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South Atlantic Modern Language Association Sounding the "Muddy Depth of Soul-History": Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Influence on Davis's "Life in the Iron-Mills" Author(s): Joe B. Fulton Source: South Atlantic Review, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Autumn, 2003), pp. 38-61 Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3201474 . Accessed: 28/06/2014 18:20 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . South Atlantic Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to South Atlantic Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 91.220.202.116 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 18:20:20 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Sounding the "Muddy Depth of Soul-History": Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Influence on Davis's "Life in the Iron-Mills"

South Atlantic Modern Language Association

Sounding the "Muddy Depth of Soul-History": Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Influence on Davis's"Life in the Iron-Mills"Author(s): Joe B. FultonSource: South Atlantic Review, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Autumn, 2003), pp. 38-61Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3201474 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 18:20

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

South Atlantic Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to South Atlantic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.220.202.116 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 18:20:20 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Sounding the "Muddy Depth of Soul-History": Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Influence on Davis's "Life in the Iron-Mills"

Sounding the "Muddy Depth of Soul-History": Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Influence on Davis's

"Life in the Iron-Mills" JOE B. FULTON

"With Labourers and hodmen it is otherwise:- their virtue consists in punctual obedience, in the careful avoidance of all independent thought, and in confiding the direction of their occupations to other men."

-Fichte ("The Nature of the Scholar," 141)

ONE OF THE MOST COMPELLING--AND CONTROVERSIAL - FEA-

tures of Rebecca Harding Davis's "Life in the Iron-Mills" is the style employed by the author. The common subject mat- ter, the stylistic attempts at immediacy, and elements of anti- Romantic rhetoric bring to the fore questions of which "school" the work belongs to. From the opening lines, the narrator addresses the reader aggressively and abruptly, describing the ruined landscape and its ruined workers in ways that seem ahead of its time. For some, Davis is "a pio- neer of American realism" (Lasseter 168), while others view the story as "a work of pure naturalism" (Harris 5). Some hedge their bets and assert that the work has elements com- mon to "sentimentalism, romanticism, naturalism, and real- ism" (Rose 10). In reality, both the form and content of "Life in the Iron-Mills" emerge directly from Romantic sources. "Life in the Iron-Mills" is not a proto-realist declaration, but

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imprints Romantic ideals in order to qualify them, not extin- guish them.

Moreover, in "Life in the Iron-Mills," the Romantic influ- ence is not of the homegrown variety. While Davis responds to American Transcendentalism in her later works, that influ- ence came primarily after her visit to New England in 1862, after the publication of "Life in the Iron-Mills."1 Thus, when Beth Doriani credits Emerson's "transparent eyeball" for imagery of vision in the story, it would be more correct to cite Emerson's German sources of that imagery, which Davis was most familiar with (205-206). That source was Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who stated, "I am a living faculty of vision. I see ... my own vision. Hence this object is also thoroughly transparent to thy mind's eye, because it is thy mind itself" ("Vocation" 294).2 Buckley, too, is correct in asserting that Davis's work "rejects the notion implicit in transcendentalism of the divine- ly inspired artist as a self-reliant force" (67), but focuses on Davis's rejection of Emerson, which occurred later. Indeed, "Life in the Iron-Mills" is largely a response to Fichte's "Ego- Philosophy." Davis's interest in Fichte has long been known, but his influence has been consistently minimized. Pfaelzer, in Parlor Radical, credits Davis's brother Wilse for her knowl- edge of Fichte and German Romanticism:

In his summer vacations he would pass along to Rebecca his recent knowledge of the German lan- guage and his growing fascination with German Romanticism, in particular the works of Johann von Goethe and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Rebecca would later reject the German romantics as obsessive and egotistical, but Rachel Harding's and Nathaniel Hawthorne's interest in "commonplace folk" would most profoundly influence the course of her writings. (10)

Pfaelzer, like Harris, notes Fichte's influence only to dismiss it, implying that, unlike Hawthorne, it would not "profound-

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40 Joe B. Fulton

ly" influence the writer. Fichte's influence cannot be so easily dismissed. While in "Life in the Iron-Mills" Davis's indebted- ness to Fichte is hidden and there are no direct references to Fichte, educated people at the time would have identified her target when she referred to "you, Egoist, or Pantheist, or Arminian, busy in making straight paths for your feet on the hills, do not see it clearly" (4). Fichte's emphasis on the Ego and clarity of vision were hallmarks of his philosophy, and it is no exaggeration to assert that there would be no "Life in the Iron-Mills" as we know it without Fichte's influence. The very ethical and aesthetic elements that readers praise in Davis's work were gleaned from Fichte.

