Working with Fluids in Mary Collier's "The Woman's Labour"

Abstract: This essay centers Mary Collier's work with fluids as part of her lifelong profession of nurse and washerwoman to the content and form of her poem, "The Woman's Labour" (1739). By giving textured specificity to Collier's labor, my effort is to make meaningful her work itself, rather than only her working-class identity, to her poetic practice. The essay reviews the arguments that body fluids provide the feeling material for poetic rhythm. I then draw a parallel between the movement of body fluids as a mechanism for poetic rhythm and the regular movement of body fluids as necessary indicators of health in eighteenth-century understandings of the body. As Collier depicts the experience of gendered work in her poem, the specific work of maintaining healthy bodily flows leads to intimate fluid connections with the people the working woman cares for, and these connections produce sensations of bodily change and alienation. As Collier works with poetic form to manipulate the rhythmic feelings of bodies and move us towards troubling intimacies akin to the experiences of caretaking, her poetry becomes a form that holds the rhythms of bodies in fluid relationships.