Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890-1930
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Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890-1930
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| ISBN-13: | 9780521119023 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/03/2009 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.67(d) |
About the Author
Morag Shiach is Vice-Principal (Teaching and Learning) at Queen Mary, University of London, where she is also professor of Cultural History in the School of English and Drama. Her most recent books are Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890-1930 (Cambridge, 2004) and (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel (Cambridge, 2007). She has published a wide range of articles on aspects of modernism, including language reform, domestic interiors and philosophies of history. She edited Feminism and Cultural Studies (1999) and has published widely on the French novelist, essayist and playwright Hélène Cixous.
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0521834597 - Modernism, labour and selfhood in British literature and culture, 1890-1930 - by Morag Shiach
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Introduction
'There is no point in work unless it absorbs you'
D. H. Lawrence
How and why does human labour matter to modernism? This book is concerned with modern labour, and specifically with the ways in which labour was experienced, imagined and represented in the years between 1890 and 1930. 'Labour' is one way of designating human productive activity. My choice of this term is, of course, a modern one: our capacity to think of human work as an abstraction, as 'labour power' rather than as the activity of a concrete individual, only arises in the context of modern industrial production.1 The word 'labour' turns our attention to productive activity that is paid and that takes place outside the home, since it seeks to capture human activity within the terms of wages and employment.2 Talking in terms of 'labour' also carries important value judgements about history and about politics, and thus risks both homogenizing the historical period we are studying, and reproducing its hierarchies and exclusions. This is a particular problem for the analysis of women's work, which assumes so many disparate and unpaid forms that it can be invisible, or at least invisible as 'labour'. The relations between women and 'labour' will thus be a recurrent theme of this book.
When I talk of 'modern labour' I am drawing attention to the specific forms labour assumes within the historical process of modernization. In that sense, modern labour has a long history in Britain, stretching back for two hundred and fifty years. But I am also using the notion of 'modern labour' in a much more historically constricted sense, to refer to labour as it was experienced in the moment that, within literary studies, we know as the moment of 'modernism'. 'Modernism' is a cultural expression of the intense development of key aspects of modernity, to the point where they are reconfigured as an internal critique. Modernist cultural expression vigorously repudiated key aspects of modern life as it was experienced in the early years of the twentieth century, drawing on the creative imagination to generate new understandings of time, of history, and of selfhood. By focussing this study on the years between 1890 and 1930, we will be able to see this cultural contestation of the meanings of labour in particularly vivid form.
As societies and cultures become industrialized, urban, secular and democratic, the experience of work is crucially modified. As we shall see, this produces a wide range of responses, many of which stress the fragmentation and mechanization of labour in the modern period. Modern labour is often experienced, and represented, as oppressive, intense and deadening, and as such we might assume that it would be seen as the negation of the individual. In fact, however, cultural responses to modern labour are often marked by a complex, but persistent, desire to read selfhood in and through the activity of labour. In the many different forms of writing and of visual representation that are explored in this book, we will find an effort to articulate the relations between labour and selfhood, expressed in ideas of fulfilment, absorption, vitality, will, species being and agency.
This book is organized in terms of a number of key questions, and it is the aim of each of the chapters to advance our understanding of these questions, and to suggest at least some answers. The first question is concerned with the languages and images available to people in the modern period for thinking about labour, and specifically with how these developed in the early years of the twentieth century. What were the distinctive ways in which writers and artists sought to capture the activity of labour in the period: how did they set in play existing philosophical, political and cultural traditions and how were these modified? I will also consider how specific technologies reconfigured the understanding of labour and selfhood. If modern labour is mechanized labour, then how do different forms of technology create or inhibit the articulation of selfhood? Thirdly, how do the experience and the significance of labour in the period vary according to gender? Is the connection between labour and liberation understood differently for men and women? And finally, I will ask how an attention to the idea of labour might modify our readings of cultural texts of the period, and particularly of literary texts where this question has been systematically marginalized in recent critical work.
