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Living in the Iron Mills: A Tempering of Nineteenth-Century America’s Orphic Poet J.F. Buckley Published in the April 1861 Atlantic Monthly, Life in the Iron Mills brought to Rebecca Harding Davis recognition, and to America, a realistic view of industrial culture.’ At a time when war, transcendental idealism and ~tionalistic fervor occupied the imagination, this novella captured the enigmatic relationship between the reality of everyday American life and the ideals which everyday Americans espoused? In short, the realism of Life rejects the notion implicit in transcendentalism of the divinely inspired artist as a self-reliant force for cultural improvement at the very time that its romanticism supports the transcendental notion that such an artist is of fundamental importance to society. Davis places the poet within the everyday society of industrialized nineteenthcentury America and thereby shows the delimiting effects of culture on transcendental idealism, but she also shows the importance of that transcendental idealism in facing everyday life. This poet, whose insight and discrimination Davis feels can illuminate the depths of society but whose desire for change she believes is nonethelessconstrained, is of a type familiar to the American Renaissance: the Orphic poet. Such a ‘‘poet [is an] inspired seer” relying “for his utterance upon his moments of inner illumination” (Matthiessen 523). He is a poet “who stands outside of human life and yet shakes it with his truth” (Whicher xxi). Such a poet is a prophet, a producer, a “liberating god and the most complete or representative of men” (Yoder xi). It is this Orphic poet who has “the authority to discriminate moral and aesthetic excellences,” who is related to “the highest aspiration of his age,” who imposes “upon men by charming or winning their consent,” who is “the ideal man,” who stands “for universality,” who has “a harmonizing capacity,” who tames nature and the wilderness (Yoder xiii, 4). However disparate in basic philosophy are the various transcendental voices of nineteenth-century America, most do espouse, at one time or another, such a poet. In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Nature. develops his notion of the Orphic poet, one who can “become a transparent eyeball,” one who can “see all,” one who feels “the currents of the Universal Being circulate through” him.’ In 1845, Henry David Thoreau, in the “Conclusion” chapter of WaMen, tells us of the possibility of becoming this ideal, self-sufficient poet: “If 67 one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he.. .will pass an invisible boundary.. .he will live with the license of a higher order of beings” (323-324). In 1851, in “The Sermon” chapter of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville also deals with this Orphic power. While “the shrieking, slanting storm [howls] without,” Father Mapple validates Ahab’s monomaniacal passion with the notion that “delight is to him-a far, far upward, and inward delight-who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self‘ (48). In his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves ofcrass, Walt Whitman proposes the need for a poet of the Orphic tradition: “If he breathes into any thing that was before thought small it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe. He is a seer...he is individual ... he is complete in himself ... he is the president of regulation” (713). While it is simplistic to see him as symbolizing the transcendentalist movement, and I do not so intend, Emerson does stand out as representative--at least to Davis. She tells us in her 1905 collection of reminiscences, Bits of Gossip, that “of the group of famous people in Concord in 1862, Mr. Emerson was best known to the country at large” (41-42). She, like most of America, was impressed with his role of “inspired seer”: I went to Concord, a young woman from the backwoods, firm in the belief that Emerson was the first of living men. He was the modern Moses who had talked with God apart and could interpret Him to us. (Birs 42) Davis, however, moderates her reverence. She does not, it seems, share the blind faith of Emerson’s disciples and is troubled by the absolute and unqualified adherence to transcendentalism evinced by many of her countrymen. As she sees it, they do not fully comprehend what it is they espouse: They had revolted from Puritanism, not to enter any other live church, but to fall into a dull disgusf a nausea with all religion. To them came this new prophet with his discovery of the God within themselves. They bailed it with acclamation. The new dialect of the Transcendentalist was easily learned. They talked it as correctly as the Chinaman does his pigeon English. (Bits 46)

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Living in the Iron Mills:

A Tempering of Nineteenth-Century America’s Orphic Poet

J.F. Buckley

Published in the April 1861 Atlantic Monthly, Life in the Iron M i l l s brought to Rebecca Harding Davis recognition, and to America, a realistic view of industrial culture.’ At a time when war, transcendental idealism and ~tionalistic fervor occupied the imagination, this novella captured the enigmatic relationship between the reality of everyday American life and the ideals which everyday Americans espoused?

