Life in the Iron Mills
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"Life in the Iron Mills" is a short story by Rebecca Harding Davis set in the factory world of nineteenth century Wheeling, Virginia, now Wheeling, West Virginia. It was her first published work, and it appeared anonymously in April 1861 in the Atlantic Monthly where it caused a literary sensation with its powerful naturalism that anticipated the work of Theodore Dreiser and Emile Zola. The story is emphatically on the side of the exploited industrial workers, who are presented as physically stunted and mentally dulled but fully human and capable of tragedy. The story’s protagonist stirs molten metal in a vast foundry beside the Ohio River. On his breaks he makes statues from a waste product of iron smelting. One of his pieces, a statue of a woman, is noticed by some bourgeois visitors who discuss the work condescendingly and awaken Hugh’s sense of natural rights. They raise his hopes but offer no concrete help, and Hugh makes a series of bad decisions that lead to tragedy. Meanwhile, the statue is kept by the narrator as a reminder of Hugh, his aspirations, and his achievements. Life in the Iron Mills was reprinted in the early 1970's with a famous introduction by Tillie Olsen and has continued to be an important text for those who study labor and women’s issues.
[edit] Characters
- Hugh Wolfe is a puddler, a laborer who turns pig iron into wrought iron by puddling. He is Welsh. Although he is a working-class he has an artistic talent to sculpt out of korl. He has a very limited education, but more than most of the other laborers.
- Deborah Wolfe, is Hugh's cousin. She works as a picker in the cotton mills. She has a hunchback.
- Clarke Kirby, overseer and son of the mill's co-owner. He feels no obligation toward the workers except "a narrow limit,--the pay-hour on Saturday night."
- Doctor May. He feels compassion toward the workers, but the overwhelming task of improving the thousands of workers (1200 at this mill alone) prevents him from helping Hugh, even when Hugh asks for it explicitly. Instead, he gives Hugh some empty words of encouragement.
- Mitchell. Kirby's brother-in-law (and son-in-law of the mill owner), an amateur gymnast, and a hardened cynic.
- "Captain"-A reporter.
- A Quaker woman. She aids Deborah during and after prison. She provides the only sincere assistance to the poor in the story.
- The narrator. This may be the author herself, a spectator who only mentions herself in the last few paragraphs. She possesses the korl woman statue as the only remaining evidence of Hugh's existence.
The story is said to reflect a capitalist society.
It is also one of the first American Realist novels written.
[edit] Sources
- Olsen, Tillie [1] “A Biographical Interpretation.” In Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills. New York: The Feminist Press, 1972.
- The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present, Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy, editors. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990.