Hardly a household name today, Fichte's influence on his own and succeeding ages should not be understated. Labeled the "Great Ego" by Goethe and Schiller, Fichte's philosophy of aggressive action at any cost won him many converts (Addresses xvii). Reading any of Fichte's works, one can sense along with the inspirational power, a pervasive sense that the philosopher sought to inspire his readers to greater things, to make themselves superior. The ideal Fichtean hero would rise above the common herd, achieving greatness that others would, of course, acknowledge. Fichte famously stated, "I create myself" ("Vocation" 260). Davis viewed such a focus on the self as dangerous, as if by so doing one denied one's social origins and obligations. Pfaelzer has argued that "Unlike the solipsistic strain found in many transcendental- ists, Fichte believed in a socially ethical self that could with- stand pressures from the competitive and aggressive world of nature" (67). Nevertheless, solipsism remains a problem with what was called "Ego-Philosophy." In fact, Fichtean philoso- phy encourages the elevation of oneself above others and encourages viewing them specifically as "Other." In his "Addresses to the German Nation," Fichte extended his phi- losophy to the German state, elevating it, its people, and its language above all others, advocating "the complete and thorough regeneration of our race" (222). The noted historian

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of the Third Reich, William Shirer, identifies Fichte as one of the "intellectual roots of the Third Reich," arguing that his ideas were the very ones "we have seen Hitler putting down in Mein Kampf" (98).

In Margret Howth, which Davis published immediately after "Life in the Iron-Mills," the character Holmes embodies a Fichtean type, with the narrator explicitly stating that he has "faith in Fichte" (244). On May 10, 1861, Davis wrote her pub- lisher, James Fields, to query him about this element: "Would the character of Holmes be distasteful to your readers? I mean-the development in common vulgar life of the Fichtean philosophy and its effect upon a self made man, as I view it?" (qtd. in Pfaelzer 249-50). Although it is in the later novel that Davis focuses on a person who had, in fact, lifted himself up, a person who could announce along with Fichte, "I create myself," there is an interesting connection here to "Life in the Iron-Mills." Davis desired to analyze "the devel- opment in common vulgar life of the Fichtean philosophy"; she engaged in just such an analysis in "Life in the Iron-Mills" by establishing Hugh Wolfe as a Fichtean hero at the lowest level. The question she asks is this: would Fichte's philosophy work at the lowest level so that even an uneducated Welsh "puddler" could create himself?

The central issue in creating oneself is the relationship between human and environment, and one of Fichte's most profound influences on Davis was his view of nature. For Fichte, Nature demands action, for it itself is ceaseless action:

I seize on Nature in her rapid and unresting flight, detain her for an instant, hold the present moment steadily in view.... But Nature pursues her course of ceaseless change, and while I yet speak of the moment which I sought to detain before me it is gone, and all is changed. ("Vocation" 240-41)

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Arising in the midst of rushing time, a product of evolving nature, a human must act or be swept away. Fichte's descrip- tion of the human condition is telling:

I am that which the man-forming power of Nature- having been what it was, being what it is, and standing in this particular relation to the other opposing powers of Nature-could become.... It is this my inter-connexion with the whole system of Nature which determines what I have been, what I am, and what I shall be. ("Vocation" 250-51)

For Fichte, change is a function of existence that must be confronted by an evolving person. Within his view of the inevitability of change over time, he sees the possibility of an evolving consciousness dependent upon opposition, with the self becoming what it "shall be" by acting on objects, rather than being acted upon. In Fichte's view, the necessity of "becoming" overrides morality. As he asserts, "The ideas of guilt and accountability have no meaning but in external leg- islation" ("Vocation" 256).

As Davis begins to relate the story of Hugh Wolfe, she employs riverine terms relating his life to that of the Ohio River. John Conron observes that Davis links the river and the mill workers through a web of "manifold correspondences" (490). Again, this pertains to the Fichtean view of human interaction with Nature, that our "inter-connexion" with nature determines "what I have been, what I am, and what I shall be" ("Vocation" 251). Fichte employs water imagery throughout his own work as a typical trope of the "river of time" and our place within it. Davis adopts both Fichte's lan- guage and philosophy, adapting them in her novel to discuss what Hugh Wolfe has been, is, and shall be.

Imitating a river, Davis creates a text that flows, but not always seamlessly. Presenting herself as a cicerone to the mill town, her narrator leisurely introduces the environs. She

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begins by describing a "long train of mules" traversing the "narrow street," while "the river ... drags itself sluggishly along," and the "slow stream of human life creep[s] past." The narrative pace further slows when, as she informs the reader, "fragments of an old story float up before me" (11-13).

