Abstract

Lovell, Thomas B. “Separate Spheres and Extensive Circles: Sarah Savage’s ‘The Factory Girl’ and the Celebration of Industry in Early Nineteenth-Century America.” Early American Literature 31.1 (1996): 1-24. America: History & Life. 7 February 2009.


Lovell makes the argument that Sarah Savage’s The Factory Girl presents the domestic and private spheres not as separate, but as “mutually enabling and interdependent” sites working toward the same goal: accepting women workers as both producing and maintaining virtue. Those who opposed factories because the supposed threat to virtue in the domestic sphere are mistaken, according to both Lovell and Savage, because factories are “a place of expansion and increasing influence over the lives of others” making them more capable of cultivating virtue than the home. Attempting to locate virtue exclusively in the home is a greater evil than any evil found in factories.

Lovell combines historical textual evidence (writings of Alexander Hamilton, Adam Smith, and Edward Everett) with textual evidence from The Factory Girl to support his argument that Savage’s readers would not support the idea of separate spheres that modern scholars argue existed in post-Revolutionary America. He describes the connections between “labor, virtue and womanhood” that were in development and their relationship to literature and culture. Wage labor enabled nineteenth-century Americans a clear sense of duty and provided an unambiguous gauge of a person’s usefulness. Unlike the Puritans, nineteenth-century Americans did not approve of a sexual division of labor; instead, they applied a principle of usefulness.

Lovell does not restrict his analysis of “labor, virtue and womanhood” to The Factory Girl, and his analysis is enriched by the inclusion of Savage’s entire body of work, historical evidence and mentions of other scholarship regarding separate spheres by Ann Douglas, and Jane Tompkins (his “Notes” includes references to more scholarship in this vein). Lovell argues that economic calculation, rather than the sentimental, guides Mary Burnham throughout the novel. This transition is reflected by real world transformation of America as a primarily agricultural world to one that looked to manufacturing as an expansion, rather than replacement, of production. In other words, manufacturing was not seen as evil, but rather as a necessary step to secure American’s independence from dependence on foreign production. The factory then becomes a site of moral regeneration or a moral incubator according to pro-factory groups, who saw the expansionist potential for factory workers, mostly women, to foster virtue in other people.

Lovell’s claim that separate spheres was a myth to nineteenth-century Americans is well supported by textual evidence from Savage’s novel, and the writings of Hamilton and Smith. The article only mentions briefly the viewpoints of Douglas and Tompkins, but does a fair job at representing their viewpoints before going on to refute them. The section most helpful to my own research concerned Mary’s expanded influence upon the Sunday school children (who are factory workers involuntarily) and their education as contrasted to the social status of her nephews, whom she deems too young and inexperienced to deal with the factory environment. However, when their moral shields are fully developed, she hopes they too will become virtuous workers.

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Abstract Notes:

This assignment, to create a one page, single spaced abstract, was actually more difficult than I initially thought it would be. It was hard to condense a twenty four page article into less than a page, and to decide what was important enough to mention and what could be discarded. I am uploading the three pages of handwritten notes I took while reading the Lovell article, and if you can read my handwriting, you’ll see the information that didn’t make the cut.

I think that as I go through the rest of my resources, I’ll continue to take notes in this manner, pretending like I will have to write an abstract or annotated bibliography for each source. This will make me focus more accurately on major keywords, topics and goals of the article or book chapter, allowing for more efficient and productive readings.


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