She knows she must find a way to express this longing, this hope. “Strains of simple powerful harmony, unknown before,” come to her. In what is a transcendent experience, she stays all night by the sea. Toward dawn, when “all things seemed waiting, glad, questioning, having accepted her as their own,” kingbirds, sandpipers “fixing their eyes on her in recognition,” she floats far out to deep water. It has “the solemnity of a baptism.” She knows she has been “summoned by a heavenly call to do her work; forbidden to do any other.”
But Kit, the man she loves, is blinded in a train accident. She marries after all:
During those years, while he was both blind and helpless, . . . [she] supported the family by giving music lessons to all the children in the neighborhood. Her old uncle opposed her bitterly. . . .
“Don’t make a market of your birthright,” he said, “hide it, bury it in a napkin if you will. You sold yourself, but don’t sell that for your own selfish ends, or God will punish you.”
“My birthright is to love,” said Audrey, and laid her hand on her husband’s arm.
Both women are disillusioned in marriage but manage what happiness they can. Jenny’s husband is a philanderer, dilettante, poseur, who takes all comforts and luxuries as his due. (“Jenny . . . knew all his maxims as she did her alphabet.”) As for Audrey, “No wife could be more loving and cheerful with Kit. Yet, unconsciously, she gives you the impression that she has her own home and her own people elsewhere and will be gone to them presently.”
The novel ends by the sea:
The sun is heat to her now, and the sea, water.
Presently, when evening begins to gather, and the sunset colors the sky and the pools in the marshes behind them blood-red, and the sea washes into their feet, dark and heavy, with subdued cries and moans as though all the love and unappeased longing of the world had gone down into it, and sought to find speech in it, Audrey takes up the child, and begins to hush it on her breast, singing a little cradle song, a simple chant with which she was always crooning it to sleep. It is so hopeful, so joyful, so full of the unutterable brooding tenderness of mother’s love, that Kit, who cares little for music, finds his heart swell and his eyes dim.
“Your uncle and that Goddard,” he observes, “used to think you had a pretty talent for music Audrey. You were going to teach the whole world by your songs, I remember. But that little tune is all you ever made, eh?. . . And nobody ever heard it but Baby and me. However, it’s very pretty, very pretty. And it was lucky your uncle taught you as thoroughly as he did. Your scales and notes helped us over a rough place. They served their purpose very well, though your voice is quite gone with teaching.”
He strolls on up the beach.
When he was out of sight, a flock of kingbirds fly up from the hedges of bay bushes, and light near her, turning on her their bright black eyes with a curious look of inquiry. When was it they had looked at her so before?
For one brief moment the tossing waves, the sand dunes, the marshes put on their dear old familiar faces. Old meanings, old voices came close to her as ghosts in the sunlight. The blood rushed to her face, her blue eyes lighted. She buried her hands in the warm white sand. She held the long salt grass to her cheeks. She seemed to have come home to them again. “Child,” they said to her, as the statues to Mignon, “where hast thou stayed so long?”
It seemed to her that she must answer them. She began to sing, she knew not what. But the tones were discordant, the voice was cracked. Then she knew that whatever power she might have had was . . . wasted and gone. She would never hear again the voice that once had called to her.
She rose then, and, taking up her child, went to the house, still looking in its face. Kit joined her, and was dully conscious that she had been troubled. “You’re not vexed at what I said down there, eh?” he asked. “You’re not really sorry, that you leave nothing to the world but that little song?”
“I leave my child,” said Audrey; repeating after awhile, “I leave my child.”
Her husband, at least, was sure that she made no moan over that which might have been and was not. [Italics added.]
No happy ending. The wife had forsaken her heavenly call, taken up what was “no better work in life for a woman.” She had literally made herself a visible Providence for her husband and child. The punishment came anyway. It was her birthright world of art out of which she was cast, whose faces were averted. The death was to the self that had had the power to achieve, the murder had been to her calling, the practice of art which was her life.
How much of the disillusion with marriage, the pain pulsing through the strong last chapter and distilled in its ambiguous last sentence, was also Rebecca’s, writing in the tenth year of her marriage?
In the ten years she had lost her place in the literary world. She no longer published in the Atlantic. The letters from Annie were lapsing. She no longer believed in, acted upon, the possibility of high achievement for herself. It was the price for children, home, love.
Was part of the price, too, that there was no one to whom she could speak the dimensions, the pain, of her loss—not even Clarke (perhaps not even herself)?
Hints in Earthen Pitchers support the outward facts that this was so. From the beginning, Clarke had not respected her aspiration to art. His own approach was writing as journalistic commodity, not writing as literature. Nor after marriage had he concerned himself with circumstances for her best writing. For all his love, his initial recognition of her potential greatness as writer (her first attraction for him), he had settled easily into what Rebecca too accepted unquestioningly: the “ordained” man-wife pattern of his ambitions, activities, comforts, needs coming first.
Well, most adults, she observed in an editorial about this time, find themselves having to put their own needs, dreams, aspirations, aside when they take on responsibilities for growing lives. She did not specify female or male. She also made it clear that other satisfactions, fulfillments, came. Her husband, at least, whether dully conscious or not, would be sure that “she made no moan over that which might have been, and was not.”
