Working Class Life
The narrator quickly delineates the life of the Wolfe family at the center of his tale and—by extension—the lives of all those like them in mill towns across the country:
“Their lives were like those of their class: incessant labor, sleeping in kennel-like rooms, eating rank pork and molasses, drinking.”
One of the elements which set this story apart, making it a transformative moment in American literature and a sensation out of its author, was its focus on the reality of working class lives. Poets such as Whitman had written of this kind of life, but had framed it in verse as a glorification. Davis brings home the harsh truth of daily existence in a way that hardly seems remarkably today, but was genuinely trailblazing at the time.
The Inequitable Value of Art and Commerce in America
At the center of the story is man who acts as a fragile connection the worlds of art and industry, aesthetics and commerce, purpose and usefulness. Within the bowels of the very same inferno in which Hugh Wolfe goes about his passion of korl sculpting within the same hellish inferno that he work as furnace-tender; in fact, his “rest” during off-hours consists of remaining inside the mill. As a furnace-tender, he is never as being particularly better nor worse than any other worker. As a sculptor, even the uneducated workers incapable of understanding his passion can recognize the quality of his work. For doing a job no better or worse than anyone else requiring no particular talents not shared by countless others, he is valued. For being a singularly distinctive artist with a talent he shares with nobody else, he is scorned and jeered; his work labor deemed unworthy of recompense.
Working Class Enslavement
The author subtly implicates the life of mill workers as parallel to that of bondage and slavery. (Keep in mind the coincidence of the story being published just as the Civil War was beginning). The hellish imagery which she describes the inner workings of the mill metaphorically situate that existence as eternal damnation. The river which runs through the city—essential to the business of running the mills—is the recipient of an unusually idiosyncratic bit of imagery:
“I used to fancy a look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river slavishly bearing its burden day.”
The most telling parallels drawn between institutional slavery and the bondage of mill work, however, comes during the tour of the factory with an understated connection. First, comes the revelation of the mystery man accompanying the recognizable figure of the son of the mill’s owner:
“a stranger in the city,—spending a couple of months in the borders of a Slave State, to study the institutions of the South,—a brother-in-law of Kirby’s.”
Mitchell’s links the slavery of the South directly to Kirby through their family relationship and through Kirby the connection to the mill is made complete when he asserts that the problems of the employees are not to be confused with being his own: “slavery, caste, white or black. My duty to my operatives has a narrow limit,—the pay-hour on Saturday night.” In other words, as long as they show up and do the job, they can enjoy as much of life as they can afford; if the owners are not happy with their work, those lives can be sacrificed as easily as a plantation owner sells a slave.
