Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 195Rebecca Harding Davis declared that it was her purpose “to dig into the
commonplace, this vulgar American life, and see what is in it.” That purpose was
clear enough in her first published work, “Life in the Iron Mills,” which appeared in
Atlantic Monthly in 1861. The story was immediately recognized as an important,
innovative work, introducing a new subject to American literature: the bleak lives
of industrial workers in the mills and factories of the nation. “Not many even of the
inhabitants of a manufacturing town know the vast machinery of system by which
the bodies of workmen are governed,” the narrator of the story declares near its
beginning. And a major aim of Davis, in “Life in the Iron Mills,” was, quite simply,
to end that ignorance – to make readers aware of the oppression and the essential
humanity of those workmen. Anticipating one of the major strategies of the
Naturalists at the end of the nineteenth century, Davis emphasizes the typicality of
her working-class characters, and the way they may be driven into crime by a
system that appears to deny them any other possible avenue of escape. The tale
begins on a “cloudy day,” with “smoke everywhere” from the chimneys of the iron
mills. As the anonymous narrator observes, from her window, an industrial
landscape “begrimed with smoke,” “fragments of an old story float up” before her.
It is one of many possible stories associated with the house in which the narrator
lives, she reveals to us, telling of some of the people who lived there some thirty
years ago. And it is one of many more stories of this dark city, with its “myriads of
furnace-hands.” The tale “Life in the Iron Mills” then tells is a simple one. At its
center is a character called Hugh Wolfe, whose activities and fate encapsulate the
aspirations and bitter reality of working people. The statue of a woman he has
fashioned in his few spare moments expresses his longing for a better life, some
possible source of fulfillment: “She be hungry,” he says of the statue, “Not hungry
for meat.” The prison where he ends up, and where he kills himself, measures the
cruel limitations that are his. “Was it not his right to live ... a pure life, a good, true-
hearted life, full of beauty and kind words?” he asks himself. The answer here is that
it may be his right but it is not his destiny.
The power of “Life in the Iron Mills” stems from the way Davis focuses on a series
of vivid images to chart the progress of her tale: the smoke, the house, the statue, the
furnace in the iron mill, the prison where Hugh ends his life. It also stems from
the use of a narrator who draws the genteel, and presumably ignorant, reader into the
tale. The narrative voice is constantly reminding us that Hugh, his cousin Deborah,
and other industrial workers are people too, who demand our help and sympathy.
“Are pain and jealousy less savage realities down here in this place I am taking you to
than in your own house or your own heart,” the narrator asks at one point, “ – your
heart, which they clutch at sometimes? The note is the same, I fancy, be the octave
high or low.” The moralizing tone, the appeal to the sentiments and sympathies of
the reader, bears comparison with a writer like Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the
purpose is similar. Davis’s readers are being invited, even compelled, to register the
humanity of these wage slaves; to see, through the smoke of their own ignorance,
how the increasing hordes of industrial workers are being emotionally and ethically
thwarted – denied the right to a decent home and family and the opportunity to leadGGray_c02.indd 195ray_c 02 .indd 195 8 8/1/2011 7:54:43 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 43 AM