping-room of a house of one who is well to do in the world” (175). For his part, Benjamin allows that he might be a “ ‘black, beastly bear,’ ” but “ ‘dam’me if I’m a monkey’ ” (177). Nonetheless, the servants remain intermediate between the “niggers … stored snug below” in the basement and the mistress whom Remarkable has resentfully preceded to her mansion room to prepare it for the night (171). Natty Bumppo is a racial outsider—he lives in a cabin and a cave and battles against the free black man Freeborn for rights over a turkey at the turkey shoot. Like Freeborn, he depends upon others for his ability to gain things—he must take money from Elizabeth to shoot the turkey, and he depends upon a special dispensation from the Judge in order to hunt his woods. Natty’s humiliation in the stocks becomes inevitable, though regrettable: since he has eluded a racial place in this civilizing town, he must be spectacularly assigned one.
Oliver Effingham is similarly excluded from social conversation—to the extent that Richard proposes he dine with the slaves in the cellar because he is suspected to have Indian blood—and he remains excluded until he demonstrates a mastery of white goods. Because his relationship to frontiersman Natty Bumppo, adopted father Chingachgook, and white grandfather Major Effingham all exert a claim on Judge Templeton’s property, Jane Tompkins argues that his marriage to Elizabeth Temple “resolves … the competing claims of rival nations, families, and races” (108). However, I would argue that only the last, legal, white claim carries any weight in the novel. Cooper’s depiction of a republican unity built upon many European nationalities is not the “composite order” represented by Judge Templeton’s house: Effingham must demonstrate racial as well as class-based whiteness before this unifying marriage can take place. In the final scene of the novel, he reveals that he has razed his former cabin—once occupied by Oliver and Natty Bumppo—and in its place erected “a headstone of white marble” and a “rich monument, decorated with an urn, and ornamented with a chisel” (450). The larger monument is dedicated to Oliver’s white grandfather, and includes a lengthy inscription that praises him as brave, religious, formerly wealthy, and Natty Bumppo’s master. The second stone is briefly dedicated to Chingachgook, and it lists his several names. But as Oliver reads the inscription, Natty must correct Oliver’s pronunciation of “Mohican,” and the stone misspells Chingachgook (452). Oliver has become “white” by virtue of his parentage and inheritance of land and wealth; in this scene, he demonstrates his whiteness by a proper use of white things—the destruction of the uncivilized cabin and the dedication of a popular urn monument. In addition, he has begun forgetting a connection to his nonwhite parents, erasing even as he memorializes Chingachgook, and erecting a white monolith that excludes nonwhites from the “composite order.”
“Serving the Dinner.” Photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1899 or 1900. Table set at the Hampton Institute, Hampton, Virginia. Foreground shows a white tablecloth and white dishes, individual place settings. On the back cupboard are displayed pictured porcelain dishes. In the background, an African American woman in serving costume and a portrait of George Washington. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-117093.
The unity of the nation, in fact, depends upon its segregation, as Cooper demonstrates even in his description of a formal dinner including citizens of different European ethnicities. The Pioneers is set in 1793, although Cooper sets his fictional table accurately to reflect the current fashion in dining etiquette:
The table-linen was of the most beautiful damask, and the plates and dishes of real china, an article of great luxury at this early period in American commerce. The knives and forks were of exquisitely polished steel, and were set in unclouded ivory … In the centre of the table, stood a pair of heavy silver castors, surrounded by four dishes [of various wild meats] …. Between these dishes and the turkeys, stood, on the one side, a prodigious chine of roasted bears meat, and on the other a boiled leg of delicious mutton. Interspersed among this load of meats, was every species of vegetables that the season and country afforded. The four corners were garnished with plates of cake …. At each corner of the table, stood saucers, filled with … ‘sweet-meats.’ At the side of each plate, which was placed bottom upwards,7 with its knife and fork most accurately crossed above it, stood another, of smaller size, containing a motley-looking pie …. The object seemed to be profusion, and it was obtained entirely at the expense of order and elegance. (106–107)
The abundant and symmetrical food demonstrates the competence of this wealthy frontier household. The dishes of wild meat indicate both the wildness of the surroundings and the land’s potential, but neither threatens the civilization and etiquette of the inhabitants. That Cooper describes every dish and diagrams its placement conveys the importance of such domestic skills to a proper household. The ivory-handled silverware, damask tablecloth, and china are the signifying white things that proclaim the household adept not only at providing food, but also at providing refinement. The properly placed dishes accord with contemporary (1830s) practice, the finest details of dinner-table management. Judge Templeton provides a “motley” feast to encourage his motley collection of guests, from various nationalities—but again, this order and refinement excludes the nonwhite servants and the black menials; and although the judge insists on including the dubiously raced Effingham, the reader does not see him seated. Indeed, this table setting is the ceramic parallel to Judge Templeton’s composite house and the “motley” appearance of the town itself. Though Templeton would idealistically incorporate different European nationalities into his construction of a unified American republic, and though he would celebrate the ambition of the lower classes earning wealth and social status, the novel still segregates class and race along definite lines.
The dinner table is symmetrically arranged with everything in its place despite the alleged lack of “order and elegance.” Even the “motley-looking” pies, artistically arranged at each plate, are “composed of triangular slices of apple, mince, pumpkin, craneberry [sic], and custard, so arranged as to form an entire whole” (108, italics in text). Profusion may even sacrifice order, but never segregation: the pies construct a unified whole despite their disparate parts, but the parts remain distinct. Indeed, part of the point may be that the pies would be much less palatable if blended together. Thus Judge Templeton’s house remains more a joke than a serious symbol of American republicanism: the roof undergoes successive coats of paint in attempts to unify the aggregate elements beneath it—and each is as aesthetically startling as it is unsuccessful.
Cooper’s use of table settings as well as architecture and house paint reveals his understanding of and endorsement of the classed messages delivered by ceramics in the early nineteenth century. In antebellum society, not only the price of wares, but the style and specialization indicated gradations in social status. In 1828, an etiquette book dictated that “ ‘a household should have a dinner service of china for company, a dinner service for ordinary use, and a third service for the kitchen’ ”—so that servants’ and employers’ dishes remained visually and physically segregated (qtd. in De Cunzo 60). By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, as pearlware and whiteware were developed, “creamware had lost its association with high-style vessel forms, was lower priced, frequently produced in more mundane forms (as common and unadorned chamber pots), and dominated the ceramic assemblages left by urban households of low to middle status” (Yentsch, “Engendering” 132). Therefore, by 1840, Miss Leslie’s etiquette book recommends the outdated creamware for the kitchen workers (qtd. in De Cunzo 60). The yellowware of the lower-class dish corresponds to the lower-class complexion of Remarkable Pettibone, with her “saffron” face and yellow teeth.
As ceramics became more important to the meal, the decorations grew to overtake the entire body of the dish, highlighted by their white background. Class was yet communicated by the decorations, as more elaborate designs were found on the finer china. In the first stage—the late eighteenth century—dishes were plain, with molded decorations confined to the rims (Wall 147). From the turn of the century until the mid-nineteenth century, decorations on vessels increased. In the early nineteenth century, families used shell-edged vessels trimmed in blue or green. Finally, as focus shifted away from the food, decoration covered the entire vessel, most commonly with a willow pattern or Chinese landscape prints.8 At that point, decoration served more to indicate class status (G. Miller, “Classification”). Cost of ceramics ranged from undecorated cream-colored ware, which was least expensive; to vessels with minimal decoration, such as shell-edged, banded, or stamped; to hand-painted floral decorations; to transfer-painted willow patterns or Chinese landscapes; and finally to porcelain as the most expensive (McBride and McBride 148–149). Over time and across class, ceramic price increased with its role in organizing a meal: Wall shows that families were willing to spend “ever-increasing amounts of money on the dishes that they used at family meals” (Wall, Archaeology 144). The whiter the dish and the more ornate its design, the more organized and specialized the meal, and the higher the exhibited class of the family.