In short, the realism of Life rejects the notion implicit in transcendentalism of the divinely inspired artist as a self-reliant force for cultural improvement at the very time that its romanticism supports the transcendental notion that such an artist is of fundamental importance to society. Davis places the poet within the everyday society of industrialized nineteenthcentury America and thereby shows the delimiting effects of culture on transcendental idealism, but she also shows the importance of that transcendental idealism in facing everyday life.

This poet, whose insight and discrimination Davis feels can illuminate the depths of society but whose desire for change she believes is nonetheless constrained, is of a type familiar to the American Renaissance: the Orphic poet. Such a ‘‘poet [is an] inspired seer” relying “for his utterance upon his moments of inner illumination” (Matthiessen 523). He is a poet “who stands outside of human life and yet shakes it with his truth” (Whicher xxi). Such a poet is a prophet, a producer, a “liberating god and the most complete or representative of men” (Yoder xi). It is this Orphic poet who has “the authority to discriminate moral and aesthetic excellences,” who is related to “the highest aspiration of his age,” who imposes “upon men by charming or winning their consent,” who is “the ideal man,” who stands “for universality,” who has “a harmonizing capacity,” who tames nature and the wilderness (Yoder xiii, 4).

However disparate in basic philosophy are the various transcendental voices of nineteenth-century America, most do espouse, at one time or another, such a poet. In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Nature. develops his notion of the Orphic poet, one who can “become a transparent eyeball,” one who can “see all,” one who feels “the currents of the Universal Being circulate through” him.’ In 1845, Henry David Thoreau, in the “Conclusion” chapter of WaMen, tells us of the possibility of becoming this ideal, self-sufficient poet: “If

67

one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he.. .will pass an invisible boundary.. .he will live with the license of a higher order of beings” (323-324). In 1851, in “The Sermon” chapter of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville also deals with this Orphic power. While “the shrieking, slanting storm [howls] without,” Father Mapple validates Ahab’s monomaniacal passion with the notion that “delight is to him-a far, far upward, and inward delight-who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self‘ (48). In his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves ofcrass, Walt Whitman proposes the need for a poet of the Orphic tradition: “If he breathes into any thing that was before thought small it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe. He is a seer...he is individual ... he is complete in himself ... he is the president of regulation” (713).

While it is simplistic to see him as symbolizing the transcendentalist movement, and I do not so intend, Emerson does stand out as representative--at least to Davis. She tells us in her 1905 collection of reminiscences, Bits of Gossip, that “of the group of famous people in Concord in 1862, Mr. Emerson was best known to the country at large” (41-42). She, like most of America, was impressed with his role of “inspired seer”:

I went to Concord, a young woman from the backwoods, firm in the belief that Emerson was the first of living men. He was the modern Moses who had talked with God apart and could interpret Him to us. (Birs 42)

Davis, however, moderates her reverence. She does not, it seems, share the blind faith of Emerson’s disciples and is troubled by the absolute and unqualified adherence to transcendentalism evinced by many of her countrymen. As she sees it, they do not fully comprehend what it is they espouse:

They had revolted from Puritanism, not to enter any other live church, but to fall into a dull disgusf a nausea with all religion. To them came this new prophet with his discovery of the God within themselves. They bailed it with acclamation. The new dialect of the Transcendentalist was easily learned. They talked it as correctly as the Chinaman does his pigeon English. (Bits 46)

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68 These observations are of a visit the year after she

published her novella and, consequently, are not proof that her treatment of the Orphic poet in Life is a reaction specifically reproaching Emerson’s-or any other’s- transcendentalism. Yet, Davis’s observations do indicate that she had for some time been aware of his olphic poet and its influence on America. It is all but impossible that she could have acquired such knowledge and developed such opinions in the few months between the publication of Life and her visit to Concord.

