rebecca harding davis (1831-1910)

Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910)Author(s): JEAN PFAELZERSource: Legacy, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Fall 1990), pp. 39-45Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25684397 .

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LEGACY PROFILE Rebecca Harding Davis

(1831-1910)

JEAN PFAELZER University of Delaware

o s ' "** ** - . ,i w w

Rebecca Harding Davis From THE RICHARD HARDING DAVIS YEARS by

Gerald Langford. Copyright ? 1961 by Gerald

Langford. Photograph from the collection of Mrs.

Hope Davis Kehrig. Reprinted by permission of

Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

Late

in the night shift in Rebecca Hard

ing Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills" (1861), a mill overseer leads a doctor, a

journalist and an effete aristocrat on a tour

of the mill. Through the visitors' startled

gazes, readers of the Atlantic Monthly discover "the white figure of a woman ... of giant proportions, crouching on the

ground, her arms flung out in some wild

gesture of warning" (32). This ominous and prognostic figure is a statue which a

desperate Welsh mill hand has carved from ukorl"?like himself, the pink refuse of the mill. Davis's artist/worker has sculpted a

figure that symbolizes one of the era's most forceful attacks on industrial life and on a set of repressive cultural expectations for

women as well:

There was not one line of beauty or grace in it: a nude woman's form, muscular,

grown coarse with labor, the powerful limbs instinct?with some one poignant

longing. One idea there was in it: the

tense, rigid muscles, the clutching hands, the wild eager face, like that of a starving wolf's. (32)

In "Life in the Iron Mills," her first

published story, Rebecca Harding Davis, a

pioneer of American realism, endowed social advocacy for workers with a feminist

perspective. Through the narrative voice of a middle-class spinster who frames and contains the tale of urban poverty in a raw industrial town, Davis portrayed a power ful identification between the arid intellec tual and sexual life of many women and the emotional suffocation of poverty. "Life in the Iron Mills" was one of the first

American attempts to represent the psycho

39



40 LEGACY

logical effects of industrial labor. Images of

hunger, silence and imprisonment cross class lines to build a unifying motif of "soul starvation" and explode the social ra tionalization of the home as woman's

refuge. In place of the idealized family, Davis puts forth pictures of interracial col

lectivity among the women at the textile

mill, the domestic labor which the tired mill women undertake after backbreaking shifts at factory looms, and finally, the enduring portrait of Deb, a defiant hunchback

"millgirl" who steals money to free her beloved cousin from the crush of factory work.

In May 1861, one month after the suc cessful publication of "Life in the Iron

Mills," Davis wrote to James T. Fields, the new editor of the Atlantic Monthly, regard ing her first full-length novel The Deaf and the Dumb, which he had just rejected as too gloomy:

I am sorry. I thank you for the kindness

with which you veil the disappointment. Whatever holier meaning life or music

has for me, has reached me through the

"pathetic minor." I fear that I only have

the power to echo the pathos without the meaning. When I began the story, I

meant to make it end in full sunshine?to

show how even "Lois" was not dumb, how even the meanest things in life, were

"voices in the world, and none of them

without its signification." Her life and

death were to be the only dark thread.

But ... in my eagerness ... I "assem

bled the gloom" you complain of . . .

[Do] you think I could . . . make it ac

ceptable by returning to my original idea.

Let her character and death (I cannot give up all, you see) remain, and the rest of

the picture be steeped in warm healthy

light. A "perfect day in June."

The tension between realism and repres sion, representation and sentimentality revealed in this passage shapes the long career of Rebecca Harding Davis, who wrote from 1861 until her death in 1910. Jean Fagan Yellin calls the process by which Davis accommodated her views to the demands of Brahmin male publishers the "feminization" of Rebecca Harding Davis. Judith Fetterley suggests that Davis

"chose a form of suicide; artistic com

promise turned her pen against herself" (313). In my view, despite economic

pressures to support her husband, an im

poverished young lawyer, and editorial pressures to eradicate uncomfortable and "unfeminine" social realities from her work, Davis, like many of her female characters, refused to remain mute. She survived as an author by finding two voices: the sentimental and the realist.

