Haley, thank you for introducing me to this story and to the concept of working class literature (obvious I'm not a lit major, huh?). And you're correct. Since I don't have the vocabulary and structure for true literary interpretation, my way into a text is through an emotional connection that allows me to seek the truth of another's perspective (whether I agree with it or not!).
I've probably scribbled as many words in my notes as are in this short text itself, and I'll try to post some thoughts after considering the questions you’ve posed. I will say that Silas Marner, Jean Valjean, and Bill Sykes and Nancy kept flickering at the edges of my meditations on Hugh and Deb. I'll have to go back to those novels to see why their authors were trying to break in on my contemplation of Harding Davis's work.
Your way into these texts is just as valid as the literary training. In fact, the more I’ve thought about it over the years…the more I’ve thought that it all comes back to some kind of emotional connection. We can only hope to have the kind of connection Hugh’s Korl-Woman has on our narrator, who keeps it safely displayed forever.
You’re spot on with these other connections. I might throw another at you: have you read Frankenstein? There’s so much to contemplate when it comes to working-class lit!
While I reflect on the heartbreak of this story (!!) and on the questions posed above (thank you, Haley!) I also wanted to see if anyone else noted how many times Olsen used the word “crimson”? It must have been at least 6 times which I thought interesting! Her imagery was so precise, beautiful and raw and so I found it curious that she came back to that same adjective again and again. ⁉️♦️🔥
Ohhhh interesting observation! I am immediately wondering about Dante’s Inferno—crimson is such a deep red. Evocative of flames and heat. Maybe there’s a connection there??
Thank you Haley for your precious thoughs about the novella.
Nearly at the end of this short story, when Hugh is in jail, I immediatly remembered the image , at the beginning of the book where the narrator writes :
"A dirty canary chirps desolately in a cage beside me. Its dreams of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream".
And I saw the similarity with Hugh who, like this canary, is dirty, covered with smoke and trapped in the cage of his vile life and at the end of the book, behind the iron bars of a real prison.
Hugh has also dreams of something beyond his predestined life of an iron mill worker. He dreams of a better reality as well as the canary has dreams of "green fields and sunshine".
But Hugh, who has a "poet's soul", can mould his dreams in "strangely beautiful” sculptures which reveal his longing for an improved life beyond the cage of his "city of fires".
Such a beautiful connection, Lassandro. Yes! You’re so right that it’s not just artistry that he dreams of. It’s the life he could’ve had if he wasn’t a mill-worker. 💛
It reminds me of Jude the Obscure another bleak story about a better life. But I admit to struggling with emotional connection with this story as I always felt a distance from Hugh and Deb, an outside observer. Their condition is so wretched. The narrator is empathetic but it almost felt like the portrayal of some "strange primitive tribe " in an old style Nat Geographical piece. I am not sure why it's not working for me.
Also thinking about what is working class literature. Will admit to not having yet read the articles from last week The tabs are open but life....But I think working class literature surely has to be written by those who are from working class even if they have got out. Black literature is written by Black people.
My comment focuses on the beginning and ending of “Life in the Iron Mill”, the frame in which the story itself is inserted.
The book opens with a narrator ( probably the author) looking out of a window, observing and describing a town of iron-works. The protagonist of the first page is “ smoke” which Is everywhere, on the muddy street, on the wharves, the boats, on the yellow river, on the “ skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke”.
Against the image of smoke, fog, soot, we can find the one of sunshine, air, green fields, mountains.: the industrial setting against the natural one. It is the contrast between the brutality, the ugliness of the first and the beauty, the purity of the latter.
Smoke becomes the symbol of the grim, dull, squalid life, depraved of hope and joy, the life of the working-class, masses of men with “besotted faces sharpened with pain, breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with smoke”. Sunshine, green fields, air, mountains become the symbol of the workers’ aspirations, their dreams for a better future.
The narrator goes on by addressing directly the reader (“my friend”, someone of her same upper-class) asking him to: “come down with me into the thickest of the fog and mud” and listen carefully (“look deeper”) to the story which is about to be told.