I do not intend to reduce Davis’s novella to a mere gloss of Emersonian transcendentalism-or any other- yet, Emerson presents us with an image of the Orphic poet which we can see evolve over the course of four essays as he attempts to deal with the realities of life in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Hence, while admitting the impossibility of selecting any “representative” transcendentalist, I offer Emerson as a touchstone by which to gauge Davis’s more complex treatment of the Orphic poet.

When Emerson first speaks of the Orphic poet he is speaking of one who modifies the physical world, one who brings his poetic power to bear on it and “beholds something as beautiful as his own nature” (Nature 1:lO). “The sensual man conforms thoughts to things: the poet conforms things to his thoughts.. . .To him, the refractory world is ductile and flexible: he invests dust and stones with humanity, and makes them the words of the Reason” (Nature 1:31). At this point, “the foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit” (Nature 1: 42). By 1841, in “Self-Reliance,” Emerson envisions an Orphic poet even more independent, even more an outsider to the everyday life of man: “High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine. society. law to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others” (2: 43). It is this Orphic poet’s destiny to free the human spirit, to raise man from animal: “With what joy I begin to read a poem, which I confide in as an inspiration! And now my chains are to be broken: I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in which I live” (‘The Poet” 3: 7-8). With the publication of The Conduct of Life in 1860, however, there is evidence of Emerson’s changing philosophy. Nature is no longer to be controlled “by a supernal breath of Will”: men are now seen as the raw materials of nature: “only now and then some superior man, by his gift of thought, [can] merge his will” with nature and partake of an Orphic moment (Whicher 303). “Once we thought, positive power was all. Now we learn, that negative power, or circumstance, is half.”‘

“Half“ is the important word: Emerson tells us that “a man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature” (“Fate” 32). The Orphic poet, although a cultural being, remains central to himself, is self-reliant and “Cannot rely on an outer world but only on an inner self, experienced as superior to the external world” (Pease 130-131). Davis brings to the pages of Life two such poets relying on their inner selves and striving

Journal of American Culture for cultural improvement; but, she shows them delimited by their everyday society. She envisions an Orphic power and places it in the narrator and in a mill worker named Wolfe. both of whom she then positions in the midst of industrial pollution and poverty. In Emerson’s words, each is “an inspired seer”, each is “a liberating god and the most complete or representative of men”: each has “the authority to discriminate moral and aesthetic excellences” and is related to “the highest aspiration of his age”: each is “the ideal man,” who stands “for universality.” However, in Life, Davis challenges the transcendental notion of a poet whose good intentions are automatically “clothed with power,” of a poet who can “ride alternately on the two horses of his private and his public nature,” of a poet who imposes “upon men by charming or winning their consent.” Davis’s two Orphic poets may be able “to discriminate moral and aesthetic excellences”: however, they cannot easily gain the consent of others. Instead, her poet narrator and poet character exemplify Richard A. Shweder’s assedon that “the life of the mind becomes an extension of, or an appendage to, or an analogue of, cultural artifacts and their built-in design features” (Stigler 23). In Life. Davis questions the ability of the transcendental Orphic poet to transcend cultural influences.

Unlike Emerson’s poet in Nature who enjoys “the woods“ and stands “on the bare ground” with his “head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space” (10). Davis’s narrator is compelled to speak, to practice her poetic craft by relating “a story of this old house into which [she] happened to come to-day” (Life 13). She has no “plantation of God” with which to commune; rather, she tells us “the sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me” (Life 11). She is not in the open spaces but is inside a house which is connected to the “massed, vile, slimy lives” of workers in an industrial, nineteenth-century town in Virginia. She is amidst sullen, “slow folds” of smoke, a “yellow river,” “a narrow brick-yard sloping down to the river” (Life 11-12).