Abruptly, the narrator bids the reader to "Stop a moment," vividly conveying the idea that her text is at odds with a pas- sive floating through life. Stylistically, this is Davis's attempt to make contemporary history real, to stop the flow of time, too fast even if it flows "sluggishly" (12). She attempts to broach the distance between theory on paper and fact in real- ity, with her direct address demanding that the reader become involved in the moment, and not merely read to while away the time:

Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your dis- gust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me, - here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this story. There is a secret down here, in this night- mare fog, that has lain dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real thing to you. (13)

On one level, the imperative "Stop a moment" is Davis's attack on the river-like narrative she has been writing, and which might lull into complacency those who read in a "lazy, dilettante way" (13). Amy Lang labels the narrator's tone "accusatory" (133), Hood terms it "antagonistic" (73), and Scheiber even notes the "violence" of the narrative at this point (103). Kirk Curnutt's claim, however, that the narrator "speaks for us rather than to us" seems inaccurate (153), for one hears echoes of Fichte's direct addresses to his readers. At one point, he exclaims, "Would that I could make myself intelligible to you, - would that I could persuade you" (Nature 202). The line sounds very like Davis's "I want to

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make it a real thing to you" and her other direct appeals to the reader (13).

Sounding much like Fichte exhorting his audience, the nar- rator of "Life in the Iron-Mills" addresses a people that need chastisement and provocation, and Davis interrupts her long, rhythmic sentences with the three short ones to provide an abrupt introduction to the world of the iron mills. At the same time, Davis literally means for us to stop a "moment," that is, a moment of time. The river's determinism is most obvious as a metaphor of the flow of time. Davis's imperative thus demands her readers to "stop a moment" in order to escape both the tyranny of the environment and of time itself. As she does later in Margret Howth, Davis evinces an overriding con- cern to tell "A Story of To-day." Even as she attempted to write the story of the moment, though, Davis recognized the impossibility of absolute immediacy. Frustrated in her attempts to rush publication of Margret Howth, she com- plained "What is today fifty years hence?" (Harris 66). In her life, as well as her "Life," Davis was cognizant of the difficul- ty in "stopping a moment" of time.

Moreover, if Davis's thought in the passage quoted above owes a great deal to Fichte, so too does her style. Two of the most noted features of Davis's narrative are her extensive use of water imagery and the abrupt, almost convulsive style she adopts throughout the narrative. Consider the following pas- sage from Fichte's "The Vocation of Man":

There is nothing enduring, either out of me, or in me, but only a ceaseless change. I know of no being, not even of my own. There is no being. I myself absolutely know not, and am not. Pictures are:-- they are the only things which exist, and they know of themselves after the fashion of pictures: - pic- tures which float past without there being anything past which they float; which, by means of like pic- tures, are connected with each other:-pictures

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without anything which is pictured in them, with- out significance and without aim. (309)

This is a typical passage from Fichte, who relies heavily on water imagery because it expresses so aptly his view of reali- ty. For Fichte, life is "ceaseless change, a continual floating between birth and decay" a view that, given his use of water imagery, suggests his ancient predecessor, Heraclitus (Doctrine 393). Davis, too, depicts reality as a flow, in which "fragments of an old story float up before me" (13-14). Moreover, in this passage one sees Fichte's insistence on the connection between our physical, especially visual, compre- hension of the world and, as he develops the idea, the growth of our souls. Davis exploits the same sort of visual imagery as she discusses the connection between body and soul.

The style is typical of Fichte's, too, in that the use of abrupt colons and dashes is characteristic of his prose. The abrupt "Pictures are:" is a form he utilizes repeatedly. Believing that the seductive flow of time must be opposed by aggressive action, Fichte developed a style illustrating his point. As he suggests, "I know that I am not placed under the necessity of allowing my thoughts to float about without direction or pur- pose" (321). Similarly, Davis opens her story with the abrupt "A cloudy day:" and follows with such commands as "Stop a moment." While the hostility of the narrator has been fre- quently noted, in reality, Davis is trying to create a narrative that mirrors the flow of time, which she then purposely makes disjointed; the style suggests implicitly what the human response to the flow of time ought to be. "A vast rhetorical chasm separates the middle class, presumably white writer, whose entire characterization consists of acts of will such as 'I open,' 'I can detect,' 'I look,' 'I want,' 'I choose,' 'I dare,' and 'I write' from the mill workers," observes Rosemarie Thomson (571). Thomson brilliantly reveals Davis's aesthetic development of her ethical point. People must act, assert the will, just as the narrator does; how is that

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possible, however, for characters mired in the environment of "vulgar life"?

As Davis focuses on Hugh Wolfe's story-his "muddy depth of soul-history" - she continues to employ riverine terms to outline the potential for individual action (23). The critical moment in his life, the night he undergoes a moral cri- sis that will determine his life or death, is so described. Having worked for years as a "puddler" in the iron mills, Hugh has a desire "to be - something, he knows not what, - other than he is" (25). After he sees the factory owner and his friends in the mill, Hugh begins to believe money is the "cure for all the world's diseases," as Mitchell informs him (38). Left to his own devices, Hugh might have conceived of some plan of action to legally obtain money. His cousin Deb, however, provokes the crisis by giving Hugh a wallet she has stolen from Mitchell. This may be Deb's aggressive action to win Hugh's favor, to "seize a moment" to further her own aims. Ironically, keeping the stolen money seems to offer a new life to both Hugh and Deb, while returning the money ensures a "living death" (23):

