A Return to the Commons: An Eco-Marxist Reading of Jewett's “The Gray Mills of Farley” and Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills

Abstract

Though several scholars have noted a possible connection between the lives and works of Sarah Orne Jewett and Rebecca Harding Davis, none have endeavored a direct exploration of the ways these two authors speak to each other or to place their writings side by side.1 It is surprising that such an exploration is absent, though there are certainly some significant differences between these two authors. Jewett was born in 1849, a descendant of a long line of New England upper class folk, mostly doctors and merchants of luxury goods. The Jewett ancestral seat was the small seaport town of South Berwick in southern Maine. Jewett's education was lovingly fostered by her physician father, and she considered studying medicine for a time, until health concerns made such a vocation impossible. Jewett demonstrated interest in writing at an early age and saw her first story published in the Atlantic Monthly when she was only nineteen. Despite this early success, her career was not firmly established for another decade, increasing throughout the 1870s and 1880s until a carriage accident injury cut short her ability to write in 1902. She died in 1909. Davis, on the other hand, born in 1831, spent much of her upbringing in border states prior to the Civil War. She grew up in towns that would develop into later industrial sites and provide inspiration for many of her short stories. Davis was homeschooled and later attended a women's seminary, graduating at the top of her class. Unlike Jewett, Davis did not have family wealth to depend upon, so she returned home and took a position at a local newspaper where she remained employed for over a decade. Her novella Life in the Iron Mills was published the year she turned thirty. Davis went on to publish over five hundred works in a short period of time, but her writing success dwindled. Her works were more or less forgotten within a decade of her death in 1910, whereas Jewett managed to maintain a small but significant readership throughout the twentieth century.Although much links these authors—their shared publisher, their preferment of the short story genre, their passion for capturing the lives of the marginalized—there are profound differences as well. Davis was thirty years old and a published author when the Civil War broke out, while Jewett was a young teenager. Jewett was far removed from the realities of war, tucked away in her New England hamlet, while Davis lived in states that actually saw conflict. Jewett remained unmarried and financially independent her entire life; Davis married late and functioned as the primary breadwinner for her family. Davis’ writing voice emblemizes the conventions of realist writing, with her depictions of squalor and her moralistic tone, but she also employs gothic tropes, exaggeration, and sentimentalism, hallmarks of earlier genres. Jewett's voice, by contrast, is noted for its attention to the particularities of local places and peoples, namely dialects, local flora and fauna, and regional customs. Her language is simple, and even when she does strike a moralist or activist tone, she tends to come across as more staid than Davis.Jewett's short story “The Gray Mills of Farley” and Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills both focus on the vulnerability of immigrant factory workers and the ways such work alienates the working class from nature and ultimately dehumanizes them. Their depictions of the workers’ living quarters, the mill structures, and the rivers that reside near each narrative's industrial town highlight these pressing concerns. Drawing on the Marxist idea of “the commons,” I hope to demonstrate that by reading these authors through one another, not only can we see their shared emphasis on collective care and equal access to natural spaces, Davis focusing on short term concerns and Jewett on long term consequences, but also accomplish the larger goal of addressing ecocriticism's anxious relationship to class.Even though their two stories were written nearly forty years apart, Davis and Jewett both witnessed firsthand the ways that industrialization was changing class structure and the American landscape. Lance Newman, in his work on the class tensions bound up in nineteenth century nature writing, notes that [d]uring the period between the Revolution and the Civil War, New England underwent a complete ecosocial revolution. Over the course of about 80 years, the colonial agricultural and mercantile order evolved into the first stage of industrial capitalism. . . . Economic and political power that had been relatively dispersed among the merchants, clerics, and farmers of colonial New England was consolidated into the hands of the increasingly wealthy owners of commercial and industrial capital. By 1860, the wealthiest five percent of the population owned 