Troubling Ideals: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Consequences of Industrialization in Life in the Iron Mills

When Rebecca Harding Davis’ novella Life in the Iron Mills first appeared in Atlantic Monthly in 1861, manufacturing cities had already cultivated an industrial appearance through smoky skies, soot-covered landscapes, and waste from overpopulation. This appearance was common across the eastern United States, including Wheeling, Virginia, the town where Davis lived and on which she based her story. As concepts of pollution and environmental hazard were just emerging, “citizens, business owners, legislators, courts, physicians, and sanitarians debated the consequences of coal smoke and other forms of waste for municipal economies, urban aesthetics, human health, and morality.”¹ Anxiety from the debate was heightened by the fact that many viewed soot and smoke as a sign of industrial and national progress.

In blanketing her landscape and characters with soot and smoke, Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills stands as an obvious critique of the national ideology of progress, exposing the moral and environmental pollution it furthers and the idealist aesthetics that sustain it. At the same time, she is reluctant to throw Howells’ “ideal grasshopper” out with the bath water. While engaging in a recognizably realist exposé, targeting the despoiled industrial landscape, labor and class exploitation, and elitist spectatorship, she also employs a more symbolic aesthetic, one that furthers her critique while also pointing to the possibility of transcendence or redemption. Whether Davis intentionally innovated this hybrid aesthetic or not, it reflects a close observation of industrial reality and a strong desire to reveal to her reader the corrosive moral consequences concealed by the popular national ideology of progress.

In structure, Life in the Iron Mills is bookended by images of pastoral idealizations of nature, between which are set scenes of industrial pollution and tragedy. The narrator is later revealed to be one of the characters, Deborah, a cotton-mill worker and cousin of Hugh Wolfe, an iron “puddler.” As the story opens, Deborah leads the reader through the soot that covers the city into the iron mill, where we meet a group of men, representing various segments of the social elite, who in touring the facility encounter Hugh and his artistic creation: The korl woman, a statue he has chipped out of pig iron, a byproduct of milling iron. While they critique the statue, one or two suggest that Hugh could have artistic potential. But while some of them recognize this, they all deny him any help of achieving this potential and leave. As they depart, Deborah steals money from their pockets, for which Hugh is later blamed and both are arrested. This part of the story ends with Hugh’s suicide in a jail cell, Deborah in the next cell mourning him, and the promise of a Quaker woman to bury Hugh among the hills. Three years later, her sentence apparently served, the woman returns for Deborah, who having found refuge in pastoral nature and Quakerism reveals her identity as one who has all along kept Hugh’s statue, now tucked away in a corner of her library.

This story has largely been viewed as representing “unquestionably better than any other nineteenth-century short story . . . both a clean break with romanticism and the birth of realism.”² But reading Davis’ novella under this apprehension risks missing many popular non-realist traits that permeate the text. Leveling the generic barriers of realism or constructing them too rigidly in literary analyses tends to ignore aspects of a text which might not support one’s claims. As Michael West argues in responding to Stoner, “romanticism, sentimentalism, regionalism, realism, and naturalism are all justifiably invoked to explain aspects of [Davis’] oeuvre, with the palm probably going to realism.”³ Whether Davis foresaw the end of romanticism and the dawn of realism is beyond the scope of this paper. What is clear is that Davis entertained the popular idealist imagery found in the American romantic literary canon, while inundating it in pollution to create a hybrid aesthetic of the real and ideal. I will begin by looking into the framework of cultural ideology that Davis invokes, briefly examining how these national...