Ребекка Хардинг Дэвис: Пионер американского реализма

American author and journalist

Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis (June 24, 1831 – September 29, 1910) was an American author and journalist. She was a pioneer of literary realism in American literature. She graduated valedictorian from Washington Female Seminary in Pennsylvania. Her most important literary work is the short story "Life in the Iron Mills," published in the April 1861 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. Throughout her lifetime, Davis sought to effect social change for African Americans, women, Native Americans, immigrants, and the working class, by intentionally writing about the plight of these marginalized groups in the 19th century.

Rebecca Blaine Harding was born at the David Bradford House to Richard and Rachel Leet Wilson Harding. Rebecca was the eldest of five children. After an unsuccessful entrepreneurial spell in Big Spring, Alabama, the family finally settled in 1836 in Wheeling, which at the time was in Virginia (in the portion of the state that is now West Virginia). At the time, Wheeling was developing into a productive factory town, the concentration of which was iron and steel mills. The environment of Rebecca's home town would later affect the themes and vision of her fiction, like "Life in the Iron Mills." Despite Wheeling's productivity and its accessible location along the Ohio River, Davis described the world of her childhood as having belonged to a slower, simpler time, writing in her 1904 autobiography Bits of Gossip that, "there were no railways in it, no automobiles or trolleys, no telegraphs, no sky scraping houses. Not a single man in the country was the possessor of huge accumulations of money such as are so common now", being before their invention in the Second Industrial Revolution.

During the earlier part of Davis's childhood, public schools in her hometown were not yet available. Her education was mainly undertaken by her mother, with occasional instruction from tutors. When Davis was fourteen, she was sent to Washington, Pennsylvania to live with her mother's sister, and attend the Washington Female Seminary. She graduated as class valedictorian in 1848, at the age of seventeen. Rebecca described the school as "enough math to do accounts, enough astronomy to point out constellations, a little music and drawing, and French, history, literature at discretion". Life in the Iron Mills, published in The Atlantic Monthly in April 1861, is regarded by many critics as a pioneering document marking the beginning of realism in American literature. She later met and became acquainted with Emerson whilst staying with Nathaniel Hawthorne during a trip she had long delayed to meet her publisher James T. Fields. She greatly admired both of these American writers. During this trip around the North, which originated with her publisher's desire to meet her personally, Davis also became close friends with her publisher's wife, Annie Adams Fields. Olsen's non fiction volume, titled Silences, was an analysis of authors' silent periods in literature, including writer's blocks, unpublished work, and the problems that working class writers, and women in particular, have in finding the time to concentrate on their art, and the second part of the book was a study of the work of Davis. In April 2013, a historical marker in Davis's honor was placed near Swanson Science Center, the site of the former McIlvaine Hall/Washington Female Seminary. The effort to place the marker there was led by Jennifer Harding, a Washington & Jefferson College English professor, who has no biological relationship to the author. The historical marker was the first dedicated to a woman in Washington, Pennsylvania. A thorough biography titled Rebecca Harding Davis: A Life Among Writers by Sharon M. Harris (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2018) appeared after biographical writing by Jane Atteridge Rose and Jean Pfaelzer.

"Life in the Iron Mills;" or, The Korl Woman is widely considered Rebecca Harding Davis's most significant work. Published in 1861 in The Atlantic Monthly, "Life in the Iron Mills" was one of the first works to explore industrialization in American literature. The short story saw its publication around the dawn of the American Civil War, and is one of Davis's earliest published works. It has become an important text not only for its artistic merit, but for its historical implications. Both its form and content were ground breaking at the time of its publication, being a narrative that follows the lives of laborers and the consequences of industrialization, in a traditionally realistic style. Though the short story is concerned with larger themes such as industrialization and the working class, Davis's depiction of Hugh Wolfe, and her command of realism allows the reader to focus on the individual within the labor class, and the consequences of its realities upon his heart and soul. In "Life in the Iron Mills," "Harding reveals what, historically was done to workers and suggests what could be done for them, moral education and social uplift."

Rebecca Harding Davis's literary style is most commonly labeled as realism. However, her literary works mark a transition from romanticism to literary realism, so they combine elements of Sentimentalism, Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism. For instance, "Life in the Iron Mills" uses sentimental elements such as a narrator who directly addresses the well defined reader, a didactic purpose, and characters in extreme situations for the purpose of emotionally stirring the reader to action. The short story also uses Romantic elements such as a statue symbolizing a spiritually hungry woman and owned by the narrator, reminiscent of the relic found in the custom house by the narrator of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. And it uses a realistic style with journalistic specificity and characters typical of their social class and speaking in its vernacular, comparable to that of writers in the height of American literary realism, which came two decades after the text was published.

Recurring themes in Rebecca Harding Davis's works are the social and political issues of the nineteenth century: the American Civil War, race, regionalism, the working class, and women.

Having lived in the steel town of Wheeling, West Virginia, Davis had first hand experience with the controversies and hardships associated with industrialism. She utilizes the theme of industrialism in Life in the Iron Mills by calling attention to the dark and dismal setting of the iron mills. She not only provides vivid imagery of the dismal landscape, but imagery of the working class as well. By exploring the effects of the iron mills on its inhabitants, Davis is able to depict her own concerns and frustrations associated with the marginalization of the working class. Davis's depiction of the daily routines of the laboring class is a common theme throughout her writing, and most importantly serves the purpose of unveiling the maltreatment of such individuals. Her goal in relating the physical and mental starvation that plagues the inhabitants of these mills is to urge her audience to form spiritual solutions to these issues rather than social solutions.