New England Mill Girl
RITVO, HARRIET
New England Mill Girl Emmeline By Judith Rossner Simon and Schuster, 336 pp. $12.95. Reviewed by Harriet Ritvo Assistant professor, writing program, MIT Despite its realistic setting amid the...
...A prosperous aunt and uncle visiting from Lynn, Massachusetts, are shocked by the family's poverty and suggest that the teenager be sent to work in Lowell, where the cotton mills were actively recruiting Yankee farm girls...
...after she has been there several months, she still gets lost on her frequent walks...
...Ma-guire, begins to pay her special attention, Emmeline is pleased as well as grateful...
...In the brick city Emmeline feels abandoned by both her mother and by God...
...What is odd about Emmeline is that she has strong desires, yet she considers herself powerless...
...Imperturbably innocent, she never really feels that she has sinned, and we are inclined to agree with her...
...Even Lowell's geography is hazy to Emmeline, and therefore to us...
...Yet she is never completely broken...
...Reviewed by Harriet Ritvo Assistant professor, writing program, MIT Despite its realistic setting amid the farms and factories of 19th-century New England, Judith Rossner's sixth novel reads more like a combined chronicle and fairy tale...
...The coachman who brings her to Lowell decides where she will board...
...Eventually, Mr...
...her aunt finds foster parents for her baby...
...Unfortunately, she is not sufficiently interesting to sustain such intense exposure, and the story sometimes drags when recounting minor incidents that recapitulate Emmeline's rather restricted repertoire of responses...
...She would be expected to send most of her wages home-the handsome sum of about two dollars a month at the outset...
...Emmeline is a study in the psychology of victimization, and of survival...
...The need to filter everything through Emmeline's limited consciousness prevents Rossner from fully exploiting some of the potentially most interesting materia] here...
...Her Lynn relatives take Emmeline in, arrange for the adoption of her baby, and help conceal the entire episode from her family...
...Even at the end, where the plot turns mythic in scope, it is played out on the single slender thread of her personality...
...The descriptions of industry at Lowell and at Lynn, of northern New England agriculture and of the treatment of Irish immigrants by Yankee exploiters reveal the author's thorough research...
...She flees the house, loses herself in the pathways surrounding the nearby pond and, although it is late November and light snow is falling, falls asleep for hours on the cold rocks...
...She is simply dumbfounded when he takes her to visit his mother's house in the Irish shanty-town called the Acre...
...That her horizons are severely limited is not simply the result of scant experience, though...
...indeed, its very inevitability lends the novel much of its poignancy...
...As a result, in some central core of her being she remains untouched by a profoundly shocking series of setbacks...
...As her life slips increasingly out of her control, she withdraws further and further from its surface incidents...
...The book then unfolds along the narrow channel suggested by that beginning...
...It starts in the soothing cadence used to quiet restless children: "This is the story of Emmeline Mosher, who, before her fourteenth birthday, was sent from her home on a farm in Maine to support her family by working on a cotton mill in Massachusetts...
...It is written in the third person, but since Emmeline is its central consciousness as well as the main character, we are constantly in intimate contact with her sensibility...
...Bass places her in a mill...
...Rossner apparently does not share Aristotle's preference for invented but probable dramatic action over events that seem highly improbable even if they have actually occurred...
...For example, neither the social nor the physical consequences of her sexual liaison with Mr...
...We learn more about Emmeline's life than we need to and less about its context than we would like...
...Except in the last case, she never protests-and even then she submits...
...Emmeline is, after all, insistently a historical novel, focusing on a particularly significant chapter in the American past...
...So when her supervisor, Mr...
...Afterward, she returns to the family farm to resume her former life, almost as if she had never left...
...Maguire lays out the plan of the city for her, and we understand it...
...it reflects a stubborness and lack of imagination that ultimately serve her in good stead...
...Whitehead (another supervisor) sends her to Lynn...
...Yet Emmeline's ignorance and inexperience, her inability to make sense of the social surroundings, require that the historical background appear in fragmentary glimpses...
...following the consecutive incidents of a life violently wrenched from a predictable rural path...
...Scarcely more than a child when she encounters the Industrial Revolution at Lowell, she is unable to adapt to the strange new society...
...Most of what subsequently happens to Emmeline Mosher is not at all surprising...
...While all her siblings marry, however, she contentedly remains alone, completely indifferent to passion until she reaches her middle 30s...
...It is this small portion of the tale that has been played up in the book's pre-publication publicity...
...This is our first glimpse of a fey quality in the demure and pious farm girl, who is apt to abandon human environments and look for solace in nature whenever she is upset...
...Maguire decides to notice her...
...She sticks to the particular historical truth, and Emmeline's conclusion is stunning...
...In the last 30 pages, though, the plot takes a bizarre, staggeringly unlikely, yet gripping twist that involves an incestuous relationship between Emmeline and her long lost son...
...Maguire seem to occur to her until they are forced on her attention...
...Emmeline's vacuity reduces the novel's richness and complexity in other respects, too...
...Not realizing the family will starve without some outside help, Emmeline is shocked when her parents scarcely resist the idea and expresses her distress in a manner curiously at odds with her usual docility and dutifulness...
...He seduces her easily, and when she becomes visibly pregnant, her Lowell career must end...
...The novel opens with a portrait of Emmeline growing up on the hard-scrabble Maine soil...
...Maguire's repeated attempts to explain himself as an Irishman among Yankees, for instance, has little meaning to a girl who has never heard of Ireland and lacks the imagination to perceive the cost at which he has achieved his powerful position...
...Emmeline is often told things she does not understand or remember so that we will know them-a device that disrupts the narrative...
...It is studded with events that correspond not only to stages in Emmeline's sad career but to the social and economic development of New England...
...The oldest of nine children, she adores her mother and uncomplainingly undertakes half the woman's work of the household, unaware of the physical attractiveness making adults notice her...
...Other characters and physical settings exist only in relation to Emmeline-only as she sees them...
...she fails to make friends with the other, slightly older girls, who seem "a happy, world-wise group, too closely knit to ever stretch to admit her...
...The rest of the novel, albeit moving, is too often crippled by the inadequacies of its heroine...
...In addition, it is based on a true account that Rossner heard from an elderly woman, who as a child had known the aged Emmeline...
...Her parents' decision to send her to Lowell is only the first of many times that others determine her fate...
...Circumstances thrust its heroine into the path of overwhelming historical, social and finally personal forces that thwart any attempt on her part to shape her own destiny...
...Thus, the novel offers a strong sense of a mill girl's day-where she slept, what she ate, what she did in the mills, how she felt-without effectively relating her life and labor to the total society of Lowell...
...Emmeline is not allowed to enjoy her bucolic existence for long...
...Oddly self-contained and passive, more at'home in the world of nature then in human society, Emmeline is shielded by an inviolable innocence from fully realizing the implications of her actions and experiences...
Vol. 63 • October 1980 • No. 18