53 percent of total capital, whereas the bottom half controlled about one percent. . . . It was a deeply contradictory society in which spectacular technological innovation and wealth coexisted with new forms of grinding poverty and exploitation.2The Jewetts found themselves in the wealthier percentage of the New England population, though they were hardly Rockefellers or Carnegies. Sarah Orne Jewett did not completely live aloof from the working classes, either. Sarah Way Sherman has convincingly argued that the fictional town of Farley “accurately reproduces the setting of the Salmon Falls Manufacturing Company . . . only a half mile from Jewett's home in South Berwick, Maine. Read within the context of this mill's history . . . Jewett's story showed how carefully she observed her industrial neighbors.”3 Jewett's portrayal of the manufacturing town does not rule out a possible coexistence or harmony between industry and the natural world, but her tone does indicate concern for the welfare of the workers and for the long-term consequences of such significant social changes for the American landscape.Rebecca Harding Davis, meanwhile, spent much of her life in the growing factory town of Wheeling, West Virginia, whose iron mills inspired the depictions in her story. Wheeling was a typical factory town, full of “billowing bituminous coal smoke and sooty surrounds.”4 According to Davis’ autobiography, she frequently took long walks through Wheeling that would have allowed her some insight into the lives of the working class, particularly the immigrant population that made up a majority of the industrial workforce. Though scholars have criticized Davis for her seeming unawareness of contemporary unionization movements that put significant power and agency in the hands of laborers, Cecilia Tichi stresses that Davis does capture the “world of industrial work as dreary, demeaning, and toilsome” through her realist style.5Due to their proximity to industrial towns, Jewett and Davis each harbored serious reservations about both the short-term and long-term consequences of capitalist industry. Neither author can be considered remotely Marxist, and yet some of their concerns about capitalist industry overlaps with Marxist discourses. Marxist theory has been slow to merge with ecocritical theory for a number of reasons, but largely because its “strategic framework was based on the emancipatory aspirations of a wide range of oppressed groups;” more recently, however, Marxist philosophers have begun to recognize “the fact that it is not just groups of people that are impacted by present-day society, but nature too.”6 Jewett and Davis share in the Marxist concern that capitalism separates the worker from the means of production, specifically as it relates to access to “the natural conditions of the production process.”7 Matthias Lievens acknowledges that though much of Marxist thought has ignored this angle, it was indeed a part of Marx's critique from the beginning. Marx and Engels expressed deep concern about the destruction of “the commons,” or public land that was accessible and available to all regardless of class. In eighteenth-century England, the eradication of the commons “took the form of the enclosures. Common land was appropriated by large landowners and small local farmers were forced to move to the city as waged laborers.”8 Today this takes on different forms, such as private and government control of essential resources like potable water, gas, and electricity, food deserts, overfishing, deforestation, strip mining, and more. Living at the cusp of American industrialization, Davis and Jewett saw where their country was headed and who would suffer the most from the destruction of the commons.Jewett and Davis’ recognition of the enmeshed relationship between non-human nature and marginalized people groups is a posture that has been too often ignored by environmental movements, which are often run by and geared towards dominantly white, affluent, highly educated activists. Ecofeminist Kamala Platt notes that “being poor, a person of color, an indigenous person, and a woman are factors which work against one's chances of having an economically and ecologically sustainable lifestyle in a relatively unpolluted, noncarcinogenic environment.”9 Platt's formula identifies a correlation between the human and non-human material world; what happens to one influences the other and vice versa. Stacy Alaimo calls this correlative relationship “trans-corporeality,” or the recognition that “the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world, [and] underlines the extent to which the corporeal substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment.’ It makes it difficult to pose nature as a mere background for the exploits of the human, since ‘nature’ is always as close as one's own skin.”10 Jewett and Davis’ stories embody a concern and investment in this shared “skinship” between non-human and human, particularly marginalized and oppressed humans.In order to acknowledge the skinship between the human and non-human world, there must first be a recognition of material agency. After all, if nature cannot be a “mere background for the exploits of the human,” as Alaimo insists, then nature must be an actant in the world. Jane Bennett uses the language of “vibrancy” to describe this non-human agency. She writes, How would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies? By “vitality” I mean the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.11Bennett's ideas have significant consequences for eco-Marxism, in that the oppression of nature must be considered alongside and equal to the oppression of human groups. If the agency of non-human nature was a recognized and respected force in the world, the processes of industry and capital would have to change. Davis’ and Jewett's works depict a nightmarish world where capitalist industry ignores the agency and enmeshment of human and non-human nature to everyone's detriment. In the following sections, I will analyze the ways that the capitalist industrial complex attempts to amputate the human from the natural world in Jewett's and Davis’ respective works. Complete separation is impossible, but the strain of circumscribed agency, dehumanizing work, and ecological pollution damage the human and non-human victims of capitalism. Each author's depictions of the degraded factory worker tenements, the insidious agency of the mill structures, and the beleaguered vibrancy of the polluted mill rivers poignantly reveal these damages.Domestic spaces in these industrial stories are not sites of agency or vibrant sources of community identity, as they are typically depicted in Jewett's other works. Rather, they are sites of degradation and female drudgery in Davis’ work, toil and futility in Jewett's. Alaimo devotes a chapter of Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space to the portrayal of the domestic in Jewett's three novels, The Country of the Pointed Firs, Deephaven, and A Country Doctor. In these works, women's homes are “an extension of the landscape,” and she argues that “[t]hese green, rooted interiors that blend with the wider natural world allow women to retain certain domestic values even while widening their prospects as they wander and partake of a broader realm.”12 While few scholars have fully explored the significance of economic systems or class in Jewett's writings, Alaimo notes that in Jewett's prototypical works “female freedom is not linked to the consumerism of the public sphere but to greater access to natural forms of life.”13 The essence of a good and free life, according to Jewett, is not increased access to income or products to “improve” one's life but the access to natural forms of life and the ability to sustain one's needs by available means of production allowed through such access. In this light, readers can clearly see how the privatization of common land is a form of ecological damage. The characters of Jewett's and Davis’ industrial short stories lead impoverished lives not only because of the grueling, uncertain nature of their work, but also because they are kept dependent upon capitalist systems by their lack of access to wholesome natural spaces.The descriptions of the Wolfe hovel in Life in the Iron Mills do not depict the house as totally apart from the natural, but they are drawn from a ghastly, dark ecological vision of a poisoned earth. Davis tells us of an “earthen floor covered with a green, slimy moss” that functions as the floor of the Wolfes’ living quarters.14 The swampy floor is a far cry from the “wooded slopes and clover-crimsoned meadows” of the Quaker meeting house at the story's end (73). The only nature to which Deb, Hugh, and their fellow workers have access is sickly and abject. Davis links the degradation of nature with the degradation of the human in her description of Hugh; Davis tells us that his “nature starts up with a mad cry of rage against God, man, whoever it is that has forced this vile, slimy life upon him” (48–49). Only a few pages before, she has called the damp, fetid, dirt floor of Hugh's home “slimy” and she uses the same language to describe his very existence. Hugh's life is enmeshed with the same matter as the toxic dirt in which he dwells.To further her audience's disgust at the degradation of human life that industry and their miserable living-quarters promote, Davis relies heavily on gothic tropes of confinement and grotesque hybridity to describe the factory workers themselves. The effect of this language is that it animalizes the factory workers to emphasize their dehumanization. She says early on that the workers sleep in “kennel-like rooms,” likening the workers to dogs and stressing the confining, prison-like nature of their living spaces (42). Davis frequently uses animal metaphors to describe the hunchbacked Deb, the sickly Hugh, and the other faceless workers, likening