The narrator continues by explaining the reasons for telling this story. It’s about a life vainly lived and lost like thousands of them, stories that “have lain dumb for centuries”. She wants to give a voice to these men and women. She also wants to awaken the reader’s consciousness about the appalling reality of the workers. That’s why, to better grasp the reader’s attention, she uses the strong and effective language of the senses to describe the town of the iron-mill.
The protagonist is a puddler. His name is Huge Wolfe. The story evolves, in particular, around one day of his life, one night, a night that the narrator calls “the crisis of his life”, when Huge has an epiphany, a moment of sudden revelation, a clear understanding and vision of his squalid, hopless life.
This awareness will lead him, through some fatal coincidences and unfair consequences, to imprisonnment and suicide.
The question with which the book opens:” Is this the end? O Life, as futile, then, as frail, what hope of answer or redress?”. The narrator points out that “the lives and the deaths of these workers ask for an answer”, answer that, in the novel, can only be seen in the great hope that “the promise of the day will surely come”.
The book ends the same way it started, with the image of the narrator back in the house looking outside the window hoping for a better future. She uses the image of the darkness turning into light and of the night into day to describe the transition from the harsh reality into a promising future. The figure of the Korl-Woman, a statue that she has preserved as a reminder of the working-class labor, is there with her. It’s arm stretched out into the darkness is suddenly “touched by a cool light, like a blessing hand and points to the east where God has set the promise of the dawn”.
Thank you for introducing me to these two stories. I recently read 'The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s', by Maggie Doherty. It's primarily about Tillie Olsen, Anne Sexton, and Maxine Kumin. I had read Tillie Olsen's 'Silences' and learned a lot more about her political work in Doherty's book. I'm eager to read 'Yonnondio'.
Your questions about working-class artistry are particularly interesting to me. In the U.S., the definition of working class is more slippery since most people work, so it might be worth discussing how to define that term. I'm not sure what we're talking about when we talk about working-class literature. Dalyandot suggests it must be written by working-class people.
I question Davis's presentation of every character besides Hugh (and of course the well-off people) as a dull brute with no artistic impulse. Although I came from a prosperous family, they disowned me after my failed marriage. With no money, health care, or child support, and given the high cost of day care, I had no choice but to go on public assistance to support my family (a baby and another on the way). During those years, I met a wide range of people in poverty or low-wage jobs, and found that each had some creative aspiration and/or outlet: some writers and artists, but also, for example, a prisoner who took special pride in her nails, a man who loved growing vegetables and helped create a community garden, a woman with seven children who started with a cheap aquarium and made their living room feel like an undersea garden.
The tone of the story also bothered me. I wrote a memoir of my years in poverty, mostly to combat the social stigma (Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother). Davis's story likewise seems intended to open a view into a social class that is usually stereotyped and stigmatised, which is great. However, her outsider's view struck me as patronising. We used to say that even a bigot was preferable to a liberal do-gooder determined to tell poor people what they should do and what they should want. The things they wanted for us were usually so out of touch with our lives--and out of reach--as to be useless.
My comment on tone goes back to the question of defining working-class literature. Despite my crack about do-gooders, I think others can write authentically about working-class lives if they do their research. Two excellent nonfiction books I've read reflect the quality of their research: '$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America', by Kathryn J. Edin, H. Luke Shaefer; and 'Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America', by Barbara Ehrenreich.
I look forward to reading more comments and to doing a closer reading as I consider your other questions.
This really resonates. I have read autobiographies by working class women in 19th century and while they are clear about poverty and hardship there is also joy in family ,politics or religion, choirs. Working class people have culture. Different culture but equally valid.
Because the narrator constantly speaks directly to a reader not expected to be part of this hellacious environment, I think she (or he, because we never really know, do we?) is really intentionally emphasizing stereotypes. The narrator knows people in her audience who consider themselves to be inherently different and better than these workers, and that is why they themselves do not have to live and suffer like this. The thesis presented when the factory owner, the doctor, and the visitor are ogling these workers like animals is in zoo is that it is money only (and the opportunities that come with it) that separates their fates from these workers. I think in sharing Hugh's artistry, and Deb's loyalty she is making the point that they too are just as deserving of all the same things the presumably well off reader expects from life. I think she also uses the doctor to nail hypocrisy. He reacts as though he'd like to help, but since he doesn't have the resources to help all of them it's not worth helping one. He also satisfies his conscience by praying for them to gain the power to rise themselves (without any sacrifice of his help or coin). I think the narrator is expecting the readers to be much like the doctor and is trying to shake their complacency. At least that's how I read the intent. Maybe the author gets a little heavy handed at describing how the brutishness of the place gets reflected in the people in service to that intent.
