Analysis of Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron-Mills

Industrial Environment and the Atmospheric Opening. The story opens as the narrator is speaking to the audience in direct address, asking them to step out of their relatively comfortable existences and into the realities of life in a "town of iron-works" where a "greasy soot" clings to everything: trees, houses, even "the faces of the passers-by" (39). The narrator speaks from a house once occupied by two of the story's chief characters, a stunted Welsh iron-worker, Hugh Wolfe, and his hunchbacked cousin, Deborah, who works in a nearby mill. Particular attention is given to soot that clots even the house's interior, its ornaments, and a canary, which "chirps desolately in a cage" (40): symbolic of the unlikeliness in such a town that anything can remain clean and untouched by the industrial system. The narrator questions the readers, even confronts them directly, about the intellectual penchants that may have distracted them from the real plight of the immigrant underclass in America, accusing them of "lazy and dilettante way[s]" and of being "busy in making straight paths for [their] feet on the hills". The narrator begs these readers to set aside their potential disgust and to follow her or him (there is some critical debate about the narrator's gender, which the story does not make clear) "into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia" to hear Hugh's story (41).

Labor Realities and the Artistry of Korl. Hugh Wolfe works six nights a week in Kirby & Johns iron mill as a puddler, a person who stirs molten iron in order that the impurities that rise to the surface might be raked off. The mills are a veritable "city of fires," replete with "pits of flame waving in the wind; liquid metal-flames writhing in tortuous streams through the sand; wide cauldrons filled with boiling fire, over which bent ghastly wretches stirring the strange brewing. . . . It was like a street in Hell" (45). One of these wretches, Hugh, has "lost the strength and vigor of a man, his muscles were thin, his nerves weak, his face (a meek, woman's face) haggard, yellow with consumption" (47). But Hugh has a "thirst for beauty," which results in an unusual habit of spending his precious spare time carving the flesh-tinged refuse of the puddling process—what is called "korl" in the story—into "sometimes strangely beautiful sculptures," which he crafts sometimes for months at a time before eventually destroying them (48). A sculpture that Hugh has not yet destroyed—"a woman, white, of giant proportions, crouching on the ground, her arms flung out in some wild gesture of warning" (52)—becomes a focal point in the plot of the story.

The Encounter with the Upper-Class Visitors. On the Saturday night narrated in the story, Deborah, who is enamored of her cousin and concerned about his health, takes supper down to the mill for Hugh, despite having herself just worked a 12-hour shift at a cotton mill. Exhausted, she falls asleep on a still-warm heap of iron-ore refuse, while some visitors enter the scene, a party that includes Kirby, a son of one of the mill owners; Dr. May, a town physician; and Mitchell, Kirby's brother-in-law. These men "linge[r], smoking and talking in a desultory way" before heading out and running nearly smack into Hugh's korl woman (51–52). Initially frightened by the flesh-colored figure, which Mitchell thinks at first glance is alive, the visitors soon turn attention to the sculpture as a piece of art, to the mystery of who the artist might be, and finally to larger questions of labor, class, and reform.

Philosophical Debates on Social Reform. Hugh, when asked the meaning of his korl woman, replies tentatively in his Welsh-inflected English that "she be hungry" but further qualifies that it is not a hunger "for meat" (53–54). Kirby laughs off Hugh's efforts at explaining his work, but Mitchell intuits Hugh's intention, correcting Dr. May, who narrowly criticizes the sculpture as not representing bodily starvation accurately: "May," he broke out impatiently, "are you blind? Look at that woman's face! It asks questions of God, and says 'I have a right to know.' Good God, how hungry it is!" (54). The marvel of Hugh's brilliant artistry, which depicts what the narrator earlier calls "a reality of soul starvation" (54), impels further questions of what should be done with people like Hugh, who make up an underclass but are manifestly capable of great human achievements, even under the worst conditions. Kirby, representing business interests in the story, argues that his factory hands are just that, nothing but "hands," and that it would be better, still, if they were machines, with none of the deeper sensitivities Hugh clearly displays. Kirby echoes Pontius Pilate in refusing any personal responsibility in allowing Jesus' execution: "I wash my hands of all social problems" (55). Dr. May, on the other hand, makes it a point to assure Hugh that there is some hope for him: "Do you know, boy, you have it in you to be a great sculptor, a great man? Do you understand? . . . A man may make himself anything he chooses" (56). Dr. May's Benjamin Franklinesque appeal to the self-made man, however, smacks of condescension, and when Hugh asks Dr. May whether he will help him to become a great man, Dr. May excuses himself of any obligation by saying he has no money with which he can help him. Of Kirby and Dr. May's responses to Hugh, Mitchell, who classifies them as the voices of the pocket and the heart, respectively, offers biting critique, easily exposing the flaws in both Kirby and Dr. May's thinking. A bit miffed at Mitchell's easy dismissal of his notions of class mobility, Dr. May demands that Mitchell offer his solution to the dilemma of Hugh. Mitchell's reply amounts to another evasion of the problem: He claims that he could not help even if he wished to because reform needs to begin with the underclass itself, from their needs and not from the pity of the powerful.

