The Limits of Totality: Rebecca Harding Davis

For the nineteenth-century women workers themselves, it was the very nonexistence of a whole that made their lives livable, bearable, and, in the end, not simply a metonym for "injustice." Their stories and poems, letters and memoirs thus stubbornly refused to bear witness to a principle of full integration, full adequation,^[97] a refusal that, at the very least, should compel us to rethink the category of "commensurability," with its attendant constructs of body and mind, part and whole, material and immaterial, and its attendant suppositions about the ground for justice. Almost without exception, these women, even those writing for house organs such as the Lowell Offering , commented on the physical ordeal of work, the fatigue and often the disfigurations suffered by the body. In a series entitled "Letters from Susan," one author, Harriet Farley, complained that

the hours seemed very long . . . and when I went out at night the sound of the mill was in my ears, as of crickets, frogs, and jewsharps, all mingled together in strange discord. . . . It makes my feet ache and swell to stand so much, . . . they almost all say that when they have worked here a year or two they have to procure shoes a size or two larger than before they came. The right hand, which is the one used in stopping and starting the loom, becomes larger than the left.^[98]

What is remarkable, however, is that, such bodily afflictions notwithstanding, Farley also went on in the same letter to report that the factory girls "scorn to say they were contented, if asked the question, for it would compromise their Yankee spirit. . . . Yet, withal, they are cheerful. I never saw a happier set of beings. They appear blithe in the

mill, and out of it."^[99] From aching ears and swollen feet, it might seem a long way to cheerfulness, happiness, and blitheness. But it was just this strange transport—this improbable outcome given the point of departure—that structured the daily lives of the women workers. Harriet Hanson Robinson, who started working in the Lowell mills in 1834 at the age of ten, offered yet another account of this phenomenon in her memoir, Loom and Spindle , published in 1898 when she was seventy-three years old. From the distance of some sixty years, she could still remember the excitement of gainful employment, of having money in the pocket for the first time, and of the magical transformation the women underwent:

[A]fter the first pay-day came, and they felt the jingle of silver in their pockets, and had begun to feel its mercurial influence, their bowed heads were lifted, their necks seemed braced with steel, they looked you in the face, sang blithely among their looms or frames, and walked with elastic step to and from their work. And when Sunday came, homespun was no longer their only wear; and how sedately gay in their new attire they walked to church, and how proudly they dropped their silver four-pences into the contribution-box! It seemed as if a great hope impelled them,—the harbinger of the new era that was about to dawn for them and for all women-kind.^[100]

For women not accustomed to having earnings of their own, not accustomed to the luxury of city clothes or the luxury of church patronage, leaving home and working in a factory brought with it a psychological well-being that shone forth in spite of the physical ordeal of repetitive labor and long working hours. One was not reducible to the other or generalizable from the other, and that was precisely the point. For what was most remarkable about these accounts of factory life was surely the persistent lack of fit—the lack of absolute determination or absolute entailment—between standards of discomfort and states of mind, between the generalized conditions of work and the specific affect reported by the women workers. The women workers were workers, to be sure; they were bodies bound to machines, bodies that became aching ears and swollen feet. But they were women as well, and, as women, they had a prehistory significantly different from that of the men and a capacity for transformation (not to say a capacity for benefit) also significantly different. The experience of industrialization, it would seem, was not at all an integral experience,

not at all evenly registered or universally shared, but locally composed for each particular group, its composition being directly related to the antecedents out of which that group emerged.^[101] In the case of the women workers, coming as they did from under the shadow of the patriarchal household, the emotional satisfaction as newly independent wage earners might turn out to be as nontrivial a benefit as the physical drudgery of labor was an oppression. It is here, in the perpetual lack of adequation between these two registers, that we can speak of the "nontrivial" as a crucial evidentiary category, a crucial supplement to any model of presumptive totality and generalizability. And here as well we can speak of gender as an exemplary instance of the nontrivial, both in the relays it multiplies between body and mind and in the challenge it poses to their supposed integration.