Really interesting discussion... I, too, was torn between respecting the way Harding Davis tries to open her readers' eyes to the plight of mill workers, and wondering if she wasn't somehow taking away from their agency by speaking for them. I found this article by William L. Watson quite interesting: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40003465 (if you log in, you can read it for free.) He points out that Davis was actually writing at a time of considerable industrial ferment (Great New England Strike etc). True, the main action of the story is set 30 years earlier, but she kind of implies in her opening description that little has changed. But other sources from that era, says Watson, indicate that workers had a lot more "culture" and political clout than Davis suggests. He maintains: "Harding reveals what, historically, was done TO workers and suggests what could be done FOR them, moral education and social uplift. But she cannot reveal what workers, historically, did WITH what was done to them." She doesn't, in other words, say much about workers' strengths, possibly because she doesn't want to paint a picture that's too disturbing for her middle-class readers. Dunno... But I enjoyed the story and the resulting conversation!
Not totally finished thoughts, but as I was reading and noting Harding's use of the word "you," I was reminded of the middle-to-upper-middle class women who would work in the slums of Victorian London--some very helpful, and others driven by less than compassionate views of the poor to do things they thought right (separate families; institutionalize people)--and how it was a pretty common view at the time that the poor were quite nearly a different, degenerate race of human beings from their more upwardly mobile counterparts. I was reminded of this again when the upper class men saw the Korl Woman and recognized it as skilled, if unsettling, artwork. The unsettled feeling that seemed to be invoked in them by the work itself seemed inseparable from the unsettled feeling they had upon realizing that the artist was one of these impoverished laborers, and they don't seem to interrogate why they are unsettled by that, or acknowledging their views that this art is doing the work of troubling.
Neither here nor there, just things that popped out at me.
One of the more depressing pieces I’ve ever read! Has anyone seen Hadestown? The story kept invoking images for me of the laborers in Hadestown, toiling “down under”— filthy, overall-clad, soulless, making endless circles, keeping their heads down— it’s had me listening to the soundtrack all week.
“Fire in every horrible form: pits of flame waving in the wind; Liquid metal flames writhing in tortuous stream through the sand; wide caldrons filled with boiling fire, over which bent ghastly wretches stirring the strange brewing. . .” This imagery and the Korl woman are so haunting. As if you’ll be cursed and damned by this witch if you are one who could help but looks away, one of the church-goers who pass and ignore Hugh on their way to worship, or the doc who prays for him but withholds his assistance.
I guess I wasn't paying attention, but I was reading along thinking I was in London or some such place, until I was brought up short by the description of the visitors. There was a "little Yankee" jotting down notes, and Mitchell was described as "in the borders of a Slave State, to study the institutions of the South." Ah, so not England. That gave me a whole new take on the story, and made me think of Uncle Tom's Cabin and wonder if Rebecca Harding Davis had read it.
I was also thinking about the seemingly random introduction of the Quaker woman who ends up saving Deb. It got me wondering how society as a whole in this time period viewed being Quaker. I'm not exactly sure where I'm going with this, but there is something here about the otherness of this character that makes me wonder if the author by making her a Quaker is telegraphing something about her that her original audience would understand that I am missing.
Thanks for introducing me to this story and writer, Haley. What an incredible piece of writing. So shocking all these years later. (And sorry this comment is coming to you weeks later! - but only just got a chance to read the story. Great analysis - helped me think more deeply about what I'd read.)
I’m so glad you read it!! Isn’t it such a unique and strange piece of writing? So much emotional tugging and forcing the reader to look and think. I am so glad you enjoyed it and the analysis!!
