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Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journalPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gwst20

Sculpture in the iron mills:Rebecca harding Davis's korlwomanMaribel W. Molyneaux aa Department of English , University ofPennsylvania , PhiladelphiaPublished online: 12 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Maribel W. Molyneaux (1990) Sculpture in the iron mills:Rebecca harding Davis's korl woman, Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal,17:3-4, 157-177, DOI: 10.1080/00497878.1990.9978803

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Sculpture in the iron mills:Rebecca Harding Davis'sKorl woman

MARIBEL W. MOLYNEAUX

Department of English, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

THE SUBJECT OF Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills (1861)is the industrial working class, a new subject in nineteenth-centuryliterature but one that had begun to be treated extensively in the Brit-ish industrial novels of the 1830s and 40s. At mid-century, however,American writers were more concerned with slavery and the threat ofwar than with industrial brutality; Ellen Moers writes that "no race ofmankind was so widely and commonly assigned to angry women [wri-ters] than the slave" (22), a subject Harding Davis herself would lateraddress in "John Lamar" (1862) and Waiting for the Verdict (1868). Butin 1861 Harding Davis directly identified herself with the problemsattending American industrialism, especially the plight of millworkerswho, in ways similar to slaves, were "victims of prejudice and oppres-sion" (Moers 22). Just as Harriet Beecher Stowe unmasks slavery'sdistortions of American democracy in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852),Rebecca Harding Davis shows in Life in the Iron Mills that the indus-trial structure being put into place would come to be seen at century'send as the "new American wilderness" (Hesford 70).

As much as Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) or Dickens's Hard Times(1854), Life in the Iron Mills is an important social document. GertrudeHimmelfarb argues that British factory novels brought anonymousworkers, however fictionalized, to the attention of "an increasinglysensitive and vigilant social conscience" (405). If Mary Barton was, asMoers argues, the "first great [British] factory novel" (35), Life in the

Women's Studies, 1990 © 1990 Gordon and Breach, Science Publishers, Inc.Vol. 17, pp. 157-177 Printed in Great BritainReprints available directly from the publisherPhotocopying permitted by licence only

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Iron Mills was, as Walter Hesford claims, a pioneer exploration of thefrequently unacknowledged social realities generated by Americanindustrialism (82). Despite the appearance of Melville's "The Paradiseof Bachelors, the Tartarus of Maids1' (1855) six years earlier, Life in theIron Mills, published anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly, was the firstmajor American work to represent in explicit detail the painful condi-tions of the American mill system.

Industrial novels were, however, more than instruments of reform;while they gave fiction a new seriousness, the forms of physical laborthat underlay their narrative structures also functioned for writers asrepresentations of imaginative production. Not surprisingly, textile-making, Britain's largest nineteenth-century industry, was one of themost extensively used analogues for imaginative labor (Scarry 99). Theblind seamstress Margaret Jennings in Mary Barton, the sweatshoptailors of Alton Locke, Dickens's Stephen Blackpool at his loom, andCharlotte Bronte's juxtaposition of Caroline Helstone at her needlewith unemployed clothmakers in Shirley (1849) have come to representboth the dark underside of Britain's spectacular industrial growth andthe making and telling of stories. In America, Melville's "Paradise ofBachelors, Tartarus of Maids" extends the making of textiles into anindustry derived form clothmaking, the making of paper from rags;while Melville's tale indicts industrial mechanization and brilliantlydescribes the sexual division of labor, it also depicts the machine, asElaine Scarry argues, as a hauntingly beautiful image of the creativeprocess (100).

Similarly, Harding Davis equates writing with both social actionand creative energy. Life in the Iron Mills is a serious attempt to influ-ence the larger cultural structure of which it is part. As the work of aself-taught woman artist who sees in the industrial oppression of mill-workers an analogue for the socio-economic and aesthetic oppressionof women, however, the tale also seeks to dissolve the disjunctionbetween what is perceived as "woman's work" and what womanperceives her work to be. Jean Pfeelzer writes that Harding Davis"identifies with the emotional suffocation of industrial poverty and thefactory worker's rebellion against it, suggesting [her] own discontentwith her arid intellectual and sexual life" (234-35). Anxiously seekingaesthetic recognition from a literary establishment that, despite thesubstantial achievements of a few women writers, was defined asalmost entirely male, Rebecca Harding Davis turns away from the

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domestic arena associated with "woman's work" and intrudes herselfinto an industrial workplace perceived as foreign to women. She takesas her subject one of the most potent images of worldly, "mysterious"male privilege and male work in the nineteenth century: the iron mill.

In Life in the Iron Mills, iron-making — in particular, the Bessemersteel-making process — functions as both the overarching materialrepresentation of imaginative production and the object of socialcriticism. The story has at its center the physical and imaginativetransformations registered in the activity of work, the fundamentalactivity through which human beings recreate themselves as theycreate the world. Though the interaction between physical andimaginative labor may be more difficult to see in a task like iron-puddling than in spinning and weaving, forms of work richly asso-ciated with story-telling, Harding Davis routinely uncovers the totalityof that interaction in Life. In the mill's operations, the imagination iscredited as capable of conceiving a massive act of invention, the separ-ation of ore into pig-metal and the waste material called korl, yet thebulk and unwieldiness of ore convey the enormous physical exertionrequired to effect the process. In itself, the mill's operation is a benign,if an awesome, objectification of the human capacity first to imaginethe transformation of ore into pig-metal and korl, and then to transferthe imagined objects out of the mind and into material objects in theworld (Scarry 100).