What emerged, then, from these writings by women workers was a set of determinations that, while acknowledged, were also carefully kept from being too seamless, too absolute. Between the body and the person, and between the person and the class, there was always the possibility for inconclusiveness, always the possibility for imperfect alignment and contrary articulation. The bodies of the women told one story, their letters told another, and their organized strikes, it would seem, told yet a third. Lucy Larcom was speaking only in one of the many possible voices of the woman worker when she wrote:

One great advantage which came to these many stranger girls through being brought together, away from their own homes, was that it taught them to go out of themselves, and enter into the lives of others. Home-life, when one always stays at home, is necessarily narrowing. That is one reason why so many women are petty and unthoughtful of any except their own family's interests. . . . For me, it was an incalculable help to find myself among so many working-girls, all of us thrown upon our own resources, but thrown much more upon each others' sympathies.^[102]

Speaking in a voice related but not exactly identical, Larcom also mentioned that she was "dazzled" by the thought of "Mount Holyoke Seminary . . . as a vision of hope" and that "Mary Lyon's name was honored nowhere more than among the Lowell mill-girls."^[103] And it was in yet another related but not exactly identical voice that Sally Rice wrote the following letter, explaining why she did not want to leave the factory and go home to the "wilderness":

I can never be happy in among so many mountains. . . . I feel as though I have worn out shoes and strength enough walking over the mountains. . . . [A]nd as for marrying and settling in that wilderness, I wont. If a person ever expects to take comfort it is while they are young. . . . I am most 19 years old. I must of course have something of my own before many more years have passed over my head. And where is that something coming from if I go home and earn nothing. . . . You may think me unkind but how can you blame me for wanting to stay here. I have but one life to live and I want to enjoy myself as well as I can while I live.^[104]

We would be hard put to find a unified identity in these letters and memoirs by women workers.^[105] What confronts us instead are many circumstances for identities, identities imagined as well as lived, all rhetorically mediated and only partially harmonized. The women were not speaking out of a singular body called the "working class." They were not even speaking out of a singular body called the "person." For the person, in every respect, turned out to be less than a singularity but also more than a body. Like the human voice itself, at once rooted in the body which nourishes it but also miraculously unencompassed by that body, the person too is at once material and immaterial, at once a determinate presence and a field of incipience, no part of which—neither the swollen feet, nor the letter-writing self—could "do justice" to the whole, the very integrity of which was now shown to be something of a fiction.

In this sense, the writings of the women workers suggest one way to think about Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills (1861), to my mind one of the most interesting nineteenth-century attempts to write in defiance of a whole, in defiance of the canon of objective adequation, and therefore also one of the most interesting experiments in what we might call "incomplete justice"—if that is not too much of a contradiction in terms. That experiment begins, significantly, with a series of carefully specified nodal points where the story's transparency of determination is allowed to become opaque, to modulate into a paradox, an enigma, a relation of untranslatability. One such moment revolves around the central female character, Deborah, whose "thwarted woman's form," "colorless life," and "waking stupor that smothered pain and hunger" would seem to make her "fit to be a type of her class."^[106] The "fit" is by no means absolute, however, for generalizable as Deborah might seem, one can

nonetheless never be sure she is just that and no more than that. Certitude extends, in other words, only to what is verifiably there, not to what is unverifiably not. There is no final proof, for instance, that there is

no story . . . hidden beneath the pale, bleared eyes, and dull, washed-out-looking face, [where] no one had ever taken the trouble to read its faint signs: not the half-clothed furnace-tender, Wolfe, certainly. Yet he was kind to her: it was his nature to be kind, even to the very rats that swarmed in the cellar: kind to her in just the same way. She knew that. And it might be that very knowledge had given to her face its apathy and vacancy more than her low, torpid life. (22)

If the opaqueness of Deborah begins with a postulate of the unverifiable, something that might or might not be in her, it ends with something like a tribute to the inexhaustible, a condition that makes any determinate cause inadequate to the felt effects. Of course, what is inexhaustible here turns out to be Deborah's capacity for suffering, a capacity well in excess even of what her "low, torpid life" so amply supplies her. This fact, lamentable from one point of view, nonetheless gives Deborah something almost akin to the cheerfulness, happiness, and blitheness reported by Harriet Farley, Harriet Robinson, and Lucy Larcom—akin, in the sense that it also saves her from being a transcript of her material conditions, affirming in her the density and dignity of the unknown, untypified, unspoken for. Her greatest suffering comes not from her bodily deprivations but from the particular sort of kindness with which she is treated. In this unexpected fastidiousness (where one would have imagined simple gratitude), Deborah emerges less as a whole than as a qualification to that concept. She cannot be read metonymically for just that reason, for her identity is both overflowing and undersaturated, both unexhausted by her materiality and only partially accounted for by its determinations.

