[In the following essay, Rose asserts that Davis uses the artist manque in “Life in the Iron Mills,” “Blind Tom,” and other stories to exorcise her desire to be an artist by simultaneously asserting her desire and denying it.]

The narrator of Rebecca Harding Davis's “Life in the Iron Mills, or The Korl Woman” ¹ concludes the tragic tale of Hugh Wolfe's artistic failure by contemplating the artist's unfinished creation: “Nothing remains to tell that the poor Welsh puddler once lived, but this figure of the mill-woman cut in korl.” The “wan, woful face, through which the spirit of the dead korl-cutter looks out,” haunts the narrator, “with its thwarted life, its mighty hunger, its unfinished work.”²

It is not necessary to know this story of the redemptive death of Hugh Wolfe, the immigrant iron puddler who creates statues in odd moments at the mill, or of his devoted cousin Deb, to appreciate the presence of motifs central to feminist reading suggested by this passage. Wolfe emblemizes his own “reality of soul starvation, of living death” in his statue's “mad, half-despairing gesture of drowning” (23, 33). Like Hugh Wolfe's fictional life, the lives of nineteenth-century female writers are often revealed in their works. And often, like the statue of the korl woman, their texts delineate characters who are frustrated by their “thwarted life,” who are unsuccessful in their “unfinished work,” or who lack the fulfillment of their “mighty hunger.”

“Life in the Iron Mills,” like much of Rebecca Harding Davis's work, illuminates the nineteenth-century female experience. Although the novella usually attracts attention as a landmark in proletarian fiction and in naturalistic realism,³ this story, along with the rest of Davis's corpus, deserves more attention as a nineteenth-century woman's text.⁴ Like a number of her stories, it is a Künstlerroman of an artist manqué.⁵ Davis is here typical of nineteenth-century writing women, whose fictional female artists all experience various forms of failure.⁶

Because of the autobiographical relationship between the fictional artist and the female writer, the Künstlerroman of the artist manqué helps us to understand how female artists were affected by their ideological context.⁷ Literary women of the last century were inextricably entangled in a web of beliefs that made their successful development as artists difficult, if not impossible.⁸ Their fictions enact a conflict between an individual empowered with the potential for creative autonomy and the ideological restrictions undermining it. The winner in this contest, staged by female writers and waged by their fictive artist doubles, seems always to be domestic ideology. The individual artist fails, or surrenders, or turns traitor to her own cause.⁹

Rebecca Harding Davis's many Künstlerromane, written over a period of forty years, show that domestic ideology exerted its force at every stage of women's lives. When plotted chronologically beside her biography, variations in Davis's depiction of the artist and in the form of failure that each of her protagonists experiences reveal changes in her attitude toward her own role as a woman writer as her life progressed.¹⁰ These changes, which mark three specific stages in her life, roughly coincide with the three defining elements of the artist manqué: the young artist, whose socially determined identity prohibits her free artistic expression, is frustrated; the mature artist, who attempts to reconcile her artistic identity with a domestic one in a society that defines the two as antithetical, is unsuccessful; and the older artist, who has long ago renounced art in order to realize a life as wife and mother, lacks fulfillment.

Though she sometimes defied or denied certain social expectations regarding her life and her work, Rebecca Harding Davis was a white, Protestant, middle-class woman of the nineteenth century. As such, she sincerely maintained many received domestic values concerning the role of women even though they conflicted with her artistic desire. Her fiction, like that of other female writers in this milieu, demonstrates that within domestic ideology the role of women was culturally invested with a number of values that determined self-perception.¹¹ For these women, the egoistic self-assertion necessary for an artist was antithetical to the passive, self-abnegating service that defined femininity. As a result, their texts, like Davis's, are often conflicted, especially when they treat artists striving to retain their integrity without disenfranchising themselves from society.

In her own life, Davis was constantly mediating the conflicting values that marked the nineteenth-century female writer and her texts. For instance, although, like other girls of her class, she returned to her parents' home after graduating as valedictorian from her three-year education at the Washington (Pennsylvania) Female Seminary, she not so typically lived a life of retirement there for the next twelve years—reading her brother's college books and writing, only rarely participating in the precourtship social life of her hometown, Wheeling, West Virginia. The facts of Davis's long life show that she continued, with remarkable success, to mediate between her equally strong antithetical desires to be a good writer and to be a good wife-mother.¹² However, her fictional enactments of this same conflict, which always delineate a failed artist, hint at her concern that in art, at least, compromise is a form of failure. Struggling against compromise leads only to frustration; acquiescing to it brings the pain of being unfulfilled.

Though men, her earliest artists of the 1860s, Hugh Wolfe of “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861) and the Tom of “Blind Tom” (1862), articulate the frustration experienced by female artists.¹³ Here, political issues that also pertain to gender are played out as problems of class. In both these stories, the protagonist's artistic freedom is prohibited by his socially prescribed role. The capitalists and slave owners, who define and limit, oppress the uneducated laborers and slaves, who have been limited by social definition. Domestic ideology also limited the potential of a class. Although Davis, like most nineteenth-century women, accepted her female definition as God-ordained, she maintained that society had erroneously limited that definition. This was particularly true early in her career when she suffered most from its restrictions.

Davis's Hugh Wolfe is frustrated in life by the inhumane economic forces that determine his inability to fulfill his creative desire, to finish his sculpture. His talent brings anguish, not joy because the korl woman fails to communicate Wolfe's inarticulate longing.¹⁴ She is an insoluble puzzle to the mill officials who discover her—“some terrible problem lay in this woman's face, and troubled these men” (34). Worse, as expression stimulates greater comprehension, her full meaning remains outside her creator's ken also; all Wolfe can say is “She be hungry” (33). Like his statue of the korl woman, Hugh Wolfe fails to satisfy his hunger, to use his power, to find his voice; he kills himself. Davis's first protagonist, like the artist figure in the fiction of most female writers of this period, is both oppressed and repressed.

