Literary Contexts of "Life in the Iron-Mills"
1977; Duke University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2925555
ISSN1527-2117
Autores Tópico(s)American Literature and Culture
ResumoREBECCA HARDING DAVIS'S Life in the Iron-Mills, published in the April, i86i 4tlantic Monthly, is the first notable work of fiction to concern itself with the life of the factory worker in an industrial American town.' In literary histories, the story is usually treated, if treated at all, as a forerunner or early example of American literary realism.2 That it should receive such treatment is natural. Davis takes pains to initiate us into the knowledge of hitherto little acknowledged social realities; she seems a pioneer exploring a territory which, by the end of the nineteenth century, would be recognized as the new American wilderness. Yet the significance of Life in the Iron-Mills can better be appreciated, I think, by setting it in several other literary contexts: the achievement of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer to whom Davis owed most; the tradition of the social novel; the religious, apocalyptic bias of mid-nineteenth-century American literature. Set in these contexts, Davis's story comes to life not as a work which is admirable because it is almost realistic, but as a work which astonishes and informs its past and present readers because it shares in and extends the accomplishments of the romance. In Bits of Gossip, a book of reminiscences, Davis recalls the world of romance she constructed as a child reading Bunyan and Scott in a tree-house.3 One day she brought up into her private world a collection of moral tales for children, among which, she records,
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