Gods in Pain1 – Divine Children Sans Carnival: Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills

By Peter Weisman, Student

Engages Davis' Life in the Iron Mills in light of Bakhtinian folk carnival marketplace humor and humor theory.

An essay hosted at LiteratureClassics.com

Gods in Pain1 – Divine Children Sans Carnival: Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills

Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills gives witness to the artist’s social and spiritual position in a perverted marketplace. Lucy Morrison reads this novella as “Davis’ expression of confusion regarding her own perception of the artist” (245). Morrison’s artist is ambiguously defined as a condition. She expresses Davis as “concerned with the nature of the artist as restricted by humanity and environment” (245). Reiterating Morrison’s validity, this Essay attempts to expand, classifying a more tangible term than “the nature of the artist” – that of the perverted marketplace, a holistic system of spiritual void and confusion weighing on Davis’ characters as well as herself, including the narrating storyteller who for all intensive purposes is indistinguishable from Davis. This line does not ignore Davis’ notion of the artist. Rather it approaches the novella through the ramifications of environmental perimeters. These perimeters limit the divine laughter and true spiritual pursuits of all the characters, the Christian pursuits and those left indefinable. The marketplace bleeds into Davis’ world and controls her voice. This essay considers these routes more closely in tune with Davis’ central themes, the implications she consciously implies or toward which she culturally assimilates.
Almost immediately following the industrial revolution, social stratification in the American northeast was the shadow of southern slavery, comparable minus the most extreme acts of human debasement. Attaining similar extremes, there was a rich class and a poor class. As with the plantation slave, the worker was offered little sense of self beyond that of worker. Theodore Parker describes the marketplace of 1842 as having “a basis of selfishness; a society wherein there is a preference of the mighty, and a postponement of the righteous, where power is worshipped and justice little honored” (407). From then until 1861, when Davis’ text emerges, conditions grow worse if changing at all. The setting lacks the carnival manifestations of the traditional folk marketplace. A certain culture of values is missing, hence the perversion.
Under a lens of historical refinement, the presence of an industrialized system did nothing to curb hardship in America. As in the novella’s fictional reality, an increase in immigration throughout the 19th century formed a distinct, mostly European, ethnic diversity virtually nonexistent in Europe’s industrialized but indigenous regions. For reasons unknown Davis chooses a Welshman as our focal character. She expresses the ethnic diversity passingly as a “crowd of drunken Irishmen” (11), a tall mulatto woman toward the end and the different physicality of the Welsh. “They are a trifle more filthy; their muscles are not so brawny; they stoop more” (15). The diversity adds a dimension to this marketplace.
American capital interests and the ruling body, often indistinguishable factions, do not require artisans from their working class. Art, in many cases similar to the newly-arrived workers, was imported from Europe, simply produced by the upper class or not valued. Davis uses the mystery of an artist’s spiritual condition as a cry “to live the life God meant him to live” (45) in this relatively new cultural setting. This cry is paralleled with the workers’ cry for social mobility, explaining “the reality of soul starvation” in “a world gone wrong” (23, 30).
The major critical task of this novella has been to solve what “scholars have generally found . . . difficult to reconcile” (Hughes 114) – the political message and the Christian implications. Coupled to Sharon Harris’ political reading of Davis’ “passive Christianity” (50) is an undeniably equal proactive spiritual craving mingled in Wolfe and in the narrator, value placed on a somber Christianity. While Harris’ error claims this proactive spiritual element as mere Irony, the Christianity of the narrator is irrefutable. In juxtaposition William H. Shurr “tends to undermine the social aspects of the tale through his religious form criticism” (Hughes 114). Does Davis compromise either her devotion to spirituality or social reform?
The story is based on the Parable of Lazarus found in the Gospel according to Luke, chapter 16 (Hughes 116). The parable is a story of Inversion wherein a rich man and Lazarus die at the same time, the rich ends up in hell begging for forgiveness while Lazarus is by Abraham’s side. The omission of the inversion acts “to arouse shock and response from her [Davis’] readers” (117). This essay asserts the major themes, an ambiguous spirituality and political reformation, are not working to supercede one other. They mingle successfully.
The question asked, “Is this all of their lives?” (15), originates from a perception of a powerless deity:
These men, going by with drunken faces and brains full of unawakened power, do
not ask it of Society or God. Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it. There is no
reply. I will tell you plainly that I have a great hope and I put it to you to be
tested. (14)

