Factory Labor and Literary Aesthetics: The "Lowell Mill Girl," Popular Fiction, and the Proletarian Grotesque

TLDR: Melville's 1855 story "the tartarus of maids" both enacts and ironizes the phenomenon this essay aims to explicate: the pervasive sexualization of antebellum working-class women in cultural representation.

Abstract: H melville’s 1855 story “the tartarus of Maids” both enacts and ironizes the phenomenon this essay aims to explicate: the pervasive sexualization of antebellum working-class women in cultural representation. The story recounts the January visit of the male narrator, a “seedsman” who seeks supplies for his growing business, to a paper mill in the remote, treacherous, “shaggy-wooded” mountains of New England (324). The paper mill’s Dantean setting helps introduce the story as industrial allegory and sets the stage for the encounter that follows (324–25). Melville’s narrator “take[s] in” the “scene” in one “sweeping glance,” and—as in many accounts of male visitors to the Lowell mills—the scene is infused with eroticism; that the narrator’s guide is called “Cupid” suggests Love’s reign in the factory, while the first machine the narrator sees produces “rose-hued note paper” impressed with a “wreath of roses”—seemingly the stuff of “love-letters” (327–29), perhaps the pink and white Valentines (often decorated with Cupid’s image) mass produced by the 1840s (Shank). However, contrary to the “romance of labor” penned by factory celebrants, the narrator’s re-presentation of factory work is characterized not by the idealized portrayal of “factory Queens” but by images of female servility and dehumanization. In “Tartarus,” the factory appropriates the women’s sexuality, draining the pale, “blank-looking” women of erotic and reproductive vitality; for Melville, the figured contrast between the