INDEXICAL PEOPLE: Women, Workers, and the Limits of Literary Language

Despite growing class segregation, spreading labor unrest, and the increasing visibility of a class of permanent waged workers during and after the CivilWar, the influential proponents of the doctrine of the harmony of interests that underwrites the social project of antebellum domestic fiction held their ground. Labor and capital, they insisted, were joined in “partnership” by an “indissoluble bond,” their “true interests” made “identical” by the operations of a free market. So complete, in fact, was the identity of capital and labor in the United States, one adherent of this view explained, that the gradations of society “shade off almost