Such is also the case for the poet. Hugh Wolfe, whose story she tells. He works “in one of Kirby and John’s mills for making railroad-iron’’ near which “the river, sluggish and black,” does not flow but rather slides away. It is a vile setting in which Wolfe “had already lost the strength and instinct vigor of a man, his muscles were thin. his nerves weak, his face (a meek, woman’s face) haggard, yellow with consumption” (Life 24). Born “in vice,” with a “starved infancy,” “he has groped through as boy and man,-the slow, heavy years of constant, hot work” (Life 25). He is “untaught, unled, left to feed his soul in grossness and crime, and hard, grinding labor” (Life 25). Unlike Emerson’s poet, Wolfe has not the opportunity to find in “the tranquil landscape,” or “the distant line of the horizon,’’ or “the boughs in a storm” a nature “somewhat as beautiful as his own” (Nature 10).

Instead, both the narrator and Wolfe are consuucts of an industrial culture. The narrator’s awareness of her

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Living in the Iron Mills 69 trust [herself] for a taskmaster. High be [her] heart, faithful [her] will, clear [her] sight.. .that a simple purpose may be to [her] as strong as iron necessity is to others” (“Self Reliance” 2:43). She is alone now in her library. She keeps the korl statue which Hugh Wolfe labored over, preserving what was once the waste of steel production and seeing in it “the spirit of the dead korl- cutter.” She, like the statue, asks us if this “is the end? nothing beyond? no more?” (64). But she knows the answer. She has absolute faith in her poetic sight which sees “the secrets of all eternal truth and beauty”:

world, like Wolfe’s, is a product of her ego constantly viewing itself from the vantage point of the oppressed and stupefied mill worker; it is a dialectical process in which that other determines her own identity.’ “The movement is completely circular”; there can be no basing or vantage point outside of the individual’s psyche which is itself a construct of an interaction with others: “There can.. .be no truly external vantage point, no transcendental ego, no real possibility of a transcendental reduction, or e@e” (Cultural Psychology 401-402). The narrator and Wolfe and Emerson are identifiable psyches precisely because they originate within a cultural context. The narrator and Wolfe originate in a context that is filled with the desperate struggle to survive; Emerson, however, can enjoy “his intercourse with heaven and earth” (Nature 9) because of his privileged life which precludes his ever having to face basic questions of survival. Although there is no transcendental ego, there is, we notice, a transcendental id or unconscious: there are inherited, biological instincts or urges which Davis recognizes and which her narrator brings to our attention:

Are pain and jealousy less savage realities down here in this place I am taking you to than in your own house or your own heart,-your heart, which they clutch at sometimes? The note is the same, I fancy, be the octave high or low. (Life 23)

The narrator and Wolfe have the makings of Orphic poets, cultural constraints notwithstanding, because they are receptive to these superincumbent spirits. The narrator, like Emerson’s poet, is “possessed [herself] by a heroic passion, [she] uses matter as symbols of it.” She challenges those “who study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way” to consider humanity as it actually exists, “here, [in] the thickest of fog and mud and foul effluvia” (Life 13). She confronts the Egoist, who is complacent in the belief that morality is founded on self-interest; she appeals to the Pantheist, who identifies God with every working of nature; she even beseeches the Arminian, whose belief in tbe necessity of the Holy Spirit for regeneration is not in accord with transcendentalism. Her endeavor is Orphic: a “self-conscious activity of the imagination, [a] power by which [she] distinguishes [herself] as the single artificer of the world in which [she] sings” (Yoder xiii).

As Deborah approaches the mill where Wolfe is working, the narrator tells us that she, unlike her character Deborah, has the poetic eye to notice the “picturesque oddity of the scene” (19). With a mind that is aware of itself, an Orphic mind, the narrator will use the industrial underworld to create her story. Emerson tells us in “The Poet” that “the distinctions which we make in events, and in affairs, of low and high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol’’ (10). The narrator presents us with such a symbol, presents us with “a reality of soul-starvation, of living death” so that we “can read according to the eyes God has given [US]” (23).

