1. Doriani, Beth Maclay, “New England Calvinism and the Problem of the Poor in Rebecca Harding Davis's ‘Life in the Iron Mills,’” in Literary Calvinism and Nineteenth-Century American Women Authors, ed. Schuldiner, Michael, special issue of Studies in Puritan American Spirituality 6 (12 1997): 180–81Google Scholar.

2. Langford, Gerald, The Richard Harding Davis Years: A Biography of a Mother and Son (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), xGoogle Scholar.

3. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Gubar, Susan, eds., “Rebecca Harding Davis, 1831–1910,” in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English (New York: Norton, 1985), 903Google Scholar.

4. Quoted in Harris, Sharon M., “Rebecca Harding Davis: From Romanticism to Realism,” American Literary Realism: 1870–1910 21, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 5Google Scholar. See Kahn, Coppelia, “Lost and Found,” Ms. 2 (1974): 117Google Scholar.

5. Quoted in Doriani, , “New England Calvinism,” 182Google Scholar. See Donovan, Josephine, New England Local Color Literature (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983), 33Google Scholar.

6. Harris, , “Rebecca Harding Davis,” 5Google Scholar.

7. Doriani, , “New England Calvinism,” 182Google Scholar.

8. Tompkins, Jane, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 122–46Google Scholar.

9. Olson, Tillie, “A Biographical Interpretation,” in Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories, by Rebecca Harding Davis (New York: Feminist, 1985), 75Google Scholar.

10. By cultural work, to put it as simply as possible, I mean the manner in which texts (in this specific instance) go about, as Tompkins, Jane states, “expressing and shaping the social context that produced them” (Sensational Designs, 200)Google Scholar.

11. Here, I am obviously using the word culture in two different ways. Turning to Raymond Williams is helpful at this point. In one sense, “culture” is “the independent and abstract noun which describes the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity”; in another sense, “culture” is “the independent noun … which indicates a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general” (“Culture,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society [New York: Oxford University Press, 1983], rev. ed., 90Google Scholar). The latter definition encompasses the former, although the relationship between the two is dialectical.

12. Levine, Lawrence W., Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 176Google Scholar.

13. Brodhead, Richard, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 123Google Scholar.

14. Ibid., 123.

15. Sedgwick, Ellery, The Atlantic Monthly 1857–1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 4Google Scholar.

16. I refer to Rebecca Harding Davis by her married name throughout this chapter, even though, technically, she should be referred to as Rebecca Harding when the years prior to 1863, the year she married L. Clark Davis, are being discussed.

17. Olson, , “Biographical Interpretation,” 86Google Scholar.

18. Brodhead, , Cultures of Letters, 125Google Scholar.

19. Langford, , Richard Harding Davis Years, 6Google Scholar.

20. Olson, , “Biographical Interpretation,” 70Google Scholar.

21. Says Levine, Lawrence, “the very word ‘culture’ [became] synonymous with the Eurocentric products of the symphonic hall, the opera house, the museum, and the library, all of which, the American people were taught, must be approached with a disciplined, knowledgeable seriousness of purpose, and — most important of all — with a feeling of reverence” (Highbrow / Lowbrow, 146)Google Scholar.

22. This phrase is lifted from Davis's second work published in the Atlantic Monthly, “A Story of Today” (10 1861: 472)Google Scholar. She addresses the reader: “I want you to dig into this commonplace, this vulgar American life, and see what is in it. Sometimes I think it has a new and awful significance that we do not see.”

23. Of these writers, it was Nathaniel Hawthorne who made the greatest impression on her (although she did not know until much later in her life that it was he who was the author of the unsigned stories she liked so much). In “A Rill from the Town Pump,” “Little Annie's Ramble,” and “Sunday at Home,” Davis, writes in Bits of Gossip, there “was no talk of enchantment…. But in these papers the commonplace folk and things which I saw every day took on a sudden mystery and charm, and, for the first time, I found that they too belonged to the magic world of knights and pilgrims and fiends” ([Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904], 30)Google Scholar. In light of Life in the Iron Mills, these tales, according to Walter Hesford, would seem to have suggested to Davis “the manner in which a child — or writer — might explore, observe, assimilate the phenomenal world, develop a sympathetic understanding of it, then testify to its importance, discuss its meaning” (“Literary Contexts of ‘Life in the Iron Mills,’” American Literature 49, no. 1 [03 1977]: 72Google Scholar). This might very well be the sort of influence that Davis herself would have believed that Hawthorne's tales had had on her work; however, I find the significance of this statement to lie elsewhere. The romanticization of commonplace folk that she per-ceived in Hawthorne's tales and that she cites as influential tellingly points to, in Life in the Iron Mills, her aestheticization of the working class for the purpose of consumption by her middle- and upper-class readers.