I called this night the crisis of his life. If it was, it stole on him unawares. These great turning-days of life cast no shadow before, slip by unconsciously. Only a trifle, a little turn of the rudder, and the ship goes to heaven or hell. (26)

Here, Davis explicitly describes time as the flowing of a river, in which days - all the moments she believes we should stop to examine - float with the current. Here the river might seem to be a naturalist symbol, very like Sister Carrie's rocking chair that, as Pizer argues, "goes nowhere, but it moves" (95). In fact, the point of the riverine imagery is that the river only seems to go nowhere, seems to be static, but in fact is always moving, always bearing the potential for either positive or negative consequences. It is ironic and significant that Hugh

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does not even "act" to provoke the "turning-day." Rather, Deb does that by stealing the money, and so the crisis truly "stole on him unawares" (26). Hugh is thoroughly inactive in this passage, drifting along and reacting to what the world presents him. Davis's language here is intriguing as well, for her use of the word "stole" reminds her readers that there

may be a connection between moral reform and political reform. Although Davis subordinates morality to politics in her story, they are interrelated. The word "stole" suggests that perhaps there is something indiscriminate in Fichte's ele- vation of action over morality; Deb's "action," after all, turns out tragically. Still, as a symbol, the Ohio River suggests the ever-present potential for action, even the necessity of action, as in the passage above. While the river continues to flow, and the change it represents continues to occur, the very envi- ronment demands a conscious awareness of the tick of time, lest a turning day "slip by unconsciously" (26). One's course, Davis suggests, can be altered. One can, as Fichte asserts, "seize on Nature in her rapid and unresting flight." The real danger for Hugh is that he will float with the current, not real- izing until too late that the moment is irretrievably gone and a decision has been made for him.

In fact, just as Hugh allows Deb to make the decision to steal for him, Hugh and the other men in the factory have allowed others to make their most important decisions for them. The captains of industry have actively made slight turns of the rudder to direct events, even manipulating the voting of the workers: "No force-work, you understand ... a bit of red and blue bunting to make them a flag" (28). More to the point, the factory owner's son, Kirby, proposes the "humanitarian" idea that it would be kinder if the men were transformed into machines as they currently have "nerves to sting them to pain" (34). As Seltzer observes, the workmen of the factory are reduced to "hands" (466), but implicit in Kirby's modest proposal is the fact that the workers are not

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yet either machines or hands but merely debased humans, still capable of action.

How much action is unclear. Davis's experiment in "Life in the Iron-Mills" is to bring an uneducated character into con- versation with Fichtean philosophy. Fichte himself recog- nized the difficulty of self-creation for those kept in "slavery," as he called it ("Vocation" 332). Still, Fichte's philosophy con- veniently absolves people like Dr. May from any guilt, for it is "not necessary that there should be another particular act on my part to unite the deed to the will" ("Vocation" 346). The statement is passing strange for one so devoted to action, but Fichte's attempt to unite will and deed in a pure image of action leads, curiously, to inaction on certain social questions. In any event, for most of the workers, their negative transfor- mation into machines proceeds without interruption. Gigliola Nocera comments that, like "vampires, the machinery of the new American industry modifies both body and soul of the workers" (83).3 While Davis condemns the system brutalizing the workers, she makes it equally clear that they themselves play a significant role in their enslavement. From her perspec- tive, the workers acquiesce in their transformation into machines, allowing themselves to be tricked into voting for Kirby's candidates with patriotic "red and blue bunting" (28). Davis would have them "stop a moment" of time to direct the metamorphosis in their favor. As the river provides labor for the "heavy weight of boats and coal barges" in the movement of its waters, so enabling the forces that abuse it, the workers participate equally dumbly in their conversion into machines (12).

The statue Hugh carves from korl, a byproduct of the smelting process, is the outward manifestation of his desire to become "something other than he is." It is a symbol of the self-creation Fichte talks about, literalizing and embodying a self in the process of becoming. The korl woman is frequent- ly viewed as a symbol of the artist generally, or of the female artist in particular. Amy Lang, for example, suggests that, in

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the end, "art ... emerges as the real subject" of Davis's narra- tive (142). Greater than that, the korl woman is an expression in stone of a soul in process. Through the korl woman, Davis illustrates the transcendentalist's conception of the individual as an artist of his or her own soul. Pfaelzer states that "the statue protests the romantic aesthetic" (42). Insofar as the korl woman critiques the ability of the working class to access romantic ideals of selfhood, it is such a protest; arguably, however, the korl woman embodies the romantic aesthetic, revealing a coterminous relationship between art and the growth of a soul. As an object it seizes a moment in time showing readers just where Hugh is at present in his "muddy depth of soul-history."4

In truth, the korl woman comprises Hugh's aesthetic and ideological desires. "Wolfe," we are told, "had not been vague in his ambitions. They were practical, slowly built up before him out of his knowledge of what he could do" (40). Stopping a moment of time, Hugh sees "a clear, projected fig- ure of himself, as he might become" (41). He accepts Fichte's declamation "I create myself" and attempts to apply it in his own life. Korl is itself part of the landscape that has been called deterministic: mined from the earth as iron and coal, it is born amid the smoke and fire that create the nightmarish world Hugh inhabits, a world of "eternal night," as Nocera phrases it (77). As the korl woman attests, however, even this rejected substance can be carved into something beautiful and powerful. Davis suggests that Hugh, or any of the work- ers, could almost literally choose to carve a new self.