At the end of her story, the narrator “has ventured to

While the room is yet steeped in heavy shadow, a cool, gray light suddenly touches its head like a blessing hand, and its groping ann points through the broken cloud to the far East, where, in the flickering, nebulous crimson, God has set the p m i s e of Dawn. (65)

In keeping with the Orphic tradition, the narrator has en ted the underworld of the everyday and stressed the continuity of truth. More important though is her Emersonian ability to make herself central: surrounded by the fragments of Wolfe’s life, she has made poetry.

Wolfe, too, is “possessed himself by a heroic passion [and] uses matter as symbols of it” when he spends “his off-hours from the furnace.. .chipping and moulding figures,-hideous, fantastic enough, but sometimes strangely beautiful ... It was a curious fancy in the man, almost a passion” (Life 24). Wolfe is driven by a “groping.. . [a] mad desire, a great blind intellect” (Life 25) to create out of the “dust and stones [of his life] the words of the Reason” (Nature 1:31). He truly is one who “stands outside of human life and yet shakes it with his truth.’’ On the night which Deborah brings him his supper, “the overseer, Clarke,-a son of Kirby, one of the mill-owners,-and a doctor May, one of the town- physicians,” along with Mitchell, a brother-in-law of Kirby’s, and a reporter, visit the mill. Mitchell, exemplifying the amateur psychologist and the Egoist whom the narrator addresses, is

a man who sucked the essence out of a science or philosophy in an indifferent, gentlemanly way; who took Kant, Novalis, Humboldt, for what they were worth in his own scales; accepting all. despising nothing, in heaven, earth, or hell. but one-idead men; with a temper yielding and brilliant as summer water, until his Self was touched. (Life 29)

Wolfe notices “the impalpable atmosphere belonging to” this man who, like the soul in Emerson’s Nature, “is a watcher more than a doer” (Life 36). Wolfe catches “with quick pleasure the contour,” the physiology of this man whose confidence in himself represents Emerson’s dictum in “Self-Reliance’’ that “no law can be sacred to me but that of my nature” (30). It is this idealistic transcendentalist who is moved by the korl statue as he is about to depart the mill after a cursory tour in the company of his friends. Mitchell instinctively knows that

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70 Wolfe is the artist; be understands that Wolfe is possessed of a passion and knows the statue is asking “questions of God,” is asserting “a right to know” (Life 34). Both Mitchell and Wolfe stand outside of their society in that they share this poetic power; however, the encounter ends with both returning to their respective cultures, to their respective lives-nothing is permanently transcended.

Rather, Wolfe and Deborah are left alone “as the coach drives off.” Like Emerson’s Orphic poet who has “the authority to discriminate moral and aesthetic excellences” and who is related to “the highest aspiration of his age,” Wolfe has shown through art what it is to be “hungry,” to want “summat to make [a human] live” (Life 33). Yet he is deserted, deserted because in “his vivid poetic sense the man who had left him ... a Man all- knowing, all-seeing, crowned by Nature.. . [is different from h i even though] ... his instinct taught him that he t-He [shares something with him]” (Life 40). Wolfe’s heart is not high, but his sight is clear. He has hied to “be doctrine. society, law to himself,” and he has made ‘‘a simple purpose . . .as strong as iron necessity is to others”; yet, “ ‘It’s all wrong,’ he muttered, slowly,-‘all wrong! I dunnot understan’. But it’ll end some day’ ” (Life 41).

