disturbing aesthetics: industrial pollution, moral discourse, and narrative form in rebecca harding...

Disturbing Aesthetics: Industrial Pollution, Moral Discourse, and Narrative Form in RebeccaHarding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills”Author(s): Jill GatlinSource: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 68, No. 2 (September 2013), pp. 201-233Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncl.2013.68.2.201 .

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Disturbing Aesthetics:Industrial Pollution,Moral Discourse, andNarrative Form inRebecca Harding Davis’s‘‘Life in the Iron Mills’’J I L L G A T L I N

When Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘‘Lifein the Iron Mills’’ appeared in The

Atlantic Monthly in 1861, smoky skies, rubbish-riddled streets,overflowing cesspools, and sulfurous, sooty rivers were com-mon sights in industrial cities and towns in the United States,including Wheeling, Virginia, inspiration for Davis’s story.Observing Wheeling’s billowing bituminous coal smoke andsooty surrounds, geographers and travelers remarked in 1832,for example, that ‘‘Pittsburgh and Wheeling are blackened with[the] impalpable effluvia’’ of coal’s ‘‘dark smoke’’; in 1842, that‘‘the coal smoke very much defaces [Wheeling’s] appearance’’;in 1853, that ‘‘the coal smoke and dust penetrate everywhere,and blacken the interior as well as exterior of dwellings. . . . andthe hands and faces of old residents obtain something of coal

Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 68, No. 2, pp. 201–233, ISSN: 0891-9356, online ISSN: 1067-8352, © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please directall requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the Universityof California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. DOI: ncl.2013.68.2.201.

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color. . . . The smoke is a great nuisance’’; and in 1860, that‘‘dirty and smoky’’ Wheeling ‘‘disappointed’’ expectations of‘‘a nice clean . . . town.’’1 Concepts of environmental hazard andpollution were still in the making, however, as citizens, businessowners, legislators, courts, physicians, and sanitarians debatedthe consequences of coal smoke and other forms of waste formunicipal economies, urban aesthetics, human health, andmorality.

For industrial advocates, smoke symbolized manufacturingmight and economic triumph. Heralding Wheeling as a modelfor industrial growth in 1860, a Cleveland journalist opinedthat ‘‘busy, smoky, dirty and enterprising’’ Wheeling ‘‘cannotbe called a beautiful city. . . . everything is besmeared with blackcoal dust, a la Pittsburgh. But Wheeling doubtless has moredimes, in consequence of her blackness, than her more comelysister Cleveland.’’2 While smoke presented a minor aestheticinconvenience to some boosters, others extolled its grandeur.In 1857 the historian, businessman, and Board of Trade Pres-ident George Henry Thurston—a prominent representative ofWheeling’s infamously smoky rival, Pittsburgh—declared ‘‘theshadow of [Pittsburgh’s] smoke’’ to be one of the few recognized‘‘report[s] of her progress,’’ explaining that ‘‘the Capitalists, theMerchants, and the Mechanics . . . have taken little or no heed tothe progress of Pittsburgh. Therefore with wonder visitorsbehold the sooty giant . . . , and with astonishment consider [its]

1 See, respectively, Timothy Flint, The History and Geography of the Mississippi Valley: ToWhich Is Appended a Condensed Physical Geography of the Atlantic United States and the WholeAmerican Continent, 2 vols. (Cincinnati: E. H. Flint and L. R. Lincoln, 1832), I, 19;Viator, ‘‘Random Sketch of a Trip from the ‘Old Dominion’ to the ‘Crescent City’ of theSouth,’’ Southern Literary Messenger, 8 (1842), 450; [Anon.], ‘‘Editorial Correspondence,’’Cleveland Herald, 24 January 1853; and [Anon.], ‘‘Communicated: Notes of a FlyingTrip,’’ Ohio State Journal, 1 May 1860.

2 [Anon.], ‘‘The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad,’’ Cleveland Morning Leader, 11 July1860. Although the praise for ‘‘black’’ Wheeling (in the slave state of Virginia) incomparison to ‘‘comely . . . Cleveland’’ (in the free state of Ohio) may seem to endorseslavery symbolically, the writer identifies only Wheeling’s polluting ‘‘manufacturingestablishments’’ as the source of her ‘‘blackness’’ and wealth (citing Cleveland’s extrav-agant mansion district as ‘‘swallow[ing] up her surplus cash’’), makes no reference to theworkforces, and recounts traveling on to Harper’s Ferry, ‘‘made ever memorable’’ byJohn Brown’s rebellion.

202 nineteenth-century literature



promise.’’3 Smoke and soot became measures of success formany mid-nineteenth-century U.S. cities, particularly in regionsburning dirty bituminous coal.

Boosters also maintained that coal and its smoke improvedthe well-being of the citizenry. Although Pittsburgh beganadopting anti-smoke laws in the 1810s, mid-nineteenth-century courts often ruled that the economic hazards of smokeabatement outweighed the health hazards of coal burning.4

Thurston acknowledged the ‘‘disagreeabilities’’ and ‘‘annoy-ances’’ of smoke but minimized them as being ‘‘to strangersmore objectionable than natives’’ and ultimately pronouncedcoal ‘‘so great a good’’ (Pittsburgh as It Is, pp. 204, 42, 58). Citingphysicians’ statements that Pittsburgh’s ‘‘superior healthful-ness’’ could be attributed not only to coal’s ‘‘abundance, cheap-ness and consequent . . . use by the poorest inhabitants’’ butalso to direct health benefits of smoke, Thurston concludedthat ‘‘when the smoke complained of results in wealth, progressand health, it can easily be put up with’’ (Pittsburgh as It Is, pp. 42,204).5 Entering a debate that would remain contentious for thenext half-century, Davis counters idealized claims linking smoketo economic equality, progress, and health. She portrays pollu-tion not as a source of awe or a sign of wealth, nor as simplya nuisance or an annoyance, but rather as a lethal hazard to

3 George H. Thurston, Pittsburgh as It Is; Or, Facts and Figures, Exhibiting the Past andPresent of Pittsburgh, Its Advantages, Resources, Manufactures, and Commerce (Pittsburgh: W.S. Haven, 1857), pp. 11, 12, 10. Both aesthetic judgments are evident in an articlelabeling Wheeling ‘‘one of the most flourishing places on the Ohio’’ thanks to ‘‘theimmense quantity of bituminous coal in the adjacent region,’’ declaring that ‘‘its smokypurlieus, when viewed from within, except to the eye of the man of business, are anything but attractive,’’ and describing a ‘‘lovely’’ sunset view of Pittsburgh, with its ‘‘tallcliffs . . . blackened by the numerous furnaces,’’ ‘‘its steeples peering through a cloud ofdense smoke’’ ([Anon.], ‘‘Pittsburgh, November 3d,’’ American Railroad Journal, andAdvocate of Internal Improvements, 2 [1833], 781).

4 On early anti-smoke laws, see Angela Gugliotta, ‘‘‘Hell with the Lid Taken off:’A Cultural History of Air Pollution—Pittsburgh,’’ Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Notre Dame,2004, pp. 6, 51. For court rulings, see Angela Gugliotta, ‘‘Class, Gender, and CoalSmoke: Gender Ideology and Environmental Injustice in Pittsburgh, 1868–1914,’’Environmental History, 5 (2000), 168; and Christine Meisner Rosen, ‘‘‘Knowing’ Indus-trial Pollution: Nuisance Law and the Power of Tradition in a Time of Rapid EconomicChange, 1840–1864,’’ Environmental History, 8 (2003), 580–81.

5 For discussion of coal’s promising ‘‘a kind of economic democracy,’’ see Gu-gliotta, ‘‘Hell with the Lid Taken Off,’’ pp. 30–31.

‘‘life in the iron mills’’ 203



laborers. Detailing the smoky scenes that travelers dismissed asholding neither attraction nor interest and disparaged for being‘‘deformed’’ and ‘‘deface[d],’’ Davis establishes their ethical andaesthetic importance to confronting oppressive industrial laborconditions.6

Although environmental historians have built a rich bodyof work addressing late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-centuryindustrial pollution in the United States, Americanist literarycritics have looked almost exclusively to post-1970s writers forrepresentations of pollution.7 Focused on proto-preservationistand conservationist texts, ecocritics studying nineteenth-century U.S. literature have neglected narrative accounts ofpollution that emerged in response to increasing industrializa-tion. Illustrating workers’ debilitating exposure to smoke andsoot, ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills’’ evidences a different kind of envi-ronmental concern than the preservationism that critics so fre-quently cite in the works of Davis’s contemporary, Henry DavidThoreau, and even than the imagination of an earth-based‘‘cleansing’’ of urban waste that Maria Farland identifies in WaltWhitman’s poetry (‘‘Decomposing City,’’ p. 808). Unlike Whit-man, who reacts to being ‘‘disgusted with human society’’ andurban waste by ‘‘divest[ing] himself of human connections and

6 See Viator, ‘‘Random Sketch of a Trip,’’ p. 450. See also Thomas Hamilton’sconclusion that ‘‘the town of Wheeling, dirty and smoke-begrimed, could boast of noattraction’’ (Hamilton, Men and Manners in America [Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, & Blan-chard, 1833], p. 292); and a traveler’s statement, ‘‘Of . . . Wheeling, I need say nothing.. . . my . . . entrance into the smoke . . . presented [nothing] of unusual interest’’([Anon.], ‘‘A Trip through Ohio—Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, &c,’’ New York Times,29 Sept. 1853). Benjamin L. C. Wailes characterized Wheeling’s ‘‘scenery’’ as‘‘deformed’’ by smoke (Wailes, ‘‘A Glimpse of Industrial Wheeling in 1829: A Selectionfrom the Journal of B.L.C. Wailes of Natchez,’’ ed. John Hebron Moore, West VirginiaHistory, 20 [1959], 129).

