Silences

by Shelly Fisher Fishkin

  **Eclipsing, devaluation, neglect, are the result of critical judgments, a predominantly male domain. The most damaging, and still prevalent, critical attitude remains “that women’s experience, and literature written by women are, by definition, minor.” Indeed, for a sizable percentage of male writers, critics, academics, writer-women are eliminated from consideration (consciousness) altogether. (See the one-out-of-twelve compilations beginning on page 186.)

  †“Women and Creativity,” Motive, April 1969.

  ‡Savor Mary Ellmann’s inimitable Thinking About Women.

  *“The Art of Katherine Mansfield,” The Collected Essays of Katherine Anne Porter.

  **See Carolyn Kizer’s “Pro Femina” in her Knock Upon Silence.

  †Letter to her publisher, W. S. Williams, 1849.

  *“No Important Woman Writer . . . ,” Mademoiselle, February 1970. These excerpts and my exceptions to them are not wholly fair to this superb essay, which I read originally and quoted from in a copy with an important page (unnoticed) missing. My abashed apologies to Calisher.

  *Among them: ways in which innate human drives and capacities (intellect; art; organization; invention; sense of justice; love of beauty, life; courage; resilience, resistance; need for community) denied development and scope, nevertheless struggle to express themselves and function; what goes on in jobs; penalties for aging; the profound experience of children—and the agonizing having to raise them in a world not yet fit for human life; what it is to live as a single woman; having to raise children alone; going on; causes besides the accepted psychiatric ones, of breakdown in women. The list goes on and on.

  *Compounding the difficulty is that experiences and comprehensions not previously admitted into literature—especially when at variance with the canon—are exceedingly hard to come to, validate, establish as legitimate material for literature—let alone, shape into art.

  **In 1976 these books are all back in print.

  *Lessing’s description of the novel (in her afterword to Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm) pertains to this writing which “explains much and tells much”: “com[ing] out of a part of the human consciousness which is trying to understand itself, to come into the light. Not on the level where poetry works, or music, or mathematics, the high arts; no, but on the rawest and most workaday level, like earthworms making new soil where things can grow.” But there are other forms of expression which can do this, and more: the journal, letters, memoirs, personal utterances—for they come more natural for most, closer to possibility of use, of shaping—and, in one’s own words, become source, add to the authentic store of human life, human experience. The inestimable value of this, its emergence as a form of literature, is only beginning to be acknowledged. As yet, there is no place in literature analogous to the honored one accorded “folk” and “primitive” expression in art and in music.

  *And for every twelve enabled to come to recognized achievement, remember: there would still remain countless others still lessened or silenced—as long as the other age-old silencers of humanity, class and/or color, prevail.

  1971, 1972

  REBECCA HARDING DAVIS

  Her Life and Times

  Written as an afterword for the 1972 reprint of the 1861 Life in the Iron Mills; or, The Korl Woman by Rebecca Harding Davis (Atlantic Monthly, April 1861).

  A few notes have been added to the original ones.

  You are about to give the life of your reading to a forgotten American classic, Rebecca Harding’s Life in the Iron Mills, reprinted here after 111 years from the April 1861 Atlantic Monthly.

  Without precedent or predecessor, it recorded what no one else had recorded; alone in its epoch and for decades to come, saw the significance, the presage, in scorned or unseen native materials—and wrought them into art.

  Written in secret and in isolation by a thirty-year-old unmarried woman who lived far from literary circles of any kind, it won instant fame—to sleep in ever deepening neglect to our time.

  Remember, as you begin to read of the sullen, clinging industrial smoke, the air thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings: this was written when almost everywhere the air was pure; and these lives, hitherto unknown, invisible (though already the lives of millions), are brought here for the first time into literature.*

  (So was Life in the Iron Mills prefaced in its 1972 republication.)

  Until Life in the Iron Mills appeared in that April 1861 Atlantic, there had been no Blakean dark Satanic mills in American literature; outside of slavery, no working people whose lives were “tragedy . . . a reality of soul starvation . . . living death.” There had been no Hugh Wolfes, consumptive puddler in a steel mill, or Debs, hunchbacked cotton mill girl, deformed by work since early childhood at the looms; no slums, kennel-like dwellings, incessant labor, alcoholism; no “is that all of their lives? nothing beneath? all?”; no implicit: “Wrong, all wrong.”

  Nowhere in fiction was industrialization, the significant development that would transform the nation, a concern—nor its consuming of the lives of numberless human beings. No one in literature had opposed the prevalent “American right to rise . . . A man may make himself anything he chooses” with Rebecca Harding’s living question: “What are rights without means?”

  No one had delineated a Kirby, twelve hundred “hands” in his mill, who would say:

  If I had the making of men, these men who do the lowest part of the world’s work should be machines,—nothing more,—hands. It would be kindness. . . . What are taste, reason, to creatures who must live such lives?

  —nor had any writers concerned themselves with the shape that taste, reason, might have to take “in such lives.”

