"The Bloody Hand" of Labor: Work, Class, and Gender in Three Stories by Hawthorne

Abstract

THIS IS AT BOTTOM NOT A STUDY OF WORK BUT OF IDEAS ABOUT Thus begins the best treatment of cultural attitudes toward in the midto late-nineteenth-century United States.1 The discrimination at first seems perfectly reasonable: not work, but about work; not the actual activity of the shoemaker or stockbroker, but about such work. On reflection, however, one wonders whether the distinction really holds: are not the blacksmith's plans, thoughts, and musings and the complex arrangement of social attitudes -directed towards his activity and permeating his community and workplaceas integral to his as the heft of his hammer and the spark bums on his leather apron? We may detach them for analytical purposes, but we do so at the risk of forgetting that a notion of abstracted from ideas about work is merely a procedural device, not a historical reality. To say that one studies not work, but about work, makes as much sense as to say that one studies not ideas, but about ideas, or that one works not on work, but on about work. The unity of and about must be borne in mind when we attempt to understand the complex relation between social representations of and the being represented therein. The