As these ceramics soliloquized from the table, the table itself became a stage. A presentation of meals emphasizing dishware became part of the code of dining room propriety. While eighteenth-century diners concentrated on a mere abundance of food to show status, the turn-of-the-century focus became the “balanced and symmetrical arrangement” of food on the table (Wall, Archaeology 117–118). Nineteenth-century cookbooks and etiquette books often diagrammed the proper arrangement of the food on the table, stressing symmetry and order. Later, the focus shifted somewhat away from food: the table had a centerpiece, possibly a caster or salad, or even flowers. Food was still visible and set symmetrically around the table “on the diagonal or ‘cross corners,’ ” as prescribed (Wall, Archaeology 119).
By the 1820s, family dinners as well as formal dinner parties were specialized, including at least two courses and more specific foods for each course. At this time, meals were also segregated for servants: whereas in the late eighteenth century, the servants ate with the family, by the mid-nineteenth century they ate separately and served only the less important courses.9 Eventually, the meal was presented under covered dishes, so that the tableware was the focus of the table (Wall, Archaeology 148). At the height of the whitening trend, table settings assumed the appearance that the ceramics, rather than the servants, were providing food for the diners. In this way, the white china—which beamed at its economically successful family—could also ignore the darker hands that set it.
The etiquette built around salad forks and soup spoons exalted stricter body control and ideals of individuality. Each diner ate from a separate plate; his or her motions were more constricted so as not to intrude into the next diner’s space. With individualized plates, such rules as not wiping one’s mouth on the tablecloth, not reaching across another’s plate, not returning chewed food to one’s plate—in effect, keeping one’s body and its functions to oneself—became popular. Diners further dissociated themselves from the animal act of eating by use of the fork, becoming widespread in the nineteenth century. Thus we understand why Cooper points out Natty Bumppo’s use of a “broken fork,” connecting him, but only tenuously, to civilization (Last of the Mohicans 51). Such rules had been elaborated and made more stringent since the Renaissance, according to Norbert Elias; Deetz finds that Renaissance ideas and practices only caught up to the American colonies in the last half of the eighteenth century (Elias, The Civilizing Process; Deetz, Small Things). Specialized tableware and industrialization landed in the country at the same time. Each helped to perpetuate the other, and each fostered an ideal of individual bodily control.
Racial whiteness required such specialization and self-discipline and became its own reward in the form of white, refined goods. Skill in handling sets of dishes and in managing subdivided houses and yards earned admittance into the closed class of “white” folks. For the upper class, this skill showcased a civilized refinement; but for the working classes, it also helped to accommodate them towards the special rigors of industrialized labor and the increasing distance it created between rich and poor. The availability of manufactured prestige dishes for the working class was both gift and curse: while resembling the privileged goods of the upper classes, dishes became a source for conditioning individual responsibility, strict control of movements, delayed gratification of desires, reverence for material things—all the qualities of a good capitalist worker. Among those included in industrialization’s overview, however, these changing, whitening goods boasted and benefited the factory labor that helped to produce them. While mass production made ever-whiter dishes in their increasingly specialized sets more available to middle and lower classes, it also contributed to the creation of a permanent unskilled working class and demanded a specialization of labor separating the worker from his product. While the ebbing popularity of the term “master” among Northern whites signaled a denial of slavery or slavery conditions, it also marked the disappearance of that class of skilled “master” craftsmen of the century before. And while the term “hand” replaced the racially charged “servant,” it also manifested the changing duties of an industrial worker, where the disembodied hands that operated specialized machinery were the valued part of the worker.
Assuming that “a person who left an assemblage of nothing but 10-in. plates ate—and thought—differently than someone who left an assemblage representing equal numbers of 6-, 7-, 8-, 9-, 10-, and 12-in. plates,” Parker B. Potter sees in the spread of segmented ceramics a subtle and accepted coercion on the part of the ruling class (122). As lower classes acquired the less expensive dishes in sets—outdated creamware, for example, as recommended by Miss Leslie—they also began to imitate the regularized body control demanded by the dishes’ proper use. The control demanded by the complicated rules of soup spoons and salad forks, in turn, helped accommodate a body to the specific and repetitive motions of factory work (Shackel, Personal Discipline; Leone, “Georgian Order”). The creamware plate that dominated the market at the end of the eighteenth century imitated expensive porcelain but was made affordable through mass production. Rather than convey the status it aspired to, however, “the mark that that plate bears most clearly is the mark of the regulated, standardized, segmented—and alienated—labor that went into its manufacture” (Potter 120).
The rise of industrialism required new manners in the workplace, as “masters” were replaced by morally distant “bosses,” as alcohol came to be excluded from the workplace, and as workers were separated into stations rather than producing goods communally. As a steady presence in the home, the whitened plates helped to naturalize factory demands: “[a] worker taught at home to see standardization and segmentation as the way in which the world naturally works may have been more likely to see such organization in the workplace as appropriate” (Potter 121). Furthermore, the standardized behavior produced more predictable workers, decreasing the need for supervision. Such habits, designed to make a worker “punctual and self-disciplined,” were “largely absorbed by 1830 and completely absorbed by 1860” (Leone 247).
These accommodations to self-control and repetitive, regularized movements were able to translate to the marketplace, therefore, as a work-discipline that promised economic success. For women excluded from most professions, factory labor offered a similar promise; but by mid-century, women were largely excluded from “direct participation in the industrial process” as well (Shackel and Larsen 22). Instead, the proper feminine participation in economic mobility centered within the household, as a site for training male workers and a place of preparation for the women. The feminine relationship to material things consisted in having them but appearing not to desire them, and an inability to earn them. Such a disavowal of material ambition was accomplished through the sanctification of household labor, which offered to transfer the woman’s work to a spiritual realm. Jane Tompkins argues that domestic labor was presented to women as a spiritual exercise, “not a household task, but a religious ceremony” and “a strategy for survival” (169). By bestowing sacred significance on the drudgery of housekeeping, the housekeeper could work without seeming to labor. Spiritual or sentimental attachment in place of overt ambition rescued the “feminine” from a determined classed position in the marketplace; her role instead was as steward of her family’s goods and ambitions.
Such an economic exercise inhered specifically in the tea ritual, partaking most acutely in display of fine white china and tabletop etiquette. When Jane Tompkins designs housework as a “religious ceremony,” she focuses her comment on an introductory scene of tea-making in Susan Warner’s The Wide Wide World (1850). In the scene, Ellen Montgomery labors to make her mother’s tea perfect, with bread sliced the proper thickness, and toasted to the proper shade of brown, as a way of coping with economic stress. On the other hand, Ann Douglas finds Ellen to be pampered and “[a]ristocratic,” with skills that are “curiously ornamental rather than functional” (75). The two scholars’ disagreement revolves around this simple ceremony. Douglas believes that Warner’s privileging tea-making over shopping shows a sentimental divestment of women’s role in the marketplace. Therefore, she concludes that sentimental novelists accepted the confinement of domesticity in exchange for a nostalgic and ultimately useless sanctity. Both scholars view tea-making as anti-materialist; I would argue that domestic discipline was itself seen as an economic activity. In my view, the proper tea ceremony is an elegantly furnished boot camp, set in an exclusively feminine environment, for basic training in domestic economics, bodily discipline and etiquette, social display, time management, and the unification of the family: in short, white middle-class womanhood. In fiction, the tea scene is an analog to the middle-class white woman’s home life. It posits her life as a series of female family or social gatherings continually intruded upon and disrupted by men, and therefore requiring re-application of self-discipline, self-denial, and economic organization in order to keep the household intact. Her management of “tea” plays out such self-mastery, and therefore is a barometer of her feminine success. In American sentimental literature of the nineteenth century, the tea scene establishes a feminine world apart from, but responsive to, the economic struggles of the marketplace.
