24 pages • 48 minutes read
Rebecca Harding DavisLife In The Iron Mills
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1861A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Point of View
This story is written in the first person omniscient point of view and is told from the perspective of the narrator, who offers a story involving several different characters. While Hugh Wolfe is the central character and it is his story that the narrator imparts, his perspective is interspersed with that of Deborah—his fellow mill worker—and even with the Doctor, one of the visiting men at the mill.
These perspectives often shift in an unpredictable way. Even though Wolfe is the central character in the story, he is not the direct and immediate focus of the narrative. Readers instead come upon him gradually, as filtered first through the anonymous voice of the opening pages and then through Deborah, taking his dinner to him at the mill. Following the events of that night, the perspective shifts briefly to the Doctor, one month later, reading about Wolfe’s arrest in the paper. The perspective then shifts again to Deborah, in prison in the room alongside Wolfe’s; and then to Wolfe’s again when he commits suicide.
These shifting perspectives help to create a feeling of suspense and disorientation in the story, but also serve a purpose thematically. The authoritative voice in the story speaks frequently about how difficult lives like Wolfe’s are to see clearly, and the shifting perspectives serve to show the difference between the way others see Wolfe and the way that he sees himself.
Nonlinear Narrative
This story is told from a distance of time, as well as one of social privilege. The story’s unnamed narrator is reconstructing Wolfe’s life and death an unknown number of years later, his former boarding house having been turned into her single-family home. A nonlinear narrative can relate the fallibility of human memory. The narrator is straightforward about the difficulty that she encounters in retrieving Wolfe’s story from her memory, and also in fighting her natural revulsion, as a privileged woman, at getting close to lives like Wolfe’s: “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” (13).
This serves in a backhanded way to make the story seem like an important one, worth retrieving from the fog of years and the “effluvia” (13) of Wolfe’s circumstances. The story is framed by a distance of years, but there are also smaller temporal leaps in the story itself, which add to the story’s drama. For instance, the narrative abruptly springs from Wolfe’s perspective—wandering around town and contemplating whether or not to keep the money that Deborah has stolen for him—to the Doctor’s, a month later, reading about him in the paper. The effect of this is jarring for the reader, as if Wolfe has been simply erased.
Direct Address
The narrator of this story is as much a presence as the characters in the story she is relating. While Davis may or may not be the same person as the story’s unnamed narrator, she employs the narrator to interrupt the story and directly address the reader. This technique is used in order to instruct the reader on how to understand the story. It also brings the reader into the world of the narrative, adding credence to the narrator's story. The narrator warns the reader not to judge men like Wolfe too hastily, and at other times seems to doubt her own ability to do justice to the souls of the characters, who come from circumstances so different from her own. She also seems to editorialize in describing some of the minor characters, such as Mitchell: “Such men are not rare in the States” (29). While the story appears from the perspective of the third person, the voice of the omniscient first-person narrator is not at all neutral or objective.
The effect of the author presenting the narrator as–by turns–flawed, uncertain, and opinionated serves paradoxically to make the story seem more real. It makes the characters seem like real people, and opaque and perplexing as real people are. By utilizing an omniscient first-person narrator, the author gives the story more authority.
