An Unknown Infrastructure: Gender, Production, and Aesthetic Exchange in Rebecca Harding Davis's "Life in the Iron-Mills"

An Unknown Infrastructure: Gender, Production, and Aesthetic Exchange in Rebecca HardingDavis's "Life in the Iron-Mills"Author(s): Andrew J. ScheiberSource: Legacy, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1994), pp. 101-117Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679129 .

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An Unknown Infrastructure: Gender, Production, and Aesthetic Exchange in Rebecca Harding Davis's

"Life in the Iron-Mills"

Andrew J. Scheiber

University of St. Thomas (Minn.)

It

is a frequent if paradoxical gesture

among nineteenth-century American

authors to use their fiction as a way of

dramatizing the limited efficacy of the

artistic enterprise itself. Writers of this

period display a recurrent anxiety about the purposes and effects of liter

ary production; their discomforts run

the gamut from Hawthorne's concerns

over whether being a mere "writer of

story-books" is in any way "serviceable to mankind" (10) to Henry James's late

meditations on the seemingly intracta ble gap between aesthetic apprehen sion and meaningful action. Other ca

nonical writers and works might easily be added to the list; consider, for

example, Whitman's recurrent insis tence throughout his writings that the

poem on the page is not the "true"

poem, nor are words adequate vehicles for his meaning; or witness the last

third of Huckleberry Finn, in which

Twain, having already sunk the Sir Walter Scott, has Tom Sawyer turn his own cockeyed interpretation of the

Western literary tradition into a fun

house plot-maze of pointless cruelty and unwarranted danger. And Michael Davitt Bell has identified a lineage of authors from Charles Brockden Brown to Melville whose attitude toward their own fiction is distinguished by "doubts and questions about their medium, about the source of its power and its

place in society" (29). Such reflections, which have the

effect of undermining the authority of the discourse in which they appear, seem startling in their modernity, pointing the way to the Barthean no

tion of the text as a mere game of

signification, or the Derridean idea that

every inscription of meaning contains the seed of its own contradiction and

collapse; and the use of such gestures by Hawthorne and James in particular has been taken as fresh testimony of the greatness and sophistication (that is, the modernity) of their work. But as

we recover the cultural contexts in which these authors created, it be comes evident that this very element

which for us marks them as "mod

LEGACY, Vol. 11, No. 2, 1994. Copyright ? 1994 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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Legacy

ern"?that is, the self-doubting quality of their discourse?is found across the

literary continuum of the century, in

cluding the work of such writers as

Rebecca Harding Davis and Harriet

Beecher Stowe, whose restoration to a

place of importance in our literary

history is a relatively recent and ongo

ing phenomenon. In composing fic tions that are marked by equivocations

regarding the purpose and value of the

imaginative enterprise itself, these writ ers take their place in the "great suc

cession" of nineteenth-century Ameri can fiction; like their male counterparts

(particularly Hawthorne and James)

they produce works of fiction that, as

Laurence B. Holland says of The Wings of the Dove, "[build]... on [their] own

failure" (286). It has been a critical commonplace of

recent years to understand this "fail

ure," particularly in James's case, as the

outcome of the artist's fight to sustain

aesthetic effects by using the materials

of a recalcitrant actuality. But in Re

becca Harding Davis's "Life in the Iron

Mills" one finds the opposite concern:

that to achieve the aesthetic effect is all too easy, and that true discipline is not

in artistic creation, but in resistance to

the temptations it presents. Therefore in this story the failure of art is as

radically and consciously embedded as

in any of James's works, as from the

outset Davis indicates her abandon

ment of that struggle to transform her

materials. Because for her the success

of her story is to be measured in moral

rather than artistic terms, her energies are dedicated not to the creation of

aesthetic values, but to the interroga tion and demolition of them. In other

words, "Life in the Iron-Mills" is best

understood as a story marked by the self-deconstructive impulses that are

currently held as indices of a work's

superior literary merit.

Specifically Davis's story portrays the artistic enterprise as a site of spiritual deformation rather than of redemption, and artistic "effect" as but one element in a series of concentric circles of

"veiling" which hide layer after layer of

exploitative activity. By an intricate series of associations, echoes, and paral lelisms, Davis establishes an identifica tion of the reader with both Wolfe and his upper-class visitors, only to reveal the resulting triangle as a schema of

exploitation that strikes at the very moral foundations of the relationship between reader and writer, between artist and audience.

I

The story's self-interrogative impulse is

evident from its opening paragraphs, which begin, ironically enough, with a

tour de force of literary description in

which the narrative voice constructs an

infernal landscape dominated by the recurrent image of the "nightmare fog." Sharon Harris has identified this narra

tive gesture, in which linguistic and

imagistic effects worthy of Poe himself

contrast with a mirage-like hope of

transcendental solace in nature, as the

"romantic" frame of the tale, whose

purpose it is "to lure readers into [the

story] without alienating them before

they descend into the lower realms"

(6).1 But if this is Davis's intention, she

gives her readers meager comfort. Even

the opening sentence contains a direct

appeal to the reader which precludes an

appreciation of her craft from a comfort

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Andrew J. Scheiber

able aesthetic distance: "A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of

iron-works?"( 11). In fact she methodically undermines

her descriptive tour de force with

explicit asides to the reader which

puncture its "literary" effect and pre clude a simple armchair appreciation of

her craft. Vivid images, such as that of

the all-pervasive smoke which "rolls

sullenly in slow folds from the great

chimneys of the iron-foundries, and

settles down in black, slimy pools on

the muddy streets" (11), alternate with

blunt, jarring apostrophes to the reader:

"What do you make of a case like that, amateur psychologist?" she asks, after a

particularly stunning description of the

mill-workers (12)?a verbal gesture that seems at first distracting if not

downright gratuitous.