The ceramic settings and silver equipage of the tea-time ritual were instrumental in determining individuality, social rank, and etiquette in the early nineteenth century. The ritual was at once the most social and the most insulated of family events; “tea” became a concentrated version of the overall dining ritual. Offering tea was a mark of hospitality to visitors, while highly stylized social teas granted an opportunity to display manners and expensive settings. A tourist noted in 1795 that “ ‘the whole family is united at tea, to which friends, acquaintances, and even strangers are invited’ ” (qtd. in Roth 444). As a family affair, tea-making was seen as the “most feminine and domestic of all occupations.”10 It was a forum for imparting the regularized discipline imbedded in the proper handling of ceramic sets, and for reinforcing a feminine domestic economy. In 1781, Abbé Robin remarked that “ ‘there is not a single person to be found, who does not drink [tea] out of china cups and saucers’ ” (qtd. in Roth 451). Yentsch explains that the tea ceremony gained popularity in the late seventeenth century as a “prestigious masculine beverage,” but “became a focal point in women’s lives by ca. 1740” (“Symbolic” 224, 223). The “ritual use of food involved men as individuals,” Yentsch argues, “and women as mothers, wives, and daughters, but not as individuals in their own right.” By the turn of the nineteenth century, tea “did become feminized,” although it continued to carry its other inherited meanings (224).
Drawing upon the ceramic message of sanctified labor and physical purity, tea scenes teach a feminine economics that can smooth over class distinctions and conquer poverty. The scene of Ellen’s tea making in The Wide Wide World falls purposefully before her unsuccessful shopping excursion and immediately after Ellen learns that her father’s failed lawsuit will force her to part with her mother. The juxtaposition is important. The bread-winner cannot provide for his family; the dependent females respond with a tea ceremony whose every movement and measurement is carefully disciplined. Indeed, as Tompkins argues, Ellen’s tea is a way of coping; Ellen asserts her affection for her mother and her devotion to higher duties when she prepares the tea and toast. Tea-making is also, however, a preliminary exercise in self-control for Ellen. Later she and her mother will shop with money supplied by a grandmother’s pawned ring. Such a sacrifice enables Mrs. Montgomery to buy the luxuries “which she thought important to [Ellen’s] comfort and improvement” (29). The women in the household practice independently the work-discipline that should produce a successful capitalist, and they provide the luxury and comfort that should inspire the worker towards spiritual and economic improvement. On the night that Ellen discovers her father’s economic failure, however, she fails to complete the tea ceremony: the kettle boils for over an hour, and she drops the toast into the ashes (14–15). The young Ellen cannot respond properly yet to the patriarch’s failed discipline, though she tries. Her mother, however, demonstrates feminine economy by providing money and luxury despite the shortness of means.
In Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? (1839), the narrator measures class status—for lack of sufficient material clues on the frontier in Michigan—by the quality of the tea ceremony. Her progression westward takes her away from the benefits of class and segregation. She describes the first cabin she sleeps in during her voyage as “a log-house of diminutive size, with corresponding appurtenances” (8). Her hostess boasts of the house’s “private like” sleeping area, which consists of a six-foot wide room fully occupied by three beds, and an attic loft strewn with beds and partitioned by “[s]undry old quilts … fastened by forks to the rafters” (9). At this house, the women place their comb on the same shelf as the spoons and scatter “loose hairs on the floor with a coolness that [makes her] shudder” when she thinks of her dinner (14). Despite these insults to etiquette, the women spread a large dinner, serve the laboring men of the household, and later set the table for a strictly feminine tea. Though wary before, the narrator looks forward to this “more lady-like meal” (15). The settings are placed before the laboring men during dinner; but they become lady-like when segregated into a tea for women. In a novel describing the trials of frontier life, the narrator sobs only once: when she misses this tea.
Class does not necessarily coincide with refinement and wealth, however, if feminine discipline is lacking. At a rare house occupied by an educated and upper-class woman, Mrs. Clavers immediately detects “that the hand of refined taste had been there” (74). Here, a “smooth-shaven lawn,” “beds of flowers of every hue,” and “white-washed log-walls” mark the house as distinguished, making the society-schooled narrator immediately blush over her own “inky stockings” (74). The family’s insistence on class markers has alienated neighbors, however, and these are the only folk available to bolster their upper-class image by laboring for them. Without servants, the undisciplined aristocrats cannot manage their house. The floors are an unwashed yellow, even though “a great box filled with sand stood near the hearth” as cleanser; dirty dogs lie nearby, and a man composed of “[p]ride and passion,” “reckless self-indulgence,” and dirty fingernails glowers in a rocking-chair (75). In spite of the house’s vestigial luxuries, Mrs. Clavers observes a lack of household efficiency and a consequent decline in manners. Neither wife nor husband practices the work-discipline preached, and thus “Mrs. B—” swoons at a slight alarm and “Mr. B—” is recklessly self-indulgent, so that neither is economically productive. At the end of their visit, the narrator encapsulates her anecdote by gravely remarking, “We were not invited to remain to tea” (76).
Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854) followed The Wide Wide World as a mid-century bestseller, but even more than a female spiritual bildungsroman, the former is an account of feminine training in how to become upwardly mobile. For Gerty, tea-making becomes part of the process in feminine success, training and demonstration of an evolving domestic discipline that will move her from her early squalor to an ultimate middle-class home. Gerty begins the novel as the orphan charge of Nan Grant, who feels the child to be “a dead weight upon her hands” and scolds, beats, and starves the girl regularly (8). Because she lives uncaredfor in a “dark, and unwholesome-looking house,” “scantily clad” as well as “uncombed and unbecoming,” Gerty has not learned to suppress her anger or control her violent fits (5). Gerty is “unbecoming” in several ways: she has no economic potential because she has not been taught to have, want, or use refined goods. Through a succession of tutors, Gerty must learn to participate in the marketplace enough to care for things, to use them properly, to desire wealth, and finally, to disavow that desire. Only then can she enjoy or even obtain a feminine position within a household, or be a maker of a home. Cummins presents this education as a literal enlightenment, as a clearing away of darker negative things and an organization of the remainder in order to create the space, or potential, for social success.
The novel begins by explaining Gerty’s deprivation, which includes not only love and care, but also light and space: the first line is, “It was growing dark in the city” (5). In Gerty’s neighborhood, the darkness comes unnaturally early; in the “narrow streets and dark lanes” where the “poor are crowded together,” even the snow that makes “everything look bright and clean in the pleasant open squares, near which the fine houses were built” loses “all its purity” (5). Gerty lives in a “low-roofed, dark, and unwholesome-looking house,” and Nan Grant often locks her in the “dark garret (Gerty hated and feared the dark)” (8). Cummins quickly equates the darkness and closeness of the novel with moral disorder, asking for “man or angel to light up the darkness within” and rendering Trueman Flint, the lamplighter, such an angel as he begins Gerty’s process of enlightenment (9). But the light is also classed: the darkness belongs to lower-class houses and habits.
Part of her darkness comes from idleness. Nan Grant does not send her to school or give her any chores except for fetching milk, and Gerty “had nothing to do at all, and had never known the satisfaction of helping anybody”; she “was always idle” (14, italics in text). Before she can learn economic usefulness, however, she must learn proper feminine usefulness—Nan Grant is a poor role model who takes in boarders, supports a lazy full-grown son, and looks upon Gerty as a useless commodity. Gerty’s first lesson, therefore, is in sentiment: when True gives her a kitten, she must learn how to love and protect it. Gerty has wished for a pair of shoes, but fulfillment of a practical need would not help to prepare her for life in the same way: her need for feminine sentiment overrides her mere physical needs.
