Journal #23

Michelle Romero
English 48A
Dr. Scott Lankford

Author: Rebecca Harding Davis

"Beneath these roofs Deborah looked in on a city of fires, that burned hot and fiercely in the night. Fire in every horrible form: pits of flame waving in the wide caldrons filled with boiling fire, over which bent ghastly wretches stirring the strange brewing....It was like a street of Hell" (2603).

This passage describes the scene that Deborah looks upon as she hurries through the mill town to where her cousin Hugh Wolfe is so that she can take him his dinner.

In reading through this description of the mill town, I couldn't help but imagine a picture of hell. Davis' repetition of words like "fire," "cauldron," and "pits" creates the sense of hell. A reader would be able to imagine red flames all around them as they walked down the dirty road. It creates a sense of being engulfed. Then, finally, she ends with the same explicit statement: "It was like a street in Hell."

I can't help seeing the similarities between Davis' writing and Douglass' in the way that they try to illicit sympathy from the reader. It is both of their political agendas to open the eyes of the oppressors and passers-by. They want their audience to see oppression for what it is: OPPRESSION. In this case, Davis portrays life in the iron mills as similar to hell. It is the lowest "pit" of life. In the same way, Douglass portrayed the cruelties of slavery in the same explicit way so as to create a more real image of slavery to his readers who previously may have been under the impression that slaves were happy being slaves.

Therefore, when Davis depicts the iron mills to be the pit of hell, there is no one who can say that is what they want. No one would ask to live in such a hell. And thus, her readers are faced with the harsh reality of what it is like to live as a lower-working class person.