Working within genres which were in

creasingly objectified and commodified in the growing post-bellum publishing in

dustry, she produced lucrative "potboilers" and thrillers for popular magazines while, for journals such as the Atlantic Monthly, she described precarious spaces where women, slaves and mulattoes might find their voice. In her ten novels; a collection of essays; over a hundred short stories

published in The Atlantic Monthly, Scrib ners, as well as in more popular magazines such as Peterson's Magazine; nearly an

equal number of topical essays in The In

dependent and Saturday Evening Post; dozens of children's stories published in Youth's Companion; hundreds of letters; and her work as managing editor of the New York Tribune, she reveals a lifelong focus on figures like the Korl Woman, who "be hungry ... for summat to make her live" (33). Her fiction sets forth vivid and

particularized portraits of freed slaves, un married women, unpublished authors, Jersey Coast fishermen, North Carolina mountain women and urban mulattoes who find their voice. Like her narrator in "Life in the Iron Mills," who reiterates, "I dare not make my meaning clearer," and "I dare not put this into words," Davis per sisted in doing just that. Indeed, in a signifi cant number of stories, Davis viewed the process by which people become inar ticulate as a metaphor for historical

changes in the late nineteenth century. Clearly, Rebecca Harding Davis faced

financial and editorial pressures to com

promise the substance and style of her fic tion. Yet in her mysteries, regional leg ends, travel narratives, Civil War stories and sentimental romances, she managed to



Jean Pfaelzer 41

use contemporary popular genres against themselves, in a sense deconstructing them as she went along. Davis's decision to ulive in the commonplace" (MH 104) called into question sentimentality's telos of stasis, order and conformity, the conven tional end of much nineteenth-century popular fiction. Her disruptive use of realism undermines generic functions, seeks discontinuities and emerges as

perspective as well as technique. Further, her fascination with hunger and silence mark a critical subjectivity in her charac ters. Influenced initially by Nathaniel

Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Johann Goethe, she assigned political meanings to narrative. Moreover, Davis

was aware, as the Romantics were, that

the very fact of literary representation con stitutes social critique.

Born in 1830, Rebecca Blaine Harding grew up in Wheeling (then in Virginia), a

booming town at the crossroads of the Ohio River and the National Road. From her father, Richard Harding, she acquired a hatred for "vulgar American life." From her mother, Rachel Leet Wilson, whom Davis called "the most accurate historian and grammarian I have ever known, [who] had enough knowledge to fit out half a dozen modern college bred women"

(Langford 4), she inherited a love of literature and a sense of history, style and

precision. Rebecca was educated at first by tutors and later at the Female Seminary in

Washington, Pennsylvania, from which she

graduated at the head of her class. Thereafter, her education depended on that of her younger brother Wilson, who attended Washington College in Penn

sylvania and passed along his knowledge of the German language and his fascina tion with German romanticism, in par ticular Goethe and Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

In 1863, following the publication of "Life in the Iron Mills," Margret Howth, and several Civil War stories, Davis finally visited Boston to meet her publisher, James T. Fields, and his wife, Annie

Fields, herself a poet and central literary presence with whom Davis carried on a

lifelong correspondence. In New England,

Davis was honored by Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Bronson Alcott and even the reclusive Hawthorne.

Another fan, a young Philadelphia at

torney named L. Clarke Davis, had written Davis encouraging letters and paid one brief visit to Wheeling. Returning home from Boston, she visited him for several

days and quietly became engaged. Within the year, Davis was married, boarding with Clarke's sister in a crowded house in

Philadelphia, writing anonymously for Peterson's Magazine (of deep-dyed-villains and dark-conspiracies repute), and trying to support her family by writing mysteries, thrillers and a series of stories about talented women who surrender their ar tistic ambitions to preserve their marriages. By January of 1864, she writes to Annie that she's uso busy sewing?a kind of sew

ing I never knew before"?a shy reference to a pregnancy marked by illness, depres sion and a dangerous delivery. But the birth of Richard Harding Davis (the first of three children), the end of the Civil War, the Davis's move to a private house and Clarke's switch to a successful career in

journalism launched a long period of pro ductivity and prosperity for Davis.