Kirby's misinterpretation of the statue as evincing mere physical hunger reveals the assumptions of his class, and per- haps Fichte's assumptions as well. Hugh is unable to articu- late the significance of his statue, but his ideas are "clear" even if his words are "muddy." Fichte's belief that people of a "vulgar life" are banished from his Romantic world of self- creation would suggest that Hugh's lack of polish, like his statue's rough-hewn quality, is a surface revealing no hidden

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depths. When Hugh states "she be hungry" (33), he announces what the rich and his fellow workers do not com- prehend; satiation of physical hunger only allows more work, but the spiritual desire for the soul's growth unites aesthetics and politics. The korl woman expresses Hugh's desire for his own growth, but also his desire for political freedom that would allow all other kinds of freedom; implicitly, the stature conjoins a striving for political freedom that would alone allow the free growth of the soul. The repeated references to "soul-starvation" emphasize Davis's criticism of the Fichtean assumption that Hugh could "create" himself spiritually and aesthetically apart from a political solution to his physical "slavery." When Dr. May encourages Hugh, exhorting him to "make yourself what you will. It is your right," Davis shows how very foolish is Fichte's philosophy in the absence of some action to render it possible in "vulgar life" (37). In con- trast, Hugh recognizes the connection between his own self- creation and the creation of a more just society. Hugh wants "to be able to speak, to know what was best, to raise these men and women working at his side up with him" (41).

But Hugh's vision of himself dis-integrates, and like the natural elements of this story, his consciousness is at war. While one aspect of his consciousness wished to be a leader of his fellow workers, the other forgets "this defined hope in the frantic anguish to escape" (41). Kirby, who not surprising- ly derides the idea of a rebellion like the French Revolution, opts to "[d]rift with the stream, because [he] cannot dive deep enough to find bottom" (35). Drifting with the stream is real- ly a type of death, as "turning-days" are inevitable and can lead one to hell. As Conron points out, Kirby's drifting means "accepting the industrial system as inevitable" (496). In Fichtean philosophy, too, it means being acted upon rather than acting. Diving to the bottom, on the other hand, is anal- ogous to seizing a moment of time, going to the root of a problem, and asseverating a radical solution. In the Fichtean

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context of the story, diving means strenuously avoiding the pull of the current and a seizing a moment in the flow of time.

The korl woman captures Hugh at this moment amid the flow of time; a moment when he could yet act to metamor- phose into either of the two visions of himself, or even unite them. In many ways, Hugh's conflict exemplifies Fichte's dis- cussion of the "equivocal mongrel" who "wavers between two worlds without properly belonging to either of them" ("Scholar" 140). Throughout, Davis characterizes Hugh as between worlds, as an "equivocal mongrel." Hugh's last name, Wolfe, suggests he has become an animal, and Davis describes his room as "kennel-like" (15). She notes, too, his "red rabbit-eyes" (15), and at other points, even gender boundaries are crossed; Hugh has a "meek, woman's face" and is one of the "girl-men" (24). Objectifying this divided sense of self that Hugh suffers, the korl woman is said to have the "half-despairing gesture of drowning" (33). For all his desire to become a leader for himself and others, Hugh is only a "puddler," a description of his work in the mill, but also, given the pervasive water imagery, a diminutive: he is just a puddle, not the river and not the ocean. Like the korl woman, Hugh is unable to dive to the bottom or to go with the flow, and thus seems likely to drown.

Viewed from the perspective of Fichtean philosophy, the moment of decision for Hugh is not a question of morality and has nothing to do with whether his theft of the money is right or wrong. In one sense, Hugh's "right" to the money presages a more radical redistribution of wealth. Ironically, however, Hugh's belief in his "right" to the money is precise- ly the philosophy espoused by the factory owners. Truly Fichtean, for them the question of morality is beside the point. They have the right because they take the right. That is a les- son Hugh learns from the factory owners and which they learned from Fichte. Davis may accept Hugh's right to turn the tables on his tormentors in this respect, for by allowing that Hugh may have some larger "right" to the money, she

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seems to accept the Fichtean view that our usual concepts of right and wrong do not always apply. As Sharon Harris argues, Davis "repudiates any theory allowing for passivity or transcendence" (49), a position very close to Fichte's sys- tem in which action is tantamount to morality. In this, Davis refigures Hugh's moral crisis. Hugh's moral crisis involves simply whether he should accept the growth of his own soul apart from the growth of the souls of his fellow workers, whom he desired "to raise ... up with him" (41). He may choose to abandon his fellows, just as the bosses have aban- doned him-"ce n'est pas mon affaire" (34).

