herds, stable hands, miners, factory workers, and so
on). One cause for the foregrounding of work is a
change in attitude toward the nature and value of
work, which came to be seen as both a blessing and
a curse. For perhaps the most prominent philoso-
pher on labor, Karl Marx, work could be a liberat-
ing activity. Freely chosen productive labor would
lead to self-realization and fulfillment for both the
individual worker and the laboring community. A
farmer’s well-tended fields reflected his discipline
and knowledge, and in working those fields, the
farmer might feel a sense of connectedness to the
land and a sense of purpose in providing food for his
family and neighbors. People who worked the land
collectively would also see their social cooperation
mirrored in the results of their work. This concept
of self-realization was important for Marx primarily
in how it is violated in work that is not freely chosen,
especially in work done under capitalism, in which
self-realization and fulfillment are replaced by what
Marx termed alienation.
Alienation is especially evident when human
beings are forced to sell the only thing they own—
their labor—in a system imposed upon them by
those who own the means of production (land,
factories, machinery, etc.). A migrant worker on a
huge corporate farm hardly sees her best qualities
reflected in the backbreaking, miserable, monoto-
nous work she does; she may be scorched by the
sun, exhausted by the pace and physical movement,
unable to talk to her fellow workers during her shift,
and paid so little that even the crop she picks would
be a luxury. In Marx’s terms, she is alienated from
nature, her community, the product of her labor, and
especially from herself. Her work satisfies no intrin-
sic need or desire; she works only to satisfy other
needs. In contemporary terms, she might say of her
work, “This is not who I am.” It is easy to see how
a production-line worker or anyone toiling for low
wages in a dangerous, tedious job may be considered
alienated from himself, but even an office worker
suffering through a dehumanizing job that strips
him of his identity and makes him feel out of sorts
can be considered a member of Marx’s exploited,
alienated class.
These two concepts—the blessings of work as a
path toward self-realization and the curse of toiling
in an exploitative system—provide the themes for
many works of literature written in the mid-19th
century and later. Whether a work of literature
includes only passing mention of workers and the
laboring life or takes work as its central topic and
theme, it might examine any number of specific con-
cepts: the struggles of immigrant, African-Amer-
ican, and female workers; the dangers of manual
labor and the effects of work on the bodies and
psyches of laborers; the way in which work infiltrates
and affects domestic life and leisure; the ethical and
moral issues associated with slavery and with other
forced labor; the camaraderie and interdependence
in the working community; the struggle to unionize
and the battle between collective and individual val-
ues; the personal and psychological rewards of freely
chosen labor; and the degree to which a worker is
alienated from himself, his work, his community,
and the natural world. And while some popular lit-
erature, treating useful toil as empowering, preaches
a gospel of self-improvement and celebrates the
work ethic of committed laborers, much serious
literature centers on the exploited worker and the
miserable conditions endured by individual workers
and by the working class.
The so-called industrial novel, a genre that
includes works by Elizabeth Gaskell (north
and south) and Charles Dickens, depicts the harsh
conditions endured by factory workers in Victorian
England. Thomas Hardy reveals in Jude the
obscure the many forces that appear to be allied
against members of the working class. Poverty and
exploitation among workers has drawn the attention
of numerous American writers, including Herman
Melville; Walt Whitman; Rebecca Harding Davis
(LiFe in the iron MiLLs); and, perhaps most
famously, Upton Sinclair, whose The JunGLe
exposed the poverty, injustice, and unsanitary con-
ditions of life in the slaughterhouses of Chicago.
The “proletarian novel” of the 1930s in America
promoted Marx’s notion that only a socialist revolu-
tion could bring about a system conducive to self-
actualizing labor, while John Dos Passos (u.s.a.
trilogy) saw nothing to be gained under socialism,
a system as destructive of individual identity as
capitalism. In The Grapes oF wrath, John Stein-
beck strikes a few astounding notes of hopefulnesswork 121