I have suggested that the period from 1890 to 1930 interests me particularly because it is a moment of energetic and polemical critique of key aspects of the modern experience. In this sense, my periodization is driven by a cultural preference for the innovative and iconoclastic. But this period also helps to focus larger historical questions. For example, if modernization is closely bound up with the development of democracy, this is the moment at which the expansion of the franchise makes modernity an achieved fact. Eric Hobsbawm has written powerfully about the period from 1875 to 1914 as the 'Age of Empire' asking us to reflect on the continuing resonance of this period in our contemporary world: 'we . . . are no longer in it, but we do not know how much of it is still in us'.3 Although I have chosen to start at the slightly later date of 1890, the force of Hobsbawm's question is very real: we do still live to some extent in the shadow of this period, and it is useful to remember that familiarity as much as the more explicit sense of strangeness generated by detailed study of these early days of the twentieth century.
These 'early days of the twentieth century' still contain many of the values and ideas of the 1890s, and writers on the Edwardian period have often begun their analyses with the final years of Victoria's reign, in order to identify some of the key industrial, international and cultural conflicts that characterize this period. Thus, for example, in The Edwardian Temperament, Jonathan Rose begins his research with the year 1895, a moment when he can begin to discern the putting in place of the characteristic Edwardian 'turn of mind'.4 The Edwardians are, indeed, at the heart of this study, and most of the writers I will discuss reached maturity in this crucial first decade. Rose writes, rather caustically, of the extraordinary openness to new ideas and new sensations in this period, suggesting that the Edwardians 'resolved psychic conflicts by believing in everything' (210). I would suggest that this multiplicity was rather more painfully experienced than Rose indicates, but, nonetheless, it is part of the fascination of these early days of the century that so many different modes of understanding the world were seriously and assiduously explored.
In terms of the specific areas with which this book is concerned, ending in 1930 has a clear rationale. By the thirties, D. H. Lawrence was dead, Sylvia Pankhurst had transferred her energies from the labour movement to the international struggle against fascism, the general strike of 1926 had been defeated, and the typewriter had become an everyday technology with a clear role in business and in the arts. Also, in the 1930s, the cultural images and arguments explored in this book were substantially modified. The philosophical, political and cultural eclecticism I explore below gives way to a more structured set of approaches to the study of labour, expressed in more rigidly defined disciplinary spaces. Both politically and culturally, labour assumed a greater prominence in the thirties, and in an increasingly polarized political landscape across Europe, exploration of the complexity of labour gave way to attempts to capture its larger historical symbolism.
The decision to pursue my research into labour and selfhood up to 1930 also reflects my unease with the widespread representation of the Great War as a cultural and social watershed, an event that brought a period to an end. There is a rich and diverse body of historical and cultural criticism on the significance of the Great War for British culture in the rest of the twentieth century, and I do not seek to deny the power or the pertinence of such work.5 Clearly, the War marked the lives of all who lived in that period, and led to conceptual and political challenges in many areas of British life. It also, of course, had very specific consequences for the organization of labour as the absence of so many young men at the Front led to the recruitment of new workers, many of them women. But in the course of my research for this book, I have been struck not by the sense of rupture generated by the War, but rather by the effort at continuity. Writers carry on arguments about labour and selfhood they had articulated before the War, and with real vigour and commitment. Sylvia Pankhurst and D. H. Lawrence, for example, are emphatically marked by the War, both personally and culturally, but it does not bring to an end the kinds of questions they were seeking to ask about labour and selfhood in the early years of the century. Also, when we find the War explicitly invoked as a key historical event, for example in discussions of the General Strike, this is done in order to create a sense of historical continuity rather than to suggest a traumatic disruption.
In studying labour and selfhood between 1890 and 1930, I am trying to capture distinctive aspects of modern labour over these forty years. Writing at the end of this period, Adriano Tilgher said that the modern era was one in which 'the conception of man as primarily a worker has spread its roots into every field of thought'.6 The nature and significance of work certainly changed significantly during the long and uneven process of industrialization in Britain, and one expression of these changes was the increasing identification of an individual with the forms of paid labour in which he or she was employed. Krishan Kumar has pointed out that the idea of 'unemployment' as a particular mode of social being 'was first elaborated and analysed in the 1890s', and this new concept provides some indication of new ways of thinking about labour and about selfhood.7
The organization of labour underwent significant structural modifications from pre-industrial to modern times. The pre-industrial period was characterized by variety and instability of work. Work was seasonal, and periods of intense work could be followed by periods of slackening, where work was sought in a number of different fields. The whole household was likely to contribute to the sustenance of the family, and much of the work was likely to take place in the home. In the early period of industrialization, paid wages were still likely to be only a part of a household income. Instability was still a common facet of working practices, and even skilled workers had to cope with periods where work was slack, or non-existent. There were also high levels of casual labour in most branches of industry. Again, however, all family members were likely to contribute to the household income, with women and children often earning money through work undertaken in the home.
