Naturalist sentimentalism: ageing between hopefulness and decline in Rebecca Harding Davis’s short fiction

Abstract

This article examines four short stories by the American writer Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910), who became a nationally acclaimed writer with the stylistically innovative novella Life in the Iron Mills (1861). Using the double perspective of age studies and ‘naturalist sentimentalism’, the essay analyses Davis’s representation of the paradoxes of old age. Davis blends sentimental ideals of sympathy, sacrifice and hope with naturalist themes of entrapment, the inevitability of decline and biological determinism. Four short stories by Davis will serve as cases in point: ‘At Noon’ (1887), ‘At the Station’ (1888) and ‘Anne’ (1889) present middle-aged and older women who struggle with ageist notions of decline; ‘The Coming of the Night’ (1909) examines from a male perspective issues of retirement, care, and the denigration and marginalisation of the elderly in a ‘Home for Aged Men’. In these stories, Davis discusses the meanings of age and ageing, intergenerational conflicts, gender, and the impact of the body and social context on the experience of ageing. In drawing on both sentimental and naturalist themes and combining them, Davis’s stories reflect conflicting notions about ageing and old age in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.