7 The only exceptions are Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Liter-ature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Pressof Harvard Univ. Press, 2001); Maria Farland, ‘‘Decomposing City: Walt Whitman’sNew York and the Science of Life and Death,’’ ELH, 74 (2007), 799–827; J. MichaelDuvall, ‘‘The Futile and the Dingy: Wasting and Being Wasted in The House of Mirth,’’in Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture, ed. GaryTotten (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 2007), pp. 159–83; and Steven Rosen-dale, ‘‘In Search of Left Ecology’s Usable Past: The Jungle, Social Change, and the ClassCharacter of Environmental Impairment,’’ in The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Lit-erature, Theory, and the Environment, ed. Steven Rosendale (Iowa City: Univ. of IowaPress, 2002), pp. 59–76.




even human form’’ (Farland, ‘‘Decomposing City,’’ p. 823), Da-vis reorients disgust in order to encourage readers to engagewith pollution and its ostensible human manifestations, advocat-ing social reform driven by interpersonal, affective exchangesthat cross bodily and socioeconomic boundaries.8 An importanthistorical artifact, ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills’’ supplements the fewpollution histories probing the pre-1870s United States and sug-gests that over a century’s worth of literary history on the topicstill requires excavation.9

At the time of Davis’s writing, those who considered envi-ronmental pollutants hazardous typically cited their moral aswell as physical dangers. The historian Adam W. Rome deter-mines that the concept of environmental pollution began todevelop in the mid nineteenth century, when the word polluted—which theretofore denoted moral impurity—and synonymssuch as ‘‘‘contaminated, ‘tainted,’ ‘vitiated,’ ‘corrupted,’ or ‘fo-uled’’’ were redirected to describe perceived hazards rangingfrom miasmas to rubbish to excrement (‘‘Coming to Terms withPollution,’’ p. 8).

Reformers and city officials often applied these moralizingterms not simply to the hazard in question but also to the peoplewho lived and worked where pollution proliferated. Romefinds, for example, that an 1857 New York Assembly commit-tee documenting unsanitary tenement conditions ‘‘feared amuch broader form of pollution—the contamination of the

8 Farland details Whitman’s turn from promoting ‘‘sanitary reform as the solution’’to New York City’s contamination by organic wastes in his 1840s and 1850s essays to hisimagining ‘‘biochemical’’ remedies, wherein ‘‘‘amelioration’ derives not from society’sinstitutions and interventions, but from the elements of the earth,’’ in his mid-1850spoems (‘‘Decomposing City,’’ pp. 807, 821).

9 The only studies that address the pre-1870s United States are Adam W. Rome’slinguistic history, ‘‘Coming to Terms with Pollution: The Language of EnvironmentalReform, 1865–1915,’’ Environmental History, 1 (1996), 6–28; Rosen’s legal history of‘‘stench nuisances,’’ ‘‘‘Knowing’ Industrial Pollution’’; and Gugliotta’s cultural historyof Pittsburgh’s smoke pollution, ‘‘Hell with the Lid Taken Off’’. Literary scholars exam-ining recent representations of pollution often present environmental justice activismas an alternative ecocritical context for their work; although ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills’’cannot be categorized according to a late-twentieth-century social movement, Davissimilarly investigates the ways in which the hierarchical organization of human liferegulates exposure to environmental hazards and relationships with nonhumannature.




city by poor, primitive immigrants’’ (‘‘Coming to Terms withPollution,’’ p. 9). Elaborating on the public discourse equat-ing these communities with filth, blaming them for its accu-mulation, and labeling them morally deficient (accusationsthat would remain common through the Progressive Era),Rome cites an 1865 New York Citizens’ Association publichealth report that characterized the poor as ‘‘the city’s worstpolluters’’ (‘‘Coming to Terms with Pollution,’’ p. 9) as it pro-claimed ‘‘a most fatal connection between physical unclean-ness and moral pollution.’’10 Those who blamed the poor forwhat the 1857 tenement report labeled ‘‘filth physical, filthsocial, filth moral’’ overlooked the public sanitation inadequa-cies, social stratification of space, and industrial labor condi-tions that ensured poorer populations’ excessive exposure tosmoke and other wastes—problems that Davis foregrounds inher story.11 Even those who saw the poor as victims oftenencouraged superficial cleanup of residences—and, by exten-sion, morals—without addressing underlying economic andspatial inequalities.12

‘‘Life in the Iron Mills’’ and other texts demonstrate thatmoralizing pollution language—which Rome contends signi-fied organic but not chemical contaminants—also character-ized mid-nineteenth-century observations of smoke and sootand the people exposed to these wastes.13 In an 1858 Atlantic

10 Citizens’ Association of New York, Report of the Council of Hygiene and Public Healthof the Citizens’ Association of New York Upon the Sanitary Conditions of the City, 2d ed. (1866;rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1970), pp. xiv–xv. Quoted in Rome, ‘‘Coming to Terms withPollution,’’ p. 9.

11 John M. Reed, et al., ‘‘Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Examineinto the Condition of Tenant Houses in New-York and Brooklyn,’’ no. 205 in Docu-ments of the Assembly of the State of New-York, Eightieth Session.—1857, Volume III, No. 145to No. 211 (Albany: C. Van Benthuysen, 1857), p. 42. Robert Gottlieb discusses thistrend’s continuation during the Progressive Era (see Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: TheTransformation of the American Environmental Movement [Washington, D.C.: Island Press,1993], p. 54).

12 See David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, andAir Quality in America, 1881–1951 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999),pp. 45–46.

13 See Rome, ‘‘Coming to Terms with Pollution,’’ pp. 6, 8. Despite making thisbroad claim, Rome documents only turn-of-the-century smoke terminology (p. 6).A closer look at one of Rome’s key mid-nineteenth-century sources, John H. Griscom’s1848 The Uses and Abuses of Air, reveals a characterization of coal smoke as




Monthly essay documenting his travels as a journalist in Wales,John Ross Dix writes that the ‘‘filthy’’ inhabitants of the ‘‘dull,’’‘‘dirty,’’ ‘‘dingy,’’ ‘‘foul’’ iron-making town of Merthyr-Tydfilepitomize ‘‘real barbarism.’’14 Similarly, as Davis portrays thelives of Wheeling’s Welsh immigrants, she describes coal smokeas ‘‘a foul vapor,’’ ‘‘vileness for soul and body’’;15 lures readers‘‘into the thickest of the . . . foul effluvia’’ (‘‘Life in the IronMills,’’ p. 13); depicts workers with ‘‘skin and muscle and fleshbegrimed with smoke’’ (p. 12), perceived by visitors as ‘‘ghastlywretches’’ (p. 20) and ‘‘spectral figures’’ (p. 31); and recountsher protagonist’s ‘‘squalid daily life’’ (p. 40) and despair over‘‘his filthy body, his more stained soul’’ (p. 30).

Davis, however, develops this nascent discourse with morecomplexity than would many writers and reformers workingfrom the 1850s through the 1920s. Dix dismisses furnace la-borers and their families as ‘‘disgusting objects’’ (‘‘A WelshMusical Festival,’’ p. 547); similarly, even while advocating forimproved living conditions, the 1857 New York Assembly com-mittee dehumanizes tenement dwellers:

. . . why attempt to convey to the imagination by words, the hid-eous squalor and deadly effluvia; the dim, undrained courts ooz-ing with pollution; the dark, narrow stairways, decayed with age,reeking with filth, overrun, with vermin; the rotted floors, ceil-ings begrimmed . . . ; the windows stuffed with rags? or why try toportray the gaunt, shivering forms and wild ghastly faces, in theseblack and beetling abodes[?] (Reed, et al., ‘‘Report of the SelectCommittee,’’ p. 14)16

-‘‘perhaps . . . most to be dreaded’’ among many examples of ‘‘vitiated air,’’ which Gris-com declares ‘‘pregnant with the hidden causes of physical, moral, and social degen-eracy and decay’’ (Griscom, The Uses and Abuses of Air: Showing Its Influence in SustainingLife and Producing Desease; with Remarks on the Ventilation of Houses, 3d ed. [New York:Redfield, 1854], pp. 76, 73, 74).

14 [John Ross Dix], ‘‘A Welsh Music Festival,’’ Atlantic Monthly, 1 (March 1858), 547.All Atlantic Monthly pieces were published anonymously through 1862.

15 Rebecca Harding Davis, ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ in her Life in the Iron Mills andOther Stories, ed. Tillie Olsen (New York: Feminist Press, 1985), p. 12. Further refer-ences to ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills’’ are to this edition and appear in the text. Originallypublished in the Atlantic Monthly, 7 (April 1861), 430–51.

16 Quoted in Rome, ‘‘Coming to Terms with Pollution,’’ p. 9. See Reed, et al.,‘‘Report of the Select Committee,’’ p. 46.




Whereas Davis denounces characterizations of workers as‘‘ghastly wretches’’ and ‘‘spectral figures’’ (‘‘Life in the IronMills,’’ pp. 20, 31), the Assembly committee reduces tenementresidents to phantomlike ‘‘forms’’ and ‘‘faces.’’ As Rome indi-cates, the committee ultimately deemed polluted tenementsand their inhabitants’ lives not simply appalling and repulsivebut ‘‘unimaginable,’’ beyond their reality (‘‘Coming to Termswith Pollution,’’ p. 9). A few years later, Davis employs similarpollution language, but she offers a different response to thequestions of representation that the report asks only rhetori-cally: ‘‘Why attempt to convey to the imagination by words’’ thescene of poverty—in Davis’s case, the industrial town—and‘‘why try to portray’’ the people living there? Although pollu-tion was becoming a visible feature of industrializing America,sometimes lauded and sometimes condemned, the exploitedworkers breathing the smoke and bearing the soot on a dailybasis were often willed invisible or dismissed as morally regres-sive by the privileged. Davis seeks not simply to bring thesemultidimensional human lives into view but also to place priv-ileged readers in these scenes and prompt them to evaluatehow their own moral, aesthetic, emotional, and economic com-mitments are implicated in the oppression of workers.