The anguish of frustrated creative desire voiced by her first artists, who, like Wolfe, cry that “all the world had gone wrong” (51), seems very close to Davis's own frustration as a young woman beginning her writing career. Never overtly defiant, Rebecca Harding—an anomaly in her time as a spinster apparently unconcerned about approaching thirty in the home of her parents, interested only in pursuing her unorthodox literary interests—surely knew frustration. She must have felt it as she exhausted her father's extensive library; as she mastered her brother's college curriculum; as she wrote, rewrote, and discarded innumerable manuscripts. Although at this time she had no name for her frustration, she would later repeatedly show her female protagonists rebelling against “decorative uselessness” and against the notion that purity requires innocence. Her frustrated desire to escape these restrictions at least temporarily is probably what first led her to develop her lifelong fondness for “vagabonding”: hours-long walks with no predetermined destination.

Her vagabonding was itself a perhaps unconscious strategy for negotiating between illicit desire and propriety. Aimlessly, yet decorously, walking, she could escape the protective confines of her comfortable home in Wheeling and experience the nearby sights and sounds of its industrial riverfront, considered inappropriate for young ladies. She could know “the fog and mud and foul effluvia” of slums, where people passed “with drunken faces,” going to the factories where “unsleeping engines groan and shrick” (“Iron Mills” 14, 19).

Not surprisingly, Davis created her greatest number of male protagonists during this early period marked by frustration. Even as she wrote of artists whose freedom was restricted, her own artistic freedom was limited because she was a young woman; vagabonding could not take her everywhere. While her work was appearing in nearly every number of Atlantic Monthly and being praised by the Boston literati, family concern for propriety forced Davis to remain isolated at home.¹⁵ In 1862, she lacked an escort and thus could not accept the repeated invitation of her Atlantic editor, James T. Fields, and his wife, Annie, to visit their home in Boston. In a letter to Annie Fields, she voiced her irritation over women's restrictions, complaining, “How good it must be to be a man when you want to travel.”¹⁶ In her fictive projections of frustrated artistic desire, Davis seems to have transcended her own specific gender oppression, transferring it to male protagonists and issues of class in “Iron Mills” or race in “Blind Tom.”

In these early stories, Davis created an antagonism between her protagonists and their society, which thwarts artistic development, silences expression, and inhibits self-comprehension. The conflicts of the early fictional artists suggest that anger at restricted artistic freedom composed at least one dimension of her own attitude toward society. Davis's ambivalence toward her frustrated creative desire and her guilt about being a woman with this desire are evident in every narrative strategy from her use of multiple anonymous identities to her ambivalent plots.¹⁷ These strategies are nowhere more evident than in “Iron Mills.”

The conclusion to this story illustrates Davis's attempt to detach herself from her artist's tale. Here she amplifies the usual doubling of the Künstlerroman writer through her artist protagonist and creates a quadruple relationship between herself, the narrator, the protagonist, and the statue. Davis, the female author, has created a narrator whose sex is not designated and, therefore, particularly in 1861, would be assumed masculine. This fictive narrator—a writer, an artist, and a musician—sits in his library, amid such value-laden objects as “a broken figure of an angel pointing upward,” a “dirty canary chirp[ing] desolately in a cage” (12), “a half-moulded child's head,” and a rendering of Aphrodite (65). The narrator is pondering the mystery of a female statue, made of refuse korl, with “not one line of grace in it: a nude woman's form, muscular, grown coarse with labor, the powerful limbs instinct with some one poignant longing” (32). In this female image, the narrator comprehends the “spirit of the dead korl-cutter.” He tells the story of its creator, Hugh Wolfe, the immigrant iron-foundry worker and repressed artist who committed suicide with his own sculpting knife rather than be confined in a jail, knowing only that “the world had gone all wrong” (51).

The narrator, the protagonist, and the statue are each a projection of spiritual longing. Davis projects her animus through her male narrative voice and her male artist protagonist and then, further, through them into their shared anima projection, the korl woman. It is this object that communicates “something pure and beautiful, which might have been and was not: a hope, a talent, a love, over which the soul mourns, like Esau deprived of his birthright” (64). The narrator ends the tale by looking on this image of desperate soul-starvation and saying simply, “I know” (64), uniting all the identities in sympathy with the repressed artist's “thwarted energy and unused power” (46).

Although Davis's cross-dressing of her protagonist as well as her narrator is extreme in “Iron Mills,” the autobiographical relationship between the artist-writer and her artist-creation asserted in this closing passage illuminates an anxiety of authorship that seems particularly female. The statue of the korl woman, to which the narrator has fallen heir, stands “in a corner of [the] library” in order to “keep it hid behind a curtain.” But like any repressed desire, sometimes at night “the curtain is accidentally drawn back,” and “its mighty hunger, its unfinished work” are painfully visible (64).

