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.
Symbols & Motifs
Korl
Korl, as we are told, is the “refuse from the ore” (24)at the iron mill where Hugh Wolfe and Deborah work. It is a malleable material, out of which Wolfe makes his sculptures in his spare time: sculptures that often depict the inarticulate anguish of his life. Both literally and thematically, then, Wolfe is using his life at the mill as artistic material. That he uses korl for sculpting shows his desperation, but also his resourcefulness.
The visiting men at the mill are impressed by Wolfe’s sculpture, but nonplused by it at the same time, perhaps because it looks so unlike the sorts of sculptures that they are used to seeing. One man describes it as having a “flesh tint” (32), which adds to the sculpture’s jarring effect; in all ways, the sculpture appears to them naked. Korl is an unlikely material for Wolfe to use, as Wolfe himself is an unlikely artist. Yet out of its unlikeliness also comes its directness and its power.
Fog and Smoke
In the story’s opening, the narrator describes the fogginess and smokiness of her town. The smokiness comes in part from the fumes that emanate from the iron mill, which is the town’s central industry. “The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke” (11), the narrator states, and the smoke serves to make the mill both an inescapable and a mysterious presence in the town. Even while the townspeople are constantly breathing in its polluted air, few of them—because of this very pollution and obscuring smoke—have very much idea of what the lives of mill workers are like. The smoke and fumes prevent them from getting any closer to the mill than they have to, as do the dirty clothes and rough manners of mill workers like Hugh Wolfe and Deborah.
On top of this smoke, the narrator is also addressing the reader: “Can you see how foggy the day is?” (13) she asks, which can be interpreted as asking readers if they can see how difficult it is to see. A few lines later in the same paragraph, she states of her story: “You may think it a tiresome story enough, as foggy as the day […] only the outline of a dull life” (13). The fog creates a disorienting atmosphere, but also a vague and dull one. Yet by repeatedly invoking the imagery of this dullness and greyness—while holding off on the story itself—the author sets up our expectations for the opposite. Davis, like the narrator, implies that the story is worth the effort involved in looking through the fog.
Fire
Alongside the fog and the smoke, fire also plays a significant role in this story. The fire comes from the mill where Wolfe and others like him work, and it is seen differently by different characters in the story. To visitors like Mitchell, the fire is enchanting and otherworldly; Mitchell muses: “These heavy shadows and the amphitheatre of smothered fires are ghostly, unreal. One could fancy these red smoldering lights to be the half-shut eyes of wild beasts, and the spectral figures their victims in the den” (31).
To Deborah, one of the workers at the mill, the fire is also otherworldly, but in a way that is disconcerting rather than fascinating; she simply mutters, “looks like t’ Devil’s place!” (20). The unnamed narrator herself describes the fiery mill as “a street in Hell” (20). While it is used in this story for the purposes of industry, its affect is wild and monstrous, rather than controlled. It turns workers into “revengeful ghosts” (20)and emphasizes shadows and darkness as much as it illuminates. It can be seen to symbolize the destabilizing, dehumanizing impact of capitalism and the industrial revolution.
