Life In The Iron Mills Summary

In Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills” there are two similar movements that play out in her short story. On one end we have this sense of realism which portrays the rural American (lower class) hardship of poverty and pollution. Davis paints this realist image by describing the harsh inhuman conditions immigrants faced when the “bully” aka the capitalist elite (the mill owners) employed them. And on the other end we see this sort of naturalist movement of social Darwinism throughout “Life in the Iron Mills.” Davis paints this naturalist image by describing the elites controlling the poverty-stricken workers with their naturalist fate in society. Both realism and naturalism share the same domain of the haves and have- nots.
Realism