Davis's artists are also frustrated because they are anomalous in a worldview based on rigid gender distinction. In “Iron Mills” Hugh Wolfe, the protagonist, is frustrated not just in his creative desire but also in his social relationships. A frail consumptive with a “meek, woman's face,” he is known as one of the “girl-men” at the mill. Because of his atypical sensitivity, the other men call him “Molly Wolfe” (24). Although it is more emphasized in her early works, Davis's artist protagonists are always androgynous, making them larger as artists but painfully less as social beings. This is true for most of the female artists of her later work also: Jane Derby, a professional writer in Earthen Pitchers, is typical in that she was aware of her unattractive “hard eyes; and that her lips were thin and her breast flat. ‘Even Nature,’ she said to herself, ‘forgot that I was a women.’”¹⁸

In “Blind Tom,” published the year after “Iron Mills,” Davis grappled with another frustration for the creative spirit that was common to the experience of many women who, like herself, wanted to write stories unlike the sentimental romances considered appropriate for female authors. This story of an enslaved genius confronts the evil of sanctioned control over individual talent rather than the repression of it. It is basically a true account of a blind slave boy, who was owned by a south Georgia planter.¹⁹ Tom was a musical prodigy of such unexplainable dimension that he was treated as an idiot savant, performing in packed concert halls throughout the slave states and even at the White House. Davis's account apparently results from her having seen his performance at one of these concerts. Although she had no insight into what Tom's soul longed to play, she was most pained by those moments in his concert when it became clear that he could not play what he wanted:

the moments when Tom was left to himself,—when a weary despair seemed to settle down on the distorted face, and the stubby little black fingers, wandering over the keys, spoke for Tom's own caged soul within. (585)

Davis, who in the writing of stories like “Blind Tom” was trying to break free of restrictions about appropriate subject matter and tone, keenly perceived that, like so many female writers of the period, the slave was not even free to use his gift as he chose. The music of Tom—like the statue of Hugh Wolfe, and the stories of their creator, a minimally educated young woman from West Virginia—proves that the divine spark of talent can appear in socially unacceptable, disenfranchised individuals. It also reminds us that, for the artist who must serve the two masters of self and society, creative desire can bring the gifted as much pain as it does joy.

The frustrated male artists of her early pieces, such as “Iron Mills” and “Blind Tom,” are also deformed. Though not physically impaired like Tom, Wolfe is considered by others to be deficient as a man. Also Deb Wolfe—who, though not an artist, shares the role of protagonist with her cousin—is a hunchbacked cripple. These protagonists all bear the physical mark of their anomalous, alienated condition. They suggest an anxiety felt by Davis, at this time a young woman in pursuit of art, that deformity was somehow concomitant with her vocation.

Rebecca Harding Davis's middle period is marked by her becoming a wife and mother. She married L. Clarke Davis and moved to his sister's Philadelphia home in March 1863. There Davis gave birth to her first son Richard on April 18, 1864, and she moved with husband and baby into the first home of her own in September of that year. Her third and last child was born in 1872. After her marriage at the age of thirty-one, Rebecca Harding Davis's personal life became more typical of that known by most wives in middle-class America, except that her domestic situation seems to have been happier than most. In her marriage to L. Clarke Davis, she enjoyed an experience rare in either the nineteenth or the twentieth century: she married a man who had first fallen in love with her mind through her writing. Clarke Davis always championed his wife's career; however, as a crusading journalist, his own literary taste for didactic fiction and the journals that specialized in it served to discourage her pursuit of objective realism. The work of Davis's middle period, primarily written in the late 1860s and 1870s, begins to take a view of the artist that differs from her earlier work. The change in her fiction parallels the great change in her life at this time from anomalous spinster and aspiring author to wife-mother and successful author.

While her earlier stories feature frustrated male artists whose creativity is stifled by their oppressive society, those written during this period, like “The Wife's Story” (1864) and “Marcia” (1876), feature female artists struggling with more internal conflicts. They also bear a greater resemblance to Davis in their ambivalence toward society and their prescribed role in it. These women must choose between feminine, maternal domesticity and egoistic, artistic ambition.²⁰ The Künstlerromane, written during this time when Davis was herself trying to integrate art with domesticity, reify the idea that the role of wife-mother and the role of artist are mutually exclusive.²¹ The protagonists of these stories are unsuccessful because, either by external societal judgment or by their own, their pursuit of art causes them to fail as women or their need to accept their womanhood causes them to fail as artists.²²

Interestingly, while Davis repeatedly enacted the failure of artistic domestic resolution in her fiction, in her own life she was attaining it, though compromising quality to do so. Always writing at home, she never allowed pursuit of her art to take precedence over her role as wife-mother. Writing became, in these years, work of secondary importance. Fragments of a journal, written during this time, talk only about Pet (Clarke), Hardy (Richard), Charlie, and Nolly (Nora); entries rarely mention the writing for publication that was occurring at the same time.²³ However, the constant reiteration of anxiety over failure in her fiction at this time suggests that Davis considered her recent move toward journalistic writing a sign of artistic failure.

The earliest of these tales, “The Wife's Story,” marks a transition in Davis's attitude. This story reveals changes in her depiction of the artist and in her own narrative technique. This first appearance of a narrating protagonist is made doubly significant in that it is also one of her first stories in which the protagonist is a woman. Hetty, the wife, begins: “I will tell you the story of my life, since you ask it … though the meaning of the life of any woman of my character would be the same” (177). In this story—filled with the need to transfer, act out, and punish guilty desire—Davis's narrating protagonist, Hetty Manning, is an unhappy new wife-mother who longs to be a composer of opera. After she suffers humiliating failure in her one attempt to realize her dream, she renounces her artistic ambition for domesticity. Although the overt theme of this story is the necessary female renunciation of art, the story deconstructs itself with the voice of desire speaking more eloquently than the voice of guilt.²⁴ Suddenly, in the last pages, the reader is asked to disregard the protagonist's struggle against allowing “this power within me to rot and waste” (204), which has composed the entire story, as merely a hysterical dream. However, the dream has been so powerful that the reality is hard to accept.

