Even in the tons of her ephemera, of the topical nonfiction, there is vitality, instructive range—and a fascinating native quality in its combination of radicalism, reaction, prophecy, piecemeal insight, skepticism, idealism—all done up in a kind of exasperated plain-spokenness.
The strong pulse of her work quoted herein evidences that—botched art or not—a significant portion of her work remains important and vitally alive for our time.
What Virginia Woolf wrote of Elizabeth Barrett Browning characterizes Rebecca as well: “a true daughter of her age: passionate interest in social questions, conflict as artist and woman, longing for knowledge and freedom.” With Rebecca, much could be only longing.
She is more than landmark, of contemporary interest only to literary historians—though she is that too. There is an untraced indebtedness to her in the rise of realism.* She maintained that fiction which incorporates social and economic problems directly, and in terms of their effects on human beings.
She was more than realist. In the most scrupulous sense, she followed Emerson’s dictum:
I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic. . . . I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.
The foolish man wonders at the unusual; the wise man at the usual.
The complexity of that wonder at the usual illumines her best pages.
She was not derivative. Her pioneering firsts in subject matter are unequaled in American literature. She extended the realm of fiction.
Without intention, she was a social historian invaluable for an understanding access to her time. On her pages are people and situations that are discovery, not only of the past, but of ourselves.
From her work—like “the figure of the mill-woman cut in korl. . . . [kept] hid behind a curtain,—it is such a rough, ungainly thing”—her epoch looks through “with its thwarted life, its mighty hunger, its unfinished work.”
It is time to rend the curtain
My primary sources have been the writings of Rebecca Harding Davis, everything of hers accessible to me for reading. In addition, I relied on Gerald Langford’s The Richard Harding Davis Years (1961) for some biographical facts (not interpretation); on Helen Woodward Schaeffer’s Rebecca Harding Davis, Pioneer Realist (a superb, as-yet-unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1947); on Charles Belmont Davis’s The Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis (1917); and—as is evident—on other reading of many years, coincidentally related to the period in which Rebecca lived. I regret there was not means to go to the archives of the University of Virginia to read her collected papers there.
I first read Life in the Iron Mills in one of three water-stained, coverless, bound volumes of the Atlantic Monthly, bought for ten cents each in an Omaha junkshop. I was fifteen. Contributions to those old Atlantics were published anonymously, and I was ignorant of any process whereby I might find the name of the author of this work which meant increasingly more to me over the years, saying, with a few other books, “Literature can be made out of the lives of despised people,” and “You, too, must write.”
No reader I encountered had ever heard of the story, let alone who might have written it. It was not until the collected Letters of Emily Dickinson came out in 1958 that, in the reference room of the San Francisco Public Library where I went lunch hours from work to read them, I learned who the author was. Appended to a note from Emily to her sister-in-law,
Will Susan please lend Emily “Life in the Iron Mills”—and accept blossom
was this citation:
Rebecca Harding Davis’ “Life in the Iron Mills” appeared in the April 1861 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.
It did not surprise me that the author was of my sex. At once I eagerly looked for other works by her. But there was no Rebecca Harding Davis in the library’s card catalogue. It did not occur to me to try the index of periodicals, as it dated only from the 1890s and I assumed that she had been dead long before. No other library, even had I had time, was accessible to me then.
Only when I received an appointment to the Radcliffe Institute in 1962 did I begin to have occasional time for and access to her other work. There they were, in Harvard’s Widener Library, in the Cambridge and Boston public libraries—old volumes, not taken out for years.
So began my knowledge of her contribution and its woeful deterioration; my attempt to understand what had happened to the Rebecca Harding who had once written with such power, beauty, comprehension.
I never envisioned writing of her until Florence Howe and Paul Lauter, to whom I had introduced Life in the Iron Mills, suggested that The Feminist Press issue it and I write the afterword. This is the result. If I have quoted so extensively from her work, it is because it is neither readily available nor known. If this came to be more biographical interpretation and history (“human story”) than critical afterword, it is because I am convinced that that is what is most needed. I have brought to her life and work my understanding as writer, as insatiable reader, as feminist-humanist, as woman.
Rebecca Harding Davis’s correspondence, some of the correspondence with her, and other references used are scattered through a number of volumes. As for years, until the writing of this manuscript, I was reading for myself only, and had had no academic training in notation, I copied out material usually without troubling to record exact pages, publishers, dates of publication, sometimes even the titles of books or magazines. This explains the few instances in which the exact source is not cited; but in every case it can be authenticated. Where no source is indicated, and it is Rebecca Harding Davis who is being quoted, the material comes either from correspondence, articles, or is a phrase from her fiction, usually from Life in the Iron Mills—and the context should make the difference clear.
*Excerpts from Life in the Iron Mills begin on p. 265.
*These prefatory remarks have been especially written for this reprint of the 1971 “Afterword,” which follows.
*The tales were: “Rill from the Town Pump,” “Little Annie’s Rambles,” and “Sunday at Home.” Some time after publication Hawthorne wrote to Longfellow: “I feel that I have nothing but thin air to connect from. Sometimes through a peephole I have caught a glimpse of the real world. . . . These three stories please me most.”