In the enigma of affect which Davis puts at the heart of a story that is otherwise relentlessly transparent, relentlessly determinate, Life in the Iron Mills stands as a testimony to the limits of totality, and perhaps to the limits of justice itself. Justice is clearly very much an issue in the story, though, I would argue, a vexed issue, at once invoked and circumscribed in the very terms of its invocation. "I want you to come down and look at this Wolfe," the narrative voice tells us, "that you may judge him justly." And it goes on:

Be just: when I tell you about this night, see him as he is. Be just,—not like man's law, which seizes on one isolated fact, but like God's judging angel, whose clear, sad eye saw all the countless cankering days of this man's life, all the countless nights, when, sick with starving, his soul fainted in him, before it judged him for this night, the saddest of all. (25–26)

In spite of Davis's repeated injunction to the reader to "be just," to arrive at a verdict that would presumably encompass the entire life of Hugh Wolfe, such a panoramic vision actually seems only to be the privilege of "God's judging angel," whose omniscient eye is in a position to see "all." Human laws, by contrast, would always be imperfect, limited by their partial vision, a limit imposed not only by the unavailability of justice as a fully viewable category but also by the unavailability of any human life to be judged as a "whole." That unavailability is further compounded by the phenomenon of loss in the routine of living, an involuntary attrition which, in making human agency porous in its effect, must render porous as well any notion of a recuperative universe.

"Something is lost in the passage of every soul from one eternity to the other,—something . . . which might have been and was not" (64), Davis writes at the end of Life in the Iron Mills . The "loss" here is perhaps loss in a general Wordsworthian sense, the loss incurred by the very unfolding of a human life. But, more specifically, it also seems to be the loss incurred by any attempt to engage the world, any attempt to translate from one experiential register into another. It is this loss that renders excruciating Deborah's love for Hugh—her nightly, mile-long walk to bring him dinner and, most fatally, her decision to steal for his sake—a love so untranslatable as to be virtually meaningless to its object. And it is this loss that renders excruciating Hugh's last attempt to engage the world in conversation. As he says good-bye to the last passerby outside his jail window, on what he knows to be the last day of his life, "a longing seized him to be spoken to once more":

"Joe!" he called, out of the grating. "Good-bye, Joe!"

The old man stopped a moment, listening uncertainly; then hurried on. The prisoner thrust his hand out of the window, and called again, louder; but Joe was too far down the street. (59)

The fragility of the human voice—its utter lack of guarantee, utter dependence on the recipient, its helplessness and involuntary silence

in the face of physical distance—thus dramatizes, for Davis, not only the incommensurability between the material and the immaterial, but also the incommensurability between self and world: a world that refuses to envelop us in reciprocity, to render back to us, in sonorous fullness, our need for attention, expression, conversation. The single most haunting image in Life in the Iron Mills is the fate of what is not translated, not received, not noticed. In ways at once accidental and agonizing, the sum of the parts is always greater than the whole here, for the whole, the supposed whole, is not so much an effect of our plenitude as an effect of our loss.

And yet it is through this loss—through the incommensurability of the material and the immaterial which occasions it—that Davis is able to offer the consolation (dubious to some, perhaps, but a consolation nonetheless) of human lives that are only partially determined, partially accounted for. That consolation marks the breakdown in a panoramic view of justice, a breakdown in its ability to tell a complete story, either about the collective life of the working class or even about the circumscribed life of a woman named Deborah. And indeed, to our surprise, Deborah, unlike Hugh, is allowed to survive, living a life "pure and meek" among the Quakers, in a "homely pine house" overlooking "wooded slopes and clover-crimsoned meadows" (63). That ending, improbable as it is, nonetheless seems nonabsurd to me: nonabsurd, not because it fully summarizes, fully integrates what has gone on before, but because it does not. There is no total justice here, only incomplete justice, incomplete both in the narrowness of its action and in the dissonance of its effects. With that incompleteness, and the nontrivial difference it nonetheless makes, Life in the Iron Mills enjoins us to rethink the very object of political philosophy—to rethink it outside its dominant claims of adequation and totality—an injunction that, thus far, would seem not only more humanly bearable but also more humanly precise.