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Framing a "Life in the Iron Mills"

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

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Literary Contexts of "Life in the Iron-Mills"

REBECCA HARDING DAVIS'S Life in the Iron-Mills, published in the April, i86i 4tlantic Monthly, is the first notable work of fiction to concern itself with the life of the factory worker in an industrial American town.' In literary histories, the story is usually treated, if treated at all, as a forerunner or early example of American literary realism.2 That it should receive such treatment is natural. Davis takes pains to initiate us into the knowledge of hitherto little acknowledged social realities; she seems a pioneer exploring a territory which, by the end of the nineteenth century, would be recognized as the new American wilderness. Yet the significance of Life in the Iron-Mills can better be appreciated, I think, by setting it in several other literary contexts: the achievement of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer to whom Davis owed most; the tradition of the social novel; the religious, apocalyptic bias of mid-nineteenth-century American literature. Set in these contexts, Davis's story comes to life not as a work which is admirable because it is almost realistic, but as a work which astonishes and informs its past and present readers because it shares in and extends the accomplishments of the romance. In Bits of Gossip, a book of reminiscences, Davis recalls the world of romance she constructed as a child reading Bunyan and Scott in a tree-house.3 One day she brought up into her private world a collection of moral tales for children, among which, she records,

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Female Body, Voice, and Space in Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills”

본고는 19세기 미국 사실주의 문학의 선구자인 레베카 하딩 데이비스의 1861년 작(作)「제철공장에서의 삶」에 등장한 여성화자와 인물들, 그리고 공간이 가진 중요성을 재점검하고, 화자 ‘나’의 존재를 여성으로 구체화하는 작업을 통해 화자의 서재가 가진 의미를 공간적·물리적 의미에 한정하지 않고 사회적·페미니즘적 의미로의 확장을 추구함으로써 서재라는 공간을 계층과 성, 그리고 시간을 초월해 유령 같았던 여성의 존재를 보존할 수 있는 공간으로 위치시키고자 한다. 데이비스와 「삶」에 대한 여러 비평을 심도 있게 살펴보고 특히 여성주의 비평에서 데이비스의 작품과 인물을 새롭게 볼 수 있는 단서를 찾을 수 있는지 탐구한다. 그리고 남북전쟁 이전 남성 중심 자본주의 미국 사회 아래에서 하층 노동자 계급의 여성의 신체가 소모․착취되는 양상을 살펴봄으로써 여성의 몸과 여성의 공간의 재건이 어떻게 작품에서 사회비판을 위한 중요한 역할로 기능하는지를 알아본다. 마지막으로 금녀의 영역이라는 전통적이고 남성중심 담론에서 벗어나 화자의 서재를 여성의 공간으로 분석하고, 서재가 어떻게 여성연대를 꿈꿀 수 있는 공간이며 여성주의 관점에서 여성의 안식처로 거듭날 수 있는지를 탐구해 본다.This paper delves into the work of Rebecca Harding Davis, a nineteenthcentury American Naturalist female writer who was once forgotten for a long time and has now been newly rediscovered. It presents a working-class female subject from the multiple perspectives of body/space/gender studies, and describes how the writer establishes a literary link between socially aware writing and feminism through her first and most successful short story titled “Life in the Iron Mills,” published in April 1961. First, the exploited bodies of working-class women characters and the voice/observer/narrator describing them in “Life in the Iron Mills” will be re-examined to explore Davis’s critical navigation of the capitalistic, materialistic, and androcentric system in America. As the omniscient narrator of this story plays a key role in assembling, inviting, and restoring women in different classes into her Utopian space, “Life in the Iron Mills” is an urging voice starting from Davis and resonating outwards, in order to question/refute the suffocating domestic ideology and the myth of True Womanhood in nineteenth-century America.

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