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This essay brings a fundamentally Americanist question to bear on Leo Marx’s fundamental piece of Americanist scholarship: What cultural work does the machine-in-the-garden trope perform in literary texts, texts that—as Marx highlighted—emphatically invoke the socio-economic upheavals of industrialization? Rather than asking what the trope means, I am interested in what it does in textual environments that, literally or metaphorically, navigate a protean discourse of class.1 I want to pursue this question in a reading of two texts that directly engage with industrialization and its machinery, two pieces of literature written in markedly different circumstances—one by an eminently canonical writer of the American Renaissance, Herman Melville, the other by a woman who worked in the factories of Lowell, the period’s model industrial town. My reading of these texts aims to draw attention to the ways in which representations of the machine in the garden are perspectivized: While engaging with the juxtaposition of nature and technology, these representations always also work on negotiating social subjectivities—on defining, contrasting, authorizing, critiquing subject positions in the rapidly shifting social matrix of an industrializing USA. In other words, I propose to not only attend to the texts’ images of the machine in the garden but also to the imaging that they depict. The texts with which I will be concerned dramatize this imaging as work that is deeply situated and entangled in other practices of selffashioning, practices which resonate with industrialism’s new regimes of social difference. Herman Melville’s short-story "The Tartarus of Maids" (1855) constructs a narrator who renders his encounter with industrialism in a rhetoric greatly informed by the machine-in-the-garden trope. By correlating this figurative practice with the notably limited and biased perspective of its narrator—a perspective whose marking laminates class and gender—the text exposes the work of socio-economic self-fashioning enabled by ...
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