Life In The Iron Mills

While this novella was published in 1861, in many ways it is extremely modern. In its attention to the grim realities of working-class life, the story is now understood to be an early example of realism, anticipating later writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. But the story’s modernity can be seen in its irresolute and complicated point of view, as well in its straightforward setting.

While the story’s plot is a simple one—the events of one fateful night in the life of a mill worker—it is framed in an elaborate way. Readers do not encounter the protagonist of the story, Hugh Wolfe, until several pages into the story. The story instead begins with an unnamed narrator, who seems inseparable from the author. She lives—as did the author—in a Virginia mill town, and like the author is not herself working-class. She sets the scene for Wolfe’s story by describing the parade of men like him who pass by her house every day on their way to work at the mill, and the generally grimy, foggy atmosphere of her town, which has penetrated her own home: “Smoke everywhere! A dirty canary chirps desolately in a cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream,—almost worn out, I think” (12). The reason she has chosen to tell Wolfe’s story, she then tells us, is because he once lived in her house, in the days when it was a boarding house rather than a single-family home. She expresses uncertainty as to whether this is a sufficient reason to tell this particular story, “more than that of the myriads of these furnace-hands” (14). Her sense of the arbitrariness of her connection to Wolfe, and of her consequent choice of Wolfe as a narrative subject, anticipates the central story, in which Wolfe’s life is transformed by his chance meeting with men of a higher social class.  

This is not the only time when the narrator expresses doubt about the story that she is telling, and about her ability to tell it. Her own fraught participation in the story is a kind of secondary drama, shadowing the main drama of Hugh Wolfe’s life. At certain moments the narrator exhorts the reader to try to imagine the interior lives of characters like Wolfe and Deborah, as difficult as this may be to do: “Deeper yet if one could look [at Deborah], was there nothing worth reading in this wet, faded thing, half-covered with ashes? No story of a soul, filled with groping passionate love, heroic unselfishness, fierce jealousy?” (21). At other times she declines to analyze the characters too closely, as if they are real people, and can be fully known only by God:

A reality of soul-starvation, of living death, that meets you every day under the besotted faces on the street,—I can paint nothing of this, only give you the outside outlines of a night, a crisis in the life of one man: whatever muddy depth of soul-history lies beneath you can read according to the eyes God has given you(23).

While the narrator often invokes God, and the story ends on a note of tentative religious uplift, there is also some religious skepticism in the story; this is another one of the story’s more modern aspects. The mill where Wolfe works is compared to Hell, and Wolfe himself wonders, while he is agonizing over whether to return Mitchell’s valuables or to keep them, why a benign God would not want him to better his circumstances: “He never made the difference between poor and rich. The Something who looked down on him that moment through the cool gray sky had a kindly face, he knew,—loved his children alike” (47). Significantly, Wolfe’s last documented moment as a free man is in a church. Although stirred by the beauty of this church, he is not consoled by the preacher’s sermon and feels that his stern, lofty words are not intended for men like him: “His words passed far over the furnace-tender’s grasp, toned to suit another class of culture; they sounded in his ears a very pleasant song in an unknown tongue” (49). When Wolfe is next featured, he is in a jail cell, preparing to end his life.