24. Harris, Sharon M., Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 24Google Scholar.

25. Sedgwick, , Atlantic Monthly, 7Google Scholar.

26. Siegel, Adrienne, The Image of the American City in Popular Literature, 1820–1870 (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1981), 97Google Scholar.

27. Carlin, Deborah, “‘What Methods Have Brought Blessing’: Discourses of Reform in Philanthropic Literature,” in The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers, ed. Warren, Joyce W. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993): 204Google Scholar.

28. Doriani, , “New England Calvinism,” 202Google Scholar.

29. Ibid.

30. Davis, Rebecca Harding, Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories (New York: Feminist, 1985), 26Google Scholar. All subsequent references to this text are cited parenthetically.

31. Curnutt, Kirk, “Direct Addresses, Narrative Authority, and Gender in Rebecca Harding Davis's ‘Life in the Iron Mills,’” Style 28, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 153Google Scholar.

32. Ibid.

33. Yaeger, Patricia, Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women's Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 270Google Scholar.

34. Harris, , “Rebecca Harding Davis,” 13Google Scholar.

35. Yaeger, , Honey-Mad Women, 270Google Scholar.

36. Doriani, , “New England Calvinism,” 191Google Scholar.

37. Curnutt, , “Direct Addresses,” 163Google Scholar.

38. Doriani, , “New England Calvinism,” 207Google Scholar.

39. Tompkins, , Sensational Designs, 127Google Scholar.

40. Ibid., 127–28.

41. Ibid., 133.

42. Ibid., 132.

43. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (1852; rept. New York: Penguin, 1986), 624Google Scholar.

44. Ibid., 401.

45. Ibid., 400.

46. Ibid., 593.

47. Tompkins, , Sensational Designs, 133Google Scholar.

48. Anderson, Olive, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 201–2Google Scholar.

49. Catherine Gallagher broadly defines the Condition of England Debate in this fashion:

The expansion of industrial production in early- and mid-nineteenth-century England was accompanied by a set of controversies about English social, material, and spiritual well-being. These controversies are often collectively called the Condition of England Debate. They extended into almost every area of English intellectual and cultural life, changing the nature of many disciplines and literally bringing others into existence. Moreover, the Condition of England Debate became a discourse unto itself, creating and absorbing new fields of inquiry in metaphysics, ethics, political economy, public administration, biology, medicine, religion, psychology, and aesthetics…. Industrialism gave not only a new content but also a new shape to English cultural and intellectual life, creating, merging, and rearranging its constituents. (Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980], xiGoogle Scholar)

50. Anderson, , Suicide, 204, 205Google Scholar.

51. Unattributed quotation in ibid., 205 n. 36.

52. Anderson, , Suicide, 205, 206Google Scholar.

53. Ibid., 205 n. 37. See also Clubbe, John, introduction to Selected Poems of Thomas Hood, by Thomas Hood, ed. Clubbe, John (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 28, 317–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54. Gates, Barbara, Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 155Google Scholar.

55. Anderson, , Suicide, 202n. 33Google Scholar.

56. Kushner, Howard I., Self-Destruction in the Promised Land: A Psychocultural Biology of American Suicide (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 13–34Google Scholar.

57. Ibid., 37.

58. Quoted in ibid., 39. See Rosenberg, Charles E., “The Therapeutic Revolution: Medicine, Meaning, and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America,” in The Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of Medicine, ed. Vogel, Morris J. and Rosenberg, Charles E. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 5–6Google Scholar.

59. Kushner, Howard I., “Suicide, Gender, and the Fear of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Medical and Social Thought,” Journal of Social History 26 (Spring 1993): 461CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60. Ibid.

61. Quoted in Kushner, , Self-Destruction, 44Google Scholar.

62. Alvarez, A., The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (1971; rept. New York: Norton, 1990), 92Google Scholar.

63. Anderson, , Suicide, 215Google Scholar.

64. Ibid., 250.

65. Harris, , Rebecca Harding Davis, 12Google Scholar.

66. Eiselein, Gregory, Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 14Google Scholar.

67. Levine, , Highbrow / Lowbrow, 207Google Scholar.

68. Although I take this point from the complaint that Walter Benjamin makes against the New Objectivity photography of the mid-1920s (“The Author as Producer,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Demetz, Peter, trans. Jephcott, Edmund [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978], 231Google Scholar), it applies equally well to Jacob Riis's photography.

