Dark to Light, Despair to Life

Erica Schweiger
Iron Mills Blog Entry
February 25, 2008
The first aspect in Life in the Iron Mills that I was drawn to is the way in which Rebecca Harding Davis uses evocative and descriptive language that allows the reader to become intertwined with the emotional tensions and struggles of the time in which her characters live. I felt like in just the second paragraph, in her description of “a little broken figure of an angel pointing upward from the mantel shelf…its wings covered with smoke,” Davis was able to portray how even a symbol of hope, glory, and light is being masked by what seems to be such a tragic way to live. What usually intrigues me about a story or novel is the way in which the plot portrays an inspirational theme or passionate response to a situation. For this realist novel, I was simply drawn to the way in which Rebecca Harding Davis seemed to want to profess that the quality of human life is worth so much more than what it was being used for in these lifeless and repetitive jobs. The human mind allows for so much more than to be institutionalized under this capitalistic type of labor and society. Trough the story of one family, under one old house, she divides the complexity of human nature with the life that this family is living. However, from this darkness, this “nightmare fog” (13), I like how Davis still manages to move into the light, providing a more inspirational ending point in which “God has sent the promise of Dawn”(65).