Life in the Iron Mills

A Biographical Interpretation

A Biographical Interpretation LzJe in the Iron Mills was not written out of compassion or condescending pity. The thirty-year-old Rebecca Harding who wrote it, wrote in absolute identification with "thwarted, wasted lives ... mighty hungers ... unawakened power"; despised love; circumstances that denied use of capacities; imperfect, selftutored art that could have only odd moments for its doing-as if these were her own. And they were, however differently embodied in the life of a daughter of the privileged class. It was in front of the Harding house that the long trains of mules dragged their masses of pig iron and the slow stream of human life crept past, night and morning, year after year, to work their fourteen-hour days six days a week. The little girl who observed it grew into womanhood, into spinsterhood, still at the window in that house, and the black industrial smoke was her daily breath. The town was Wheeling, on the Ohio, in the border slave state of what was then Virginia. When the Harding A Biographical Interpretation 69 family moved there in 1836 (Rebecca was five), it was one of only a handful of steel towns in the nation. All her growing years, the slave South, the free North; the industrial future, the agrarian present, the wilderness that was once all the past-were uniquely commingled here. In the streets, farmers were as familiar a sight as Irish and Cornish steelworkers, slaves, free blacks, commercial travelers, bargemen, draymen, Indians, and rawboned mountain people in to work at the mills. Over the country's single north-south National Road, snaking mostly through wilderness to this halting point, came huge vans with cotton bales for Northern mills, manufactures for the South; stagecoaches carrying passengers to and from the river boats that connected St. Louis and New Orleans with the East; and Conestoga wagons with emigrants or immigrants still in European dress, heading west. And over all, through the night and morning river mists, the constant changes of light, was a sense of vast unpeopled distance from the hills that curved fold on fold far as eye could see. "These sights and sounds did not come common to her." The slow-moving thoughtful Rebecca absorbed them into herself with the quiet intensity that marked all her confrontation with life, and with an unshared sense of wonder, of mystery. She was the eldest of five children. Her father, a successful businessman, later City Treasurer, professedly hated "vulgar American life" and its world of business, secluding himself evenings for what he did love: reading Elizabethan literature, mostly Shakespeare. "He was Tillie Olsen 70 English and homesick," Rebecca wrote of him years later. "We were not intimate with him as with our mother." 1 The household revolved around him. Her mother ("the most accurate historian I ever knew, with enough knowledge to outfit a dozen modern collegeeducated women") was kept busy with an ever increasing family and running the large household noiselessly. It was a house that had servants, perhaps slaves, for necessary tasks. Public schools did not yet exist. Rebecca's mother did the early teaching, and later there were occasional tutors, usually brought in for her brothers. Rebecca rambled; she read. The books (Maria Edgeworth, Bunyan, Scott) were of a remote world of pilgrims, knights and ladies, magic, crusaders. But once, in her soot-specked cherry tree hideout, in a new collection of Moral Tales (it was years before she discovered the anonymous author was Hawthorne), she found three unsigned stories about an ordinary American town, everyday sights and sounds, the rambles of a little girl like herself. She read and re-read them so often that "I know almost every line of them by heart, even now." In them her own secret feelings, so opposite to those of her complex, austere father, were verified: that "the commonplace folk and things which I saw every day had mystery and charm ... belonged to the magic world [of books] as much as knights and pilgrims." When she was fourteen (an age when most Wheeling girls had already been working in the mills or as domestic slaveys for years), Rebecca was sent-not too far away-to live with her mother's sister in Washington, A Biographical Interpretation 71 Pennsylvania, to attend the three-year Female Seminary there and be "finished." "Of all cursed places under the sun, where the hungriest soul can hardly pick up a...