As with Parker, Davis works “on the principle that social wrongs can be corrected by the men causing them” (Parker 407). She includes “patient Christ-love” as one of the things “needed to make helpful and hopeful this impure body and soul” (63), referring to Deb’s healing from the ordeal. Clearly for Davis, pure Christian spirituality is a necessity for social reform.
Given the Puritanical paradigm of America regarding religion, at the heart of divine madness, what Bakhtin might call innocently suppressed “folk humor”, is a different spiritual sense necessary for Davis’ political change. It is “the madness that underlies all revolution, all progress, and all fall” (Davis 46). These themes exist side-by-side. They conjoin sociopolitical implications and an arguably-spiritual carnivalesque ideal within our main character, a Welshman named Hugh Wolfe. Wolfe becomes distanced from Christianity, embracing a different spiritual form. The void of carnival themes in this man’s life makes him hungry, only to be redeemed too late by the Quaker’s Christian consolation – that of the natural environment and God’s “promise of the dawn” (65) – not a carnival form and perhaps a continuation of the perverted marketplace philosophy, although not the perverted marketplace lifestyle, an important note. Can the comic protocol of carnival and its absence explain the novella’s miseries? What of Deb’s vision of an afterlife, portrayed as a delusion with “who blames her” (64) for believing? Is the absence of a tangible redemption a call to action?
Wolfe, a menial laborer and sculptor of the iron mill’s byproduct korl, sustains a fundamental awkwardness throughout the novella. He is guilty of being born poor, powerless, different from the rest and an artist, defined here simply as one who produces art. He has a slightly educated and androgynous appearance, “the taint of school-learning on him” and his “meek woman’s face”, respectively (10,11). “In the mill he was known as one of the girl-men: ‘Molly Wolfe’ was his sobriquet” (24). As we see through his hunchbacked cousin Deb’s eyes, he has been living with these dilemmas from the outset of his mysterious personal history. Wolfe, perhaps a newcomer to America, is an outsider to his working comrades, an oddity who is “no favorite” (24). Through a handful of upper class men, he has a brief glimpse of what is to him an incomprehensible world.
The narrator quickly divines the fraternal group, some more than others, as “. . . this mysterious class that shone down on him perpetually with the glamour of another order of being” (27). As with strong, Puritanical Christian piety, the divination is taken seriously, lacking all humor. “Never! . . . between them there was a great gulf never to be passed. Never!” (30). The men have a powerful place in Wolfe’s psyche but do not offer lessons of transcendence, helpful knowledge such as how to express his art to an appreciative audience. The men are preoccupied with money, becoming swayed by the philosophy of the marketplace.
Mitchell, the major avatar of Wolfe, “a Man all-knowing, all-seeing, crowned by Nature, reigning”, perhaps most represents the perverted marketplace philosophy (40). He ends the interaction tersely, with cold closure. The upper class men exit, solidly misinterpreting Wolfe’s “request for aid as a desire for monetary support, and thus categorizing Wolfe with the other workers as being satisfied by and desirous of only financial award” (Morrison 247). When they misinterpret Wolfe, they also project an image onto him, an image he lives up to by keeping the money stolen by the misshapen Deb. This projected image is played out, ruining him.
As Doc May, a member of the upper class fraternity, says in dialogue, Wolfe has it in him “to be a great sculptor, a great man” (37). Deb has this sense earlier without expressing it. Upon hearing this judgment from a wealthy man, Wolfe is set to explore an enlightened realization of self-worth. With the seemingly constant emotional flux of Wolfe’s inner self, highs do not last long before lows follow.
Given an example of his art, validating the merit of his skill and the depth of his soul, the men treat him as a child. Society rejects Wolfe as anything but an uneducated worker, trivializing his life, his art and his sense of self. The critique of his own sculpture, the figure of a woman gesticulating, which he says is “hungry,” is patronized. “’Oh-h! But what a mistake you’ve made, my fine fellow!’” says May. “The cool, probing eyes” of Mitchell “who saw the soul of the thing . . . turned on himself now, - mocking, cruel, relentless” (33). May stoops his voice “to the capacity of his hearer: it is a way people have with children” when explaining the potential of Wolfe to Wolfe (37).
Hugh Wolfe finds all the reasons he cannot attain “one moment of free air on a hill-side, to lie down and let his sick soul throb itself out in the sunshine”, to simply live a “true life . . . one of full development” and become “As he might be!” (41, 46, 46) are due to money. Mitchell, his enlightener, is inclined to educate with a cruel, honest wit. In a simple Marxian equation, the very money with the potential to free Wolfe slowly becomes an opposing force working against him, a powerful enemy and a replacement for God’s omnipotence. “’Money has spoken’” says Mitchell (35). So have the upper class, a term one can submit into the equation in lieu of money. The perversion thrives on the notion of omnipotent money. Consider Mitchell quoting scripture at the expense of his brother-in-law Kirby, “one of the mill owners” (27), telling him exactly what kind of a Christian the capital owner is (36). Consider his statement, “’Let them have a clear idea of the rights of the soul, and I’ll venture next week they’ll strike for higher wages’” (38). Hugh Wolfe, artist and spiritually hungry being, a man whose self-image and intention is talented enough “to raise these men and women working at his side up with him”, is sent back to his life with nothing but the sting of a world he will never see, a potential he will never attain and a false omnipotence he cannot debunk (41). Instead of revolution, Wolfe shifts to a belief in money. He does not catch on to Mitchell’s historic paradigm.
Mitchell, the refined and philosophic upper class man, atheistic and nihilistic, laughs at Wolfe’s request for help and May’s contemplation thereof, finishing a sentence for May:
“’You know Mitchell, I have not the means. You know, if I had, it is in my heart
to take this boy and educate him for’” –
“’The glory of God, and the glory of John May’” (37).