Robyn Warhol, noting similar pas

sages in fiction by other nineteenth

century women writers, characterizes

this strategy as that of "engaging narra

tive," whose primary purpose is not to

provide aesthetic pleasure, but "to in

spire belief in the situations their [the

authors'] novels describe?and admit

tedly hoping to move actual readers to

sympathize with real-life slaves, work

ers, or ordinary middle-class people"

(811). Such narrators are at pains to

cast their readers as the narratees, or

persons who are the object of their

direct address, and "work to engage

[the narratees] through the substance

and, failing that, the stance of their

narrative interventions" (813). Davis's narration in "Life in the Iron

Mills" is marked by the violence of such

"interventions," particularly in the open

ing stages of her story. Her pattern of

alternating vivid description with

abrupt asides to her imagined reader is

climaxed with an extended address

which, in rhetorical terms at least, amounts to her grabbing him by his

freshly starched collar and yanking him

into a posture of moral attention:

There is a curious point for you to

settle, my friend, who study psychol ogy in a lazy, dilettante way Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to do. I want

you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,?here,

into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this story. There is a secret down

here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain dumb for centuries: I want to

make it a real thing to you. (13-14)

The clue to Davis's method is in her

construction of her imagined reader: a

person of education and sensibility, as

indicated by his "dilettantish" study of

psychology and his clean clothes; em

powered, aristocratic, a creature of lei

surely intellectual pursuits; one whose

principal contact with the lower depths of human experience has been through the safely vicarious or abstract channel

of literature. He is perhaps even an

inveterate reader of the fiction in maga zines such as the Atlantic, where "Life in

the Iron-Mills" first appeared. Davis's implied reader is, in other

words, an implicit double of Mitchell, the aesthete whose failure of moral

perception is a crucial catalyst in the

story's tragic outcome. Her descrip tions of Mitchell's intellectual dab

blings make unmistakable the parallels between him and her implied reader, who "stud[ies] psychology in a lazy,

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Legacy

dilettante way"; Mitchell is, Davis says, "a man who sucked the essence out of a science or philosophy in an indiffer

ent, gentlemanly way;... with a tem

per yielding and brilliant as summer

water, until his Self was touched, when

it was ice, though brilliant still" (29). "Such men," she observes, "are not rare

in the States" (29). Her construction of Mitchell as a not

so-veiled double of the reader is signifi cant because he represents the aesthetic

impulse that the story first engages, and

then subverts. Mitchell's artistic sensi

bility converts the hellish factory into a

Dantesque landscape (27), with the

"heavy shadows and the amphitheatre of

smothered fires" striking his eye as

"ghostly, unreal" (31); he regards Wolfe

"as he had looked at a rare mosaic in the

morning; only the man was the more

amusing study of the two" ( 36). Perhaps most telling is the dramatic gap between

the alertness of Mitchell's artistic sense

and the obtuseness of his moral one.

Among the nocturnal visitors who gaze on the korl woman, Mitchell alone sees

"the soul of the thing"; he finds that

"[t]he figure touched him strangely" (32), even that it "asks questions of

God" and feels "disgust" at the compara tive blindness of his companions (33).

Yet he himself remains "aloof, silent" in

response to it ( 32 ); his attitude is one "of an amused spectator at a play" (36), and

his response to the sculpture's mute

entreaties is nothing more than a "cool, musical laugh" (35).

Mitchell's response, which combines

aesthetic appreciation, even insight, with moral detachment and indiffer

ence, demonstrates the necessity for the "interventions" described by War

hol. His attitude exemplifies precisely

the danger that Davis anticipates: that

for all her care to render the reality of

the ugly mill town, her reader will be

tempted to respond to this hellish scene as an aesthetic rather than as a

moral spectacle.2 Without her authorial

asides to the reader, with their trou

bling disruptions of the narrative's aes

thetic coherence, the reader would see

what Mitchell does, and no more: not a

world, but a theatrical synecdoche of one. In this regard her concerns remark

ably anticipate a later generation of

theorists; it is instructive to compare Davis's strategies here with the con

cerns expressed nearly seventy-five years later by Walter Benjamin who, ad

dressing the then-current "New Objecti vism" in photography and literature, would decry an art that "can no longer

depict a tenement block or a refuse

heap without transfiguring it," that

makes "the struggle against poverty an

object of consumption" (230, 231-32). Patricia Yaeger argues that the aes

theticization of suffering is the fault of

words themselves, and that Davis as a

result is forced to use her language to

call attention to its own "inadequacy"; Davis's narrator, she says, trusts neither mimesis nor metaphor, since the words that underwrite them are "implicated in

abuse and violence" (269, 271). This is

because, for Mitchell and the other

upper-class men who resemble Davis's

implied reader, language represents a

"subterfuge" which distances them from the suffering of the mill-workers, and

from an awareness of their own complic ity in that suffering (Yaeger 270). In this context, the "nightmare fog" of the

opening passage may be seen as an apt

metaphor for more than American capi talism's veiling of its own exploitation of

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Andrew J. Scheiber

the mill-workers. The self-skepticism

marking Davis's narration suggests that

language itself is a kind of fog which

obscures its own complicity in the

brutal usages which it describes; in

Yaeger's analysis Mitchell's own "depen dence on words" (268) is what, at least

in part, stunts his moral response to the

reality that confronts him in the mills.

II

Indeed, this may be why Davis "darejs] not put ... into words" the terrible

"secret" at the heart of her story, the

one that has "lain dumb for centuries"

beneath the various obfuscations of

economics, class, and culture (14, 13); she finds herself as a writer in the

paradoxical position of attempting to

expose injustice through a medium that

is ordinarily employed to disguise it, abstract it, or rationalize it away. But

what of Wolfe's own mode of artistic

expression? That is, is the korl woman, in her stark, starved vividness, an aes

thetic disruption which puts the lie to

the cultured notions of beauty which

Davis abhors?or does it too partake of

the aesthetic veiling which enables

denial, distance, even hypocrisy among those who derive meaning from it?