After True takes Gerty to live in his small apartment with him, Gerty receives her second lesson in feminine economy. This lesson combines cleanliness, tea-making, and filial devotion. Mrs. Sullivan, the gentle neighbor, decides to subject True’s messy apartment “to female intrusion” by straightening it (32). Helping Mrs. Sullivan clean and organize the rooms gives Gerty her first taste of “that happiness—perhaps the highest earth affords—of feeling that she had been instrumental in giving joy to another” (36, italics in text). Thus happiness arrives with discipline and self-denial. Drawing on her homemaking instincts, Mrs. Sullivan arranges the room so as to make “a parlour of it” and thereby conjure refinement from the tiny working-class space (37). Whereas True has cluttered up his apartment “to such an extent that one almost needed a pilot to conduct him safely through” it, Mrs. Sullivan, a model of feminine success within the limits of poverty, with a “dress almost quaker-like in its extreme simplicity, and freedom from the least speck or stain,” manages to “clear up and put to right” the room so efficiently that True believes half his furniture has been removed (33). For Mrs. Sullivan, “cleanliness and order” are “the cause of virtue and happiness, so completely did she identify outward neatness and purity with inward peace” (33). Gerty participates in the renovation in order to learn such organization—the clearing away of clutter that precedes economic success. True has gained through this feminine industry more than half the space of his apartments, and a subdivided bedroom and parlor—a material gain wrought in the cause of spiritual improvement.
For the next step in the operation, Mrs. Sullivan gives Gerty “careful instructions” on how to “set the table and toast the bread for supper” (37). The teacups and saucers have been placed, for this purpose, in “regular rows” along the lower shelf, so Gerty can reach them (37). After this ceremony, Gerty resolves to conquer her temper and appeal to God as a continuation of her love for True. When Gerty has demonstrated that she can use the ceramics properly, taking care of the things themselves and also managing the tea-time ritual for True’s comfort and training, she receives her own white thing: “one of those white plaster images, so familiar to every one, representing the little Samuel in an attitude of devotion” (39). It is, perhaps, Gerty’s diploma marking the extent of True’s tutelage: it is significant that he obtains this present from a “furren” boy, who offers him a choice of black or white statues as thanks when True has helped him collect them (40). Although True is kind to the foreign boy, the stranger remains excluded from the group because of his odd manners and unintelligible language. His foreignness highlights Gerty’s own whiteness, and the white statue marks her social potential. Willie warns her to “ ‘take care and not break it,’ ” transferring the early lesson in caring for a kitten to an inanimate object and linking economic use of a thing with the thing’s pious message (41).
When Gerty has learned to use things properly, she still must be taught ambition: she can improve economically only when she begins to desire better circumstances than True has provided her. Willie, her future husband, arouses such desire when he takes her “window-shopping,” looking in the windows of fine houses and imagining themselves within. One night she and Willie follow True as he lights lamps, and Willie shows her an elegant family tea through a mansion window:
Rich carpets, deeply-tinted curtains, pictures in gilded frames, and huge mirrors, reflecting the whole on every side, gave Gerty her first impressions of luxurious life. There was an air of comfort combined with all this elegance, which made it still more fascinating to the child of poverty and want. A table was bountifully spread for tea; the cloth of snow-white damask, the shining plate, above all, the home-like hissing tea-kettle, had a most inviting look. A gentleman in gay slippers was in an easy-chair by the fire; a lady in a gay cap was superintending a servant-girl’s arrangements at the tea-table, and the children of the household, smiling and happy, were crowded together on a window-seat. (57)
The window scene outlines social evolution for Gerty: the luxury marks the range from Nan Grant’s squalor, through Mrs. Sullivan’s efficient coziness, to a pinnacle of comfort involving snow-white damask and shining silver. The light and the whiteness of the place attract her: she renounces her former poverty with the exclamation, “ ‘I hate old, dark, black places,’ ” and her ambition ever after will be to escape the blackness or rearrange it to make space for refinement. Everyone inside the fine house is “smiling and happy.” In contrast to Gerty’s odd face, the eldest girl necessarily has “fair hair … in long ringlets over a neck as white as snow,” blue eyes, and “a cherub face” (57–58). Gerty’s ability to possess white things has been marked by an encounter with, a tribute from, and the exclusion of a distinctly foreign person. Her ability to desire is marked by an abnegation of the dark and the black. The fine house’s comfort also excludes manual labor: the father rests in an easy chair while Gerty’s guardian lights lanterns on the street. More importantly, the mistress supervises a servant rather than sets the tea herself. Furthermore, as a social tea and its elaborate etiquette presume a discerning audience, the rich children are comfortable on display. When True lights a nearby lamp and Gerty becomes visible to them, however, she cannot stand the scrutiny and runs away. Nevertheless, her career of increasing discipline is fixed as she breathes to Willie, “ ‘[A]n’t it splendid?’ ” (58).
In this scene, Gerty learns how to desire fine things; but in order to become femininely successful, she must also learn how to disavow that desire. Her social education is completed in a trial with the housekeeper, which concludes in “the first instance of complete self-control in Gerty, and the last we shall have occasion to dwell upon”: scarcely 150 pages into a 500-page novel, Gerty’s economic education is complete. Mrs. Ellis, the main housekeeper at Gerty’s new home (she has become the ward of Emily after True’s death), resents Gerty’s intrusion, and one afternoon takes revenge by throwing away all of Gerty’s sentimental treasures. These things include the figure of Samuel, True’s clay pipes, his lantern and hat, some toys and books, and “a few other trifles” (141). When Gerty learns that Mrs. Ellis has spitefully burned them, she hides herself before crying, and though she repeatedly begins to exact revenge or to tell Emily of the housekeeper’s offense, Gerty ultimately does not mention the incident. Her success has come from her learned ability to treasure things, and her ability also to attach less importance to them than to her own self-control. Only after this triumph can she be ready to exchange her initial “low-roofed, dark, and unwholesome-looking house.” While her final home is not a mansion, she begins her own family with Willie in a “well-lit, warm and pleasantly-furnished parlour” in their “own home” (507).
The discipline produced by creamware dish sets also manufactured them; a large part of using white things properly involved using them at the proper time and employing them with the most efficient use of time. Dinnertime work-discipline was paired with time-discipline, and etiquette books emphasized a strict use of time as well as of forks and napkins. Lydia Maria Child begins her 1830 The Frugal Housewife, for “People of Moderate Fortune,” advising, “The true economy of housekeeping is simply the art of gathering up all the fragments, so that nothing be lost. I mean fragments of time, as well as of materials” (3, italics in text). As important as “a few shillings saved,” she insists, is for all to be “kept out of idleness” (3). Similarly, Catharine Beecher includes in her 1841 Treatise on Domestic Economy a chapter on table manners, which rehearses prohibitions against reaching, eating noisily, and using the tablecloth for a napkin. In another chapter, “On Habits of System and Order,” she explains the most necessary skills to a housekeeper, the “right apportionment of time to different pursuits” (145, italics in text). The use of italics by both authors shows an insistence on this aspect of organization: time-discipline must be emphasized as a novel virtue in industrial America. Moreover, “systematic and regular” use of time is demanded of the successful housekeeper as well as the successful business manager (151, italics in text). Beecher suggests allotting a day for each activity, if not certain hours of the day, according to the ranking of the activity; and “mere gratification of the appetite is to be placed last in our estimate” (146).
Special awareness of time appears in the gravestones at the same time. As opposed to the birth and death dates popular later, early nineteenth-century gravestones often carry a death date along with the deceased’s exact age, in years, months, and days. Such a precise figuring of the loved one’s lifetime recalls the role age plays in Frederick Douglass’s critique of slavery. He begins Narrative of the Life establishing the access to time as part of “an inflexible barrier of meaning” (Gates 87). His first paragraph is a series of unknowns—he knows where he was born, but is ignorant of dates. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., glosses this ignorance as an oppositional definition: “The knowledge the slave has of his circumstances he must deduce from the earth; a quantity such as time, our understanding of which is cultural and not natural, derives from a nonmaterial source, let us say the heavens: ‘The white children [Douglass writes] could tell their ages. I could not’ ” (87, italics in text). Slaves become those who cannot tell time, and therefore their grouping with horses and cattle could be rationalized as natural.