Mitchell uses the philosophy of psychological hedonism, an observation developed by Thomas Hobbes. Psychological hedonism explains all action and sentiment as fundamentally selfish. For instance, a saint is not motivated by altruism. They are motivated by how their actions will make them feel emotionally, the attainment of a position in Heaven or for other reasons of self-interest. It is the antithesis of Christianity, corrupting the very act of altruism with the smack of selfishness. With obvious loopholes in the complexity of the human condition, psychological hedonism corrupts May’s vision of Wolfe’s future not only with the lack of physical means to help him, but also with the General philosophy of a perverse marketplace. In this instance, what is good for Wolfe is measured by what is good for May, valued thus and therefore perverted. Mitchell’s laughter is from a pedestal of mockery, realism undisguised by religion and perhaps most importantly for Hugh Wolfe – it is a terminal and unscalable facet of the marketplace.
While May is beset with the idea Wolfe can live “a better life than I, or Mr. Kirby here” and tells him it is his right to rise, Mitchell appears heartless (39). Perhaps Mitchell is a typed-character, typical of capital’s defense philosophy, perhaps something else:
’Reform is born of need, not pity. No vital movement of the people’s has worked
down, for good or evil; fermented, instead, carried up the heaving, cloggy mass.
Think back to history and you will know it. What will this lowest deep – thieves,
Magdalens, negroes – do with the light filtered through ponderous Church creeds,
Baconian theories, Goethe schemes? Some day, out of their bitter need will be
thrown up their own light-bringer, -their Jean Paul, their Cromwell, their
Messiah’ (39).