Some have seen the korl woman as an

antidote to the puerile, consoling vision

of the "conventional" art which Davis

criticizes in the opening paragraphs of

Margret Howth. Yaeger, for instance,

argues that the sculpture, by virtue of its

"wildness of form" and independence of

the medium of language, has escaped the moral conundrum in which all

verbal art, including Davis's own, finds

itself implicated (272). Similarly, Sharon

Harris has argued that Wolfe's tragic fate

results from his partaking of Mitchell's

bourgeois aestheticism; Davis, she sug

gests, "attributes the destruction of the true artistic spirit to Hugh's acceptance of the capitalist's vision of Beauty," and

argues that the author values the "

'strange' beauty" of the korl woman

over "the beauty of perfection" repre sented in Mitchell (9, 10).

But the korl woman, at least as a

product of Wolfe's native artistic talent, is more coextensive with than distinct

from the aesthetic system embraced by Mitchell and (by implication) the story's reader. This is most evident in

Wolfe's own attitude toward Deborah, whose actual physical presence pro vides a telling point of contrast to the

sculpted female body of the korl woman. Suggesting that the sculptor's

eye is analogous to that of the reader, Davis consistently uses forms of the

verb "to read" to characterize Wolfe's own ray of vision, and the defects

endemic to it:

[W]as there nothing worth reading in this wet, faded thing, half-covered

with ashes? no story of a soul filled with groping passionate love, heroic

unselfishness, fierce jealousy? of

years of weary trying to please the one human being whom she loved, to

gain one look of real heart-kindness from him? If anything like this were hidden beneath the pale, bleared

eyes, and dull, washed-out-looking

face, no one had ever taken the trouble to read its faint signs: not the half-clothed furnace-tender, Wolfe,

certainly. (21-22)

In presenting the reader with Deborah's

"thwarted woman's form," which re

duces her to "a type of her class," Davis

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Legacy

shows how such abstract tropes?both intellectual and aesthetic?disguise the

passionate, loving individuality that lies

behind Deborah's mask of ugliness. She

also makes it clear that Wolfe's insensitiv

ity to Deborah is not a result of his

brutalization by his environment; quite the contrary, the aesthetic impulse he

shares with Mitchell is innate rather

than socialized, and produces in him a

kind of moral obtuseness that parallels Mitchell's own:

She knew, in spite of all his kindness, that there was that in her face and form which made him loathe the

sight of her. She felt by instinct,

although she could not comprehend it, the finer nature of the man

She knew, that, down under all the vileness and coarseness of his life, there was a groping passion for

whatever was beautiful and pure,?

that his soul sickened with disgust at

her deformity, even when his words were kindest. (22-23)

Such passages make clear that the story

questions not just the audience's moral

adequacy, but the artist's as well; the

anticipated moral obtuseness of Davis's

armchair reader is present in Wolfe as

well as Mitchell, linking all three in a

complicit gaze with the korl woman at

its center. Whereas Mitchell's glaciated soul cannot be touched, even when he

sees the "soul" of the sculpture, and the

reader is himself inclined to a simple armchair appreciation of the story's

vividly rendered horrors, Wolfe's own

artistic "finer nature" keeps him at

arm's length from a sympathetic identifi

cation with this woman who shares his

lot in the hellish factory. For all three

Davis recognizes a habit of mind that,

regardless of its "fineness" of sensibility,

produces an aesthetic reflex when a

moral one is wanted.

There are two sobering corollaries to

this geometry of moral failure. The first,

significantly, is that "conventional" art?

what Harris refers to as "the capitalist's vision of beauty"?is not the only aes

thetic that is implicated here. That is to

say, contrary to both Harris's and

Yeager's arguments, the failure of art to

redeem or otherwise ameliorate the

human condition is not restricted to any

particular artistic norm or medium.

Although the korl woman is not "beauti

ful" by the standards of upper-class taste, Mitchell nevertheless finds the sculp ture artistically compelling; this sug

gests that Mitchell's inadequate re

sponse is not founded on any particular aesthetic standard, but derives instead

from a more general quality of his vision.

Second, it must be observed that this

quality of vision is found in the pro ducer as well as the consumer of art; it

therefore represents a failure of cre

ative praxis as well as of perception. Mitchell's "anatomical eye," which con

verts all before him into an artistic

trope, like "Dante's Inferno" (29, 27), is not in kind unlike Wolfe's "fierce thirst

for beauty" (25), which expresses itself

by transforming the reality before

him?the raw material of the korl as

well as the sculpture's prototypical form, an actual female body?into a

"work of art" which, whatever its ex

pressive value, is both motivated by and

appreciated in aesthetic rather than

moral or ethical terms.

Art and imaginative activity, then, are

not the remedy for the ills that afflict

Wolfe and Deb, but are coextensive with

them. In fact the korl woman may be un

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Andrew J. Scheiber

derstood as significant of the essential

parallelism between the exploitative ac

tivity of the factory and that of art itself.

The sculpture is in fact a product?or more specifically a by-product?of the

factory, and its process of creation paral lels the brutalities of industrial conver

sion to which Davis takes such vigorous

exception from the first paragraphs of

the story. Like the factory owners them

selves, Wolfe converts raw materials

into an artifact for his own use without a

proper understanding of or identifica

tion with the human beings whose

suffering is an essential ingredient of the

finished product. For sculptor as well as

audience, the korl woman at once re

flects and veils the materials out of

which it has been fashioned; it is but

another made object, concealing as

much as it reveals of the brutalities that

have attended its creation.

Ill

But what cruelties are veiled in the korl

woman, if not those perpetrated by class

and economics? On what basis might Wolfe, the poor puddler, and Mitchell, the well-to-do aesthete, be seen as paral lel exploiters? The answer may be found

in Davis's implicit analysis of the korl

woman as an index of the male artist's

colonization of the female form. David S.

