Agricultural Insights: Care Ethics in American Proletarian Literature

Abstract

This dissertation examines proletarian fiction's multifaceted engagements with care ethics and socio-material relationships in response to the Great Depression. Through analysis of literary texts which focus on agricultural contexts, labour strikes, and reproductive labour on the West Coast, this project challenges ideas of proletarian literature as primarily being narratives of a masculine, revolutionary battle for the control of production in urban factory and mill settings. The labour struggles in these texts take place in grand forests, Edenic orchards, and lush fields. I argue that the authors' proximities to and concerns for these non-urban ecological settings influence their perceptions of the complex set of social, economic, political, and environmental issues meaningfully entangled in the working-class labour disputes. Moreover, this project complicates conceptions of collective marching as the labour movement's primary form in practice and symbol by showing how these texts do not focus only on masculine struggles against corporate exploitation but also suggest solutions that anticipate a feminist ethics of care. The exploration of various forms of care, as ethical concern and material practice, extends and complicates proletarian literature's concern with collectivity and collective action. I further argue that these authors experiment with care in relation to the more-than-human world, sometimes proposing the natural world as guide for human modes of care and suggesting the need to extend better care to the world's more-than-human inhabitants.

Over four chapters, I read texts by John Steinbeck, Clara Weatherwax, Langston Hughes, and Carlos Bulosan that offer a range of perspectives on California's and Washington's agricultural and lumber strikes in the 1930s. I argue that Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle (1936) and Weatherwax's Marching! Marching! (1935) present opposing conceptions of working-class collectivity. While Steinbeck portrays marching as the activity of mobs who risk uncontrolled violence and a dangerous erasure of individuality, Weatherwax affirms marching as a pathway to heightened, embodied consciousness that understands the world as a harmonious, reciprocally beneficial collective. At the same time, both novels anticipate feminist care ethics in attending to care work as essential to economic work and labour activism. In contrast, Hughes and Bulosan do not emphasize the collective march as the most important expression of collectivity. Chapter Three shows how Hughes's 1934 play Harvest, co-authored with Ella Winter, demonstrates collectivity as forged by communication across perceived differences, while Hughes's poetry anticipates Weatherwax's concern with embodied selfhood. In Chapter Four, I show how Bulosan's America Is in the Heart (1946) emphasizes that the building of collectives must be done through acts of care and that his poetry explores the relationships between care, humanity, and the more-than-human world. By reading these proletarian texts through feminist care ethics and new materialism, my dissertation shows how all four authors not only challenge competitive individualism and capitalist exploitation of nature but also consider positive solutions based in the prioritization of ethical care practices.