If the mastery of calendar time marks differences between slaves and masters, the mastery of expensive and more esoteric measurement marked differences between finer gradations of class. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Mark P. Leone argues, the upper class used “clocks, scientific instruments, and musical instruments … to show that newly aggregated wealth was legitimate because its possessors understood natural law through direct observation, which justified both hierarchy and individualism” (240). Those who mastered time, measurement, and mechanics through these difficult-to-obtain goods thereby justified their mastery of lower classes. Cooper reflects this class justification in The Pioneers, when the Judge furnishes his hall with “a heavy, old-fashioned, brass-faced clock,” a “Fahrenheit’s thermometer,” and a barometer, which is “consulted, every half-hour, with prodigious exactitude” (61–62). Here, the Judge publicly displays his control over time and the elements and a regulated behavior towards these instruments, which explains his means to both city and frontier wealth.
Wage labor and industrial production contributed to the equation of time and money, but it valued everybody’s time exactly and rendered time itself the main commodity. The attendance to time by factory workers was more than a claim for power and freedom; it was a careful accounting and use of their main economic asset. As argued by E. P. Thompson in his important article, “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” the widespread use of watches in the nineteenth century helped to internalize a minutely structured sense of time and produced the work-discipline crucial to industrial labor. While not a white thing itself, time discipline regulated the use of white things—in fact inhered in them specifically. A complete set of china would be rotated according to time of day; guidebooks explained and diagrammed specific placement of dishes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, supper, tea time—even brunch. Women’s clothing, ideally figured as white, was also styled according to time of day, as well as location and occasion.
In “Devil in the Belfry,” Edgar Allan Poe imagines time as a product divorced from its uses, as a thing that can be kept, spent, and wasted according to contemporary notions.11 His description of the town’s seven clocks—“[I]ts faces are large and white, and its hands heavy and black”—is not accidental (739). The factory that exploited the clock depended upon these distinctions between white faces and black hands. Ralph Waldo Emerson laments industry’s division of labor by parodying its use of a “hand,” describing people as embodied body parts, “so many walking monsters—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man” (64). In Poe’s “A Predicament,” the hand of a clock literally beheads the heroine, rendering her a disembodied head and a headless body. The body has the final voice as Signora Psyche Zenobia decides to die, because the body cannot retain possession of its things: “[d]ogless, niggerless, headless,” nothing remains for her (353). Fanny Fern points to the time-discipline of mill girls as an obstacle to their enjoying nearby refinements, declaring that “[t]hey might as well be machines, for any interest or curiosity they show, save always to know what o’clock it is” (qtd. in Tichi 159). It is time that creates these hands, time that they sell, and time that keeps them in the underclasses. In claiming such time by constantly watching the clock, workers also lay claim to their own servitude, granting power to the clock for both their work and their freedom from work.
Poe’s villagers in “The Devil in the Belfry” are appropriately round-faced, as they are the ones who read the clock; the devil, dark-skinned and clad all in black, resembles a hand—either of the clock or of the factory. Moreover, the devil evokes “righteous indignation” because of his neglect of “such a thing as keeping time in his steps” (740; italics in text). The village, set in an imaginary Dutch borough, is the picture of factory efficiency. Landscaped in the image of a clock, sixty houses sit in a circle and point towards the central green: like Boott Mills, they face the central concern of the town—in this case, the clock tower. The houses themselves “are so precisely alike, that one can in no manner be distinguished from another” (737). Each house has its own small garden, growing strictly cabbages. Standardization reigns even in reproductive matters: to each house belong three boys, “each two feet in height” (738). As in the Boott Cotton Mills, class distinctions are perfectly discernible in this society—the highest class of gentlemen has the longest coat-tails and the most chins.
All citizens carry watches. Even the household pets sport timepieces, unwillingly, tied to their tales. Keeping time is the sole occupation of the villagers—they neither use it nor spend it well, but rather monitor it and hoard it. The stasis of the village is the result of such a strict time consciousness, a factory-work ethos with its perfect standardization and regularized behavior. Poe’s critique is directed not at industry but at both the lower-class and the upper-class workers: one’s keeping time is evidence of one’s slavery to time. The villagers are perfectly obedient to their main clock, which demands not only hourly obeisance, but also attempts to Americanize them, as it calls out the time for each hour: “ ‘One!’ said the clock. ‘Von!’ echoed every little old gentleman in every leather-bottomed chair in Vondervotteimittiss” (741).
The devil who disrupts such organization has a “countenance … of a dark snuff-color, and he had a long hooked nose, pea eyes, a wide mouth, and an excellent set of teeth” (740). He wears “a tight-fitting swallow-tailed black coat … black kerseymore knee-breeches, black stockings, and stumpy-looking pumps, with huge bunches of black satin ribbon for bows” (740). He carries a fiddle—instrument of slaves and poor whites—grins, and capers about, resisting “such a thing as keeping time in his steps” (740). Chaos erupts as this “very diminutive foreign-looking man” enters town, beats the timekeeper of the tower, and makes the clock strike “thirteen.” His face and his grin are “sinister,” as he threatens to and succeeds in destroying the perfectly regulated community. Poe’s intentions in handing the devil victory are unclear: the narrator calls “all lovers of correct time” to rise against his disruptions, but the villagers themselves have been contented slaves of time. In fact, their response to the clock’s strike “Thirteen!” reveals their utter reliance on the clock: men, women, and boys react with horror thinking that they have lost an entire hour.
The villagers and the devil, as they together form a sort of clock face, represent the threat of stagnation and the threat of violence, respectively. With his snuff-colored face and black suit of clothes, the devil remains indeterminately raced: he is dark like a clock hand, or like an African American slave, or like a lower-class worker. Alternately, he is an ambiguous embodiment of all these, resembling a blackface minstrel who introduces chaos into the staid order of the working community. The devil, like a minstrel, represents the wildness that has been abandoned for factory discipline and siphoned onto an imaginary slave, who may be possessed by the donning of a black mask. As such, his violence mimics the riots staged in Philadelphia, Poe’s home during part of the 1830s and 1840s. “The Devil in the Belfry” was published in Philadelphia in 1839, and that town was the locus of marked interracial tension during Poe’s stays. One of the worst riots in Philadelphia occurred in May 1838 and targeted the second Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, but destroyed a black church, a black orphanage, and the hall holding the convention (Lemire 177). In 1834, a race riot occurred between working-class whites and the “interracial clientele” of a tavern (Roediger, Wages 103). A few miles down the road in Columbia, Pennsylvania, another race riot prompted workers to decide on “the complete removal of Blacks.” Between 1829 and 1841 in Philadelphia, at least nine other race riots occurred. At the same time, blackface was a popular pastime in the town, and in the 1830s it was the “ ‘most common disguise’ in the festival maskings” at Christmas (Roediger, Wages 103; 105). Often these disguises were used in attacks on blacks as well, as in the 1834 and 1840 riots associated with Christmas celebrations. Roediger observes, however, that mobs of black-faced working-class men “often went to elite places of entertainment and sometimes attacked municipal watchmen—to mock the respectable, middle class, orderly and wealthy” (106).
The standardized, oppressive order of Poe’s fictional town brings most readers to welcome such variety as a fiddle-wielding foreigner, and the violence he does the belfry watchman seems spirited exercise rather than malice. The rioting workers of Philadelphia saw a connection between attacking municipal watchmen, impersonating blacks, and attacking blacks. Poe paints his devil as indeterminately raced, although Poe has him playing the Irish songs “ ‘Judy O’Flannagan and Paddy O’Rafferty,’ ” emphasizing the Irish folk music which comprised much of minstrelsy’s songs and the Irish immigrant majority among minstrelsy audiences and actors (742). The devil is not a black man, but rather imaginary blackness embodied: the blackness that threatens workers who might be tempted to abandon the time-discipline regulating a factory. Also, he represents the personified blackness that threatens contentedly working whites who oppress the lower classes and slaves. For this reason, the villagers are painted as German: their victimization can remain humorous because they are not Americans, even though the reader cannot tell who exactly represents the greatest threat. Poe seems equally unsympathetic to the villagers’ initial contentment and their final despair, as the resurfacing blackness destroys their master, clock time, but also reveals their purposelessness without it. The riotous undiscipline of the black foreigner intrudes upon the order of the village. But that order has only been produced by the expulsion of the “devil” elements of society and the consequent erasure of any lingering traces, so that Vondervotteimittis seems to have been the same since time immemorial. The village only becomes interesting when the unpredictable black hand joins the round white faces of the clock-watchers—but interesting is also painful.