But if the mill is on the one hand a benign image of the humancapacity to create, this "city of fires" (20) is conversely a demonicimage of both imaginative and economic exploitation of the workerswho operate it. While the owners and managers of the mills alignedthemselves with the inventive aspects of steel-making in the nineteenthcentury, they sought to deny or to extinguish the imaginative capacit-ies of the iron-puddlers whose physical labor was required to completethe process. Metal, whether represented explicitly as pig-metal orimplicitly as money, is everywhere in Life in the Iron Mills a counter forwhat Harding Davis saw as male values and male power; the produc-tion of pig-metal and korl is analogous to the production of class divi-sions. In the same way that pig-metal gets lifted away from korl in themill's Dantean landscape, the money and economic profit that pig-metal signifies in the industrial economy gets lifted away from the"ghastly wretches" who make it. Writing at a time when steel-makingrequired the mills to operate around the clock, Harding Davis draws

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an analogy between millworkers and slaves by describing the mill'soperations as a "vast machinery of system by which the bodies ofworkmen are governed" (19), a system in which waged workers wereincreasingly dehumanized by a rapidly expanding manufacturingeconomy that saw them not as full human beings but as so manyexpendable "hands." Millowners rated workers, as Stephen Blackpoolgloomily notes in Hard Times, as "so much power, [regulated] as ifthey was figures in a soom [sum], or machines" (116). In Life in the IronMills, the mill's overseer, Clarke, lists "hands employed, twelvehundred" alongside economic assets such as coal facilities and theannual sinking fund (28). Kirby, son of the millowner, argues that itwould be a "kindness" if the workers "who do the lowest part of theworld's work [were] machines" (34); Harding Davis illustrates justsuch a process of human mechanization in Deb Wolfe. Deb works in atextile mill as a "picker," a word that designates both the machine andthe worker who tends it, making worker and machine "linguisticallyone" (Pfaelzer 240); as in "Tararus of Maids," where Melvilledescribes the silent maids as "cogs to the [machine's] wheels," humanlabor becomes an anonymous function of the machine.

The reduction of waged workers to disembodied statistics ormachines in the entrepreneurial imaginations of the men who employthem is perhaps the most rankling of industrialism's impersonalrelationships and the one closest to Harding Davis's own sense ofanonymity. Like Manchester's textile workers, the iron-puddlers shedescribes are a presence willfully forgotten by a man like Kirby who,when he visits the mill, "lookfs] curiously around, as if seeing the facesof his hands for the first time" (27). Harding Davis was acutely awarethat the anonymity and uniformity required of industrial millworkerswas only one element of a larger social reality that expected a similardocility from women. As is equally evident in Bronte's Shirley,however, where Hollow's mill and Hollow's cottage register the ambi-guities of a single socio-economic structure, or in Stowe's Uncle Tom'sCabin, where marketplaces and kitchens revolve around each other inunceasing narrative dialogue, Harding Davis understood that the"public" world of historical change and the seemingly unrelated "priv-ate" lives of middle class women are inseparable. In a sense, she foundherself writing from the borders of both the intertwined worlds presentin Life, making marginality and its opposite, the dissolution of bound-aries, significant issues in her story. As the daughter of a prosperous

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businessman, she wrote from the margins of Life's world of grindinglabor, a narrative position she repeats in Margret Howth, first publishedas A Story of Today (1862): "I write from the borders of the [industrialworkplace], and I find in it no theme for shallow argument or flimsyrhymes" (3). As a woman who did not fit into (was, in fact, acutelydistressed by) the class and gender stipulations of the privileged worldinto which she was born, however, Harding Davis also wrote from themargins of her own.

Conscious that the conventional perception of marriage and moth-erhood as women's only goals extended into a belief that romanticand domestic fiction was the special sphere of women writers, Hard-ing Davis perceived her portrayal of industrial brutality to be a radicalact for a woman of her privileged class. Less sure of herself than Stowe,who was an experienced writer by the time she wrote Uncle Tom'sCabin, Harding Davis not only wrote in secret but chose anonymousauthorship and the use of a male hero in order to enter literary andindustrial realms she perceived as otherwise hostile to her. She makesthe trepidation she felt at entering male strongholds explicit in MargretHowth, in which the narrator claims to have found the story in an oldtextile mill's account book, a "ledger . . . kept by a woman" (8). Whatthe narrator perceives in Margret's "book" is a woman writer trembl-ing with apprehension as she begins to record the mill's "story" ofindustrial greed and worker distress; she writes, "I am sure thewoman's hand trembled as she took up the pen . . . for it was a new,desperate adventure for her, and she was young, with no faith inherself (9).

In some ways, Harding Davis's insecurity seems puzzling. TillieOlsen argues that the 1850s were good years for women writers: the"upswelling women's rights movement had created an atmosphere, achallenge, an interest" in serious writing by women (82). The AtlanticMonthly, one of America's most prominent and respected literary jour-nals at mid-century, openly courted new writers — in particular,women writers — and new kinds of writing. Yet Wheeling itself wassomething of a literary backwater because of its regional isolation fromplaces like New England and New York, America's literary centers.Worse, Harding Davis was unable to discuss her aesthetic interestseven within her own family. Unsympathetic to her heady delight inAmerica's national literature, her father dismissed American writersaltogether, male as well as female; "no other viewpoint was expressible,"