Hetty, a New England woman who “had an unquiet brain and moderate power” (181), has been strongly influenced by Margaret Fuller. She is a recurring character type in Davis's fiction, suggestive of anxiety. A mature woman of developed sensibility who has married, rather late, a widower with several children, Hetty finds it impossible to acclimate herself to her new domestic role. She feels no kinship with her new family of exuberant but insensitive Westerners or even with her own new baby daughter, “a weazen-faced little mortal, crying night and day” (192). Having been raised on Fuller's motto, “The only object in life is to grow,” she finds herself unable to abandon her dream:

There had been a time when I had dreams of attaining Margaret's stature, and as I thought of that, some old sublime flame stirred in me with a keen delight. New to me, almost; for, since my baby was born, my soul as well as my body had been weak and nauseated. (192)

In addition to Fuller's influence, the memory of Hetty's previous acquaintance with Rosa Bonheur haunts the fictional protagonist of this story. She remembers the Parisian artist saying of her art: “Any woman can be a wife or mother, but this is my work alone” (193). A new wife and mother, Hetty sits in the hearth glow of domestic peace, amid “the white bust of Psyche, and a chubby plaster angel” (185), and agonizes over her unrealized talent—her “gift,” her “power”—asking, “was I to give it unused back to God? I could sing: not that only; I could compose music,—the highest soul-utterance” (193). She regrets her marriage, realizing, “If I remained with Doctor Manning, my role was outlined plain to the end: years of cooking, stitching, scraping together of cents” (194). Hetty's crime in this story is twofold: the rejection of her domestic role and the assertion of artistic egoism. “No poet or artist,” she says, “was ever more sincere in the belief that the divine power spoke through him than I” (197).

Hetty does not leave her husband, though, and when events cause the family to move to Newport, Rhode Island, she eagerly goes too. There, Hetty meets an impresario from New York who is willing to produce her opera and to feature her in the leading role. One day, after long and troubled deliberation, she finally decides to do her opera. Her decision occurs during a solitary walk on the beach, in contemplation of the sea's affinity with her own soul: “It [the sea] was no work of God's praising Him continually: it was the eternal protest and outcry against Fate,—chained, helpless, unappealing” (200). When produced, her opera fails; the audience's rejection of her composition and of her performance is described in humiliating detail. This scene illuminates another dimension of the female artist's anxiety. In addition to fearing the consequences that will befall her rejection of the divinely ordained domestic role, there is the very real fear of independence. Independence is fantasized as a double-edged sword that is both attractive and frightening. Hetty leaves the theater penniless, homeless, hungry, ashamed, and beaten:

If the home I had desolated, the man and child I had abandoned, had chosen their revenge, they could not have asked that the woman's flesh and soul should rise in me with a hunger so mad as this, only to discover that [I would fail]. (213)

However, Davis has not yet punished her artist self-projection enough. Hetty soon discovers that her loving husband has been in the audience and has had a heart attack. Racked with grief and guilt, she wanders the Bowery, longing for death, until she awakes to find that the entire attempt at being an artist has all been a dream of her “brain-fever,” which has hit her while out by the sea (217). Renouncing art as an enticing false value, she joyfully accepts her regained life as wife and mother.

The brain-fever, by which the dream-state rebellion of the new wife-mother in this story is both explained and excused, was a condition that Davis knew. “The Wife's Story” was written sometime during the first year of Davis's marriage when she was living with her husband's family in a strange city. She was also suffering a difficult pregnancy, which in its early stages was marked by a type of nervous breakdown, then called “brain-fever.” Interestingly, her physician for this illness was probably S. Weir Mitchell, a family friend, who treated her, as he did Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of “The Yellow Wall-paper,” by restricting her reading and her writing.²⁵ Although Davis's story reflects a far less individuated response to the experience than Gilman's, it similarly illuminates the tragedy of a female writer's repressed, guilty desire.

Other tales of artistic-domestic conflict during this period—“Clement Moore's Vocation” (1870), Earthen Pitchers (1873–74), and “The Poetess of Clap City” (1875)—repeat variations on the theme of failure anxiety that appears in “A Wife's Story.”²⁶ In each case the protagonist fails as an artist because she is internally or externally impelled to abandon art for womanhood. Sometimes she is tragically forced to surrender to social forces greater than herself, as in “Marcia,” Davis's darkest, most realistic vision of the failed artist.

The story “Marcia,” like “The Wife's Story,” is typical of Davis's middle period in that it dramatizes an attempt to mediate the conflict between art and domesticity that ends in failure. Also like Hetty, Marcia Barr, the would-be writer from Yazoo, Mississippi, is a recurring female type in Davis's fiction who reflects another facet of Davis's self-image during this middle period. Marcia is courageous in her determination to break out of the oppressive rural culture that trapped her opium-addicted mother. Marcia describes her mother, a woman with “one of the finest minds in the world,” more like a slave than a plantation mistress. She has never been “further than twenty miles from the plantation; she has read nothing, knows nothing” (925). Marcia herself is proud of her refusal to compromise her dream by accepting a protected life of marriage to a man who, like her father, “thinks women are like mares—only useful to bring forth children.” But, according to the professional writer who narrates the story, she is tragically innocent:

The popular belief in the wings of genius, which can carry it over hard work and all such obstacles as ignorance of grammar or even the spelling-book, found in her a marked example. (926)

Although Marcia resembles Davis's young rebellious artists, her story, told from the perspective of the older narrator reveals a compromised vision that comes with age.