them to “torpid lizards,” “beaten hounds,” and “horses dying under the lash” to emphasize the dehumanizing nature of their work and the way that industry proscribes the exercise of human agency (41, 42, 74). These characters are not totally without agency, but their agency is certainly limited by their circumstances. They may be characterized as creatures of the natural world, but they are in fact prohibited from meaningful relationship with nature.This amputation from nature takes a particular toll on women in the stories. Though Alaimo finds that “the greening of the domestic allows for a specifically female sense of ‘liberty and space and time,’” the domestic remains an ambivalent space, a site capacious enough for female freedom but also female captivity.15 Davis paints this capacity for captivity with vivid despair when she describes Deb's “second shift” after clocking off from the mill: Deborah groped her way into the cellar, and, after considerable stumbling, kindled a match, and lighted a tallow dip, that sent a yellow glimmer over the room. It was low, damp,—the earthen floor covered with a green, slimy moss,—fetid air smothering the breath. . . . [S]he went through into the room beyond. There she found by the half-extinguished fire an iron saucepan filled with cold boiled potatoes, which she put upon a broken chair with a pint-cup of ale. (43)Though she has worked all day at the cotton mill, returning home at eleven o'clock at night, Deb makes her way to their cellar rooms to cook a meal, check on her uncle, feed a waif named Janey who lives with them, and walk over a mile in the bitter rain to take her cousin Hugh his supper as he works the night shift at the nearby iron mill. The term “second shift,” which comes from Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung's work of the same name, describes the phenomenon of women who have entered the labor force and work outside of the house all day only to come home and bear a second round of work, shouldering the majority of domestic work, such as cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing.16 Though Deb is neither married nor a mother, as the oldest female in her family unit she takes on stereotypically maternal and wifely tasks. Domestic duties are not freeing to Deb. Jeffrey W. Miller puts it well in his analysis of domestic symbols in Davis, saying, “Industry destroys the home—the blackened ‘angel of the house’ has been quite literally grounded by the smoke of factories, its smoke-clotted wings defiled and deformed by excessive production.”17 Deb is trapped in a life of drudgery, working grueling hours at the mill and through the night to provide for her family. Entrapment in systems of labor both within and outside of the home cut Davis and Jewett's characters off from meaningful relationship with the natural world.The industrial complex further creates an antagonistic relationship between humans and nature. As she makes her way from the Wolfe hovel to the iron mill, Deb traverses a road which “had been quarried from the solid rock, which rose abrupt and bare on one side of the cinder-covered road, while the river, sluggish and black, crept past on the other” (45). The land has been marred to construct the industrial town. Pickaxes have violently ripped a passage into the hills, and Deb nightly treads upon the mountain's scars as she trudges to the smelting furnaces. Polluting run-off from the town and mills runs down into the oily river below. Even the weather seems to turn against Deb; the rain falls like volleys of arrows and the night threatens to swallow up the solitary woman. There is no sense of harmony with nature in the world of the mills—only antagonism. The labor makes the land inhospitable, and the bitter land in turn makes the creation of a healthy home and family impossible.While Davis’ narrative takes a very dark, even sensational tone to describe the strain that the labor-industrial complex places upon nature, Jewett's tone is more subtle. A reader almost needs to be familiar with Jewett's other work to understand the latent criticisms she makes against the quality of life afforded to factory workers. “The Gray Mills of Farley” opens with a critique of a manufacturing town that “had no room for gardens or even for little green side-yards where one might spend a summer evening.”18 For Jewett, this is a harsh critique. Throughout her writings, the importance of having a home garden space is a consistent theme. These spaces have multiple functions in her narratives, but they serve predominantly as spaces for economic independence, female empowerment, and, most importantly, connection to the land. In her essay “From a Mournful Villager,” Jewett describes the independence and agency that gardens afforded to women at a time when their rights to property were not guaranteed: “It was not man-like to think of the front yard, since it was the special domain of the women,—the men of the family respected but ignored