The Importance Of Mary Paul's Experience At The Lowell Mills

Spindle or canvas? Millworker or author? Daughter or historian? Mary Paul left Vermont for the Lowell Mills as an economic necessity of the times, leaving her father in an attempt to strike it out on her own. From her intimate and painstakingly detailed letters to her family, we can assume that she provides a very accurate account of her day to day life. She was a millworker who sought out an honest pay. Around the same time, through her writings, we can meet author Harriet Robinson’s as a child in Boston. She moved to Lowell with her mother, but her story not told in letters, but instead as a nostalgic written account put into a book. While both women were hopeful in the the trying labor of working in the mills, Paul’s experience at the mills
While Harriet Robinson produced a book to be distributed publicly, complete with contextual information and narrative, Mary Paul’s experience is solely defined by unedited correspondence with her father. The informal non-contextualized experience by Mary Paul might lack a broader understanding of the era, but it provides a first-hand direct account of her situation. In stark contrast, Harriet Robinson’s experience is from memory and gives us a story of perseverance that is not only mean to relay a story, but also to sell a story. “The historian is a species of mental photographer of the life and times he attempts to portray,” Robinson writes. “He can no more give the whole history of events than the artist can, in detail, bring a whole city into his picture” (Robinson Ch.1). Robinson provides us with a full account of millworking in Lowell, from her days as a child all the way up until the era of factories; we lose Paul after her correspondence with her father. These two different presentations dictate not just the format of the writings, but how the reader will interpret their experiences. Because of this, Paul’s experience is more authentic and reliable. Robinson is an advocate for a fondly remembered era, while Paul is an ever reliable narrator and skeptic. In this way, while Robinson is an “artist” of sort and an
Unfortunately for Paul, the venture collapsed after one of the mills burned and collectively they could not bring the business venture back up. Paul was enticed by the idea of a fair wage and equal pay with men (Paul 136). “All work there, and all are paid alike,” she wrote. “Both men and women have the same pay for the same work.” While Robinson was excited by the prospect of voting rights for women and economic parity, Robinson was the one to take an extreme risk in her life that ultimately did not pay off. Both remained hopeful in life, but the one who had the ability to write about hardships for publication took the opportunity to decry the benefits of mill life, rather than a life filled with hardships, work, and a lack of opportunity. Perhaps a book with complaints and critiques of men wouldn’t have sold as well. Perhaps Robinson truly felt this way about the world. Regardless, because of her broad generalizations and rosey outlook on her past life, she serves as an ultimately unreliable narrator who over-generalizes the lives of those around her, including