Haley, thank you for introducing me to this story and to the concept of working class literature (obvious I'm not a lit major, huh?). And you're correct. Since I don't have the vocabulary and structure for true literary interpretation, my way into a text is through an emotional connection that allows me to seek the truth of another's perspective (whether I agree with it or not!).
I've probably scribbled as many words in my notes as are in this short text itself, and I'll try to post some thoughts after considering the questions you’ve posed. I will say that Silas Marner, Jean Valjean, and Bill Sykes and Nancy kept flickering at the edges of my meditations on Hugh and Deb. I'll have to go back to those novels to see why their authors were trying to break in on my contemplation of Harding Davis's work.
Your way into these texts is just as valid as the literary training. In fact, the more I’ve thought about it over the years…the more I’ve thought that it all comes back to some kind of emotional connection. We can only hope to have the kind of connection Hugh’s Korl-Woman has on our narrator, who keeps it safely displayed forever.
You’re spot on with these other connections. I might throw another at you: have you read Frankenstein? There’s so much to contemplate when it comes to working-class lit!
Frankenstein is on my reread list.
While I reflect on the heartbreak of this story (!!) and on the questions posed above (thank you, Haley!) I also wanted to see if anyone else noted how many times Olsen used the word “crimson”? It must have been at least 6 times which I thought interesting! Her imagery was so precise, beautiful and raw and so I found it curious that she came back to that same adjective again and again. ⁉️♦️🔥
Ohhhh interesting observation! I am immediately wondering about Dante’s Inferno—crimson is such a deep red. Evocative of flames and heat. Maybe there’s a connection there??
Thank you Haley for your precious thoughs about the novella.
Nearly at the end of this short story, when Hugh is in jail, I immediatly remembered the image , at the beginning of the book where the narrator writes :
"A dirty canary chirps desolately in a cage beside me. Its dreams of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream".
And I saw the similarity with Hugh who, like this canary, is dirty, covered with smoke and trapped in the cage of his vile life and at the end of the book, behind the iron bars of a real prison.
Hugh has also dreams of something beyond his predestined life of an iron mill worker. He dreams of a better reality as well as the canary has dreams of "green fields and sunshine".
But Hugh, who has a "poet's soul", can mould his dreams in "strangely beautiful” sculptures which reveal his longing for an improved life beyond the cage of his "city of fires".
Such a beautiful connection, Lassandro. Yes! You’re so right that it’s not just artistry that he dreams of. It’s the life he could’ve had if he wasn’t a mill-worker. 💛
It reminds me of Jude the Obscure another bleak story about a better life. But I admit to struggling with emotional connection with this story as I always felt a distance from Hugh and Deb, an outside observer. Their condition is so wretched. The narrator is empathetic but it almost felt like the portrayal of some "strange primitive tribe " in an old style Nat Geographical piece. I am not sure why it's not working for me.
Also thinking about what is working class literature. Will admit to not having yet read the articles from last week The tabs are open but life....But I think working class literature surely has to be written by those who are from working class even if they have got out. Black literature is written by Black people.
Olivia Lassandro
My comment focuses on the beginning and ending of “Life in the Iron Mill”, the frame in which the story itself is inserted.
The book opens with a narrator ( probably the author) looking out of a window, observing and describing a town of iron-works. The protagonist of the first page is “ smoke” which Is everywhere, on the muddy street, on the wharves, the boats, on the yellow river, on the “ skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke”.
Against the image of smoke, fog, soot, we can find the one of sunshine, air, green fields, mountains.: the industrial setting against the natural one. It is the contrast between the brutality, the ugliness of the first and the beauty, the purity of the latter.
Smoke becomes the symbol of the grim, dull, squalid life, depraved of hope and joy, the life of the working-class, masses of men with “besotted faces sharpened with pain, breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with smoke”. Sunshine, green fields, air, mountains become the symbol of the workers’ aspirations, their dreams for a better future.
The narrator goes on by addressing directly the reader (“my friend”, someone of her same upper-class) asking him to: “come down with me into the thickest of the fog and mud” and listen carefully (“look deeper”) to the story which is about to be told.