There is nothing to do but return in despair to the cellar where they live, where, while his father and Janey sleep, Wolfe, “seated on an old chest,. . .[holds] his face in his hands.’’ Deborah then gives him the wallet she has stolen from Mitchell. Wolfe, mulling over “his right” to keep the money, leaves and “wanders slowly down the darkening street” (Life 45). “His artist-eye grew drunk with [the] color” of “the sun-touched smoke-clouds opened like a cleft ocean,-shifting, rolling seas of crimson mist, waves of billowy silver veined with blood- scarlet, inner depths unfathomable of glancing light” (47). He, like the poet in Emerson’s essay, “leave[s] the world, and know[s] the muse only”; he forgets “the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men” and relies on his muse (“The Poet” 23):

A consciousness of power stirred within him. He stood up. A man,-he thought, stretching out his hands,-free to work, to live, to love! Free! His right! (h ie 47)

Regardless of his Orphic sensibilities, Wolfe is arrested. In a cell next to Deborah, he peers from the window, awaiting the onset of nineteen years at hard labor.

Both Wolfe and the narrator evince traits of the Orphic poet, but they fail to achieve “the double consciousness” which Emerson espouses as the saving grace for that poet. They have difficulty combining their private and their public names. Yes, both Wolfe and the narrator stand outside of everyday life and shake it with their truth. “[Wolfe was] not one of themselves, [the workers] felt that., though outwardly as filthy and ash- covered; silent, with foreign thoughts and longings breaking out through his quietness” (Life 24). The narrator, too, is outside the “massed, vile, slimy lives’’

Journal of American Culture creeping past her window; she “srand[s] here, idly tapping tbe window-pane, and looking out” (13). Yes, both Wolfe and the narrator are “prophets, producers, the most complete or representative.” Wolfe produces a korl statue that “asks questions of God, and says ‘I have a right to know’ ” (Life 334). He represents the plight of mankind and the yearning of the human soul. The narrator produces a story that conveys her hope that salvation awaits; she too represents the plight of mankind and the yearning of the human sod. Yes, they both demonstrate the authority to discriminate moral and aesthetic excellences and exhibit the highest aspirations of their age. However, Davis also shows that what Emerson and other transcendental writers expect of the Orphic poet is not possible in the industrial culture in which both Wolfe and the narrator move.

Wolfe cannot “ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature” (“Fate” 32). As the visitors are about to leave the mill, Mitchell is shaken by the korl statue’s visage: “the mad, half-despairing gesture of drowning” (33). Still, his society is too strong an influence: neither he nor any of the visitors is charmed by or won over to Wolfe’s viewpoint:

No one spoke. Only the dumb face of the rough image looking into their faces with the awful question, “What shall we do to be saved?’ Only Wolfe’s face, with its heavy weight of brain, its weak, uncertain mouth, its desperate eyes, out of which looked the soul of his class.. . (35)

He has shaken them with his truth, but recognizing the human soul that transcends class and culture does not effect change. Human feelings and emotions may be intersubjective; however, they are limited by the reality of a culture which “is a world of dialectical feedback loops and dynamic nonlinear relationships” (Stigler 31-2). Kirby, Dr. May, and Mitchell are of the bourgeoisie, and for them to align themselves with Wolfe would entail each of them redefming his own selfhood. They are who they are because their culture is an intentionally created milieu which provides them with meaning and support and validation for their opinions which are themselves a product of interacting within their culture. The same is true of Wolfe. The private desires of Kirby, Dr. May, Mitchell and those of Wolfe originate from different viewpoints which are part and parcel of different social srrata, different cultures, each of which engulfs their own subjects with the very issue of existence (Ecrits 194). Kirby, Dr. May and Mitchell perceive Wolfe as part of the “rare mosaic” of life and tell him he has “it in [him] to be a great sculptor”; yet, they do not help him. The mosaic of the mill and Wolfe and the korl woman become signifies for an unconscious discourse of an “Other” created by the upper middle class, a class far different from Wolfe’s. Consequently, what is a private desire to Wolfe is but the public nature of mill workers to the visitors because Wolfe and the bourgeoisie do not share the same cultural values. Wolfe cannot accept this

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Living in the Iron Mills dichotomy and rejects his own selfhood, devalues his own self when Mitchell does no more than acknowledge that the korl statue contains something transcending social class. His belief in his inner passion’s ability to transcend his surroundings is destroyed:

