Life In The Iron Mills Essay

Class and Gender in Life.

Rebecca Harding Davis admirably wrote "Life in the Iron-Mills" to show the unrelenting fact that there is no such thing as social mobility and the only way to escape social discrimination is by placing one self outside the system. In her short story, she takes her reader, “into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia” (Davis, p. 13), in order to illustrate class conflict in American culture. Davis initially published this fiction ‘anonymously’ (life in the Iron-Mills, novelguide.com, December 4, 2011), which gave her the freedom to illustrate the oppression of the lower class in a vivid and moving way. This story is written to members of the upper and middle classes in order to create change within the American

The main identification would slavery amongst women. Throughout Davis’s short story, women are clearly the fundamental individuals suffering throughout humanity. Deborah, the main protagonist, is a ‘cripple’ working in the cotton mills, who is hopelessly in love with her cousin, Hugh Wolfe “she knew, in spite of all his kindness, that there was that in her face and form which made him loathe the sight of her . . . that his should sickened with disgust at her deformity, even when his words were kindest” (Davis, p. 22). Comparably interpreted in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. In the chapter entitled ‘Godliness’, the character Louise Bentley is unhappy which is manifested through her relationship with her son, and her loneliness, which she tries to cover with marriage, but it only caused displeasure. Another women displeased with her life is portrayed in ‘Adventure’. Alice Hindman is also unhappy because of her loneliness. Her dysfunctional, and failed long-distance relationship has left her resenting life and feeling lonely. Both women portray loneliness at their best, which is comparably like Deborah’s character, as she is too lonely and isolated by her own feelings and