it.”19 Elsewhere, she emphasizes the importance of garden space for the preservation of traditions and connection to one's region, saying, “[l]et us try to preserve the character of these old homes and old neighborhoods as best we can, and not try to make them look like newer places not half nor quarter so beautiful as they. Let us keep the pleasant old houses standing, and our grandmothers’ front yards blooming, and teach the old associations and legends to all newcomers just as long as we can.”20 A keen gardener and lover of nature, Jewett understood that cultivation of the land and care for living things empowered relationship and investment in the well-being of the material world.The fact that the manufacturing town has not constructed its employees’ living quarters in ways that allow for garden spaces is a strike against capitalist industry in Jewett's mind. The lack of garden spaces limits the agency of her characters. Sarah Way Sherman has noted the way that the lack of yards limits the factory workers’ ability to grow their own food by separating the worker from the means of production. She notes the irony of the mill town's incongruity with the seasons: “We begin in late autumn, which should be a time of harvest and thanksgiving. However, the harvest is gathered and taken away, not by those who have labored for it but by the absentee shareholders. . . . The news of the shutdown then arrives in early spring, which should be a time of renewal. However, here it initiates a season of increasing want.”21 Because the construction of the tenements does not leave space for home agriculture or, by extension, food independence and self-sufficiency, the mill workers are left vulnerable and fully reliant upon the mill's directors.Not only does the lack of garden spaces leave the residents of Farley vulnerable, but Jewett seems to hint at their expendability by the very appearance of the town itself. She writes, “Somehow the Corporation homes looked like make-believe houses or huge stage-properties, they have so little individuality or likeness to the old-fashioned buildings that made homes for people out on the farms” (72). Elsewhere she describes the houses “as if they belonged to a toy village, and had been carefully put in rows by a childish hand” (75). There is something artificial and contrived about the corporation town. Part of this certainly stems from Jewett's preference and nostalgia for the small agrarian and artisan villages of her youth, but she does clue into the fragility of life in industrial towns. The tenements are run down at best and ought to be condemned at worst. Despite the mill agent's many attempts to acquire funding to properly maintain the facilities, he is powerless to enact significant improvements. The absentee nature of the stockholders and factory director's roles, ruling from afar in affluent Boston, keeps them aloof from the needs of their workers. “[T]hese houses seem disconnected from their natural setting, like theater props. . . . [N]o one truly ‘owns’ these houses.”22 They are houses, not homes.Like toy villages, there is a mass-produced quality to the homes; a sense that anyone could live in the tenements, and it would make no difference. And indeed it does not. The Irish workers who are the focus of the story are replaceable proletariat cogs. They are merely a single wave in a long undulation of employee turnover: The Corporation had followed the usual fortunes of New England manufacturing villages. Its operatives were at first eager young men and women from the farms nearby, these being joined quickly by pale English weavers and spinners, with their hearty-looking wives and rosy children; then came the flock of Irish families, poorer and simpler that the others but learning the work sooner and gayer-hearted; now the Canadian-French contingent furnished all the new help, and stood in long rows before the noisy looms and chattered in their odd excited fashion. They were quicker-fingered, and were willing to work cheaper than any other workpeople yet. (72)The lack of personality of the towns indicates the impermanence of the workers and the precarity of their agency over their situations. As soon as workers come along who are willing to work for cheaper wages, their positions are in jeopardy. Likewise, as Alison Easton notes, the language of the “childish hand” suggests the ease with which the stockholders and factory director play with the livelihoods of the mill-hands by “selling out their stock while it is rising after an imprudently high dividend.”23 The absentee Corporation toys with the lives of its employees as if they were model soldiers or rag dolls, and the depiction of the employee living quarters reflects the precarious agency of the factory laborers. If houses and home-life, as Alaimo suggests, are extensions of the landscape, then the vulnerable livelihoods and living quarters of these factory workers indicate a troubled natural world.The narratives by Jewett