Life In The Iron Mills

In this story, art and art-making plays a complicated role. While art helps the characters in the story to imagine lives and circumstances beyond their own, it ultimately does nothing to change any lives (at any rate, not for the better). It is used for different ends in the story: sometimes as an authentic revolutionary expression, but also sometimes to reinforce the very status quo that it seeks to challenge. 

At the end of the story, the narrator reveals that she now owns Hugh Wolfe’s sculpture, which led to his encounter with the four upper-class men touring the mill, and indirectly to his prison sentence for theft. Her relation to this sculpture is in uneasy one. Unlike the more refined and decorous objects that sit in her home—“[a] half-moulded child’s head; Aphrodite; a bough of forest-leaves”—the sculpture has a disturbing immediacy about it, so much so that she usually keeps it “hid behind a curtain” (64-65). It is the one artwork in her home that “seems to belong to and end with the night” (65), rather than to fit in comfortably with her comfortable life. Yet the narrator also finds hope in the sculpture’s undiminished capacity to disturb—even while its maker has died by his own hand in jail—and the last line of the story suggests that the sculpture might literally point the way towards a better world: “While the room is yet steeped in heavy shadow, a cool, gray light suddenly touches its head like a blessing hand, and its groping arm points through the broken cloud to the far East, where […] God has set the promise of dawn” (65).

The four men at the mill, who come from the same social world as the narrator, also register the sculpture’s power. Yet this recognition does not cause them to treat the sculptor himself with any special respect. There is an unconscious sense among the men that even if Hugh Wolfe made the sculpture, they alone possess the vocabulary and the sensibility to appreciate it; this allows them to continue to feel superior to Wolfe. Even Mitchell, the most perceptive and sophisticated of the men, is unmoved by the plight of Wolfe himself, although he is manifestly moved by the sculpture. Correcting Dr. May’s literal-minded assertion that the sculpture appears quite strong and healthy, not “hungry,” Mitchell states, “Look at that woman’s face! It asks questions of God, and says, ‘I have a right to know.’ Good God, how hungry it is!’” (33-34). This passionate analysis contrasts sharply with Mitchell’s cool and muted goodbye to Wolfe a few pages later, which consists of merely “a quiet look of thorough recognition” (39). Moreover, Mitchell is well aware that coming from a man like him, this mere acknowledgement is enough; indeed, Wolfe likens it to a king anointing a commoner with his “sceptre” (40).  

For the more prosperous characters in this story, art is connected to displays of articulacy; for characters such as Hugh Wolfe, it is connected to inarticulacy. Wolfe makes sculptures in order to express feelings that he cannot express otherwise, and for which he does not have the language. Likewise, Deborah, Wolfe’s fellow mill-worker and most ardent supporter, loves Wolfe for the very reason that many of his other co-workers instinctively distrust him: because of his artist’s soul. She is only dimly aware of this, however, as she is only dimly aware of the unearthly beauty of the mill at night time, a beauty which she is too close to and at the mercy of to see clearly: “Perhaps, if she had possessed an artist’s eye, the picturesque oddity of the scene might have made her step stagger less […] but to her the mills were only ‘summat deilish to look at by night’” (20). Mitchell and his companions are better-equipped than she to appreciate the scene’s “picturesque oddity,” being less affected by it: “‘Do you know,’ said Mitchell, ‘I like this view of the works better than when the glare was fiercest? […] One could fancy these red smouldering lights to be the half-shut eyes of wild beasts, and the spectral figures their victims in the den’” (31).