Journal #26

Michelle Romero

English 48A

Dr. Scott Lankford

Author: Rebecca Harding Davis

"Never! He had no words for such a thought, but he knew now, in all the sharpness of the bitter certainty, that between them there was a great gulf never to be passed. Never!" (Life in the Iron Mills, 2608).

Hugh Wolfe is captured by these sorts of upper class gentlemen: Kirby, Doctor May, Mitchell and their friends. Every chance he gets, the narrator tells us, he tries to near them to hear what they say, to absorb every breath. In his eaves-dropping, he hears the men observing the workers and seeing some of the horrors. Yet, they seem to dismiss these things they see. They care more to look away if it means there is money in their own pockets. And that is when the narrator describes Wolfe's realization in this passage, that he would never be part of their class.

The narrator uses a great rift as a metaphor for the thing which separates the classes. It is something that will always separate them. I found this image and thought it fit quite perfectly with the passage. In the image, the works are in raggedy worker clothes and they are all bowing to these other men on the other side who stand up straight and stare down at the workers. The position of the men's bodies is symbolic of this hierarchy between the classes. Furthermore, you will notice the money that lies between them. This fact, along with other textual references to money, suggest that money or rather capitalism is what has created this rift between the classes. Since this suggestion comes from the narrator, we the readers are inclined to believe that the author is making an attack on capitalism, or at least showing one consequence of it.

Behind all the bowing and standing, behind capitalism, there was a mass of lower-working class men and women slaving away. There was a mass of workers being pushed down by the sword (as shown in the picture). By these types of images which are created by Davis' language in various parts of the book, we know that she is attacking both the outward political show and also the real day to day life of hell as a working-class mill-worker.

Journal #25

Michelle Romero
English 48A,
Dr. Scott Lankford

Author: Rebecca Harding Davis

"Perhaps the weak, flaccid wretch had some stimulant in her pale life to keep her up, --some love or hope, it might be, or urgent need. When that stimulant was gone, she would take to whiskey. Man cannot live by work alone" (2602).

The narrator describes Deborah Wolfe as a woman who did not drink any strong alcohol. To show that this was a rare case, the narrator goes on to describe that she must have a special circumstance which keeps her going. It would seem that everyone around her has given up. This woman, however, must have something, the narrator says.

The last line in this passage is the most powerful: men cannot live by work alone. They are not machines, they are not tools. They are humans with feelings. They are people with needs themselves. Therefore, when they must give up their needs and desires to do someone else's bidding, it destroys them. They are not made for this. They are not made for work in the iron mills day after day, night after night taking shifts without any rest.

The narrator makes it clear that in that hard time, a person had to find something, anything to live for. Later, this same theme is revisited when Kirby and his friends start asking about the statue of a woman they find in the mills. Hugh Wolfe answers that the statue of the woman is portraying her hunger. He later explains that she hungers for "summat to make her live" (2609).

How horrible to have to fight for something to live for. You would think that being born gives a person right enough to live their life, but clearly the narrator is showing us different. Clearly, it took every bit of strength left in a person just to resist whiskey, to resist sinking down into the pits.

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.

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.

Journal #22

Michelle Romero
Dr. Scott Lankford:
English 48A

Author: Rebecca Harding Davis

Life in the Iron Mills
"With all this groping, this mad desire, a great blind intellect stumbling through wrong, a loving poet's heart, the man was by habit only a coarse, vulgar laborer, familiar with sights and words you would blush to name" (2606).

In this passage, Davis introduces the character of Mr. Wolfe.
Davis' language in this quote illustrates the stark contrast between the innate character of Mr. Wolfe and the persona he has taken on. The contrastive language pits good against bad, tenderness against hardness. In doing so, Davis shows the reader how the reality of living such a hard, cruel, laborious life as that in the iron mills really changes a person. It takes their spirit away.

This passage actually reminded me of similar parts in Douglass' Narrative that aim to describe the same message: oppression can steal a person's soul. In Douglass' Narrative the oppression comes in the form of slavery, while in Davis' Life in the Iron Mills the oppressor is sort of an unseen monster...money perhaps, or the owners of factories, the price of progress. In both stories, the victims are considered less worthy than their oppressors.

Davis represents the lower class as being incredibly worn, tired, and starving. They have to become machine-like to go on. In this particular passage, she shows the change in Mr. Wolfe. At some point, he was a man with "a loving poet's heart" and now he is part of the vulgar, dirty scene of the hard life in the iron mills. Through this contrast of images, Davis shows how life in the iron mills sucks the life out of someone. The environment is not conducive for self-expression. It does not allow a person to be even themselves. Instead, they have to harden themselves. They must become part of the machinery of progress.