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Essay On Life In The Iron Mills

Decent Essays

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 …show more content…

Hugh relies on his creative inspiration in life, valuing his talent that does not represent “a labourer, servant in husbandry, journeyman, artificer, handicraftsman, miner, or otherwise engaged in manual labour” (Williams 65). As can be seen, Davis’s use of narration expresses her desire for oppressive gender specific roles to carry over less meaning within social division, exemplifying Hugh’s intuitive perception of reality. The statue Itself functions as a synecdoche for the story that yields another point of Davis’s understanding between her relationship and subject matter with the audience. Hugh’s statue when rightly viewed, exemplified by Mitchell speaks the truth of workers’ existence that neither Hugh (whose speech becomes hesitant and sub literate when asked about the statue) nor the narrator seem capable of doing. As Mitchell reads the statue, lashing out against May’s understanding of it “asks questions of God” (Davis) just as the narrator hopes he or she will reveal the very lives of workers asking the “terrible dumb question” she or he cannot fully Drinkle 3 articulate. The statue coincides with Williams’s class theory that is “acquired [through] a special association with education” (Williams 61) as if educated upper class individuals are unable to depict reality seen through disadvantaged interpretations of stagnated working men. Life in the Iron Mills makes certain the

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