Suicide, Social Reform, and the Elision of Working-Class Resistance in Rebecca Harding Davis'sLife in the Iron Mills

Abstract

Since 1972, the year that Tillie Olsen and the Feminist Press resurrected it, Rebecca Harding Davis'sLife in the Iron Mills, which presents the tragic circumstances of the life of a Welsh furnace tender, has primarily been discussed in terms of it being an unjustly forgotten forerunner of such realist fiction of the later decades of the 19th century as Frank Norris'sMcTeague(1899) and Theodore Dreiser'sSister Carrie(1900). With its portrait of the “tragic realities of the immigrant poor, the cynicism of factory owners, [and] the brutality of working class life,” it has been widely praised for being “the earliest notable experiment of American realism,” for exemplifying a literary theory of the commonplace two decades prior to William Dean Howells's better-known theory of the same, and for dramatizing the “socioeconomic implications of environmental determinism” several years prior to Émile Zola's naturalism.