Reynolds, observing how much of the

tone and content of Davis's story is

"derived principally from the literature

of misery" a strain of American fiction

that had since the 1830s been emphatic in its portrayal of "the wretchedness of

working people ... and the special mis

ery of factory girls," insists that the korl

woman illustrates "[t]he whole move

ment of the literature of misery...

toward the artistic objectification of

women's wrongs and women's potency in a compact image" (411).

But if, as Reynolds points out, the korl

woman is "an objectification of women's

wrongs and women's potency," what is

one to make of Wolfe's indifference to?

even revulsion toward?the actual

woman, Deborah, whose inner hunger is

the most natural correlative of the

sculpture's expression? Davis estab

lishes early in the story the fact of Deb's

"urgent need" for "some stimulant in her

pale life to keep her up,?some love or

hope" (17)?a clear anticipation of

Wolfe's own explanation that the korl woman is hungry for "[sjummat to make

her live" (33); but he himself fails to realize the connection between his "cre

ated" woman and the real one.

In fact the notion of the sculpture as

the cry of Deb's love-hungry soul is oc

cluded by its function as a direct expres sion of its creator's inner self. Davis is at

pains to establish how the condition of the male artist's soul might be read in

this "nude woman's form,... grown

coarse with labor, the powerful limbs instinct with some poignant longing" (32); she describes how Wolfe's "weak nerves" and "meek, woman's face" have

earned him the female nickname

"Molly," and how the physical disease of his consumption (that ravager of sen

timental heroines throughout nine

teenth-century popular fiction) finds its

inner correlate in the spiritual starvation

which the sculpture expresses (24). Such associations make his art seem

at first glance an expression of his

essential "femininity." But this initial

impression is undercut by the fact that

Wolfe's use of the female form is devoid of any authentic identification with the

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Legacy

actual woman whose selfhood it might more immediately express; in this case

it is Deborah herself whose cry of

humanity is obscured in this artifact of

Wolfe's painful self-expression. His art is

actually a kind of imaginative cannibal

ism; by using a woman's figure to

express his own "foreign thoughts and

longings," Wolfe has in essence colo

nized the female form, making it the

vehicle of his own expressive need, and

in the process denying the real women

whose form he has appropriated a

presence or a voice of their own.

In this light the figure of the korl wo

man may be seen as speaking to the ques tion, rampant in nineteenth-century lit

erary discourse, as to whether artistic

production is a feminine activity, coex

tensive with Hawthorne's image of Hes

ter at her needle, or (as in Moby Dick) a

masculine one in which the pen re

places the harpoon or some other phal lic weapon as an instrument of dom

ination, exploitation, and capitalistic conversion. Though the form is female,

Wolfe is the maker, a role which once

again points up the story's parallel be

tween industrial and artistic production. As Luce Irigaray has observed, both eco

nomic and cultural products are as

sumed to be the work of men, while the

contingent contributions of women, who comprise the "unknown infrastruc

ture" of "social life and culture" (171), are rendered invisible.

So despite all the talk about Wolfe's

"womanly" tendencies, in the end the

artistic product?the sculpture?is the

expression of a masculine sensibility. Their differences in class notwithstand

ing, Wolfe the producer has more in

common with Mitchell the consumer

than with Deb, who is neither. This is

underscored by the way in which the

sculpture provides a site of transaction

between the two men, with the "man

made" version of the female form serv

ing as the object of exchange, while

Deb significantly spends much of the scene either on the ash-heap or as a

mute observer of the conversation

among the men. The korl woman be comes a focus around which men, across class boundaries, recognize mo

mentarily their essential solidarity as

men, and recuperate the essential

"hom(m)osexual" nature of patriarchal culture, in which woman, consigned to

the status of "signs, commodities, and

currency," "exists only as an occasion

for mediation, transaction, transition,

transference, between man and his

fellow man, indeed between man and

himself" (Irigaray 192-93). This exchange is possible, in other

words, because the female body has

been turned into a currency, a totem of

masculine creativity which allows both

producer and consumer somehow to

claim that body, or its symbolic transfor

mation, as "theirs." In The Madwoman

in the Attic Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan

Gubar explain how masculine creativ

ity has assumed not just ownership of

the female figure, but responsibility for

its very existence: "From Eve, Minerva,

Sophia, and Galatea onward,... patriar chal mythology defines women as cre

ated by, from, and for men, the children

of male brains, ribs, and ingenuity"

(12). This is possible, as in the case of

the korl woman, because the repre sented body itself has been converted

into a transcendental value, abstracted

from the physical reality of its origins; the real female voice is occluded in the

artistic metamorphosis of the female

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Andrew J. Scheiber

body into an expressive metaphor for

Wolfe's own tortured soul.3

An additional suggestion that gender, and not class, is the principal axis of

conflict in "Life in the Iron-Mills" ap

pears early on, when Davis slyly notes

that the "apathy and vacancy" in Deb's

countenance may be less easily as

cribed to the economic impoverish ment of her "low, torpid life" than to

Wolfe's dehumanizing view of her?a

view which, even when kindly, is like

that shown "to the very rats that

swarmed in the cellar" (22). Such

treatment knows no class boundaries, and is associated with the illusionary

beauty of the upper classes as much as

with the harsh reality of the iron mills; but what is constant is the role of women as its objects and victims, since