“Look at me!” he said to Deborah, with a low, bitter laugh, striking his puny chest savagely. ‘What am I worth, Deb? Is it my fault that I am no better? My fault? My fault?” (41)

Unlike Wolfe, who, once he fails to charm the visitors or win their consent, accepts the stolen money from Deb and finally resorts to suicide while in jail, the narrator, having likewise produced art, waits for a better day. She finally succeeds in her attempt to “ride alternately on the horses of [her] private and [herlpublic nature” (“Fate” 32). She tells “a story of [an] old house into which [she] happened to come to-day’’ (Life 13). Then, finishing the story, she is back in her library pondering the efficacy of her undertaking (Life 64). She has produced a work of art that she hopes has shaken the “amateur psychologist,” or the “Egoist, or Pantheist, or Arminian,” perhaps any ‘‘dilettante.” She is, however, in “the deep of night” keeping company with what “belong[s] to the open sunlight” (64-5). Her private nature removes her from the world to write and hope; her public nature is mired in the industrial grime of nineteenth-century America The two never fully interact or meet. Hence, riding two horses is hardly effective since it leads nowhere.

Davis demonstrates. then, a limitation inherent in the belief that “a good intention clothes itself with sudden power.” She establishes this limitation when she places the poet’s transcendental powers within a man-made culture. Wolfe knows the korl statue “be hung ry... not hungry for meat ... summat to make her live” (33). The narrator, too, knows “there is a secret down here” in the mire of industrialization (13); she has “a great hope” for a better future (14); she sees in the mill hands “a soul tilled with groping passionate love” (21); she keeps the korl statue and waits for “the promise of the Dawn” (65). But playing the Orphic poet in the depths of “Dante’s Inferno” is as difficult as rescuing Eurydice: the poet cannot avoid looking upon his or her surroundings, his or her culture, his or her bell. It is telling that Kirby equates one of his workers with “Farinata himself in the burning tomb” of the Sixth Circle where the damned are able to see the future but not the present. Wolfe, the Orphic poet, is attempting to transcend this Sixth Circle of hell but is doomed because he cannot see the delimiting effect of his own present situation, his culture. So, too, the narrator who ends her story with “the presupposing language of passive Christianity, clutching to a hope for some nebulous future” (Harris 19). She has noticed in the eyes of dumb brutes a look akin to that evinced by the workers passing her window, but she is still writing, still retaining the korl statue, still imploring her listeners to believe.

Wolfe, to the very end, is an artist, an Orphic poet

71 who from his jail cell sees in the face of a mulatto slave something to capture in korl: “a clear-cut olive face, with a scarlet turban tied on one side, dark, shinning eyes.. . .The picture caught his eye. It was good to see a face like that” (58). His transcendental Orphic soul is alive, but his cultural constraints will soon kill him. From her library the narrator is still writing, still telling her listeners there is hope: “me deep of the night is passing as I write .... While the room is yet steeped in heavy shadow, a cool, gray light suddenly touches [the] head [of the korl statue] like a blessing hand” (65). Wolfe and the narrator have the insight and the poetry to transcend their sibxition. to join in the Over Soul of human instinct and desire which is common to all. Momentarily they attain their goal by creating a statue and a story which expresses transcendental human desire, but in the long run they fail because they and their art are never viewed outside of their cultllre.

