ENGL 200 D: Reading Literature: Literature in the Marketplace

For my major paper, I am going to answer the question what makes labor value difficult to establish?  What I think makes labor value difficult to establish is the amount of effort given by an individual. The two texts I plan to work with are “The Lady’s Dressing Room by Jonathan Swift and Mary Collier’s The Woman’s Labour.  By using these two texts  I think it would be interesting to talk about women and their hardship and role during this time to explain why it was difficult as women to establish labor value.

Swift’s poem The Lady’s Dressing Room is an ironic poem. The topic of the poem is just what the title says: he’s describing what happens in a lady’s dressing room. However, the first lines signal the ironic approach: five hours to get ready? This is hammered home by the suggestion of a goddess, as if the women were divine, an image Swift then contrasts with both agricultural byproducts (dung, hard work, smell) and a kind of industrial production. He’s saying how much work it is to make women beautiful, and how disgusting the work behind the scenes is.

Collier’s poem describes the double shifts of wage labor, home- and field-work, and work in others’ homes that make up the lives of the rural working women. Because of their toil in the fields, as domestics, and as care-givers, they have little time for rest, she explains, and even less to reflect or to dream. Collier also criticizes the exploitation of domestic labor and the dangers of seasonal work. These two texts show the hardship of developing labor value.