and Davis each present the mill structures as embodying some degree of agency operating in opposition to the natural or material world. It may seem strange to think of the mills as characters in these tales, but both authors suggest that they exert a will against the characters of the story as well as against nature. Davis uses gothic images, crafting Bosch-like hellscapes to emphasize the tortured nature of the factories, while Jewett suggests that the mills of Farley have usurped the natural, standing in for formerly agrarian presences in ways that will have significant long-term consequences for the factory hands. In both cases, the mills are worthy of note in that they exhibit the material vibrancy described by Bennett but seem to be warped towards destructive ends.Davis’ iron mills are sites of gothic horror, suggesting that “the factory, the mill, and other sites of industrialization” are sources of “topophobia—fear of place.”24 As Deb carries Hugh his supper during his night shift, she passes by “great furnaces [that] break forth with renewed fury . . . engines [that] sob and shriek like ‘gods in pain’” (45). Davis clearly marks out the iron mills as aberrant but also as conscious and vocal. The descriptions evoke a state of Promethean torment or, as a friend of young Kirby, the son of the mill-owner, says, “your works look like Dante's Inferno” (50). The comparison to hell is an apt one. Everything about the mills suggests inhumane torture, or perhaps a torture so profound that it persecutes the inhuman into a maimed version of humanity. The mill and its engines are twisted, excruciated. By likening the mill and its components to the tortured, screaming souls of Dante's Inferno, Davis suggests that the mill is a conscious actant in the story. There is something vibrant in its materiality, even if that vibrancy is marred by horrific suffering.Davis uses natural language to describe the mill's torment, creating a cognitive dissonance for the reader to drive home the distinctly uncanny setting: “Beneath these roofs Deborah looked in on a city of fires, that burned hot and fiercely in the night. Fire in every horrible form: pits of flame waving in the wind; liquid metal-flames writhing in tortuous streams through the sand” (my emphasis) (45). Davis uses pastoral language to describe the mill. “Waving in the wind” and “streams through the sand” taken alone evoke soft, Impressionist landscapes, but these romantic metaphors describe unnatural horrors with poignant irony. The nature metaphors heighten the unnatural screams and shrieks of the mill and its machinery. The narrator even extends the thread of animalistic metaphors, typically applied to the laborers, to the mill itself: “One could fancy these red smouldering lights to be the half-shut eyes of wild beasts, and the spectral figures their victims in the den” (52). The mill becomes a predatory animal, the mill workers its victims and food. The mill buildings are tortured into a twisted vibrancy while the human workers are reduced to consumables.Though the mills moan like Frankenstein's monster brought to life, the workers suffer, too, in their dehumanization. After Deb has delivered Hugh his supper, he urges her to lie down and rest on a heap of ash from the furnaces. She lies down and Davis writes, “[t]he heap was the refuse of the burnt iron, and was not a hard bed; the half-smothered warmth, too, penetrated her limbs, dulling their pain and cold shiver” (46). Carol DeGrasse argues that Davis here enmeshes Deb with korl, the material by-product of the iron-smelting process; “korl becomes considerably more than a mere symbol of the working class as a type of social waste: Deborah is dehumanized by being likened to korl, and her narrative emphasized public impressions of working-class immigrant women as disposable outliers of society.”25 Deb shares in the mill's waste in a moment of trans-corporeality. Only a few lines later, the sleeping Deb is described as “a limp, dirty rag” (46). In becoming one with the material world, Deb and the mill share in each other's suffering.The natural world also shares in the suffering and degradation of the mills and its workers. Jill Gatlin has noticed the trans-corporeal abjection of human and non-human nature in the text. Looking at the opening scene of the story, she observes that smoke and soot seem to inflict ubiquitous damage. They mar nonhuman nature—filling the air, “settl[ing]” in the water (“black, slimy pools” and the “yellow river”), and “clinging” to plants and animals (“faded poplars,” “reeking” mules and a “dirty canary”)—as well as humanmade structures (“dingy boats” and soot-covered houses), humans themselves (sooty “passers-by”), and their symbols of redemption (“a little broken figure of an angel; but even its wings are covered with smoke, clotted and black”).26Nothing escapes the damaging filth of Wheeling. The enmeshment of human and non-human matter through soot and smoke is so deep that distingu