"that dead, vacant look steal[s] some

times over the rarest, finest of women's

faces," allowing one to "guess at the secret of intolerable solitude that lies

hid beneath the delicate laces and

brilliant smile" (22). The use of the word "secret" with

respect to these upper-class women is

significant here, since it evokes Davis's

impassioned plea to her reader to get at

the "secret" that has "lain dumb for

centuries" in the "nightmare fog." But it is a secret for which the brutalities of the iron mill existence are only meta

phorical, in the end?a kind of objec tive correlative for the inner devasta

tion produced in women by the system of aesthetic exchange that excludes

them from the author-audience circle and casts them, like Deborah, upon the

ash-heap at its periphery. Davis is only too well aware of her

paradoxical position: namely, that in

attempting to expose this "secret" to

her readers she has insinuated herself

into the very circle of exchange that

makes her efforts necessary in the first

place. Because she is trying to reveal

the very secret which her chosen form

normally functions to veil or obscure, there is also the danger that her revela

tions, once glimpsed by the reader, will

be once again absorbed by the rhetori

cal frame in which they are displayed. Thus the reasons for the various

disruptions, deconstructions of the sur

face of the narrative; Davis's intrusive

narrator recognizes that the imagina tive reader-writer transaction is recu

perative of the masculine circle which

surrounds the korl woman in the mid

night mill, and wishes to assert the

essential female presence upon which both Wolfe's sculpture and her own

narrative are contingent, to lay bare the

invisible female skeleton that lies be

neath the masculinized praxis of her discourse. Attempting to assert the

"feminine" in a medium of transaction whose very nature is masculine, she must work both through and against the embedded patriarchal conspiracy of the reader-writer connection, at once

mastering and subverting the linguistic codes by which it is constructed.

IV

There is one possible objection that should be disposed of here. One might argue, contrary to the emphasis pursued here, that Wolfe is the story's ultimate

victim, since it is his death that produces the story's final pathos; that in fact the

poor puddler's tale follows the narrative

paradigm of "sentimental power," which in Jane Tompkins's description affirms

"[t]he power of the dead or the dying to

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Legacy

redeem the unregenerate" (128). But as

we have seen, Wolfe's status as a redemp tive victim is questionable, since he is

himself implicated in the habits of per

ception and behavior which the story

attempts to critique. There is no denying that Wolfe him

self is a victim of the social and eco

nomic privilege which the brutalities of

the mill serve to sustain. Whereas

Wolfe's body and the labor it produces

comprise the "unknown infrastructure"

of industrial production and its resul

tant wealth (thus the various veilings and curtainings that conceal the mill

from the rest of the town), Deb's body

provides the same for artistic produc tion. The solidarity of class which

excludes the exploited Wolfe from the

circle of affluent men is merely a

reflection of the solidarity of sex by which all the men, Wolfe included, exclude Deb herself.

And while the indifference of the

wealthier men certainly contributes to

Wolfe's tragic fate, the sculptor himself

is the final author of the outcome; in

fact Davis suggests that Wolfe's suicide, which is prefigured by his hacking at

the bars of his prison as if he were

creating another sculpture, is his ulti

mate "work of art." Listening to Wolfe in

his cell, Deborah hears "[n]othing but

the rasping of the tin on the bars. He

was at his old amusement again" (57). Davis's use of the word "amusement" to

describe Wolfe's desperate, compensa

tory sculpting is significant, since it

links his activity as a creator of art to

Mitchell's apposite quality as consumer, that of "amused" spectatorship; for both

men, whether they are aware of it or

not, art is a kind of game that keeps them at one remove from their own

humanity and that of those around

them.

The creative personality, it would

appear, lacks the spiritual resources to

resist moral desensitization by his envi

ronment, whether it be the comfort of

privilege or the agonies of exploitation. In his own suicide Wolfe's artistic activ

ity finally manifests itself as a kind of

lethal inscription, not unlike Ahab's

murderous attempts with the harpoon, that deadly analogue of the pen, to

"inscribe" his will on the white whale; once turned upon himself, the instru

ment makes the very act of egoistic self

expression one of self-annihilation.

Here is a great irony, which the story's self-deconstructive energies are dedi

cated to pointing out: not only can art

not "save" the reader from debased

habits of perception; it can't save the

artist either, since he must ultimately turn his ray of vision inward, and find

himself judged by his own impossible standards. The act of colonizing others,

whether by industrial or aesthetic pro cesses, risks the possibility of a mutila

tion of the self as well.

Wolfe thus stands as another one of

Davis's egoistic artists, like the painter Corvill in "Anne"?one of those who

"had made a trade of art and humanity until they had lost the perception of

their highest meanings" (238). The trag

edy is that such egoists can be found in

the infernal mills as well as in the luxury

railway carriage. Davis describes Wolfe's

ambition-fevered brain as "greedy," and

observes that "to him a true life was one

of full development rather than self

restraint ... that he was deaf to the

higher tone in a cry of voluntary suffer

ing for truth's sake" (46). This life of "full development," the

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Andrew J. Scheiber

distant call of what Davis refers to as

"the fiillest flow of spontaneous har

mony" (46), is of course what Wolfe

glimpses over the course of that fatal

evening when, the stolen money in

hand, he dreams of escape from the

infernal mills. Like Mitchell he experi ences a revulsion toward the condition

of those around him that springs more

from aesthetic than moral objection;

just as Mitchell is repelled by the "thick, unclean odor" of the mills rather than

the spectacle of human degradation he

finds there (38), Wolfe bids farewell to

his old haunts "with a new disgust, a

new sense of sudden triumph" (48). Even the church service strikes Wolfe as an aesthetic spectacle, with its "dis

tances, the shadows, the still, marble

figures, the mass of silent, kneeling

worshippers, the mysterious music"

(48); and while it is true that the

preacher's message escapes Wolfe's

grasp because it is "toned to suit

another class of culture" ( 49), the fault

is at least partly Wolfe's own. The fact

that he is "touched, moved... uncon

trollably" by the aesthetic spectacle of

the service (48) suggests that his re

sponse is guided as much by the keen ness of his artistic sensibility as by the

spiritual and intellectual poverty of his

physical existence. As with Mitchell's

reaction to the "strange beauty" of the

korl woman, Wolfe's "artist's eye" substi

tutes aesthetic value for moral epiph

any; the abstract beauty of a finer, purer existence that inspires Wolfe during the

church service is simply the mirror

image of the demonic exoticism of the

midnight mill that Mitchell interprets as

a hellish picturesque. But what is wrong with Wolfe's

dream of a better life? Indeed, is not

one of the evils in the story the denial

of this "better life" to exploited work ers such as Wolfe? This is, of course,

part of the realization Davis urges

upon her armchair audience. But there

is something more. The figure of the

korl woman reminds us that the artis

tic representation of this dream is, like

its attainment, built on the backs of

others, through the imaginative trans

formation?indeed, the de-essentiali

zation?of others' bodies. Not only this, but the egoistic prerogatives of art

in Wolfe's case compound usage with

betrayal. Disposed to see his rights as

an artist rather than his responsibili ties to fellow human beings, Wolfe

envisions his freedom in terms that

involve not just his liberation from the

physical degradation of the mills, but an abandonment of those he leaves

behind, whose lot remains unchanged. As he has done artistically through his

sculpture, Wolfe now aspires to do

physically with the money?to tran

scend Deb and her world, which is to

say, to leave them behind.