The Theft, Trial, and Tragic Outcome. Almost as soon as these visitors have entered Hugh's life, they leave, but their brief visit exposes the tremendous differences between what he might be and what he is, between the life of someone like Mitchell and his own life, and the differences drive him to near madness, leaving him crying out for justice: "Look at me!" he said to Deborah, with a low, bitter laugh, striking his puny chest savagely. "What am I worth, Deb? Is it my fault that I am no better? My fault? My fault?" (59). Little does Hugh know, however, that Deborah was awake during Dr. May and Mitchell's talk of money, and in a misguided attempt to help Hugh, seizing on money as the answer to his problems, she picked Mitchell's pocket. Once home, she presents Hugh with the pocket book, which contains a few gold pieces and "a check for an incredible amount" (61). Deb tells Hugh that it is his right to keep the money, but Hugh clearly knows the theft is wrong. Still, he is tempted and begins imagining a life of personal and artistic freedom, as he wanders the town. Eventually, however, Hugh is apprehended, the narrator withholding the details, saying understatedly, "The trial-day of this man's life was over, and he had lost the victory" (65). He is sentenced to 19 years of hard labor as an example to other mill hands, and Deb receives three years as his accomplice.

· 1st stage: Withering away in prison, Hugh has no hope of reprieve, but he claims nonetheless to his captor, "I think I'll get out" (66), and he does just that, by committing suicide, opening his veins with a piece of tin "not fit to cut korl with" (69).

· 2nd stage: Deb assists a Quaker woman in preparing Hugh's body for burial in the country, beyond the stifling confines of the mill-town.

· 3rd stage: When her sentence ends, Deb joins the Quakers.

Framing Device and Symbol of Hope. The long story closes with a noteworthy framing device. The narrator speaks again from the present day and as before from the confines of the Wolfe house, where, in the corner of its library, the narrator keeps hidden behind a curtain Hugh's korl woman, who "speaks" as clearly in the present frame as in the past: "Its pale, vague lips seem to tremble with a terrible question. 'Is this the End?' they say,—'nothing beyond?—no more?'" (74). Despite this sculpture's bleak plea, however, the story closes with a modicum of hope that, ultimately, God will intercede for the good: "While the room is yet steeped in heavy shadow, a cool, gray light suddenly touches [the korl woman's] head like a blessing, and its groping arm points through the broken cloud to the far East, where, in the flickering, nebulous crimson, God has set the promise of the Dawn" (74).

Genre Synthesis and Metarealism. Certainly "Life in the Iron-Mills" presented something new in 1861. Stretching beyond the confines of the sentimental and romantic fiction that dominated much writing of the day, Rebecca Harding Davis infused her story with an unexpected realism, unexpected because as a literary historical movement, realism would not be under way in the United States until much later in the 19th century. Realism abounds in the text in the form of unsparing description, such as that of the Wolfes' cellar domicile: "It was low, damp,—the earthen floor covered with a green, slimy moss,—a fetid air smothering the breath" (43). In its descriptions of the general conditions of life for the Wolfes and other immigrants, we might even see "Life in the Iron-Mills" as a first in the tradition of "critical realism," realism "impelled by the motive to reform," as does the critic Jane Atteridge Rose (11). Rebecca Harding Davis's realism also might be seen in her dialect writing in the story, a device that William Dean Howells and realists of the regionalist/local color stripe, such as Kate Chopin, would frequently employ as well. Another central realist tactic employed by Rebecca Harding Davis in "Life in the Iron-Mills" is the placing of characters in situations in which they must make ethical choices, keeping in mind that failures to make a choice at all, such as we see in Mitchell's feelings on reform, also constitute a kind of choice. But, to classify Rebecca Harding Davis's novella as realist may ultimately be somewhat limiting: "Life in the Iron-Mills" melds its realism with some of the concerns of sentimentalism (such as its Christian reformist rhetoric), romanticism (as in the hell-like imagery of the iron mill), and naturalism, a determinist form of realism (in the pervasive feeling of Hugh's entrapment within his life as a puddler). For this reason, Sharon M. Harris calls Rebecca Harding Davis not a realist but a "metarealist," a writer who "synthesize[s] several modes" of writing but keeps her "explicit focus" on realism and uses realism to value and explore everyday experience (19).

