Silences

by Shelly Fisher Fishkin

  She could not even freely discuss literature. She had come home excited over living native writers. “We were in the first flush of our triumph in the beginnings of a national literature . . . these new men—Holmes and Lowell and Hawthorne—were our own, the indigenous growth of the soil.” To her father, all literature had ended with Shakespeare; the United States was incapable of culture. No other viewpoint was expressible.

  Nor was there any of LeMoyne’s concern with “the unhelped pain of life.” All through the fifties—that earthquake decade of antislavery, bleeding Kansas, women’s rights, the fugitive slave law, Dred Scott, John Brown, the struggle for a ten-hour workday—her family and its circle stayed removed, indifferent, when not hostile. Except through reading, Rebecca was shut in their narrowness. She tells of one family, “radicals, believers in divorce and women’s rights, refusing to eat sugar or use cotton” (products of slavery), furthermore visited by John Brown. Naturally they were “social outcasts.” Rebecca did not question the taboo.

  Thirteen years are to go by before the seventeen-year-old girl-valedictorian emerges as the thirty-year-old author of Life in the Iron Mills. Shrouded years. The outward, known facts are so few, it is to the writings one must turn to piece together what those thirteen years must have been.

  In Rebecca’s first published fiction, there is a gallery of girls before marriage, devoted to their families, especially their usually difficult fathers. They are “hungry to make some use of themselves, . . . undergoing fierce struggles to tame and bind to some unfitting work, the power within.”* They responsibly carry out household tasks “though heart and brain need more than this.” Unlike those dear to them, they are “hurt” by

  the filth, injustice, bafflings in the world . . . she [Dode] never glossed them over as “necessity,” or shirked them as we do: she cried hot, weak tears, . . . over the wrongs of the slaves about her, her old father’s ignorance, her own cramped life . . . these passion-fits were the only events of her life.

  Throughout her work, there is another recurrent figure: proud, vulnerable young women, subjected to indignities and rejection because their appearance and being do not fit the prevailing standards of female beauty or behavior. Young men say to them patronizingly: “You are built for use, but not for show.” They are made to feel shame for their energy and strength, which “they cannot remember to dissemble into fragility that appeals.” They are penalized because they cannot “blush and flutter and plume themselves when a man comes near.” They are “freaks” for their “rare sincerity” or “seriousness.”

  If they attract, they at the same time repel:

  He took her short, thick hand in his delicate fingers, but dropped it again quickly. The fiery spirit in his veins rose to meet the heat in hers . . . but he really could not bear to see a young girl with a paw shaped like a man’s.

  When they love, it is in an agony of intensity—love most often unspoken, or despised; or if mutual, having to be denied.

  There are older women, realizing that theirs is to be the social obloquy of the unchosen, the unmarried, “loathing themselves as one whom God had thought unworthy of every woman’s right—to love and be loved, . . . their strength drying up within them, jeered at, utterly alone.” “We laugh at their trial,” Rebecca goes on to say. “I think the quick fagots at the stake were fitter subjects for laughter.” Like the younger women, they school themselves to maintain dignity, integrity; they armor, imprison themselves in “the great power of reticence.”

  There is nothing sexless about them. They suffer physically as well as socially. Their “hopeless thirst is freshly bitter.” Margret Howth “kindles at the look or touch” of the man she unrequitedly loves “as if her veins were filled with subtile flame.”

  With Rebecca’s younger women, they comprise the most openly physical women in the fiction of the time. Here is a bride-to-be, dressing up as the month of June, “the moist warm month,” for a costume party:

  Some tranced summer’s day might have drowsed down into such a human form . . . on the thick grass-crusted meadows. There was the full contour of the limbs hid under warm green folds, the white flesh that glowed when you touched it as if some smothered heat lay beneath, the snaring eyes, the sleeping face, the amber hair uncoiled in a languid quiet, while yellow jasmine deepened its hue into molten sunshine, and a great tiger-lily laid its sultry head on her breast.

