Rebecca Harding Davis: Pioneer of American Realism and Social Critique

"I want you to dig into this commonplace, this vulgar American life, and see what is in it. Sometimes I think it has a new and awful significance that we do not see." — (Margret Howth)

Literary Legacy and Early Realism. Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910) developed a realistic style of writing in the mid-19th century that anticipated by some 20 years the full flowering of realism in America, as witnessed in the work of William Dean Howells and Henry James. The 1861 publication of her first major artistic statement, the short story "Life in the Iron-Mills," marked the national debut of a writer who was to go on to produce around 500 published works. She wrote a large body of fiction—hundreds of sketches and short stories, children's literature, 11 novels, 16 novels in serial form—and a significant collection of nonfiction, including insightful commentary on literature, gender, education, labor, race, war, and imperialism, to name a few topics. In her fiction, Rebecca Harding Davis cast an unblinking eye upon social ills and questions of great importance: the predations of capitalist industrialism, the legacy of slavery, and the shuttered lives of women. Throughout her career, she brought out the "commonplace," believing that the everyday often discloses the deepest meanings.

Critical Rediscovery and Canonical Status. Although a well-known and well-respected writer in her day, Rebecca Harding Davis failed to attract scholarly attention for most of the 20th century. This period of neglect lasted until the late Tillie Olsen's edition of Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories in 1972. Rebecca Harding Davis then began to emerge from an undeserved obscurity, yet it was not until the 1990s that she became the figure of central concern to scholars of American literature that she is today, heralded by the publication of notable biographies and literary studies of her work by Sharon M. Harris, Jane Atteridge Rose, and Jean Pfaelzer, as well as various editions of her work. Now her "Life in the Iron-Mills" is a fixture in American literature survey courses in secondary schools and colleges, alongside works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and other long-standing canonical figures in American literature. No discussion of American realism would be complete without an exploration of her writing.

Early Life, Education, and Literary Influences. The eldest child of five surviving children of Rachel Harding and Richard Harding, Rebecca Blaine Harding was born on June 14, 1831, in Washington, Pennsylvania. She spent her early years in Florence, Alabama, and grew up in Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), where she lived until her marriage at 31 years of age to L. Clarke Davis in 1863. Early biographical treatments of Rebecca Harding Davis located her in either Huntsville or Big Spring, Alabama, but recent scholarship by Janice Milner Lasseter and Sharon M. Harris conclusively demonstrates that Florence is the town in which the Hardings had their home (3–4). Growing up in a family known for its scholarly and imaginative cast, Rebecca Harding Davis read much on her own as a child, from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress to popular romances of the day. In Bits of Gossip, an autobiography she wrote in 1904, she speaks of a special attachment to three unsigned stories from a cheap two-volume collection of stories she devoured in her favorite reading spot, a tree house:

"One was a story told by a town pump, and another the account of the rambles of a little girl like myself, and still another a description of a Sunday morning in a quiet town like our sleepy village. There was no talk of enchantment in them. But in these [stories] the commonplace folk and things which I saw every day took on a sudden mystery and charm, and, for the first time, I found that they, too, belonged to the magic world of knights and pilgrims and fiends." (37)

Formative Years and Early Career. Rebecca Harding Davis was to discover years later that these seemingly anonymous stories were actually written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom she was later to meet and whom among the earlier generation of American writers she revered most highly. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the preeminent American romance writer, had paradoxically awakened the young author's fascination with the things of everyday life, developing her realist perspective at an early age. After an education at home and with private tutors, she attended Washington Female Seminary at age 14, graduating as valedictorian in 1848, having digested a "standard" female seminary curriculum of "geometry, literature, music, and drawing" (Sharon M. Harris 23), plus theology and French (Jane Atteridge Rose 5). She continued her education at home in Wheeling, despite domestic duties including tutoring her three youngest siblings. She learned German and studied philosophy with the help of her younger and very close brother, Wilson Harding, a Washington College student who would share his books during his breaks from school. Rebecca Harding Davis and Wilson Harding worked through "not only the classic literature of France, Germany, and England but also contemporary European and American literature" (Sharon M. Harris 24). She also served an important apprenticeship during the late 1850s as a contributor—of reviews, opinion pieces, and poems—to the Wheeling Intelligencer, a newspaper whose editor, Archibald W. Campbell, deliberately cultivated her skills as a writer and editor (Sharon M. Harris 24–26).

