SOURCE: “Rebecca Harding Davis: From Romanticism to Realism,” in American Literary Realism 1870–1910, Vol. 21, No. 2, Winter, 1989, pp. 4-20.

In the following essay, Harris analyzes the complex narrative structure of “Life in the Iron Mills” in terms of the movement from romanticism to realism, concluding that the story rejects transcendentalism and is a work of naturalism.

In April, 1861, the Atlantic Monthly published Rebecca Harding Davis' “Life in the Iron Mills,” a startlingly new experiment in literature and a pioneering document in American literature's transition from romanticism to realism. Further, the naturalistic plot of “Life”'s core story challenges our traditional theories of the influences behind the movement from realism to naturalism. In a period that enthroned romanticism, Davis developed a literary theory of the “commonplace”—nearly two decades before William Dean Howells used the concept—that insisted upon telling the “story of today.”¹ She greatly admired what she termed the...