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writes Olsen (76), certainly not that of a dependent daughter.Ironically, the constraints women experience in telling their own

stories had already been spelled out in an earlier American tale,Melville's "The Paradise of Bachelors, The Tartarus of Maids," wherethe depiction of the industrial division of labor as sexual in naturespills over into the literary realm. As in Uncle Tom's Cabin, where"upper" and "lower" socio-economic levels divide white male slaveowners from white women and slaves, Melville describes a two-tieredsocio-economic structure that defines the ownership class as male andanonymous labor as female. The bachelor lawyers, by-products ofindustrialism and the legal entanglements of the marketplace, inhabitan all-male paper world of money and privilege that, by way of the"pleasant stories" (208) they tell each other, claims proprietorship overlanguage itself. In contrast, the narrator, also a bachelor, stresses thatthe mute, machine-tending maids, "mere cogs to the wheels" (216) ofan industrial system under male guardianship, are required to servethe machine in passive silence: the "human voice was banished fromthe spot" (217-18). Though Melville's tale asserts the fitness of mill-workers as a literary subject, his allegorical language, his literary allu-sions, and his intimate knowledge of both the world's events and theimportant men who control them prevents the maids' participation inthe rarified social, economic, and aesthetic realms inhabited bybachelors. When the narrator appropriates the telling of the maids'story onto himself, the very paper they make becomes the vehicle thatperpetuates his male literary authority, dooming them to permanentsilence.

As Melville does in "Paradise of Bachelors," Harding Davis attri-butes historical references and elevated literary language to the menwho dominate the socio-economic structure of Life in the Iron Mills, butshe differs from the male writer in that the workers whose story shetells gradually emerge from the background to speak for themselves asshe herself wants to do. Allying herself with working men and womenas Bronte allies herself with unemployed weavers and Stowe identifieswith slaves, Harding Davis represents the difficulty of becoming awriter through a pair of immigrant workers as unfamiliar to Americanreaders as the slaves Stowe introduced: the Welsh iron-puddler andsculptor Hugh Wolfe and the woman who loves him, his hunchbackedcousin Deb. Concerned with her own limited power to "create theworld," Harding Davis transposes her anxiety about literary achieve-

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ment into the mill where it is magnified both by Hugh's analogousproblems of self-creation as a sculptor and by Deb's thwarted love forthe male artist. The aesthetic and industrial economies are linked inthe iron mill. The mill is simultaneously the place of Hugh's dailylabor and the subject and setting of his art; physical making and theauthorial act are deeply embedded in each other in an environmentthat discourages imaginative development. Harding Davis's problemis the same as the millworkers' problem, that is, to dispel the anonym-ity suggested by the very phrase "working class" and thereby givevisibility to the woman writer. Despite her retreat to anonymousauthorship in Life in the Iron Mills, she understood that such a retreatcarried risks; by masking the constrained female experience that ledher to identify with powerless millworkers, she risked obscuring thestory's referential center, her own coming into being as a writer. Shegoes about revealing herself in at least two closely related ways, waysthat intersect in the startling figure of the korl woman, a giant figure ofa woman Hugh carves from korl. First, she employs the intrusivenarrative voice of a self-announcing woman writer and second, shefictionalizes aspects of herself and displaces them onto Hugh and Deb.

Though Hugh Wolfe gradually emerges at the ethical center of Lifein the Iron Mills, the narrator is the tale's strongest personality and itsorganizing principle. The mediating arc across which the readerbecomes implicated in the Wolfes' story, she binds herself to Hughand Deb by beginning her story in the very house where they livedthirty years earlier, collapsing the temporal boundaries between thewoman writer and the fictional realm inhabited by the male artist andhis crippled cousin. While the narrator begins her story in the role ofmiddle-class observer, tapping at the window that separates her fromthe "drunken Irishmen [and] foul smells" (11) in the crowded street,the gloomy pall of industrial smoke that cloaks the town penetratesinto her isolated room and links her enclosed domestic world with thestifling industrial atmosphere of the town itself. In the room with herare a smoke-covered, broken statue of an angel and a "dirty canarychirp[ing] desolately in a cage" (12). In the angel, Harding Davis cari-catures the nineteenth-century idealization of woman as the "angel inthe house" in a world that is, like Deb, deformed by class and genderinequity; in the imprisoned canary and its desolate song, she firstsuggests that Hugh's dream of escape from the mill has beencorrupted by the marketplace values that govern both public

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and private life.By story's end, the room in which the narrator begins the story is

transformed into a woman's library, the writer's place of labor.However, the difficulties she experiences in telling her story reveal thatif she easily identifies herself with a broken angel and an imprisonedsinger, she does not find it quite so easy to align herself with the seem-ingly impenetrable world of male pirivilege that is as integral a part ofthe "stifling" industrial world as drunken Irishmen. She writes for amiddle-class audience represented in the narrative by a group of malevisitors to the mill: Kirby; Dr. May, a town physician; and Mitchell,"a stranger in the city, — spending a couple of months in the bordersof a Slave State, to study the institutions of the South" (29). Thoughher audience would prefer to avert its glance from an underclass bothforeign and potentially threatening, "the narrator's task," writesFetterley, "is to make her readers see what is currently invisible tothem" (Provisions 310). To dispel her fear that the woman writer, likethe story she tells, is permanently alien in a world where the twin gulfsof class and gender may be unbridgeable, the narrator presents theiron mill as a mysterious, almost inaccessible "secret" space that canbe entered only through the act of narration itself. As if she imaginesherself as a writer and simultaneously offers evidence of her achieve-ment, she makes her voice a palpable presence in the narrative, onethat is in continual dialogue with the reader.

In striving for artistic authority the narrator duplicates what Lawr-ence Lipking, in an exploration of the beginning and ending of poeticcareers, describes as the writer's "enormous will to discovery" (6) ofthe self as a poet. In an analysis of Keats's "This living hand,"1 a poemfragment that graphically projects poetic immortality, Lipking notesthe "extraordinary self-consciousness that dr[ove Keats] to watch hisown hand in the process of writing/' In the poem's haunting conclud-ing lines — "see here it is — I hold it towards you" — Keats extendshis hand as if expecting us to return the gesture; we are invited toaccept in the gift of a poem "the reality of the donor" (Lipking 183,182).

