The Columbia History of the American Novel

specifically, as a plantation laborer, he is a form of capital — a fund of wealth managed specifically with the aim of producing more wealth. To the extent that capital presupposes a marketplace in which different persons' wealth can be exchanged in the form of various commodities, then its function is calculated as a relatively 'public' one. On the other hand, distinguished from the category of capital, there exists that set of commodities whose implication in the larger system of exchange is relatively veiled, or mystified, through their fairly infrequent circulation in it. I am thinking of property that is not only 'private' but emphatically 'personal,' and I have in mind one particular example of such personal property from Uncle Tom's Cabin itself.

In chapter 5 of the novel, when Mr. Shelby informs his wife, Emily, of the necessity of selling Tom and the young boy, Harry, she is first horrified, and then attempts to rally to the call of economic necessity by offering a substitute bargain for the sale of the two slaves. When Mr. Shelby hopes aloud that he has convinced his wife of the necessity for his action, she responds emphatically:

'O yes, yes!' said Mrs. Shelby, hurriedly and abstractedly fingering her gold watch, — 'I haven't any jewelry of any amount,' she added, thoughtfully; 'but would not this watch do something? — it was an expensive one, when it was bought. If I could only at least save Eliza's child, I would sacrifice anything I have.'

Mrs. Shelby's insight into the nature of her family's economic straits allows her to effect the transmutation of her watch — the private possession that, for all its practical use, is still primarily a personal adornment — into an item for exchange in the public marketplace. Simultaneously, and conversely, as the personal item is being offered as a substitute for the slave in the proposed exchange, an equivalency is established whereby the status of the slave must be recognized as related to the personal, private life of, in this case, the slave mistress. Once slave status is clearly demonstrated to fall within -221- the realm of the private, the personal, the domestic, then the questions pertaining to slavery may logically be considered by women, whose stereotypical realm, after all, is the actual and metaphorical private, domestic space of the nation. In short, Uncle Tom's Cabin depends for its power on a demonstration of the fundamental interrelatedness of the private and public spheres — on showing that the private is the public or, to put it in the terms of second-wave feminism, that the personal is political.

The confusion between private and public in the matter of slavery is explicitly manifested in the novel in a scene between Senator and Mrs. Bird, who assist the runaway slave, Eliza, as she makes her way toward the North. Just before Eliza's arrival at the Birds' home, Mrs. Bird remonstrates with her husband for his support, in the Ohio state legislature, of a fugitive slave act: 'Things have got to a pretty pass, if a woman can't give a warm supper and a bed to poor, starving creatures, just because they are slaves, and have been abused and oppressed all their lives, poor things!' Her husband responds with what he considers to be typically masculine rationality:

'But, Mary, just listen to me. Your feelings are all quite right, dear, and interesting, and I love you for them; but, then, dear, we mustn't suffer our feelings to run away with our judgment; you must consider it's a matter of private feeling, — there are great public interests involved, — there is such a state of public agitation rising, that we must put aside our private feelings.'

On the contrary, however, it is precisely by filtering public events through private feelings that the reform impulse is developed in the historical context under consideration, and this strategy certainly accounts for Stowe's ability to mount an abolitionist protest through the feminized form of sentimental fiction.

In its narrative treatment of the public/private relationship, Uncle Tom's Cabin prefigures much other reform fiction from the latter half of the nineteenth century. Nine years after the publication of Stowe's novel, just at the outbreak of the Civil War, Rebecca Harding Davis published her remarkable Life in the Iron Mills in the April 1861 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. This piece of fiction, which has been seen as representing the first step in American literature's transition from romanticism to realism, depicts the fate of two immigrant workers in the mills of a Midwestern industrial town. Hugh Wolfe rolls -222- iron in the vast works that, by the time of Harding's writing, are operating around the clock; his cousin, Deborah, is a 'picker' in a cotton mill. The structure of Harding's narrative is such that it demonstrates the oppressive conditions of life in the factories both as they are experienced by Hugh and Deb themselves and as they are viewed from the vantage of a middle-class observer, represented in the narrator.

The opening of Harding's tale has become famous since its reprinting by the Feminist Press in 1972:

A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer's shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their pipes. I can detect the scent through all the foul smells ranging loose in the air.

And, three paragraphs later:

Can you see how foggy the day is? As I stand here, idly tapping the windowpane, and looking out through the rain at the dirty back-yard and the coalboats below, fragments of an old story float up before me, — a story of this old house into which I happened to come to-day.

From this point, the tale is related of the Welsh-born industrial workers who are the focus of Harding's story. But these opening lines are crucial, for they posit the grim reality of the mill workers' lives as an irruption into the narrator's apparently comfortable middle-class existence. After all, we do learn, at the end of the narrative, that the storyteller is ensconced in her domestic library, which is scattered with a number of objects of distinction: 'A half- moulded child's head; Aphrodite; a bough of forest-leaves; music; work; homely fragments, in which lie the secrets of all eternal truth and beauty.' It is striking then that, as she meditates in her insulation, the narrator should remark about the air of the mill town, 'It stifles me.' The personal effect that the stifling atmosphere of the mills has on the narrator indicates the degree to which the private, middle-class domestic space is penetrated by the machinery of industrial capital. The inevitable implication of the industrial world in the domestic realm is underscored, as well, by the fact that the story of Hugh and Deb -223- Wolfe, which the narrator relates, is the story, too, 'of this old house,' which the narrator presently occupies, and which is also 'the one where the Wolfes lived.'

The plot of Life in the Iron Mills is relatively simple. Hugh Wolfe, oddly independent and standoffish from the other millhands, is visited by two parties one evening as he labors overtime at the ironworks. One is his cousin Deb, a young, hunchbacked woman who ardently loves Hugh, and who this night, as on other evenings when he works the night shift, brings him a dinner pail; the other is a group of men from the upper classes come to take a tour of the mill while Deb is there. They include a Mr. Kirby, son of one of the millowners, the factory overseer, a town physician, a newspaper reporter, and a relative of Kirby's from out of town, named Mitchell. While at the mill, they marvel not only at the roar and bustle of the works themselves but also at a strange female figure that Hugh has carved out of korl, the refuse from the iron ore (the subtitle of Life in the Iron Mills is 'The Korl Woman'). She has a strained and anguished-looking countenance, but is so muscular — in clear contrast to the Victorian 'true woman' — that the gentlemen cannot understand when Hugh explains her pained expression by saying 'She be hungry.' Obviously, her hunger is a spiritual one, born of the stifling existence that her class endures as laborers in the industrial machine, which is evidently Davis's point; and this fact is clarified when Hugh specifies to his inquisitors that she is hungry for 'Summat to make her live, I think, — like you.' This statement provokes a debate amongst the visitors about exactly who is responsible for the social welfare of the factory workers.

While this exchange is going on, though, Deb makes her own grab at 'summat to make her live' by stealing from Mitchell's pocket a wallet that contains a little cash and a check for a substantial amount of money. Following some persuasion on her part after she and Hugh leave the mill, he decides to keep the wallet, and is arrested the next day for theft. He is quickly tried, convicted, and sentenced to nineteen years in prison (literally half his life, as is pointed out in the Feminist Press notes to the book: the life expectancy at the time for men in his position was