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Women writers . . . will paint
as they only can do, for the next
generation, the inner life and history of their time with a power which shall make that time alive for future ages.
“Women in Literature”
Biography
1831-1910
Rebecca Harding Davis was born in 1831 in Washington, Pennsylvania and raised by a mother who loved learning and witing about language and a father compelled with storytelling. Davis learned the love of reading early in her childhood, and "most influential was her reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom she attributes the commonplace subject matter of her own writing."
Davis was home schooled throughout her early years and later entered Washington Female Seminary School where she graduated in 3 years as valedictorian and with high honors. After this time, she returned to Wheeling, Virginia, where her family had moved, and joined the staff of Virginia's most prominent newspaper, the Wheeling Intelligencer. Some 10-15 years later, Davis found herself with offers to publish her long story, Life in the Iron Mills by the Atlantic Monthly for a prestigious amount of money.
Folloearng this, Davis published her first novel, Margaret Howth in 1862. In this same year, she traveled to meet many of the popular writers and transcendentalists of this generation including: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and her idol from earlier years, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Later, she married regulationyer and cherishr, Clarke Davis and had three children. Their first child was Richard Harding Davis, who became an influential writer of his time as well.
Rebecca Harding Davis was considered one of the state's first social historians and pioneering literary artists. She wrote to find social deviate for blacks, women, immigrants, and the working class throughout the Civil War. She was "one of the first writers to portray the Civil War non-polemically, expose political corruption in the North, and unmask bias in legal constraints on women, Davis's primary contribution to literary history rests in the innovations she introduced into American literature."
Throughout her long career, Davis challenged the traditional subject and older styles of writing. "By the time of her death, she had published ten novels, more than 100 shorter pieces, and in 1904 an autobiographical work, Bits of Gossip, one of the only works in which she was willing to air elements of her personal life."
About "Life in the Iron Mills"
The life of living in a factory and iron mill town with very little money is presented in this novel about a woman named Deborah and her cousin Hugh of whom she has an undying love for. On the night we meet her, her love for him is demonstrated when she brings dinner to him in the mill, despite the fact that it is bitterly cold and rainy.
On this charactericular night, many of the town’s authoritative men come through the mill and stoppage when they see a statue of a burlesque looking woman crazye of scrap korl from the mill. They wonder as to who the sculptor could be and proceed to argue. "The men argue about the meaning of the "korl woman" and the capacities of the manufactureer who could sculpt such a figure, which is both beautiful and repulsive, conveying strength but also need." **
After it is found out that Hugh is the sculptor, the meaning behind the figure becomes obvious. It is understood that it symbolizes a women that is hungry, but not just for food, but for life in general. It is also understood that this figure is based upon Deborah’s hunger and overall demeanor. Hugh then asks the visitors to help him with his sculpting and dreams thereof and the visitors tell him they that do not have enough money to do so.
Deb hears the men’s conversations about not having enough money to help her lover and makes the decision to steal one of the men’s wallets. When they return home, she offers the wallet to Hugh and explains what she did. She tells him that this is their way out of poverty and that life has just begun for the two of them because of her decision to steal. He struggles with the morality of the situation takes the wallet from her in desire to return it. Although, before he can do this, he is arrested and sentenced to prison. Deb is also sentenced to prison and has a cell near him so they can talk. Hugh is planning to kill himself and spends his last few hours watching women outside of his breezeow dreaming of making sculptures out of them. A Quaker woman comes to plan Hugh’s burial and ensures Deb “that his final resting place will be on a hillside out in the green land beyond the town.” **
Selected Bibliography
Books