*The Story of an African Farm, 1883.
In Eminent Women of the Age (1869), Elizabeth Cady Stanton says of the far superior seminary she attended: “If there is any one thing on earth from which I pray God to save my daughters, it is a girls’ seminary. The two years which I spent in one were the dreariest years of my whole life.” And in the same book, in regard to the seminary schooling of a contemporary, sculptor Harriet Hosmer, writes: “Public sentiment . . . as to the education of girls prevails . . .” that they should be
“Ground down enough
To flatten and bake into a wholesome crust
For household uses and proprieties.”
*Rebecca writes of him directly in Bits of Gossip, a volume of reminiscences (1904). The LeMoyne family home in Washington, Pennsylvania, is now a historical museum, centering mostly on Dr. LeMoyne.
The succeeding quotations are from Margret Howth.
*Her father may have preferred to keep her home, as fathers of the time—including some fathers of famous literary women—often did. Think of Elizabeth Barrett (Browning), Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot).
*“I know that if women wish to escape the stigma of husband-seeking, they must act and look like marble or clay-cold-expressionless, bloodless—for every appearance of feeling of joy-sorrow-friendliness, antipathy, admiration-disgust are alike construed by the world into an attempt to hook in a husband.”—Charlotte Brontë, as a young woman of about Rebecca’s age to her friend Ellen Nussey.
*Quotations in this and the next five paragraphs are from David Gaunt, Margret Howth, Earthen Pitchers, John Andross, and A Law Unto Herself.
*“All that is enthusiastic, all that is impassioned in admiratio
n of nature, of writing, of character, or in the motions of affection, I have felt with vehement and absorbing intensity—felt till my mind is exhausted and seems to be sinking into deadness. Half of my time I am glad to remain in a listless vacancy, to busy myself with tasks, since thought is pain and emotion is pain.”
*“The present regime to which custom dooms the sex: steel-ribbed corsets with hoops, heavy skirts, trains, high heels, panniers, chignons and dozens of hairpins sticking in our scalps; cooped up in the house year after year with no exhilarating exercise, no hopes, aims nor ambitions.”—Lucy Stone in a debate at Oberlin.
Such clothing was a mark of class distinction. Contrast it with the “half clothed” cotton mill girls at the beginning of Iron Mills, or indeed, the dress of most women of that time: farm, slave, and working class.
**. . . which it was not.
Though Hawthorne complained in a letter to his publisher of “the damned mob of female scribblers,” the field was dominated by men: editors, publishers, and staff were men; the overwhelming number of novels, stories, articles, were still being written by men. The comparatively few women writers were conspicuous because they were a new phenomenon, for the first time in any numbers successful, recognized. And the Women’s Rights movement had focused attention on women. The 1850s was the decade of Whitman, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Dana, Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, though not all had popular fame.
Fred Pattee, the literary historian who affixed the label “feminine fifties,” writes that he did so because ten words characterized the decade: “Fervid, fevered, furious, fatuous, fertile, feeling, florid, furbelowed, fighting, funny”—and the “single adjective that would combine them all” is “feminine.”
*The “Is that all of their lives?” may well have been partially roused by the determined struggles of working people—all through the 1850s—for a ten-hour workday. These must have been strongly visible in Wheeling.
*“. . . the starry leap from the springboard of exact observation.”
*“The supremacy of the Atlantic was unquestioned. To have published . . . in it . . . was to be known among writers all over the country. It was a force . . . setting the critical standard and spreading suggestions.”
To Emily Dickinson it was “a temple.” To appear in it was a true accolade, and guaranteed a wide and distinguished audience. It was the first to use the expression “realism.” One of its editors, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a great and influential male champion of women’s rights, actively promoted the development and publication of women writers. An Atlantic article of his—“Women and the Alphabet”—was credited with resulting directly in the founding of Smith College and the opening of the University of Michigan to women.
*Yet by 1860, one of every seven Americans were mine and mill “hands,” who lived and worked in circumstances like Deb and Hugh.
There had been a white Satanic mill, the paper factory in Herman Melville’s “Tantalus of Maids,” sequel to “Paradise of Bachelors” (Harper’s, 1855). It left no impress, perhaps because it was written as sexual analogy. As for furnace fires, they burned but three times before in American literature: in that small hillside lime kiln where Hawthorne’s Ethan Brand incinerated himself for his Unpardonable Sin—(the separation of the intellect from the heart); in the “try works” on the “red hell” of the “Pequod” in Melville’s Moby Dick; and in occasional descriptive lines in Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “A Song for Occupations,” and “A Song of Joys”:
The fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night,
Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow light over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.
No satanic mills. The human being is omitted. Contrast the critiques of the machine, of industry, of materialism in that period, with that in Life in the Iron Mills and Margret Howth. Instead of “things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” Rebecca Harding alone concerned herself with the wrong of how those making the things were being ridden.
*She is one of Rebecca’s precedents, the first “working girl” heroine in American fiction, and shown in her working habitat. Even the occupation is ahead of its time. Women bookkeepers were exceptional; keeping books was primarily a man’s occupation then.