Echoing Keats's poem, Harding Davis's story about industrialmisery, though perhaps an unwelcome gift to readers who wouldprefer to see neither the misery nor the woman writer who describes it,also attempts to project into her audience's consiousness 'the reality ofthe donor." Like Keats offering his hand, the narrator's voice goads us

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not only to witness events through her eyes but, in effect, to "see" herrecounting them. "Stop a moment," she commands us in a verbalgesture later duplicated in the physical gesture of the korl woman'soutstretched arms; we can almost feel her hand on our coat-sleeve asshe leads us into "t' Devil's place" (20), the iron mill where the korlwoman waits:

Stop a moment. . . . I want you to hear this story. There is a secret down here, in thisnightmare fog, that has lain d u m b for centuries. . . . I dare make my meaning noclearer, but will only tell my story. (13-14)

Inventing an image of herself as a storyteller in this passage, thenarrator implicitly begins to describe, in her account of Hugh'sstruggle to create himself as an artist, the difficult act of story-tellingitself. By transforming herself in the story's concluding pages into anactor in the story we have witnessed her write, the narrator becomes,as much as any narrator can become, an inscription of the womanwriter's own self.

Hugh Wolfe functions as a thinly-disguised surrogate for thiswoman artist; Harding Davis tells his story as a way of making herown "hunger to know" visible. As commentators on Life in the IronMills consistently note, Harding Davis sets Hugh apart from otheriron-puddlers by "feminizing" him: "his muscles were thin, his nervesweak, his face (a meek woman's face) haggard, yellow with consump-tion. In the mill he was known as one of the girl-men: 'Molly Wolfe'was his sobriquet" (24). Hugh's "feminine" traits make him an outcastamong workers we would otherwise expect to his allies, but what mostisolates him is his art. Out of the korl that is both the product of hislabor and the material of his art, Hugh carves figures "hideous [and]fantastic enough, but sometimes strangely beautiful" (24). The statuesrepresent what is most precious to Hugh, his "groping passion forwhatever was beautiful and pure" (23), and, in the material fromwhich they are made, what is most repellant to him; the korl, a "light,porous substance, of a delicate, waxen, flesh-colored tinge" (24), signi-fies the wasted flesh, the terrible vulnerability, and the sheer expenda-bility of millworkers. The making of one object, the korl perceived aswaste in the industrial economy, into a second object, a work of artthat embodies only Hugh's wasted self, endlessly reproduces thecentral opposition of his life. Each statue makes visible Hugh'sstruggle to break free from the stultifying conditions of labor; each

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conveys a tale of continuing entrapment that he does not want to"read." Though he sometimes spends months carving a single statue,the statues continually fail in his eyes. When he smashes the figures assoon as they are complete and begins the cycle again, he merely retellsby his actions the story of his own vulnerability and expendability inthe mill.

The only one of the statues to evade destruction is the korl woman.The central image of the story, this ambiguous work of art is savedwhen Hugh's work is interrupted first by Deb and then by the groupof male visitors. As Harding Davis unfolds her narrative, the korlwoman gradually reveals herself as a figure of nearly infinitemutations. She links work and art within the iron mill and, as a "femi-nized projection of the rebel artist* (Pfaelzer 237), she links HardingDavis and Hugh in rebellion against the industrial economy. But shealso represents Deb, whose "secret of intolerable solitude" (22) Hard-ing Davis shares. In Hugh, Hardins; Davis describes what it is like tobe an artist suffering from economic deprivation, a man for whom theimaginatively devastating experience of work overshadows all otherforms of experience. In Deb, she introduces what Pfaelzer describes asthe "double oppression of working class women" (235), whose quoti-dian misery in the cotton mill is intensified by the experience ofgender, an experience that "explicitly crosses class lines" (Pfaelzer237). Out of her sympathy for Deb, Harding Davis forges a connectionbetween working-class woman and middle-class woman writer thatbecomes entangled with, and infringes on, her overt identificationwith Hugh's ambiguous gender and his artistry.

Harding Davis does not take us into the cotton mill where Deblabors as a disembodied function of the machine she serves.2 Instead,the brutalizing conditions of a workplace where workers anesthetizethemselves with whiskey to get through mind-deadening labor arevisible in the half-clothed, half-drunk women who emerge from it aftera day's work. An outsider among these women, not least because sheis sober, Deb finds little relief in the domestic sphere she so eagerlyhastens to reach. Despite nineteenth-century assumptions that homeand hearth provided a haven from the disordered relations of themarketplace, the lack of distinction between work and family life thatGillian Brown associates with slavery reappears in the working classfigure of Deb, "for whom there is no separation between economicand private status" (Brown 505). If for Stowe women's domestic labor

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is the source of social and economic reform, for Harding Davis thehome has been irreparably corrupted by the "confusion of the market-place" (Brown 505).

Besides Hugh and Deb, the family unit consists of Hugh's father, adrunken nonentity, and Janey, the helpless Irish girl Hugh loves. Inthe jealous tension between Deb and Janey, Harding Davis shows thateven here, on the lowest rung of the socio-economic ladder and amidstalmost indescribable material and imaginative distress, patriarchalhegemony remains firmly in place; the emotions and rhythms of dailylife revolve around the male. Janey looms larger in Hugh's imagin-ation than in physical reality; her shadowy presence in the narrative ismore an imaginative projection of his "fierce thirst for beauty" (25)than a realization of character. To Deb, however, Janey's "dark blueeyes and lithe figure" (23) are rankling reminders of her own deformedbody. Deb suffers from the painful knowledge that Janey's delicatebeauty attracts the male artist in the same measure that "his soulsicken[s] with disgust at [Deb's] deformity, even when his words [are]kindest" (23). In a grotesque gesture of courtship, Deb drags herselfthrough the cold and rain to the iron mill to bring food to Hugh that,like her love, he does not want. Though Hugh eats the food out of"kindness," his kindness is profoundly impersonal; just as Kirby willlater speak kindly to Hugh because "it was his habit" (38) to patronizeworkers otherwise despised, Hugh is "kind to [Deb] in just the sameway" (22) as he is to the rats that swarm through the Wolfes' cellarrooms. Bound by economics to the textile mill where every day thepicking machine appropriates her labor and denies her the right to tellher own story, shamed and humiliated within the family by Hugh'sdisgust and Janey's condescension, Deb is, like Harding Davis, bothpart of and not part of the two worlds she inhabits.

