Early American Literature

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...