However, the narrator is moved by Marcia's valiant, if ingenuous, battle for independence. Marcia struggles to find work writing, suffering hunger and also frustration because she has “something to say, if people only would hear it” (927). After several years, when she has become a ragged, gaunt writer of social and commercial puffs for the papers, Zack Biron, her father's plantation overseer, comes to find her and take her home. He is “an ignorant, small-minded man” (926), but he is genuinely horrified by Marcia's straits and determined that she be cared for “like a lady” (928). In the narrator's description of the leave-taking of the new Marcia, “magnificent in plumes, the costliest that her owner's [husband's] money could buy,” this story voices both sadness at Marcia's failure and horror at her victimization. Without question, defeat is total as Marcia hands the narrator her unpublished manuscripts, asking, “Will you burn them for me? All: do not leave a line, a word” (928).

The voice of the author is totally conflicted in this story. The narrator, a writer and successful publisher whose own sex is fascinatingly indeterminate, voices attitudes that more closely resemble Davis's at this time than does the protagonist.²⁷ The narrator is ambivalent toward Marcia—admiring her grit and integrity, pitying her victimization, and blaming her innocence. Figures like Marcia, idealists who fail, reappear as admonitions in Davis's fiction and essays of this middle period and later. There is always much of Rebecca Harding, the young woman from West Virginia, in them. But in this story, Davis seems to have split herself into two; there is also much of her in the narrator, who constantly needs to validate the compromises she has made.

Most of Davis's middle-period artists are not as overtly victimized as Marcia Barr. More often, indoctrinated and defined by domestic ideology, their failure results from a subtler self-destruction. Usually, like Hetty Manning, the female artist voluntarily forsakes art in order to fulfill her redemptive role as wife-mother. This is the choice made by Maria Heald, the artist in “The Poetess of Clap City,” and it is the true work discovered by the artist protagonist in “Clement Moore's Vocation.” Earthen Pitchers, a serialized novel from Davis's middle period, enacts the title's implications: that the transcendent or autonomous motive of art is antithetical to the corporeal, serving nature of woman's domestic being. In this novel, Audry Swenson, a musician of promise, witnesses the atrophy of her unused talent; her complement, Jane Derby, a successful journalist, also renounces professional achievement for domesticity. The resolutions of all these stories are painfully ambiguous regarding the tragedy or the wisdom of the protagonists' choices. They assert more than anything else a psyche in conflict. Like Maria in “The Poetess of Clap City,” the two artists in Earthen Pitchers are forced to confront the facts that undeveloped power atrophies and wasted talent is irrevocably lost. Davis's fictional artists of this middle period fail in their attempts to deny their domestic role or to mediate it with their artistic aspirations. Their eventual success as wives and mothers is undermined by awareness of their failure as artists. Interestingly, Davis allows none of these artists the option of mediation through compromise that she herself chose.

These Künstlerromane were written by Davis at a time when she was enjoying the fulfilled life of a happily married mother of three children. But they are also the stories of a writer who, though always writing, was forsaking her talent, producing increasingly less of the intense, demanding fiction of which she was capable. Instead of submitting to the respected journals that continued to solicit her work, at this time she was more often submitting easy potboilers for popular children's and women's fashion magazines. These are what she had time and energy for, but the continued occasional appearance of her work in better journals demonstrates that she still knew and valued quality in her own writing. In her artists of this period, we see her ambivalence about the life she had chosen. Unlike the domestic contentment found in much of her fiction of this period, her stories of artists feature women who voice both anxiety about the compromising of their maternal, female role with their egoistic artistic desire and guilt about being unable to renounce that desire successfully.

The transition to the next period in Davis's fiction is marked by her development of an artist manqué in A Law Unto Herself (1877), written just a few years after Earthen Pitchers.²⁸ Cornelia Fleming, the female artist in this novel, is a minor character whose primary role is that of the other woman in a love triangle. However, she suggests a change in the nature of Davis's anxiety about her art from guilt to regret, which marks the older female artist. In the creation of this character's unfulfilled life, Davis seems again to be transferring attitudes to her characters; however, this instance seems motivated by the author's insecurity. Cornelia's inability to find fulfillment, which reinforces the idea that domestic desire cannot be repressed or mediated, hints at Davis's need for reassurance about the choice she herself had made. Even though Cornelia's failure at love has permitted her pursuit of art, she still finds herself unable to find satisfaction without domestic definition. In this case, Cornelia's singular pursuit of art results from, rather than causes, her inability to find completion in her womanhood. This scenario differs from those of Davis's previous period, in which the pursuit of art threatens success as a woman, and from those of her later period, in which the pursuit of domesticity causes her lack of fulfillment as an artist.

At the close of this story, Cornelia, who has lost the man of her dreams to the novel's protagonist, finally settles in Rome and brings to its artist colony all her frustrated domestic desire; “she makes her studio one of the pleasantest resorts for the young artists in Rome.” There, with “her hair cut short” and “man's collar,” she attempts to have both worlds—domestic centrality and artistic autonomy—but she fails to be successfully fulfilled by either. “A good fellow, Corny,” the other artists say, “but what a pity that she is not a man” (731). Cornelia's ironic unfulfillment seems to reify Davis's fears about the impossibility of a woman's successful denial of her domestic urges: Cornelia is not only an artist manqué, she is also a male manqué.

When she wrote this story, Davis was the mother of three children, ranging in age from five to thirteen. She was also the wife of the editor of Philadelphia Inquirer. Davis, who always practiced her belief that mothers should not work out of the home unless doing so was financially necessary, chose to subordinate her writing to her domestic commitments. Nevertheless, the prodigious output of her fifty-year career demonstrates that, while she was a wife and mother, Davis was also always a writer.²⁹ When her eldest son, Richard Harding Davis, was beginning his career, she once responded to a suggestion he had received that an unhappy writer should stop writing by saying, “God forbid. I would almost as soon say stop breathing, for it is the same thing.”³⁰

Davis's works of the late 1880s through the 1890s are the creations of a more mature woman with grown children, who as a writer was beginning to confront the consequences of her choices. In her treatment of the artist in stories like “Anne” (1889) and Frances Waldeaux (1897), artistic expression is linked with individualism more than with creativity.³¹ While these stories are not marked with frustration or with anxiety about failure as thoroughly as the earlier artists' tales, they are tinged with regret and resignation at a lack of fulfillment.³² Older women whose age and situation often closely resembles Davis's, these protagonists have either rejected the pursuit of art, seeing it as irreconcilable with domesticity, or like Davis, they have compromised their art in order to pursue it. In both cases they are unfulfilled.

