The Columbia History of the American Novel

penetrate the mills or have validity for Wolfe? He longs to be 'other than he is.' At the turning point of the story, the narrator places Wolfe in a natural setting outside the mills. 'Overhead, the sun-drenched smoke-clouds opened like a cleft ocean, — shifting, rolling seas of crimson mist, waves of billowy silver veined with blood-scarlet, inner depths unfathomable of glancing light.' The assumption underlying this conventional language of the picturesque and sublime is that, in the midst of the beauties of nature, we gain access to the divine. In 'Old Times' as this language and its ideology lose their hold, the narrator experiences an understandable sense of loss. For Hugh Wolfe, even more than in his attraction to the glamour of the refined upper class, to Janie, and to sun-drenched purple thistles, 'Wolfe's artist-eye grew drunk with color. The gates of that other world! Fading, flashing before him now! What, in that world of Beauty, Content, and Right were the petty laws, the mine and thine of mill-owners and mill hands?' Wolfe experiences a momentary 'consciousness of power' but the narrator indicates that the entire experience is a delusion. 'His soul took in the mean temptation [to keep the stolen money], lapped it in fancied rights, in dreams of improved existences, drifting and endless as the cloud-seas of color.'

Wolfe understandably wants to be free of the misery of the mills. But under the corrosive pressures of industrial capitalism, how reliable is 'the artist's sense' as the narrator conceives of it? Does it give Wolfe access to 'that other world' of gentility and the risen savior or does it delude Wolfe into ignoring his own insights into the American realities of oppression and class barriers? Wolfe convinces himself that 'God made this money' but the narrator implies a separation between the realm of God and the realm of Caesar, between true Christianity and Mammon. The issues are tangled and commendably -175- contradictory. As disturbing as they are to her, the narrator faces up to the central role of money and class in America. As an underpaid mill worker, Wolfe can never fully realize his talent. Money would help but accepting stolen money reinforces rather than changes the system. The narrator knows that change is necessary. In showing the way Kirby's father manipulates his foreign-born workers through appeals to spectacle and patriotism, the narrator, however, has ruled out change through the electoral process. Mitchell has raised the prospect of revolutionary change led by a Cromwell or Jean-Paul of the oppressed. Wolfe has imagined himself in this role but nothing comes of it, partly because Wolfe is too thwarted, partly because the workers are too fragmented and too easily coopted. The narrator herself believes the solution is the risen savior and the redemptive power of the other world beyond, but she recognizes that nothing in Wolfe's experience justifies the belief for him. Just as she believes in the risen savior, the narrator believes that Beauty resides in kindly smiles and sun-drenched thistles but she is honest enough to present Wolfe as drunk and deluded in his response to the crimson light from the sunlit heavens.

The narrator believes that 'the artist's sense' comes from God. If so, it is a God suspiciously aligned with her own class. If 'the artist's sense' does not come from God, could the phrase be a sign that the middle class, the dominant class, has penetrated and warped Wolfe's consciousness? The narrator does not say so explicitly but her usage is open to that interpretation. When Wolfe functions as a creator he shapes grotesque, powerful, working- class figures. The narrator is honest enough never to connect these figures with 'the artist's sense,' a term she reserves for the kind of art, beauty, and religion she herself values. But when Wolfe acts on the perceptions of what the narrator calls 'his artist's sense' or his 'artist's eye,' he steals money, denies his own best perceptions, reinforces the prevailing system, and ends up committing suicide in prison. As in works like Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener,' Kate Chopin's The Awakening, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' the prison and suicide are signs of impasse, of a dead end, of a situation the writer wants to expose but can imagine no way out of. In Life in the Iron Mills an emerging realism, the power of class, and the hellfire energies of industrial capitalism undercut established canons of beauty and re-176- ligion. The dilemma is even more extreme than in 'Old Times on the Mississippi.' Like Isabel Archer and the cub, moreover, Hugh Wolfe's imagination both creates and falsifies under the pressures of the new American world the realist artist struggles to explore.

