“Blocks of This Korl”: Substance as Feminist Symbol in “Life in the Iron-Mills”

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Notes

¹ Recognizing that “Life” was one of the first short stories to depict the horrors of American industrialism, Forster argues that the works of Davis and other women writers, such as Elizabeth Stoddard and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, prefigure the “high realism” of male writers like Henry James and William Dean Howells (66).

² In a 26 January 1861letter to James T. Fields, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Davis responds to an apparent rejection of her original title, “The Story of To-Day.” She suggests “Beyond” as her first choice for an alternative, claiming it is “suggestive of the subdued meaning of the story,” and offers “The Korl-Woman” as her second choice. Fields published the story as “Life in the Iron-Mills.”

³ Only after Hugh’s death does the narrator make any emotional or spiritual connection between the figure and the “korl-cutter” who created it, suggesting that perhaps Hugh’s spirit looks out from the sculpture’s “wan, woful face” (450), questioning whether there is life after death.

⁴ The word “carved” does not appear anywhere in “Life in the Iron-Mills.” Instead, Davis writes that Hugh spends his time “chipping,” “hewing,” and “hacking” the korl into shape (435). Knowles argues, in part, that since korl is not “amenable to carving” it exists only as an invention of Davis’s imagination (231).

⁵ More recently, the word corr has been used to indicate an “odd” amount or number, which still carries a connotation of excess or something left over, especially in connection with even-numbered countable objects (“corr”).

⁶ In editing her second work for The Atlantic Monthly, Margret Howth, Davis informed James T. Fields in 1861, “I would like Margret restored,” adding, “[M]y spelling calls out most rebelliously to your proof-reader to be let alone” (Letter, [Aug.] 1861). In a follow-up letter, she added a postscript, “Margaret – Is the proof reader quite killed?” (Letter, 17 Sept. [1861]). A year later, she wrote to Fields about “David Gaunt,” “I do wish Mr George Nichols would learn to spell before he corrects mine Papaws! Is that Webster? It looks like him – ” (Letter, 22 Aug. 1862).

⁷ Davis’s father was an “Anglo-Irish immigrant” and the Harding household had a “live-in Irish American servant” during Davis’s late-teenage years (Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis: A Life Among Writers 22).

⁸ In 1867, for example, Davis wrote to a Miss Chase seeking “some needed information” for “a long work” she was developing. Claiming she wants “to show as forcibly as [she] can the present needs … in both North and South” of those formerly enslaved and citing Miss Chase’s personal knowledge of the “freedmen” in “the Carolinas and Georgia,” Davis explains that she “would not have attempted such an undertaking without going [herself] to the South” but caring for “two baby children” keeps her at home and causes her to “rely on others for information.”

⁹ Knowles contends that Davis “took poetic license” in her revelation that Hugh was “yellow with consumption” (Knowles 231; “Life” 435). But the term “consumption” was used during the early to mid-1800s to define a whole range of diseases, including “nailers’ consumption,” as Knowles admits, citing a medical report by Wheeling Health Officer James E. Reeves (228, 231). Since the chief product of the Wheeling Mills was nails, Davis likely would have heard the term used frequently in Wheeling in reference to the various lung diseases that plagued the mill-workers.

¹⁰ Knowles bases her notion that Davis was unfamiliar with “drag down” on an advertisement found in the Intelligencer in which “Norton, Acheson & Co.” solicit “a number of workmen at their mill, for the ‘drag down.’” The advertisement adds, “We hope those for whom the advertisement is intended will know what ‘drag down’ means. We don’t” (qtd. in Knowles 225). Knowles provides the information to cast doubt on Davis’s knowledge of Wheeling industrial life, although she readily admits that she does not know whether the advertisement is written by Davis or by the paper’s editor.

¹¹ In an 1873 conference proceeding of the Cleveland Institute of Engineers in Middlesbrough, England, Charles Wood details historical attempts to develop a commercial use for slag, noting that the “soft and brittle nature” of the slag made it difficult to use for road building (77). Wood describes more profitable efforts that produced a substance “full of holes [that] is exceedingly light”; he notes that large bricks made of this mixture “possess great strength, with very little weight.”

¹² Two other characters in the story, Janey and the Quaker woman, also exhibit the incongruous characteristics of korl.

¹³ Patmore’s highly influential poem, originally published in 1854, venerates the image of the True Woman as one who is graceful and charming, who finds fulfillment in devoting herself to being a wife and mother (125–26).

¹⁴ The narrator states that Deborah will turn to whiskey when she no longer has any “stimulant in her pale life to keep her up” (432), and Hugh explains to Kirby, one of the mill owners, that the Korl-Woman may be hungry for “[s]ummat to make her live” (438). “Whiskey ull do it, in a way,” he suggests.

¹⁵ Readers must be cautioned here that this is Deborah’s interpretation of Hugh’s feelings about her and not Hugh’s own. Indeed, Hugh creates in his korl sculpture the same physical deformities he sees in Deborah. His artist’s eye, then, attempts to replicate the image his man’s eye perceives, not to improve upon it. In other words, the artist Hugh recreates the likeness of Deborah, not Janey, in his Korl-Woman.

¹⁶ The narrator describes Janey as having “real Milesian eyes … dark, delicate blue” (“Life” 432). According to Carey, the Milesians are a mythical people appearing in medieval Irish history, said to be Gaels who had left the Iberian Peninsula and eventually settled in Ireland (11).

¹⁷ See Mazurek (436–58) , Forster, and Curnutt (146–68) for more on Deborah’s role in “Life.”