The older artists of this period, like the title character of “Anne,” mourn the loss of creative fulfillment but conclude eventually that its loss is the inevitable price of maturity. The creative impulse, seen in retrospect by the mature author and by her mature protagonist, is characterized by strength, beauty, and selfishness; these qualities seem to equate it with the shallowness of youth. In “Anne,” the discovery of being unfulfilled as a woman is realized first as the discovery of being unfulfilled creatively, and both discoveries are revealed dramatically at a moment of middle-age crisis.

Davis's emphasis on the protagonist's interiority shows the ironic disparity between the female artist as expressive subject and the wife-mother as silenced object. Throughout there are two Anne's. The external Mrs. Anne Palmer, “a stout woman of fifty with grizzled hair and a big nose,” tries to sing, but produces only a “discordant yawp.” However, always “something within her” cries out, “I am here—Anne! I am beautiful and young. If this old throat were different my voice would ring through earth and heaven” (227).

Anne's midlife crisis is the crushing discovery of being unfulfilled, common to the mature artist in Davis's later fiction. Anne, a “woman of masculine intellect” who has assumed management of the family peach farm since her husband's death and who, through shrewd stock investments has considerably improved the family estate, is bored with her life. Increasingly her mind wanders to her first love, George Forbes, now a famous author. Unknown to either of her two overly solicitous children, the Anne within is racked with discontent, crying out, “I should have had my true life” (232). This story of an artist whose situation—solicitous adult children, domestic comfort, and economic productivity—strongly resembles Davis's own is actually a rebellion fantasy by a woman who rarely in her own voice uttered discontent with her personal life.

In the story, the Anne within finally even convinces Mrs. Anne Palmer, the widow and mother of grown children, to run away:

She would go away. Why should she not go away? She had done her full duty to husband, children property. Why should she not begin somewhere else, live out her own life? Why should she not have her chance for the few years left? Music and art and the companionship of thinkers and scholars, Mrs. Palmer's face grew pale as she named these things so long forbidden to her. (234)

She does run away, but eventually, like Hetty Manning and many other of Davis's rebellious women, she is led by events to realize that life is best and values are truest at home. Once again, though, Davis's commitment to her “it's-a-wonderful-life” theme is suspect. She first develops her comfortable conclusion in which Anne, who has been welcomed home, enjoys a “quiet, luxurious, happy life.” But she adds a final reassertion of Anne's interiority that invites suspicion of the author's surface text:

Yet sometimes in the midst of all this comfort and sunshine a chance note of music or the sound of the restless wind will bring an expression into her eyes which her children do not understand, as if some creature unknown to them looked out of them.

At such times Mrs. Palmer will say to herself, “Poor Anne!” (242)

In her last novel, Frances Waldeaux, Davis again treats the elderly female artist, this time depicting her fictive double with satiric objectivity as an aging woman hack. This protagonist's discovery of unfulfillment is ironic. Well aware that she has injured her artistic potential in the name of motherhood, the protagonist discovers late in life that, in her attempt to live the domestic ideal of abnegation, she has actually annihilated any sense of herself as an individual.

Frances Waldeaux, widowed at a young age by a sweet but irresponsible wastrel, has made a successful career more like that of Davis's contemporary Fanny Fern than like Davis's. Frances is a successful writer of “comical squibs” that are “not vulgar but coarse and biting” (14). Like Fern, she also uses a pseudonym: “Quigg.” Frances, however, maintains her anonymity for reasons slightly different from Fern's and from those that impelled Davis's frequent choice of anonymity. She hides her successful identity in order to delude her grown son into thinking that his support comes from his father's well-planned trust.

In this final treatment of the artist, Davis depicts her protagonist's failure to find fulfillment in her choices of self-abnegation as a writer and as a mother. In the character of Frances Waldeaux, Davis embodies the error of compromised choices and mediated desires, the choices that had directed Davis's own life. Frances's error originates in the sacrifice of her own identity. During an early conversation with her adored son, George, she reveals that she is unfulfilled to the point of hollowness:

I never think of you as my son, or a man, or anything outside of me—not at all. You are just me, doing the things I should have done if I had not been a woman. … when I was a girl it seemed as if there was something in me that I must say, so I tried to write poems. … I've been dumb, as you might say, for years. But when I read your article, George—do you know if I had written it I should have used just the phrases you did? … I am dumb, but you speak for me now. It is because we are just one. (9)

But they are not one; he leaves, and Frances is left alone. The novel's plot centers on Frances's gradual and troubled acceptance of George's right to an individual existence—his choice of career, his wife, and his home. It also deals with her discovery that domestic self-abnegation can be harmful. By turning to potboiling journalism, Frances has done what Maria Heald in “The Poetess of Clap City” refused to do: sold her “birthright”—her poems and her individual identity—“for a mess of pottage.” Though more extreme, Frances's choice is essentially the one that Davis made. In earlier stories of anxiety the artists are frustrated by or fearful of unused talent. Even in later stories like “Anne,” the artist regrets unused talent. In this last rendering, however, misuse of talent seems as disastrous as its disuse.

