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Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts by Marla Miller (review)
Early American Literature ( IF 0.3 ) Pub Date : 2021-02-10 , DOI: 10.1353/eal.2021.0023
Jonathan Beecher Field

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

  • Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes
    of Change in Rural Massachusetts
    by Marla Miller
  • Jonathan Beecher Field (bio)
Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts
marla miller
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019
384 pp.

Marla Miller's Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts engages with place to explore the lives of people. In particular, Miller's interest is in tracing the lives and labors of women in Hadley, Massachusetts, from English settlement to the mid-nineteenth century. Miller's focus on a single New England town recalls the vogue for this model of monograph in the days of the New Social Historians, when Philip Greven, Kenneth Lockridge, and others took a single New England town as a laboratory to measure and document social change. However, Miller's approach departs from this model in several significant ways. Most notably, her concern is with the lives and labor of women. Even as the book conjures a geographical space as its focus, the town of Hadley is a means to Miller's end of thinking and talking about gender, labor and class, rather than an end in itself.

For early and nineteenth-century American historians, Miller's work represents an important contribution to the robust scholarship concerning rural Massachusetts in an era of social, economic, and agricultural change. It supplements work like Christopher Clark's The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Cornell UP, 1990) by offering a sustained focus on gender; it adds nuance and masses of archival detail to work like Richard Bushman's The Refinement of America (Vintage P, 1993). In a different valence, Miller's consideration of schooling for women in and around Hadley joins the conversation carried forward in books like Mary Kelley's Learning to Stand and Speak (Omohundro/U of North Carolina P, 2008), as well as Catherine E. Kelly's Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, [End Page 293] and Everyday Life in Early America and In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women's Lives in the Nineteenth Century (both U of Pennsylvania P, 2016). For the readers of Early American Literature, one fascinating aspect of Miller's work is the insight it offers into the lives of women similar to those who populate the pages of novels like The Coquette and The Boarding School. Entangled Lives is at its strongest when it details the labor that is essential (and essential to conceal) for the life of a genteel woman in the Federalist era.

There are times where the richness of the archival tapestry Miller weaves makes an impression that overwhelms the reader's sense of the intervention she is making in this work. "Livelihoods," the middle segment of the book is probably the most compelling in terms of detail, such as the vagaries of running a tavern in rural Massachusetts, but the least engaging in terms of an argument, and at times it posits the very fact of change over time as an argument in itself.

That said, "Topographies of Change," the final section of the monograph, offers a more compelling synthesis of archive and argument. In a chapter on working women and the domestic landscape of Forty Acres—the farm that is the focus of much of this monograph—Miller surveys how changes in the floor plan of the house both shaped and responded to relations between and among family members and their servants. In this chapter, Miller captures some Gosford Park–style upstairs/downstairs drama, and she grafts it on to the kind of early New England architectural history typified by Thomas Hubka's Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn (UP of New England, 2004).

Miller's ability to infuse historiography with a kind of social urgency within the context of early New England architectural history is an impressive accomplishment. I suspect that some of this gift comes from the stakes of this project for Miller, who writes as a resident of the town that is the focus of her book. Speaking in general, discovering that a book about a town is written by a resident of that town raises concerns that the outlook will be provincial, or perhaps...



中文翻译:

纠结的生活:马萨诸塞州农村的劳动,生计和变化景观(作者:Marla Miller)(评论)

代替摘要,这里是内容的简要摘录:

审核人:

  • 纠缠住:劳动,生活和景观
    变化的农村马萨诸塞州
    的玛拉·米勒
  • 乔纳森·比彻(Jonathan Beecher Field)(生物)
纠结的生活:马萨诸塞州农村的劳动,生计和变化景观
马拉·米勒
·约翰·霍普金斯大学出版社,2019年
384页。

马拉·米勒的纠结生活:马萨诸塞州农村的劳动,生计和变化景观与地方互动,探索人们的生活。特别是,米勒的兴趣是追踪从英国定居到十九世纪中叶在马萨诸塞州哈德利的妇女的生活和劳动。米勒对新英格兰小镇的关注使人们回想起了新社会历史学家时代这种专论模式的时尚,当时菲利普·格雷文,肯尼斯·洛克里奇和其他人将新英格兰小镇作为实验室来衡量和记录社会变化。但是,米勒的方法在几个重要方面背离了该模型。最值得注意的是,她关心妇女的生活和劳动。即使这本书以地理空间为焦点,但哈德利镇还是Miller终结思想和谈论性别,劳动和阶级的手段,而不是终结自身的手段。

对于19世纪早期和19世纪的美国历史学家而言,米勒的工作代表了在社会,经济和农业变革时代,有关马萨诸塞州农村的强大学术研究的重要贡献。通过持续关注性别问题,它补充了克里斯托弗·克拉克(Christopher Clark)的《农村资本主义的根源:马萨诸塞州西部,1780–1860年》(Cornell UP,1990)。像理查德·布什曼(Richard Bushman)的《美国的提炼》(Vintage P,1993)一样,它增加了档案细节的细微差别。米勒对哈德利及其周边地区的妇女上学的考虑也与之不同,这与玛丽·凯利(Mary Kelley)的《学习站立和说话》(北卡罗莱纳州大学的Omohundro / U,2008年)以及凯瑟琳·E(Catherine E)等书中进行的对话相结合。品味共和国:艺术,政治[末页293] 和美国早期新英格兰时尚的日常生活:重塑19世纪的女性生活(宾夕法尼亚大学,2016年)。对于美国早期文学的读者来说,米勒作品的一个有趣的方面是它提供了对女性生活的洞察力,就像那些在诸如《卖弄风情》《寄宿学校》等小说中充斥着女性的女性一样纠结的生活在详述联邦主义者时代对贵族妇女的生活至关重要(以及隐瞒必不可少的工作)的劳动时,表现得最为出色。

有时,Miller编织的挂毯的丰富性给人留下了深刻的印象,使读者对她在这项工作中所进行的干预感到不知所措。这本书的中间部分“生计”在细节方面可能是最引人注目的,例如在马萨诸塞州农村经营小酒馆的游说无常,但在论点方面参与的最少,有时也证实了这一事实。随时间变化本身就是一个争论。

也就是说,专论的最后一部分“变化的地形图”提供了关于档案和论点的更引人注目的综合。在关于职业女性和四十英亩的家庭环境的一章中,米勒调查了这本专着的大部分内容,该农场调查了房屋平面图的变化如何塑造和响应家庭成员及其家庭之间的关系。仆人。在本章中,Miller捕捉了一些Gosford Park风格的楼上/楼下戏剧,并将其嫁接到了新英格兰早期的建筑历史上,以托马斯·哈伯卡(Thomas Hubka)的大房子,小房子,后屋,谷仓(新英格兰的2004)。

米勒在新英格兰早期建筑历史的背景下,将史学与社会紧迫感相融合的能力是一项令人印象深刻的成就。我怀疑这笔礼物中有一部分是给米勒(Miller)这个项目的股份的,米勒(Miller)是小镇的居民,这是她的书重点。一般来说,发现某镇居民写的一本关于城镇的书引起了人们的担忧,即前景将是省级的,或者也许是……

更新日期:2021-03-16
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