Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
Realism took the familiar and every day for its subject matter and focused on the
so-called lowly and poor, as did Romanticism. Realism, however, dwelt more on
the urban than rural landscape, without apprehending an animism or metaphysical
force in the environment. Realism also did not infuse its depictions of reality
with (often ostentatious) emotion and subjectivity, taking instead an apparently
objective view—almost like that of a court report—and letting often “sordid” facts
and details speak for themselves.
Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills realistically depicts unpleasant details and facts,
particularly of the political, social, and aesthetic divide between laborers and
factory-owners, the poor and the landed wealthy, the charitable and the hypocrite.
However, she frames her story’s perspective within a Christian context in apparent
hope of reform.
Image 4.26 | Housing in a Mills Factory in Alabama, 1910
Photographer | Lewis Wickes Hine
Source | Wikimedia Commons
License | Public Domain
4.27.1 Life in the Iron Mills
(1861)
“Is this the end?
O Life, as futile, then, as frail!
What hope of answer or redress?”
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