I argue that Davis achieves this readerly immersion andengagement by crafting an aesthetic of disturbance that disruptsmoral assumptions undergirding pollution discourse. Demand-ing that readers enter the polluted industrial environment andconfront their disgust, Davis facilitates a reading experience akinto what Gay Hawkins calls a ‘‘politics of disturbance.’’17 Hawkinsmaintains that the disgust elicited by encounters with waste—when waste suddenly seems not easily expunged but clinging, orwhen we can no longer sustain our denial of its presence aroundus—can be productively resituated as disturbance. Forgoingmyths of purity to entertain disturbance, Hawkins contends,

17 See Hawkins, ‘‘Down the Drain: Shit and the Politics of Disturbance,’’ in Cultureand Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, ed. Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke(Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), pp. 39–52. Hawkins discusses drains aspart of a disciplinary system that promises to flush away excrement and other pollu-tants, even while it morally stigmatizes putting toxics down the drain and offers noalternative modes of understanding or managing waste.




means moving beyond a sense of self dependent on the abjec-tion of waste and re-seeing waste ‘‘transgressions’’ not as individ-ual moral failings but rather as a consequence of political andinfrastructural shortcomings.18 Apprehending pollution in thiscontext opens up ‘‘possibilities of new political relations andresponses, new sensibilities for our waste’’ (Hawkins, ‘‘Down theDrain,’’ p. 50), developed in Davis’s story through active readerlypositions.

Directing her thesis toward consumer- and state-subjectsseemingly unmarked by class, however, Hawkins overlooks thedifficulties of sustaining disturbance in the face of differentialrisk distribution; for Davis, these problems are paramount.Delineating the economic and spatial foundations of a riskhierarchy, Davis demonstrates that disturbance also requiresgrappling with class privilege. Moving readers beyond a self-stabilizing, dismissive response to disgust means uprootingmiddle-class and elite ideals of the self from a sense of physicaland moral purity while catalyzing an intersubjective encounterwith poor immigrant workers, the human incarnation of pollu-tion in the eyes of many a nineteenth-century reader.

In characterizing ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills’’ as aestheticallydisturbing, I propose that Davis fosters an empathic and eco-nomically contextualized politics of disturbance through hernarrative form and construction of readers. While most criticsagree that Davis’s story exhibits an emergent realism stillinfused with sentimentalism (her narrator’s presence in thestory differing dramatically from the objective viewpoint thatlater realists would adopt), they do not adequately explain thereflexive role that Davis ascribes to readers and its importanceto her telling a tale grounded in concrete realities yet shaped bymultiple and mutable perspectives.19 Analyses that identifygothic or pastoral literary conventions as formal foundations

18 See Hawkins, ‘‘Down the Drain,’’ pp. 40–42, 48, 49.19 See Kirk Curnutt, ‘‘Direct Addresses, Narrative Authority, and Gender in Rebecca

Harding Davis’s ‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’’ Style, 28 (1994), 147, 163; and Sharon M.Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism (Philadelphia: Univ. of PennsylvaniaPress, 1991), pp. 7, 12, 38. Indeed, it is readers’ knowledge and selfhood that arebrought to account, rather than, as Curnutt suggests, the storyteller’s (see ‘‘DirectAddresses,’’ p. 163). While Curnutt describes the importance of ‘‘intersubjectivity’’ tothe story, he presumes that compassion for the other already underlies readers’




for Davis’s work also inadequately account for this role. Davisdisrupts the morally superior position that gothic tales typicallygrant readers in relation to the fictional world’s inhabitants,and she prevents readers from assimilating her story to thepopular, purified, abstracted pastoral landscape mythos equallyappealing to Yankee or expansionist nationalists and planta-tion slavery advocates. Davis’s interactive aesthetic—fashionedas a frame story through the narrator’s address to the reader,and depicted within the story through laborer Hugh Wolfe’sartistry—redirects the readerly quest for voyeuristic pleasure inbeauty and narrative resolution to a recognition that a satisfyingcompletion of the story resides only in the ensuing actions ofreaders.

Addressing an Atlantic Monthly audience inlarge part made up of the educated middle class and ‘‘culturalelite,’’ Davis immediately begins to destabilize the position ofreaders who may ignore, deny, or presume immunity to pollu-tion’s material hazards.20 Asking, ‘‘A cloudy day: do you knowwhat that is in a town of iron-works?’’ in the story’s first sen-tence, the unidentified narrator commences a challenge toreaders who assume they can comprehend the story withoutconfronting the physicality of its setting, ‘‘Smoke everywhere!’’(‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ pp. 11, 12).21 Following an extended-

‘‘emotional investment’’ (‘‘Direct Addresses,’’ p. 162), a problem I take up in myanalysis of disgust.

20 See Ellery Sedgwick, The Atlantic Monthly, 1857–1909: Yankee Humanism at HighTide and Ebb (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1994), p. 40. In the early 1860s,the Atlantic Monthly editor James T. Fields sought to expand readership beyond theelite, in part by publishing ‘‘a new strain in American fiction based more on directobservation of the commonplaces of contemporary life’’ (Sedgwick, The AtlanticMonthly, pp. 9, 96).

21 While most critics implicitly or explicitly equate the narrator with Davis, Curnuttconvincingly analyzes the dual-gendering of the narrative voice (see ‘‘Direct Ad-dresses’’). Ruth Stoner argues for the likelihood of readers’ assuming the anonymousauthor and narrator to be male (see Stoner, ‘‘Sexing the Narrator: Gender in RebeccaHarding Davis’s ‘Life in the Iron-Mills,’’’ in Scribbling Women and the Short Story Form:Approaches by American and British Women Writers, ed. Ellen Burton Harrington [NewYork: Peter Lang, 2008], pp. 28–36). Thus, I use gender-neutral pronouns in referringto the narrator.




description of the smothering, inescapable smoke and soot thatsully the mill town, the narrator queries, ‘‘Can you see how foggythe day is?’’ (p. 13), still unconvinced that readers understanda ‘‘cloudy day’’ to be an especially smoky, ‘‘slimy,’’ ‘‘greasy,’’‘‘foul’’ day (p. 11).

In this opening scene, smoke and soot seem to inflict ubiq-uitous damage. They mar nonhuman nature—filling the air,‘‘settl[ing]’’ in the water (‘‘black, slimy pools’’ and the ‘‘yellowriver’’), and ‘‘clinging’’ to plants and animals (‘‘faded poplars,’’‘‘reeking’’ mules, and a ‘‘dirty canary’’)—as well as humanmadestructures (‘‘dingy boats’’ and soot-covered houses), humansthemselves (sooty ‘‘passers-by’’), and their symbols of redemp-tion (‘‘a little broken figure of an angel; but even its wings arecovered with smoke, clotted and black’’) (‘‘Life in the IronMills,’’ pp. 11–12). That readers must ‘‘take no heed to [their]clean clothes’’ in order to ‘‘hear this story’’ signals their ownimpending exposure (p. 13). Notably, while preservation andurban sanitary reform are typically considered environmentalagendas with discrete histories, Davis documents pollution’searly impacts on humans as well as nonhuman nature.22

The narrator, however, soon reveals a hierarchy of hazarddisproportionately subjecting the laborers to pollution. Thesmoke ‘‘stifles’’ the narrator only when s/he opens the windowand threatens readers’ clothes most immediately, not their lungs(‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ pp. 11, 13). In characterizing her read-ers, Davis may have had in mind the sentiments of writer andeditor Nathaniel Parker Willis; after traveling to Wheeling as partof an ‘‘artists’ excursion’’ sponsored by the Baltimore and OhioRailroad, Willis rhapsodized in 1859 that although

Wheeling . . . confesses to the one little drawback of too coal’d anatmosphere for the lovers of clean linen . . . its suburban capabil-ities are unequalled. . . . It quite made my blood tingle to standon the hill-top, overlooking the town on one side and this glori-ous vale on the other.23

22 For an integrated discussion of these often-separated historical strands, see Gott-lieb, Forcing the Spring.

23 Willis, quoted in J. R. Dodge, West Virginia: Its Farms and Forests, Mines and Oil-Wells;with a Glimpse of Its Scenery, a Photograph of Its Population, and an Exhibit of Its IndustrialStatistics (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1865), p. 95. On the excursion, see




Davis anticipates that her readers hold precisely this trivial con-cern for sartorial cleanliness and that, ‘‘busy in making straightpaths . . . on the hills,’’ they have the privilege of escaping thecity (‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ p. 14). In contrast, the workers,populating the streets and tending the foundries’ coal fires—‘‘breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog andgrease and soot, vileness for soul and body’’ (p. 12)—cannotescape spiritual and physical suffocation by the smoke.

Although no standardized measures of smoke and soottoxicity existed at the time of Davis’s writing, scientists andcitizens had rightly associated these corrosive pollutants—which ‘‘had an oily quality’’ and ‘‘could stick to exposed skin,collect in nostrils, lungs, eyes, and stomachs’’ (Stradling, Smo-kestacks and Progressives, p. 25)—with disease since the thir-teenth century.24 In 1849 The American Journal of the MedicalSciences pronounced bituminous coal smoke and its sootfall incities, including Wheeling, ‘‘at all times, injurious to health’’‘‘unless carried away and diluted in the upper regions of theatmosphere, or consumed.’’25 Smoke and soot exacerbatedtuberculosis and led to ‘‘irritation of the air passages, inflam-mation of the lungs, and even, if inhaled in considerable quan-tity, spasmodic contractions of the windpipe, and occasionallysuffocation,’’ observed the New York physician and sanitaryreformer John Griscom in 1854 (The Uses and Abuses of Air,pp. 99, 76).