  And always there is the vein of “unused powers, thwarted energies, starved hopes”; the hunger for a life more abundant than in women’s sanctioned sphere—one in the full human context of Hugh Wolfe’s definition: “A true life is one of full development of faculties.”

  Clues? Autobiography? Of a sort. There is enough correspondence to outward fact, and if all was not experienced directly, it went deep enough to be carefully and caringly recorded.

  But of what is most singular in those thirteen years—the development of that girl in her cramped life, fiercely struggling to tame and bind to some unfitting work the power within; of what made it a cramped life; of how she faced down the harm and maimings of her personal situation, the self-scorn, the thwartings; and—fitted in between tasks and family needs, in secret and in isolation, without literary friendship and its encouragement—developed an ear, a discipline, made of herself a writer; against the prevalent, found her own subject: of this there is scarcely a word.

  The “hunger to know” and for “summat to make her live” must have gone on, unsatisfied. Like Emily Dickinson, in withdrawing from the social round she created some measure of time for herself beyond the inescapable family pulls and responsibilities; and she was of those rare fortunate who had “a room of one’s own.” When her brother Wilson went to Washington College—where, unlike the Female Seminary, the courses had to have substance and range—she set herself to studying the books and subjects she had not had, giving herself his lessons. Then that too was over. She writes somewhere of “the curse of an education one cannot use.”

  She continued to read avidly. But books, for all their companionship, could only have intensified the sense of constriction, of waste, of the unattainable. Like the young Harriet Beecher (not yet Stowe) at the same age and in somewhat similar circumstances: “thought, intense emotional thought” became a “disease.”*

  Almost the first sentence in Life in the Iron Mills is: “I open the window, and looking out . . .” She must have opened her window and looked out at the life beyond her a great deal in those years. (Something of this must have fed the sense of unattainable longing, the intensity of sight, sound, emotion, the impulse to art that she conveys near the end of Life in the Iron Mills where Hugh presses his face to the rusty prison bars and looks out.)

  Year after year, Rebecca saw changes: the factories and mills spreading over more and more of the landscape, thieving the farms; the coming of the first railroad, the Baltimore & Ohio; coal mine smoke beginning to stain the once pure mists over the Appalachians; the Ohio River darkening with wastes; the throngs and traffic in the streets, thickening; and always, night and morning, the workers on their way to or from the mills.

  And she walked. Not the carefree rambles of childhood, for she was encumbered now by the steel-ribbed corsets and dragging skirts of her sex and class,* the restrictions as to where she might go and how she must behave. She walked in stupor, in vacancy, in self-scorn; walking off a “passion-fit” or seeking release from the walls of family; in joy of motion, the one active exercise of a lady’s body permissible, or “in an ecstasy of awareness . . . in the peopled maze of the streets.” Walking was her travel, her adventure, her transaction with the world—living substance for her idling intellect and imagination. It is significant that much of Life in the Iron Mills and Margret Howth takes place during walks.

  At some point she began secretly, seriously, to write. Whatever the roots, all might have fallen away into silence as with nearly all women before her, but the times were nurturing. Writing was being demonstrated as the one profession it was possible
to carry on within the sphere, the one male domain in which there was beginning to be undeniable, even conspicuous, success by women. The upswelling Women’s Rights movement had created an atmosphere, a challenge, an interest.

  Eighteen hundred and fifty, the year Rebecca was nineteen, began the decade called by literary historians “the feminine fifties.”** Two years before, Jane Eyre had appeared, with its unprecedented heroine who was plain and earned her own living and was rebelliously conscious of unused powers, restrictions because of her sex. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which reached and affected more readers the world over than any work of fiction before (or since), came out in 1852. Grace Greenwood and Fanny Fern (Sara Willis Parton), joined later by the devastating Gail Hamilton, were earning splendid and well-publicized incomes with their writing. Parton’s Ruth Hall (1855) stunned readers, including an admiring Hawthorne, with its account of the struggles of a woman genius against poverty and prejudice. For the first time, year after year, there were successful novels by women. Contrary to received opinion, in its first high tide this “feminine” writing was predominantly serious—about something—not romantic fluff or sentimental slush.

