Review: Life in the Iron Mills

Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The entry on realism in A Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia brings this up, and it's not hard to see the linear connection between Clyde Griffiths of An American Tragedy and this story's Hugh Wolfe, though the latter is shockingly more wretched, as we might expect of an 1861 Welsh mill worker:

Physically, Nature had promised the man but little. He had already lost the strength and instinct vigor of a man, his muscles were thin, his nerves weak, his face (a meek, woman's face) haggard, yellow with consumption. In the mill he was known as one of the girl-men: "Molly Wolfe" was his sobriquet. He was never seen in the cockpit, did not own a terrier, drank but seldom; when he did, desperately.

Shades of Dreiser's realist tones show up in the writing of Rebecca Harding Davis, and for the same reasons, too, to bluntly unveil the social reality that darkens and blots out the will to life and love, as in the portrait of Wolfe's only likely match in the community, Deborah:

Yet he was kind to her: it was his nature to be kind, even to the very rats that swarmed in the cellar: kind to her in just the same way. She knew that. And it might be that very knowledge had given to her face its apathy and vacancy more than her low, torpid life. One sees that dead, vacant look steal sometimes over the rarest, finest of women's faces,—in the very most, it may be, of their warmest summer's day; and then one can guess at the secret of intolerable solitude that lies hid beneath the delicate laces and brilliant smile. There was no warmth, no brilliancy, no summer for this woman; so the stupor and vacancy had time to gnaw into her face perpetually. She was young, too, though no one guessed it; so the gnawing was the fiercer.

To read the piece is to take a step back to an early example of raising awareness of inequality in America, which apparently Rebecca Harding Davis certainly achieved, along with the magazine she published with, The Atlantic. It's so cool that the magazine formats the story on its website like a contemporary piece. I happened to find the audio file on LibriVox, thanks to Elizabeth Klett for recording. This would be an excellent piece for advanced high school readers. The Wikipedia entry for it is unusually rich in material, too.

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