The narrator continues by explaining the reasons for telling this story. It’s about a life vainly lived and lost like thousands of them, stories that “have lain dumb for centuries”. She wants to give a voice to these men and women. She also wants to awaken the reader’s consciousness about the appalling reality of the workers. That’s why, to better grasp the reader’s attention, she uses the strong and effective language of the senses to describe the town of the iron-mill.
The protagonist is a puddler. His name is Huge Wolfe. The story evolves, in particular, around one day of his life, one night, a night that the narrator calls “the crisis of his life”, when Huge has an epiphany, a moment of sudden revelation, a clear understanding and vision of his squalid, hopless life.
This awareness will lead him, through some fatal coincidences and unfair consequences, to imprisonnment and suicide.
The question with which the book opens:” Is this the end? O Life, as futile, then, as frail, what hope of answer or redress?”. The narrator points out that “the lives and the deaths of these workers ask for an answer”, answer that, in the novel, can only be seen in the great hope that “the promise of the day will surely come”.
The book ends the same way it started, with the image of the narrator back in the house looking outside the window hoping for a better future. She uses the image of the darkness turning into light and of the night into day to describe the transition from the harsh reality into a promising future. The figure of the Korl-Woman, a statue that she has preserved as a reminder of the working-class labor, is there with her. It’s arm stretched out into the darkness is suddenly “touched by a cool light, like a blessing hand and points to the east where God has set the promise of the dawn”.
Thank you for introducing me to these two stories. I recently read 'The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s', by Maggie Doherty. It's primarily about Tillie Olsen, Anne Sexton, and Maxine Kumin. I had read Tillie Olsen's 'Silences' and learned a lot more about her political work in Doherty's book. I'm eager to read 'Yonnondio'.
Your questions about working-class artistry are particularly interesting to me. In the U.S., the definition of working class is more slippery since most people work, so it might be worth discussing how to define that term. I'm not sure what we're talking about when we talk about working-class literature. Dalyandot suggests it must be written by working-class people.
I question Davis's presentation of every character besides Hugh (and of course the well-off people) as a dull brute with no artistic impulse. Although I came from a prosperous family, they disowned me after my failed marriage. With no money, health care, or child support, and given the high cost of day care, I had no choice but to go on public assistance to support my family (a baby and another on the way). During those years, I met a wide range of people in poverty or low-wage jobs, and found that each had some creative aspiration and/or outlet: some writers and artists, but also, for example, a prisoner who took special pride in her nails, a man who loved growing vegetables and helped create a community garden, a woman with seven children who started with a cheap aquarium and made their living room feel like an undersea garden.
The tone of the story also bothered me. I wrote a memoir of my years in poverty, mostly to combat the social stigma (Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother). Davis's story likewise seems intended to open a view into a social class that is usually stereotyped and stigmatised, which is great. However, her outsider's view struck me as patronising. We used to say that even a bigot was preferable to a liberal do-gooder determined to tell poor people what they should do and what they should want. The things they wanted for us were usually so out of touch with our lives--and out of reach--as to be useless.
My comment on tone goes back to the question of defining working-class literature. Despite my crack about do-gooders, I think others can write authentically about working-class lives if they do their research. Two excellent nonfiction books I've read reflect the quality of their research: '$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America', by Kathryn J. Edin, H. Luke Shaefer; and 'Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America', by Barbara Ehrenreich.
I look forward to reading more comments and to doing a closer reading as I consider your other questions.
This really resonates. I have read autobiographies by working class women in 19th century and while they are clear about poverty and hardship there is also joy in family ,politics or religion, choirs. Working class people have culture. Different culture but equally valid.
Because the narrator constantly speaks directly to a reader not expected to be part of this hellacious environment, I think she (or he, because we never really know, do we?) is really intentionally emphasizing stereotypes. The narrator knows people in her audience who consider themselves to be inherently different and better than these workers, and that is why they themselves do not have to live and suffer like this. The thesis presented when the factory owner, the doctor, and the visitor are ogling these workers like animals is in zoo is that it is money only (and the opportunities that come with it) that separates their fates from these workers. I think in sharing Hugh's artistry, and Deb's loyalty she is making the point that they too are just as deserving of all the same things the presumably well off reader expects from life. I think she also uses the doctor to nail hypocrisy. He reacts as though he'd like to help, but since he doesn't have the resources to help all of them it's not worth helping one. He also satisfies his conscience by praying for them to gain the power to rise themselves (without any sacrifice of his help or coin). I think the narrator is expecting the readers to be much like the doctor and is trying to shake their complacency. At least that's how I read the intent. Maybe the author gets a little heavy handed at describing how the brutishness of the place gets reflected in the people in service to that intent.
