Framing a "Life in the Iron Mills"

Abstract

Framing a "Life in the Iron Mills" Richard A. Hood Richard A. Hood Denison University Notes 1. John Conron describes the story this way, seeing its tiers as reflective of its landscape, in "Assailant Landscapes and the Man of Feeling," JACult, 3 (1980), 487-500. Sharon Harris extends this three-level description to reflect a division in class distinction, in "Rebecca Harding Davis: From Romanticism to Realism," ALR, 21 (1989), 4. 2. Harris, p. 6. 3. Rebecca Harding Davis, "Life in the Iron Mills," in "Life in the Iron Mills" and Other Stories, ed. Tillie Olsen (New York: The Feminist Press, 1972), p. 11. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 4. Coppelia Kahn, "Lost and Found," Ms., 2 (April 1974), 34. 5. Emily Dickinson, "Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?" (#365), in Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960). 6. Note the implication that the reader will recognize "self-restraint" as a cardinal virtue. This is one of the relatively newly encoded virtues of the factory system. It would be interesting to explore the religious themes of the story and their connection to recently inscribed "virtues" of the nineteenth century. Mark Seltzer explores the connection between a growing culturalist "aestheticization of the natural body" (p. 459) and Davis's "uncanny hesitations about bodies and identities" (p. 466) in "The Still Life," ALH, 3 (Fall 1991), 455-86: "Davis's account . . . registers . . . the discipline of organized bodily movement that spread throughout the social body from the late eighteenth century on, disciplines centered in but not restricted to the army and the prison, the school and the factory" (p. 465). For an historical account of a new, religiously sanctioned conception of virtue as "self-discipline" growing up with the factory system, see Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). The new virtues "served the needs not of 'society' but of entrepreneurs who employed wage labor" (p. 137). 7. William Shurr, "Life in the Iron-Mills: A Nineteenth-Century Conversion Narrative," ATQ, 5 (1991), 245-57. 8. Shurr, pp. 256, 251. 9. Seltzer, p. 467. 10. Seltzer, p. 468. 11. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, in Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, ed. G. Thomas Tanselle (New York: Library of America, 1985), p. 1408. 12. Tillie Olsen, Silences (New York: Delta/Seymour Lawrence, 1978), p. 51. 13. Charlotte Goodman, "Portraits of the Artiste Manqué by Three Women Novelists," Frontiers, 5, no. 3 (Fall 1980), 57-59. 14. Jean Pfaelzer, "Rebecca Harding Davis: Domesticity, Social Order, and the Industrial Novel," International Journal of Women's Studies, 4 (May-June 1981), 237. 15. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, in Three Novels, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar (New York: Library of America, 1982), p. 68. 16. Seltzer, p. 466. Copyright © 1995 Northeastern University