This speech is an important element to the story. It might voice the epitome of a capital-owner’s defense. Perhaps it is Davis offering her solution. According to Mitchell the natural order has set the classes apart and the cycles of history bring them together every now and then. What duty does a man on top have in catalyzing these cyclic events? Of equal importance is Mitchell’s perception of Wolfe upon exiting. Mitchell exits with a touch of his hat, “as to an equal, with a quiet look of thorough recognition” (39). Is Mitchell our social reforming catalyst in wolf’s clothing, pun intended? Is Wolfe essentially selfish? Is Mitchell calling Wolfe out? If Wolfe were in Mitchell’s position, raised with all the benefits, would he help? This conjecture is dampened by Wolfe’s philosophical agreement with Mitchell:
Wolfe had not been vague in his ambitions. They were practical . . .
Able to speak, to know what was best, to raise these men and women working at
his side up with him: sometimes he forgot this defined hope in the frantic anguish
to escape,-only to escape,-out of the wet, the pain, the ashes . . . (40, 41)

Motivated by May, perhaps a more damaging lesson, and the horrendous environment, Wolfe jumps the gun, failing his quest with the easy way out – individual gain. “The trial day of this man’s life was over, and he had lost the victory” (50).
In reflection, Wolfe’s first outward reaction to the experience with the men is a “low, bitter laugh, striking his puny chest savagely” while he says, “’Look at me!’” (41). The role of laughter as a renewing and regenerating element of the marketplace is essential to the idea of a marketplace perverted. In Life in the Iron Mills, this laughter becomes transformed. Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian theorist, maps the history of laughter and carnival in European culture. Although an ocean away, the theory can be applied successfully for America is an extension of these cultures, namely the somber rational classicism later referred to. Prefaced with Rose’ claim Davis “demonstrates an aesthetic more akin to Romance than realism” and that the “concerns of this story are spiritual and its structure mythic” (15):
Unlike the medieval and Renaissance grotesque, which was directly related to
folk culture and thus belonged to all the people, the Romantic genre acquired a
private ‘chamber’ character. It became, as it were, an individual carnival, marked
by a vivid sense of isolation (Bakhtin 37).

Can we validate Mitchell’s ‘rise from beneath’ shrugging off of social responsibility with the carnival paradigm, for certainly Mitchell has a sustainable individual carnival? Can we validate Wolfe’s baffling failure, a man whose greatest sin is taking himself seriously as a deep-rooted identity? Is looking at this text through the eyes of the carnivalesque worthwhile?
Dependent on subtle differences, festivals of the carnival form have one unifying theme – all fit into one culture of folk carnival humor. Humor is protocol. At its heart, carnival is based on universal laughter and play. According to Bakhtin, “The basis of laughter which gives form to carnival rituals frees them completely from all religious and ecclesiastic dogmatism, from all mysticism and piety” (7). For this reason, Wolfe like Mitchell turns away from Christianity within his individualized carnival. Humor is the central theme. God is humorless in the Puritan paradigm. Ideally it is not a humor like Mitchell or Wolfe’s, hidden and personal. Traditional carnival humor is a humor of the people, for all people. It is laughter of the marketplace, closer to the tall mulatto woman Wolfe spies from his cell.
“In reality, it [the humor] is life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play” (Bakhtin 7). Working in the iron mills is an event outside of carnival but crafting korl, as Wolfe does or “saying the money was his by rights and that all the world had gone wrong” are activities outside of society’s procedural outlines (Davis 51). These belong “to the borderline between art and life” (7). They belong to carnival, a carnival Wolfe cannot live without, creating one with what he is given.
Davis’ message is clouded with the unique role of the artist. In avoidance of ambiguity, Wolfe the individual longs for certain things. Perhaps time to realize himself in manhood and attain a communal episode of shared laughter, i.e. a carnival, pre Lenten or otherwise. As Bakhtin says, Romanticist laughter “was cut down to cold humor, irony, Sarcasm. It ceased to be joyful and triumphant hilarity. Its positive regenerating power was reduced to a minimum” (38). We see this cold humor most evident in Mitchell and with the seed planted in Wolfe. It is important to note the redemption offered by Davis lacks laughter. The resolution is not made to comfort us in light of Wolfe’s suicide. In this way it calls the reader to action, essentially consisting of Wolfe’s vision of Janey the Irish child’s future existence, the Quaker woman, the natural setting of the hills and the inevitability of Deb portrayed in the future, a “woman, old, deformed, who takes a humble place among them [Quakers at a meeting]” (63). The resolution is left in the reader’s hands. The reader is asked to create an environment where laughter can regain its healing power. Deb, the Quaker, as well as the narrator, do not laugh for adult laughter in the perverted marketplace takes the form of Mitchell’s educated pedestal. It is the distorted laugh of a desperate and suicidal Wolfe. “That which is important and essential cannot be comical. Neither can history or persons representing it – kings, generals, heroes – be shown in a comic aspect” (Bakhtin 67).
According to the marketplace, Wolfe’s position is laughable. He is unimportant. His doom is expressed by society as morbidly “jocose”. Is it then the fault of the working hours, the control of the ruling class and the piety of religion which makes it impossible for the working class to laugh at their benefactors, human, material or ethereal? Consider the isolated artist when listening to a Christian reformer who:
. . . held up Humanity in its grand total; showed the great world-cancer to his
people. Who could show it better? He was a Christian reformer; he had studied
the age thoroughly; his outlook at man had been free, world-wide, over all time
(49).