Really interesting discussion... I, too, was torn between respecting the way Harding Davis tries to open her readers' eyes to the plight of mill workers, and wondering if she wasn't somehow taking away from their agency by speaking for them. I found this article by William L. Watson quite interesting: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40003465 (if you log in, you can read it for free.) He points out that Davis was actually writing at a time of considerable industrial ferment (Great New England Strike etc). True, the main action of the story is set 30 years earlier, but she kind of implies in her opening description that little has changed. But other sources from that era, says Watson, indicate that workers had a lot more "culture" and political clout than Davis suggests. He maintains: "Harding reveals what, historically, was done TO workers and suggests what could be done FOR them, moral education and social uplift. But she cannot reveal what workers, historically, did WITH what was done to them." She doesn't, in other words, say much about workers' strengths, possibly because she doesn't want to paint a picture that's too disturbing for her middle-class readers. Dunno... But I enjoyed the story and the resulting conversation!
Not totally finished thoughts, but as I was reading and noting Harding's use of the word "you," I was reminded of the middle-to-upper-middle class women who would work in the slums of Victorian London--some very helpful, and others driven by less than compassionate views of the poor to do things they thought right (separate families; institutionalize people)--and how it was a pretty common view at the time that the poor were quite nearly a different, degenerate race of human beings from their more upwardly mobile counterparts. I was reminded of this again when the upper class men saw the Korl Woman and recognized it as skilled, if unsettling, artwork. The unsettled feeling that seemed to be invoked in them by the work itself seemed inseparable from the unsettled feeling they had upon realizing that the artist was one of these impoverished laborers, and they don't seem to interrogate why they are unsettled by that, or acknowledging their views that this art is doing the work of troubling.
Neither here nor there, just things that popped out at me.
One of the more depressing pieces I’ve ever read! Has anyone seen Hadestown? The story kept invoking images for me of the laborers in Hadestown, toiling “down under”— filthy, overall-clad, soulless, making endless circles, keeping their heads down— it’s had me listening to the soundtrack all week.
“Fire in every horrible form: pits of flame waving in the wind; Liquid metal flames writhing in tortuous stream through the sand; wide caldrons filled with boiling fire, over which bent ghastly wretches stirring the strange brewing. . .” This imagery and the Korl woman are so haunting. As if you’ll be cursed and damned by this witch if you are one who could help but looks away, one of the church-goers who pass and ignore Hugh on their way to worship, or the doc who prays for him but withholds his assistance.
A couple of more thoughts.
I guess I wasn't paying attention, but I was reading along thinking I was in London or some such place, until I was brought up short by the description of the visitors. There was a "little Yankee" jotting down notes, and Mitchell was described as "in the borders of a Slave State, to study the institutions of the South." Ah, so not England. That gave me a whole new take on the story, and made me think of Uncle Tom's Cabin and wonder if Rebecca Harding Davis had read it.
I was also thinking about the seemingly random introduction of the Quaker woman who ends up saving Deb. It got me wondering how society as a whole in this time period viewed being Quaker. I'm not exactly sure where I'm going with this, but there is something here about the otherness of this character that makes me wonder if the author by making her a Quaker is telegraphing something about her that her original audience would understand that I am missing.
I think that's it. Now, on to Yonnondio.
I was fascinated by the Quaker savior at the end!
Thanks for introducing me to this story and writer, Haley. What an incredible piece of writing. So shocking all these years later. (And sorry this comment is coming to you weeks later! - but only just got a chance to read the story. Great analysis - helped me think more deeply about what I'd read.)
I’m so glad you read it!! Isn’t it such a unique and strange piece of writing? So much emotional tugging and forcing the reader to look and think. I am so glad you enjoyed it and the analysis!!