An Analysis Of Rebecca Harding Davis's Life In The Iron-Mills

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The Industrial Revolution was a booming age for the United States that, though it brought many improvements in technology, caused many controversial events to take place.. Through the story Life in the Iron-mills, Rebecca Harding Davis proves the negativity of the factories from the Industrial Revolution. She proves this from personification, symbolism/metaphors, and also visual imagery. Rebecca Harding Davis proves through her writing, that the effect of industrialism in not pretty. Davis uses personification to illustrate to the reader the negativities of industrialism. “By night and day the work goes on, the unsleeping engines grouan and shriek, the fiery pools of metal boil and surge. Only for a day in the week, in half-courtesy …show more content…

Through this quote Davis uses clear personification to show how the engines were constant and compared them to what appears to be a dictating monster. Davis later tells the reader how she wants the public to view the main character, Hugh, who represents a main caught in industrialism. “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.” In this quote Davis shows how Hugh’s life has no opportunities, happiness, or change, like many of the other factory worker’s lives at the time. In another quote Davis illustrates how desperate Hugh becomes; …show more content…

Davis starts by describing the workers in a unhealthy and rather revolting way; their health condition a result of the factory conditions: “..thousands of them, massed, vile, slimy lives, like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt..” Davis later goes on to use a graphic lines of similes to describe the mill from a factory worker’s eyes. “Fire in every horrible form: pits of flame waving in the wind; liquid metal-flames writhing in tortuous streams through the sand; wide cauldrons filled with boiling fire, over which bent ghastly wretches stirring the strange brewing; and through all, crowds of half-clad men, looking like revengeful ghosts in the red light, hurried, throwing masses of glittering fire. It was like a street in Hell.” The author later even describes the factory from a point of view from a man of a the richer class: “One could fancy these red smouldering lights to be the half-shut eyes of wild beasts, and the spectral figures their victims in the den.” Rebecca Harding Davis here uses similes and metaphors to show the negativity of

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