Introduction
American realism remains an elusive field, and Eric Sunquist asserts, “No genre is more difficult to define than realism, and this is particularly true of American realism.” But certainly, this should not discourage scholars from beginning the process.
Rebecca Harding Davis was a strong-willed, highly intelligent young woman who emerged at the age of thirty-two as an excitingly new and innovative writer. She was born in Washington, Pennsylvania, a small community located twenty-five miles south of Pittsburgh. From the late 1860s, until her demise in 1910, Rebecca Harding Davis was one of the finest and well-known writers in America. She broke into the issue as a youthful woman in the 1860s with “Life in the Iron Mills,” which established her as one of the founders of American Realism. In this enlightening thesis of significant work, I seek to present a skillful investigation of Davis’s literary style and of the aesthetic, philosophical, and political assumptions that fashioned it.
‘Life in the Iron Mills’
Historical, Philosophical and Cultural Forces
The extraordinary intensity and uniqueness of vision in this short story, has earned it a position as one of the revolutionary documents in American Literature’s evolution from Romanticism to Realism. Two factors in Davis’s personal life eternally altered her vision of what the purpose and structure of literature should be. The first factor: being brought up in a rapidly emerging mill town, and the second, Davis’s experiencing at first hand the horrific realities of war.
From these experiences, Davis produced her distinctive literature of the middle to late-nineteenth century. Davis’s letters to her family and friends remained an important avenue for political discussions throughout her life and sometimes even acting as an impetus for her articles and short stories. It was during their apprenticeship years that she gained first-hand knowledge of the national and local particulars of political life and consequently began to recognize her own era as one of incredible growth and equally rampant fiction. It is out of this knowledge that she shaped her literary theory of the “commonplace.”
Treated as a novella in the genre of local regionalism, Life in the Iron Mills begins with an epigraph from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s popular poem “In Memoriam A. H. H.” 1850),
Is this the end?
O Life, as futile, then as frail!
What hope of answer or redress?
The basic story of “Life in the Iron Mills” is set thirty years in history thus permitting Davis to demystify the historical myths of that era so as to write what she believed was the crucial history: “the story of today.” Davis’s research has centered on “Life” as a milestone in American literary history. Gerald Langford classifies the novella as “one of the revolutionary documents in American writing” and Tillie Olsen admits that the “commonplace” Davis chose as her topic “was nowhere in books” at that time. Jay martin categorizes Davis as “one of the earliest and best of the American realists.”
The three-level narrative structure of “Life” is a re-creation of the hierarchical social stratum of the mid-nineteenth century in America. The “upper” tier is the narrator’s middle-class world and her examinations structure the inner stories. Critics often believe that the voices of Davis and her narrator are exchangeable. The narrator is an essential initial channel, whose language and social status are known and comfortable to Davis’s reading community. The middle stratum is Deborah’s arena and belongs to both worlds. She inhabits the lowest economic stratum but has not yet been entirely dehumanized.
She has no last name. Finally at the heart of the narrative is Hugh Wolfe’s account, one of the most basic renderings of naturalism in American literature. Every stage of the narrative structure tackles the concern of language as an instrument of authority and each challenge submissive, conventional Christianity as a solution to the nation’s tribulations.
The narrator initiates with a conversational “exchange” with the reader that instantly addresses the truth of a mill town. The narrator asks, “Do you know what that is in a town of iron works?” the sky is “muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me.” Davis reveals how an economic structure terminates human potential and identifies voracious industrialization that distorts nature and defeats the human spirit.
Davis’s insertion of immigrants in her portrayal of the mill town, especially Irish immigrants is a significant aspect of her realism. Between 1815 and 1865, roughly five million immigrants had entered the United States. Two million of these immigrants were Irish comprising the biggest nationality.
Rebecca Harding Davis’ existence in Iron Mills observes the artist’s social and spiritual position in a distorted marketplace. The marketplace bleeds into Davis’ life and controls her voice. Theodore Parker exemplifies the marketplace of 1842 as having “a basis of selfishness; a society wherein there is a preference of the mighty, and a postponement of the righteous, where power is worshipped and justice little honored” (407). Since then, until 1861, when Davis’ text surfaced, conditions grew worse. The site is devoid of the carnival signs of the conventional folk market. A certain tradition of ethics is missing, therefore the distortion. Underneath a lens of historical alteration, the continuation of an industrialized structure did nothing to arrest the suffering in America.
Social and Political factors
As a sensitive analyst of the sociopolitical apprehension that had been emergent in the nation since the 1830s, Davis comprehends that progressively stratifying class divisions were discouraging the actual conception of democracy in American life. By highlighting the working class citizens and daily events, Davis desired to expose industrial capitalism’s deformation of human lives as well as its destruction of nature. America was to Davis’s mind, “a tragedy more real … than any other in life.” For intentions, unknown Davis selects a Welshman as our central character. She communicates the racial diversity casually, as a “crowd of drunken Irishmen” (11), a tall mulatto woman near the end, and the different physicality of the Welsh. “They are a trifle more filthy; their muscles are not so brawny; they stoop more” (15). The variety adds a dimension to the marketplace.
The ruling body and American capital interests which often seem identical factions do not need artisans from their functioning class. Art, in many cases similar to the newly arrived employees, was traded in from Europe, merely produced by the upper class or not appreciated. Davis makes use of the mystery of an artist’s spiritual state as a cry “to live the life God meant him to live” (45) in this relatively fresh cultural setting. This cry is similar to the workers’ cry for social mobility, explicating “the reality of soul starvation” in “a world went wrong” (23, 30).
