Summary Of Life In The Iron Mills

In antebellum America, radical change metamorphosed the nation towards equality in both class and race. Despite these formations, fire began to float from city to city burning the underprivileged as only those with money and power were left unscathed. Working class people were focused on living day-to-day, rather than saving for a day scattered of flames pouring from the skies. Lofting safely in a small town—more than likely, Wheeling, Virginia—Rebecca Harding Davis writes a depressing, eye-opening novella centering around the life of poor workers slaving away to keep their bosses happy and rich titled, Life in the Iron Mills.
When it was published in 1861, the country was more focused on slavery and the economy, as the Civil War was beginning to brew in the border states. Funnily enough, this story takes place in a border state. Contrary to popular belief, the story became a beacon for the nation as it opened eyes on the “other,” but also people of their same race. Poverty-stricken people were focused on the idea of just living day-to-day, while their bosses were living in posh circumstances. Elitists tended to think that these penniless paupers were none of their concern (Davis 3129). Davis’s story is set around working
people’s lives who were considered to be a slightly higher status than actual slaves; her story gives insight to the class division stricken within this setting found through the three elitists and the ashen white working people. Despite her being a dissenter of the elitist class that she resided in, she opened the eyes of Americans at the time of terrible tribulations that their fellow neighbor were suffering when they could do something about it. I am laying my matches out to strike the fire for these workers who suffered through this classist regime crafted between their appearances, their differences in vernacular, and their everyday hellish lives.
Eric Schocket, an assistant professor of American literature at Hampshire College, strikes the fire against the picturesque, incandescent debilitation of America in this time period. He articulates the “immobility on the working class poor” is a radical topic for Antebellum America (Schocket 47). His argument determines that Davis wanted to set her friends and family’s hearts ablaze with hope and fervor to lift their fellow brethren from the flames of poverty into a settled, working class life. Continuing his argument, Schocket includes the idea of “white slavery, one of the era’s most common racial metaphors. Here the suggested alliance [is] built around the word slavery is undercut by the modifier white” (50). This form of historically American slavery is saved for African descended people; Davis explicitly describes the “masses of men with… skin and muscle and flesh [is] begrimed with smoke and ashes,” borderline racism vis-a-vis (3117). The workers have the same appearance as African slaves, despite their Anglo-Saxon color under their “blackface.” The theme of the “other” is prevalent, especially with the upper class when they are discussing the Welsh Hugh’s korl sculpture.
Race certainly plays a hand in the elites’ thoughts about the working class. Schocket continues using his stance of race and class as he thought “for the proslavery industrial novelist”-which Davis is not-”blackness was not a metaphor to be disavowed; it was a way to portray figuratively the link between… slavery and wage labor” (50). This allows the reader to see the rampant racism, as most would gather from antebellum America. Furthermore, the ash and soot buried in the skin of the mill worker caused the predominantly English descended elites to view the workers as not only Welsh, but also African. The comparison between chattel slavery and industrial, or white waged, enlists the idea that possessional slavery is better; due to the fact that bills and debtor’s prison was a consequence for the working class. For the views of the elites on the lower class, they become a separate race which only caused flames to darken the skies and hope for some sort of a savior. The korl sculpture becomes a reflection of the working class as it is covered in ash and soot; it lives in the iron mills, becoming another reflection of the working class, as they tend to live at their jobs.
The sculpture symbolizes the picturesque idea of a white working citizen; the mockery of said symbol by Kirby, May, and Mitchell shows the reader that she “confirm[s] the southern view that chattel slavery is better than industrial slavery” (Pfaelzer 50).
This view that white waged slavery is a sentence worse than being black demonstrates that the upper class did not give a damn for them and saw class as a bigger divide than skin color. This idea that “blackness is widely understood in the mid nineteenth century as a state of becoming” tells the reader that class is a construct where once cannot move in society; conversely, the reality is true (qtd. in Pfaelzer 50). Skin color cannot be changed; but class placement can and should be worked
for.
