The narrator, in both the story and
the drama, manipulates our understanding of every
action. We are dependent on this woman's voice for
our cues on how to feel as well as for all our information.
Rebecca Harding Davis does not want only to create
scene and plot but to ask how fiction imposes feelings
and how it helps us understand a world that is alien
to our own experience. In a long opening address,
the narrator emphasizes the lurid, grimy hellishness
of both the setting and the lives of two human beings
whose very humanity becomes the drama's central
issue. Words are piled upon one another to give
a heaviness of description that matches the story's
message. It is a cloudy day, and we are forced by
language to feel, not just to know, the oppressive,
smothering air, the dirt, the stench, the smoke
of this environment. Descriptive language functions
in a particularly dramatic way to evoke feeling
and thought largely because the narrator calls attention
to herself as the one who is creating this scene.
She uses the method of direct address somewhat like
a preacher, determined to bring us "down" with her
into a palpable knowledge of the humanity of others.
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Language also calls attention to itself
through dialect and levels of diction. Hugh and
Deb are common laborers and immigrants, not unintelligent
but unintelligible to those from a higher class,
the men who visit the mill. Differing accents as
well as vocabularies reinforce our sense of the
way these beings inhabit different, totally incompatible
worlds. The narrator, whose dialect and diction
are different from any of the characters', seems
through her word usage removed from both us and
the action. She inhabits her own realm of creativity
and insight and establishes her authority as guide.
She is not one of us, but neither is she one of
them, the characters whom she puts before us to
try to make us truly see.
Within the story, our sympathies,
but never our point of view, are attached to Hugh,
the blighted artist doomed to suffering and death
because of environmental forces and his own basic
biological needs. Where does the human spirit find
nourishment in a world officially defined only by
environment and biology? Actually, the upper-class
men who visit Hugh's world are not more-instead
they are even less-attuned to beauty and art, the
expression of the human spirit, than Hugh. They
represent the vision and capacities of modern man
once he totally accepts a deterministic definition
of life as controlled exclusively by economic forces.
There is less of a place for art, for a spiritual
dimension,
in the lives of the managers than even in Hugh's.
The "korl woman," an outward and visible sign of
Hugh's and the other laborers' hungry spirits, belongs
to the world of the man who has not lost his sense
of feeling. Yet there is much irony in the figure
as well. The statue of the naked woman is made out
of a waste product, while it testifies to the soul
of its maker and the souls of the "least of these,"
who are totally ignored by those who control the
means to a better life. The gentlemen who tour the
mill are willing to discuss the meaning of an artistic
representation, but not the significance of real
human beings. One of Davis's important rhetorical
strategies is to place the middle- and upper-class
Americans, her readers, into a situation where they
can both judge and be judged. She accomplishes this
identification between reader/listener and plot
by creating characters in the story with whom they
will identify: the mill owner's son, a doctor, a
reporter, and later one of these gentlemen's wives.
As her audience confronts the insensitivity and
the pious mouthings of abstract philosophy of those
in the story who are like them, readers and listeners
come to reject their safe place and to move closer
to the filthy and ragged laborer whose actual plight
they will never have to face. Deb and Hugh are allies
in suffering, in memories of their own better place,
and in their sense of helplessness, but they too
embody contrasts, some of them based on gender.
Hugh is somewhat cold and unfeeling. He thinks in
terms of art and beauty but not in terms of sympathy
and love. He wants to draw beautiful things but
not to reach out to less pleasant realities. His
rejection of Deb for her ugliness is ironic; it
is Deb whose spirit he has captured in his sculpture,
a hungry woman who wants not food, but emotional
sustenance. The story begins with Deb taking nourishment
to Hugh. She is trying, we come to understand, to
feed her own love through this act of kindness,
and taking the dinner pail becomes linked to her
later stealing of the wallet. Like food, money becomes
a way Deb uses to nourish Hugh's life, while sacrificing
her own.
Through Hugh the artist and Deb the
woman, Davis explored two sides of her own identity
and therein two kinds of values that were often
opposed in the nineteenth century. The artist removes
himself from the realm of sympathy and nurture to
view his subject with proper objectivity. The woman,
according to nineteenth-century domestic ideology,
contained and promoted the elements of emotion and
caring for the culture. As Deb becomes associated
with the Quaker woman at the end, she is more "domesticated,"
and the two united become a new kind of symbol for
feminized social activism. In the final scene, Hugh,
seeing the mulatto servant-a figure representing
enslavement and exclusion parallel to his own-wants
to capture her image in his own artistic vision,
but he does not look out with sympathy for her condition.
This, in some ways, is one final self-assessment
that Davis makes, and one that joins Hugh with her
narrator. We recall at the end, when we hear Hugh's
voice overtaking the narrator's as he looks out
of his cell window, that the story began with the
woman narrator looking out of her window at the
miserable, cloudy day. Davis writes with a reformist's
zeal, trying to reach her readers and to make them
feel, but she also conveys a sense of the inevitable
distances, including artistic distance, that separate
people of different means and experience. Deb and
the Quaker, who choose active, loving involvement,
offer some hope, yet behind the scenes the artist
writer questions all traditional answers. -Lucinda H. MacKethan
Wood engraving and photograph courtesy of the
Hagley Museum and Library
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