Silences (24 page)

Landmarks, unless they loom large in landscapes often visited, tend to become weed-grown tombstones over the forgotten dead, noticed only by accident.

Even
the sense of landmark has been obliterated. Rebecca Harding Davis is a name known today only to a handful of American Studies people and literary historians. Few have read any of her work; fewer still teach any of it.
^**

Myriads of human beings—those who did the necessary industrial work in the last century—lived and died and little remains from which to reconstruct their perished (vanished) lives.
About them as about so much else, literature was largely silent, and the charge can be levied:
Nowhere am I in it.

               
No picture, poem, statement, passing them to the future

               
Unlimn’d, they disappear.
^*

To those of us, descendants of their class, hungry for any rendering of what our vanished people were like, of how they lived, Rebecca Harding Davis’s
Life in the Iron
Mills
is immeasurably valuable. Details, questions, Vision, found nowhere else—dignified into literature.

She never wrote anything of its near-classic quality after.

Once, at Harvard’s Widener Library, in that time of my trying to trace what had happened to Rebecca Harding, out of one of her books—
John Andross?
—fell an undated presentation card:

            
For Mr. C. E. Norton

          
            
from R. H. D.

                  
Judge me—not by what I have done,

            
but by what I have hoped to do.
^**

Poor Rebecca. The cry of every artist (of every human). But Proust is right. There are no excuses in art. Including having been born female in the wrong time/place.

A scanty best of her work is close to the first rank; justifies resurrection, currency, fame. Even that
best is botched.

Here or there in even her most slipshod novels, stage-set plots, moldering stories: a grandeur of conception (“touches, grand sweeps of outline”), a breathing character, a stunning insight, a
scene as transcendent as any written in her century, also confirm for us what a great writer was lost in her.

Even in the tons of her ephemera, of the topical nonfiction, there is vitality,
instructive range—and a fascinating native quality in its combination of radicalism, reaction, prophecy, piecemeal insight, skepticism, idealism—all done up in a kind of exasperated plain-spokenness.

The strong pulse of her work quoted herein evidences that—botched art or not—a significant portion of her work remains important and vitally alive for our time.

What Virginia Woolf wrote of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning characterizes Rebecca as well: “a true daughter of her age: passionate interest in social questions, conflict as artist and woman, longing for knowledge and freedom.” With Rebecca, much could be only longing.

She is more than landmark, of contemporary interest only to literary historians—though she is that too. There is an untraced indebtedness to her in the rise of realism.
^*
She maintained that fiction which incorporates social and economic problems directly,
and in terms of their effects on human beings.

She was more than realist. In the most scrupulous sense, she followed Emerson’s dictum:

            
I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic. . . . I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.

                  
The foolish
man wonders at the unusual; the wise man at the usual.

The complexity of that wonder at the usual illumines her best pages.

She was not derivative. Her pioneering firsts in subject matter are unequaled in American literature. She extended the realm of fiction.

Without intention, she was a social historian invaluable for an understanding access to her time. On her pages are people and situations
that are discovery, not only of the past, but of ourselves.

From her work—like
“the figure of the mill-woman cut in korl. . . . [kept] hid behind a curtain,—it is such a rough, ungainly thing
”—her epoch looks through
“with its thwarted life, its mighty hunger, its unfinished work.”

It is time to rend the curtain

My primary sources have been the writings of Rebecca Harding Davis, everything
of hers accessible to me for reading. In addition, I relied on Gerald Langford’s
The Richard Harding Davis Years
(1961) for some biographical facts (not interpretation); on Helen Woodward Schaeffer’s
Rebecca Harding Davis, Pioneer Realist
(a superb, as-yet-unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1947); on Charles Belmont Davis’s
The Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis
(1917); and—as is
evident—on other reading of many years, coincidentally related to the period in which Rebecca lived. I regret there was not means to go to the archives of the University of Virginia to read her collected papers there.

I first read
Life in the Iron Mills
in one of three water-stained, coverless, bound volumes of the
Atlantic Monthly,
bought for ten cents each in an Omaha junkshop. I was fifteen.
Contributions to those old
Atlantics
were published anonymously, and I was ignorant of any process whereby I might find the name of the author of this work which meant increasingly more to me over the years, saying, with a few other books, “Literature can be made out of the lives of despised people,” and “You, too, must write.”

No reader I encountered had ever heard of the story, let alone who
might have written it. It was not until the collected
Letters of Emily Dickinson
came out in 1958 that, in the reference room of the San Francisco Public Library where I went lunch hours from work to read them, I learned who the author was. Appended to a note from Emily to her sister-in-law,

            
Will Susan please lend Emily “Life in the Iron Mills”—and accept blossom

was this citation:

            
Rebecca Harding Davis’ “Life in the Iron Mills” appeared in the April 1861 issue of the
Atlantic Monthly.

It did not surprise me that the author was of my sex. At once I eagerly looked for other works by her. But there was no Rebecca Harding Davis in the library’s card catalogue. It did not occur to me to try the index of periodicals, as it dated only from the 1890s
and I assumed
that she had been dead long before. No other library, even had I had time, was accessible to me then.