Frances Waldeaux is autobiographical in a number of ways, not the least of which is that the protagonist is a doting mother of a now-grown son in the support of whom she has silently, voluntarily sacrificed her integrity as a writer. This is a novel by a mother who took greater pride in the accomplishments of her son, Richard Harding Davis, than she ever did in her own work. However, this is also the final novel of an aging author who, looking back at her early work like “Life in the Iron Mills” and remembering the indignant passion that had filled her with purpose, might have regretted the atrophy of that power. Finally, this is the work of a sixty-five-year-old widow, who for all her free-thinking individualism, was a product of her culture. No matter what special power she possessed, she also shared possession of her culture's dominant domestic ideology.

Rebecca Harding Davis, like her characters, an artist and a woman in the nineteenth century, was forced in every stage of her life to make choices that placed her in a dilemma, assuring failure—by being either frustrated, unsuccessful, or unfulfilled. She experienced the frustration of her artistic desires because they were incompatible with her role as wife-mother. She was unsuccessful in her attempts to mediate the role of artist with those that defined a woman, and she admitted failure in the necessary rejection of one of the conflicting roles. Finally, she recognized a lack of fulfillment within the narrow limitations of her selected identity; she even had to confront being unfulfilled by the compromises necessary to allow the female pursuit of art. Davis made choices that she knew were right for her as a woman, but choices that she also knew were wrong for her as an artist.

Like many other women writers, Davis often appeased the guilt and frustration inherent in the double-bind of being a female artist by becoming her own worst enemy, creating fictional projections of herself as artist and then negating their power, punishing them, or having them recant their unacceptable artistic desire. The paradigm of the artist manqué allowed women writers in the nineteenth century to exorcise their illicit desires by simultaneously asserting and denying them. It provided a way for a woman like Davis to fantasize her desire, to punish her guilt, to salve her pain, and still to be a writer.

Notes

1. “Life in the Iron Mills,” Atlantic 7 (1861), 430-51, did not appear with “The Korl Woman” as a subtitle, although Davis had submitted it as an alternative title to “Iron Mills”; the reprint Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories, biographical interp. Tillie Olsen, rev. ed. (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1985), which is cited, prints the subtitle.

2. P. 64; korl is a pinkish-white, chalky substance left from the Bessemer steel smelting process.

3. This aspect of Davis's writing, which is indeed essential, is enriched, not refuted, by feminist reading. For various genre/tradition arguments, see James C. Austin, “Success and Failure of Rebecca Harding Davis,” Midcontinent American Studies Journal 3 (1962), 44-49; Walter Hesford, “Literary Contexts of ‘Life in the Iron Mills,’” American Literature 49 (1977), 70-85; John Conran, “Assailant Landscapes and the Man of Feeling: Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills,” Journal of American Culture 3 (1980), 487-500; and Sharon M. Harris, “Rebecca Harding Davis: From Romanticism to Realism,” American Literary Realism 21.2 (Winter 1989), 4-20.

4. Tillie Olsen's insightful biographical interpretation of “Iron mills” gave Davis new literary life. But, while her Feminist Press editions (1972, 1985) have created a sizable readership, they have stimulated surprisingly little critical interest, compared with that in some other rediscovered woman writers. For discussion of Davis's fiction from a feminist perspective, see Margaret M. Culley, “Vain Dreams: The Dream Convention in Some Nineteenth-Century Women's Fiction,” Frontiers 1.3 (1976), 94-104; Louise Duus, “Neither Saint nor Sinner: Women in Late Nineteenth-Century Fiction,” American Literary Realism 7 (1974), 276-78; Charlotte Goodman, “Portraits of the Artiste Manqué by Three Women Novelists,” Frontiers 5 (1981), 57-59; Jean Pfaelzer, “Rebecca Harding Davis: Domesticity, Social Order, and the Industrial Novel,” International Journal of Women's Studies 4 (1981), 234-44, and the introduction to “Marcia,” Legacy 4 (1987), 3-5; and Jane Atteridge Rose, “Reading ‘Life in the Iron Mills’ Contextually: A Key to Rebecca Harding Davis' Fiction,” in Conversations: Contemporary Critical Theory and the Teaching of Literature, ed. Charles Moran and Elizabeth Penfield (Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1990) 187-99. Also see brief references in Susan Gubar, “The Birth of the Artist as Heroine: (Re)production, the Künstlerroman Tradition, and the Fiction of Katherine Mansfield,” in The Representation of Women in Fiction, ed. Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 19-59; and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “To ‘bear my mother's name’: Künstlerromane by Women Writers,” in Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 84-104. For a concise overview, see Judith Fetterley, Provisions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 306–14.

5. This French word manqué is critically appropriate as an umbrella term because it encompasses the various ways failure can occur: frustration, lack of success, lack of fulfillment.

6. For further discussion of this genre, see Linda Huf, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: The Writer as Heroine in American Literature (New York: Ungar, 1983); also see DuPlessis, Goodman, and Gubar.

7. This discussion is largely premised on two studies: the understanding of duplicity in nineteenth-century women's fiction, provided by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979); and the understanding of values implicitly operating in middle-class nineteenth-century America, provided by Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). It is also influenced by the understanding that women interpret and thereby reconstruct their particular position in history, provided by Linda Alcoff “Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13.3 (1988), 405-36.

8. For biographical reading of other women writers in consideration of ideological construction of female identity, see Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

9. For further discussion of the artist manqué as evidence of women's collusion with patriarchal ideology continuing into the twentieth century, see Linda Dittmar, “When Privilege Is No Protection: The Woman Artist in Quicksand and The House of Mirth.” For a provocative alternative view of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, often seen as the epitome of the nineteenth-century Künstlerroman of the artist manqué in its conclusion that “Art is much but Love is more,” see Holly A. Laird, “Aurora Leigh: An Epical Ars Poetica.”