Fetterley describes Deb as a model of female constraint, a womanwho registers Harding Davis's failure to imagine for her characteranything other than the "most traditional of women's stories, that offrustrated love and hopeless self-abnegation" (312). Yet Deb is a keyfigure in developing the story's plot, which centers around an act oftheft. Late in the story, Deb transforms herself from the symbolicbroken angel gazing silently heavenward in the story's early pages into"t' witch dwarf (43).3 Subversively working through masculineassumptions in order to evade them, Deb exploits the "needs of[Hugh's] male ego" (Gilbert and Gubar 473) when she offers him the

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money that signifies male power in Life in the Iron Mills. While Fetter-ley argues that Deb merely acts for Hugh when she secretly transfersthe money taken from Mitchell's pocket to the sleeping ugh's (313),Deb in fact initiates a test of the male artist's social and aestheticintegrity. Hugh must decide between returning the money, whichmeans remaining in the mill, or keeping the money, which representsan escape from misery and the capacity to be like Mitchell, a manwhose physical beauty and intellectual powers of discernment attractthe artist in Hugh and make him aware of his own debased mind andbody. When nineteen-year-old Hugh decides to keep the money, he iscaught and sentenced to nineteen years in prison, a formalization ofthe death sentence implied in mill work itself. Though Deb realizesthat Hugh contemplates suicide in his jail cell, she does nothing toprevent him; instead, like a lethal "belle dame" in whose face we seenot sorrow but "the stuff out of which murderers are made" (61), shewaits mutely in her own cell as his life ebbs away.

But Deb has worked from the beginning toward shaping Hugh'slife and his art by entwining her story with his.As the story's quintess-ential outsider, she enters the rigidly "masculine" iron mill al;mostunnoticed by either Hugh or the mill's visitors. As if in emulation ofthe artist's "will to discovery," however, she begins to dispel her anon-ymity when she covertly insinuates her story of unrequited love andunspeakable misery into Hugh's an. Deb lies across a heap of korl"like a limp, dirty rag." As the material's "half-smothered warmthpenetratefs] her limbs," Deb's "groping, passionate love" (21) for themale artist seems to penetrate into the interior of the flesh-coloredkorl. The boundary between woman and industrial refuse, betweenanimate being and inanimate object, becomes indistinct.

Thus, when the korl woman appears out of the mill's darkness asthough looming up out of the dark interior of Hugh's mind, her "armsflung out in some wild gesture of warning" (30), she bears many levelsof inscription. She appears for a moment to be an animate being: "Ithought it was alive" (31), says the startled Mitchell. In a sense, thekorl woman is "alive," an embodiment of the iron-puddler's imagin-ation, distorted by debasing labor. In the graceless but musculartension of her strong, naked body, she makes visible his "heavyweight of brain"; the eager longing in her "dumb face" asks the ques-tion his "weak, uncertain mouth" has no words to express: "Whatshall we do to be saved?" (35). As a woman formed out of the same

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refuse that is nearly indistinguishable from the human body of Deb,however, the korl woman also draws into herself and gives materialform to Deb's unspoken love for Hugh Wolfe. Finally, in thegesture of the korl woman's arms, outstretched as if to say, "Stop amoment, I want you to hear this story," she appears the shadowyfigure of the narrator. Now no longer in the shadows, the narrator's"enormous will to discovery" is visualized in the korl woman. Givingtestimony to the "reality of the donor," the korl woman is a materializ-ation in the text of the narrative act: an image of the text in the text.

But it is not enough for the korl woman's heavily freighted image tohave emerged from the narrative shadows and to have intervened inthe privileged world of middle-class male discourse. The question shemutely asks remains to be answered by the reader's act of interpreta-tion. Though Kirby and Dr. May play key roles in Life in the Iron Mills,it is at Mitchell's coatsleeve that the narrator has been tugging allalong and it is his massive indifference she wishes to penetrate. Impli-cit in the confrontation between the korl woman's crouching figureand Mitchell, a man who "walk[s] like a king" (43), is Harding Davis'sconsiousness that recognition as a writer depends on readers like him,the greatly powerful men who dominate the literary establishment towhich she is attracted as Hugh is attracted to Mitchell and Deb toHugh.

