SOURCE: “The Artist Manque in the Fiction of Rebecca Harding Davis,” in Writing the Woman Artist: Essays on Poetics, Politics, and Portraiture, edited by Suzanne W. Jones, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991, pp. 155-74.

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...