10. For biography of Davis, see Gerald Langford, The Richard Harding Davis Years: A Biography of a Mother and Son (New York: Holt, Rinchart and Winston, 1961) and Sharon Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).

11. For discussion of the socioeconomic aspects of domestic ideology, see Kirk Jeffrey, “The Family as Utopian Retreat from the City,” Soundings 55 (1972), 22-41; Barbara Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981); and Susan Moller Okin, “The Woman and the Making of the Sentimental Family,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 11 (1982), 65 88: for discussion of the religious aspects of domestic ideology, see Ann Douglas, The Femization of American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Tompkins, Sensational Designs.

12. In similar fashion, she dutifully moved to her husband's home in Philadelphia after her marriage, yet, once there, she spent more time in the library than she did keeping house. Later, when she had children, she always stayed home with them, but she spent the time writing.

13. “Blind Tom,” Atlantic 10 (1862), 580-85; also as “Blind Black Tom,” All Year Round 8 (1862), 126-29.

14. Many of Davis's protagonists suffer some form of “dumbness,” her term for the silence that Tillie Olsen has shown to be the mark of women's texts in patriarchal culture (Silences [New York: Delacorte, 1978]). For another instance of silence, see Linda Hunt, “The Alberta Trilogy: Cora Sandel's Norwegian Künstlerroman and American Feminist Literary Discourse,” in this volume.

15. The real dangers of life in a border state during the Civil War only exacerbated the status quo of double standards and dependency.

16. Rebecca Harding [Davis], letter to Annie Fields, May 27, 1862, Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6109), Manuscript Division, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville.

17. Maintaining anonymity long after it had ceased as a convention, Davis established several identities through textual lineage, her two most used being “by the author of ‘Margret Howth’” (realism) and “by the author of ‘The Second Life’” (sensationalism). Sometimes she published very different stories simultaneously in the same journals.

18. Earthen Pitchers, in Scribner's Monthly 7 (1873-74), 73-81, 199-207, 274-81, 490-94, 595-600, 714-21.

19. The real enslaved musician was named Tom Cauthen and was the property of a plantation owner by that name in Columbus, Georgia.

20. “The Wife's Story,” Atlantic 14 (1864), 1-19, rpt. Olsen, Silences, pp. 177-221; “Marcia,” Harper's 53 (1876), 925-28, which is cited, has also been recently reprinted in Legacy 4 (1987), 6-10.

21. Although certainly less extreme, the perceived conflict between a life of art and a life of domesticity has not disappeared. Other essays in this volume demonstrate that the destructive power of this tension is not specific to one age or one culture. See Renate Voris, “The Hysteric and the Mimic: A Reading of Christa Wolf's Quest for Christa T.,” Katherine Kearns, “From Shadow to Substance: The Empowerment of the Artist Figure in Lee Smith's Fiction,” and Linda Hunt, “The Alberta Trilogy.”

22. These stories, as a group, also show that this subject was an obsession of Davis's at this time of her life and not something tailored to appeal to a particular journal; her stories of failed artists appeared in Atlantic, Harper's, Scribner's, and Peterson's magazines, covering the total spectrum of fiction presses in the period after the Civil War.

23. Rebecca Harding Davis, Diary (1865-79), University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

24. Asserting that for nineteenth-century women dreams of artistic achievement were “not so much vain, as in vain,” Culley argues that ambivalent dreams in fiction like “The Wife's Story” indicate that Davis and others “may have been unable to admit to themselves the full extent and meaning of their fantasies of the married woman in America” (102).

25. Rebecca Harding Davis, letter to Annie Fields (1866), University of Virginia, Charlottesville; on the occasion of Mitchell's first publication in Atlantic, Davis made reference to his care of her during her first, emotionally difficult pregnancy: “I owe much to him—life—and what is better than life.” For fuller discussion, see Jane Atteridge Rose, “Images of Self: The Example of Rebecca Harding Davis and Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” English Language Notes 29.1 (1991).

26. “Clement Moore's Vocation,” Peterson's 57 (1870), 54-59; “The Poetess of Clap City,” Scribner's Monthly 9 (1975), 612-15.

27. In her introduction to “Marcia,” Pfaelzer defines the narrator as male, which the narrator's professional status would certainly indicate. However, comments like the narrator's statement that Biron did not have to be so quick declaring his business, because “any woman would soon have guessed” it, suggest the character is female. The most plausible explanation seems to be that Davis became so aligned with her male character that she let her persona slip.

28. A Law Unto Herself, in Lippincott's 2 (1877), 39-49, 167-82, 292-308, 464-78, 614-28, 719-31.

29. Davis wrote and published continuously from 1861 until three months before her death in January 1910. During this time she published well over five hundred stories and essays, in addition to twelve books. For bibliography, see Jane Atteridge Rose, “The Fiction and Non-Fiction of Rebecca Harding Davis,” American Literary Realism 22.3 (Spring 1990) pp. 67-86.

30. The Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis, ed. Charles Belmont Davis (New York: Scribner's, 1917), pp. 34-35.

31. “Anne,” Harper's 78 (1889), 744-50, rpt. in Olsen, Silences, 225-42; Frances Waldeaux (New York: Harper, 1897).

32. Kearns's reading of Lee Smith's fiction, in this volume, suggests an interesting contrast between nineteenth-century and twentieth-century projections of the woman artist. Davis's artists manqués, which reflect each stage of her life, never conquer or successfully reconcile the tension in their lives. Smith's sequence of artists, however, seem increasingly to have integrated their womanhood with their art.