Loom(ing) Tragedy: Precarity, Sympathy, and Poetic Exchange in Ellen Johnston’s Autobiography, Poems and Songs

Abstract

On December 5, 1863, the working-class Ellen Johnston was dismissed from her
position as a power loom weaver in the Verdant Factory in Dundee, Scotland. The
dismissal came shortly after a considerable period of unemployment and added to a
series of unfortunate circumstances that had affected Johnston’s life: she was
abandoned by her biological father as an infant, forced into factory labor at the age of
eleven, sexually and emotionally abused by her step-father in adolescence, left
homeless at various intervals, and harassed by co-workers in her adult life.
Johnston catalogues these misfortunes in her 1867 Autobiography, Poems and Songs in
what Monica Smith Hart calls a “risky act.” While I agree with Smith Hart, I find that
– for Johnston – writing was not just “risky,” it was precarious. Following Judith
Butler, I define precarity as “a politically-induced condition in which certain
populations suffer from failing social and economic networks...and become
differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.” Unlike riskiness, precarity
accounts for the political structures which make it possible for some lives to flourish
while others falter. While scholars have previously considered how Johnston candidly
discusses her status as a fallen woman and dramatically proclaims herself a “factory
exile,” the role of precarity in Johnston’s oeuvre has not been discussed; this essay seek
to address that gap. I argue that the intimacy of Johnston’s Autobiography contests the
conditions that create precarity and, in doing so, writes back against limited
representations of class and gender.