"Life in the Iron Mills" chronicles
a particular period, place, and problem-the dawning
of industrial America in northern urban cities and
the crushing poverty and limitation of opportunity
that resulted for the working classes. Her concern
in this work was specifically the people who were
part of the machinery through which America was
on its way to becoming, before Rebecca Harding Davis's
death in 1910, the world's most powerful industrial
culture. One of the most important social disruptions
that Davis captures is the end of agrarianism as
a national ideal. The only possibility of a return
to the simpler, cleaner pastoral world of the farm
available to most Americans would be, after the
Civil War, through the imagination or through death.
Writing in 1861, Davis was ahead of her time in
seeking to capture the bleak determinism at work
in the fates of the growing numbers of the urban
poor. Her city is a prescient glimpse of the future
turning into reality before her very eyes.
When Davis is called a pioneer for
"Life in the Iron Mills," that term usually refers
both to her subject matter and to the style in which
she 
wrote.
However, she drew heavily on earlier writers for
her literary strategies, and her influence as a
stylist has been minimal. What makes "Life in the
Iron Mills" most remarkable as a literary work is
its mixture of so many styles, both those that preceded
it and those that came later. The long story is
perhaps most comparable to Uncle Tom's Cabin
(1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe's revolutionary work
of one decade earlier. Like Stowe, Davis wrote first
as a visionary reformer who believed in the power
of the pen to force change, to right wrongs. Her
story, like Stowe's novel, is a polemical one that
uses language for oratorical effect in trying to
persuade. Hawthorne, too, in his novels of the 1850s,
was important to Davis. He had been the favorite
writer of her girlhood. From him, she learned an
effective way as a writer to manipulate narrative
point of view. Like many of the narrators in his
short stories, her narrator in "Life in the Iron
Mills" enters the frames of action to interpret
and control both readers and characters.
Beyond the story's rhetorical dimension
is its often-noted realism, yet this term is in
some ways deceptive when applied to Davis as well
as to 
other
post-Civil War writers. The sources for Davis's
realism go all the way back to Caroline Kirkland,
who in the 1840s insisted on writing about ordinary
people with accuracy and objectivity. Moreover,
Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills" contains more sentimentality
than Kirkland's work. Learning how to use emotionalism
from mid-century writers like Dickens and Stowe,
Davis did not want simply to depict her society
but to analyze and indict it. As a social theorist,
Davis moved beyond Stowe's Christian evangelicalism
to accept the Darwinian thesis of "survival of the
fittest," which, during the decades that followed
"Life in the Iron Mills," became aggressive capitalism's
justification for leaving the poor in their misery.
Émile Zola, in an 1880 thesis on the "Experimental
Novel," called for fiction to be a kind of laboratory
that would treat human problems scientifically,
"naturalistically," through just such a lens as
Darwin provided in his Origin of the Species
(1858). Davis looks ahead not just to Zola, but
to twentieth-century writers like Eugene O'Neill,
whose play, The Hairy Ape, in the 1920s gave
a similar expression in dramatic form to the ways
in which men were turned into animals in a deterministic,
industrialized world.
In the 1860s and 1870s, painters,
like writers, turned to the common people and places
for subject matter and, with techniques such as
impressionism, sought not just to photograph reality
but to highlight shadow, nuances, and colors in
ordinary scenes. Davis's story of one young man's
life in the iron mills works in an impressionistic
manner as well. Davis's subject is not just life,
but how art and life relate, a concern reflected
in Hugh Wolfe's own interest, as artist, in how
he might capture scenes from the marketplace that
he views from his cell window. Symbolism is also
important as a stylistic vehicle in the story, particularly
through the "korl woman" and the imagery of "hell
itself" that the street descriptions, with their
emphasis on smoke and fire, evoke.
By 1972, when Tillie Olsen wrote her
long introduction to the Feminist Press's new edition
of "Life in the Iron Mills," the story and its author
had long been forgotten. Olsen's choice of this
text, and her slant on it, emphasize the ways in
which it addresses many feminist concerns. The story,
again ahead of its time, announces an end to the
Victorian ideal of domesticity. Women in the new
industrial cities would not be able to keep the
home at the center of cultural life. Deb has a woman's
sensitivity to the needs of others, yet she has
no home, and no traditional moral sense is available
to her. Her theft of the rich man's wallet is a
recognition that in the new industrial order, money
is the only power, and all people have a right to
try to get it by any means they can muster. The
naked "korl woman" likewise turns "true womanhood"
upside down-here is woman naked, embodying brute
strength but also a new definition of hunger as
a force of both physical and spiritual craving.
The "korl woman" is identified with woman but not
carefully kept in bounds by womanly modesty and
temperance.
Davis looks at the world to come and
the people, especially the women, who will inhabit
it with an unromantic, even antiromantic eye. Poised
between two worlds at the beginning of the Civil
War, which would split a whole country apart, Davis
saw beyond that war to a time when other national
conflicts-between industry and farm, between sentiment
and abstraction, between religion and science, between
rich and poor, between laborers and managers-would
be decided increasingly on the basis of economic
speculation and greed. That she could dramatize
great cynicism and pessimism while retaining her
own faith in and respect for the human spirit remains
a notable achievement. -Lucinda H. MacKethan
Drawing courtesy of Bethlehem Steel
Corporation
Photograph courtesy of the International
Museum of Photography, Eastman House
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