Migration, Material Culture, and Identity in William Attaway's "Blood on the Forge" and Harriette Arnow's "The Dollmaker"

Abstract

lthough at first glance they might seem like strange companion texts, William Attaway's Blood on the Forge (1941) and Harriette Amow's The Dollmaker (1954) share key thematic elements pertaining to the experiences of migrants from rural Appalachia to multiethnic industrial centers of the urban north during the first half of the twentieth century. To be sure, there are substantial differences between the two texts. Blood on the Forge follows the lives of three male African American protagonists, brothers Melody, Chinatown, and Big Mat Moss, from a life of sharecropping in Kentucky to a steel-mill town resembling World War I-era Homestead, Pennsylvania. Recruited along with other black migrants as strikebreakers to a community whose largest block of laborers are Slavic immigrants, the Moss brothers soon find themselves pitted against their unionized white fellow workers. In addition to the double bind of marginalization from white labor unions and exploitation by industrial capitalists, the Moss brothers simultaneously must deal with pressing issues of familial and cultural dislocation. As I elaborate in this essay, Attaway marks these dislocations primarily through his accounts of the Moss brothers' encounters with radically new forms of labor and labor technology. Like many social realist novelists of his day, Attaway offers readers no idealized resolution to the Moss brothers' rather bleak dilemma. Rather, the novel's tragic conclusion finds Big Mat slain while work-