Feminism and Alienated Labor: Rebecca Harding Davis'sLife in the Iron Mills

Abstract

As One of the primary works of American literature to be recovered by feminist archaeology,Life in the Iron Mills(1861) can also stand as the test of a theoretical blind spot of early feminist criticism – its inability to see “bad writing” – for Davis's novella is notably awkward in its conception and construction. An obvious reason for the lack is that this kind of judgment fulfills an assumption of patriarchy in regard to women's writing: “that the reason for the absence of women [in the literary canon] is that women have not written in the past – or that what they have written is not very good” (Spender, 1). In the older formalist critical dispensation, aesthetic defects had to be publicly identified and labeled, like Hester Prynne's badge of shame. I certainly do not mean to suggest that feminism (however constituted) has any obligation to reproduce this order of judgment, but not owning such effects has consequences. Davis's novella can temporarily resolve this dilemma by using feminism to expose the traditional aesthetics of judgment.