Rebecca Harding Davis

American short-story writer, novelist, and journalist

• Born: June 24, 1831
• Birthplace: Washington, Pennsylvania
• Died: September 29, 1910
• Place of death: Mt. Kisco, New York

Biography

Rebecca Harding Davis has been called the first critical realist; her story “Life in the Iron-Mills” precedes French realist Émile Zola’s work by six years. Davis’s philosophy of art embraced reform as well as realism. “Life in the Iron-Mills” exemplifies her amalgamation of realism and reform in her attention to the “commonplace,” in which every voice was significant. In her five decades of writing, Davis produced nearly five hundred works in both fictional and nonfictional prose. Her novels, periodical fictions, and topical essays embraced critical realism. Her themes urged reform through explorations of subjects such as class, gender, racism, abuses in the penal system and insanity laws, labor abuses against women and children, capitalistic avarice, and the necessity of economic self-sufficiency for women. {$S[A]Harding, Rebecca Blaine;Davis, Rebecca Harding}

Born in Pennsylvania in 1831, Rebecca Blaine Harding moved with her family in 1837 to the steel-manufacturing town of Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia). This environment was influential in the development of Davis’s realism and emphasis on reform. Educated at home until the age of fourteen, Davis then attended the Washington Female Seminary, where she graduated valedictorian of her class in 1848. Little is known about Davis’s next twelve years, other than that she took lengthy walks through Wheeling for exercise and contemplation. These solitary excursions enabled her to glimpse the realities of working-class life and to see the destruction that resulted from the Civil War.

In 1861, Davis published her first work, “Life in the Iron-Mills,” in the nation’s most prestigious periodical, The Atlantic Monthly. As did much of Davis’s work that had reformist goals, this realistic short story simultaneously depicted industrialization’s demoralizing effects upon society while it introduced working-class lives to upper-class readers.

Davis’s work represents a mediation between realism and sentimentalism, exemplifying her reconciliation between domesticity and artistry. In 1863, at the age of thirty-two—an age considered relatively late by Victorian standards—she married impoverished attorney L. Clarke Davis and bore three children. Her periodical publications served not only as artistic expression but also as economic sustenance for the family. During her first pregnancy, Davis suffered from depression and endured the “rest cure” made famous by Philadelphia physicianSilas Weir Mitchell. Davis’s bout with depression subsided and never resurfaced in her lifetime, although both her son Richard, an author, and her daughter periodically suffered symptomatic bouts.

Davis was an intensely private woman, and as a writer she preferred to express herself through the situations and voices of others. In The Atlantic Monthly, she published works that depicted “commonplace” voices such as the nonfiction account “Blind Tom,” describing an idiot-savant slave whose musical talent was exploited for financial profit. Such stories as “The Wife’s Story” and “The Harmonists” serve as pragmatic countervoice to the Transcendental philosophies espoused by Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Davis visited in Concord, Massachusetts. The suffering and degradation Davis witnessed living in a border state during the Civil War caused her to disagree strongly with what she saw as elitist philosophies, rhetoric detached from reality.

While a contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, Davis also initiated her lifelong affiliations with popular periodicals such as Peterson’s, Harper’s, and Scribner’s with narratives such as “Put Out of the Way,” which aided the reformation of Pennsylvania state laws regarding institutionalization of the insane, and “The Man in the Cage,” which denounced the penal system. Davis’s works also confronted society’s marginalization of women. In the Gray Cabins of New England, “The Middle-Aged Woman,” and “Anne” exemplify her prevailing theme of women’s intellectual and emotional subjugation. “In the Market,” “Earthen Pitchers,” and “Marcia” depict various survival strategies of the nineteenth century woman and artist.

Each realistic and reformatory novel Davis published was initially serialized in periodicals; her popularity was overwhelming. Waiting for the Verdict addressed racism and abuses that occurred during the Civil War, John Andross exposed political corruption, and A Law Unto Herself urged women’s independence.

In 1869, Davis also began writing juvenile fiction, which she continued to do throughout her life; her first stories for children appeared in The Youth’s Companion and St. Nicholas. That same year, Davis also began a forty-year venture into journalism. For twenty years, she was a contributing editor for the New York Tribune; she resigned to protest the censorship of her articles. In 1875, Davis began a lifelong affiliation with the New York Independent, where she addressed the destructive effects of capitalism in Some Significant Facts, Lord Kitchener’s Methods, The Disease of Money-Getting, and Low Wages for Women. Davis continued her topical journalism by publishing regularly in The Saturday Evening Post from 1902 until her death.

As a nineteenth century woman, Davis was instrumental in the struggle for social reform; as an artist, she utilized her pen to portray the realities of the commonplace. As her autobiography, Bits of Gossip, attests, Davis chose to express her own position through addressing the situations of others. Her art filtered her voice as a woman writer through a kaleidoscope of other voices.

Bibliography

Harris, Sharon M. Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Recovers many of Davis’s obscure works to hail her as a pioneering realist.

Lasseter, Janice Milner, and Sharon M. Harris, eds. Rebecca Harding Davis: Writing Cultural Autobiography, by Rebecca Harding Davis. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001. Originally published as Bits of Gossip in 1904. Includes an additional unpublished family history.

Olsen, Tillie, ed. Life in the Iron-Mills, and Other Stories, by Rebecca Harding Davis. Rev. and expanded ed. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1985. Includes a biographical essay by Olsen which offers the first feminist critique of Davis.

Pfaelzer, Jean. Parlor Radical: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of American Social Realism. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996. A good examination of Davis’s work.

Rose, Jane Atteridge. Rebecca Harding Davis. New York: Twayne, 1993. A standard biography from Twayne’s United States Authors series.

Yellin, Jean Fagan. Afterword to Margret Howth: A Story of To-day, by Rebecca Harding Davis. New York: Feminist Press, 1990. Addresses the author’s feminization through editorial pressures.