Propaganda and design for nineteenth-century factories celebrated the order and discipline of a factory-manufactured life. When the Boott Cotton Mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, opened in 1835, its landscape and housing were designed to afford all the benefits of a middle-class country home, while controlling “ ‘the total living environment for labor’ ” (Mrozowski and Beaudry 193). The structure of boardinghouses and overseers’ houses provided a model of moral supervision and “corporate paternalism” for the mill girls (195). The carefully planned town provided “row upon row” of housing for operatives, but also gardens for the nicer yards that passing workers could enjoy (194). Landscape designers placed trees and grass throughout the grounds to “temper the urban landscape” (196). Individual boardinghouses had backyard lawns, weak imitations of higher-class gardens, where the young women could perform everyday housekeeping chores. Advertisements and landscape paintings displayed large white buildings bordered by immaculate streets and grassy courts, whose focal point “was not the church or the town square but the industrial complex that was the reason for [their] existence.”12 Overall, Boott Mills tried to duplicate for its workers all the refining benefits of a middle-class home: besides these garden promenades, they offered free or discounted lectures, library use, and mandatory Sunday school. It was not the fault of the corporate planners if the mill girls, as some complained, could not take advantage of these refinements because of exhaustion and lack of time (Tichi 170–174).
In a late-century reminiscence of her factory-working childhood, Harriet Hanson Robinson outlines the classes of laborers. The highest class, the agents “lived in large houses … surrounded by beautiful gardens” and a “sometimes open gate in the high fence” (14). The second class, the overseers, lived in “the end-tenements of the blocks, the short connected rows of houses in which the operatives were boarded,” much as Southern overseers lived at the head of rows of slave cabins (14). The third class, operatives, were the lowest class in the factory, “men” or “girls” who performed the most repetitive, mechanical tasks. But Robinson also briefly mentions a fourth class, not included in the factory scheme because they labored with the “spade and the shovel” outside its machinery. Likewise, their housing resided outside the deliberate order of the factory setting; they lived not in rows but “clustered around a small stone Catholic Church,” in “hundreds of little shanties” among “disorder and riot” (15). It is this Otherness of class, a ranking outside of the unofficially acknowledged three-class system, that forces the poorest of manual laborers to relate to and distinguish themselves from slaves. This other class is also constituted of characteristics shared with slaves, although sometimes imaginary: a tolerance of disorder, dark and overcrowded shanties, earthen floors, and overriding uncleanness.
The original, ordered plan of the mills soon began to decay, however. Fanny Fern lists among “what ails the working-girls” their lack of ritualized meals—neither the proper food nor time to eat it, but rather a breakfast “hastily swallowed.” Their shared room is “close and unventilated, with no accommodations for personal cleanliness,” and their garments include “a soiled petticoat,” “a greasy dress,” and some pathetic attempt at feminine ornament. Predictably, they labor endlessly in a “large, black-looking building” (qtd. in Tichi 158–159). Mrozowski and Beaudry find evidence that boardinghouse yards were heavily used and quickly went to weeds, although the higher-class homes sustained their lawns. For the upper-class houses, situated next to the operative’s buildings, earth was imported to elevate the yards, and the houses themselves were positioned above white “cut granite blocks” (202). Factory expansion also overtook much of the space set aside as courtyards and greens. At the same time, the town planners sought to expel the class of day-laborers and canal-diggers involved in construction of the mills: no housing was provided for those. As described by Robinson, this “fourth class” of citizens remained architecturally unacknowledged.
In “Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids,” Herman Melville explicitly investigates the relationship between the dinner table and the factory. By pairing the two stories, of a heavenly dinner party and a hellish factory, he connects class and gender in disorienting ways.13 Part of the cause for this confusion, it seems to me, is that Melville is hardly concerned with the characters in the diptych at all, but largely interested in their things—and the story’s gender and class are both constructed from these.14 That which is deemed “feminine,” an anti-materialistic preparation for participation in the marketplace, is frozen, literally, in Tartarus: perpetual potential is in fact poverty. The stories are not a critique of wage slavery, but rather an examination of the way white things shape class and gender, how they exclude but account for black slavery. What is finally built is a completely colored and unintegrated setting, where the identities created remain constant, and only the white things are mobile—cotton, cloth, and paper circulate throughout the economy.
In part, Melville dislocates the sexes, creating a distant locale for effete dining gentlemen and visibly laboring women, in order to highlight the emptiness of an etiquette-driven Paradise and the harshness of the efficiently industrialized Tartarus—although etiquette and efficiency were the height of fashion. Casting pale female virgins as victims in “Tartarus of Maids” becomes more mythically touching than documenting overworked men; imaging their whiteness as checked by the dark overseer stirs subterranean racial fears which alone render the factory’s efficiency frightening. Furthermore, Melville draws the connection between the factory work and seven course meals: both participate in the commodification of race, both suffer and profit from the suppressed blackness of slavery, and both perpetuate the power of white things without being fully aware of their ramifications.
Melville begins the diptych by dwelling on the difference between pre-industrial, Medieval London—full of stalwart knights and their manly battles—and the industrial city dinned by hurrying tradesmen and superficial lawyers. Nonetheless, the narrator faithfully relates the details of the dinner, house, and company, in the style of a gossipy letter to a friend. Melville pocks his narrative with question marks, exclamation points, and self-contradictions—such as when he rejoices over the company, exclaiming, “It was, indeed, a sort of Senate of the Bachelors …. Nay, it was, by representation, a Grand Parliament of the best Bachelors in universal London” (206). The narrator’s constant gushing and backtracking alert the reader to his wispiness, and contrast him to both the manly Medieval knights and the silent sickly maids of Tartarus. In this fashion, the narrator dubiously declares the private dinner a modern-day ritual as noble as the Crusades. The qualities that make for polite dining become valorized: more evolved than the haughty and gruff ancient knights, modern Templar lawyers have “warm hearts and warmer welcomes, full minds and fuller cellars, … good advice and glorious dinners,” and are “finer fellow[s]” for it (205, 204). In this way, Melville constrasts the manly traits of bygone knights with the “masculine” manners of the bachelors, distinguished not by conquests but by possessions.
Invited to dine “at a private table,” the narrator escapes from the mud and trade of the workplace to a “refuge” with “a park to it, and flower-beds, and a riverside”—a setting that, if gendered, might be seen as feminine.15 As he climbs “well up toward heaven,” the narrator enthusiastically describes the marks of refinement surrounding him: his own gloved hand pinching a card, the old and snug furniture, the low ceiling of the room. These details betray not only that the narrator is of a lower class and therefore easily impressed—he is a salesman, of the middling class—but also that domestic details would be expected when one relates a fine dining experience. The subsequent details are even more emphatic in their precision: he names every course. His description here contrasts the ancient construction of manhood—involving battles and armament—with the modern “masculinity,” which requires simply the celebration and proper use of material things.