  The ardor, “the fierce thirst for beauty, to know it, to create it, to be something other than [she] was,” turned in this direction. At first, Rebecca says, she “rashly” tried her hand at “idylls delicately tinted . . . heroines in white dresses that never need washing . . . deep-dyed villains, full-blooded saints . . . dark conspiracies, women rare and radiant in Italian bowers.” “I never was there,” she says. “I am willing to do my best, but I live in the commonplace.”

  She chose to live in the commonplace, this commonplace that was nowhere in books. Her changing changing Wheeling, the huge mills, the new men of power: owners, managers, whom she observed obliquely in her father’s house; the despised, ignored life she saw from her windows, mingled among in the streets; “filth, injustice, bafflings,” “vulgar American life.” All those years of seeming vacancy and waste, they had drawn her more and more with LeMoyne’s sense of great portent, great meaning, hid within them.

  Now in this dazzling possibility of expression, use, she came to this as subject. Without realizing it, she had the advantage of the writer’s deepest questions: what is happening here, what does this mean? Of the “massed, vile, slimy lives” she asked, “Is that all of their lives? nothing beneath? all?”*

  But this “commonplace” was outside the permitted sphere. She was house-bound, class-bound, sex-bound; there was no way of natural, direct (participatory) access to the worlds of work and power for her.

  It is almost impossible for us at a later, freer time, to conceive the difficulties of accumulating the dense accretion of significant details out of which Life in the Iron Mills springs so terribly to life* (details that could no more come out of books than do Wolfe or, for that matter, Clarke, Kirby, May, Mitchell).

  Perhaps only once was Rebecca able to take Deborah’s night walk to the “city of fires.” She would not have been permitted to go unescorted, or to linger, or to initiate or participate too actively in any conversation. In homes such as the Hardings’, labor relations, politics, gritty subjects, were not discussed around the ladies socially. How did she come then by the observation, the knowledge, of the incomparable rainy night mill scene with its seizing descriptions and its unequaled encompassing of various class attitudes? How, too, did she come to know the fetid kennel-like room where the Wolfes lived, with its slimy moss-covered earth floor; and the dress, the differing talk and beings of its potato eaters?

  She must have had to use “trespass vision,” eavesdrop, ponder everything, dwell within it with all the resources of intellect and imagination; literally make of herself (in Henry James’s famous phrase) “one on whom nothing is lost.” Each walk, each encounter, had to be freighted with significance, each opportunity for knowing seized. More, with demeaning, painful, excited strategem, she must have had to create opportunities for knowledge; and for a knowing relationship with those outside the bounds of her class.

  And in the process, the noting of reality was transformed into comprehension, Vision.

  In Margret Howth, she writes of Lo (Lois), a black peddler girl, crippled in a cotton mill accident:

  . . . this creature, that Nature had thrown impatiently aside as a failure, so marred, imperfect. . . came strangely near to her [Margret], claimed recognition by some subtle instinct. . . some strange sympathy drew her to this poor wretch, dwarfed, alone in the world,—some tie of equality.

  Some tie of equality, of kinship. The subtle recognition that these were not of a lower order, but human beings like herself, capable of—with the right to—but denied circumstances for full development. As Hugh saw himself, she saw them. As they might be.

  Her father had maintained that tragedy could have only to do with the noble, the high born. But she recognized that this misuse of human beings by industry was tragedy, “terrible tragedy, a reality of soul (and body) starvation, of living death.” And “from the very extremity of its darkness, the most solemn prophecy which the world has known of the Hope to come.” As they might be.

  “I want to make it a real thing for you. . . . You, busy in making straight paths for your feet on the hills.”

  It may have taken her years to embody her vision. “Hewing and hacking,” like Hugh, “working at one figure for months and, when it was finished, breaking it to pieces in a fit of disappointment.” Writing, discarding, trying again. Often the effort and the transport must have seemed a kind of insanity, a vain delusion. There was nothing or no one outside herself to verify or justify it. Only the Vision, and the need to make it a real thing.