The implication of divine, time-transcending messages being soliloquized to Wolfe in the gravest of ways offers a glimpse into the reality of the novella’s holistic cultural message. The artist and any real divinity the individual, artist or otherwise, might be taught in this manner acts as a spiritually powerless placebo. The divinity within is so obscured by the treachery of the perverted, humorless marketplace “his words passed far over the furnace-tender’s grasp, toned to suit another class of culture; they sounded in his ears a very pleasant song in an unknown tongue” (49).
Bakhtin writes mostly of French culture but the theory is applicable:
The seventeenth century was marked by the stabilization of the new order of the absolute monarchy. A relatively progressive “universally historic form” was created and was expressed in Descartes’ rationalist philosophy and in the aesthetics of classicism . . .. In the new culture there prevails a tendency toward the stability and completion of being, toward one single meaning, one single tone of seriousness. (Bakhtin 101)

The artist is hereby reduced to the grotesque for “In this morbid, distorted heart of the Welsh puddler he [the preacher] had failed” (49). Wolfe turns away from the sobriety of organized religion, Harris’ “passive Christianity”, for it cannot bring him closer to the carnival he desires. It cannot help him gain the regeneration he needs – laughter. Only success, or its extreme – failure, can accomplish this task.
Where is the humor or emotion to teach with the heart? It is not in Davis’ vision of church. Besides the Quaker, who appears truly divine under Bakhtin’s “single tone of seriousness”, perhaps a sliver of the humor is found here:
Why, in the police-reports of the morning paper you can find a dozen such
tragedies: hints of shipwrecks unlike any that ever befell on the high seas; hints
that here a power was lost to heaven, - that there a soul went down where no tide
can ebb or flow. Commonplace enough the hints are, - jocose sometimes, done up
in Rhyme (50).