Literary Breakthrough and The Atlantic Monthly. In 1861, at 30 years of age, Rebecca Harding Davis escaped the literary orbit of Wheeling with the publication of "Life in the Iron-Mills" in the Atlantic Monthly. She followed this piece with a serialized novel, published as Margret Howth: A Story of To-day, which appeared by installments in six issues of the Atlantic. Originally, Rebecca Harding Davis had entitled the piece "The Deaf and the Dumb" (Jane Atteridge Rose 25) to suggest the way in which people who might do something about conditions in factory towns remain deaf to the cries of those in need of help and the ways in which those in need of help remain dumb, unable to voice their condition. In the novel Margret Howth, having been left by her lover, Stephen Holmes, who has become betrothed to another woman, Margret Howth takes to working as a factory bookkeeper in order to support her family after her father becomes ill. Having selflessly released Stephen Holmes from his obligation to her, she appears to accept her dull lot in life, but not without feeling deeply the unfairness of it all. The novel also traces the fortunes of Dr. Knowles, a philanthropist who runs a "house of refuge" for outcasts, and Stephen Holmes, her former lover. Margret Howth, Dr. Knowles, and Stephen Holmes, however, all learn a lesson of humility and sacrifice from Lois Yare, a mulatto in her teens—stunted and deformed by years of hard factory labor—who rushes into a burning mill in order to save Stephen Holmes.

Commercial Publishing and Financial Challenges. Over the years, Rebecca Harding Davis published more than 20 pieces of fiction in the Atlantic Monthly, including the story "The Wife's Story". While many of these developed her realism in fiction, as Jane Atteridge Rose points out, many also anticipate her later "journalistic and satiric realism," and "in a few she began to incorporate conventional sentimental motifs" (42). Her artistic range clearly extended beyond her realist experiments in fiction, as can also be seen in her contributions to Peterson's Magazine, a popular women's monthly published in Philadelphia. Her early Peterson's stories—she was to write 29 short stories and five serial novels in the 1860s alone (Sharon M. Harris 73)—experimented with gothic, mystery, and horror themes. She wrote for Peterson's even while under an informal agreement with James T. Fields, a friend and the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, that she publish only in that journal.

Dual Publishing Life and Marriage. The Atlantic Monthly paid poorly, and Rebecca Harding Davis needed money to contribute to her family, which was suffering financially as a result of her father's illness. Every piece that she published before 1866, for either journal, was unsigned, so there was slight chance that James T. Fields would know of her early work for Peterson's Magazine, although he did eventually become aware of it, and in 1868 the Atlantic Monthly dropped her in retaliation for publishing elsewhere. Her dual publishing life at this point in her career suggests an important struggle in her life between her desire to create art certified by an audience of high tastes, such as the Atlantic's, and the necessity to make a living through writing that appealed to the masses.

• 1st stage: In March 1863, Rebecca Harding married L. Clarke Davis, a law student in Philadelphia, who had been corresponding with her ever since he read "Life in the Iron-Mills".
• 2nd stage: The Davises remained married until L. Clarke Davis's death in 1904 and had three children: Richard Harding Davis, named after her father; Charles Belmont Davis; and Nora Davis.
• 3rd stage: Richard Harding Davis would go on to become a famous writer and celebrity in his own right at the turn of the 20th century.

