Shaping a Body of One's Own: Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron-Mills and Waiting for the Verdict

ADAM SONSTEGARD Shaping a Body of One's Own: Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron-Mills and Waitingfor the Verdict This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed of your clean clothes, and come right down with me,—here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real thing to you. Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron-Mills ITH ominous lines like these, Rebecca Harding Davis opened her short novel Life in the Iron Mills ( 1861 ), asked her readers to peer out of their genteel and sterile drawing rooms, and introduced the proletarian world of Hugh Wolfe. Published in James Fields's The Aûantic Monthly in April, 1861, her story garnered even Hawthorne's and Emerson's attention. Republished by Tillie Olsen in 1972, it attracted notice as a point of origin for social realism, a stunning depiction of class inequities, and a complex feminist text.1 A Cultural Edition of contextual documents and her recently republished, supplemented autobiography have enabled fresh approaches to her work. Seldom have "mud and foul effluvia" proven so inviting for so many readers. Criticism of the literary achievement of the art ofRebecca Harding Davis, however, has sometimes elided the metaphorical possibilities of Arizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number 1, Spring 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 610 W I OO Adam Sonstegard the art of Hugh Wolfe. Most sculptors of the period studied in Europe and created ideal, allegorical depictions; Davis's sculptor-character learns his craft during breaks from work and renders rough, workingclass forms. Monuments of the period glistened in alabaster marble imported from Italy; Hugh's work shows its own origins in molten pigiron from western Virginia. The novelist shapes her most famous story out of "fog and mud and foul effluvia," and that story revolves around a hero who literally digs into the mud to give shape to his creativity. Exhorting readers to get themselves dirty in attempting to understand a working-class environment, she depicts a hero who similarly struggles to make art out of the very grit and foulness of proletarian life. Readers encounter Davis's working-class figure shaping a body of his own, the sculpture in korl, and encounter the owners of the mill trying to shape Hugh into a body of their own, a mill-hand that selflessly serves the industry's needs. As he helps his sculpture, the korl woman, to emerge as more than a lump of pig-iron, Hugh himself tries to emerge as more than a faceless mill-hand. When Hugh finds himself unable to release his spirit, he desperately turns from shaping a woman's body in korl to cutting at his own body of flesh. Davis's sculptural metaphors dramatize her hero's attempts to shape himself amid social and industrial forces that in themselves shape working-class bodies according to their own designs. The lesser known, less compact, but just as complex novel Waiting for the Verdict (1867) revisits the motifs oí Life in the Iron-Mills as it dramatizes interracial relationships, racist and classist systems of determining identity, and individuals' attempts to escape those systems.2 John Broderip, one of that novel's heroes, uses the surgeon's scalpel as Hugh Wolfe had used iron and tin to cut at the bodies that society marks as "foreign" or familiar, Anglo- or African American, until he, too, loses his power to shape individual bodies. With the sculptor's chisel and the surgeon's scalpel, Davis discovered a complex set of metaphors for an individual's power of self-conception in conflict with his or her existence in a racialized, gendered body at the mercy of society and industry . Davis in turn aligned herself with characters who struggle with the limitations of self-determination, but realized that many of her readers wished to see themselves untouched by such external shaping forces. Whenever she finds her language colluding with industry...