  In the creature, Hugh Wolfe, is “a fierce thirst for beauty,—to know it, to create it; to be—something . . . other than he is.” Off hours he sculptures crude, powerful shapes out of the pig-iron waste; (dissatisfied, hacks them to pieces afterward). One is a giant korl woman. “She be hungry,” he tries to explain to Kirby and his party of sightseers who are “of the mysterious class . . . of another order of being.” “Not hungry for meat . . . [For] summat to make her live . . . like you. . . . Whiskey ull do it, in a way.”

  “Boy, you have it in you to be a great sculptor,” Wolfe is told. “Make yourself what you will. It is your right.” When the question of means arises, the admirer shortly explains that exercise of rights depends upon money. And adds: “Why should one be raised, when myriads are left?”

  Wolfe, the sense of his capacities kindled, sees his life as it “might—but never can, be,” (What are rights without means?) “never.”

  Deborah steals to free him from the mill. “Free. To work, to live, to love. His right.” He is caught; judged “by man’s law that seizes on one isolated act, not . . . God’s justice that weigh[s] the entire life”; sentenced to nineteen years. “Half a lifetime! . . . A hard sentence—all the law allows; but it was for ’xample’s sake. These mill hands are gettin’ onbearable.”

  “It was only right,” Wolfe thinks, “he had done wrong. But was there right or wrong for such as he? What was right?”

  Rather than suffer the lingering death of the penitentiary (he knew “how it went with men there”), with “a dull old bit of tin, not fit to cut korl with,” sharpened on the prison bars, he takes his life.

  Near the beginning of Life in the Iron Mills, the narrator had said:

  There is a secret down here . . . in this nightmare fog. . . . From the very extremity of its darkness, . . . the most solemn prophecy which the world has known of the Hope to come.

  The secret is the great capacities hidden in humanity, latent, denied—yet struggling for expression.

  The book ends with one of the oldest of human symbols, the promise of dawn.*

  Life in the Iron Mills was not written out of compassion or condescending pity. Rebecca Harding wrote it in absolute identification with “thwarted, wasted lives . . . mighty hungers . . . unawakened power”; circumstances that den
ied use of capacities; imperfect, self-tutored art that could have only odd moments for its doing—as if these were her own. And they were—however differently embodied in the life of a daughter of the privileged class.

  It was in front of the Harding house that the long train of mules dragged their masses of pig iron and the slow stream of human life of the story crept past, night and morning, year after year, to work their twelve- to fourteen-hour shift, the six or seven days a week. The little girl who observed them grew into womanhood, into (near) spinsterhood, still at the window in that house, and the black industrial smoke was her daily breath.

  The town was Wheeling, on the Ohio, in the border slave state of what was then Virginia. When the Harding family moved there in 1836 (Rebecca was five), it was one of only a handful of steel towns in the nation. All her growing years, the slave South, the free North; the industrial future, the agrarian present, the wilderness that was once all the past—were uniquely commingled here. In the streets, farmers were as familiar a sight as Irish and Cornish steelworkers, slaves, free blacks, commercial travelers, bargemen, draymen, Indians, and rawboned mountain people in to work at the mills.

  Over the country’s single north-south National Road, snaking mostly through wilderness to this halting point, came huge vans with cotton bales for Northern mills, returning with manufactures for the South; stagecoaches carrying passengers to and from the river boats that connected St. Louis and New Orleans with the East; and Conestoga wagons with emigrants, or immigrants still in European dress, heading west. And over all—through the night and morning river mists, through the constant changes of light—was a sense of vast unpeopled distance from the hills that curved fold on fold far as eye could see.

  “These sights and sounds did not come common to her.” The slow-moving thoughtful Rebecca absorbed them into herself with the quiet intensity that marked all her confrontation with life, and with an unshared sense of wonder, of mystery.

  She was the eldest of five children. Her father, Richard W. Harding, a successful businessman, later City Treasurer, hated “vulgar American life” and its world of business, secluding himself evenings for what he did love: reading Elizabethan literature, mostly Shakespeare. “He was English and homesick,” Rebecca wrote of him years later. “We were not intimate with him as with our mother.” The household revolved around him. Her mother, Mrs. Rachel Leet Wilson Harding (“the most accurate historian I ever knew, with enough knowledge to outfit a dozen modern college-educated women”), was kept busy with an ever increasing family and running the large household noiselessly.

  It was a house that had servants, perhaps slaves, for necessary tasks. Public schools did not yet exist. Rebecca’s mother did the early teaching, and later there were occasional tutors, usually brought in for her brothers. Rebecca rambled; she read. The books (Maria Edgeworth, Bunyan, Scott) were of a remote world of pilgrims, knights and ladies, magic, crusaders. But once, in her soot-specked cherry tree hideout, in a new collection of Moral Tales (it was years before she discovered the anonymous author was Hawthorne), she found three unsigned stories about an ordinary American town, everyday sights and sounds, the rambles of a little girl like herself.* She read and reread them so often that “I know almost every line of them by heart, even now.” In them her own secret feelings, so opposite to those of her complex, austere father, were verified: that “the commonplace folk and things which I saw every day had mystery and charm . . . belonged to the magic world [of books] as much as knights and pilgrims.”

