The following text was developed for a class facilitation that partially focused on Rebecca Harding Davis's portrayal of social class divisions. A few questions are included to initiate a more critical reception of Davis's writing:
Social Class
Though Davis was “herself a daughter of gentility and comfort” (Davis 4), she was self-exposed to the class divisions in Wheeling, noticing that the poor lived a "dreary, demeaning, and toilsome” life (7). The opportunity to observe both her peers in the middleclass and “the world of industrial work” (7) obviously influenced Life in the Iron Mills greatly.
1. How does the upper class (namely, the men who visit the mills) view people like Hugh in Life in the Iron Mills? How is this similar to or different from current stereotypes regarding the poor?
2. What, according to Deborah, is the biggest factor separating her and Hugh from the upper class? Do you think she is right? Why or why not?
3. The narrator speaks to the reader assuming s/he is a member of a higher class than Hugh and Deborah. What do you think Davis’s reasons for doing this were? How do the narrator’s assumptions affect the representation of social class in the story?
4. Davis’s story was pretty radical when it was published because it put the horrible conditions of the poor in the spotlight, and attacked the idea of meritocracy as a means of advancing socially. It what ways does Life in the Iron Mills apply to social class divisions in our society today?
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