In the early years of the twentieth century, 'the occupational composition of the working classes changed substantially' with very significant increases in the numbers of men working on the railways and in the mines.8 Those in work now found themselves less subject to irregular and uncertain patterns of employment: mechanization meant that work had to be undertaken regularly, as the cost of interrupting production could be significant; and widespread unionization was an effective means of protecting employment practices. Paid employment now became a much more significant proportion of family income, and was very likely to be undertaken by men. Women's employment will be discussed further below, but it is worth noting here that while twenty-five per cent of married women were employed in 1851, by 1911 only ten per cent were in employment.9 The concept of the 'family wage', developed in the middle of the nineteenth century, presented a model of household income in which men earned sufficiently high wages that women were not required to contribute to the household income. Trade unions campaigned, often unsuccessfully, to secure this level of remuneration in the early years of the twentieth century. They also campaigned systematically to eradicate casual and sweated labour, seeing both as a threat to the high wage levels they sought. This frequently amounted to attacking women's right to work in specific industries, as we will see below, but it also meant systematic criticism of significant sections of immigrant workers. David Feldman has discussed the significance of 'sweated labour' in debates leading up to the passing of the Aliens Act, which sought to reduce Jewish immigration to Britain in 1905.10 We can catch something of the intensity of this debate in Robert Sherard's 1905 study of child labour, The Child-Slaves of Britain, where he writes:
What is the cause of this, do you ask? The continuous pumping of alien filth from the kennels and ghettos of Europe, Asia and America into the East End of London through the sewage pipes of the steamship companies. . . . Faces that were not with us at Agincourt peer at you from every doorway.11
The language of 'slavery' Sherard employs in his title serves to create a link between the communities from which he withdraws so emphatically and forms of labour that are the antithesis of self-realization, and thus of modernity.
In the same period when work begins to be grasped as the defining aspect of human individuality, however, it is actually declining as a proportion of that individual's daily life. The passing of the Ten Hours Act, regulating working hours in industry, in 1847 was followed by campaigns for a nine-hour day in the 1870s and an eight-hour day in the 1890s. Paul Thompson points to the fact that the average working week was reduced from something over sixty hours in the nineteenth century to fifty-three hours in 1911, while John Burnett indicates that the figure is further reduced to forty-eight hours by 1920.12 This reduction in working hours was accompanied by the significant growth of a leisure industry. The number of cinemas in Britain increased rapidly in the early years of the cinema, the mass-circulation press more than doubled in size, while new and bigger Music Halls were built across Britain. Broadcasting and motorized transport both opened up new forms of leisure as the century developed. The tension between the persistent attempt to articulate labour as self-realization, and the very real reduction of the time spent on labour by almost all workers, is part of the fascination of this period.
One reason for a reduction in working hours was greater 'efficiency' in many branches of industry. Efficiency was actively sought in many areas of industrial and social endeavour in the period; and this quest reached a particular form of articulation in the movement known as 'Taylorism'. 'Taylorism' was named after Frederick Winslow Taylor, who published his Principles of Scientific Management in 1911.13 As James F. Knapp has argued, Taylorism is:
not a single theory, but rather a number of associated practices, ranging from technical procedures for machining steel, to time and motion studies, to recommendations about pay incentives, to philosophical generalizations about the relevance of scientific 'law' to economic production.14
Taylor sought to design structures of management and forms of production that would eliminate 'awkward, inefficient, or ill-directed movements' (Principles, 7). His method was to reduce labour to its simplest components, to devise the most efficient method of carrying out each minute part of a task, and to devise pay structures that would reward workers for modifying their habitual work routines in favour of those known to be more efficient. 'Time and motion' studies were the means by which managers could measure each aspect of a production process to arrive at the most efficient method of operating. This process involved fragmentation of the labour process, detailed and constant measurements of workers' actions and productivity, and the redesigning of fundamental aspects of the labour process. Taylor was clear that the successful implementation of scientific forms of management would mean the reshaping of the worker, and the eradication of habitual working methods, but argued that 'our duty, as well as our opportunity, lies in systematically cooperating to train and to make this competent man' (7).