Taken as a whole, Davis's opus involves an ongoing critique of romanticism, both in its formal and ideological configurations.

The narrator of Margret Howth observes, "Once or twice I have rashly tried my hand at dark conspiracies, and women rare and radiant in Italian bowers; but I have a friend who is sure to say, Try and tell us about the butcher next door, my dear'

" (MH 104). While many of her texts

do invoke the "sentimental procedure" and the lachrymose emotions it stimulates

(Fisher 91-9), Davis recasts literary con ventions to challenge such social and legal concerns as domestic abuse, post-war treatment of Afro-Americans, the lack of coastal lighthouses, and involuntary intern ment in mental institutions. In stories about

slavery and the Civil War and in John An

dross, her novel about the Whiskey Ring scandal, she repudiates romanticism's

distinction between character and culture. In regional stories set on the Jersey coast,



42 LEGACY

in West Virginia, Maine and North Carol ina, she challenges both the uninformed idealization and comic primitivism of con

temporary images of rural people and rural work. Further, Davis opposes the patriar chal attitudes in many reformist tendencies of romanticism. Her suspicious attitude toward power?often white, often wealthy, generally male?shapes her critique of a liberated imagination. In uThe Harmonists" and in Margaret Howth, she portrays Uto

pian visions and communities as authori tarian and a-historical. Utopia, she finds, dangerously elevates male subjectivity to the status of a political program. Overall, three concerns inform her writing: race, regionalism and women.

Of Davis's full-length novels, Margret Howth (1862) and Waiting for the Verdict (1868) most deserve modern critical atten tion. Margret Howth was a much modified version of The Deaf and The Dumb.1

Through her original title, she had sought to expose how an Indiana town's upper class?the "Deaf"?project their egotism onto the community as a whole through their social visions of self-reliance, pastor alism and communitarianism. True social conscience resides only in the "Dumb," the silenced women?Margret, an impoverished unmarried bookkeeper of the mill, and

Lois, a crippled mulatto peddler. Margret Howth is the story of the effects of a woolen mill on the psychological options of the townspeople. From the anger of a black convict who burns down the mill to the philanthropy of the mill owner who seeks to reform the community and control

Margret through his self-defined Utopia, Davis suggests how frontier industrialism deforms the human ego. Through layered discourses of sentimentality and realism, she invokes an empathic emotional reac tion and insists on its political implications. Prefiguring the apocalyptic metaphors of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee (1889) and Ignatius Donnelly's Caesars

Column (1890), the narrator comments:

I want you to go down into this common,

every-day drudgery, and consider if there

might not be in it also a great warfare. Not a serfish war; not altogether ignoble,

though even its only end may appear to

be your daily food. ... It has its slain.

Men and women, lean-jawed, crippled in

the slow, silent battle, are in your alleys, sit beside you at your table; its martyrs

sleep under every green hill-side. (6-7)

In addition to poverty and gender, Davis also had a lifelong concern with race, both as a cultural and historical determinant in itself and as an analogue for women's

marginality. Her representations of blacks were shaped by her upbringing in a border state on the one hand, and the restrictions of contemporary rhetorics on the other. In the years when Davis began writing for

publication, Wheeling became a center of abolition concerns, a crossroads on the

underground railroad, a site chosen by John Brown for a slave uprising and the

capital of West Virginia after it split off from

Virginia over the issues of slavery and union. Across the street from her house was the headquarters of General Fremont's Western Department of the Army, and Davis spent the early war years under mar tial law, living on the border of a battle

ground. From an abolitionist yet anti-war per

spective, Davis explores the experience of

slaves, freed slaves and mulattoes in essays on Northern blacks, in stories such as "John Lamar" (1862) in which an angry slave murders his master who has been captured by the Union Army, and in the novel

Waiting for the Verdict. The "verdict" is the situation of post-bellum blacks, viewed

through the figure of a prominent mulatto surgeon who has passed for white in the abolitionist circles of Philadelphia. Rejected by his white lover once his secret is revealed, the ostracized doctor volunteers to serve the Union Army as colonel of the first black

regiment and is shot on the march into Richmond.