The ritual begins when “[i]n good time nine men sat down to nine covers” (206). Such segmentation of place settings initiates the discipline of dining, and we understand that this “good” time—measured by “wine-chronometer”—regulates the courses (208). The bachelors’ meal closely follows current etiquette manuals’ prescriptions for the most elaborate and structured dinners:
These courses mounted in scale and importance from the relatively simple, light, and uncooked to the richer and more lavishly prepared …. It began, typically, with raw oysters and champagne. Then waiters offered a choice of a white or brown soup and poured sherry. Then fish with Chablis. Next an entrée. … Then a slice of roast (with claret and champagne). After that, perhaps some Roman punch … [and] game such as canvasback duck (Madeira and port); salad; cheese; pastry or pudding; ices and sweet dishes. Then liqueurs. Then fruit … accompanied by sherry or claret. And then waiters passed nuts, raisins, sugar plums, and dried ginger …. Gentlemen sometimes remained by themselves at table … with their wine and cigars, liqueurs and cognac. (Kasson 134, italics in text)
Compared to this description, Melville’s narrator lists a nearly textbook meal: ox-tail soup with claret, turbot with sherry, roast beef, then mutton, turkey, and chicken pie with ale, game-fowl with red wine, tarts and puddings, cheese and crackers with port, and followed by snuff rather than cigars.
Such protocol and its corresponding demands to order would have been familiar to Melville through contact with his own domestic affairs while working at home (Kelley, “ ‘I’m Housewife Here’ ”). In 1854, Melville gave his wife Mrs. Pullan’s The Modern Housewife’s Receipt Book: A Guide to All Matters Connected with Household Economy, which provides advice for everyday and elaborate meals as well as overall ordering of the household. The gift suggests both a mutual concern over domestic affairs between Melville and his wife and Melville’s awareness of a need for household direction. Laurie Robertson-Lorant argues that later that year Melville drew from this cookbook to compose “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs” (342). In “Paradise of Bachelors,” the meal’s deviations from protocol serve to connect it visually to the factory’s setting—the early soup and most of the wines are red, like Blood River, and the fish is “snow-white, flaky, and just gelatinous enough,” recalled by the snowy factory’s vats of “albuminous” white paper pulp (207, 218). But the list itself establishes Melville’s company as among the finest and most knowledgeable of prevailing etiquette.
Beyond the meal, the bachelors also show themselves familiar with more encompassing rules of etiquette and thereby demonstrate their worthiness of such riches and abundance. While their conversation at table may appear to signal their effete but bland distancing from real life, the anecdotes merely conform to polite dictates. Systematically, the narrator relates the conversational contributions of Bachelors One through Eight—his own story might be the Ninth. Each gentleman obeys the mannerly maxim “not simply to fall silent but to engage in conversation while eating, keeping the table talk light and steering away from ‘heated discussions’ and ‘heavy or abstruse topics.’ ”16 An etiquette book of the time gives a sample conversation in which diners tiptoe around even the most vaguely personal comments (J. F. Kasson, “Ritual” 137). For the men to discuss anything less patently dull than Flemish architecture or “Saracenic scenery” would be low class.
Finally, the narrator comments on the rules of bodily control that accompanied the rise of segmented and ritualized dining. Among the multitude of toasts, the bachelors continually “expressed their sincerest wishes for the entire well-being and lasting hygiene of the gentleman on the right and on the left” (207). Hygiene evolved alongside table manners until the nineteenth century, when both became not only the mark of good breeding, but also a necessity in a democratic society. Melville mocks this obsession with manners in the seriousness of the bachelors’ toasts to hygiene, and in his repetitious praise of polite behavior. Throughout the dinner, the narrator claims, “nothing loud, nothing unmannerly, nothing turbulent” occurs (208). “Decorum” must be the final impression left on the narrating salesman: the “remarkable decorum of the nine bachelors—a decorum not to be affected by any quantity of wine—a decorum unassailable by any degree of mirthfulness—this was again set in a forcible light to me, by now observing that, though they took snuff very freely, yet not a man so far violated the proprieties … as to indulge in a sneeze” (209–210). Thus, in the details that assure us that this dinner is elite yet boring, Melville establishes a ritual of precision, segmentation, and etiquette that will produce the same habits in the factory.
The story begins to implicate such ritual dining with white goods and racial whiteness as the narrator, enjoying the evening’s luxury, can only find expression in the song, “Carry me back to old Virginny!” Recent scholars who mention this line discuss the pun on “virgin,” which calls into question the bachelors’ sexual practices: Karcher adds that the narrator recalls a slave system in the American South that promotes an upper-class male sexual exploitation of lower-class females.17 Wiegman believes that this reference to Southern slavery presents “class and race hierarchies as repressed aspects of the male bond” (“Melville’s Geography” 740). Although both recognize the confluence of gender and race construction, the song should also be situated historically. Melville’s narrator recalls the slave system from the comfort of his dinner table, but he also recalls the American tradition of minstrelsy. Caroline Moseley has located the song as a minstrel piece, since “Paradise” predates the more familiar Virginia state song.18 On the other hand, Edwin P. Christy’s minstrel version appeared in various forms throughout the 1840s. It was published in The Ethiopian Glee Book (1848), was advertised with “Oh! Susannah” in 1848, and provided the melody for an abolitionist song in 1856. Therefore, Melville could have expected his audience to be familiar with the song and its sentiments, and its choice as the narrator’s luxuriating exclamation provides an unelaborated comment on industrial discipline and blackness.
“Old Virginny” begins, in the voice of a slave, longing for the work of earlier days: “The floating Scow of Old Virginny / I work’d in from day to day, / A fishing ‘mongst de oyster beds, / To me it was but play.” Work in a slave state, as opposed to the singer’s current Northern situation, was “but play” because of its pre-industrial freedoms—freedoms indebted to the fluid schedule of fishing compared to the regimentation of wage labor. The third stanza connects “Virginny” to animals and a friendly Nature, asking that “when I’m dead and gone / Place this old banjo by my side; / Let the possum and coon to my funeral go, / For dey was always my pride.” The only other stanza recommends a different course than Melville’s bachelors have taken, one that images happy domestication and economic discipline: “If I was only young again, / I’d lead a different life; / I’d save my money, and buy a farm / And take Dinah for my wife” (Moseley 14).
Melville’s readers may not have been familiar with the entire text of the song, but in that it is characteristic of minstrel songs, it reflects on the racializing of the diptych. The two stories problematize the trend of industrialization, etiquette, class and race construction; blackface complements their concerns in popular form. At the same time, the portrait of blackness that minstrel plays produced enabled and necessitated the increased whiteness in material goods. The imaginary slave of blackface, in particular, defined “whiteness” in the same terms as white dishes did—as wealthy, well-mannered, disciplined, and domesticated—but he also kept conspicuous the actual slave, who would allow more comfort if he remained hidden. The dining ware then works to unite the bachelors and to flood the place with whiteness so that the slave’s dark form fades into the background.
As with the tableware, the main purpose of Tartarus’s factory is to produce whiteness. By populating the mill with “girls” and drawing clear gestational imagery, Melville locates the labor of “whitening” with women. The birthing analogy of the paper-making machine has become a scholarly commonplace; the vats of pulp resemble semen, the nine minutes suggest nine months of pregnancy, the ex-nurse waits for the “moist, warm sheets” to be “delivered” into her hands, and the process ends with a sound “as of some cord”—an umbilical cord—“being snapped.”19 Here, Melville associates economic with biological production. The one does not necessarily substitute for the other, however. Literally, the women do not merely produce marketable items—if they did, then “Tartarus” could be read solely as a lament over the mill girls’ oppression. Instead, it is the whiteness of the items, their standardized inevitability, and their social circulation that terrify.
A process of whitening begins even before the narrator reaches the factory. A bastion of civilization, the building stands as “a large white-washed building, relieved, like some great white sepulchre, against the sullen background of mountain-side firs” (211). To get there, the narrator first passes the “black-mossed” ruins of an old saw-mill, which hearkens to “primitive times” when pines and hemlocks covered the region (211). The saw-mill contrasts with the paper mill: the former represents the bygone, pre-industrial organization of labor and appears layered in blackness next to the factory’s enormous white face. Nature repeats the hierarchy of color: blackness coats the doomed and primitive, just as dark dishes and blackface signaled slavery and lower-classness.
