Life In The Iron Mills Analysis

Rebecca Harding Davis wrote “Life in the Iron Mills” in the mid-nineteenth century in part to raise awareness about working conditions in industrial mills. With the goal of presenting the reality of the mills’ environment and the lives of the mill workers, Davis employs vivid and concrete descriptions of the mills, the workers’ homes, and the workers themselves. Yet her story’s realism is not objective; Davis has a reformer’s agenda, and her word-pictures are colored accordingly. One theme that receives a particularly negative shading in the story is big business and the money associated with it. Davis uses this negative portrayal of money to emphasize the damage that the single-minded pursuit of wealth works upon the humanity of those

While Sonny was physically locked up in jail for his addiction to drugs, his older brother was confined to the racism in Harlem and unable to express his emotions towards his brother until his daughter passed away. It’s ironic that they were imprisoned in opposite ways. While the narrator never got addicted to drugs like most of the men in the community, Sonny got to escape Harlem and create a new life. Until the brothers shared a drink at the end of the story, they hadn’t found salivation from their self-imprisonment. On the other hand, in “I Stand Here Ironing” it was almost as if the iron was the mother’s imprisonment. The narrator was trapped by the daily tasks she had to perform to effectively care for her family, but ironically it was these chores that weakened her relationship to Emily. “Help make it so there is cause for her to believe that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron,” pleads the narrator (Olsen, 7). The mother ends her monologue with a cry of hope that her daughter won’t be imprisoned by the iron that trapped

The 1920s were a time of social injustices, primarily revolving around racial discrimination. With the revival of the Ku Klux Klan only a few short years before, African Americans lived in fear of lynching and other forms of racism during this period. This form of social injustice was widespread and known by all in the United States, but there was another issue during this time that was not as well known. The West Virginia mine wars had begun in 1920 due to the injustices that the miners had faced for decades. Miniscule wages and dangerous work conditions were only a few of the hardships that the miners had to face. The author of the book Kettle Bottom, Diane Gilliam Fisher, was able to capture these hardships perfectly in her poetry to help shine light on the terrible treatment and the resulting consequences that the miners and their families received during this time. Many of her poems, such as, “Dear Diary,” “Pearlie Tells What Happened at School,” and “Walter and His Mama Talk about Angels,” show the negative impact that growing up during this period of violence and injustice had had on the miners’ children.

As hardworking women living of the prairie, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters can relate to Mrs. Wright’s situation. They know personally that long days of doing laundry, cooking, and cleaning can become very tiresome (Hedges 91). They realize that living on the prairie can force a woman to be confined to her own house for weeks at a time, and because Mrs. Wright never had children, the grueling loneliness that she suffered must have been excruciating. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters both experience the constant patronization and sexual discrimination that most women in the early twentieth century lived with. They empathize with the difficulties of Mrs. Wright’s life and almost immediately a bond is formed with a woman they do not even know.

The following passage is an excerpt from Katherine Anne Porter’s short story “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” Read the passage carefully. Then write an essay in which you analyze how such choices as figurative language, imagery, and dialogue develop the complex emotions the character is feeling.

In “The Gilded Six-Bits,” Zora Neale Hurston uses several techniques to characterize Joe and Missy May, the main couple throughout the story. Hurston uses her own life experiences to characterize Joe and Missy May and their marriage. She also shows their character development through her writing styles and techniques, which show reactions and responses between Joe and Missy May to strengthen the development of their relationship. Hurston supports her character development through her writing style, her characters dialect, and includes experiences from her own life to portray a sense of reality to her character’s personalities.

The movie “Gone with the Wind” is about a rich southern girl named Scarlett O’Hara and her life hardships set during the time-period of the Civil War. In the story, Scarlett is forced to watch helplessly as her family’s wealth and lives fade as the confederacy loses the Civil War. Even though, the movie is mainly centered on the dilemmas of Scarlett’s love life, there are many historical accuracies that immerse the viewer in the southern mindset as well as the timeframe. The portrayal of class structures and the confederate attitudes before the Civil War are both accurate and engaging details that the movie successfully implements. In the film, these examples are displayed mainly through the dialogue and setting.

This book is full of stories of the men who descend into the mines, and their women and children who wait for them to come out safe at the end of each shift are the subject of a, poet Diane Gilliam Fisher’s collection, Kettle Bottom. Set in 1920–21, a period of violent and brutal act against miners known as the West Virginia Mine Wars, the topic of the poems in Kettle Bottom. The stories includes the miners, their children, and most importantly their wives who suffered the consequences of their husband’s deeds. In Kettle Bottom, Diane Gilliam Fisher probes the emotional truth of coal camp history, and then extracts it, holds its darkness in the light of her brilliant poetic lines. Racism, Blood sheds, economic injustice, inhumane way to treat

Throughout Cultural Perspectives, many influential texts have been read, analyzed, and discussed. One text, Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis, integrates the thoughts of quite a few authors that have been discussed this semester. Through employing a Marxist view of history—there are always the “haves” and the “have-nots”—one can see that Life in the Iron Mills exemplifies the struggles that face many “have-not” citizens throughout history. One can then see the clear connections to various authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, W.E.B. DuBois, Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, and Adam Smith.

Class division has existed throughout time, both in its range of meaning and complexity of describing social division. The modern implications of class can be seen as a general word for groups or group distribution that has become more common. Rebecca Harding Davis’s short story Life in the Iron Mills, together with Raymond Williams’s entry Class delineates the oppressed lower class in a vivid and moving way, exemplifying the impact of social divisions on oppressed working labourers. Davis “embodies a grim, detailed portrayal of laboring life” (Pistelli 1) with an articulate correlation of Williams’s entry Class, structuring her narrative and focus of attention on gender, industrialization, immigration, and social divide. This essay

Jane Eyre and Incidents in the life of a slave girl are two opposite literary texts which, despite being 19th century texts, belong to different historical periods. Brontë sets her character in the Victorian England. Jacobs, on the other hand, writes about slavery during the civil war in order to relate the treatment of slaves, and more precisely that of female slaves. We will analyse, in this essay, the differences as well as the similarities which exist between Jane Eyre and Incidents in the life of a slave girl written by herself. We see that they differ in terms of genre, the period of history in which they find themselves, the way the characters are presented and so forth. However, they share some of the main

Life in the Iron Mills is a novella that is hard to classify as a specific genre. The genre that fits the most into this novella is realism, because of the separation of classes, the hard work that a person has to put into their every day life to try and make a difference, and the way society influences the actions of people and their relationships. However, no matter what genre is specifically chosen, there will be other genres present that contradict the genre of choice. While the novella shows romanticism, naturalism, and realism, this essay is specifically centered around realism. The ultimate theme in Rebecca Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills is the separation of classes and gender. It is the separation of classes when the people in the

The theme of the story concentrates on women's suffrage. Mrs. Wright apparently has been pushed over the edge with the restrictions set on her life and one day she finally snaps. This implicit theme suggest

James’ novella centers around a young governess who is in charge of watching her employer’s kids at an estate in Bly. The governess’ social standing and desire to keep her job reveal the instability of jobs for women in this era. Her employer, the uncle of Miles and Flora, is a typical wealthy

The play is based towards the end of the 19th century during the winter season in a traditional rural America farming town. The setting is "the kitchen in the now abandoned farmhouse of John Wright" where "signs of incompleted works" (Glaspell, 1916, p. 5) appear as "signs of incompetent" housekeeping to the men but as signs "of a disturbed consciousness" to the women (Noe, 1995, p. 39). The kitchen is described as