Gloves Symbol Analysis

In American Pastoral, gloves represent the Swede’s dedication to family tradition. They also represent a vision of America that by the novel’s present day has ceased to exist. Though once an impoverished immigrant family who struggled to get by, generations of Levovs work tirelessly in the leather industry until eventually, Lou Levov, the Swede’s father, owns a prosperous glove factory of his own. The Levov family business, Newark Maid, manufactures ladies’ gloves, high-end accessories worn by women of means in the earlier part of the 20th century. The Swede grows up with the expectation that he will one day inherit the factory, and so he spends his formative years learning everything there is to know about gloves—under the ever scrutinizing, ungenerous eye of his father. Eventually the Swede does take over Newark Maid, and he becomes as engrossed in and passionate about gloves as his father was before him, taking Merry to work on special occasions and delighting in her reciprocated pride in her family’s legacy. In its prime, then, the Levovs’ gloving business represents the fruits of good, honest labor, and it honors the generations of Levovs who toiled in dehumanizing, unrewarding conditions so that their descendants could one day thrive.

But as time marches onward, modern fashion trends, relaxed social norms, and a radically transformed social and economic landscape considerably shrink the market for ladies’ gloves and alter the conditions in which they’re produced. When Merry adopts extremist political views as a teenager, she comes to see the business as a source of shame rather than a marker of family pride, and she condemns her father for his complicity in the predatory capitalist economy. Following the Newark Riots of 1967, businesses like the Swede’s exit the city en masse, with many moving operations outside of the U.S., where the cost of labor is cheaper. Though the Swede tries to stay in Newark for as long as he can, eventually he, too, closes the original factory and moves production overseas. Though Lou Levov decries the radically transformed gloving industry and the sharp decline in quality he has observed across the business, his complaints read as the deluded and futile (if also tragic) ramblings of a grumpy, stubborn old man who is past his prime of life and who resents the rest of the world for moving ahead without him. And indeed, the world moves forward, cruelly indifferent to Lou’s unhappiness about where it’s headed. In this way, then, the Levov family’s glove business traces the radical economic, social, and cultural transformation America undergoes over the course of a century, and the inevitable conflicts that change brings with it.