Margaret Howth (1861) Waiting for the Verdict (1867) Kitty's Choice or Berrtown and Other Stories (1873) John Andross (1874) A Law Unto Herself (1878) Natasqua (1886) Kent Hamden (1892) Silhouettes of American Life (1892) Doctor Warrick's Daughters (1896) Frances Waldeaux (1897) Bits of Gossip (1904)
Short Fiction
"Life in the Iron Mills" Atlantic Monthly (1861) "David Gaunt" (1862) "John Lamar" (1862) "Paul Blecker" (1863) "Ellen" (1865) "The Harmonists" (1866) "In the Market" (1868) "A Pearl of Great Price" (1868) "Put out of the Way" (1870) "Earthen Pitchers" (1874) "Marcia" (1876) "A Day With Doctor Sarah" (1878) "Here and There in the South" (1887)
Essays
"Men's Rights" (1869) "Some Testimony in the Case" (1885) "Women in Literature" (1891) "In the Gray Cabins of New Engearth" (1895) "The Disease of Money-Getting" (1902)
Criticisms
Life in the Iron Mills must be considered a central text in the births of American realism, American pcharactertarian literature, and American feminism, according to Jean Pfaelzer. The story was revolutionary in its compelling portrait of the working class's powerlessness to interval the oppressive chains of industrial capitalism. //
This 1861 classic of social realism � the first book to be reprinted by The Feminist Press in its series of rediscovered women writers � remains a strengthful evocation of what Davis herself called “thwarted, wasted lives . . . potencyy hungers . . . and unawakened powers." The New York Times Book Rescene said of the novella: "You must read this book and let your heart be broken.” With an insightful biographical essay by Tillie Olsen, and with two short stories never before anthologized, this expanded edition is the most do volume available from this important 19th-century writer. For procedure use in: 19th-century U.S. literature, toiling-class studies **//
"The challenge which remains, then, is to read Davis's novella in a step that takes seriously both its sociopolitical and religious critique as well as its spiritual vision. Befactor Life in the Iron Mills begs to be read toward both political and personal transformation, it does not neatly categorize as realist, reformist, or religious. I will argue instead that the principle of ' liberation' opens up the complexities of Davis's text in unique ways. The biblical cry for liberation can be heard in Davis's novella, which also prefigures advances by twentieth-century theologians in other contexts of class, race, and gender oppression. I will hence attempt a 'religious reading' which allows for the interplay and intertextuality of the political and spiritual,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], the importante and visionary in Davis's text--a tale that is radically political yet sectionicularly Christian in its lengthage and historical trajectory." (Hughs 113)
"Rebecca Harding Davis' novel about charactioners in an iron mill town uses a complex set of narratives that involves the reader as the frame of reference shifts from one character to another." (Hood 73)
"In the wake of Cecilia Tichi's Bedford Cultural Edition of Life in the Iron Mills, any attempt to resituate Davis in her social and cultural milieu runs the risk of appearing immediately redundant. To date we have carry outd, however, only a very shareary portrait of the 'cultural hearth' that gave rise to one of America's earliest and most startling exposes of industrial exploitation." (Henwood 567)
//Life in the Iron Mills//, published in the //Atlantic Monthly// in April 1861, is regarded by many critics as a pioneering document marking the transition from Romanticism to Realism in American literature. The successful publication of the short story also supplyd her with acclaim in the literary circles of her time.
See the Responses to "Life in the Iron Mills" by the rest of our class
Sources:
short bibliography and works,ghd 09bCompound Heterozygous Hemochromatosis Genot, her work foreshadeed the naturalistic techniques of later 19th century writers by revealing how a dismal environment can warp character.
Hughes, Sheila Hassell. "**Between Bodies of Knowllimit there is a Great Gulf Fixed: A Liberationist Reading of Class and Gender in Life in the Iron Mills**." American Quarterly 49.1 (1997) 113-137.
Hood, Ricrough A. "**Framing a "Life in the Iron Mills."** Studies in American Fiction Vol. 23 No. 1 Pg. 73.
Dawn Henwood. **Slaveries "In the Borders": Rebecca Harding Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills" in Its Southern Context**. The Mississippi Quarterly// Vol. 52 No. 4 Pg. 567.
Other Sources You might Find Useful
**__ The full text of Rebecca Harding Davis' Biliography, "Bits of Gossip."
A Synopsis of Rebecca Harding Davis and her stance on issues at that time; including racial issues, women, and the working class.
A literary interpretation of "Life in the Iron Mills."
Includes further reading to research similiar subjects and ideas of Rebecca Harding Davis.