As the narrator travels towards the factory, white things replace the natural, the animal and the wilderness, with disciplined, repressed civilization. First, the narrator describes the forests surrounding him: the frozen trees feel the “all-stiffening influence” of the cold, which penetrates to the “vertical trunk,” until “many colossal tough-grained maples [snap] in twain like pipestems, cumbering the unfeeling earth” (212). In order to elucidate this imagery, the narrator continues that his horse is startled by one of these fallen trunks, which lies across the path “darkly undulatory as an anaconda” (212). From the beginning of his passage, therefore, the narrator begins to remark on fallen phallic images—as nature and manhood alike are overcome by the force of the surrounding white. The Black Notch yields to a “white-wooded” summit filled with “white vapors.” His horse, Black, becomes “[f]laked all over with frozen sweat,” and “white as a milky ram” (212). Indeed, the black male horse becomes whitened and feminized—through his layer of milkiness—while yet remaining male underneath.
The process continues, and becomes even more linked with femininity, as the narrator enters the factory square. He begins his journey wrapped in “buffalo and wolf robes,” a fur tippet, and “huge seal-skin mittens”—all notably from wild animals (212, 222). As the narrator enters the mill, he removes the animal furs that associate him with the surrounding wilderness, and the animal images of the forest come to be replaced by the “iron animal” of the factory. As he sheds his animal coverings, he reveals further evidence of whitening. The frost has produced on his cheeks “ ‘[t]wo white spots like the whites of [his] eyes’ ” (216). Besides the narrator, only two males inhabit the building, and both are distinguished from the unnumbered pale women by their coloring. Old Bach is repeatedly “the dark-complexioned man,” and Cupid a “red-cheeked” boy (216). The women, on the other hand, are marked by unalloyed pallor: their whiteness becomes disturbing when described as “hueless,” “blank,” “pallid,” and “sheet-white.” The narrator’s white cheeks therefore undercut his masculinity, although only in spots. But the whitening which associates him with the women remains indelible, as even when he leaves, his cheeks look “ ‘whitish yet’ ” (222). The paper mill therefore conscripts both feminine and masculine power for industrial production, banishing the natural elements of preindustrial life, and in the process domesticating citizens into a flaccid femaleness.
Melville’s narrator suggests that the women act as slaves to the machine, which rightly should be the “slave of humanity” (215). We understand, then, that the women work to produce whiteness, but in the process subjugate themselves to the means. In disseminating the ideas and behavior that will build disciplined, upper-class, and refined families, women first delimit their own spheres to a colorless home. In addition, the girls are induced to labor by the men—one dark, and one red. More than an economic incentive, these “colored” men become the cultural necessity for whiteness: they haunt the feminine workplace just as slaves and servants inhabit the wealthy white woman’s home. Through an intense attention to the Cult of Domesticity, white Americans could rationalize or evade the ethical problems posed by African American slavery and Native American genocide; through an emphasis on white female chastity they could divert any imaginary threats of miscegenation. The dark men therefore become the ideological drivers of this gang of pale-producing women.
The factory women produce whiteness with all its cultural implications. Beyond the showers of white paper, vats of white pulp, and baskets of white rags, the factory is responsible for consummate work-discipline. The women work “ ‘twelve hours to the day, day after day, through the three hundred and sixty-five days, excepting Sundays, Thanksgiving, and Fast-days’ ” (222). Importantly, the specifically American holiday of Thanksgiving is honored, since the business is interested in producing specifically American workers. The machine conforms to “unvarying punctuality and precision” (220). It processes the paper methodically, “inch by inch,” constantly refining the pulp (219). The time-discipline that frightens the narrator—the cycle of production lasting exactly nine minutes—finalizes the connection between factory work and table manners. In “Paradise,” “nine gentlemen [sit] down to nine covers,” drink from “nine silver flagons,” and tell nine affable anecdotes (including the narrator’s) (“Paradise” 206–208). In “Tartarus,” this ritual is translated into nine-minute precision for the intervals of production.
Nonetheless, this process must also be seen to parallel birth. The inevitability of production translates to the inevitability of reproduction. Therefore, part of Tartarus consists of its parturition, just as part of Paradise depends on its childlessness. The factory women are certainly producing offspring—the narrator draws the connection himself between “the human mind at birth” and “a sheet of blank paper” (221). And beyond producing white paper and “whitened” children, the women broadcast them. The narrator thinks upon the “strange uses to which those thousand sheets would be put”: “sermons, lawyers’ briefs, physicians’ prescriptions, love-letters, marriage certificates, bills of divorce, registers of births, death-warrants, and so on, without end” (220). The mill women oversee all aspects of domestic life and the most noble and lucrative callings. Thereby, they commodify whiteness, creating a standardized product that promises access to economic and social success—while they remain forever in the factory.
But these women are not house mistresses, wives, and mothers. They are all maids. The narrator involuntarily bows in “pained homage to their pale virginity” (222). As if he were again singing “Carry me back to old Virginny,” the narrator reacts with chivalry to the chastity of the women—a chastity imposed, he acknowledges sadly, by the system that asks them for whiteness. Little Eva, not her mother, is the ideal feminine figure, and mythical chastity levels all proper women to virginity. That they are “ ‘[a]ll maids’ ” fills the narrator with a “strange emotion,” but their work has been effective: rather than stay and try to mend his cheeks, which remain white, he departs because “ ‘time presses’ ” him (222). That these are the narrator’s last words is telling—leaving a warehouse full of eligible maids, he finds himself pressed instead by time. His devotion to work and time-discipline “presses” him just as the machinery inside presses paper, and he is equally a product.
Paper functions as an ideal example of portable whiteness for Melville: it is unthreateningly present and habitually used everywhere, and it is clear that the narrator has never before really thought about paper. As with the plates at the bachelors’ dinner, the narrator believes paper to be unsignifying, blankly waiting for a message to bring it into existence; he does, however, read its meanings, from the faces of tradesmen “hurrying by, with ledger-lines ruled along their brows,” and from the face of the factory “girl,” “ruled and wrinkled” as she plies a mechanical harp to draft lines on the paper. In addition, the benign envelopes for which the narrator needs this paper feed the slave institution in the South, as he sends seeds through Missouri and the Carolinas as well as “all the Eastern and Northern States” (“Paradise” 211). In this way, Melville reminds his reader of the tensions embedded in the act of reading and writing. Those who thought seriously about slavery and the wage slavery of industrialization were troubled by their own dependence on slave-produced cotton paper for their very abolitionist arguments, and Melville implicates the one holding his story in these oppressive systems as well. Granting the illusion of power by its potential to be moved, removed, and marked, these white things actually function to sustain slavery and to create new types of slavery in the factories and homes.
Cooper’s The Pioneers negotiates class, race, and gender by carefully placing each thing and person in its hierarchical space, with consideration of color-codings valued from white, to off-white, to black. Melville attempts to separate class from gender, and both from race, but finds that the items constructing these categories circulate among them, tying them together inextricably. The feminine convention of the tea ritual simplifies this seeming confusion by treating class as an activity rather than a status or place. The sentimental heroine such as Gerty in The Lamplighter must constantly perform the highest class that her means allow her, and in performing, inspire her family towards it, but not aspire to wealth or status herself. The “feminine” experience of class is therefore different from the “masculine,” at least in the upper and middle classes. The masculine achieves his class status; here, upper-, middle-, and lower-classness are measurable in tangible goods. The feminine experiences class not as a position, but as a challenge—it is not measurable except in the moment of its performance and transmission, therefore requiring ritual and discipline for its display. Since class was also a racial designation, with “black” defining the greatest distance from wealth and privilege, the “feminine” experienced racial whiteness as a performance as well: she must visibly distance herself from the laboring black body and continually expunge blackness from her household. In the emergent capitalism of the early nineteenth century, upper-classness required a gendered partnership—the accumulation of refined goods, coupled with carefully regulated instances of proper use.