During the era of Radical Reconstruc tion, Davis employed sentimental devices to explore racism, thus undermining the conservative nature of the genre. Despite its many stereotypes, Waiting for the Ver dict extends the range of intense emotions, often the reserve of white female characters, across racial lines.2 Like Harriet Beecher



Jean Pfaelzer 43

Stowe and Harriet Jacobs, Davis invokes

domesticity's promise of maternal safety, retreat, and purity to condemn slavery.3 Nonetheless, plantation scenes of implied rape and the sale of child slaves reveal the fallacies of domesticity as a protective social contract. Among her stories with

significant slave, black or mulatto char acters are "Blind Tom" (1862), "The Asbestos Box" (1862), "David Gaunt"

(1862), and "The Yares of Black Moun tain" (1875). In other stories, such as "Marcia" (1876) or "The Story of Christine" (1866), slavery is a metaphor for domestic life: when women lose economic and political control, they relin

quish authority in the home as well. For Davis, "regionalism" also became an

instrument to explore social history through finely observed characters. Start

ing with her first visit to Manasquan, near Point Pleasant, New Jersey, in 1865, she

sought to interpret the legends, people and

geography of the Jersey and Delaware coasts in such works as "Out of the Sea"

(1865), "Earthen Pitchers" (1873), "House on the Beach" (1876) and "Life

Saving Stations" (1876). Here, contact with the sea, the storms and the isolated

fishing villages fosters self-discovery through representations of nature that are localized and suggestive, yet less symbolic than those of Sarah Orne Jewett. These stories describe the "wreckers" (men who

pillage the shipwrecks while the widows and families rescue the sailors), the need for tourists in impoverished .beach towns and the migration of unemployed young fishermen and boat builders who seek jobs in the city. Images of isolated coastal com

munities, the economic power of the city and the compelling beauty of the barren shore shape these stories, in which Davis resists the local colorist's delight in the ec centric or "picturesque."

It is in her stories that focus on the lives of women that Davis most forcefully chal

lenges the rationalizations of sentimentali

ty, conflating the choices for women with the situation of American literature. Tales of women authors, actresses, journalists,

pianists and opera singers picture the train

ing, competition and professional bias women artists endure, the romantic and sexual isolation they face, and the pressures they feel to conform to popular tastes. As suggested by her early figure of the Korl Woman, Davis's heroines seek to

satisfy their artistic and intellectual hunger, hunger often stimulated by the loneliness of marriage and the poverty of daily life. In stories such as "Earthen Pitchers," "Mar

cia," "The Wife's Story" (1864) and "The Harmonists" (1866), she again confronts

sentimentality's paradoxical assertion of female superiority and subservience. Often the discourse of realism confronts the rhetor ics of sentiment within detailed images of the tensions of family life; romance and

marriage, as the only options for compa nionship and growth, are inadequate. Still, Davis frequently retreats from these aesthetic and domestic insurrections, and often restrains her rebellious heroines in the conventional literary closures of mar

riage, childbirth or death. To what degree did Davis succumb to

the pressures of writing for popular maga zines? To what degree did sentiment's

assumption of inevitability frustrate real ism's assumption of the possibility of per sonal and social choice? Davis criticism still needs to address these issues.4 Nonetheless, among Rebecca Harding Davis's achieve ments was to engage the discourses of realism and economics and to explore the restrictive tenets of domesticity?the illu sions that domestic culture can transcend

political culture, that the self can be divorced from social circumstances, that mother hood gives women a position of social power and moral redemption. Men and women in the fictive world of Rebecca Har

ding Davis confront the imperatives of

history and place.