The drama generated by the korl woman exposes the vacuous plati-tudes and indifferent, satanic machinations of the mill's visitors. Theiractions are not merely idiosyncratic but rooted in a widespread systemin which an undivided — but socially divisive — allegiance to the cashnexus overrides all other considerations. "All men taken singly, aremore or less selfish," writes Charlotte Bronte in Shirley, "and taken inbodies they are intensely so . . . the mercantile classes [are] oblivious ofevery national consideration but that of extending [their own]commerce" (182). Along with the overseer Clarke, each of the menwho visits the mill makes explicit that the money that could alleviatepoverty and enrich workers' lives is contaminated by the narrowmeanness of mercantile values. At first, Mitchell seems to be the bestof these men, singling out Hugh for attention and recognizing that thekorl woman "asks questions of God" (33). As if possessed by a "mock-ing devil" (36), however, Mitchell mercilessly shows how the reductionof all human relations and aspirations to the ethos of the industrialmarketplace seductively grasps the male artist's imagination. An intel-

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lectual dilettante who watches the happenings in the mill "with theamused air of a spectator at a play" (36), Mitchell behaves like ademonic puppeteer whose sole task is to awaken self-contempt inHugh and invite him to believe that money is the answer to the riddleof his life. Unlike the narrator, who places her own artistry at enor-mous risk in the encounter between Mitchell and the korl woman, heremains an emotionally detached observer who replies to the korlwoman through his cynical manipulations of the story's least sympa-thetic characters, Kirby and Dr. May. He initiates a debate aboutwhat the korl woman means (Hesford 77). During this debate, hedraws damning revelations of character from Dr. May, Kirby, andfinally from Hugh himself.

In Dr. May, Harding Davis unfolds the contamination of democ-ratic principles by industrial capitalism and the disintegration ofhuman ties generated in the mill along with pig-metal and korl. Maybuys self-approval by mouthing platitudes as if the iron-puddler werea child being given a lesson in democratic tenets of faith. "A man maymake himself anything he chooses" (37), May tells the credulousHugh. When Hugh asks for help as bluntly as the korl womanappeared out of the mill's darkness, however, May withdraws inastonished surprise at the iron-puddler's temerity. His chillingresponse — "I have not the money, boy" (37) — displays a heart firmlyanchored in economic self-interest and complacently closed againstworkers like Hugh. As if it were merely another commodity, the rightto self-advancement "belongs" to the: moneyed class. Kirby foregoesthe magnanimous charades that serve May. He bases his philosophyon the conviction that his responsibility toward the workers ends witha paycheck on Saturday night: "What has the man who pays [theworkers] money to do with their soul's concerns?" (35), he asks. ToKirby, iron-puddlers are impotent pawns of the industrial system,banded together in the service of the political interests of millowners.Kirby's father, for instance, "brought seven hundred votes to the pollsfor his candidate last November" (238). Kirby expresses his indiffer-ence to these men in the inexactness of his knowledge of them: "Ibelieve [the Invincible Roughs] is their name. I forget the motto: 'Ourcountry's hope,' I think" (28).

Yet through the question Hugh asks Dr. May and through theInvincible Roughs, an embryonic workers's union, Harding Davisintroduces a potential for rebellion among industrial laborers.

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Though May defines the korl woman as "the very type of her class,"he does not see, as Mitchell does, that her strength stands in directopposition to his classbound understanding of democracy's promises.In a rare moment of seriousness, Mitchell argues that social changecan only come about through a reconstitution of the factory proletariatfrom within its own ranks. "Reform is born of need, not pity," saysMitchell: "No vital movement of the people's has worked down, forgood or evil. . . . Some day, out of their bitter need will be thrown uptheir own light-bringer" (39). Harding Davis implies that this "light-bringer" might have been Hugh. Over the years, the iron-puddler hasevolved "a clear, projected figure of himself as a social reformer,"[a]ble to speak, to know what was best, to raise these men andwomen working at his side up with him" (40-41). Though the support-ing structure of this uprising is already in place in the InvincibleRoughs, working-class rebellion fails to materialize in Life when Hughcapitulates to the morally bankrupt middle class devotion to moneythrough the act of theft.

We may wonder whether, by asking Hugh to reject the money thatsymbolizes male power in Life in the Iron Mills, Harding Davis asksmore of him than he can reasonably be expected to perform. Certainlythe cumulative, hopeless, grinding nature of his life and work militateagainst his ability to resist a "mean temptation" (24). Yet in his hoursof indecision over whether or not to keep the money, the narratorunfolds with pitiless accuracy the logical inconsistency in his belief thatmoney will enable escape. When Hugh wakes on the "trial day" (50) ofhis life and finds the money in his pocket, he begins to experience thewish-fulfillment of a "dream of [escape into] green fields andsunshine" (12). His dream signifies an imaginative return to a prein-dustrial, pastoral America. Embedded in the dream is a kind of naivehope that he can recapture the time of innocence before he enteredthe mill. But the dream is as "worn out" as the caged canary's desolatesong; no amount of money can restore what has been taken from himbecause money itself signifies industrial power to make such a returnimpossible. The debilitating poverty that holds Hugh as tightly in itsgrasp as he clutches a few golden coins is itself a sign of the iron-puddler's incapacity to alter his own life except in industrial terms. If toDr. May the theft is an act of "ingratitude" after all his "kindness"(50),to Harding Davis, the unpardonable crime in Life in the Iron Mills isnot the theft of a few dollars, or even the theft of a few hundred dollars;

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it is theft as an emulation of the male aggression that lifts away all butthe meanest subsistence from workers like Hugh and Deb.

But Hugh's role in Life in the Iran Mills is not simply that of theoppressed worker callously punished for rebelling against industrialexploitation in its own coin. He is an. artist; the source and the subjectof his artistry has been the industrial working class, and it is finally inrelation to the artist's sense of responsibility toward the "men andwomen working at his side" that he is judged. Harding Davis's insistencethat the artist has a greater responsibility toward the relief of humanmisery than do other men and women is a recurrent theme in Britishand American factory novels. In the case of Kingsley's Alton Locke, forinstance, the twin lures of idealized "love" and aristocratic privilegetemporarily draw the poet away from his labor in behalf of starvingtailors; he redeems himself when he publishes "Songs of the High-ways," a book of poetry that brings to public attention the social evilsembedded in the tailoring trade. Similarly, Melville's narrator isbriefly lulled by the soporific comforts provided by the London bach-elors. Though telling the maids' story resembles the appropriation oflabor Melville ostensibly rails against, the very contradictions embeddedin the tale bring significant questions aibout the relation between humancreativity and industrial mechanization to American readers.

