Living in the Industrial Revolution must have sucked. Honestly, can anyone here really say they haven’t started to appreciate life a little bit more after having read everything we have about life in factories? Both Davis and Melville basically describe the factories as the Devil’s armpits, and Chaplin’s character quite literally goes mad working there. I, for one, can definitely say that I am very happy to be sitting comfortably in my dorm room, unmarried, and reading about this life, than being unmarried and shipped off to go live it.
Having said that, I should probably get to my point. In this day and age, humans are treated like indispensable and important beings, which is what we are. Sadly, that wasn’t always the case. Take “Life in the Iron-Mills” for example. The hundreds and hundreds of mill-hands working there were treated like filth. Davis says, “A reality of soul-starvation, of living death, that meets you every day under the besotted faces on the street,” (Davis 2769) giving an accurate account of what the lives of the workers were like, their pain clearly visible on their faces. She mentions the conditions that they worked under and things are brought up that would never happen in our current day in age. Men in an iron mill working without shirts? Unfathomable! But back then, nobody cared about the lower class. They were just there to do the work.
Similarly, in “The Tartarus of Maids” the working girls are hardly given a second thought. They aren’t even seen as human beings anymore. Melville even compares them to horses, tied up to a rack (Melville 1272) at one point. After being asked why the females are always called girls, the factory owner says something very striking: “For our factory here, we will not have married women; they are apt to be off-and-on too much. We want none but steady workers: twelve hours to the day, day after day, through the three hundred and sixty-five days.” (Melville 1278) He basically says that he doesn’t care about anything other than them getting work done. He refuses to hire a married woman because she might possibly not show up for work one day. This right here shows again that the humans in this time were not humans to their bosses, or owners rather, but merely slaves.
And then there’s Chaplin’s Modern Times, which takes a completely different approach to convey the same message. Chaplin’s movie is seen as a comedy or parody of how working life was for the working class during the Great Depression. While the factory doesn’t exactly look like Hell, like it did in “Life in the Iron-Mills,” it’s still clear that it is not a fun place to be. In the beginning of the film, the workers all settle at their stations and start their work. Immediately the factory owner demands that they work faster. We cut to Chaplin and see the repercussions this brings: he can barely keep up with the speed of the conveyor belt. This, of course, is viewed as humorous, but when you really think about it, it’s awful. This goes on for a while; Chaplin struggling to keep up with the work and messing up. Then lunchtime rolls around, and a company wants to demonstrate their feeding machine so lunch breaks can be cut out entirely. Now, let’s think about this concept for a second. A feeding machine? Really? I’m sure we can all agree that breaks are imperative to perform. I highly doubt anyone here has sat down and banged out an entire six-page paper without checking Facebook at least once or grabbing something to eat. But getting back to the movie, this feeding machine obviously doesn’t work. And once again, because it’s a comedic movie, we all laughed when it didn’t. I’ll admit, it was funny when Chaplin’s face got covered in food and the mouth-wiper hit him in the face repeatedly, but can you imagine if that happened in real life? And then here’s the kicker: instead of turning down the machine because it was injuring a member of his staff, the factory owner doesn’t want to buy the machine because it wasn’t efficient enough. I mean, seriously? That’s your reason for not wanting to buy it? Once again it becomes clear that the upper class really doesn’t care about the workers. And I’m sure everyone caught the comparison in the opening act of the movie: workers going to work aren’t any better than sheep being driven into their cages.
If you ask me, the slogan for the Industrialization should have been: “Humans don’t matter, as long as our stuff gets done!”
I appreciate the personal tone that you’re using in this post, Emily. It certainly makes for an entertaining read.
It is worth remembering, of course, that “in this day and age” many people in the world don’t have jobs all that different from those that we’ve been reading about. I hate to tie the proverbial horse to my patented equine pummeling machine, but we have to learn to see ourselves within these narratives we’re reading.
I agree, Emily, it is terrible that the workers were allowed to be treated the way they were. In the scene you described where the feeding machine was demonstrated to the factory manager, the machine had a glitch and began to injure Chanplin with an increasing amount of force. The creater of the machine focused on fixing any defects instead of the worker’s well-being. Charlie Chaplin’s character was left strapped to the machine while the men worked on repairs. Here, he is viewed simply as a guinea pig and not as the human that he is.