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Shaping a Body of One's Own:

Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron-Mills

and Waiting for the Verdict

Criticism of the literary achievement of the art of Rebecca Harding Davis, however, has sometimes elided the metaphorical possibilities of the art of Hugh Wolfe. Most sculptors of the period studied in Europe and created ideal, allegorical depictions; Davis's sculptor-character learns his craft during breaks from work and renders rough, working-class forms. Monuments of the period glistened in alabaster marble imported from Italy; Hugh's work shows its own origins in molten pig-iron from western Virginia. The novelist shapes her most famous story out of "fog and mud and foul effluvia," and that story revolves around a hero who literally digs into the mud to give shape to his creativity. Exhorting readers to get themselves dirty in attempting to understand a working class environment, she depicts a hero who similarly struggles to make art out of the very grit and foulness of proletarian life. Readers encounter Davis's working-class figure shaping a body of his own, the sculpture in korl, and encounter the owners of the mill trying to shape Hugh into a body of their own, a mill-hand that selflessly serves the industry's needs. As he helps his sculpture, the korl woman, to emerge as more than a lump of pig-iron, Hugh himself tries to emerge as more than a faceless mill-hand. When Hugh finds himself unable to release his spirit, he desperately turns from shaping a woman's body in korl to cutting at his own body of flesh. Davis's sculptural metaphors dramatize her hero's attempts to shape himself amid social and industrial forces that in themselves shape working-class bodies according to their own designs.

The lesser known, less compact, but just as complex novel Waiting for the Verdict (1867) revisits the motifs of Life in the Iron-Mills as it dramatizes interracial relationships, racist and classist systems of determining identity, and individuals' attempts to escape those systems.³ John Broderip, one of that novel's heroes, uses the surgeon's scalpel as Hugh Wolfe had used iron and tin to cut at the bodies that society marks as "foreign" or familiar, Anglo- or African-American, until he too loses his power to shape individual bodies. With the sculptor's chisel and the surgeon's scalpel, Davis discovered a complex set of metaphors for an individual's power of self-conception, in conflict with his or her existence in a racialized, gendered body at the mercy of society and industry. Davis in turn aligned herself with characters who struggle with the limitations of self-determination, but realized that many of her readers wished to see themselves untouched by such external shaping forces. Whenever she finds her language colluding with industry, working to classify or confine these figures instead of encouraging their own self-conception, she attempts to let a sculptor's "work" - in iron-mills as well as in artfully carved bodies - speak for itself.

The Sculptors and the Sculpted

Davis's best-known fiction takes place on the regional borders that make for great differences in individual lives. Wheeling, the setting of Life in the Iron-Mills, sits on a narrow strip of Southern land between the free States of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Davis's autobiographical Bits of Gossip (1904) locates Wheeling on the national road between the North and South, on the paths of West-bound settlers, and at a multiethnic crossroads for European immigrants (Writing Cultural Autobiography 24 - 25). The seemingly remote outpost becomes a check-point on nearly every cultural journey that matters. Wheeling belonged to Virginia, but when the State seceded in 1861, the town provided the meeting hall for an assembly that reversed Virginia's decision. Wheeling and much of northern Virginia soon voted to leave the Secessionist State, and to rejoin the Union as New or West Virginia. "Nowhere in the country, probably," Davis writes, "was the antagonism between its sections more bitter than in these counties of Virginia which the North thus wrested from the South - 'for keeps'" (Writing Cultural Autobiography 102). Wheeling had seen Virginia's "Rebel Cheat counties" express their loyalty for the Confederacy, and had seen slaves express disloyalty by escaping across the Ohio River. More than just any town in a Border State, Wheeling was a place to have a divided state of mind.

Rebecca Blaine Harding probably sensed this ambiguity more than many of her fellow Virginians. As a toddler in Alabama and later as a seminary student in western Pennsylvania, she had witnessed America's sectional conflict first-hand. She married L. Clarke Davis, an attorney from the North, and raised a family in Philadelphia while providing Boston editors with stories set in Kentucky and Virginia. She wrote for Boston's Atlantic Monthly so prolifically that, in the four years beginning with the April, 1861, publication of the story of Hugh Wolfe, one-third of the magazine's numbers contained her work. The magazine's editor, James Fields, changed her title from "The Korl Woman" to the less specific Life in the Iron-Mills, and later insisted that she dispel the "gloom" of her second novel, Margret Howth.When Davis wrote to Fields about that novel's many revisions, she urged him, "Don't leave anything out of it in publishing it. Deformity is better than a scar, you know" (quoted in Harris 82). When the editors of The Galaxy demanded that she cut more than thirty pages from her later novel Waiting for the Verdict (1867), she mobilized the same metaphor, replying that the excision "mutilates" the story (quoted in Harris 132).⁴ Davis wrote for both sides of a deeply divided country, packaged her observations to cross regional as well as demographic borders, and metaphorically depicted the results as bodily wounds. Later, when the combination of pregnancy and an illness deemed to be "nervous exhaustion" prompted a doctor to bar Davis from reading and writing, Sharon M. Harris and Janice Milner Lasseter conclude that her "ominous premarital fears about being silenced in her wifely role were being realized" (Writing Cultural Autobiography 5). Though Davis did not always share in the full measure of her contemporaries' or her characters' misfortunes, as a woman writer whose sense of uniqueness came into conflict with the demands of her doctors, editors, readers, and family members, Davis could relate to characters who felt shaped and even silenced by extrinsic forces. . . .

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