Rebecca Harding Davis uses great detail, symbolism, and imagery in “Life in the Iron Mills”. She is very descriptive in depicting what people working in the mills suffered through. Davis is very skilled at showing the emotions of the characters in her stories. She truly understands how to use detail while including both symbolism and imagery. Rebecca Harding Davis is fantastic at utilizing detail to draw her readers in. She does a fantastic job of portraying the struggles and injustices that the lower class goes through. Davis begins the story with a description of the conditions that they live and work through: “A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron works? The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable” (Davis,…show more content… “Not many of the inhabitants of a manufacturing town know the vast machinery of system by which the bodies of workmen are governed, that goes on unceasingly year to year” (Davis, 142). This imagery shows the appalling conditions that the lower class suffers through. It shows that all of the upper class citizens of this manufacturing town know nothing of the tiring hellish work that the lower class go through while trying to make a living by working at the iron mill. According to Richard Hood, there is a lot of water imagery included in this story also (Hood). He also says in the story, the narrator references puddles, gulfs, floating, and so on (Hood). The use of water is a very powerful tool, because water stands for so many things to so many different people. In this context, Davis is trying to show that water stands for the great divide. This imagery shows that water is the thing that is separating the upper and middle class from the lower working class and that no matter what happens you are either going to sink or swim. In the case of Hugh, he carved this woman out of Korl in hopes that maybe someone would be interested in his work but no one is. Nothing he does seem to be good enough to get him out of the filthy world he lives
