thirty-seven years; Hugh is nineteen when he is incarcerated). Deb gets a three-year jail sentence for acting as his accomplice. Rather than waste away in prison, Hugh kills himself by -224- slicing his veins with a piece of sharpened tin. Deb is befriended by a helpful Quaker woman, and lives a pious life among the community of Friends after her release.
What remains, however, is the figure of the korl woman itself, which stands, hidden behind a curtain, in the narrator's library. Its position there suggests the status of the story of Hugh and Deb, which, it has been proposed, is a realist narrative set in the romantic frame of the narrator's rhetoric. The korl figure represents unsettling questions about social inequities within the newly developing system of industrial capitalism, and its position in the narrator's library represents the introduction of those questions into the private realm of the domestic space, in which context they become fodder for a reform movement that is both represented in and occasioned by such works as Life in the Iron Mills.
In terms of literary history, Life in the Iron Mills is a remarkably prescient indicator of the characteristics of later works of United States literature. Observers have drawn links between its motifs and those of such disparate naturalist novels as Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1894), Frank Norris's McTeague (1899), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900). Davis's exposure of the millhands' lives has been likened to the exploration of turn-of-the-century urban ghettos represented in Jacob Riis's text-cum-photo essay, How the Other Half Lives (1890). The dramatic theatricality that characterizes the behaviors of her fictional personages has been seen as prefiguring a similar strain in Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), Norris's The Pit (1902), and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905). These associations are all traceable through the narrative techniques that Davis utilizes, many of which appear repeatedly in the later works. But Life in the Iron Mills is not merely a precursor of American literary realism and naturalism; it is also a powerful instance of reform fiction — a status to which most later naturalism was prevented from acceding, however graphic its depiction of social inequality and the squalor of the poor, owing to its equally strong sense of the immutably determined and deterministic nature of those very conditions. Davis's work is deterministic, without a doubt — suggesting that Hugh and Deborah have inherited the conditions of their parents before them, just as does the wealthy Kirby; and that the future may be beyond their -225- ability to control — but it also suggests the possibility of transcendence of these conditions through Deb's association with the Quaker community, well known during the period for its interest and activity in effecting social reform through individual action. Consequently, Davis's work can illuminatingly be aligned with later realist works of social criticism, such as Hamlin Garland's A Spoil of Office (1892) and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), both of which will be taken up here. Critics have also considered it to be centrally positioned amongst a trio of social reform works that establish the conventions for the later material: Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Davis work, and The Silent Partner (1871), by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.
Phelps's novel incorporates a number of aspects of literary naturalism, including grimly realistic depictions of the life of Sip Garth and other workers in the cotton mills of Five Falls, Massachusetts. Moreover, Phelps utilizes what critics have identified as a key symbolic structure of naturalism, whereby one particular entity is early on associated with the main character of the story and its significance evolves along with the fate of that character. In Norris's McTeague, gold is such an emblem; in Dreiser's Sister Carrie, it is the rocking chair; in Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, it is Henry's wound; in Life in the Iron Mills, it is the iron itself. In The Silent Partner, this naturalistic emblem is the hand of Perley Kelso, the daughter of one of the owners of the factory where Sip works. At the beginning of the novel that hand is beautiful and beringed, for Perley is to be married to Maverick Hayle, her father's junior partner. After she meets Sip in the street one evening, though, subsequent to which news of her father's sudden death is rapidly conveyed to her, Perley decides to test the limits of her new status as a silent partner in the firm (the only status that her fiancé and his father will allow the young woman with respect to the business) by trying to reform the condition of the millhands. Her insistence on this course of action — along with her growing realization that it is through the agency of the firm's partners and other members of her own class that the workers are kept downalienates her from Maverick, and she terminates her engagement to him. By this point in the story her ring has already been broken, as she has forcefully brought down her hand on a table in a fit of passionate frustration over the plight of Sip and the other mill work-226- ers, and the resultant bruise on her finger is a constant portent throughout the rest of the novel.
We mustn't forget, however, what the ring has signified: betrothal, marriage, domesticity — in short, precisely the type of insulated existence characteristic of high-bred ladies such as Perley, who would normally be ignorant of the goings-on at the factories their husbands and fathers control. Perley's mission, however, becomes precisely to incorporate the world of the mills into her own private sphere; or, rather, she comes to recognize that the factory has always been implicated in her own life of luxury and opulence. For, while it is true that, after her father's death, Perley leaves her comfortable home in Boston to live permanently in the family house at Five Falls and, thus, in closer proximity to the activity at the mills, the interrelation of her life and that of the mill workers is actually pointed out to her through a much less dramatic incident.
Having become acquainted with the squalor that characterizes the lives of the mill workers, Perley insists to Maverick that a number of improvements must be made at the factories, including the establishment of a library, reading rooms, lectures, schools, relief societies, and tenement housing, all for the benefit of the laborers. Maverick protests that Hayle and Kelso cannot afford to provide such amenities, but Perley makes a cogent rejoinder based on her own knowledge not just of the resources of the company but of the manner in which they are distributed, with the employees continually stinted in their share: 'I think, if I may judge from my own income, that a library and a reading-room would not bankrupt us, at least this year.' Thus, Perley's impulse to reform is developed through her growing sense of the relation between the condition of the mill workers and her own rather more comfortable existence, which she actually comes to use as an index of the wrongs suffered by the workers. The consciousness that she thus develops (though it seems to slip in a way that betrays the entrenchedness of her class conditioning during her effort to mollify the workers when they consider striking over a cut in wages) influences her to eschew marriage altogether and devote her life to personal efforts at reform within the mills, which she undertakes as a means to realize her rather naive utopian vision of social equality among the classes. -227-
But The Silent Partner is not merely a utopian vision; it is also a political tract, an attempt to convince its readers, through the example of Perley Kelso, of the necessity of bettering the lot of factory workers. Consequently, it is characterized by a fair amount of didacticism in its presentation. Indeed, throughout the novel Phelps cites extensively from the Reports of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor in order to support her claims about the laborers' existence. In this respect she shares much with other reform novelists of the era, particularly those writing about slavery, such as the African American writers William Wells Brown (Clotel [1853]) and, especially, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (Iola Leroy [1892]), whose characters themselves give direct voice to Harper's appeals for social justice. The combination of utopian vision and the moral exhortation that characterizes The Silent Partner is seen, as well, in the central utopian fiction of the late nineteenth century, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888).
Bellamy's novel is the first one treated here to fall squarely within the era that has been termed the age of protest and reform. While the period lasted, it spawned numerous movements of dissent within the United States, and saw the publication of nearly 500 social gospel and utopian novels, among which Bellamy's is the foremost. But if Looking Backward gives us the most fully developed depiction of a utopian community, it nevertheless does not suggest that this ideal social order is a 'nowhere' land the attainment of which is impossible. On the contrary, Bellamy suggests that a full socialist 'Nationalism,' as he called it, is not only possible but inevitable, and that, to paraphrase from the contemporary artist Laurie Anderson, 'paradise is exactly like where you are right now — only much better.' For, indeed, Bellamy's hero, Julian West, never leaves his Boston home. He merely goes to sleep in it — or, rather, in a soundproof chamber beneath it, which he has built as a haven from the bustle of the city that prevents him from sleeping — with the aid of a mesmerist who helps him treat his insomnia. The profound power of hypnotism keeps him in a sort of state of suspended animation until he awakes, Rip Van Winkle-like, 113 years later, in the year 2000, not a day older than when he first dozed. He soon learns that Boston, and, indeed, the entire society, has been fully socialized, and he is familiarized with this brave new world under the