At the end of Life in the Iron Mills the narrator cannot forget Hugh Wolfe and the statue of the Korl Woman, which call into question all of her affirmations. No wonder she keeps the statue behind a veil. On her interpretation, the arm of the statue is stretched out 'imploringly,' whereas for Mitchell the arm is a 'wild gesture of warning.' What she sees as the statue's 'thwarted life, its mighty hunger, its unfinished work' is deeply threatening to the narrator, partly because they challenge her religious and artistic commitments, partly because they express the situation of many middle-class white women like the narrator and Rebecca Harding Davis. 'Molly' Wolfe has created 'the white figure of a woman' that faces both Mitchell and the narrator 'in the darkness, — a woman white, of giant proportions, crouching on the ground, her arms flung out' in a gesture Mitchell interprets in his way and the narrator in hers. The powerful image of the white woman is open to interpretation like any image that emerges from and speaks to the deepest recesses of the self and society. The narrator's concluding hope is that her redemptive solution is universal but she knows that even behind the veil Wolfe's statue continues to express its recalcitrant and subversive realities.

We must be grateful to a narrator who gives us compelling insights into class barriers, into the hegemonic infiltration of working-class consciousness, and into the thwarting and spiritual hunger of middleclass women as well as of foreign-born workers. Part of what is missing from the narrator's story, however, is any sense of the kind of working-class consciousness and cohesion Herbert Gutman finds among actual nineteenth-century American workers. The story also negates the prospect of radical change. In these respects Rebecca Harding Davis and her narrator are at one with almost every other writer in the American canon. A decade ago Life in the Iron Mills was practically unknown. We now recognize that, in the words of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, 'the story affords one of the most overwhelming reading experiences in all American literature.' Now that works like Life in the Iron Mills are at last receiving the attention they deserve, however, we must ask why some works -177- are and other works are not entering the canon. In the early 1990s is it a condition for entry into the canon that a work should be open to subversive interpretation and at the same time reinforce the sense both of the need for and the near impossibility of fundamental change?

The statue of the Korl Woman prefigures the turn-of-the-century work of the German artist Käthe Kollwitz — the same muscular intensity, sensitivity to darkness, and insight into working-class and feminine oppression — but in Kollwitz the raised arm is never imploring. She gives us instead figures of angry, cohesive protest. Even as we value the statue of the Korl Woman and all it embodies, perhaps we also need to keep our eyes open for American literary equivalents of Käthe Kollwitz. This is one question for readers to pose as they examine Rebecca Harding Davis's still-neglected novels, Margret Howth (1862) and Waiting for the Verdict (1867).

Charles Chesnutt is another talented but relatively unknown realist. As a black writer white enough to pass, Chesnutt was a fluent speaker of America's main social dialects. From the frame tales in the collection The Conjure Woman (1899) through the facades of his subtly ironic novel of passing, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), to The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Chesnutt presents a surface as impeccable as any in the Atlantic Monthly of his period. Playing off against the genteel prose, however, are underlying revelations, sometimes in black vernacular, sometimes the result of conflicting voices that expose the racial contradictions of the era of 'separate but equal.'

In The Marrow of Tradition Chesnutt unpolemically uses a series of double relations to test basic American views and practices about blacks and whites and the power relations between the races. Tom Delamere and Sandy look like 'twin brothers.' The degenerate son of a distinguished North Carolina family, Tom applies blackface and puts on the clothes of the family servant, Sandy, takes over Sandy's identity, and wins the cakewalk contest. He borrows money from Sandy and frames him after robbing and murdering his aunt. Chesnutt perceptively connects the white theft of black identity with the white theft of property. Elsewhere in nineteenth-century American literature divided selves are intimately connected with the underlying -178- dynamics of the market society, as in Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener.' In The Marrow of Tradition, the formal device of the double has the added force of encoding and judging America's racial divisions.

Chesnutt is equally good at revealing a range of white racial views and the way they are used to further another theft, of the government. In the language of his patrician class, Major Carteret argues that the entire black race 'was morally undeveloped, and only held within bounds by the restraining influence of the white people.' Sandy's 'murder' and 'assault…upon our race in the person of its womanhood, its crown and flower,' is, according to the Major, 'the logical and inevitable result of the conditions which have prevailed in this town for the last year.' As