Clothed in Meaning: Literature, Labor, and Cotton in Nineteenth-Century America

As one of the very few items that “ascend to metaphorical stature,” cotton has attracted great academic attention. Lively interest has been growing in the investigation of the cotton trade, its material culture, and its complicated nexus with the global economy. Sylvia Jenkins Cook’s Clothed in Meaning: Literature, Labor, and Cotton in Nineteenth-Century America stands out as the first attempt to exhaustively excavate the reciprocal relationships between cotton, chattel, cloth, and clothing in nineteenth-century American literature. Cook asserts that “the fashion revolution driven by cotton promised the nonelite the elegance, variety, and joy in the sumptuary projections of selfhood that were formerly the exclusive preserve of the elite” (149). She focuses her study on laboring people in the cotton industry, deftly weaving personal stories and tactile sensation into the readers’ understanding of cotton history and American economy. The book consists of an introduction, eight chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction describes the subject and structure of the research, starting with the claim that clothing is important because it “registers palpably on the body and cognitively in the mind in a symbiotic connection” (1). Such a connection is fully shown in the cotton experience and clothing awareness of enslaved people and other laborers involved in the nineteenth-century cotton industry in the United States. Cook argues that an exploration into these groups’ oral discourse and writing articulates their subjectivity, their indispensable role in the constitution of the “empire of cotton” and “empire of fashion,” and their importance to the development of American literature, especially the burgeoning African American literature. The first chapter concentrates on the writing of women factory workers in the mid-1840s that appeared in the Lowell Work on this review was financially supported by Jiangsu Office of Philosophy and Social Sciences under Grant (No. 20WWB002).