Mantraps: Men at Work in Pietro Di Donato's Christ in Concrete and Thomas Bell's Out of This Furnace

Abstract

Whether we want it there or not, for most of us work squats at the center of life. It consumes our time and energy and to a large extent determines our experience in every other activity of living. When we are out of work, the lack of it and the search for it takes its place as the dominant condition. One of the continuing uses of literature has been to counteract that dominance, to provide a form of imaginative vacation to other lives and other places governed not by work but by love, perhaps, or mystery, or nature. Yet there has also been a strand of literature which centrally engages the subject of work in order to explore the effects of its centrality in our lives. This perspective is particularly clear in the literature of those people, including poor European immigrants to industrial America, for whom the job was especially long and hard and never enough to quite support a family for whom, in other words, work was inescapable, a palpable force to be wrestled with every day. They sought in their writing to understand the meaning of this force: what they got out of work, what it took out of them; how the relations of work got this way, how they might be different. Mariolina Salvatori, in a 1982 MELUS article, has studied the meaning and status of women's work in novels of immigrant life.1 In particular, she finds a tendency in certain novels for the public sphere of men's work to eclipse the private and domestic labor of women which, she argues, was equally important to the family's survival. Salvatori movingly describes the psychic and emotional cost of performing essential and exhausting labor without its being recognized as such. I want here to offer a complement to her study by examining men's relationships to their public sphere work, in two of the novels she discusses. For while it is clear from these novels that men's commitment to work and the breadwinner role is oppressive to women and marginalizes their labor, the effect of that commitment can be seen as scarcely less destructive to the men themselves.