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The Kitchen and the Factory

Spaces of Women’s Work and the Negotiation of Social Difference in Antebellum American Literature

Kanzler, Katja

American Studies – A Monograph Series, Bd. 280

2017

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Abstract

This book asks for the cultural work that spaces of feminine labor do in antebellum texts from a variety of literary and ‘para-literary’ contexts. Singling out the kitchen and the factory, it argues that sites of women’s work serve as key textual microcosms in which antebellum culture negotiates the discourses of social difference whose relevance skyrockets in this period, especially the discourses of gender, class, ‘race,’ and nationhood. Because of their ostensible marginality on the map of the national imaginary, and because they are associated with social subjects multiply marked as marginal—women of the ‘working class’ and slave women—the kitchen and the factory enable the rehearsal of ideas that are difficult to articulate within the core narratives of nationhood: ideas about the forms and meanings of social inequality, and their relationship to the promises of equality that suffuse the nation’s mythology.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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Cover Cover
Titel 3
Imprint 4
Table of Contents 5
Acknowledgments 7
1 Introduction: Kitchen and Factory 9
2 Theories, Histories, Contexts 17
2.1 The Poetics and Politics of (Built) Space 17
2.2 Rehearsals of Class: Social Inequality in Antebellum Literature and Culture 29
3 The Kitchen 43
3.1 The Kitchen, I: The House of Bondage 47
3.1.1 ‘White’ Perspectives: Stove, Eastman, Hale 49
3.1.2 ‘Black’ Perspectives: Jacobs and Wilson 82
3.1.3 A Southern Cookbook 92
3.2 The Kitchen, II: ‘Free’ Homes 98
3.2.1 "The Lamplighter" and “The Cook's Dream" 100
3.2.2 Didactic Domestic Novels 112
3.2.3 Northern Cookbooks 137
4 The Factory 155
4.1 ‘Looking In 161
4.1.1 Travelogues 161
4.1.2 Sensation Novels 174
4.2 ‘Looking Out‘ 188
4.2.1 ‘Realism‘ 192
4.2.2 Arrivals 201
4.2.3 Windows and Machines 202
4.2.4 Home 210
4.3 Aestheticizing the Factory 234
4.3.1 “The Tartarus of Maids" 236
4.3.2 “Life in the Iron Mills" 245
5 Conclusion 257
6 Illustrations 260
7 Works Cited 262