In the central scene of Hugh's "muddy depth of soul-histo- ry," Davis uses a bridge to symbolize a moment of potential becoming, when Hugh could walk over a bridge into a new self. It is, however, the moment of his failure. During his night of crisis, Hugh sits on a "broken cart-wheel," itself a symbol of thwarted travel, gazing at a bridge over the Ohio. With the stolen money resting on his knee, he sees a picture of himself "as he might be, strong, helpful, kindly" (46). Symbolically, he is poised over the river of time, and this is the moment he "stops" and "seizes," but he then yields to "dreams of improved existences, drifting and endless" (48). The idea of drifting should be a tocsin of warning as to the falseness of this vision- a vision Davis tellingly labels a "shallow temptation" (46). The reflection he encounters is not authentically Hugh's own. The vision of himself is much like that of Dr. May, who freely distributes "helpful, kindly" words, but is markedly more restrained with practical assis- tance. Walter Hesford calls Dr. May an "eloquent Christian reformer" who is yet "naive and ineffectual" (83). Similarly, Hugh's vision in this scene "blinded him to delirium, - the madness that underlies all revolution, all progress" (46).

Davis further undercuts Hugh by letting readers see the world through his eyes. While he sits on the cartwheel, the water of the Ohio seems noticeably purer than in the begin- ning of the story. It appears as a "clear depth of amber,"

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which retains the muddy quality of the earlier part of the story, but marks a notable shift in Hugh's perception of it (47). Surely, this is Davis's criticism of Fichte's conception, "I am a living faculty of vision. I see ... my own vision" ("Vocation" 294), for Hugh does not see the smoke and smog and mud the rest of us see. Analogous to Emerson's "trans- parent eyeball" in "Nature," which allows the American tran- scendentalist to "see all" and yet alienates him from all the particulars of social life, like the "name of the nearest friend" (13), Fichte's sense of vision proves delusive. Just as he imag- ines himself "as he might be," Hugh projects his state of mind onto the river (46). Significantly, Hugh sees above him "the sun-touched smoke-clouds ... like a cleft ocean,-shifting rolling seas of crimson mist, waves of billowy silver" (47). Unlike the river, which has an implied destination, the imag- ined sea is without current, literally goes nowhere, and leaves Hugh "drunk with color" (47).

In this section, the world also appears to Hugh as a "panorama," a loaded word that Gilbert and Gubar identify as referring to the "continuous scenes painted on rolls of can- vas that were unrolled before an audience" (924). The attrac- tion of such a picture-show deludes Hugh, for although the unrolling panorama imitates the flow of reality, it does not portray reality realistically. The panorama is a loop of repeti- tion, "drifting and endless" with no "turning-days" to beware of. Hugh accepts the self-delusion that he has project- ed onto nature as authentic. His motives are understandable: who would cavil at the offer of a life without conflict, where the story is always beautiful and always the same? That life, however, is the afterlife, and not this one. It is precisely in this daily dialectic of conflict, as an active participant, that one is redeemed in Fichte's vision. The natural panorama that leaves Hugh "drunk with color" contains dead activity, and is every bit as insalubrious as the whisky is for the other workers.

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Yielding to the false vision, Hugh keeps the money. The narrator informs us that the "trial-day of this man's life was over, and he had lost the victory. What followed was mere drifting circumstance" (50). Lucy Morrison's comment that "Wolfe's choice is an irrevocable step toward unfavorably altering his destiny" (248), is absolutely true; however, it is not just Hugh's destiny that is destroyed. As Sheila Hughes rightly states, the story "begs to be read toward both political and personal transformation" (114). Like Kirby, electing to "drift with the stream," Hugh turns his back on his vision of becoming, a self that would be socially responsible and not solipsistic. Hugh's failure is, in a very real sense, a failure of Fichtean philosophy, and the result of Davis's suspicion of the introspective emphasis on the individual self, amoral and apart from society. Hugh, in Fichte's phrase, is one of "the chosen ones," who could evolve into a "Divine Man" ("Scholar" 154). As Harris touches on, the character Holmes in Davis's Margret Howth is intended to expose "Fichtean phi- losophy and its effect upon a self made man" (62). Similarly, when Hugh gains money, however briefly, he abandons his plan to aid his fellow workers.

