Comparison Of Life In The Iron Mills And The Yellow Wallpaper

Literary realism’s goal is to invoke compassion within its readers. By learning and experiencing something of the characters’ lives in the story, one of the hopes for realism is that by invoking sympathy within the reader, social injustice may be dealt with.
Two examples that use form such as imagery to reach the end goal of compassion are Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills uses an embedded narrative to tell the story of Deb and Hugh, and the daily struggles of Deb’s life. Life in the Iron Mills was written in 1861, two years prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. The goal of this story is to feel compassion for those in the lower

class and to attempt to change the structure of the American class hierarchy.
An unnamed middle-class narrator begins the story by describing the town in which the story takes place. It is described as a town filled with smoke.
“The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron foundries, and settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats, on the yellow river-clinging in a coating of greasy soot to the house-front, the two faded poplars, the faces of passers-by” (3).

Following the description of the hazardous town, the unnamed narrator then proceeds to tell the story of Deb and Hugh, and how thirty years ago, Hugh was a furnace tender at a rolling mill.
Deb is cousin to Hugh, has a hunchback, and lived in the cellar room of the house that now belongs to the narrator. Hugh and Deb live with a servant girl named Janey. Hugh and Deb’s story starts with Deb returning home from a twelve-hour shift at a cotton mill where she works as a cotton picker. As she sits down to eat her cold supper, she learns that Hugh forgot his dinner. Putting Hugh’s needs before her own, she gathers up his supper and walks a mile in the rain and smoke-filled street to take Hugh his supper. She loves Hugh, and is constantly striving to please him. Hugh only half-heartedly eats his supper in an attempt to please her. He feels sorry for Deb. Hugh is repulsed by her hunchbacked appearance, and is shown to favor Janey. Deb is well aware of this, but still continues to try her best to please Hugh. Her unrequited love for him is what compels her to keep trying.
The working conditions Hugh endured and his predicament of being in jail after the stolen money incident eventually compels him to commit suicide.
The iron mill alludes to workers in a factory setting or government setting that often are unnoticed and unappreciated. The iron mill is described as a machine that never ceases to quit working.
“Not many of even the inhabitants of a manufacturing town know the vast machinery of system by which the bodies of workmen are governed, that goes on unceasingly from year to year. The hands of each mill are divided into watches that relieve each other as regularly as the sentinels of an army. By night and day the work goes on, the unsleeping engines groan and shriek, the fiery pools of metal boil and surge”. (6).
By writing about workers and factory life in such a bleak, dismal setting, it is clear that Davis’ goal is invoke compassion within the readers and ignite in them a passion for change.

The grim conditions under which the factory works do their jobs is unhealthy, and a bad place to work. Change needed to be made in the social class system, and workers needed to be given federal work laws, which would not be enacted for several more years, but Harding’s Life in the Iron Mills was a step in the right direction.
Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper was written in 1892. The story takes place in the late nineteenth century. The story is told from a first person narrator, a young woman of upper class status who is suffering from post partum depression after she gives birth to their child. The Yellow Wallpaper seeks to invoke sympathy from the reader by allowing us an inside view of the narrator’s life as she tells it. We are witness to her struggles right from the very beginning of the story.
“If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do? . . .
So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again”

(131).
The narrator has no control over her own life.

Her husband, a physician, as well as others in her life, urge her in a passive way to be silent about her health matters. Her husband John believes that he is superior to her, in both intelligence and in general. Due to their “concerns” about her well being, she is confined to a single room in the house and is not allowed to move freely about the estate. We see her gradual descent into madness as the narrator struggles to find a way to adapt to her confinement of the one room.
She has nothing to keep her entertained, so she finds herself becoming fascinated with the yellow wallpaper.
“"It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper – the smell! ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell” (140-141).
The narrator’s descent into madness deepens as the story progresses, and eventually she imagines women in the wallpaper, and that she is one of them and is among them.
“For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way” (144).
By this point, her sanity is completely gone and her reliability is considered nonexistent by the story’s

end.
The Yellow Wallpaper not only reflects Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s struggles with postpartum depression but also a general depiction of what women had to endure during the nineteenth century. Women were seen as second-class citizens to men due to their duties as obedient housewives. This story does a fine example of showing how women were kept ignorant and were often prevented from reaching their full potential. Women did not have much of a say in their lives. In The Yellow Wallpaper, her husband dictates the narrator’s life. Her mind is the only form of escapism where she can be in control of her life. Her mind is where she is safe. By the book’s end, she has gone completely insane, and continues to creep around the room, even after her husband is knocked unconscious.
The Yellow Wallpaper seeks to invoke sympathy from its readers by providing an insight of what women in the nineteenth century had to endure. Often diagnosed with hysterics, their lives were reduced to confinement within their own homes, or treated differently and not taken seriously when out in public. They seemed destined to live a life within the shadows of their husbands, and The Yellow Wallpaper provides a fine example of what life was like for women during that time frame, and its goal is to gain compassion from its readers.
While entirely different stories, Life in the Iron Mills and The Yellow Wallpaper both detail the hardships of the lives of women during the nineteenth century, and literary realism’s goal of these two tales is to gain sympathy from the readers and raise awareness about events that transpired in the past, to prevent history from repeating itself and ensuring that it will not happen again.