Notes

Published serially in the Atlantic Monthly, Oct.

1861-Mar. 1862, as "A Story of Today." Republished as Margret Howth-A Story of Today by Ticknor and

Fields, in 1862. References to MH refer to this edi

tion.



44 LEGACY

2This is what Philip Fisher would term sentimentali

ty's "experimental, even dangerous, extensions of the

self of the reader . . . the experimental extension of

normality, that is, of normal states of primary feeling to people from whom they have been previously withheld" (98).

3See Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Femi nists in American Culture by Jean Fagan Yellin for a

discussion of the implications of domesticity in the

abolitionist movement.

4An edition of Margret Howth, edited and with an

introduction by Jean Fagan Yellin, is forthcoming from Feminist Press. Rebecca Harding Davis: A Scrib

bling Woman by Jean Pfaelzer is forthcoming from

University of Pittsburgh Press. Pfaelzer is also prepar

ing A Rebecca Harding Davis Reader, which will in

clude an extensive selection of Davis's short stories,

essays and correspondence.

Works Cited

Davis, Rebecca Harding. Letter to Annie Fields.

11 January 1864. C. Waller Barrett Collec

tion. University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

_. Letter to James T. Field. 10 May 1861. Papers of James T. Field. Huntington

Hartford Library, Pasadena, California.

_Life in the Iron Mills 1861. Old

Westbury, NY: Feminist P, 1972. _. Margret Howth? A Story of To

day. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862.

_. Waiting for the Verdict. NY: Sheldon and Co., 1868.

Fetterley, Judith. Introduction. Provisions: A

Reader from 19th-century American Wom

en. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.

Fisher, Philip. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in

the American Novel. NY: Oxford, 1985.

Langford, Gerald. The Richard Harding Davis

Years: A Biography of Mother and Son. NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1961.

Yellin, Jean Fagan. "The Feminization of

Rebecca Harding Davis." Margret Howth: A

Story of Today. 1862. NY: Feminist P, forthcoming.

_. Women and Sisters: The Anti

slavery Feminists in American Culture. New

Haven: Yale, 1989.

Selected Bibliography

Archives

A significant collection of correspondence and a

few manuscripts reside at the C. Waller Barrett

Collection, Alderman Library, University of

Virginia. Other correspondence and manu

scripts can be found in the James T. Fields Papers, Huntington Hartford Library.

Selected Primary Works uLife in the Iron Mills." 1861. Old Westbury,

NY: Feminist P, 1977, 1985. Margret Howth: A Story of Today. Boston:

Ticknor and Fields, 1862. "The Asbestos Box." Peterson's Magazine

Mar. 1862.

"John Lamar." Atlantic Monthly Apr. 1862.

"David Gaunt." Atlantic Monthly Sept.-Oct. 1862.

"Blind Tom." Atlantic Monthly Nov. 1862.

"The Wife's Story." Atlantic Monthly July 1864. "Out of the Sea." Atlantic Monthly May 1865. "The Harmonists." Atlantic Monthly May 1866.

"The Story of Christine." Peterson's Magazine

Sept. 1866.

Waiting for the Verdict. NY: Sheldon, 1868. "Earthen Pitchers." Scribner's Monthly Nov.

1873-Apr. 1874.

John Andross. NY: Orange Judd, 1874.

"The House on the Beach." Lippincott's Mag azine Jan. 1876.

"Marcia." Harper's New Monthly Magazine. 1876. LEGACY 4.1 (1987): 6-10.

"Life-Saving Stations." Lippincott's Magazine Mar. 1876.

Silhouettes of American Life. NY: Scribner's, 1892.

Bits of Gossip. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904.