Though Davis’s novella emphasizes the limits of the uanscendental belief in the Orphic poet, it also finds value in Wolfe as an “inspired seer” relying “for his utterance upon his moments of inner illumination.” The narrator, likewise, is an “inspired seer” relying “for [her] utterance upon [her] moments of inner illumination” in order to tell her story. It is because Davis was an “inspired seer” relying “for [her] utterance upon [her] moments of inner illumination” that she created a novel which recognizes the transcendental soul within vile and slimy lives doomed to horrible fates. All of these Orphic poets stand outside of human life and yet agitate it with their truth; all are prophets, producers, liberating gods and the most complete or representative of nineteenth-century Americans; all are proficient and can discriminate moral and aesthetic excellences; all are related to the highest aspiration of their age. It is their transcendentalism, their Orphic traits that have produced the novella, Life in the Iron Mills. The Orphic poets have ventured into their culture and played upon their harps and Hades is affected. Sadly, though, because these Orphic poets cannot avoid looking at the hell surrounding them their efficacy is limited; they lose what they most immediately desire. Their surroundings have limited them; nonetheless, the value of their transcendental idealism is neither extinguished nor undercut. It is the surroundings of these Orphic poets that do them in, not their idealism which prompts them to enter hell in the first place.

Notes

This essay is indebted to many enjoyable conversations with George Sebouhian, Professor of English, SUNY College at Fredonia.

‘See page 88 of Till ie Olsen’s “A Biographical Interpretation” in Rebecca Harding Davis’s LiJe in rhe Iron Mills, Ed. Tillie Olsen (Old Westbury, New York The Feminist Press, 1985). Future references to Davis’s novella or to Olsen’s comments will be abbreviated Life.

Page 6: Living in the Iron Mills: A Tempering of Nineteenth-Century America's Orphic Poet

72 Journal of American Culture Emerson. Ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1971.

-. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Edward Waldo Emerson. 12 vols. New York: Bigelow, Brown and Company, 1903-4.

Fetterley, Judith, ed. Provisions. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.

Harris, Sharon M. “Rebecca Harding Davis: From Romanticism to Realism.” American Literary Realism 21 (Winter 1989):

Hesford, Walter. “Literacy Contexts of Liye in the Iron Mills.” American Literature 49 (1977): 70-85.

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. New York: Norton, 1977. Matthiessen, F.O. American Renaissance. London: Oxford,

1968. Melville, Herman. The Writings of Herman Melville. Ed.

Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. 9 vols. Chicago: Northwestern U P, 1968.

Pease, Donald E. “Moby Dick and the Cold War,” The American Renaissance Reconsidered. Ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985.

Shweder, Richard A. “Cultural Psychology: What is it?” in

Stigler, James W.. et al., eds. Cultural Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Ed. J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.

Whicher, Stephen E. Selections From Ralph Waldo Emerson. Boston: Houghton, 1957.

Whitman, Walt. The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman. Ed. Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley. 9 vols. New York New York UP, 1961.

Yoder, R.A. Emerson and the Orphic Poet in America. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.

4-20.

Stigler.

*See Judith Fetterley, ed., Provisions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). On page 310 Fetterley notes that Life is considered “an early example of American literary realism.” For a discussion of Davis’s romanticism, see Walter Hesford, “Literary Contexts of Life in the Iron Mills, ” American Literature 49 (1977) 70-85. In “Rebecca Harding Davis: From Romanticism to Realism,” American Literary Realism 21 (Winter 1989) 5, Sharon M. Harris claims that “Lve is indeed a work of pure naturalism.”

’Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) 1:lO. All further references to Emerson’s writings except “Fate” will be from this collection and will be cited by referencing the essay and the volume and page number.

‘Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate,” The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. (New York: Bigelow, Brown and Company, 1903-4) 6:9. Further references to “Fate” will be from this volume and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

’Vincent Crapanzano. “On Self Characterization” in Stigler, 401. See also Jacques Lacan. “The Mirror Stage” and “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud,” Ecrits (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1977). While Crapanzano argues that the dialectic between self and other is ongoing and Lacan does not, it is only important to our purpose here that we see the subject as constrained or delimited by others, as produced by culture.

Works Cited

Crapanzano, Vincent. “On Self Characterization” in Stigler 401. Davis, Rebecca Harding. Bits of Gossip. Boston: Houghton, 1905. -. Life in the Iron Mills. Ed. Tillie Olsen. Old Westbury,

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Collected Works of Ralph W&o New York: The Feminist P, 1985. J.F. Buckley is in the English Department at The Ohio State

University.