Rebecca Harding Davis, Nathaniel Hawthorne, AND Elizabeth Gaskell--Oh snap!

 Life in the Iron-Mills.
Wow.

  I love this story; it's filled with passion. I started reading this and I knew I would like it, even though it is dark and morbid for 95% of the story. I love the way Davis wrote this. She spoke to the reader like she could read their thoughts. The way she inquired of her readers was chilling, in a way, and I kept wanting to deny any judgement she assumed upon her audience. The way she wrote this made me appalled to think someone might even try to judge these mill workers for being dirty and stuck in a rut. That's what life was like back then; if you weren't somebody you were nobody.
  After reading the first page or so, it struck me who I could compare Davis to. In a way, her dark and depressing story just screams Hawthorne.
  I also found myself thinking of the novel North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. I just recently started reading this book and haven't gotten very far, but the same friend who insisted I read the book also insisted I watch the movie with her. Therefore, I have a bit of North and South discourse in the back of my mind. While reading Life in the Iron-Mills, I kept imagining the fluffy pollution of the cotton mills (the very atmosphere is filled with particles of cotton that could easily be breathed in). It was easy to imagine what the iron mills would look like. Also, in North and South one of the main characters, Mr. Thornton, is a mill owner. He's the classic Jane Austen hero--tall, dark, and handsome--but he appears to care none at all for his workers. When he catches a worker smoking his pipe in the cotton mill, he beats him bloody and proceeds to fire him from his job. Throughout the story, Mr. Thornton is found discussing business with his fellow mill owners. The very same thing happens in Life in the Iron-Mills. I felt like I was watching another episode of North and South the entire time I read this story.
  Another aspect about Davis' piece is that she heavily used Biblical allusions all throughout the story. Just a handful of these include p. 2600- "busy making straight paths"; p. 2602- "Man cannot live by work alone.."; p. 2608- "...a great gulf never to be passed"; p. 2610- "What shall we do to be saved?"; p. 2611- paragraphs 2 and 4; and p. 2616- "...mote in brother's eye..."
  Davis uses these scriptures well. She must know her Bible, much like her character Mitchell.
Well, having said all of this, I just thoroughly loved reading this piece. I couldn't figure out what it was that Deb was horrified that Hugh would do until we got to the scene where he kills himself with the blade that he had been sharpening on the jail bars. But I think what I liked most about this piece was that at the end, Davis wrote with a hopeful light rather than sticking with morbid tones all throughout. I really think it was the perfect piece of literature to end the semester with.