The issue of aesthetic responsibility to the worker is made particu-larly plain in Gaskell's Mary Barton, in which long hours of labor in themills and incessant needlework at home gradually blind MargaretJennings. As a surrogate for the socially concerned woman writer,Margaret becomes a singer of working class songs that describe theworker's poverty and the gruesome conditions of labor in theManchester mills; her singing engagements take her all over England,indicating Gaskell's desire to show that the plight of Manchester'stextile workers is not merely a local, but a national, concern. In contrastto Margaret, young Harry Carson, son of the millowner, caricaturesstarving workers in a cruel drawing that defines them as industrialcannon fodder. Gaskell is remarkably unsubtle about the cost of usingart to exploit rather than ameliorate industrial misery. Art that cele-brates mercantile values is morallv repugnant; Harry Carson ismurdered. Conversely, Margaret gives Mary Barton both moral andeconomic support; she recovers her sight.

As do Gaskell and the other writers mentioned above, HardingDavis insists that the artist's task is not merely to seek aesthetic satis-

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faction but to solicit social change. Because she so closely identifiesherself with Hugh Wolfe as she seeks a place in the literary world, shediscovers that his failure places her in an agonizing dilemma. As thenarrator's identity with the male artist becomes negative, she strugglesto establish herself as "not-Hugh." For a moment, she tries to extricateherself from him, to disown him, as he grasps the money. But to walkaway from Hugh as he walks away from his fellow workers would beto risk the same moral and aesthetic failure he does.4 Cast back onherself by Hugh's failure, the narrator assumes the task of "light-bringer"; unable to offer Hugh and Deb economic restitution, sheoffers them spiritual restitution. When Hugh finds himselfcondemned to a prison sentence that merely emulates the restraintsalready experienced in his life and work, he cuts his wrists with a "dullold bit of tin, not fit to cut korl with" (57). He dies with his armsoutstretched in a transfiguration of the korl woman, his body suffusedby the most symbolically female of the natural elements, the moon-light. Harding Davis breathes a note of imaginative optimism into Lifethrough a mysterious Quaker woman who erupts from the narrativeat the moment of Hugh's death. The Quaker woman, an image ofboth social and spiritual reform, subsequently buries Hugh in the"green fields and sunshine" or his dreams, implying that his suicide,like Deb's conversion into a pious Quaker after a brief, purgatorialprison sentence, is a spiritually redemptive triumph.

Life in the Iron Mills ends with open-ended images of a world in flux;the korl woman, now the narrator's companion in the library whereshe writes, gives form not only to Hugh's but to the narrator's "unfin-ished work" (64). The present is charged with the tangible social andaesthetic struggle of the past; as she earlier rose up out of the mill, thekorl woman's "bare arm stretched out imploringly in the darkness"(64) seems to push aside the curtain behind which the narrator keepsher hidden. At the same time, the intangible nature of an imaginedfuture is projected by the "flickering, nebulous . . . promise of thedawn" (65). While the narrator's "I write" (64) calls attention to hersuccessful self-inscription as a storyteller, it is not for her to answerthe "terrible dumb question" (14) the korl woman asks: "Is this theend? Nothing beyond?" (64). Just as Hugh offers the korl woman orKeats offers a poem in order to give "reality [to] the donor," HardingDavis "can only tell [her] story." She must finally trust in us toacknowledge her artistry.

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Yet the fragility of women's hold on literary authority can be seenin the difficulties Harding Davis experienced later in her career.Perhaps the most poignant tragedies of her literary life were the terri-ble fear of rejection that resulted in the gradual erosion of her artisticpower and, in particular, her turn to hack-writing after her marriagein 1863 to L. Clarke Davis. Isolated as she was in Wheeling, she didnot readily recognize that the publication and critical success of Life inthe Iron Mills was a fulfillment of the story's "promise of the dawn,"and the troubled relation between herself and Hugh Wolfe had ironicrepercussions when she sent the manuscript of what was to becomeMargret Howth to the Atlantic Monthly. In requiring Hugh to resistmarketplace ethics, Harding Davis; must have felt herself on sureground; she refused to accept an advance for Margret Howth because,as she wrote to the magazine's editor, "if I were writing with ahundred dollar bill before me, the article would be broad and deepjust $100 and no more — dollarish all over" (cited in Olsen 87). Yetthe novel suffered from a different kind of compromise, an aestheticcompromise. Still hungry for literary approval from men like themagazine's editor, she agreed to revise the manuscript when hecomplained that the story "assemblefd] the gloom too depressingly"(cited in Olsen 89).

In agreeing to the revisions, Harding Davis knew that she was beingasked to write the kind of conventional romance she found aestheti-cally alien. While the trembling hand with which Margret Howth, thestory's narrator, takes up the pen be:rays the woman writer's continu-ing literary insecurity, she defiantly insists that the story, like Life in theIron Mills, will not be the romantic tale women were expected to write.The Barriers between middle clas:5 and working class collapse inMargret, a middle-class woman, who, when her father falls on hardtimes, goes to work as a bookkeeper for a textile mill. A wage earningmember of the industrial world of which she writes, Margret acceptsas her work the redress of industrial evils. "You want something . . . tolife you out of this crowded tobacco-stained commonplace" (6), shewrites, but argues instead that she will "dig into this vulgar Americanlife, and see what is in it. Sometimes I think it has a new and awfulsignificance we do not see" (6). By novel's end, however, Margretabandons her work for the industrial poor and homeless and sinksinto domestic oblivion. With brilliant certainty, Harding Davis selectsthe perfect image of female surrender xo social and literary mandates

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when she sets Margret's decision to accept a proposal of marriage,thereby giving up the "higher work" of developing her "highestnature" (220), in a library. The betrothal tacitly represents romance asthe sum of a woman's life. But the very artificiality of this tacked-on"happy" ending, which includes the absurdly fortuitous discovery of oilon the Howth's property, draws attention to the painful inadequacy ofthe romance plot to heal the physical and emotional crippling of theindustrial workers described in the novel's pages. It is as if the revisionthat guaranteed that the story would be published had to be held upto ridicule in order to preserve the artistic integrity compromised bythe revision.