The question of the stolen money aside, for Wolfe to pursue an artistic

career, removing himself from the mate

rials which he draws on for the sub stance of his creative production, will

make him no better than the factory owners themselves. The temptation is not simply to become wealthy, but to

pursue self-expression through an aes

thetic that is predicated on the coloniza tion of, rather than service to, others. The fact that Wolfe is tempted to wash his hands of the suffering of others

reveals that the production of art and

the production of wealth rest on paral lel contingencies of denial and exploita tion. It is thus appropriate that Davis

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Legacy

calls Wolfe's dream of aesthetic tran

scendence "the mote in my brother's

eye" (46); his tragic moral misstep is a

result of a vision aimed too high,

overreaching not so much his own

suffering as that of those around him.4

V

Thus Davis is skeptical that art can medi

ate the exploitative division between

rich and poor, between beautiful and

ugly?or, most significantly, between

masculine artist and feminine object. The failure of art in this story is total; the

artist as well as his audience remains

blind to its most urgent suggestions, and

the "strange beauty" of the Vulcan

depths proves as ineffective in provok

ing the appropriate moral response as

the bright, bloodless aestheticism of

transcendental ideals. In a paradox that

remarkably anticipates Jamesian heroes

like Strether, Densher, and the nameless

narrator of The Sacred Fount, Wolfe is

blinded by his own process of vision; the

stark suffering of the korl woman is

easily transmuted into an artistic value,

freezing both Wolfe and Mitchell in the

paralysis of the aesthetic gaze, and

stunting their responses to the real

suffering encoded in it.

The fact that Deb herself is spared Wolfe's fate may be read as an index of

Davis's intention: one cannot save, or be

saved, by art alone, however "strange"; it

will at best take one halfway, and no fur

ther. Significantly, Deb's final victory comes not by dying, as would be custom

ary for the sacrificial innocent in a story of sentimental power; rather, it occurs

through her escape from the circle of

aesthetic production and exchange in

which her own "reality" as a woman is

denied status and value. She accom

plishes this escape through the interven

tion of the Quaker woman, whose figure

represents a self-conscious retreat from

aesthetic engagement; with her "homely

body, coarsely dressed in grey and

white" (61), she is severely neutral ra

ther than picturesque, either in conven

tional or "strange" terms. Her spiritual

strength is signified by her anaesthetic

quality; in the place of Wolfe's and Mit

chell's preoccupation with the artistic

transaction one finds in her the work

ings of "slow, patient, Christ-love" (63). Yet we have to be suspicious of such

consoling formulas, and recall the skep ticism about language that is the key note of the tale. For even this formula, which some have taken as the norma

tive value of the story, is undercut?a

reminder of language's ability to codify human suffering into a tidy package that

allows the reader the luxury of aes

thetic closure. The final paragraph,

extending the religious theme begun with the appearance of the Quaker woman, ends with a flourish of rhetoric

whose air of hopeful finality we are

only too right to distrust:

[A] cool, gray light suddenly touches

[the korl woman's] head like a bless

ing hand, and its groping arm points through the broken cloud to the far

East, where, in the flickering, nebu lous crimson, God has set the prom

ise of the Dawn. (65)

Sharon Harris insists that these lines are

best taken ironically, as Davis's satire on

the false and simplistic hope afforded by conventional Christianity and its sym bolism (19); but they are also reminders

of the drive of art toward completion,

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Andrew J. Scheiber

finality, design and finish, that ultimately neuters its moral power. For instance, it

is interesting to compare the descrip tion of the dawn with the sunset in

which Wolfe's "artist-eye," "drunk with

color," persuades him that he should

have nothing to do with "the petty laws, the mine and thine, of mill-owners and

mill-hands" (47); as we should be aware

by now, these painterly touches are

always suspect, signalling moments in

which aesthetic occludes moral sense, and allows us the false satisfaction we

feel in the presence of the created, rather than the actual, world.

But as we have seen, Davis knows the

hope of such pleasures is what has

brought her reader to her story in the

first place; she is only too aware of his

expectation that her tale will provide a

site for the "hom[m]osexual exchange" of aesthetic currency. The task she sets

herself in "Life in the Iron-Mills" is

necessarily duplicitous, given its pur

pose of "feminizing" her reader through a medium which, as the story itself

avers, is inescapably masculine: she

must at once engage and disrupt the

process of aesthetic exchange, hoping

thereby to point to the tragic insuffi

ciency and moral danger of the very

activity by which author and reader, narrator and narratee, establish their

connection.

