Journal #24

Michelle Romero
English 48A,
Dr. Scott Lankford

Author: Rebecca Harding Davis

"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" (2599).

This passage reaffirms for me that it is no coincidence that I find so many similarities between Davis' story and Douglass'. Davis apparently saw the similarities between slavery and the factory life also. The image Davis creates of the negro-like river working slavishly day after day and the lower class men and women working just the same, slavishly day after day, is just depressing. There is no life in this picture. There is no action, only the mundane continuity of progress. It puts an ugly face on progress and dehumanizes the workers. They are just dumb faces moving along.

In fact, not only do the people before dehumanized, the working river becomes humanized. The use of personification in this way, shows the life of everything around the people, but the lack of life in the people. Davis eludes to this thought more than once as the machines come to life, as the fires burn, but the faces of the men and women only become more tired looking.

I would think that it should be embarrassing of our society to have supposedly moved forward from slavery (some at least), and then to here be seeing the oppression of the lower working class. To be successful, does it really take putting down others? Does it really mean someone gets exploited? It would appear the answer is yes. There is perhaps a continuous cycle of things that will try to destroy the spirit of human life.