24 pages • 48 minutes read
Rebecca Harding DavisA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Hugh Wolfe is the protagonist of the story. He is a mill worker who is separate from the mill workers around him, due to his artistic gifts. At the same time, his working-class origins separate him from cultivated men such as Mitchell and Dr. May, who can appreciate his art. Wolfe is therefore stranded, in a kind of limbo between one social world and another. His stranded situation, and his inarticulacy even to himself, give him a volatility as a character. While he is ultimately imprisoned for a crime that he did not commit—the theft of Mitchell’s money—there is a sense in the story that he would have come to another bad end if not that one, since there is no place in the world for a man like him.
Wolfe’s inarticulacy is due to his life of punishing physical labor, which allows for no reflection or no perspective. As the narrator makes clear several times, the toll that this sort of life takes on the soul as is severe and tragic as any physical toll. Wolfe’s meeting with Mitchell, by suggesting to Wolfe the existence of a world where he might belong, serves only to further destabilize him; it is this meeting, more than the subsequent theft of Mitchell’s money, which marks the story’s real turning point. Meeting Mitchell causes Wolfe to see his own life with fresh eyes, while also seeing the impossibility of escaping this life. His only way out is through criminal behavior, and ultimately through death.
Deborah is Wolfe’s devoted friend, and ultimately his undoing as well. Her theft of Mitchell’s wallet—committed in an effort to save Wolfe and perhaps to prove her devotion to him—is what sends Wolfe to prison. While she receives a prison sentence as well, it is only for 3 years, as opposed to Wolfe's 19. As a poor, handicapped female, she is perceived as a harmless and pathetic creature, even by prison jailers and law officers. Her complexities go unacknowledged because most people cannot see beyond her shabby appearance and do not believe her capable of volatile emotions like jealousy and unrequited love.
Deborah survives prison and goes to live afterwards with a Quaker benefactor in a community outside of the mill town. She appears to find peace in this ascetic, simple life, and there is a sense in which she finally becomes the dull and unassuming soul whom others have long perceived her to be. At the same time, this ending is a hopeful one, and there is a suggestion that Deborah has sublimated her old internal battles in a striving for godliness: “What blame the meek Quaker, if she took her lost hope to make the hills of heaven more fair?” (64).
Mitchell is slightly apart from his upper-class touring companions at the mill, as Wolfe is slightly apart from his own milieu of working men. Wolfe picks up on his distinctiveness, and he on Wolfe’s. He says goodbye to Wolfe “as to an equal, with a quiet look of thorough recognition” (39). For his part, Wolfe is awed both by Mitchell’s intelligence and by his refined appearance and air; these qualities together make Mitchell appear to him like a kind of deity: “[A] Man all-knowing, all-seeing, crowned by Nature, reigning,—the keen glance of his eye falling like a scepter on other men” (40).
Mitchell’s flaw is in his lack of conviction: a flaw that he himself takes to be a strength and a sign of worldliness. He is conversant in many subjects but impassioned by none of them; he sees both Wolfe’s talent and his desperation but does nothing to help him. While he and Wolfe have their intelligence in common, the nature of their intelligence is different. Mitchell, we are told, despises “nothing, in heaven, earth, or hell, but one-idead men” (29); Wolfe, on the other hand, creates a sculpture that is stirring precisely because it is “[o]ne idea” (32).
Dr. May represents a certain type of well-meaning but self-deluding prosperous man. He believes that it is sufficient for a man like him to acknowledge a man like Hugh Wolfe; he then turns shocked and cold when Hugh Wolfe is not satisfied by this mere acknowledgement and dares to ask him for more concrete help, to which he quips: “I have not the money, boy” (37).
While not as openly contemptuous as his companion Clark Kirby, Dr. May is no less unreachable. Like Kirby, he cannot conceive of the world as any way other than it is and sees no point in social revolutions. His friendly gesture to Wolfe is more a self-congratulatory display of open-mindedness and magnanimity than a real showing of empathy. His lack of imagination is shown in his literal-minded reaction to Wolfe’s sculpture. Upon hearing Wolfe’s description of the figure as “hungry,” he replies: “But what a mistake you have made, my fine fellow! You have given no sign of starvation to the body” (33).
Clark Kirby is the son of the overseer at the mill. He is the crudest and most openly mercenary of the men in his group, and he makes no pretense of humanity towards the mill workers. However, there is a twisted empathy behind his cruelty, a sense that he is refusing to see the mill workers as human beings because to do so would be unbearable: “If I had the making of these men, these men who do the lowest part of the world’s work should be machines […] It would be kindness, God help them! What are taste, reason, to creatures who must live lives such as these?” (34).