Toward Imagined Solidarity in the Working-Class Epic: Chris Llewellyn’s Fragments from the Fire and Diane Gilliam Fisher’s Kettle Bottom

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Michele Fazio for feedback on drafts of this article.

Notes

¹ See Zweig, The Working-Class Majority; Zandy, Calling Home and Hands; Lauter, “Under Construction: Working-Class Writing”; Tokarczyk and Fay, Working-Class Women in the Academy.

² Erin O’Brien cites the following as among the scholars who have argued that racial and ethnic identities undermine worker identities: Wilson, The Bridge Over the Racial Divide and Scholzman and Verba, Injury to Insult.

³ In The Politics of Identity: Solidarity Building among America’s Working Poor, O’Brien surveys low-wage workers about their attitudes toward workers of other races and the ways in which they see their individual interests converging with those of other service workers.

⁴ A 1930s style proletarian novel, which depicts a young person coming to working-class consciousness and identification with labor, would be difficult to construct now because organized labor has lost so much power. The proletarian novel has often been criticized as dogmatic and prescriptive, but some contemporary critics have attempted to revision it. In particular, Barbara Foley in Radical Representations argues that the proletarian novel failed because it was not radical enough, not because it was too radical.

⁵ Larry Smith delineates characteristics of Appalachian literature that are often shared by Appalachian culture. Among the more notable features of Appalachian writing are a deep appreciation of folk habits, customs, and rituals; an intimate sense of community, strong and physically intense religious beliefs, and rebellion when family or land is threatened. Smith’s list of characteristics of Appalachian literature follows a list of characteristics of working-class literature. He clarifies that he is not naming criteria.

⁶ Chris Llewellyn’s Fragments from the Fire received the 1986 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. Diane Gilliam Fisher’s Kettle Bottom was the summer reading choice at Smith College in 2007. Fisher’s book was also a Top Ten Poetry Pick of the American Bookseller’s Association in 2005.

⁷ Immigration to the United States in the early twentieth century peaked in around 1905 at approximately 1.3 million. The numbers dropped during World War I and again climbed around 1920 to about 800,000. Since 1820, the peak in immigration has been in the late 1980s, at about 1.8 million (MPI Data Hub).

⁸ In a work-in-progress I am examining the films Frozen River and Gran Torino that represent working-class people of different races recognizing their affinities and shared concerns.

⁹ Bourgeois novels do, of course, deal with individual concerns, as critics such as Barbara Foley have noted. However, there is a stronger novelistic tradition of novelists such as Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and Victor Hugo representing social concerns.

¹⁰ See “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel” for a discussion of these points.

¹¹ Jenny Goodman also discusses the perceived maleness of the epic in her “Presumption and ‘Unlearning’: Reading Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead’ as a Woman’s Epic.”

¹² Most sources agree that about 500 workers were present when the Triangle Fire occurred. Llewellyn concurs with this figure, as does the website “Remembering the Triangle Factory Fire” (Cornell University, ILR School). In her text Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea, Hapke puts the estimate much higher at 900. Sources, including the PBS documentary The Triangle Fire produced on the 100th anniversary of the tragedy, agree that 146 people died in the fire.

¹³ My source is Berger’s New York Times article, but these numbers are widely available.

¹⁴ Other poets who have represented the Triangle Fire include Mary Fell, “The Triangle Fire,” in The Persistence of Memory; Carol Tarlen, “Sisters in Flames” in Women’s Studies Quarterly; Safiya Henderson-Holmes, “Rituals of Spring” in Madness and a Bit of Hope; Julia Stein, “Downtown Women” in Zandy, Calling Home. Paola Corso has poems about the Triangle Fire in her book Once I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing. For an overview of Fell’s, Tarlen’s, Henderson-Holmes’s, and Stein’s work, see Zandy’s “An Essay about Triangle Fire Poetry” on the Modern American Poetry website as well as the section “Fire Poetry on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire” in Zandy’s Hands.

¹⁵ Lauter notes that writers may have a variety of motivations: from stirring people to job action, to advocating socialism, to validating the lives of neglected people. Working-class writers are not any more monolithic than other writers in their goals and visions.

¹⁶ The three other quotes from the Hebrew Bible that, respectively, mark the second, third, and fourth sections of the book are: “O Lord my God, thou art very great! / Thou art clothed with honor and majesty, / who coverest thyself with light as a garment, / who stretchest out the heavens / like a curtain.” Psalm 104:1, 2; “I made sackcloth also my garment; and I became a proverb to them.” Psalm 69:11; “The children which thou shalt have / after thou has lost the others / shall say again in thy ears: / The place is too strait for me; / give place to me that / I may dwell.” Isiah 49:20.

¹⁷ The worldwide occupy movements might be seen as a fulfillment of this prophecy.

¹⁸ See Roediger’s Working Toward Whiteness for a discussion of attitudes toward white immigrants from eastern and southern Europe.

¹⁹ Roediger in Working Toward Whiteness also argues that the blackface performances in vaudeville and in silent films served as a form of miseducation for white immigrants who knew little English and had had little contact with African Americans (180).

²⁰ See Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise for an examination of blackface performances by Jews.

²¹ For other texts on whiteness studies see Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness.

²² On 9/11 many victims trapped in the Twin Towers also leapt to their deaths. It is striking that they were never described as undifferentiated masses, but that their individuality was respected. The New York Times ran a series of portraits profiling every person killed in the attacks on the Towers. The difference in the representation of Triangle Fire and 9/11 victims is undoubtedly attributable both to class differences and deaths resulting from foreign attack as opposed to deaths resulting from domestic negligence.

²³ Diane Gilliam Fisher received her MFA at Warren Wilson College. She told me that one of the reasons she chose this school was because she wanted to be in the Appalachian Mountains.

²⁴ The West Virginia Coal Mining Wars are also the subject of Denise Giardina’s acclaimed 1987 novel Storming Heaven.

²⁵ For background on some of the events to which Aunt Mandy refers see texts by R. L. Lewis and Barbara Rasmussen.

²⁶ Roediger builds on the work of David Orsi for the concepts of “hard racism” and “inbetween status.”

²⁷ For a discussion of the outsider within, see Patricia Hill Collins’s work.

²⁸ The lines from the hymn that appear at the beginning of the poem are: “I have heard of a land, on a faraway strand, / It’s a beautiful home of the soul, / Built by Jesus on high, where we never shall die, / It’s a land where we never grow old” (85).

²⁹ “Dear Mr. President” does not represent the miners’ decision to stop fighting, but in her explanatory author’s note Fisher states, “The miners, many of whom were World War I veterans, were convinced to return to their homes, at least partly because they were unwilling to fight against the armed forces they had so recently been part of” (2). The military, as the series Band of Brothers illustrates, is well known for cultivating group identity. Appalachians already have a strong sense of community with their neighbors and fellow workers, so this aspect of military service resonates with them. Some scholars and professionals argue that the military emphasis on group identity and behavior is one reason—along with the appalling lack of job opportunities in the region—that Appalachians continue to enlist at high rates (Crabtree et al.).

³⁰ See Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought for her theory on intersectionality.