  When she was fourteen (an age when most Wheeling girls had already been working in the mills or as domestic slaveys for years), Rebecca was sent—not too far away—to live with her mother’s sister in Washington, Pennsylvania, to attend the three-year Female Seminary there and be “finished.”

  “Of all cursed places under the sun, where the hungriest soul can hardly pick up a few grains of knowledge,” Olive Schreiner writes of that century, “a girls’ boarding-school is the worst. . . . They finish everything but imbecility and weakness, and that they cultivate. They are nicely adapted machines for experimenting on the question, ‘Into how little space can a human soul be crushed?’ ”*

  Probably the indictment is too severe in this instance, but certainly it was not an atmosphere conducive to learning, development, attainment. The ardent “hunger to know” (later ascribed to Hugh Wolfe and other of her fictional people) was already deep in Rebecca. She was eager for companions, for stimulus, exploration, range, substance.

  Little of substance beyond religion and “soft attractive graces” was offered the young ladies. “Enough math to do accounts, enough astronomy to point out constellations, a little music and drawing, and French, history, literature at discretion” is how Rebecca describes it.

  Nor did she find satisfactory companionship. For all her classmates’ shocked delight at her irreverent wit, Rebecca’s very seriousness of purpose and “hunger to know” set her apart.

  Still it was a larger world than home. It was a college town, site of (the all male, of course) Washington College. There were more books, more current literature available. Speakers came through regularly on the college circuit, and sometimes Seminary girls were permitted to attend. There was a bracing sense of currents and concerns of the time, and the stimulation of hearing famous figures such as Horace Greeley.

  And there was Francis LeMoyne, the town physician, radical reformer, agnostic, abolitionist (their vice-presidential candidate in 1840). “He should have lived in a . . . great arena. . . . He had the power for any work.” Unquestionably, the most challenging experience of those years was her acquaintance with him.*

  This “uncouth mass of flesh,” “mad against Destiny . . . unconquerable ills,” “smothered rights and triumphant wrongs,” “inflamed with the needs and sufferings of . . . countless lives” brought to Rebecca a troubling sense of “a gulf of pain and wrong . . . the under-life of America,” and deepened her childhood feeling of something of great mystery and portent in this “vulgar” everyday American life.

  Fourteen years later, in her first novel, Margret Howth, she was still trying to come to terms with the meaning of LeMoyne’s radical life and beliefs, so diametrically opposed to the precepts and assumptions of her own upbringing.

  She graduated as valedictorian, still hungry to know. The “larger life” away from home was over. It was 1848. She was seventeen. Even had she wanted to go on with education, there was but one college in the entire country that would admit a female, the scandalous, unthinkable (abolitionist) Oberlin. The massed social structure prescribed one sphere, one vocation for a woman of her class: domestic—marriage, or serving as daughter, sister, aunt where needed. Only in case of extreme economic necessity did a girl or woman of her class live away from home, with but one “respectable” occupation open to her—teaching (at a third of a man’s pay).

  That summer, a few hundred miles north at Seneca Falls, the first women’s rights convention in the world was being held. Their Declaration spoke of the situation of women as:

  a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman. . . . He has monopolized nearly all profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. He closes against her all avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. . . . He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her. . . . He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

  It is doubtful that Rebecca read the Declaration. Even if she had, it is doubtful that the seventeen-year-old girl would have seen in it a description of her circumstances. To her they were personal, singular; something awry, unnatural in her to harbor needs, interests, longings for which there seemed no place or way or precedent.

  She was a dark, vigorous, sturdily built girl, with a full, han
dsome face that decades later was to become the most admired, sketched, photographed face of its generation in the person of her famous son Richard. In her own time, when what was prized in female features was delicacy, her appearance was probably considered unfortunate—for a girl. Her manner was direct, “unvarnished,” quiet.

  The Wheeling to which she returned, and in which she was to be immured for the next thirteen years, was not Boston, nor Amherst, nor Concord—nor even Washington, Pennsylvania, with college circuit lectures, traveling theater, a Francis LeMoyne. It was a yeasty, booming industrial town of nearly 13,000 people, but with no intellectual or literary circles of any kind. The fever for gold, just beginning in California, had long dominated here; the heavy industrial smoke, manifesting its own kind of gold dust, pervaded more than the atmosphere.

  The social life open to Rebecca in her own class was with young men intent on making the most of the possibilities for “getting on,” and with young women whose concern—natural under the circumstances of but one sanctioned vocation—was with getting asked into the most advantageous possible marriage. All social activities were calculated toward these ends. Rebecca did not involve herself in the expected social round.

  Whatever the reasons were—subtle family ones,* the lonely pull of obviously unshared interests—among them must have been Rebecca’s refusal to remain in situations of emptiness, of falsity, of injuries to her sense of selfhood** where there was choice. She stayed almost exclusively within the family circle.

  As the eldest daughter in a large household, even one with servants, there was much help to be given her mother in the commonplace, necessary tasks of caring for family needs, younger children; keeping the atmosphere pleasant, especially for her father. The bonds of love were strong—she writes of “the protection and peace of home”—but they were not bonds of mutuality. She had to keep her longings, questionings, insurrections, secret.