Answer one of the following questions in this category: narrow and focus your answer and also support your response with examples and/or quotes from the readings. 1. Consider the important symbolism of the Korl Woman, the statue in “Life in the Iron Mills.” What does she represent? How does the Korl Woman bring meaning to this story? Why is it important that Hugh is an artist? What does Hugh’s death illustrate? Is he a Christ figure, for example? 19th Century Critical Perspectives Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron-Mills; or, The Korl Woman” (1861) “A puddler and his helper remove a 150-pound, near molten ball of wrought iron from a puddling furnace at Youngstown Sheet & Tube’s Campbell Works in the 1920s.” Courtesy of “Death, Technology, and the Rise of Steel: Why Workers Matter in American History”. Rebecca Harding Davis, described as the first American Realist, published “Life in the Iron Mills; or, The Korl Woman,” in the nation’s prestigious journal, The Atlantic Monthly in 1861. The novella is based on Davis’s first-hand knowledge of the desolate, often demeaning lives of industrial laborers in her hometown of Wheeling, Virginia, now part of West Virginia. Davis wrote with a socially-progressive agenda unusual for her time: she wanted to educate her readers, to make them aware of the wretched and unhealthy conditions under which immigrant workers lived and labored. One of the first writers to expose what journalist, Jacob Riis, would later describe as “how the other half lives,” Davis anticipated the American Realism Movement by almost ten years with “Life in the Iron Mills”. Published just before the Civil War, “Life in the Iron Mills” exposes the working class enslavement of mainly immigrant workers who lived unspeakable lives and endured horrific working conditions, producing goods for the comfort of upper and middle-class American households. The wide disparity between the haves, the thriving middle-class of which Davis was a part, and the have-nots, are represented in “Life in the Iron Mills” by Deborah, a hunchback, and Hugh, a talented artist suffering from tuberculosis, probably from his work as a puddler in the mill. Although Davis deliberately elicits our sympathy, Deborah and Hugh’s plight is illustrated in realistic detail. They are trapped in a meaningless existence from which there seems to be little hope of escape, except through death. When a group of affluent men visit the mill, they notice Hugh’s dramatic sculpture, the Korl Woman, whose outstretched arms represent the mill worker’s hunger for life. Even though they recognize Hugh’s talents, they offer no real assistance, only capitalistic platitudes: one of the men, the physician, ironically tells Hugh he can make of himself what he chooses. Of course, Hugh is dying and has little time left to do anything. Hugh realizes more than the well-do-men, that he and Deborah have little hope of release from endless toil and poverty. Davis, thus, undercuts the mythology of the American Dream, especially for immigrants, often shunned by middle-class society. Davis wrote for a genteel audience, and she wanted them to gain awareness of the growing gap between the classes. Hugh and Deborah are therefore portrayed realistically, yet sympathetically. By story’s end, Hugh becomes a Christ-figure and Deborah is rescued by a tolerant Quaker woman. The story ends optimistically with “the promise of a new dawn.” Davis, therefore, leaves the possibility of evolving social conditions in the hands of her now enlightened genteel audience. READING: Click on the link below to access your required reading assignment for this lesson: o Rebecca Harding Davis, “Life in the Iron-Mills” (1861)
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