Marriage Dynamics and Writing Autonomy. Rebecca Harding Davis biographer Jane Atteridge Rose says that the two, L. Clarke Davis and Rebecca Harding Davis, were in love and that Clarke, "on a personal level . . . appears to have been an ideal spouse" (37). Yet Sharon M. Harris, another biographer, suggests that Clarke had a negative effect on her literary career: Clarke "identified her work as secondary to his own and secondary to her roles of wife, mother, and housekeeper" (17). Moreover, according to Sharon M. Harris, Clarke "never understood Rebecca's need to write for a reputable journal regardless of the pay". Even before their marriage, L. Clarke Davis regarded her writing career as financially based. Though he was proud of his wife's talents, he did not understand her artistic vision (104). Whatever the precise nature of their marriage and the effects it might have had on her literary trajectory, she still managed to write short fiction and novels that made powerful social and literary statements.

Civil War and Post-War Social Novels. Notable among her novels is Waiting for the Verdict (1868), a realistic novel about the American Civil War and its aftermath, published at a time when the recent violence was all too fresh in the nation's consciousness. Her novel, described by scholars as among her best, dares to take on racial mixing through dual plots in which the hidden black ancestry of white-appearing characters generates racial confusion and ethical dilemmas. Her critique of racial issues ties the novel to both her earlier story "Blind Tom" (1862), based on a blind slave child who was a musical genius, played classical piano, and was exploited and displayed as such, and her later "Some Testimony in the Case" (1885), an essay growing out of a tour she made of the Deep South that calls for education to help solve social inequality. In Waiting for the Verdict, the Civil War and nascent Reconstruction have not, ultimately, solved the question of how freed blacks will merge into a society thoroughly preoccupied with racial differences. And so, at the novel's end, nothing is truly wrapped up: we still wait for the verdict. While Jane Atteridge Rose notes that the novel ends with a "sentimental domestic vision," she also argues that the novel's refusal to settle many of its "unresolved issues" is a real testament to the "book's power" (73).

Social Reform, Politics, and Conservative Feminism. Other novels, short fiction, and essays by Rebecca Harding Davis often take on similar hard-hitting social and political issues. An 1870 novella, Put Out of the Way, for instance, details abuses in the way the mentally ill are institutionalized and treated, especially the graft involved, while a novel published two years later, John Andross (1874), boldly explores political corruption through a fictionalization of the workings of the infamous Whiskey Ring and the corruption of the Ulysses S. Grant administration. While institutional reform had been on her mind from the very beginning, she also frequently returned to issues of gender, and this has been of special interest to scholars keen to know where she stands in relation to feminism. She published a number of pieces that might serve to illustrate her position, including:

• Short story: "The Wife's Story" (1864)
• Short story: "In the Market" (1868)
• Short story: "Anne" (1874)
• Humorous essay: "Men's Rights" (1869)
• Seven-part serial: Earthen Pitchers (1873–74)
• Novel: Kitty's Choice (1876)
• Novel: A Law unto Herself (1877)

Feminist Ambivalence and Cultural Legacy. Sharon M. Harris notes that the work of Rebecca Harding Davis is best understood within the "tradition of conservative feminism" (5). As it did in the thinking of her literary forebears Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catharine Sedgwick, women's power, for Rebecca Harding Davis, emerged from the domestic setting, and so she walked a tenuous line between 19th-century women's domestic ideology, characterized by separate male and female spheres, and the greatly expanded range of women's roles advocated by the notion of the "New Woman". As an illustration of this ambivalence, Sharon M. Harris notes of Rebecca Harding Davis, "she advocated woman's suffrage, but she often demeaned the 'New Woman'" (5).

Comprehensive Literary Achievements. The career of Rebecca Harding Davis is difficult to sum up in an encyclopedic entry, for it spanned so many years and covered so much of American literary history. She pioneered realism, but she also wrote sentimental and gothic fiction, journalism, mock-travelogues, local color and regional fiction, satire, children's fiction, and political commentary. She even wrote an autobiography in which, as she was to do with much of her writing, she stretched the limits of the genre. As Janice Milner Lasseter and Sharon M. Harris note in their edition of Bits of Gossip, she writes not a personal or self-centered account of her life but rather a "cultural autobiography" more than anything else. As with much of her work, in this last important piece of her career, she sought to approach the largest issues of her day. Rebecca Harding Davis died in 1910.