Hugh's moment of crisis, had he acted, might have allowed him to work towards a man-made dawn, and not the paste- board dawn erected at the end. The difference between the two is spelled out early on; one is "perfume-tinted," and the other is "pregnant with death," and the two choices reflect the two visions of self at war in Hugh's consciousness (14). Just as Hugh accepts "the capitalists' vision of Beauty" in the panorama (Harris 36), he accepts their vision of Truth, a phi- losophy of individual self-creation divorced from any respon- sibility toward others. Hugh, whose ideas had once been "clear," finds them muddied, and he no longer truly decides for himself, in Fichte's words, "what I have been, what I am, and what I shall be." Perhaps worse than the "thousands of dull lives ... vainly lived and lost" (13), Hugh is the one set apart by Nature who, with the proper inner direction, could

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have become "their light-bringer, -their Jean Paul, their Cromwell, their Messiah" (39). Ultimately, Hugh, like the Ohio River in the story, the air and earth surrounding the fac- tory, and the workers toiling in the mills, is both physically and spiritually deformed by the industrial processes.

Hugh fails in this "trial-day," primarily because he betrays the vision of himself that he himself had created. Hugh's fail- ure has less to do with the theft of the money than with the philosophy that comes with the money. While Davis does not endorse Fichte's notion that "What the Divine Man does, that is divine" ("Scholar" 154), neither does she assert traditional morality in her narrative. She is somewhere in between tradi- tional moralism and Fichte's idea that "guilt and accountabil- ity have no meaning but in external legislation" ("Vocation" 256). Primarily, Davis condemns Hugh for failing to achieve his own vision of himself, not for theft. Critics of "Life in the Iron-Mills" continue to debate the question of Davis's advo- cacy of political action or moral reform as a response to social ills. Walter Hesford, for example, believes Davis calls for a "deep and bloody surgery," an opinion shared by many scholars (84). Others tend to view moral reform as Davis's preferred solution; Conron, for example, argues that "Davis resolves this dilemma in implicit favor of moral reform" (489). William Shurr is a notable exception to the dichotomy and sees moral reform and political action as interrelated; while Shurr views the story as a "conversion narrative," he argues that the "particular kind of religion" she calls for is socially oriented. Like others, however, Shurr focuses on the narrator, and no critic adequately connects Hugh's moral transgression with his political failure. It is important to rec- ognize that had Hugh returned the money, he might have become the leader the korl woman symbolizes. The problem Davis sees with moral reformers like Dr. May is that they overlook and even undergird the corrupt system that victim- izes people like Hugh. Although he fails, Hugh Wolfe is the best example of Davis's belief that moral and political reform

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must unite in the person who would bridge the gulf between individual and social salvation. Hugh, after all, betrays him- self and his coworkers - the men and women he sought to lead-by keeping Mitchell's money. Broadly viewed, Hugh selfishly chooses individual growth over the "lifting up" he had imagined himself performing in his earlier vision of him- self. A Fichtean hero apprehends the "Divine Idea" and then "moulds the outward world in its own image" ("Scholar" 158). Hugh's failure to do so suggests Davis recognizes the insufficiency of Fichte's ideas "in common vulgar life," as she wrote to Fields.

Likening Hugh's failure to "shipwrecks ... on the high seas," the narrator describes the only escape left for him, now behind bars (50). Kirk Cornutt notes that Judge Day, who sen- tences Hugh, suggests "Judgment day" (153). This fits with Hugh's judgment, of course, but also reminds us of Hugh's failure to seize the moment in time, to "stop a moment" as Davis suggests. With the possibility of achieving either vision of himself nullified, he kills himself. Before, he had two visions of himself as he might be, but now Hugh has only "a sudden picture of what might have been," and so commits suicide (55). With the "stream of blood dripping slowly from the pallet to the floor," and the "moon floating from behind a cloud," it is the final perversion of Hugh's promise. The pas- sage is very nearly a parody of Fichte's assertion that the indi- vidual Will is a "stream of light" and that "Here it streams as self-creating and self-forming matter through my veins and muscles ... [c]reative life flows forth in one continuous stream, drop on drop" ("Vocation" 376). As Seltzer observes, Hugh renders himself a still life (475), but it is a testimony of failure, an ironic commentary on Fichte's central formula of seizing moments in time to consider "what I have been, what I am, and what I shall be." Hugh failed to "stop a moment," and in Hugh's still life, the flow of time and Will slowly drips to a stop; each drop of blood, catching the reflection of the moon through the cell window, is a Fichtean moment that if

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one could "detain ... for an instant, hold ... steadily in view," a life could be made, a world won.