After her own marriage, however, Harding Davis found herselfcaught up in the same cash nexus that destroyed Hugh Wolfe in Lifein the Iron Mills. On the one hand, she never ceased to identify with thedifficult social, economic, and political issues of her time, and to takesocial injustice as her subject. In Waiting for the Verdict, for instance,written while the Civil War was still going on, she explores the socialand racial hostilities that did not vanish with the emancipation ofslaves who had neither education nor work. On the other hand, theneed for money led her to sacrifice her particular genius to the econ-omic exigencies of the literary marketplace. Clarke Davis, a youngman struggling to establish his own career, viewed his wife's "aspir-ation to art" with indifference; he saw "writing as [a] journalisticcommodity, not . . . as literature" (Olsen 145). While Harding Daviscontinued to write for the Atlantic Monthly, she also began spinning off"dollarish" pot-boilers for Peterson's, a magazine which specialized in"thrillers, Gothics, mysteries, [and] plot romances" (Olsen 113),because it paid so much better than the Atlantic. Most damaging ofall, when she agreed to serialize Waiting for the Verdict because ofmoney problems, she subjected "a book that demanded all her powers. . . [to her publisher's] inexorable monthly deadline" (129). In conse-quence of her disappointment at what she saw as the novel's aestheticflaws, she never tried to write a serious work again.

It is especially right, then, that Life in the Iron Mills should end in alibrary with a woman writer who describes the making of a femaleliterary history as "unfinished work." In the image of the korl woman,Harding Davis brings the special problems of the woman worker andthe woman writer into focus in a space of labor that, like the iron mill,was once the exclusive province of male work and male artistry. The

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korl woman's outstretched arms draw our attention not only to theindustrial misery Rebecca Harding; Davis takes as her special subjectbut to "woman's work" as textual production.

Notes

1. This living hand, now warm and capableOf earnest grasping, would, if it were coldAnd in the icy silence of the tomb,So haunt thy days and chill thy dreamng nightsThat thou would wish thine own heart dry of bloodSo in my veins red life might stream again,And thou be conscience — calm'd — see here it is —I hold it towards you —

2. For a description of mill conditions in the early nineteenth century, see ThomasDublin's descriptions of Yankee women in the Lowell textile mills; Dublin'sstudy emphasizes both the economic independence resulting from women'swaged work in the mills and the role of women in early union movements. JulieA. Matthaei, if less sanguine than Dublin about the link between mill work andfemale autonomy, also sees women's work for wages, even if temporary, as an"important and special interim" (156) of independence between adolescence andmarriage. W. Elliott Brownlee and Mary M. Brownlee discuss the degenerationof factory conditions that had occurred by mid-century (see Chapter III).

3. For an extended analysis of the intersection of women's conventionally submis-sive passivity and her subversive creative energy, see Nina Auerbach. "[T]hedemonic angel rises from within the angel in the house" (186), writes Auerbach,describing a transfiguring phenomenon readily apparent in Deb.

4. For a description of the moral implications registered in the act of disowningeither one's own body or the body of scmeone else, see Elaine Scarry 112-14.

Works cited

Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge:Harvard UP, 1982

Brown, Gillian. "Getting in the Kitchen With Dinah: Domestic Politics in Uncle Tom'sCabin." American Quarterly 36 (1984): 503-23.

Brownlee, W. Elliott and Mary M. Brownlee:. Women in the American Economy: A Docu-mentary History, 1675-1929. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976.

Davis, Rebecca Harding. Life in the Iron Mills. Ed. Tillie Olsen. 1861; rpt. Old West-bury, New York: Feminist, 1972.

.Margaret Howth: A Story of Today. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862.

. Waiting for the Verdict. New York: Sheldon & Co., 1868.Dublin, Thomas. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell,

Massachusetts, 1826-1850. New York: Columbia UP, 1979."Life in the Iron Mills." Provisions: A Reader from 19th-Century American Women. Ed. Judith

Fetterley. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. 306-14.

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Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writerand the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Hesford, Walter. "Literary Contexts in 'Life in the Iron Mills.'" American LiteratureXLIX (March 1977): 70-85.

Lipking, Lawrence. The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers. Chicago: Uof Chicago P, 1981.

Matthaei, Julie A. An Economic History of Women in America: Women's Work, the SexualDivision of Labor, and the Development of Capitalism. New York: Schocken, 1982.

Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1977.Olsen, Tillie.Biographical Interpretation. Life in the Iron Mills. By Rebecca Harding

Davis. Old Westbury, New York: Feminist, 1972.. "Tell Me a Riddle." Tell Me a Riddle. New York: Dell, 1956. 72-125.

Pfaelzer, Jean. "Rebecca Harding Davis: Domesticity, Social Order, and the Indus-trial Novel." International Journal of Women's Studies 4 (May-June 1981): 234-44.

Scarry, Elaine. "Work and the Body in Hardy and Other Nineteenth-Century Novel-ists." Representations 3 (Summer 1983): 90-123.

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