The Christian Allusion
The most important significant mission of this story has been to solve what “scholars have generally found… difficult to reconcile” (Hughes 114) – the political significance in addition to the Christian allusion. The tale is based on the allegory of Lazarus found in the Gospel according to Luke, chapter 16 (Hughes 116). The allegory is a story of Inversion in which a prosperous man and Lazarus die at the same instance, the rich to hell pleading for pardon while Lazarus is next to Abraham, which acts “to arouse shock and response from her [Davis’] readers” (117). This dissertation emphasizes the key argument that indistinct spirituality and political restoration, are not functioning to supersede one another. On the contrary, they merge successfully.
Davis labors “on the principle that social wrongs can be corrected by the men causing them” (Parker 407). She incorporates “patient Christ-love” as one of the possessions “needed to make helpful and hopeful this impure body and soul” (63), implying Deb’s curing from the trial. Obviously, for Davis, chaste Christian spirituality is a prerequisite for social development. Given the Puritanical paradigm of America regarding religion, at the heart of divine madness, is a different spiritual sense essential for Davis’ political change. It is “the madness that underlies all revolution, all progress, and all fall” (Davis 46).
These themes co-exist parallel to each other. They adjoin sociopolitical entailments and an arguably spiritual festive ideal inside our chief character, a Welshman with the name Hugh Wolfe. Wolfe becomes detached from Christianity and embraces a different religious form. The emptiness of festive themes in his life makes him hungry, only to be converted very late by the Quaker’s Christian solace – that of the natural surroundings and God’s “promise of the dawn” (65) – not a carnival form and possibly an extension of the tainted marketplace philosophy, even though not the perverted marketplace way of life.
Wolfe is an unskilled manual worker and sculptor of the iron mill’s byproduct korl and is at fault because he is born underprivileged, weak, dissimilar from the others, and an artist, defined here merely as one who creates art. He has a somewhat cultured and genderless look, “the taint of school-learning on him” and his “meek woman’s face”, respectively (10,11). “In the mill, he was known as one of the girl-men: ‘Molly Wolfe’ was his sobriquet” (24).
Absence of Feminism?
The men have a dominant position in Wolfe’s consciousness and are preoccupied with wealth, becoming influenced by the philosophy of the marketplace. Mitchell, the chief avatar of Wolfe, “a Man all-knowing, all-seeing, crowned by Nature, reigning”, perhaps most represents the perverted marketplace philosophy (40). He ends the communication abruptly and with a cold conclusion. Mitchell uses the philosophy of psychological self-indulgence.
Psychological hedonism elucidates all actions and emotions as essentially self-centered. For example, a saint is not motivated by selflessness. They are motivated by how their actions will make them understanding sensitively, the achievement of a place in Heaven. It is the converse of Christianity, debasing the very act of self-sacrifice with the blow of self-interest. Mitchell’s mirth is from a platform of contempt where pragmatism is unconcealed by religious conviction and possibly most significantly for Hugh Wolfe; it is a terminal feature of the marketplace.
Possibly, here Davis presents her solution when according to Mitchell the natural order has set the classes apart and the cycles of history bring them together every now and then.
Humor the central theme
Humor is the central theme. God is humorless in the Puritan paradigm. Ideally, it is not humor like Mitchell or Wolfe’s, hidden and personal. Traditional carnival humor is a humor of the people, for all people. It is the laughter of the marketplace, closer to the tall mulatto woman Wolfe spies from his cell. The reader is asked to create an environment where laughter can regain its healing power. Deb, the Quaker, as well as the narrator, do not laugh for adult laughter in the perverted marketplace takes the form of Mitchell’s educated pedestal. It is the distorted laugh of a desperate and suicidal Wolfe.
Irony and Symbolism
In “Life” the naturalistic symbol is iron. Pfizer continues, “A major characteristic of each of these symbols is that it functions ironically within the structure of the novel.” Fro Davis, the ironic symbol is iron itself. Hugh has completely assimilated the values of the iron mill owners; he carries those values with him throughout the core narrative and literally employs iron to hone the piece of tin with which he kills himself.
The Final Question (Or Answer?)
Hidden behind a curtain is the Karl woman statue, now in the possession of the narrator. Her arm reaches out beseechingly and her pale lips appear to question, “Is this the end?” (p. 64). The Karl woman’s question, (“What shall we do to be saved?”) is drawn from scripture, which leads us to the final inclusive theme of Davis’s realism. maybe this question is answered when the narrator becomes aware of a cool gray light pointing to the Far East, the East serves as a symbol for Christ, where “God has set the promise of the Dawn” (p. 65).
The narrator reveals another art object in her room, “a little broken figure of an angel pointing upward from the mantel-shelf; but even its wings are covered with smoke, clotted and black” (p. 12). Hence, although the angel has not attained victory over desolation, maybe the Karl woman, representative of working-class souls, will be rewarded salvation. The korl woman’s “wild gesture of warning” (p. 31) could moreover forecast a potential revolution by the working classes, as signified by Hugh’s statement that “the money was his by rights, and that all the world had gone wrong” (p. 51).
References
Davis, Rebecca Harding. Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories. New York: The Feminist Press. 1985.
Harris, Sharon M. Rebecca Harding Davis and American Literary Realism.> Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1991.
Hughes, Sheila Hassell. “Between Bodies of Knowledge there is a Great Gulf Fixed: A Liberationist Reading of Class and Gender in Life in the Iron Mills.” American Quarterly. 49.1. (1997): 113-135.
Morrison, Lucy. “The Search for the Artist in Man and Fulfillment in Life – Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills.” Studies in Short Fiction. 33.2. (1996): 245-253.
Parker, Theodore. “The Perishing Classes in Boston.” The American Mind. New York: American Book Company. 1963. 407.
Rose, Jane Atteridge. Rebecca Harding Davis. New York: Twayne Publishers. 1993.