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Browsing Archival Materials by Subject "19th C. American Literature"

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    Troubling Ideals: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Consequences of Industrialization in Life in the Iron Mills
    (University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Vernon, Adam; Rossi, William
    When Rebecca Harding Davis’s novella, Life in the Iron Mills first appeared in Atlantic Monthly in 1861, manufacturing cities had already cultivated an industrial appearance through smoky skies, soot-covered landscapes, and waste from over population. This appearance was common across the eastern United States, including Wheeling, West Virginia, the town in which Davis grew up in and on which she based her story. As concepts of pollution and environmental hazard were just emerging, “citizens, business owners, legislators, courts, physicians, and sanitarians debated the consequences of coal smoke and other forms of waste for municipal economies, urban aesthetics, human health, and morality” (Gatlin 202). Anxiety from the debate was heightened by the fact that many viewed soot and smoke as a sign of industrial and national progress. In blanketing her landscape and characters with soot and smoke, Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills stands as an obvious critique of the national ideology of progress, exposing the moral and environmental pollution it furthers and the idealist aesthetics that sustain it. At the same time, she is reluctant to throw Howells’ “ideal grasshopper” out with the bath water. While engaging in a recognizably realist exposé, targeting the despoiled industrial landscape, labor and class exploitation, and elitist spectatorship, she also employs a more symbolic aesthetic, one that furthers her critique while also pointing to the possibility of transcendence or redemption. Whether Davis intentionally innovated this hybrid aesthetic or not, it reflects a close observation of industrial reality and a strong desire to reveal to her reader the corrosive moral consequences concealed by the popular national ideology of progress.