  When at last it was done, she did not know what to call it: a story? a parable? an article? It was not like any of these. Furthermore, the only magazine she could think of that might possibly publish something so different was also the most unlikely: the Atlantic Monthly, the most prestigious, influential magazine of the day. Revered by readers and writers alike, the great of the time, Emerson, Thoreau, Lowell, Stowe, Holmes, Whittier, appeared regularly in it. But it also published odd things, new things; had indicated it would welcome material dealing with “real life”; and had shown friendliness to women—rights and writers.* Rebecca sent the piece there.

  A letter came back in January 1861. She carried it around “half a day without opening it, being so sure it would be a refusal.” Instead it was a laudatory acceptance, signed for the editorial board by the publisher himself, James T. Fields. Fifty dollars—a huge sum then—was enclosed in payment, the first paid earnings of all her thirty years.

  They had but a single suggestion for change: the name of the “story” was not “taking” enough. In that case, Rebecca wrote back, the article could be called “The Korl Woman” or “Beyond”; but she still preferred “Life in the Iron Mills.” And that her name not be revealed as author. No hint of the tumult of joy she must have felt at their acceptance, the sense of vindication of years of solitary effort. The great power of reticence managed two sentences: “Your letter is kind, and gave me much pleasure,” and “I thank you for your encouragement.”

  They wrote back, again lauding the story. They wanted more work; they wanted exclusive rights to everything she wrote; they offered $100 at once toward anything she might write in the future.

  “I see that the novelty of the scene of the story has made you overestimate me; another most probably would disappoint you.” As for the advance, no. “If I were writing with a hundred dollar bill before me, the article would be broad and deep just $100 and no more—dollarish all over.”

  She did not say that in a fever of work, wrought up by the confirming recognition and by the possibility of further publication, she was writing (or perhaps had gone back to writing) something else—a longer, more ambitious piece that would give her greater scope. Hugh Wolfe’s cry (her cry), “Wrong, it’s all wrong,” was again to be authenticated; the portent and vision of Life in the Iron Mi
lls made more manifest; the tie of equality made flesh and blood. There was still the troubling, radical figure of Francis LeMoyne to write of, he who thirteen years ago had given her her first awareness of the gulf of pain and wrong outside herself, who had insisted that work for change was the only worthy way to live. The dialogues between LeMoyne and her father had gone on in her head all these years; she would translate them into fiction. And there were the “new men” of power to be more fully delineated; and love, female sacrifice, the embittering scorn, unknowingness of society toward women not married, all to be written.

  The three-hundred-page novel, A Story of Today (afterward called Margret Howth), was near completion when Life in the Iron Mills appeared.

  To the readers of that April 1891 Atlantic, Life in the Iron Mills came as absolute News, with the shock of unprepared-for revelation.

  (To repeat:) in the consciousness of literary America, there had been no dark satanic mills;* outside of slavery, no myriads of human beings whose lives were “terrible tragedy . . . a reality of soul starvation, of living death.” When industry was considered at all, it was as an invasion of pastoral harmony, a threat of materialism to the spirit. If working people (again, outside of slavery) existed—and nowhere were they material for serious attention, let alone central subject—they were “clean-haired Yankee mill girls,” “mind[s] among the spindles,” or Whitman’s

  workwomen and workmen of these States having your own divine and strong life . . .

  “Life lies about us dumb,” Emerson had written. “How few materials are yet used by our arts. The mass of creatures and of qualities are still hid and expectant.” This reality, hitherto “dumb . . . secret . . . in this nightmare fog,” verified him beyond expectation with its crowding of implications, troublings, its new themes and types, images, sounds, smells, dictions.

  Life in the Iron Mills was an instant sensation; it was recognized as a literary landmark. A wide and distinguished audience, shaken by its power and original vision, spoke of it as a work of genius.