Genevieve Taggard's Sentimental Marxism in Calling Western Union

In Sentimental Modernism, Suzanne Clark argues that throughout the twentieth century American women writers perpetuated an earlier sentimental tradition. Although Clark's particular interest in lyrical poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and Louise Bogan results in her downplaying the woman poets as activists in the 1930s, Genevieve Taggard and Muriel Rukeyser utilized the sentimental to denounce social and economic inequities in American culture. Calling Western Union (1936) is especially important because as Taggard's only book of poetry entirely devoted to class issues, it employs the ethical norms and pathos for which Clark praises the sentimental (1991, 24-25). Admittedly, Taggard's work is not characterized by overwrought characters as in, for instance, Maria Susanna Cummins' The Lamplighter (1854) or by the narratorial exhortations as in Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills (1861). However, Calling Western Union, like Davis's novel and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, is blatantly interventionist by targeting social problems and attempting to cure them with actions derived from a maternal ethos. As characters exemplify this ethos by bonding with and helping the unfortunate, they function as role models whom readers can respect and emulate. Taggard's concern is creating an inclusive community, and for her this is a classless society that provides opportunities and an improved standard of living for working class people. Although Calling Western Union is unapologetically leftist, we should not dismiss it as mere Marxist propaganda; it is actually a complex work that recasts a maternal ethic of interpersonal bonds into helping others in Marxist terms. After discussing Taggard's links with this strain of American sentimentalism, I use close readings of her autobiographical preface and representative vocalic poems in which women frequently play key roles to evidence her sentimental Marxism.

Calling Western Union1 consists of several prose sections and thirty eight poems: the autobiographical prose preface is followed by four books, each consisting of thematically linked poems and an interpretative prose note. The volume's two concluding poems predict the victory of the working class. The preface, "Hawaii, Washington, Vermont A Frame for the Verse," focuses on early experiences that shaped Taggard's later political views and lays the foundation for poems calling for an inclusive community within the United States. Since the preface uses geographical regions to expose ethical issues, the volume's title is a plea for Americans to unite by eliminating divisive social conditions stemming from a socio-economic hierarchy. The poems and notes underscore that this goal can be accomplished by altering the economic base of a class structure debilitating to the working class. By advancing a position consistent with Marx and Engel's historical materialism, these sections call for an alignment of primarily middle and working class people to supersede powerful, moneyed groups. Throughout the poetry, community is a class issue subsuming geography, gender roles, and art.

Taggard's Marxism complicates her relationship to sentimental writers because unlike many of them she accepts technology and industrialism. In "Stowe's Dream of the Mother Savior," Elizabeth Animons argues that after 1850, black and white female writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Harper, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Sarah Orne Jewett, challenged the ethos of industrialism with an idea of community that asserted the supremacy of family, relationships, and the power of women over work, products, and the domination of males (1986, 156-57). Because Taggard accepts industrialism as a given in twentieth-century America, she cannot concur with, for instance, Davis's solution in Life in the Iron Mills to remove exploited workers from the mills into a loving Quaker community. Taggard's working class women labor in mills or support their men by marching in the streets to protest working conditions, and her men are beaten when they strike against Ford Motor Company for higher wages in order to feed their families. Although Taggard embraces industrialization and technology, she still envisions women as powerful agents who advocate an ethos of interpersonal bonds and helping others which is associated with nineteenth-century domestic figures and showcased in the interventionist sentimental fiction to which Animons refers. Concerning the potency of these earlier domestic women, Barbara Welter and historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg think that a middle class Caucasian woman in nineteenth-century America had considerably more independence and power as a mother and as a pious woman rather than as a submissive, supportive wife. She exerted her strength by inculcating morality into children and influencing her husband so that his actions would hopefully counter the immorality in his workplace (Welter 1966, 152, 154-55, 159-61; Smith-Rosenberg 1985, 199). In The Bonds of Womanhood, Nancy Cott draws out the moral implication of this selfless figure when she argues that mothers were powerful because they shaped the mores of America: In guiding a child's life, the American mother guided the nation, because social progress was based on individual character (1977, 85, 94).