Rebecca Harding Davis: Life in the Iron-Mills

"A morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to feed his soul on grossness and crime, and hard grinding labor."

Hugh Wolf, the main character in a story by Rebecca Harding Davis, is summed up in the passage above. "Life in the Iron-Mills" tells the story of a nineteenth century factory town... of the poverty and darkness of its people, and of an utter helplessness.

After reading this story, I had the urge to look back in my journal archives, back to English 48B, to an entry on Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Davis' "Iron-Mills" left me with such a similar feeling to that which I had of Maggie, and I find myself wanting to say almost exactly the same thing as I did then, about how an unfortunate character of unfortunate circumstances has a faint glimmer of hope, and that if one person had just reached out to help, maybe the character could've found a way out of despair. The two stories are so similar, it felt as if they could've taken place on the same grimy streets, in the same dark alleys, and at the same old mills. While they were set a few decades apart, the subject matter is the same, and I tend to think both authors had the same intention in writing such stories, to reach out to a blinded higher class who needed an awakening to this dank underground, where actual people lived and labored... people who had names and faces, and families and lives.












A piece on "Iron-Mills" at Novelguide.com pointedly concludes that through writing the story, Davis "introduced American literary realism and at the same time provided the first scathing critique of industrial capitalism by showing the price a nation pays for depending on technology in the name of progress."
Perhaps literary realism's ultimate purpose is to make people wake up and smell the rank darkness they would otherwise go on ignoring, or would remain unaware of.

Herman Melville- "Bartleby The Scrivener"

"But he seemed alone, absolutely alone in the universe.
A bit of wreck in the mid Atlantic."


In Melville's "Bartleby The Scrivener," the narrator is reflecting on the fact that Bartleby seems to have absolutely no family or friends to speak of. By this time, Bartleby has refused to leave the office, but also refuses to work.

Perhaps the reason this passage stuck out is because it was quoted in the Norton's biography of Melville as well. In the bio, it was in reference to Melville's "larger metaphysical interests." In "Bartleby," the lines stand out from the regular flow of the story... It seems as if the narrator has stopped to ponder not only Bartleby, but the concept of a human being's place in the world as well. The narrator is deeply affected by Bartleby's overall "condition" throughout much of the story, which is odd, considering how Bartleby himself seems unaffected by much of anything.

What is it that Bartleby represents? It's extremely hard to tell. To some, he may be a hero... a man who stands up for his own right to do whatever the hell he pleases. To others, he may seem like a lazy free-loader, pushing it as far as he can, not giving a damn whether he gets fired and kicked out of the office. Could it be something in between? Could it be that he has decided he doesn't want to work anymore, and doesn't want to do much of anything, for that matter, and doesn't see why he should pretend otherwise. And while he doesn't necessarily mean any harm to anyone, he doesn't particularly give a damn about the possible consequences. And since this is absolutely unheard of to the general public, nobody seems to know what to do about it.

One is left wondering what made him this way. Not until the end of the story do we get a possible past scenario on Bartleby, that the narrator says is basically a rumor, stating that he used to work at the "dead letter" office. And if he in fact did work there, what an absolutely melancholy place to work, and what a profound effect it must've had on Bartleby! It drove him into utter depression.

The story is comical, in that the more Bartleby refuses to work, the more perplexed the narrator becomes, yet has no idea what to do about it, and even feels sympathy for the man. It's quite possible that sympathy is deserved, depending on what Bartleby is really all about, but if he's just being downright lazy and stubborn, then it's comical that it works so well to his advantage.

That latter concept brings to mind the 1999 movie Office Space, in which the main character, facing complete career burnout and the apprehension of being laid off, decides to quit working completely, and eventually stop showing up, even. But he still gets paid, and the higher-ups at the company begin to call him some kind of innovator. He can do no wrong. While "Bartleby" and Office Space are perhaps quite different concepts, one might consider the movie a lighter, more modern take on similar issues. After all, the two do share the concept of job burnout and "cubicles" of some sort.

Dr. Lewis Leary may have hit the nail on the head when he said of Bartleby (quoted in this e-notes article): "Its charm resides in what Melville preferred not to reveal, so that no one key opens it to simple, or single, or precise meaning." There are definitely many uncertainties and disagreements about who and what Bartleby was, or what he represented. It's likely that Melville didn't have absolutely one simple meaning in mind when he wrote it.