Despite common medical consensus regarding the ha-zards of smoke, many boosters, businesspeople, and doctorsvoiced dissenting opinions, arguing from the early nineteenthcentury through the Progressive Era that smoke contributed

-Frederick Arnold Sweet, The Hudson River School and the Early American Landscape Tradition(Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1945), p. 46.

24 Early associations of coal burning with illness were often based on miasmatictheories of disease, not yet fully supplanted by germ theory in the 1860s (see PeterBrimblecombe, ‘‘Writing on Smoke,’’ in Dirty Words: Writings on the History and Culture ofPollution, ed. Hannah Bradby [London: Earthscan, 1990], p. 95), or on statistical anddemographic ‘‘correlation[s] between death rates and coal burning’’ (see Nigel Dud-ley, ‘‘Changing Public Perception of Air Pollution,’’ in Dirty Words: Writings on the Historyand Culture of Pollution, p. 51).

25 [Anon.], ‘‘Reviews: Art. XVII,’’ American Journal of the Medical Sciences, 18 (1849),132.




to healthfulness.26 During Wheeling’s 1833 cholera epidemic,as during outbreaks in other major U.S. cities through the1860s, ‘‘cart loads of coal were deposited at intervals of fiftyyards along each side of the principal streets and fired’’ in anattempt to curtail the disease, resulting in even greater thanusual ‘‘volumes of dense black smoke enshrouding the town.’’27

Physicians declared coal smoke not only ‘‘anti-miasmatic’’ butalso, ‘‘from the carbon, sulphur and iodine, . . .highly favorableto lung and cutaneous diseases’’ (Thurston, Pittsburgh as It Is,p. 42). Moreover, mid-century courts typically defined ‘‘mate-rial nuisance[s]’’ according to ‘‘pre-industrial cultural sche-mas,’’ the legal historian Christine Meisner Rosen writes,wherein ‘‘truly horrible stenches of slaughterhouses and ren-dering businesses stood out in screaming sharpness against’’factory smoke, which seemed only an extension of ‘‘ordinarystenches, smokes, and liquid wastes coming from homes’’; inresponse, plaintiffs sought to reframe mill wastes as ‘‘violationsof the ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ every bit as unacceptable as thefoul odors’’ of meatpacking (‘‘‘Knowing’ Industrial Pollution,’’pp. 587–88). Davis similarly indicates that smoke violates the‘‘normal’’ or ‘‘natural’’: she assumes that smoke will be foreignto her readers, describes it as the ‘‘idiosyncrasy’’ of the town(‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ p. 11), and recounts its violation ofnonhuman nature and human bodies.

Portraying smoke as physically damaging and even fatal,Davis entered a debate that held high stakes for industrialists,medical and legal professionals, and citizens. Her declarationof smoke’s danger to the body (‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ p. 12),

26 Gugliotta establishes that ‘‘general medical opinion, from the early to midnineteenth century, saw smoke as harmful to health’’ (‘‘Hell with the Lid Taken Off,’’pp. 63–64). On late-nineteenth-century perceptions of smoke as healthful, see Gugliot-ta, ‘‘Class, Gender, and Coal Smoke,’’ p. 170; and Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives,p. 43.

27 E. A. Hildreth, ‘‘Report on Topography, Climatology, and Epidemic Diseases ofWest Virginia,’’ Transactions of the American Medical Association, 19 (1868), 228. On thePittsburgh and St. Louis epidemics of 1849 and the New York outbreak of 1866, see,respectively, Leland D. Baldwin, Pittsburgh: The Story of a City (Pittsburgh: Univ. ofPittsburgh Press, 1937), p. 212; John C. Peters, ‘‘Cholera in St. Louis, Missouri, 1848–1853,’’ in A Treatise on Asiatic Cholera, ed. Edmund Charles Wendt (New York: WilliamWood and Co., 1885), pp. 30–31; and Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: TheUnited States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 205.




supplemented by her depictions of ailing workers—Janey, her‘‘face . . . haggard and sickly’’ (p. 17), and Hugh, ‘‘haggard, yel-low with consumption’’ (p. 24), later ‘‘bleeding at the lungs’’and weakened with ‘‘a death-cough’’ (p. 52)—combats the illu-sion of smoke as beneficial or benign. When the narrator fore-warns readers that the story ‘‘will, perhaps, seem to you as fouland dark as this thick vapor about us, and as pregnant withdeath’’ (p. 14), s/he employs a simile that requires recognizingsmoke’s physical hazards: it is not only distasteful and dismalbut also death-delivering. If Davis at first chastises readers fortheir lack of knowledge regarding pollution, she quickly assim-ilates them to this knowledge, positing smoke’s ‘‘pregnan[cy]with death’’ as a common understanding.

As the narrator elaborates on the town’s hierarchy of haz-ard, even nonhuman nature appears less threatened than thesocially and spatially immobile workers. In an extended meta-phor, the narrator initially equates the victimization of the‘‘tawny-colored,’’ ‘‘negro-like river slavishly bearing its burden’’of ‘‘coal-barges’’ and the ‘‘begrimed,’’ soot-bearing workers(‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ p. 12) but quickly qualifies this likeness:

What if [the river] be stagnant and slimy here? It knows thatbeyond there waits for it odorous sunlight,—quaint old gardens,dusky with soft, green foliage of apple-trees, and flushing crim-son with roses,—air, and fields, and mountains. The future of theWelsh puddler . . . is not so pleasant. To be stowed away, after hisgrimy work is done, in a hole in the muddy graveyard, and afterthat,—not air, nor green fields, nor curious roses. (p. 13)

Eric Schocket argues that the blackness of smoke and sootconveniently facilitate Davis’s presentation of wage slavery, ina ‘‘substitution of race for class,’’ making the convincing casethat this river-slave-worker metaphor is ‘‘borrowed fromproslavery apologists’’ who described ‘‘a rosy retirement’’ forSouthern slaves under ‘‘the paternalistic care of a loving mas-ter,’’ in contrast to the endless labor and dark future of indus-trial workers.28 Correspondingly, Davis’s depiction of body- and

28 Schocket, ‘‘‘Discovering Some New Race’: Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘Life in theIron Mills’ and the Literary Emergence of Working-Class Whiteness,’’ PMLA, 115

(2000), 47, 50. Outlining Davis’s ambiguous stance on slavery, Dawn Henwood




soul-crushing wage slavery directly controverts abolitionists’optimistic claims that an ‘‘iron slave’’ would not only replacehuman slaves—‘‘with our prodigious development of mechan-ical inventions, [and] iron and coal, . . . the time for chattelizingmen . . . has passed by’’—but even offer unsurpassable under-standing of ‘‘the Infinite Spirit,’’ ‘‘an infinite mechanic,’’ as theAmerican Anti-Slavery Society founding member Elizur Wrightenthused in an 1858 Atlantic Monthly essay.29 Writing in theborder town of Wheeling at a time when immigrants’ racialcategorization was in flux, Davis invokes but also downplayssome of the sufferings of black slaves to draw attention to theWelsh workers’ plight.

Schocket and other critics, however, risk reducing smoke tosymbolism alone, disregarding Davis’s documentation of itsthreats to health: her blackened, sooty workers are also sickenedworkers. Moreover, Davis’s ‘‘landscapes’’ are never solely ‘‘sym-bolic’’ of an ‘‘exchange’’ between North and South, as Schocketindicates (p. 49), but rather doubly referential.30 From the nar-rator’s vantage point, the polluted river is also ‘‘la belle riviere!’’(‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ p. 12)—the clean, beautiful Ohio Riverflowing beyond the mill town, where the narrator and otherwealthy city dwellers, Thoreauvian ‘‘walkers,’’ and travelers likeWillis might stroll its shores at their leisure; the laborers, unableto access the countryside, spend ‘‘night and morning’’ ‘‘creep-ing’’ through smoky streets to and from their oppressive jobs andunhealthful dwellings, where ‘‘a fetid air smother[s] the breath’’

-similarly contends that Davis’s river metaphor and other portrayals of African Amer-icans imply that black slaves lead better lives than white wage earners, yet Davis ulti-mately ‘‘highlight[s] . . . the whiteness of her white slaves’’ beneath their sooty facades toadvocate for them on behalf of their racial privilege (Henwood, ‘‘Slaveries ‘In theBorders’: Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘Life in the Iron Mills’ in Its Southern Context,’’Mississippi Quarterly, 52 [1999], 585, 586).

29 [Elizur Wright], ‘‘What Are We Going to Make?’’ Atlantic Monthly, 2 (June 1858),95, 90.

30 See Schocket, ‘‘Discovering Some New Race,’’ p. 49. Andrew J. Scheiber alsominimizes industrial labor’s materiality, arguing that ‘‘the brutalities of the iron millexistence are only metaphorical . . . for the inner devastation produced in womenby the system of aesthetic exchange that excludes them’’ (Scheiber, ‘‘An UnknownInfrastructure: Gender, Production, and Aesthetic Exchange in Rebecca Harding Da-vis’s ‘Life in the Iron-Mills,’’’ Legacy, 11 [1994], 109).




(‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ pp. 12, 16).31 Delineating the rarelyrecognized economic stratification of space overexposing la-borers to industrial pollution, Davis protests the tendency toblame the poor for filth and begins to qualify both industrialand pastoral ideals imagined by the elite.

In ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ industrial in-novations assault the body as well as ‘‘the dignity of the soul,’’rather than freeing the former and elevating the latter asWright envisioned (‘‘What Are We Going to Make,’’ p. 90).Davis not only censures readers who would blame the poor forpollution, ignore economic and spatial inequities, and denythe physicality of hazard, but also complicates the associationof physical uncleanliness with moral defilement. Initially, sheindicates that filth degrades the working class, the insidious‘‘grease and soot,’’ again, ‘‘vileness for soul and body’’ (‘‘Lifein the Iron Mills,’’ p. 12). Comparing himself to a group ofowners and aristocrats touring the iron mills, Davis’s protag-onist, laborer Hugh Wolfe, fears that his physical conditionhas damaged his moral being: ‘‘seeing . . . his filthy body, hismore stained soul,’’ ‘‘he knew now . . . that between them therewas a great gulf never to be passed’’ (p. 30). Imagining indus-trial pollutants’ infiltrating his soul and distinguishing himfrom the wealthy, Hugh rationalizes his social immobility. Inan epiphanic moment, he continues contemplating his con-tamination: ‘‘His squalid daily life, the brutal coarseness eat-ing into his brain, as the ashes into his skin . . . ; to-night, theywere reality. He gripped the filthy red shirt that clung, stiffwith soot, about him. . . . The flesh beneath was muddy withgrease and ashes,—and the heart beneath that! And the soul?

31 Wondering how workers can remain indoors, Thoreau presumes in his 1851

lecture ‘‘Walking’’ that one need only ‘‘saunter’’ to ‘‘fresh woods and pastures new,’’moving westward ‘‘and withdrawing into the wilderness’’ to join the tide of the future,the ‘‘way the nation is moving,’’ and the way ‘‘that mankind progress’’ (Henry DavidThoreau, ‘‘Walking,’’ in his Collected Essays and Poems, ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell [NewYork: Literary Classics of the United States, 2001], pp. 236, 234). Telling a differentstory of labor’s constraints, Davis equates neither natural nor industrial landscapes withprogress.




God knows’’ (p. 40). An agent ‘‘eating’’ into Hugh, pollutionattacks body and selfhood, in the manner that Mary Douglasdescribes in Purity and Danger. Discussing pre-bacteriological(and pre-chemical-toxicological) definitions of pollution as‘‘matter out of place,’’ Douglas draws on Jean-Paul Sartre’sdiscussion of ‘‘the viscous’’: ‘‘Its stickiness is a trap, it clingslike a leech; it attacks the boundary between myself and it.’’32

Indeed, Hugh fears that the boundary between the greasy sootand his ‘‘soul’’ has been irreparably breached, transforminghim into the essence of filth and leaving him to be‘‘ignore[d]’’ or ‘‘condemn[ed]’’—typical reactions to pollu-tion that Douglas outlines (Purity and Danger, p. 38). In short,pollution as material contaminant and as mark of moral fail-ing are inseparable for Hugh and, he believes, for those whojudge him.

Davis, however, does not settle with this fixed association,which circulated widely in reform discourse; presuming herreaders to be among these judges of filth and character, sheseeks to dislodge them from their moral high ground. Assert-ing that the ‘‘antagonistic’’ narrator ‘‘can hardly be seen as . . .‘lur[ing]’’’ readers in, Richard A. Hood underestimates thetransformative potential of the disturbing confrontations thatDavis expects of readers.33 So too does Kirk Curnutt, who de-scribes the narrator’s ‘‘aggressive’’ appeals as ‘‘distancing’’ thenarratee from readers who ‘‘already share the narrator’s com-passion’’ (‘‘Direct Addresses,’’ p. 149). Instead, as Sharon M.Harris notes, the narrator lures readers in ‘‘without alienatingthem’’—but not simply through ‘‘a conversational ‘exchange’’’(Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism, p. 29), or, as Cur-nutt puts it, a self-stabilizing process of mutual, ‘‘earnest spec-ulation’’ (‘‘Direct Addresses,’’ p. 161), the sort of ‘‘friend[ly]’’direct addresses that Barbara Hochman identifies as character-istic of pre-realist storytellers.34 Her reader/narratee neither

32 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo(New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), pp. 40, 38.

33 Richard A. Hood, ‘‘Framing a ‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’’ Studies in American Fiction,23 (1995), 73.

34 See Hochman, Getting at the Author: Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age ofAmerican Realism (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2001), p. 2.




the friendly potential ally typical of sentimental literature northe ‘‘dazed spectator’’ constructed by later realists (Hochman,Getting at the Author, p. 4), Davis hails readers who harbor uglyemotions toward pollution and the poor—readers who, likeDix, would be ‘‘glad to escape from such disgusting objects,’’‘‘to breathe the free, fresh mountain air, after inhaling the foulsmoke of the iron-works’’ (‘‘A Welsh Musical Festival,’’ p. 547).35

I propose that Davis draws these readers in precisely by acknowl-edging their disgust and shaping its revision.

To occupy the frame story’s second-person subject posi-tion, Davis’s readers must reconsider their spatial and socialpositionality as well as their affective response to pollution.Well before Hugh agonizes over his condition, the narratoradmonishes the reader: ‘‘I want you to hide your disgust . . . andcome right down with me,—here, into the thickest of the fogand mud and foul effluvia. . . . There is a secret down here, inthis nightmare fog . . . : I want to make it a real thing to you’’(‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ pp. 13–14). The narrator pushes theimaginative as far toward the material as possible: readers can‘‘hear this story’’ only if it becomes an encounter, a ‘‘real thing.’’Compelling readers to enter the site of smoke’s inescapabilityand potential harm, Davis capitalizes on ‘‘the relationshipbetween elimination and return’’ that Hawkins identifies asfoundational to the disgust response: ‘‘the sense that whatmakes shit so disturbing and disgusting is that we can nevercompletely escape it’’ (‘‘Down the Drain,’’ p. 40). Even as sheprovokes readers’ disgust through this sense of immersion, Davisinsists that the terms of emotional engagement be opened tonew possibilities, for ‘‘disgust’’ hinders seeing the ‘‘real thing.’’Readers must give up spatial, emotional, and moral superiority,occupying a vulnerable position where they are judged by thenarrator.

Davis also proffers an intertwined epistemological, moral,and aesthetic challenge vis-a-vis disgust. Coaxing readers into

35 For a discussion of how Davis’s promotion of ‘‘social reidentification rather thanmere sentimental sympathy’’ is also rooted in biblical parable, see Sheila HassellHughes, ‘‘Between Bodies of Knowledge there is a Great Gulf Fixed: A LiberationistReading of Class and Gender in Life in the Iron Mills,’’ American Quarterly, 49 (1997),119.




a story propelled by the transformation of a ‘‘secret’’ into a ‘‘realthing’’ (‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ pp. 13–14), Davis takes advan-tage of the ‘‘relation of secrecy and truth,’’ ‘‘the collapse of[an] active desire not to know,’’ which Hawkins posits as a sec-ond factor underlying disgust (‘‘Down the Drain,’’ pp. 40, 41).Davis’s Atlantic Monthly readers, ‘‘many . . . engaged in profes-sions involving the transmission of cultural values’’ (Sedgwick,The Atlantic Monthly, p. 40), must accept the burden of dis-comforting knowledge and move beyond ‘‘disgust’’ (‘‘Life inthe Iron Mills,’’ p. 13) before divining pleasure, beauty—which Davis will eventually present in a sculpture carved fromkorl, a foundry byproduct (p. 24)—or any other moral oraesthetic value.

In fact, these disturbances trouble simplified notions ofreading as leisure or pleasure. Davis will not tell an aestheticallysanitized story that would keep readers at a distance and, likesanitation technology, would ‘‘allow populations physical andmoral escape from the unacceptable’’ (Hawkins, ‘‘Down theDrain,’’ pp. 40–41). Extending Hawkins’s remarks regardingurban sanitation infrastructure to the aesthetics of literary struc-ture—another site where cultural value is so often determined—reveals the crux of Davis’s narrative disturbance: in ‘‘Life in theIron Mills,’’ neither spatial nor aesthetic frames function as ‘‘sys-tems for waste removal’’ to protect readers from ‘‘knowing whereshit ends up,’’ nor do they ‘‘keep that without value concealed’’(Hawkins, ‘‘Down the Drain,’’ p. 40). Instead, the story callsattention to waste—be it soot, smoke, korl, or workers—andrefutes the assumption that it is categorically valueless and resid-ual to ethics of daily life.36

The interaction between narrator and reader in the framestory—with the physical, moral, emotional, and epistemologi-cal vulnerabilities it creates through aesthetic disturbance—serves as a bridge to the story’s most important intersubjectiveencounter. Continuing to counteract the typical affective pro-gression from disgust to dismissal, the narrator asks readers to

36 Robert E. Abrams observes similarly that ‘‘in Davis’s aesthetic’’ of ‘‘negativespace,’’ ‘‘‘waste products’ . . . begin to assume a foregrounded prominence of theirown’’ (Abrams, Landscape and Ideology in American Renaissance Literature: Topographies ofSkepticism [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004], p. 119).




recognize the foundations of selfhood they hold in commonwith people who seem to embody pollution. To reframe Hugh’sact of keeping a wallet that his cousin Deborah has stolen fromone of the wealthy mill visitors, the narrator expounds on thephysically and spiritually oppressive conditions that workersface:

I want you to come down and look at [Hugh], . . . that youmay judge him justly. . . . I want you to look back, as he does everyday, at his birth in vice, his starved infancy; to remember . . . theslow, heavy years of constant, hot work. . . . Think that God putinto this man’s soul a fierce thirst for beauty,—to know it, tocreate it; to be—something, he knows not what,—other than heis. . . . With all this groping, this mad desire, a great blind intellectstumbling through wrong, a loving poet’s heart, the man was byhabit only a coarse, vulgar laborer. . . . Be just,—not like man’slaw, which seizes on one isolated fact, but like God’s judgingangel, whose clear, sad eye saw all the countless cankering daysof this man’s life, all the countless nights, when, sick with starv-ing, his soul fainted in him. (‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ pp. 25–26)

