Revising Paragraphs: Before and After

1. Revising Paragraphs: Before and After Paragraphs on Race Slavery and Wage Slavery in “Life in the Iron Mills”

2. In “Life in the Iron Mills,” the river that powers the iron mill of the title is personified in a way that transforms it into a metaphor for the virtual enslavement of exploited workers. First off, “dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream—almost worn out, I think” (2892). This river isn’t just personified as any old river, it is represented as a person of mixed race. In other words, having the status of a slave. “The river, dull and tawny-colored, (la belle riviere!) drags itself sluggishly along, tired of the heavy weight of boats and coal-barges. The narrator’s sarcastic remark in French about the “beautiful” river suggests that industrialism destroys the romanticism of nature. This reveals a shift from Romanticism to a new period of American literature: Naturalism which reveals the large forces that determine the direction of individual lives. Another cue that this river is a metaphor is the way it reminds the narrator of something she saw in her childhood. She remarks: “When I was a child, I used to fancy a look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river slavishly bearing its burden day after day” (2892). This is not a metaphor for slavery, however, it’s a metaphor for a new class of slaves. The skin color of the iron mill workers is artificially changed by the soot of the mill, “skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes.” The people that power this mill are represented by the river, which is, like them, artificially darkened and “negro-like,” carrying “its burden day after day” (2892). The narrator tries to make readers guilty about this, addressing them directly: “It will, perhaps, seem to you as foul and dark as this thick vapor about us, and as pregnant with death; but if your eyes are as free as mine are to look deeper, no perfume-tinted dawn will be so fair with promise of the day that shall surely come” (2893). Later on in the story, Davis draws a contrast between a black woman carrying a burden and Hugh Wolfe, who stares at her from his jail cell. This contrast is extremely meaningful. “A tall mulatto girl, following her mistress, her basket on her head, crossed the street just below, and looked up. She was laughing; but, when she caught sight of the haggard face peering out through the bars, suddenly grew grave and hurried by (2914). Even though this woman is a slave in the description “a free, firm step, a clear-cut olive face” “bright eyes looked out half-shadowed” (2914). Hugh Wolfe forms a stark contrast with this virtually free slave woman: “Hugh rasped away at the bars. A dull old bit of tin, not fit to cut korl with.” The only freedom Hugh enjoyed, his korl art, has been taken away from him. And now, whereas before he escaped his captivity by sculpting korl, now he tries to escape by cutting the less tractable iron bars. Soon he will apply the ragged piece of tin to an even softer material: his wrists. So death becomes the ultimate escape for an artist imprisoned by the dehumanizing demands of industrial labor. Wolfe is a kind of articulate Bartleby the scrivener, though that’s kind of ironic given Wolfe’s semi-literate utterances. At least, though, we understand his longings, which cannot be said for Bartleby. He tries to explain the longings of his sculpture of a “hungry” woman to the uncomprehending, refined factory tourists: “Not hungry for meat” “Summat to make her live, I think, — like you” (2902). The slave woman that appears later is laughing and looks freely out from her “half-shadowed” face, Hugh “covered his face with his hands.” Also, “the evening was darkening fast.” The change in the setting reinforces the contrast of characters here and makes a powerful point about racial slaves versus industrial slaves. In “Life in the Iron Mills,” the river that powers the iron mill of the title is personified with words that make it a symbol of slaves. The narrator begins by giving the river human attributes, describing its futile “dream of green fields and sunshine,” a dream that is “almost worn out” (2892). Rivers do not “dream”; human beings do. The metaphor develops in way that makes its symbolism even more specific: the river is “dull and tawny-colored” and “tired of the heavy weight of boats and coal-barges.” The “tawny” river is as tired as the slaves who dreamed of freedom. Although the passage goes on to link the river even more explicitly to black slaves, its symbolism soon becomes more complex as another class of workers is reflected in it. The narrator remembers the “negro-like river slavishly bearing its burden day after day” (2892). Even though this seems like a straightforward symbol of racial slavery, the next few