Life In The Iron Mills

19/03/13
The relationship of the soul to the body in Life in the Iron Mills
In Life in the Iron Mills the bodies of the miners have been invaded by their environment. The barriers of their skulls and skin have been breached and their hearts and souls are as smeared with soot as their hands. They are likened time and again to cats, dogs and horses, “dumb”, “stunned” beasts whose humanity flickers weakly under piles of pig iron and dirt. Davis not only attacks the false ideal of the healthy, masculine labourer, she argues that the human spirit is as tangible and vulnerable as the human form and when its existence is neglected and ignored, it does not disappear, but remains in torment. The demands of the iron mills destroys the physical form,
This time the other figure, the “unnamed Quaker woman” is not protected from the degradation of the iron mills by insincere detachment but by purity of spirit and purpose. As with the contrast drawn between Hugh and Mitchell, the disparity in the state of their souls is represented through their bodies. Unlike Deb, whose years of toil have hunched and crippled her form, the Quaker woman has a “homely body” with a “strong arm” and an equally “strong heart“. As Thomson writes, “her body functions are an efficient vehicle of her will”, whereas Deb’s body “emblematizes the unredeemed, subjugated body that impedes will” (572). Like Hugh, Deb’s spirit has been destroyed by neglect and the ability of her crippled body to impress her will upon her environment has vanished; both soul and body are all but destroyed. A salvation figure, perhaps a result of the author’s desire to present the reader with a model for positive action, the Quaker woman reflects the narrator’s understanding of the influence of the state of the body on the state of the spirit. She resolves to “make healthy and hopeful this impure body and soul” through “slow, patient Christ-love”, and when Deborah first notices her, she is carefully “laying straight the limbs” of Hugh’s body, suggesting that the first step towards preserving the memory of his soul is through correcting the bends and twists
Locked in his cell by iron window bars with “irons on his feet” he is imprisoned by the very material that his body has worked tirelessly to create. He has been almost totally reduced to an object and the narrator’s description of “A dull bit of old tin, not fit to cut korl” feels as apt a description of the man as the tin he is holding. And yet he ceases to scrap the bars of his cell and instead considers “his arms, looking intently at their corded veins and sinews”. Here again one sees layering approach to Davis’s presentation of Hugh. His body is physically constrained by leg irons, a metaphor for his life working at the iron mill, but beneath this, his soul is trapped by his body. His “corded veins and sinews” evoke images of rope and restraint, and Hugh’s decision to cut them can be read as a final, desperate bid for freedom. The narrator describes his sense of despair, “he knew how in those long years he should slowly die, but not until soul and body had become corrupt and rotten”. Again the narrator emphasis for the reader the link between the two. Hugh, realising that his trampled soul cannot retreat into cynicism and insincerity, nor can it entertain the hope of a purifying, Christian redemption, decides to destroy the corporeal form that binds his soul to his miserable existence, before it can be corrupted even further.
Thus, Hugh’s circumstances drive him to suicide;