Identifying not filth but rather hunger, overwork, and illness ascausing Hugh’s seeming failures of ‘‘soul’’ and ‘‘intellect,’’ Da-vis trains readers to evaluate situated ethical problems, in placeof rejecting workers as filthy, crime-destined, lost souls. Whiledetailing these constraints, she persists in upsetting readers’stable, impervious sense of self by cultivating empathy in twodirections. That is, the narrator first requests that readers thinkfrom Hugh’s position, seeing his life and history ‘‘as he doesevery day.’’ Then, from this new position, the narrator promptsreaders to see Hugh as an empathetic being as well, someonewith the capacity to think from a position that a typical AtlanticMonthly reader would occupy, respect, or covet—that of a‘‘great . . . intellect,’’ ‘‘loving’’ poet, or simply someone with ‘‘afierce thirst for beauty’’ or desire for self-realization, ‘‘to be—something.’’ The narrator asks readers to be like Hugh momen-tarily, and to accept that Hugh may be like them, constrainedonly by environment and economy. Significantly, however, thenarrator does not allow readers to erase boundaries of selfhoodand thereby subsume the other. The narrator’s remarking on




Hugh’s ‘‘familiar[ity] with sights’’ that readers ‘‘would blush toname’’ (p. 25) betrays sustained skepticism about readers’ moralconvictions.

The readerly empathy that Davis advances exceeds ‘‘passiveempathy,’’ which Megan Boler defines as a practice of ‘‘easyidentification,’’ wherein readers seek ‘‘the voyeuristic pleasureof listening and judging the other from a position of power/safe distance,’’ ‘‘never called upon to cast [their] gaze at [their]own reflection[s].’’37 Beginning with the narrator’s openingquestion, reading ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills’’ means abandoninga position of ‘‘safe distance’’ to pursue active, situated, self-reflexive reading. Aesthetically disturbed readers might recog-nize the ‘‘blind[ness]’’ of their own ‘‘intellect stumblingthrough wrong’’ (‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ p. 25) after consid-ering Hugh’s situation in relation to their own.

By relocating readers spatially and psychologically, Davisintends to reorient their moral compasses to an assessment ofindustrial capitalism. The narrator asks that readers judge notHugh’s act, ‘‘one isolated fact’’ (‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ p. 25),but rather the conditions he faces. Although Hugh laments thelink between his physical and moral pollution, he also appre-hends the context that negates this determination. At first hecannot fathom keeping the wallet, but then wonders: ‘‘what wasit to be a thief? . . . God made this money—the fresh air, too—for his children’s use. He never made the difference betweenpoor and rich’’ (p. 47). Rather, industrial capitalists have‘‘made the difference’’ by instituting and enforcing a systemwhere wealth determines being and where moral standardsrooted in lives of privilege are divorced from larger environ-mental and economic contexts.

Davis challenges the paternalistic proclivity to blame thepoor for pollution and prescribe their moral improvement byillustrating the systemic roots of their oppression and redirect-ing the righteous self who refuses to interact with those deemedinferior. Hawkins proposes that, ‘‘rather than disturbances en-forcing a dogmatic reassertion of self or morality, their force

37 Megan Boler, ‘‘The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism’s Gaze,’’Cultural Studies, 11 (1997), 255, 260, 259.




could lie in exposing contingency and interdependency, ingenerating different engagements with the world,’’ providingthe example of a household that composts excrement (‘‘Downthe Drain,’’ p. 42). Yet Davis demonstrates that disturbing theclassification of human others as waste requires attending tosocial, economic, and emotional ‘‘contingency and interdepen-dency’’ (Hawkins, ‘‘Down the Drain,’’ p. 42).

Significantly, Davis’s aesthetic of disturbance deviates fromthe gothic aesthetic of her contemporaries, which LawrenceBuell cites as the basis of the story’s ‘‘toxic discourse’’ (Writingfor an Endangered World, p. 30). Building on Eric Homberger’sanalysis of ‘‘mid-nineteenth-century exposes of the lowerdepths of New York City,’’ Buell explains that ‘‘gothification’’‘‘reli[es] on ‘the Virgilian mode’: ‘a guided tour of the under-world’ slums that allegorizes them in classico-biblical terms as‘the home of lost souls’ so as to instill shock and compassion inuninitiated readers’’; this narrative mode typically dehumanizeslaboring subjects while affirming the sound, humanist judg-ment of readers (Writing for an Endangered World, p. 43).38

Although Davis’s narrator leads ‘‘uninitiated readers’’ intoa wasteland populated by dehumanized workers, s/he demon-strates that these ‘‘souls’’ are not ‘‘lost’’ but rather beaten downas they strive for physical and emotional sustenance. The nar-rator immediately instructs readers to overcome their ‘‘shock’’and move beyond ‘‘compassion’’ to empathize with the workersand evaluate material conditions and moral frameworks froma newly vulnerable subject position.

Moreover, Davis does not simply ‘‘reinscrib[e] the polariza-tion of saved versus damned, the guide being so much wiser, somuch more like ‘us,’ than the hapless hardly human victims,’’the problem that Buell identifies as the ‘‘double bind’’ of gothi-fication (Writing for an Endangered World, p. 44). The narrator’swisdom comes from proximity to the workers, and it distin-guishes the narrator from uninitiated readers, as evidenced bythe continual warring with readers’ assumptions and skepticismthat they understand the story’s demands. The narrator provides

38 See Eric Homberger, Scenes from the Life of a City: Corruption and Conscience in OldNew York (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994).




only partial guidance, leaving the numerous questions s/he asksunanswered as s/he pushes readers into the scene to disturbtheir sense of normalcy, expose their shared humanity with theworkers, and revise their modes of interaction. Empatheticallyaligned with both the workers and the readers, the narratormodels a vulnerable position that eschews purity as a standardof judgment.

Davis also censures gothification through a pointed critiqueof Mitchell’s traditional aesthetic loyalties. As Kirby, the millowner’s son; May, a local doctor; and Mitchell, a Northern, cos-mopolitan relative of Kirby’s, tour the mills ‘‘merely for amuse-ment’’ (‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ p. 28), Mitchell imagines himselfon precisely the sort of Virgilian expedition that Buell describes,declaring, ‘‘your works look like Dante’s Inferno’’ (‘‘Life in theIron Mills,’’ p. 27). Refusing to confront the physicality of dis-gust, Mitchell substitutes an image corresponding with a classicaesthetic standard and continually reduces the mills to cliche:

‘‘Do you know . . . I like this view of the works better thanwhen the glare was fiercest? These heavy shadows and the am-phitheatre of smothered fires are ghostly, unreal. One could fancythese red smouldering lights to be the half-shut eyes of wild beasts,and the spectral figures their victims in the den.’’ (pp. 30–31)

Mitchell labels the men inhuman and immaterial, the indus-trial environment simply a ‘‘view.’’ His using the pronoun‘‘one’’—a stark contrast to the narrator’s intimate first-personvoice and second-person address—projects an abstractedviewer, augmenting his distance. Unlike Davis’s chastenedreaders, Mitchell does not ‘‘forget’’ his life of leisure and plea-sure in reading. Instead, he ‘‘look[s] at the furnace-tender as hehad looked at a rare mosaic in the morning; only the man wasthe more amusing study of the two’’ (p. 36). Remainingdetached and even entertained while asserting his superioraesthetic judgment, Mitchell is hardly disturbed. Rather thanthe narrator or Davis herself, it is Mitchell who stands guilty ofthe ethically vacant representational practice of gothification.




Functioning as a mise en abyme within Da-vis’s framing narrative aesthetic of disturbance, the reactionof the mill visitors to Hugh’s sculpture illuminates significantbarriers to sustained encounters with waste in the space ofcapital. Before telling of the stolen wallet, the narrator presentsHugh’s own disturbing aesthetics: his ‘‘habit of chipping andmoulding figures,—hideous, fantastic enough, but sometimesstrangely beautiful,’’ from korl, ‘‘the refuse from the ore afterthe pig-metal is run’’ (‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ p. 24). Davis’saccount of Hugh’s artistry in this industrial setting differs dra-matically from other representations of smoky cities publishedin the Atlantic Monthly—not only Dix’s but also the Americanwriter and art historian Charles Eliot Norton’s. In the maga-zine’s inaugural November 1857 issue, Norton proclaims thatManchester’s ‘‘pall’’ of coal smoke destroys ‘‘Beauty,’’ ‘‘not con-sulted here,’’ as well as ‘‘Nature,’’ ‘‘parched and scorched by thefeverish breath of forges and furnaces,’’ ‘‘the burnt waste offields covered with ashes and coal-dust.’’39 This scene of ‘‘purelyunimaginative life,’’ he writes, ‘‘sharp[ly] . . . contrast[s]’’ withthe art on display at the Manchester Exhibition (Norton, ‘‘Man-chester Exhibition,’’ p. 33). In ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ affectingartworks instead appear in the industrial scene presumed to bethe antithesis of beauty.

Hugh appropriates benign waste, from the industry thatpoisons him with its hazardous waste, for artistic, emotionalsustenance, creating beauty and value that exceed capitalistexchange (‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ p. 24). When Mitchell stum-bles upon one of Hugh’s sculptures, it jolts him out of hisgothic fantasy: he ‘‘started back, half-frightened, as . . . the whitefigure of a woman faced him in the darkness, . . . her arms flungout in some wild gesture of warning’’ (p. 31). In a moment ofmutual recognition, Mitchell identifies Hugh as the artist, andHugh senses that Mitchell can see ‘‘the soul of the thing’’ (p. 33).Notably, Hugh’s association with this benign, aestheticized wastefleetingly marks his moral worth, rather than his depravity, inMitchell’s eyes.