The guerrilla nature of Davis's activ

ity becomes clearer if we consider the

final disposition of Wolfe's sculpture, and the narrator's relationship to it. We are told at the beginning that the

narrator merely "happened to come" to

the house where the Wolfes once lived, and where the sculpture now stands

(13); yet by the end she refers to the korl woman by claiming that "I have it

here in a corner of my library" (64;

emphasis added). Whether or not we

are meant to take this claim of owner

ship literally, the symbolic importance of the house is clear enough. It stands as

a synecdoche of the house of art, littered with such artifacts of the cre

ative process as "a half-moulded child's

head; Aphrodite; a bough of forest

leaves; music; work; homely fragments, in which lie the secrets of all eternal

truth and beauty" (65). But more importantly, the inconsis

tencies in the narrator's relation to the

house suggest her fundamental ambiva

lence as to her "place" and function as

an artist; as a woman she is an acciden

tal resident in the house of art, one

whose tenure there is understood to be

provisional, mercurial, elusive. This in

consistency is mirrored by her relation

ship to the korl woman. Though cre

ated by that other, thwarted artist, it is

now apparently a fixture of her library; but there is also the hint that its

acquisition has been accidental, that it

in a sense "came with the house,"

making her ownership of both subject to a provisional Derridean erasure. De

spite the narrator's final acknowledg ment that the studio is "hers," we are

left with the sense that she is an

interloper, that she has somehow stolen into this cradle of artistic production and is attempting to make what she can

of the orphaned materials she finds

there.5

We might finally consider "Life in

the Iron-Mills" as Davis's own version

of the korl woman, but one which

lacks the fatal hunger for transcen

dence which Wolfe imparted to his

creation. Like the sculpture, Davis's

story is an ungainly piece of work, one

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Legacy

whose terrible beauty tempts us to

substitute appreciation for recognition, so long as we remain, like the men of the story, within the masculinized cir

cle of symbolic exchange. But like the

final scene, in which we find "the

curtain... accidentally drawn back," and the sculpture's "bare arm

stretched out imploringly in the dark

ness" (64), Davis's story insistently

pushes its rough edges at the reader?

finally asserting its truth through the

self-created gaps in the various veilings and curtainings?aesthetic and other

wise?that comprise the fabric out of

which it is woven. The "secret," how

ever, remains inarticulate, the moral

oddly elusive. One might say it makes

up the "unknown infrastructure" of the

tale itself, an element not directly accessible or evident in the surface of

the discourse. A final word is in order here, to set

Davis's guerrilla methods in the context

of American literary history. As much as one might be tempted to see her deconstructive energies here as eccen

tric to the prevailing concerns of other

writers of her time, her distrust of the

aesthetic transaction is a theme almost

continually glossed by the narrative

voice in fictions of the period, includ

ing those of the so-called writers of

sentimental power. A recurrent claim

these writers make for their work is

that it is not creative or literary, but

merely a species of truth-telling.6 The

explanation put forth by Mary Kelley and others is that women writers of the

nineteenth century felt the need to be

circumspect about the exercise of liter

ary powers; because they were not

authorized creators of culture, they feared condemnation if they aspired to

write "literature," and so claimed in

self-defense to be writing something else instead.

But many of these writers seem

authentically disturbed by, or impatient with, the dominance of the aesthetic value over all others in literary produc tion. For them writing is not simply a

self-serving end in itself, but a way of

doing good in the world; and they are no more willing to make an idol of their own authorship than they are to accept their culture's prohibition on "scrib

bling women." Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, makes a defense of one of her novels on the premise that it is not a novel at all, but a "parable" (Pink and

White Tyranny v, vi)?implying that what she is creating is not really "Art," but something more clearly useful?a sermon in the guise of art, a "story with a moral."7

These writers, then, forgo "literary" pretensions not just because literature is a male preserve, but because it is

morally suspect?a kind of elegant lying whose representations can ob scure or even contradict the spiritual facts of human existence. Their fictions are replete with self-referential gestures

whose purpose is to remind us that the

story is not an end in itself, but a point of departure from itself; the reader's

energies are not to be trapped in an

aesthetic contemplation of the text, but

redirected to the social and spiritual issues that lie outside it. The text itself

is thus self-abnegating, resistant of the

impulse on the part of the reader to

make it an end in itself, a transacted

object whose horizon of exchange is

confined to the tidy circle of reader and

writer; the various self-rendings and

self-apologies of the text are a reminder

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Andrew J. Scheiber

to the reader that there are others to be

considered?invisible but real, like the women who, in Irigaray's words, make

up the "unknown infrastructure" on

which the text is contingent. While their artistic self-interrogation

may be asking different questions than

those posed by the likes of Hawthorne

and James, heretofore underappre ciated writers such as Davis and Stowe

share with their more "canonical" coun

terparts troubling skepticisms about

the value and nature of artistic produc tion. It is important to recognize that

these skepticisms, though often associ

ated with these more canonical fic

tionists, are not held in exclusive fran

chise by them; in fact it would appear that a writer like Rebecca Harding

Davis, who has conventionally been

understood as part of a parallel but

separate movement from the "main

stream" of American literary history, is

actually engaged with these other writ ers in a dialogue on the purpose and

efficacy of art itself. Thus it is time, I

would suggest, to recognize Davis and

others as full participants in the exposi tion of this important theme, and to see

how formulations such as hers are

taken up and transformed by other writers whose stature in the canonical succession has long been established.

Notes

1. Harris further argues that the ironic "ro

manticism" of the opening passage (as well as

that of the concluding paragraphs) is meant to

disparage the philosophical optimism dominant

in Davis's time, which "presupposed a transcen

dental divinity that shapes our humanity toward

nature" (6). But this opening passage, with its

ponderous, Poe-like echoes, challenges the aes

thetic of dark romanticism as well; Davis's

interrogations in this story are not limited to the

demolition of the puerile Transcendentalism which she so loathed in Bronson Alcott, but

extend to the question of artistic representation as well?whether even the "grimy" side of life is not rendered incapable of moving us when it is

converted, via artistic power, into a "terrible

beauty" whose "terror" is, finally, absorbed into

and contained by the aesthetic value into which it has been transformed.

2. "Life in the Iron-Mills" is not the only work

by Davis marked by such radical self-interven tions. The opening of her novel Margret Howth takes her readers to task, scorning their appetites for "idylls delicately tinted; passion-veined hearts, cut bare for curious eyes; prophetic utterances, concrete and clear," in short for

anything "to lift you out of this crowded, tobacco

stained commonplace, to kindle and chafe and

glow in you" (6). Davis's concern here is

remarkably prophetic, considering the history of the Margret Howth manuscript itself; in a recent

article, "The Feminization of Rebecca Harding Davis," Jean Fagan Yellin has documented how Davis found herself obliged to conventionalize and prettify the novel's conclusion at the urging of Atlantic editor James T. Fields, making it into

precisely the sort of "safe" art that the author

rejects in "Life in the Iron-Mills."