This process of fragmentation and measurement, in which control of the labour process shifts from worker to manager, was readily understood as simply the culmination of that process of the division of labour that began in the eighteenth century, in other words as the epitome of modern labour. This seems to be the view of Harry Braverman, whose Labor and Monopoly Capitalism (1974) was such an influential account of the fate of work in the twentieth century.15 But this fragmentation, and 'degradation' of work is only part of the story of labour in the early years of the century. The search for efficiency certainly commanded widespread cultural and political support,16 but the implementation of Taylorist principles was always rather uneven. Traditional practices survived in many branches of industry, and the acceptance of new working methods was very closely allied to the actual realization of higher levels of wages. 'Waste' was not removed from either the practice, or the imagination, of labour in these early years of the century.
The period between 1890 and 1930 has often been seen as particularly significant for women, and is frequently represented as the historical moment when women gained access to key aspects of modernity. As Rita Felski has argued 'the emancipation of women is presented as inseparably linked to their movement into the workplace and the public sphere'.17 Adding access to the vote, of course, adds to the sense of this as a crucial moment in British women's history. In an account of the relations between feminism and early modernism, Ann Ardis once more identifies labour as a key site of women's emancipation in the period, as 'women enter the workplace in significant numbers for the first time'.18 As we will see, there was indeed an acute sense in this period that labour was a central issue for women in a quite new way. But the participation of women in the labour force did not change as dramatically as these judgements might suggest.
The percentage of women in the workforce changed very little between 1850 and 1930, staying at around thirty per cent for most of the period. It actually dipped a little in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and then climbed back up gradually over the opening decades of the twentieth century.19 What did change was the participation of married women in the workforce, which declined substantially, and also the fields of work in which women were likely to participate, which expanded significantly.
As we have seen, the participation of married women in paid forms of labour fell in this period. This was partly because of a commitment to raising the earnings of male workers to the point that they could financially support a whole household, a central part of Trade Union policy in the second half of the nineteenth century. This policy developed in the context of a growing sense within working-class communities that for married women to work was a threat to 'decency' and respectability. This sense was reinforced by policies of the state, which assumed a male breadwinner in the way it designed and implemented social policies: for example, National Insurance regulations limited the access of married women to employment benefits.20 Concern over levels of infant mortality also created very significant pressures on working mothers, expressed by the passing of the Factory and Workshop Act of 1895, which restricted women's early return to work after giving birth. Finally, many trades and professions, including teaching and the civil service, operated a 'marriage bar', which required women to leave their employment at the moment of their marriage.
The female working population in the early years of the twentieth century, then, consisted mostly of young single women. As they had done since the nineteenth century, many of these women worked in domestic service: John Burnett suggests that in 1901, forty per cent of women who worked still worked in domestic service (Useful Toil, 140). But new areas of employment did also open up, including, shop work, clerical work, nursing and teaching. Following the passing of the Sex Disqualification Removal Act in 1919, a number of professions and learned societies also became open to women for the first time. In the context of a general expansion of the clerical workforce in this period, it is striking that while only one per cent of clerks were women in 1851, by 1951 sixty per cent of clerical workers were female.21 During the First World War, women also entered new forms of employment in munitions factories. This move was surrounded by anxiety, on behalf of both employers and Trade Unions, and Veronica Beechey argues that engineers working in the industry before the War:
eventually reached a series of agreements with the employers and the government that women should only be allowed to enter the industry as unskilled and semi-skilled workers.22
If women did succeed in gaining access to training, and consequently to skilled forms of labour, they were required to leave at the end of the War.
Despite these restrictions on work in the munitions factories, however, women still had access to relatively higher rates of pay and shorter working hours, particularly if they had previously been employed in domestic service. One of the women whose autobiographies were collected by John Burnett writes quite explicitly about the benefits of this munitions factory work, asking, 'what would she find in this great new venture? She already had a feeling of a new freedom, and of time to think' and adding that she was 'enjoying a freedom that she had not known for a long time, having been like her sister in domestic service' (Useful Toil, 125-27).