39 [Charles Eliot Norton], ‘‘The Manchester Exhibition,’’ Atlantic Monthly, 1

(November 1857), 33, 34.




Hugh’s sculpture temporarily shrinks the distance thatMitchell and the others seek to maintain from the workers,provoking their recognition of Hugh’s subjectivity, spurringtheir interaction with him, and inspiring a discussion of workers’conditions and capitalists’ responsibilities. As Mitchell speech-lessly observes ‘‘the figure [that] touched him strangely’’ (‘‘Lifein the Iron Mills,’’ p. 32), May fights its intrusive assertion ofhuman artistry and angst into the dehumanizing mills, attempt-ing to reduce the figure to a specimen, ‘‘a working-woman,—thevery type of her class’’ (p. 32). Despite May’s efforts to fit thesculpture into his comfortable, middle-class vision of socialorder, it continues to disturb the group. When May and Kirbydismiss Hugh’s artistry and label the woman a drunkard,Mitchell ‘‘flashe[s] a look of disgust somewhere,—not at Wolfe’’(p. 33). Disrupting assumptions regarding the industrial castesystem, this disturbing aestheticization of waste has directedMitchell’s disgust away from the workers to his companions.

This disturbance, however, is short-lived, as the men evadesocial and emotional vulnerabilities. May ultimately views theworkers as Kirby’s pawns (‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ p. 34). Kirbyquantifies his relationship to the laborers in capital, refusing toconsider working conditions and wages as ethical concerns(p. 35). Meanwhile, Mitchell scoffs at Kirby’s abdication ofresponsibility (p. 35) and May’s self-elevating claim that hewould help Hugh if he could (p. 37), but even Mitchell’s inter-vention is limited to challenging Kirby’s proclamations. More-over, as soon as they venture away from Hugh and his sculpture,Mitchell’s revulsion returns: ‘‘He . . . looked into the mills. Therehung about the place a thick, unclean odor. The slightestmotion of his hand marked that he perceived it, and his insuf-ferable disgust. That was all’’ (p. 38). Reversing his responsefrom disturbance to dismissal, Mitchell fails to scrutinize theconditions and relations that have produced his disgust. He tooconcludes that he cannot help since he is ‘‘not one of [the work-ers],’’ and ‘‘reform is born of need, not pity’’ (pp. 38, 39).

Although Mitchell sees the sculpture’s call for justice, hedoes not interrogate the connection between his own socialposition and that of the workers—whom he now labels ‘‘theheaving, cloggy mass’’ (‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ p. 39). Davis




describes Mitchell as having ‘‘a temper yielding . . . as summerwater, until his Self was touched, when it was ice,’’ noting that‘‘such men are not rare in the States’’ (p. 29); initially touched byHugh’s artistry, Mitchell quickly becomes icily self-protective, his‘‘cool, probing eyes . . . mocking, cruel, relentless’’ (p. 33), his‘‘tranquil’’ ‘‘soul’’ ‘‘bright and deep and cold as Arctic air’’(p. 36). Their boundaries of selfhood undisturbed, the touringmen are unreflexive, failed readers of the scene who see only twopossible solutions: paternalistic saviorship, wherein the privi-leged retain power, or worker rebellion, in which the privilegedplay no role. Divesting the men of moral authority in thisdilemma, Davis further troubles the privileged wisdom of gothi-fication, as well as the self-stabilizing standards of judgment thattypical Atlantic Monthly readers may hold, to revise popular dis-course on class and morality.40

That the men turn away from the sculpture’s (and, byextension, the narrator’s) unsettling, unanswered questionsand leave the mills with self-placating moral platitudes revealsthat disturbance is particularly vulnerable to erasure wheneconomic power is at stake, and when industrial capitalistcommonplaces enforce reductive views of people and place.As J. F. Buckley writes, Hugh ‘‘has shaken them with his truth,but recognizing the human soul that transcends class andculture does not effect change. . . . Kirby, Dr. May, and Mitch-ell are of the bourgeoisie, and for them to align themselveswith Wolfe would entail each of them redefining his own self-hood.’’41 Buckley correctly identifies the failure of the visitorsto assess their own positions; consequently, they fail to imag-ine alternatives to the system that reduces laborers to energyand waste while supporting righteous, wealthy human selves.Buckley’s conclusion, however, that Hugh and the narratorfail to ‘‘transcend their situation’’ ‘‘because they and their art

40 May’s failed reading is reinforced when he literally reads Hugh’s nineteen-yearsentence, essentially a life sentence, in the newspaper and announces, ‘‘Scoundrel!Serves him right!’’ (‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ p. 50). As Curnutt observes, Mitchell, inparticular, ‘‘resembles the audience of the Atlantic Monthly’’ and ‘‘represents the mostdangerous type of audience: one that already sees clearly yet accepts no responsibilityfor social change’’ (‘‘Direct Addresses,’’ p. 154).

41 Buckley, ‘‘Living in the Iron Mills: A Tempering of Nineteenth-Century Amer-ica’s Orphic Poet,’’ Journal of American Culture, 16, no. 1 (1993), 70.




are never viewed outside of their culture’’ (‘‘Living in the IronMills,’’ p. 71) overlooks both Hugh’s and the narrator’s callsfor change—which counter ideals of individual, artistic tran-scendence—as well as the important role of the story’s read-ers, who serve as a secondary audience for the sculpture (andits lessons about sustaining disturbance) and the primaryaudience for the narrator’s more direct attempts to disturbselfhood in the frame story. For Davis’s readers, whom shecarefully prepares to evaluate contexts in place of dismissingimpurities, these disturbances have the potential to moldreflexive, interactive subjects willing to confront economicand environmental injustices.

Bringing Hugh’s sculpture into the framestory in her conclusion, Davis sustains and merges Hugh’s andthe narrator’s disturbing aesthetics to expose the inadequacyof another potential solution to physical and alleged moralpollution: pastoral redemption. After Hugh kills himself injail, a Quaker woman takes Deborah to the countryside. Inthe third-to-last paragraph, the narrator announces: ‘‘I endmy story here. . . . There is no need to tire you with the longyears of sunshine, and fresh air, and slow, patient Christ-love,needed to make healthy and hopeful [Deborah’s] impurebody and soul’’ (‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ p. 63). Deborahregains bodily health in the pristine countryside, ‘‘on one ofthese hills . . . overlook[ing] broad, wooded slopes and clover-crimsoned meadows,—niched into the very place where thelight is warmest, the air freest’’ (p. 63). Having detailed thephysically damaging effects of pollution and overwork, Davisconfirms the health benefits of a cleaner, more restful place.

Yet while critics invariably interpret Deborah’s pastoral lifeas redemptive (spiritually, politically, personally, or aestheti-cally), her new physical environment resolves neither her emo-tional yearnings nor the story’s many disturbances.42 Earlier in

42 Harris characterizes Deborah’s redemption as ‘‘alternative[ly] spiritual’’ (RebeccaHarding Davis and American Realism, p. 53); Schocket sees it as ‘‘middle-class’’ (‘‘Dis-covering Some New Race,’’ p. 53); Curnutt and Donna M. Allego characterize it as love-




the tale, the narrator instructs readers to look ‘‘deeper’’ forsomething ‘‘worth reading’’ in Deborah’s wasted being: a ‘‘storyof a soul filled with groping passionate love’’ for Hugh (‘‘Life inthe Iron Mills,’’ p. 21). We continue to read that unresolvedstory in this pastoral scene: Deborah sits at the Friends’meeting-house, ‘‘waiting: with her eyes turned to hills higherand purer than these on which she lives. . . . There may be inher heart some latent hope to meet there the love deniedher here’’ (p. 64). Deborah does not see the hills, woods, andmeadows around her—a landscape similar to those that Thor-eau described in his lecture ‘‘Walking’’ (1851) and in Walden(1854), those that Asher Durand painted in his Pastoral Scene(1858) and Pastoral Landscape (1861), or those that Dix andWillis depicted.43 Deborah does not encounter the unpolluted‘‘belle riviere’’ that the narrator portrays (‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’p. 12), nor does she ‘‘mak[e] straight paths for [her] feet onthe hills,’’ as the narrator accuses naive, self-interested readersof doing (p. 14). Idealized pastoral landscapes—which hadlong symbolized nationalist democracy and continued to holdimaginative promise for many of Davis’s contemporaries—remain sites of privilege inaccessible to industrial workers.44

-based (see Curnutt, ‘‘Direct Addresses,’’ p. 162; and Allego, ‘‘Genevieve Taggard’sSentimental Marxism in Calling Western Union,’’ College Literature, 31, no. 1 [2004],28); and William H. Shurr sees it as ‘‘art-based’’ (‘‘Life in the Iron Mills: A Nineteenth-Century Conversion Narrative,’’ American Transcendental Quarterly, 5 [1991], 254).Although Henwood asserts that Davis ‘‘challenges . . . [proslavery] literature’s idealizedvision of the slave South as an absolute pastoral paradise,’’ given that ‘‘North and Southare co-conspirators in . . . economic enslavement,’’ she also reads the story’s pastoralending as redemptive (‘‘Slaveries ‘In the Border,’’’ pp. 588, 591).

43 See Henry D. Thoreau, The Variorum Walden, ed. Walter Harding (New York:Twayne, 1962); and ‘‘Walking.’’ See also Asher Durand, A Pastoral Scene (1858) andPastoral Landscape (1861), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Durand and Willistraveled to Wheeling on the same 1858 Baltimore and Ohio tour.

