Rebecca Harding Davis, Tillie Olsen, and Working-Class Representation

Abstract

The literary encounter between Tillie Olsen and Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, which Olsen rediscovered in her 1972 Feminist Press edition of Davis's work, is a landmark event in working-class studies. Olsen's criticism of Davis's work resists the ghettoization and dismissal of working-class literature that still persists in contemporary literary studies, balancing concerns of class and of gender without devaluing either. Historical scholarship demonstrates that Davis mischaracterized the working-class culture of iron workers and other skilled workers, failing to understand the pride and strong sense of autonomy those workers maintained; Davis often represents workers as victims and uses racial metaphors to describe oppression. Olsen also misread some aspects of nineteenth-century working-class culture as represented in Davis's work. Nevertheless, Life in the Iron Mills is, as Olsen claimed, an important critique of the ideology of capitalist America.