"Nothing beneath—all?": Rebecca Harding Davis' Critique of Possessive Individualism in "Life in the Iron-Mills"

Abstract

"Nothing beneath—all?":Rebecca Harding Davis' Critique of Possessive Individualism in "Life in the Iron-Mills" Sean J. Kelly (bio) In The Lives and Deeds of Our Self-made Men, Vol.1 (1872), Harriet Beecher Stowe lauds men who, having "sprang from conditions of hard-working poverty," embody the promise of social mobility and, more importantly, the truth of American exceptionalism.1 Appraising Frederick Douglass, for example, she asserts that "if a man is a man, no matter in what rank of society he is born, no matter how tied down and weighted by poverty and all its attendant disadvantages, there is nothing in American institutions to prevent his rising to the very highest offices in the gift of the country" (LD, 2:380–81). According to Stowe's formulation, one's successful ability to make oneself by rising from poverty and disadvantage would seem to provide the retroactive evidence of one's status as a man with inalienable rights. Crucially, Stowe views Jeffersonian republicanism as a political representation of Christian morality, claiming that "the American government is the only permanent republic which has ever based itself upon the principles laid down by Jesus Christ, of the absolute equal brotherhood of man, and the rights of man on the simple ground of manhood" (LD,1:vi). Stowe's conception of rights is, in this instance, ontological rather than practical, spiritual rather than juridical. If man as such is defined by his [End Page 261] equality with other men, then his inherent rights are founded upon that absolute status. Like Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis links the notion of rights to something fundamental in humanity, an element associated with Christian grace that is essential to "solv[ing] the darkest secrets of a world gone wrong."2 Unlike Stowe, however, Davis suggests that a conception of inalienable rights requires that we focus on the subject's hidden cause rather than its social effects. First appearing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1861 and revived by the Feminist Press in 1972, "Life in the Iron-Mills" ironically questions Hugh Wolfe's ability to scale the "ladder" of the "American system" and, exposing the hypocrisy of characters such as Doctor May (and even the narrator), promotes a conception of rights as humanity's spiritual and political foundation ("Life," 439). Davis' well-known short story distinguishes Hugh Wolfe from the benighted laborers around him by his artistic sensibility and his nascent talent as a sculptor. When Kirby, the mill owner's son, leads a group of wealthy men, including his brother-in-law, Mitchell, and Doctor May on a tour of the foundry, May appraises Wolfe's artwork as the evidence of a God-given power that endows Wolfe with the right to "make [himself] what he will" ("Life," 440). Inspired by the vague notion of his rights and the possibility that a better life awaits him outside the mill, Wolfe keeps Mitchell's wallet, which his cousin, Deborah, steals. Instead of building a new life and fulfilling his potential as an artist, Wolfe lands in prison and ultimately dies by suicide. Importantly, Davis' morally ambiguous narrative eschews the labor rights struggle's more realistic particularities in the early nineteenth century in order to promote a more fundamental vision of rights, namely what Mitchell, sarcastically invoking "Saint-Simonian doctrines," calls the "rights of the soul" ("Life," 440).3 While Stowe cites the self-made man's worldly accomplishments as incontestable evidence of the [End Page 262] subject's inalienable rights and the American system's ideal liberality, "Life" criticizes American self-making ideology and possessive individualism's empty promises. In so doing, Davis evinces a transcendental subject whose rights are guaranteed by its permanent non-inscription in the social. As the psychoanalytic theorist Joan Copjec argues, the ultimate guarantor of rights is a subject whose "very existence . . . is simultaneous with society's failure to integrate, to represent it."4 Consequently, we should not view the subject's cause simply as its identification with the numerous subject positions (regarding class, race, gender, etc.) available to it but instead with its "attachment to what language cannot say, to the unspeakable double that is the indestructible support of our freedom...