Socioeconomic Themes: Exploitation and Class Stratification. A central theme in "Life in the Iron-Mills" is the predation of systematic industrial work on laborers. Workers, according to Kirby, are "hands," a common figurative expression in which the part stands in for the whole. A "hand" is a person; however, when Kirby employs the figure of speech, he makes it clear that he would rather do away with the whole person and keep the part that does the work. In fact, Kirby already acts as if his workers are machines, and as the narrator observes, the mill system is itself one giant and controlling machine: "Not many even of the inhabitants of a manufacturing town know the vast machinery of system by which the bodies of workmen are governed" (45). Thus, just as the pervasive, greasy soot of the town penetrates all spaces, no one escapes the industrial system. The reality of class stratification for workers like Hugh marks another theme that Rebecca Harding Davis explores in "Life in the Iron-Mills". Hugh is fascinated by the idle visitors to Kirby & Johns, and we are told that "he seized eagerly every chance that brought him into contact with this mysterious class that shone down perpetually with the glamour of another order of being. What made the difference between them?" (49). But class, for Hugh, is not merely something impalpable, ethereal. He takes the difference to be almost physical in its embeddedness, as when Hugh listens in as the visitors talk, feeling "more and more like a dumb, hopeless animal, . . . glancing now and then at Mitchell, marking acutely every smallest sign of refinement, then back to himself, seeing as in a mirror his filthy body, his more stained soul" (52). While men like Dr. May windily expatiate on boundless upward mobility, on pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, in the example of Hugh, Rebecca Harding Davis shows us how firmly entrenched class differences actually are.

For Discussion or Writing
1.Critics disagree over whether the story's narrator is female or male. Our knowing in advance that the story was written by a woman may sway us, but the original audience would not have known the author's gender as the story was published unsigned. What do you think? What difference, if any, does the gender of the narrator make?

2. How would you describe—in terms of class, education, literary taste, and other characteristics—the original audience for this story? What details from the text help you make your determination? Does Rebecca Harding Davis run the risk of offending her audience in any way? How so?

3. Critics have called the story's ending—Hugh's suicide, Deborah's joining the Quakers, the closing invocation of the "promise of the Dawn"—passive in nature and, thus, not in line with the strident attitude asserted by the narrator throughout the story. Can the ending be brought into agreement with the rest of the story? Why or why not?

4. Compare Rebecca Harding Davis's kind of realism in this story to that in Kate Chopin's The Awakening.

Critical Analysis of Rebecca Harding Davis's "The Wife's Story"

Introduction and Domestic Realities. "The Wife's Story" begins, as does "Life in the Iron-Mills," with a direct address to the reader: "I will tell you the story of my life, since you ask for it," promising to disclose the events that have made her the person she is today (112), a story of "terror and temptation" that threatened her married life (113). The narrator, Hester Manning, is a young wife married to an older man, Dr. Daniel Manning, who has several children from a previous marriage and who has suffered a terrible financial loss that requires that the family leave New York and return to his old home of Newport so that he can take up his former occupation of teaching. While Manning and his niece, Jacky Monchard, who helps look after the youngest boy, Teddy, find in the impending move a potential return to a simpler life, Hester Manning cannot bear the thought of the struggle that might be required for the family to thrive and what it might do to her. Much of her misgiving she attributes to her own upbringing, intelligence, and significant artistic talents. She was raised by a New England family that nurtured her talents, and she feels as if "God had made [her] with a different, clearer insight into life" than others (120). Accordingly, she asks herself, "What would taste or talent be worth in the coarse struggle we were about to begin for bread and butter?" (114). Her unease soon becomes a loathing of her husband's family; she especially dreads contact with Jacky, whom she sees as insipid.