*In this remarkable story, a century ahead of its time in its understanding of racism and the right of the enslaved to freedom, the white southern guilt-fear—the fear that the oppressed when free will behave as oppressively as they were treated—breaks out at the end. What had been understood earlier as “the same heroic dream” as William Tell’s and Garibaldi’s to be “men and free,” becomes an animal lust for revenge, to be master—and for the young sister of Lamar. As to the actuality, years later in Bits of Gossip Rebecca makes a special point that “during the Civil War, the women and children of the South were wholly under the protection of their slaves, and I have never heard of a single instance in which they abused a trust.”
*Quotations from Margaret Fuller appear throughout Rebecca’s writings.
*The quotations in the account of Rebecca’s New England visit, if not otherwise footnoted, come from her Bits of Gossip.
*“Saw Miss Rebecca Harding, author of Margret Howth, which has made a stir, and is very good. A handsome, fresh quiet woman, who says she never had any troubles, though she writes about woes. I told her I had had lots of troubles, so I write jolly tales; and we wondered why we each did so.”—Louisa May Alcott’s Journal, May 1862.
**Annie Fields’s “angel in the house” contribution to American literature (and British-American literary relations) has never been assessed. For half a century, “writers as famous as Thackeray and Dickens, down to starving poets from the western prairies” came and stayed there; friendships were formed, cemented. She was Sarah Orne Jewett’s closest friend. They invariably summered together, and it was she who introduced Willa Cather to Jewett. There is a memorable tribute to Annie Fields in Cather’s Not Under Forty, and a book on her by Mark de Wolfe Howe, Memories of a Hostess. After Fields’s death, Annie published two books of poems, Under the Olive and The Singing Shepherd and Other Poems, as well as The Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe and a book of reminiscences, Authors and Friends.
*“Mr. Emerson stood listening, his head sunk on his breast, with profound submissive attention, but Hawthorne sat astride of a chair, his arms folded on the back, his chin dropped on them, and his laughing, sagacious eyes watching us, full of mockery.”
*The Flowering of New England.
**Hawthorne died in May 1864, within two years of their meeting.
*“O Annie,” she wrote on returning, “the inexpressible loathing I have for it [the war]. If you could only see the other side enough to see the wrong, the tyranny on both. I could tell you things I know that would make your heart sick.”
*1976—Yes, there was a Blind Tom. It was probably in 1858 that Rebecca heard him. Mary Austin in Earth Horizon records an early childhood memory of hearing him (or a similarly named, gifted, Blind Tom) play. Martha Collins suggests that possibly Blind D’Arnaud in Willa Cather’s My Antonia is also based on him.
*Margaret Fuller.
*Atlantic Monthly, May, June, and July 1863. The comment is made in the story that contrary to expressed attitudes, although supposedly “women are angels,” they are invariably treated as if they were idiots, but “in these rough & tumble days, we’d better give ’em their places as flesh and blood, with exactly the same wants and passions as men.”
*The full description of Lucretia Mott in Bits of Gossip, is recommended as of special interest for biographers, students, and historians.
Lucretia Mott [is] one of the most remarkable women that this country has ever produced. . . . Even in extreme old age she was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen . . . a little, vivid, delicate creature, alive with magnetic power . . . that charming face with its wonderful luminous eyes . . . is as real to me at this moment
as ever. . . . When you were with [her], you were apt to think of her as the mother and housekeeper, rather than as the leader of a party. . . . Her fingers never were quiet. Until the day of her death she kept up the homely, domestic habits of her youth.”
*Margaret Fuller. Women in the Nineteenth Century.
*Clarke was ill in March, and Rebecca wrote Annie of herself: “And then I was just enough ailing in mind to be nervous and irritable, a stupid desire to be quiet and forgotten. Do you never feel as if every faculty has been rasped and handled unbearably and must rest?”
*Among others, and still unequaled, the 1877 classic by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Story of Avis (partially reprinted in American Voices, American Women, 1974); Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s “Babushka Farnham,” in Fables for Parents (1937); Mary Gray Hughes’s “The Thousand Springs,” in her collection so entitled (1970); and Cora Sandel’s Alberta.
*The self-belittlement, the wound to a woman, in having to feel that a male child is preferable, more to be valued than a female child, is written of for the first time here. It was realistic recognition of objective fact: “man’s world”; (“ . . . what I had lacked in gifts and opportunities, he should possess”).
*Anny, Nat’s wife, is speaking to Rosslyn, a white woman:
“De debt de whites owes us is to give us a chance to show what stuff’s in us . . . . De next five years is de trial day for us. . . . Your chile has every chance open to him; but dar’s few schools in de country beside dem kept by de Quakers dat will admit a cullored boy or girl. Dey calls us lazy an’ idle, but wher’s de mechanics’ shop or factory open for Tom to learn a trade? What perfession is free to him? His hands is tied. His father giv’ his blood free for de country.” Proudly: “He has a right to ask de chance for his son dat neber was gib to himself!”
Silences Page 17