This narrative of liberation through labour is far from the universal experience of labour for women in the early years of the twentieth century, however. Deborah Thom has argued that between 1900 and 1920 'visual and verbal representations of the working woman changed' in such a way that women's labour became overwhelmingly associated with the evils of sweated labour.23 'Sweated labour' refers to labour involving long hours, very low rates of pay and unsanitary working conditions, and was the site of considerable agitation in the early years of the century. We have seen that sweated labour was associated with immigrant communities, but it was also associated with women, who were held to be driving down wages by agreeing to work in such dreadful conditions. An exhibition of 'the sweating system at work', organized under the auspices of the Daily News in 1906, concentrated almost exclusively on women's labour, involving as it did forty-two women and only two men.24 The National Anti-Sweating League, which was set up after this exhibition, was to campaign vigorously for the establishment of Boards to regulate industries felt to be particularly liable to employ sweating. And Deborah Thom points out the first Trade Boards set up to regulate pay in sweated industries dealt overwhelmingly with areas of employment strongly associated with women ('Free from Chains', 89).
This identification of women with the low pay and poor working conditions associated with sweated labour produced a number of, sometimes opposed, political responses. Sally Alexander has discussed the importance of the economic position of working women for the Fabian Society.25 The Society formed a women's group in 1908, and much of their campaigning was concerned with women's labour, and particularly with sweated labour.26 Many women active in the Trade Union movement supported the introduction of a minimum wage to combat sweated labour, and also supported a broader range of 'protective legislation', designed to secure better working conditions for women.
Other parts of the feminist movement in this period, however, saw protective legislation as generally bad for the industrial status of women workers, since it would make it difficult for them ever to earn the same level of wages as men. Denise Riley suggests that the Open Door International for the Economic Emancipation of the Woman Worker, founded in 1926, saw legislation designed to protect the working mother as antagonistic to the interests of working women as a whole.27 Many of the women who took up this position had come to feminism through the suffrage movement, and were broadly committed to equality of treatment for men and women.
Despite the poor rates of pay for women in the early years of the century, the difficulty of access to training, the insecurity of many jobs, the certainty of having to resign on marriage and the dreadful physical conditions in which many women worked, there is a persistent desire among women in this period to find some form of liberation, or fulfilment, through and in modern labour. Clementina Black wrote in 1915 of 'that wave of desire for a personal working life which forms so marked an element in the general development of modern women'.28 Three years earlier, Rebecca West wrote more succinctly of 'the women who are alive: the working women'.29 Both suggest that work is the space in which modern women might re-imagine themselves, and make themselves 'alive'.
There are a number of books that have explored arguments and ideas related to the present study in recent decades. David Meakin's Man and Work: Literature and Culture in Industrial Society (1976) is a wide-ranging exploration of the ways in which work has been represented, and experienced, as an integral part of human identity. Meakin argues that 'consciousness is born of that active confrontation with nature', and his book examines the historical emergence of particular narratives and images for understanding the activity of human labour.30 The burden of Meakin's argument is the degradation of work in the modern period, and he explores traces of alienation and rootlessness across a range of writings. He argues forcefully for the importance of returning to the social and political conditions in which we would be able once more to grasp work as 'the natural centre of a whole and integrated existence' (156). Meakin's polemic is engaged and engaging. It is regrettable that he gives almost no attention to women's labour, however, for as we shall see attention to women's work may offer a rather different sense of what is possible at any given historical moment in terms of imagining labour and selfhood.
Ruth Danon's Work in the English Novel (1985) is a study of the ways in which work enters the imaginative landscape of narrative fiction in Britain. She is concerned to explore the 'gospel of work' as represented in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fictions, examining both its utilitarian and its idealist modes. She begins by discussing the aspiration to integrate life and work in Robinson Crusoe, and then explores the fictional realization of this integration through the domestic space in David Copperfield. Her study ends with a discussion of the challenges of modern labour, understood in terms of instrumentality and the limits of 'vocation'. Her key text here is Jude the Obscure where, she argues, 'physical labor, which provided, in earlier novels, the primary model of integrated work, has become alienated labor'.31 This narrative of decline, towards instrumentality and alienation, means that this book has little to say about the ways in which such decline was actively challenged in the twentieth century, ending instead with a sense that labour and life cannot be integrated in the modern world.
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