69. 1: “[The Wolfes'] lives were like those of their class [my emphasis throughout this note]: incessant labor, sleeping in kennel-like rooms, eating rank pork and molasses, drinking — God and the distillers only know what; with an occasional night in jail, to atone for some drunken excess” (15). 2: “Miserable enough she [Deborah] looked, lying there on the ashes like a limp, dirty rag, — yet not an unfitting figure to crown the scene of hopeless discomfort and veiled crime: more fitting, if one looked deeper into the heart of things, — at her thwarted woman's form, her colorless life, her waking stupor that smothered pain and hunger, — even more fit to be a type of her class” (21). 3: “If you could go into this mill where Deborah lay, and drag out from the hearts of these men the terrible tragedy of their lives, taking it as a symptom of the disease of their class, no ghost Horror would terrify you more” (23). 4: “[Hugh Wolfe] seized eagerly every chance that brought him into contact with this mysterious class that shone down on him perpetually with the glamour of another order of being” (27). 5: “‘Look,’ continued the Doctor, ‘at this bony wrist, and the strained sinews of the instep! A working-woman, — the very type of her class’” (32). 6: “Only Wolfe's face, with its heavy weight of brain, its weak, uncertain mouth, its desperate eyes, out of which looked the soul of his class, — only Wolfe's face turned toward Kirby's” (35). 7: “It was a sombre Gothic pile, where the stained light lost itself in far-retreating arches; built to meet the requirements and sympathies of a far other class than Wolfe's” (48). 8: “[The Christian reformer's] words passed far over the furnace-tender's grasp, toned to suit another class of culture; they sounded in [Wolfe's] ears a very pleasant song in an unknown tongue” (49).

70. Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage-Random, 1966): 9Google Scholar.

71. Brodhead, , Cultures of Letters, 132, 136Google Scholar.

72. The narrative that I speak of here is the narrative of the “industrializing substructural transformation,” the substance of which included “the manufacture of finished products (as opposed to earlier crafts production), the introduction of a factory system (as opposed to earlier workshop organization), the appearance of production for mass markets (instead of custom production), the investment of capital in commercial ventures, …and rapid population growth and urban growth” (Ash, Roberta, Social Movements in America [Chicago: Markham, 1972], 85–86)Google Scholar.

73. Brodhead, , Cultures of Letters, 115–16Google Scholar.

74. Ibid., 121.

75. Ibid., 131.

76. Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899; rept. New York: Modern Library-Random, 1931), 43Google Scholar.

77. “Glimpses of Garibaldi,” Atlantic Monthly, 04 1861: 470Google Scholar.

78. Brodhead, , Cultures of Letters, 138Google Scholar.

79. Such a reading is indebted, at least in part, to Amy Kaplan's reading of realism as a “strategy for imagining and managing the threats of social change — not just to assert a dominant power but often to assuage fears of powerlessness” (The Social Construction of American Realism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 10)Google Scholar.

80. Although the text does not explicitly make clear the gender of the narrator, I refer to the narrator as a male, simply because the Atlantic Monthly's readers would have certainly assumed that the anonymous author of Life in the Iron Mills was male because it would have been appropriate only for a male to tell a tale as harsh as this. Jane Atteridge Rose accurately notes that it was necessary for Davis to assume a masculine voice because “she could not have told a story of sordid life in the iron mills without pulling the focus away from the story to explain her knowledge of it” (“Reading ‘Life in the Iron Mills’ Contextually: A Key to Rebecca Harding Davis's Fiction,” in Conversations: Contemporary Critical Theory and the Teaching of Literature, ed. Moran, Charles and Penfield, Elizabeth F. [Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1989], 191Google Scholar). For an argument for reading the narrator as female, see Scheiber, Andrew J., “An Unknown Infrastructure: Gender, Production, and Aesthetic Exchange in Rebecca Harding Davis's ‘Life in the Iron-Mills,’” Legacy 11, no. 2 (1994): 101–17Google Scholar. For a reading of the androgynous nature of the narrator existing as an intended rhetorical device on the part of Davis, see Curnutt, , “Direct Addresses,” 146–68Google Scholar. For an argument stating the appropriateness of reading the narrator as being an older Deborah, see Hood, Richard A., “Framing a ‘Life in the Iron Mills,’” Studies in American Fiction 23, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 73–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

81. Harris, , “Rebecca Harding Davis,” 6Google Scholar.

82. The narrator specifically mentions his idleness in two other places within the brief opening section of the frame: “When I was a child, I used to fancy a look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river slavishly bearing its burden day after day. Something of the same idle notion comes to me to-day, when from the street-window I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and morning, to the great mills” (12). And, “My fancy about the river was an idle one: it is no type of such a life” (13).