Marital Discord and Postpartum Alienation. Hester Manning fondly remembers early days in her marriage to Dr. Daniel Manning, when the two would go on drives together, and she could occasionally induce him to talk to her about his past. His openness, though, is generally rare, and he refuses to discuss his previous marriage. Though she knows no details, Hester gets some sense of the failed marriage from Robert, another of Dr. Daniel Manning's sons: "You do not know my father. If he wakens to find his wife is not what he thinks her, it will be too late for me to warn you then. He has been hurt sore and deeply in his life. Your chance is but once" (118). Although Hester continues to press her husband for more detail, he will give none. The lightsome air of the first few months of marriage dissipates with Daniel's reticence and with the arrival of Daniel's children and Jacky.

We find out in the course of Hester's discussion of how loathsome home life has become for her that in the year after her marriage she bore a child, and the aftereffects have been unpleasant: "Since my baby was born, my soul as well as my body has been weak and nauseated" (120–121). Seemingly incapable of caring for the child, whom she calls "an animal" that wears her down (121), she has the child sent away to be raised elsewhere.

As a reflex reaction to what is happening at home, Hester begins a mental process of pulling apart from her husband: "If I remained with Dr. Daniel Manning, my rôle was outlined plain to the end: years of cooking, stitching, scraping together of cents: it was the fate of thousands of married women without means, to grovel every year nearer the animal life, to grow niggardly and common" (122). The alternative, she believes, is to cultivate her own gift for music, returning to and reworking the score of an opera she had written prior to her marriage. While still in New York, she secretly engages with an opera producer, M. Vaux, to stage the opera and to take a singing role in it. She also plans to leave her family once they arrive in Newport and to return to New York.

The Steamer Journey and Psychological Climax. En route via steamer to Newport, Jacky Monchard speaks frankly with Hester Manning about Dr. Daniel Manning's previous marriage. Showing Hester a daguerreotype picture of Manning's first wife, Jacky says of the wife, "She was an opium-eater" and "she, the foul vampire, sucked his youth away," leaving him with "but the husk of life" remaining (127). Dramatically casting the picture overboard, Jacky leaves Hester with her thoughts, which vacillate between the options before her: to nurture her husband or to nurture her own talents. She decides for the latter and once in Newport commits herself to telling her husband she is leaving him. She seeks to do so, seating herself on the cliff adjacent to the beach where she intercepts him and Robert, but she cannot bring herself to do it.

The story here skips forward to the first performance of Hester's opera, in which she plays a central part. Her now-estranged husband and his son, Robert, are in the audience, witnessing firsthand the embarrassing, miserable failure that it is: "As the curtain fell, it was stopped by a faint, dismal hiss that grew slowly louder and more venomous, was mingled with laughs and jeers from the gallery, and the play was damned" (132). Having nowhere to go after the grotesque failure, and no family, only her "Self" (133), Hester wanders about the street and joins a crowd of onlookers at a corner pharmacy, only to discover that the crowd has formed around the body of a man, her husband, collapsed and dead of "nervous excitement" brought on by the opera (134).

Resolution, Fever-Dream Device, and Biographical Context. Hester Manning wakes to discover that the entire sordid opera affair has been but a fever-induced dream, and that she had never actually executed her plans to leave, having instead fallen prostrate on the cliff at Newport, a victim of "brain fever" (135). She discovers that the family has settled on a farm that Daniel's son, Robert, has given them. The atmosphere is rejuvenating, and Hester is, to her delight, reunited with her baby to begin life anew with Daniel and Teddy (Daniel's older sons have gone west). Although Hester wishes Jacky Monchard to remain with them, too, Jacky leaves with Robert to be married to him.

· Historical context: "The Wife's Story" has an important biographical context.

· Authorial condition: When Rebecca Harding Davis wrote it, she was suffering from a very deep depression, which began about the time she discovered she was pregnant with her first child.

· Publication timeline: The story was published in the Atlantic Monthly "just three months after the birth of her son and about five-months before the date usually associated with the lifting of her depression" (Janice Milner Lasseter and Sharon M. Harris 5).

· Experiential narration: To some extent Rebecca Harding Davis was writing from experience when she narrates Hester's postpartum depression.

· Scholarly relevance: The story is also clearly rife with feminist connotations, which might be investigated by taking Sharon M. Harris's observations on Davis's feminism mentioned earlier as a starting point.