"Life in the Iron-Mills" Rebecca Harding Davis

"May," he broke out impatiently, "are you blind"  Look at the woman's face!  It asks questions of God, and says, "I have a right to know.' 

Good God, how hungry it is!"

Life in the Iron-Mills, Rebecca Harding Davis

I am increasingly aware of how art, written or visual, requires the collaboration of the reader or viewer to interpret it.  This particular story evokes a multitude of feelings and ideas, from class, money, justice, quality of life, art, women's roles, the role of religion, etc., etc.  This was the second time I had read the story in as many decades, and my view on what makes life meaningful has also changed in that time, and thus, my interpretation of the story now is different than the first time.  This is a story that I should return to again and again.

A question I ask myself frequently is 'what is the difference between people?'  How are their needs different?  What makes one person sophisticated in some way an not another?  What level of sophistication did people have in the past?  In the long past?

This story illustrates a belief by those of a certain class in the mid-nineteenth century that people of lower class that did not have their same sensibilities.  Davis paints a portrait of a man working in the iron mills as a puddler, someone who stirs the vats of molten metal, but who is also a natural artist.  In the down time at the mill he carves in korl, a type of refuse of iron milling.  His figures speak.  They tell powerful stories.  Yet, he is illiterate and a laborer.

Men of money and class are visiting the mill one night and spot a woman carved from korl.  In their description, quoted above, they talk about the hunger she portrays.  Wolfe, the puddler-sculptor, says that the woman is hungry for something other than food, that she is hungry for life.  One man says that such a talent should be nurtured, but as the only one in the group of men interested in Wolfe's well-being, he lacks the money necessary to help him.

Money.  In a comment made during this meeting between the town men and Wolfe, it is said that money is all that keeps Wolfe from changing his status.  But the ensuing events show that is not really the case, and the barriers are much more difficult to overcome.  In the end, the life of Deborah, Wolfe's cousin, is changed by the kindness of a group of Quakers. However, Wolfe's thirst for life is never quenched.

This story speaks to me in many ways, but it is its relationship to my question above that strikes me most right now.  On the one hand, I have education and enough money to live a life of comfort and opportunity, specifically the opportunity to create art.  Even with that luxury, I do not have the natural talent of someone like Wolfe in this story.  And so, which one of us is more sophisticated?  I also think about comments made in a literature course I am taking, and how the stories that we tell now are no different than the stories told in, say, Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" written in the fifteenth century. I am also reading an art history book.  I was surprised to know that the potter's wheel pre-dates Christ by millennia.   My prejudice misled me to think that such a level of technology would not have arisen so early  And so why would we think ourselves more sophisticated than those living in Chaucer's time?  In Christ's time?  Before that?

And, so what does sophistication mean?  How artificial is it, or how tied to a specific time, culture or clique is it?  Is it not something we can measure objectively?

"Life in the Iron-Mills; or The Korl Woman" is available on Project Gutenberg.