83. Kirk Curnutt states that the “direct addresses that delineate [Hugh Wolfe's] tragedy are spoken aggressively, reprimanding the narratee for ignoring the horrendous work conditions and the human dignity of the workers. Of course, the actual audience may already share the narrator's compassion. As a result, we are not compelled to identify with the ‘you’ inscribed in the story” (“Direct Addresses,” 149). Either way, “you” understands, regardless of the narrator's tone, that the narrator possesses, by the very fact that he speaks from the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, the right to speak to his readers as a social equal.

84. Hesford, , “Literary Contexts,” 74Google Scholar.

85. Macherey, Pierre, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Wall, Geoffrey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 85Google Scholar.

86. Morrison, Lucy, “The Search for the Artist in Man and Fulfillment in Life: Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills,” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (1996): 249, 250Google Scholar. For arguments that, to varying degrees, interpret the korl woman in terms of its autobiographical significance, see Pfaelzer, Jean, “Rebecca Harding Davis: Domesticity, Social Order, and the Industrial Novel,” International Journal of Women's Studies 4, no. 3 (05–06 1981)Google Scholar; Morrison, “Search for the Artist;” and Olson, “Biographical Interpretation.” For a discussion of the korl woman in relation to Davis's commentary on the inability to achieve representation through language, see Yaeger, , Honey-Mad Women, 272–73Google Scholar.

87. Stewart, Susan, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 164, 165Google Scholar.

88. Langford, , Richard Harding Davis Years, xGoogle Scholar.

89. Pfaelzer, , “Rebecca Harding Davis,” 234Google Scholar.

90. Rose, Anne C., Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), xiGoogle Scholar.

91. George R. Taylor, quoted in Watson, William L., “‘These Mill-hands Are Gettin' Onbearable’: The Logic of Class Formation in Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis,” Women's Studies Quarterly 26, nos. 1–2 (1998): 116Google Scholar. See Taylor, , The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962): 284Google Scholar.

92. Huston, James L., “Facing an Angry Labor: The American Public Interprets the Shoemakers' Strike of 1860,” Civil War History 28, no. 3 (1982): 197CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93. Foner, Philip S., History of the Labor Movement in the United States (New York: International, 1947), 1: 240Google Scholar.

94. Watson, , “These Mill-hands,” 117Google Scholar.

95. Harris, , Rebecca Harding Davis, 25–26Google Scholar.

96. “Although coverage of the [Great New England] strike by [the Intelligencer] was limited, the strike gets several mentions, including a report dated March 17 describing the march of six thousand strikers led by a company of militia” (Watson, , “These Mill-hands,” 132n. 2Google Scholar).

97. Foner, , History, 221Google Scholar.

98. Watson, , “These Mill-hands,” 116Google Scholar. See Williams, John Alexander, West Virginia: A Bicentennial History (New York: Norton, 1976), 52Google Scholar.

99. Watson, , “These Mill-hands,” 118–19Google Scholar.

100. Ibid., 119.

101. Ibid.

102. Ibid., 120.

103. Ibid., 120–21. See American Social History Project Under the Direction of Gutman, Herbert G., Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture and Society (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 1: 361Google Scholar. The illustration mentioned appears in the March 17, 1860, issue of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Magazine.

104. Watson, , “These Mill-hands,” 122Google Scholar.

105. Ibid., 123–24.

106. Ibid., 124.

107. Ibid., 116, 123.

108. Ibid., 126.

109. Ibid., 128, 129. See Kaplan, , Social Construction, 13Google Scholar.

110. Hood, , “Framing,” 82Google Scholar.

111. Morrison, , “Search for the Artist,” 249Google Scholar.

112. Hughes, Sheila Hassell, “Between Bodies of Knowledge There Is a Great Gulf Fixed: A Liberationist Reading of Class and Gender in Life in the Iron Mills,” American Quarterly 49, no. 1 (03 1997): 128CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

113. Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 90Google Scholar.

114. Ibid., 90, 104.

115. Ibid., 90.

116. Gaskell, Elizabeth C., North and South, The World's Classics, vol. 154, The Novels and Tales of Mrs. Gaskell, vol. 4 (1855; rept. London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 212, 238Google Scholar.

117. Kushner, , Self-Destruction, 37–38Google Scholar.

118. Ibid., 38.

119. Bremner, Robert H., The Public Good: Philanthropy and Welfare in the Civil War Era (New York: Knopf, 1980), 10Google Scholar.

120. Quoted in Farberow, Norman L., “Cultural History of Suicide,” in Suicide in Different Cultures, ed. Farberow, Norman L. (Baltimore: University Park Press, 1975), 10Google Scholar.

121. Scheiber, , “Unknown Infrastructure,” 108Google Scholar.

122. Ibid., 109.