44 See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964) for an extensive discussion of the Americanpastoral ideal, especially as propagated by Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson,and Thoreau. While Shurr acknowledges that Deborah’s Quaker life does not answerthe story’s questions, he cites Emerson, Whitman, Durand, and Thomas Cole as sourcesfor ‘‘an art-based religion’’ (Shurr, ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills: A Nineteenth-Century Con-version Narrative,’’ pp. 253, 254–55), overlooking Davis’s departure from notions oftranscendence in nature or pastoral purity.




Instead, Deborah stays resolutely focused on Hugh’sabsence from this pastoral site. However ‘‘hopeful’’ her ‘‘soul,’’she does not wait, with the other Quakers, for God’s counsel,‘‘for the Spirit of Love to speak, . . . to receive His words’’ (‘‘Life inthe Iron Mills,’’ p. 63). For Deborah, even the prospect ofheaven is not the promise of spiritual purification but rather thepotential for being reunited with Hugh (p. 64). The narratorasks, ‘‘What blame to the meek Quaker, if she took her lost hopeto make the hills of heaven more fair?’’ (p. 64). Schocket inter-prets Deborah, in these scenes, as ‘‘a character whose true self—whose true ‘story’—lies in her potentiality’’ as a white womanworthy of salvation: ‘‘This potential is, furthermore, the condi-tion on which Deborah is, at the text’s conclusion, brought intomiddle-class redemption’’ (‘‘Discovering Some New Race,’’ p.53). This pastoral, Christian, ‘‘middle-class redemption’’ has sig-nificant limitations, however, not only for the rest of the laborers(for whom it remains unlikely, as Schocket acknowledges [‘‘Dis-covering Some New Race,’’ p. 54]), but also for Deborah; her‘‘potential’’ for self-fulfillment, as the narrator has directed theaudience to read it, cannot be realized in this landscape.

Davis also discloses her incomplete faith in the redemptivepower of the pastoral when she recounts Hugh’s crisis earlier inthe story. After Mitchell and the others assert the order ofcapital, proclaiming ‘‘money’’ to be the (unattainable) answerto self-realization (‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’ pp. 37–38), Hughreflects:

Able to speak, . . . to raise these men and women working at hisside up with him: sometimes he forgot this defined hope in thefrantic anguish to escape,—only to escape,—out of the wet, thepain, the ashes, somewhere, anywhere,—only for one moment offree air on a hill-side. (p. 41)

A workers’ revolution is Hugh’s ‘‘defined hope’’; a turn to thepastoral is only a temporary, ‘‘frantic . . . escape.’’ Although thecountryside offers physical respite and recuperation, it does notresolve the emotional, environmental, or economic conditionsof the industrial town.

In the end, Davis disallows a simple exchange of a hellishgothic scene (a cliched Northern industrial landscape) for a




heavenly pastoral one—whether a slave-based, Southern agrar-ian landscape, as Schocket suggests (‘‘Discovering Some NewRace,’’ p. 49); an idealized Northern scene of the Transcenden-talists or Hudson River School painters; or an expansionistvision of a rural West.45 In fact, the narrator does not ‘‘end[the] story here,’’ with this pastoral scene (‘‘Life in the IronMills,’’ p. 63). Just as Deborah stays preoccupied with Hugh,the narrator turns back to the industrial town where s/he sitswriting, declaring: ‘‘Nothing remains to tell that the poor Welshpuddler once lived, but this figure of the mill-woman cut inkorl’’ (p. 64). However meager, this remnant retains the forceof disturbance. Looking at the sculpture, the narrator reiteratesthe ‘‘power of its desperate need’’ (p. 65) and describes itsreaching out ‘‘imploringly,’’ ‘‘eager[ly],’’ questioning, ‘‘Is thisthe End? . . . nothing beyond?—no more?’’ (p. 64). The ‘‘des-perate need’’ of the workers remains unfulfilled by a romanti-cized pastoral escape, and unaddressed by escapist reading.Even the narrator has attempted, unsuccessfully, to avoid dis-turbance: ‘‘I have [the figure] here in a corner of my library.I keep it hid behind a curtain. . . . Sometimes,—to-night, forinstance,—the curtain is accidentally drawn back’’ (p. 64). LikeDeborah and Hugh, the sculpture can be hidden away, or itsdisturbance can be confronted, and its story told, in the contextof the conditions of its production.

Davis’s readerly positioning and her protagonist’s arrest-ing sculptures, hewn from waste, direct attention away from theillusive purification of pastoral redemption and back to thedisturbing claims of the polluted industrial environment.Whereas Deborah does not speak when she appears in thecountryside, the narrator and the sculpture, having promptednearly all of the story’s dialogue, continue to speak in the milltown, the setting of the entirety of the story’s dialogue and itsspace for discursive change. Significantly, the reader alsospeaks here indirectly, providing the narrator one final chanceto decry the disturbing otherness produced by oppression:

45 Located on the North-South border and also seen as a gateway to the West (lyingon the National Road and site of the first bridge across the Ohio River), Wheeling andits surrounding countryside did not neatly fit any of these commonplace landscapecategories.




‘‘Why, you tell me you have seen that look in the eyes of dumbbrutes,—horses dying under the lash. I know’’ (‘‘Life in theIron Mills,’’ p. 64). If readers attempt to deny the sculpture’shuman angst by labeling its look that of an animal, the narratorcynically affirms that the workers are treated no better thanbeasts, and that this treatment is ignored by viewers who pre-sume a superior ability to determine what qualifies as human—in aesthetic form and material being.

While pollution in the mid-nineteenth-century UnitedStates was often seen as an individual moral failing of thepoverty-stricken (when it was considered a material hazard atall), Davis exposes its economic context and its environmentalconsequences, which fall disproportionately on the poor. Shepresents the countryside not as a site of proto-preservationism,the popular ecocritical reading of mid-nineteenth-century re-presentations of pastoral landscapes, but as a potential distrac-tion from the realities of industrial pollution and labor. If shedraws on moralizing pollution tropes, then she also begins torevise their class-based foundations. For Davis, addressing pol-lution requires assessing subjectivities across the socioeco-nomic spectrum, a stance distinct even from statements ofcontemporaries who recognized the inequities governing expo-sure to pollution. For example, upon observing in 1854 that‘‘for smoke, smut, and gloom, Pittsburgh and Wheeling bear nocomparison to’’ Britain’s Berwick-Newcastle region, HarrietBeecher Stowe writes:

. . . people with immense wealth can live in such regions in clean-liness and elegance; but how must it be with the poor? I know ofno one circumstance more unfavourable to moral purity thanthe necessity of being physically dirty. . . . trade must be pursuedin such a way as to enable the working classes to realize some-thing of beauty and purity in the circumstances of their outwardlife.46

Whereas Stowe advocates moral purity for the poor and putsfaith in technical solutions for abating smoke, commending

46 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, 2 vols. (Boston: Phillips,Sampson, and Co., 1854), I, 191–92.




engineering fixes and legal regulations (Sunny Memories of ForeignLands, I, 192), Davis urges a wider moral and aesthetic evalua-tion to counter assumptions about the immorality of the poor,the absence of aesthetic value in their lives, and the ethics ofpurity.

Elite accounts of corporeal, spatial, and moral purity thatregulate the very category of the human—in popular pollutiondiscourse as well as gothic and pastoral tales—fail as narrativeframes for this portrait of life in the iron mills. Sustaining sen-timentality only to erode it with scathing cynicism, Davis seeksneither to entertain nor simply to disgust readers, but rather todisturb their defensive notions of self, justice, and aestheticpleasure. Readers can take on Davis’s challenges, pursuinginteractive, reflexive interpretive practices, or they can aban-don her story after reading it, hide away the secrets revealed,and remain unchanged in their actions, like Mitchell. Davispushes for change as she concludes her story; the narrator doesnot lead readers back out of the industrial scene but ratherleaves them to face the dawning day (‘‘Life in the Iron Mills,’’p. 65), the potential story of disturbance and hope in whichthey now play a part. Davis’s ideal reader becomes a vulnerablereader—judge but also judged, newly aware of self-exposure—willing to navigate textual terrain defying literary conventionsand toxic terrain demanding intersubjective immersion andsocial change.

New England Conservatory

A B S T R A C T

Jill Gatlin, ‘‘Disturbing Aesthetics: Industrial Pollution, Moral Dis-course, and Narrative Form in Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘Life in theIron Mills’’’ (pp. 201–233)

This essay reevaluates the historical, literary, cultural, and ecological significance ofRebecca Harding Davis’s ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills’’ (1861) in the context of industrialpollution. Situating the story in relation to contemporaneous debates regarding thebenefits and hazards of coal smoke, I extend the work of historians who have over-looked the influence of moralizing rhetoric on early understandings of industrial wasteand workers. As Davis contests idealized equations of smoke with economic equality,progress, and health, she also delineates the spatial stratification determining laborers’debilitating exposure to smoke and censures the paternalistic proclivity to blame the




poor for pollution and prescribe their moral improvement. I argue that Davis under-mines moralizing pollution discourse by crafting an aesthetic of disturbance throughher narrative form and construction of readers, which departs from sentimental,realist, gothic, and pastoral formal features that critics have associated with the story.Entering the frame story, readers must reconsider their spatial and social positionalityas well as their affective response to pollution. Davis positions readers to move beyondself-stabilizing, dismissive disgust to interactive empathy that prompts them to confronttheir complicity in workers’ oppression and classification as waste. Intervening innascent pollution discourse with more complexity than many nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers and reformers would, ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills’’ disrupts popu-lar, gothic, and pastoral accounts of moral, corporeal, and spatial purity regulating theaesthetic and material category of the human in toxic industrial environments.

Keywords: Rebecca Harding Davis; ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills’’; pollutionand waste; disgust; ecocriticism and environmental justice




disturbing aesthetics: industrial pollution, moral discourse, and narrative form in rebecca harding...

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