3. Compare, for instance, the relationship between Wolfe and the korl woman with the

parallels invoked by Gilbert and Gubar: "For Blake the eternal female was at her best an

Emanation of the male creative principle. For

Shelley she was an epi-psyche, a soul out of the

poet's soul" {Madwoman 12). Or, to bring the

example closer to home, consider Hawthorne (a writer whom Davis herself gready admired), who in The Scarlet Letter creates Hester Prynne as?in part at least?a "feminine" figuration of his own frustrated artistic persona.

4. Lest the reader take satisfaction in the narrator's indictment of Wolfe's exploitive atti tude as producer, Davis implies that the con sumer of art bears an equal, if not greater,

responsibility for the brutalities that underwrite its exchange; if one completes the Biblical

parallel invoked by Davis, the "mote" in Wolfe's

eye is dwarfed by the occluding "beam" in his

neighbor's?which is to say, the reader's. What ever Wolfe's sins, it would be hypocrisy for the

reader to judge him; while both are implicated in the suffering embodied in the korl woman, the privileged reader determines both the form

and the terms of the producer-consumer transac

tion to which the sculpture is subjected. 5. It is true that nowhere in the story is

there an explicit acknowledgment that the tale's

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Legacy

narrator is, like its author, a woman. But there are rhetorical reasons to assume that the voice

speaking to the reader in "Life in the Iron-Mills"

is implicitly female. I have tried to establish that

Davis, like other female authors of her era, strives in this story to devise a distinctly feminized narrative strategy and conception of

authorial purpose. Given that this strategy must

operate in and through the masculine vehicle of

aesthetic exchange, it should not be surprising that the gender identity of the narrator is a

covert rather than overt feature of the tale.

But a covert presence is nevertheless a pres ence, however it may be veiled or elided. Other

indications of the narrator's identity may be

found in the rhetorical attitude of the story, which particularly in the opening passages sug

gests a profound dialectical friction between the

narrator and the leisure-class male reader of the

piece. And while this friction certainly has a class

dimension, I have been at pains to argue that

Davis dissolves this particular dialectic in order

to reveal the more fundamental one?gender? which it veils. The narrator's ability to speak

authoritatively of the tale's ultimate secret, which

lies "beneath the delicate laces and brilliant

smile[s]" of other women (22), suggests not only identification with, but particular knowledge of

the marginalized territory of their consciousness.

That other critics (Yaeger for instance) unam

biguously refer to the narrator as "she" suggests as well that the gender of the story's principal voice is implicitly but palpably feminine.

6. Mary Kelley's work presents the most

elegantly concentrated documentation of this

point. To supply two examples: Kelley quotes Caroline Howard Gilman as saying that her

"story is a mere hinge for facts," and records

Mary Jane Holmes's insistence that she "[tries] to

describe human nature as I have seen it" (210). This emphasis on fidelity to observed particulars is rampant throughout these authors' comments

on their writing, and at first glance represents a

primary point of distinction between them and

many male writers of the time (e.g., Cooper, Poe,

Hawthorne, Melville, James), who according to

earlier critics like Richard Chase and Richard

Poirier romantically aspire to create a literature

of alterity which transcends rather than con

fronts immediate social realities. My own sense,

however, is that these other writers also see

their art as problematically implicated in issues

of history, and that they are in this respect closer

to writers like Davis, Stowe, and others than

these previous critical models have admitted.

7. Significantly, many nineteenth-century

women novelists make the case that their works are not fictions in the literary sense, but

something else. For instance, Fanny Fern says of her autobiographical work Ruth Hall, "I do not

dignify it by the name of 'A Novel,'" but rather as a "primitive mode of calling"; similarly, Caroline Howard Gilman records, "My ambition has never been to write a novel" (quoted in

Kelley 210).

Works Cited Bell, Michael Davitt. The Development of

American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.

Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Apho risms, Autobiographical Writings. 1978. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. and intro. Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken,

1986.

Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. 1957. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.

Davis, Rebecca Harding. "Anne." Life in the

Iron Mills and Other Stories. Ed. and intro. Tillie Olsen. Old Westbury: Femi

nist, 1985. 225-42. -. "Life in the Iron-Mills." Life in the

Iron Mills and Other Stories. 11?65.

-. Margret Howth or, A Story of To

Day. 1862. Upper Saddle River: Gregg, 1970.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The

Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Liter

ary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Harris, Sharon M. "Rebecca Harding Davis:

From Romanticism to Realism." Ameri

can Literary Realism 21.2 (1989): 4-20.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Vol. 1 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. 18 Vols, to date. Ed. William Charvat et al. Colum

bus: Ohio State UP, 1962-.

Holland, Laurence Bedwell. The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964.

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Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One.

1977. Trans. Catherine Porter with Caro

lyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.

Kelley, Mary. Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth -

Century America New York. Oxford UP, 1984.

Poirier, Richard. A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1966.

Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagina

tion in the Age of Emerson and Melville.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Pink and White

Tyranny: A Society Novel 1871. New York: Plume, 1988.

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

Warhol, Robyn R. "Toward a Theory of the

Engaging Narrator: Earnest Interventions

in Gaskell, Stowe, and Eliot." PMLA 101

(1986): 811-18.

Yaeger, Patricia. Honey-Mad Women:

Emancipatory Strategies in Women's

Writing New York: Columbia UP, 1988.

Yellin, Jean Fagan. "The 'Feminization' of Rebecca Harding Davis." American Liter

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Documents

An Unknown Infrastructure: Gender, Production, and Aesthetic Exchange in Rebecca Harding Davis's "Life in the Iron-Mills"