Only when I received an appointment to the Radcliffe Institute in 1962 did I begin to have occasional time for and access to her other work. There they were, in Harvard’s Widener Library, in the Cambridge and Boston public libraries—old volumes, not taken out for years.

So began my knowledge
of her contribution and its woeful deterioration; my attempt to understand what had happened to the Rebecca Harding who had once written with such power, beauty, comprehension.

I never envisioned writing of her until Florence Howe and Paul Lauter, to whom I had introduced
Life in the Iron Mills,
suggested that The Feminist Press issue it and I write the afterword. This is the result. If I have
quoted so extensively from her work, it is because it is neither readily available nor known. If this came to be more biographical interpretation and history (“human story”) than critical afterword, it is because I am convinced that that is what is most needed. I have brought to her life and work my understanding as writer, as insatiable reader, as feminist-humanist, as woman.

Rebecca Harding
Davis’s correspondence, some of the correspondence with her, and other references used are scattered through a number of volumes. As for years, until the writing of this manuscript, I was reading for myself only, and had had no academic training in notation, I copied out material usually without troubling to record exact pages, publishers, dates of publication, sometimes even the titles of books
or magazines. This explains the few instances in which the exact source is not cited; but in every case it can be authenticated. Where no source is indicated, and it is Rebecca Harding Davis who is being quoted, the material comes either from correspondence, articles, or is a phrase from her fiction, usually from
Life in the Iron Mills
—and the context should make the difference clear.

*
Excerpts from
Life in the Iron Mills
begin on p. 265.

*
These prefatory remarks have been especially written for this reprint of the 1971 “Afterword,” which follows.

*
The tales were: “Rill from the Town Pump,” “Little Annie’s Rambles,” and “Sunday at Home.” Some time after publication Hawthorne wrote to Longfellow: “I feel that I have nothing but thin air to connect from. Sometimes through a peephole
I have caught a glimpse of the real world. . . . These three stories please me most.”

*
The Story of an African Farm,
1883.

In
Eminent Women of the Age
(1869), Elizabeth Cady Stanton says of the far superior seminary she attended: “If there is any one thing on earth from which I pray God to save my daughters, it is a girls’ seminary. The two years which I spent in one were the dreariest years
of my whole life.” And in the same book, in regard to the seminary schooling of a contemporary, sculptor Harriet Hosmer, writes: “Public sentiment . . . as to the education of girls prevails . . .” that they should be

                      
“Ground down enough

              
To flatten and bake into a wholesome crust

              
For household uses and proprieties.”

*
Rebecca writes of him directly
in
Bits of Gossip,
a volume of reminiscences (1904). The LeMoyne family home in Washington, Pennsylvania, is now a historical museum, centering mostly on Dr. LeMoyne.

The succeeding quotations are from
Margret Howth.

*
Her father may have preferred to keep her home, as fathers of the time—including some fathers of famous literary women—often did. Think of Elizabeth Barrett (Browning), Emily Dickinson,
Charlotte Brontë, Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot).

*
“I know that if women wish to escape the stigma of husband-seeking, they must act and look like marble or clay-cold-expressionless, bloodless—for every appearance of feeling of joy-sorrow-friendliness, antipathy, admiration-disgust are alike construed by the world into an attempt to hook in a husband.”—Charlotte Brontë, as a young woman of about
Rebecca’s age to her friend Ellen Nussey.

*
Quotations in this and the next five paragraphs are from
David Gaunt, Margret Howth, Earthen Pitchers, John Andross,
and
A Law Unto Herself
.

*
“All that is enthusiastic, all that is impassioned in admiration of nature, of writing, of character, or in the motions of affection, I have felt with vehement and absorbing intensity—felt till my mind is exhausted
and seems to be sinking into deadness. Half of my time I am glad to remain in a listless vacancy, to busy myself with tasks, since thought is pain and emotion is pain.”

*
“The present regime to which custom dooms the sex: steel-ribbed corsets with hoops, heavy skirts, trains, high heels, panniers, chignons and dozens of hairpins sticking in our scalps; cooped up in the house year after year with
no exhilarating exercise, no hopes, aims nor ambitions.”—Lucy Stone in a debate at Oberlin.

Such clothing was a mark of class distinction. Contrast it with the “half clothed” cotton mill girls at the beginning of
Iron Mills,
or indeed, the dress of most women of that time: farm, slave, and working class.

**
. . . which it was not.

Though Hawthorne complained in a letter to his publisher of “the
damned mob of female scribblers,” the field was dominated by men: editors, publishers, and staff were men; the overwhelming number of novels, stories, articles, were still being written by men. The comparatively few women writers were conspicuous because they were a new phenomenon, for the first time in any numbers successful, recognized. And the Women’s Rights movement had focused attention on
women. The 1850s was the decade of Whitman, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Dana, Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, though not all had popular fame.