Fichte himself had questioned whether his "Ego-philoso- phy" could be adequately developed "in Vulgar life," as Davis phrased it. Fichte admitted that there was "the necessi- ty of previous spiritual culture," and predicted what lay in store for one employing his philosophy without that prior development:

As for him with whom the indwelling Genius pro- ceeds but half-way in its embodiment, and stops there, - whether it be because the paths of Learned Culture are inaccessible to him, or because, from idleness or presumptuous self-conceit, he disdains to avail himself of them, - between him and his age, and consequently between him and every possible age and the whole human race in every point of its progress, an impassable gulf is fixed, and the means of mutual influence are cut off. ("Scholar" 161-62)

Fichte had feared, and rightly if Davis's supposition is accu- rate, that for such a one as Hugh, the final act of self-creation would be "to cast life indignantly from him and make the moment of his awakening to reason also that of his physical death" ("Vocation" 341). It is not as if Fichte was blind to the commercial and political tyranny of his world; rather, Davis criticizes the lack of connection between seeing and doing. Fichte's concept of action is the dominant characteristic of his philosophy, but it seems not to extend to social reconstruc- tion, only personal growth. How, Davis asks, is personal growth possible when environment and society militate against it? Fichte's Ego-philosophy cannot answer the ques- tion.

Like Fichte, Davis ends her narrative with a veil. In Fichte's "Vocation of Man," he ends with one final exhortation to his readers to pull back the "curtain by which a world infinitely

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more perfect is concealed" (379). "My Faith," Fichte asserts, "looks behind this veil" (379). Davis inverts the symbolism of the veil, however. In "Life in the Iron-Mills," the veil the nar- rator places before the korl woman symbolizes society's fail- ure to "stop a moment" and consider "common, vulgar life"; the veil suggests, too, that in the absence of political reform the "common, vulgar life" may not be able to access the tran- scendental glorification of the self Fichte describes. Fichte's Ego-philosophy likewise placed the common person behind a veil, as did all the "self-made" people in America who embraced his ideas.

"Life in the Iron-Mills" is not just Davis's attack on Fichtean philosophy; it is, rather, an illustration of that philosophy in action, and a reflection on its curious in-action toward others while demanding action for the creation of the self. Davis sees the danger of the Romantic ego, recognizing that the laudable process of self-creation outlined by Fichte in Germany and Emerson in the States is difficult and perhaps impossible for those in industrial environments. Indeed, the emphasis on organic self-growth causes those under the influence of Romantic thought to ignore the plight of others, just as the factory owners do, and as Hugh himself does in his moment of crisis. Davis's rejection of Romantic egoism was hardly a decisive break with Romanticism, but her criticisms of Fichte do make her rather poor company for Emerson, Channing, Fuller, and other Transcendentalists. Davis has more in com- mon with the Romanticism of Hawthorne and Melville. As her criticisms of Fichte demonstrate, Davis was as critical as Hawthorne of the "Giant Transcendentalist" who is "a German by birth" (274-75). In addition to being inspired by the generative aspects of Fichtean philosophy, Davis likewise saw within it, one might say, the destructiveness of Melville's Ahab. Doubtless, she would have concurred with Ishmael's statement, "It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians" (61). At one point in his crisis, Hugh recognized that truth, but the "muddy depth of soul-history" we are privy to records the negative influence of Fichte's philosophy on a

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potential working-class leader. Davis echoes Fichte's philoso- phy that we ought to consider "what I have been, what I am, and what I shall be" when she asks, "Do you remember rare moments when a sudden light flashed over yourself, your world, God? when you stood on a mountain peak, seeing your life as it might have been, as it is?" (40). As Whitney Womack contends, "While Davis is critical of certain facets of romanticism, particularly with romantic egoism, she clearly endorses its belief in the power and transcendence of nature" (241). So it is with Davis and Fichte. For Davis, Fichte's Ego- philosophy provided crucial ways of understanding reality and the human condition, methodologies that she found alternately inspiring and dehumanizing. Fichte states, "I myself will make myself whatever I am to be" ("Vocation" 260). That beautiful, inspirational exhortation was problemat- ic for men and women who were reduced to "machines" and whose environment had already debased them. Davis's "Life in the Iron-Mills" is, in the final analysis, not a work of Realism, but rather a work that trumpets a Romanticism con- nected back to the world of "common, vulgar life." Davis's "Life in the Iron-Mills" is a Romantic call to arms that would

rejuvenate society to allow all to engage in the Transcendental creation of the self. Davis champions Fichte's "I create myself," but cautions her readers that such a Romantic ideal is possible only when we first create a just society.

Baylor University

NOTES 1 See Davis's description of the visit in the second chapter of Bits of

Gossip, reprinted as "Boston in the Sixties" in The Concord Saunterer. Lasseter and Garland discuss Emerson's influence at length.

2 The translations of "The Doctrine of Religion," "The Nature of the Scholar," and "The Vocation of Man" used in this essay are Smith's trans- lations of 1848, printed in their third edition in 1873. If Davis used an English translation, it was likely Smith's 1848 version; she may well have read Fichte's works in the original, however.

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3 All translations from Nocera are my own. 4 Eric Shocket notes, too, that the korl woman symbolizes "the potential

for working-class creativity and self-representation" (55), but in my view this potential is firmly within the bounds of Romanticism and as both embodiment and critique of Romanticism.

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