Monday, April 11, 2011

just what kind of man are you, anyway, Mr. Frick?

Agatha

reading New Working-Class Studies after visiting the Frick mansion yesterday brought home the ridiculously wide contrast between the lives of a wealthy industrialist's family, versus the lives of those who made such opulence possible. of course, there were so many levels of hierarchies present in the home which are worth thinking about–that of guests and outsiders coming in to be received, that of servants and governesses in relation to the family, and that of the men and the women (one wonders what daily life was like for Mrs. Frick if she was reading The Five Arts of Woman, By the Author of How to Be Happy Though Married).

in particular, while reading Paul Lauter's chapter on working-class writing, i couldn't help making a comparison between the "inside" perspective of a working-class person versus the (seeming) "outside" perspective of our tour guide's description of the Frick family, and of servant life. i remember laughing to myself when we were in the library, and our tour guide noted that, on one of the paintings on the wall, the artist took the liberty to add an extra flounce of flowers to the painting "to make it more sentimental." contrast that to the line that Lauter quotes from "The Orange Bears": "i remember you would put daisies / on the windowsill at night and in / the morning they'd be so covered with soot / you couldn't tell what they were anymore" (65).

the image of those extra "sentimental" flowers, of the almost oppressive ornateness of the house, is so startling in contrast to the pitiful image of those soot-blackened daisies, of the violence and physicality of labor. i faithfully believed our tour guide when she testified that the Frick family treated their servants with great kindness and solicitousness; and yet, what of those thousands of others who, across the river, had no room in their lives for "extra sentimentality?" it is striking to consider that in one sense, there is very obvious display of intense labor in the opulence of the Frick home; and yet what is missing from this display is the physical, often brutal reality associated with that labor, whether it is the sweating laundress in the basement, the painstaking plasterwork of the craftsmen applying aluminum–aluminum, i tell you–to the walls of the breakfast parlor, or the strenuous toil of the factory itself, by whose capital everything in that house was realized.

to rival myself, however, i would like to know more about places like Frick's settlement house which our tour guide referred to. would such a place have been the kind of center that gave working-class people access to tools with which to define their "class sensibility," as Lauter calls it?

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