Selected Criticism Austin, James C. "Success and Failure of

Rebecca Harding Davis." Midcontinent

American Studies Journal 3 (Spring 1962): 44-9.

Davis, Charles Belmont. Adventures and Let

ters of Richard Harding Davis. NY: Scrib

ner's, 1917.

Davis, Sharon M. "Rebecca Harding Davis: A

Continuing Misattribution." LEGACY 5.1

(1988): 33-4. Fetterley, Judith. Introduction. "Life in the Iron

Mills." Ed. Judith Fetterley. Provisions: A

Reader from 19th-century American Wom

en. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.

306-14.

Fisher, Philip. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in

the American Novel. NY: Oxford, 1985.

Grayburn, William F. "The Major Fiction of

Rebecca Harding Davis." Diss. Pennsylvania State U, 1965.



Jean Pfaelzer 45

Hesford, Walter. "Literary Context of Life in the

Iron Mills." American Literature 49.1 (1977): 70-85.

Langford, Gerald. The Richard Harding Davis Years: A Biography of Mother and Son. NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1961.

Malpezzi, Frances M. "Sisters in Protest: Rebec ca Harding Davis and Tillie Olsen." Re Artes: Liberales 12 (Spring 1988).

Olsen, Tillie. "A Biographical Interpretation." In

Life in the Iron Mills. Old Westbury: Feminist P, 1972. 69-174.

Pfaelzer, Jean. Introduction. "Marcia." By Rebec ca Harding Davis. LEGACY4.1 (1987): 3-5.

_"Rebecca Harding Davis: Domes

ticity, Social Order and the Industrial Novel."

International Journal of Women's Studies 4

(1981): 234-44. _"The Sentimental Promise and the

Utopian Myth: Rebecca Harding Davis's The Harmonists' and Louisa May Alcott's

Transcendental Wild Oats.' " American Tran

scendental Quarterly ns 3.1 (1989): 85-99. Sheaffer, Helen W. "Rebecca Harding Davis,

Pioneer Realist." Diss. U. of Pennsylvania, 1947.

Yellin, Jean Fagan. "The Feminization of Rebecca Harding Davis." Margret Howth: A

Story of Today. 1862. NY: Feminist P [forth coming].

from Bits of Gossip, 1904

That was the first peculiarity which struck an outsider in Emerson, Hawthorne, and the other members of the "Atlantic" coterie; that while they thought they were

guiding the real world, they stood quite outside of it, and never would see it as it was.

For instance, during the Civil War, they had much to say of it, and all used the same note of exaltation ... I remember

listening during one long summer morning to Louisa Alcott's father as he chanted

paeans to the war, the "armed angel which was wakening the nation to a lofty life unknown before."

We were in a little parlor of the Wayside, Mr. Hawthorne's house in Concord. Mr. Alcott stood in front of the fireplace, his

long gray hair streaming over his collar, his

pale eyes turning quickly from one listener to another to hold them quiet, his hands

waving to keep time with the orotund sen tences which had a stale, familiar ring as if often repeated before. . . .

I had just come from the border where I had seen the actual war; the filthy spew ings of it; the political jobbery in Union and

Confederate camps; the malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and glut ted by burning homes and outraged women; the chances in it, well improved on both sides, for brutish men to grow more brutish, and for honorable gentlemen to degenerate into thieves and sots. War

may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums. . . .

Even on the border, your farm was a

waste, all your horses or cows were seized

by one army or the other, or your shop or

manufactory was closed, your trade ruined. You had no money; you drank coffee made of roasted parsnips for breakfast and ate only potatoes for dinner. Your nearest kinsfolk and friends passed you on the street silent and scowling; if you said what

you thought you were liable to be dragged to the county jail and left there for months. The subject of the war was never broached in your home, where opinions differed; but one morning the boys were missing . . .

The parsnip coffee and the empty purse did give a sting to the great overwhelming misery, like gnats tormenting a wounded man.



rebecca harding davis (1831-1910)

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