In truth, men had harsher opportunities to advance in class, as the only way to legitimately do so was to either gain an education or marry into it. Education was near impossible, due to the impoverished rates that workers would receive; marriage was impossible, as marriage was for politics and not for love. Conversely, women had a better opportunity to advance as if they caught the eye of someone above them, then she would jump to enjoy the posh life and to not have to suffer under the circumstances that she is accustomed to. Either way, the chances are slim of anyone changing ranks, as language was one of bigger barriers; especially as the upper class viewed the working class as children, needing to quiet the vocabulary of their conversations in order for them to understand.
The condescending nature of the vernacular in which Hugh hears when his boss and his friends when visiting the iron mills; Dr. May changes his the eloquence of his language to:
“Do you know, boy, you have it in you to be a great sculptor, a great man?—do you understand?” (talking down to the capacity of his hearer; it is a way people have with children, and men like Wolfe)—“to live a better, stronger life than I, or Mr. Kirby here? A man may make himself anything he chooses...” May stopped, heated, glowing with his own magnanimity. And it was magnanimous (Davis 3130).
This section from the novella guides the understanding to the point of where it should be. Davis’s interjection—as she is the narrator determines Hugh is uneducated—a fact that only the elite were able to attend due to tuition cost, as money is something that the labor class did not have reliable accessibility to save or earn it. Originally, conceiving the idea that Dr. May was the “Saint-Simonian” hero to Hugh and Deborah—his deformed cousin—as he was trying to help (Davis 3131). He could be seen as the opportunist of the three elitists with his condescending tone when talking to Hugh about the korl statue as seen in the passage above. Since money is May’s primary focus, thus the actuality of it is taking the fast track to get rich. His educational mind speaks out during his conversations with Mitchell and Kirby. The latter character could be defined as the treasury as his eyes are deprived of sympathy and filled with greed and ignorance for anyone else, regardless of class-his language showcases this. Davis’s style has been compared to a river, contrastly, it is similar to a storm of fire. The storm that lights her fellow socialites’s bosoms to see someone else’s life, not necessarily ones of their own class or race. The fiery darts that fire from her gun is present itself in the intense, dark realism in order to jarr sympathy from the reader. The dark imagery of the unnamed town reflects Davis’s central theme of agony, but her narrator does not offer an answer, except committing suicide or to a nunnery. The work conditions exasperates the truth; Deborah falls asleep-likening to the narrator-on a pile of ashes, successfully camouflaging herself into it. The constant danger of being burned to a crisp only precipitates the reality of home conditions; the “low, damp-the earthen floor covered with a green, slimy moss” was the basis for Deborah and Hugh’s cellared home (Davis 3120). The living arrangements described were dampened by Davis’s own upbringing in the middle class, harboring herself from the impoverished life of Deborah and High. These people lived inside the Inferno. Their living conditions wreaked havoc on their bodies and soul. The Inferno becomes a symbol for them, as their lives are surrounded by fire and the smell of charred flesh. Davis continues to spearhead her campaign, as her “white savior” complex sharpen itself. Jean Pfaelzer, Professor of English and American studies at the University of Delaware argues that “the new urban factory life dehumanized the immigrant working class and [Davis] exposed the effects of millwork on women” (25). She continues declaring her argument as she recounts through the usage of the female narrator and “the capacity of sympathy” (Pfaelzer 29). Pfaelzer’s thoughts on this phenomenon of the lower class, viewing themselves as “the other” in society. The divide continued to burn away with the elitists being situated on the top of the hill, contented with everyone below them scorch.
In short, Davis attempts to be a heroine for those underrepresented and treated as juveniles, but the only truth is the inflicted, classist regime only benefits the owners of both the mills and workers, even though they never had to endure conditions such as the ones that were apparent. Other scholars such as Pfaelzer, Schocket, and others highlighted these instances that these workers were living and being treated as nothing more than scum on the bottom of boots; however there is no supplemental information that they ever tried to turn the tables in order to improve conditions in the breadwinners of antebellum America.