details in the description show that it simultaneously symbolizes white slaves. The skin color of the iron mill workers, like that of the polluted river, is artificially changed by the soot of the mill, their “skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes” (2892). The workers, like the symbolic river, are suggestively “negro-like” in their slavish labor. Like the river, their color has been changed by their labor. Two classes of slaves thus converge in the symbolic river that powers the mill. While white wage slaves and black slaves symbolically converge in the river, later in the story they literally diverge. The first black person in the story is a woman who contrasts with the slavish river despite superficial similarities. Like the “tawny” river in color, “a mulatto girl, following her mistress, her basket on her head, crossed the street just below, and looked up” at Hugh in the jail above her (2914). The girl bears a burden on her head, much like the enslaved river. However, unlike Hugh and the river, she ironically seems free: “She was laughing” and she walks with a “free, firm step.” Even though she is owned by a “mistress,” she has the attributes of a free person. Although it would seem natural for this slave woman to identify with Hugh, a virtual slave, her neglect of him dramatizes Davis’s point about the way white wage slaves are being left behind. Davis subtly contrasts the prospects of slaves and those of iron workers through stark contrasts in the body language of the two emblematic characters. When the black woman sees Hugh, she hurries by his cell, perhaps symbolizing the way the freeing of slaves is leaving behind another class of slaves: “when she caught sight of the haggard face peering out through the bars, [she] suddenly grew grave and hurried by” (2914). Hugh has no bright prospect, unlike the mulatto woman whose “bright eyes looked out half-shadowed” (2914) at her brighter future. By contrast, Hugh “covered his face with his hands” (2914). Changes in the setting intensify this contrast. The time of day seems to shift suddenly after the young mulatto woman walks away from Hugh: “the evening was darkening fast,” the narrator says (2914). This shift makes a powerful point about the divergence of racial slaves from industrial slaves: whereas the woman is moving away from the darkness, darkness is descending quickly upon Hugh’s jail cell. The woman’s “bright eyes” reflect the light of hope, which fades quickly for Hugh. Davis’s point, then, is not simply to say that wage slaves are “negro-like”; more radically, she suggests that wage slaves, unlike black slaves, have no bright prospect of freedom to lighten the burdens they bear on their bodies. The effect of leaving Hugh alone in the symbolic darkness that descends upon him, behind the young black woman who seems to be gaining a degree of freedom, is the erosion of what little freedom Hugh possesses. Hugh’s artistic escape from his dehumanizing labor is replaced by increasingly desperate attempts to escape from physical confinement—first from jail, then from his own body. The only freedom Hugh enjoyed, sculpting korl, has been taken away from him. Now he tries to cut iron: “Hugh rasped away at the bars. A dull old bit of tin, not fit to cut korl with” (2914). The narrator’s reference to “korl” contrasts his artistic escape with his unsuccessful attempt to escape from prison. Soon he will apply the ragged piece of tin to an even softer material: his wrists. Death becomes the ultimate escape for an artist imprisoned by the dehumanizing demands of industrial labor. Putting Hugh Wolfe into a broader literary context, we can see that he is more like Bartleby the scrivener than Uncle Tom or any other black slave in 19th century American fiction. Hugh’s death, unlike Tom’s, does not seem to bring attention to the plight of his fellow slaves. Like the narrator in Bartleby, the upper-class observers of Wolfe’s decline and fall seem only temporarily disturbed by his silent, inarticulate demise. Like the narrator of Melville’s story, the observers seem to feel that they have done all they could to help Wolfe and do not see how they in fact contribute to the system that enslaves him to a capitalist system that benefits the rich at the expense of the poor. Dr. May, the sympathetic equivalent of Bartleby’s narrator, sighs much like him. “The Doctor sighed,--a good honest sigh, from the depths of his stomach” right before he walks away (2903). The narrator of “Bartleby” concludes with a similarly useless sigh of human sympathy: “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity” (Melville, 2677). He, too, has literally walked away from Bartleby. Will America walk away from the problem of wage slavery after race slavery is abolished, Davis asks readers in “Life in the Iron Mills”?