The key word is “jocose”.
Carnival is made up of individuals. While it might lack religious / political authorities it is a mistake to think it brings people out of existing social orders. There is something resembling anarchy procured by carnival, but it is more a mimicry and Satire of an existing social order, sanctifying and preserving them with play and laughter. Within the perverted marketplace where even children work, carnival does not exist in any form. Laughter at the social order forces its way out in true criminal intonation.
Bakhtin divides carnival manifestations into three distinct forms: ritual spectacles, comic verbal compositions and various genres of crude language and abuse, i.e. the grotesque (5). They intersect and overlap, offering different perceptions of the world, man and human relations. Davis’ society, lacking any sense of traditional carnival, uses the criminals in the police report to fill in the void of all three. The ritual spectacle is the printed page, reinforcing the loneliness of a single character’s carnival by removing the physical from the spectacle. It can also be seen in physicality of Wolfe’s trial. As with Mitchell’s speech, the police reports written in rhyme scheme act as the comic verbal compositions. Abuse of the grotesque can be witnessed in Doc May’s response, a brief dialogue with his wife condemning Wolfe for his actions. It also exists in Mitchell’s “curiosity” (51), visiting Wolfe in his prison cell. Although we are shown nothing else of this interaction, Mitchell’s sentiment of curiosity is enough to speculate he wishes to view the abused grotesque from his voyeuristic pedestal.
Wolfe is more distinctly shown as the grotesque when he is in his cell, locked up as a powerless voyeur – while alive for when dead he gains a little more attention. “How clear the light fell on that stall in front of the market! and how like a picture it was . . .” (55). Wolfe has become a perverted form of the grotesque, attaining “a something never seen on his face before” (58). “The world of Romantic grotesque is to a certain extent a terrifying world, alien to man” (Bakhtin 38). There is no empathy with or acceptance of the abused grotesque. The feces-covered fool of traditional Renaissance and feudal folk humor is now a horrifying individual. They are not laughed at while reciprocating the energy invested. Rather they are degraded, perverted, locked away and removed fully from society. “A tall mulatto girl . . . was laughing; but, when she caught sight of the haggard face peering out through the bars, suddenly grew grave, and hurried by” (57). These activities send the carnival form into an unsettling perversion.
Ponderous of his own condition, the equation in practical terms is seemingly simple for Hugh Wolfe. Money equals free time. Free time equals physical freedom fro work, emotional self-exploration, intellectual self-realization, natural settings and possibly, although we are not sure he will continue on with it, artistic production. These things mean an ambiguous spiritual fulfillment and a certain sense of manhood. Why does he fail? What stops him from rising? Davis’ parable is inverted. He does not rise. He falls. In carnival, attribution to personal identity is superfluous and even publishable. In seeking a negative, personal laughter, placing himself above the object of carnival’s mockery, other people, including oneself, Wolfe becomes opposed to the object – his own objectified self. But the distortion of these themes make his situation an impossibility.
Doc May’s advice sticks with him, “telling him to ‘take care of himself, and to remember it was his right to rise’” (39). He does not take Mitchell’s cryptically communicated, rising prophet paradigm to heart. It is hardly taught with emotion. Wolfe follows through with the idea of, “His right! The word struck him. Doctor May had used the same . . . Why did this chance word cling to him so obstinately?” (45). What is the message here? Doc May, aware of Mitchell’s damaging intelligence with “Go back, Mitchell!” (38), forgets his own. Is it May who demotes Wolfe to thief ? Is it not a coupling of Mitchell’s divination of currency? The blame cannot be placed. If anything, it is the holism of the situation.
With Wolfe’s incarceration and decided doom there is “a bright, boyish smile” (53) on his face. Perhaps the expression of Hugh Wolfe as a divine child falling unknowingly from a false Eden, i.e. the marketplace, by attempting to attain a truer version, i.e. manhood through a life away from the mills, most accurately elaborates the perversion found in this marketplace. A confused childishness manifests in Wolfe. He shifts between a state when “He did not deceive himself. Theft!” (45) to his delusion of the practical world, i.e. his “rights” therein. A childishness is also found in his androgyny and in the sense Wolfe wants to return to the Eden of youth and attain a realization of himself there as a man. “Of God and heaven he had heard so little, that they were real to him what fairy-land is to a child: something real but not here; very far off” (46). In this manner, there is a Paradox to his momentary rise of drunken stupor. It is his disastrous fall. “Something is lost in the passage of every soul from one eternity to the other, -something pure and beautiful, which might have been and was not: a hope, a talent, a love, over which the soul mourns, like Esau deprived of his birthright” (64). After all is written, Deb is left waiting for heaven. There is no carnival on the horizon but the carnival the reader is sent off to create from the memory of Hugh Wolfe’s struggle with the perverted marketplace. The loss through fatality deepens the impact of the relationship Wolfe had with society and with the reader. The artist is sanctified. Carnival is sought.






Notes
1 The title is found on page 19 of the text as a Metaphor to railroad engines.

Work Cited
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