The power for art might be wasted and gone, but the power for work remained. The alive social intelligence kept listening to its society, though it might never hear again the voice that once had called. In 1874 she published John Andross, calling attention to the control of government by special interests, through bribery of legislators, gangsterism if necessary; and the corruption of character through subservience to wealth. It was the first novel of this kind.
The first year in the new house, she had written another first book of its kind—a defense of the rights of supposedly insane persons. Clarke had told her in his lawyer days of the malign practice whereby family members or enemies could, without notice, commit a sane person as insane to an institution, to be held there incommunicado (“buried alive”) for life—simply on the basis of a statement by one cooperative doctor. Now her Put Out of the Way (published in Peterson’s in 1871), along with editorials and articles by Clarke, resulted in getting the Pennsylvania lunacy laws changed.
The Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 came and went. “Though Clarke was one of the most active managers . . . I was only down there one evening,” Rebecca wrote Annie. She was not present, then, when Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other women “sat in” at the assembly celebrating that hundredth year of the Declaration of Independence and took over the platform to read their Women’s Declaration of Rights.
Rebecca went almost nowhere now. Clarke went everywhere. He was a leading citizen, an increasingly influential man-about-town; his fishing companions included Grover Cleveland. Their social circle consisted of Clarke’s friends, many of them theatrical people. The Drews, the Barrymores; when they were in town, Ellen Terry, Sir Henry Irving, Joseph Jefferson, Edwin Booth. Pre-matinee breakfasts at the Davises’ became a custom. There is no record that Rebecca went on to the theater with Clarke afterward.
In 1878, the The Nation
reviewed A Law Unto Herself:
Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis writes stories which can hardly be called pleasant, and which frequently, as in “A Law Unto Herself,” deal with most unpleasant persons, but there is an undercurrent of recognized aptitude and a capacity for calling a spade a spade which sets her writing in a category far removed from French morality. . . though she shows bad taste in various ways, or perhaps because of this, she succeeds in giving a truer impression of American conditions than any writer we know except Mr. Howells, while there is a vast difference between his delicately illuminated preparations of our social absurdities and Mrs. Davis’s grim and powerful etchings. Somehow she contrives to get the American atmosphere, its vague excitement, its strife of effort, its varying possibilities. Add to this a certain intensity, a veiled indignation at prosperity, and doubt of the honesty of success, and we get qualities which make Mrs. Davis’s books individual and interesting if not agreeable.
She did not feel very agreeable. The rasp of asperity characterized her more and more. She wrote the young Kate Fields in England: “Don’t come home if you are happy there. You can have no idea of the stagnation of. . . all life here. The country is like a man whom somebody is holding by the throat.”
In 1881, into this supposed stagnation, Helen Hunt Jackson published her documented denunciation of the genocidal treatment of the American Indian, A Century of Dishonor (a first of its kind). To the keen disappointment of its author, who regarded Rebecca as a still-active champion of the wronged (“I counted on you to bring out the facts as I wanted them brought out”), she did not review it.
There is a picture of Rebecca taken during this time. The hair is still severely parted in the middle, but now the luxuriant curls are stiff; the eyes, slits; the face clamped; the hands clamped together. She looks old, shrewd, grim, somehow formidable; not at all the ardent young woman who twenty years before had been a Hope in native letters and had had her picture taken before going up North to be welcomed as such.
Oliver Wendell Holmes had not forgotten that younger Rebecca. Richard, now eighteen, stopped by to visit him: “He talked a great deal about Mamma.”
Mamma thought a great deal about Richard. “I leave my child,” Audrey had said stubbornly at the end of Earthen Pitchers, “I leave my child.” It was beginning to seem that Rebecca’s child might become the fine writer she had not. She encouraged him, with advice still helpful for young writers:
I don’t say like Papa, stop writing. God forbid. I would almost as soon say stop breathing, for it is pretty much the same thing. But only to remember that you have not yet conquered your art. You are a journeyman, not a master workman, so if you don’t succeed [now] it does not count. The future is what to look to. . . . I’ve had 30 years experience and I know how much [getting published] depends on the articles suiting the present needs of the magazine, and also on the mood of the editor when he reads it. Develop . . . your dramatic eye; your quick perception of character and of the way character shows itself in looks, tones, dress; . . . your keen sympathy with all kinds of people. Add to that your humour. Just in proportion to your feeling more deeply and noticing more keenly, [you will] acquire the faculty of expressing more delicately and powerfully. Not inspiration, practice. A lasting real success takes time and patient steady work.
I had to stop my work to say all this, so goodbye dear old chum.
And mamma went back to her work in which, through habits of years, she seldom stopped to use her advice. Richard went on to become famous.*
Rebecca’s first critical and popular success in years (“These young writers are crowding me to the wall,” wrote Richard) came in 1892 with Silhouettes of American Life, her first collection of stories.* A strain from Earthen Pitchers and from “The Wife’s Story” sounds within it: the power for art wasted and gone—but this time there is doubt, had there ever been power?
It was with her precisely as when her heart swelled with a song that ought to silence heaven itself—and she uttered a cracked piping falsetto; or as when years ago, she felt herself inspired with poetry, and had written miserable rhymes—vapid and pretentious.
And there is a significant story, “Anne,” of an older woman, a woman in her sixties, who runs away from home. Though she is shrewdly successful in business, and her children patronizingly love her, somewhere else is her heart’s country of books and music “and the companionship of thinkers.” On the train she sits close enough to overhear a famous poet, a great painter of human suffering, a noted woman reformer, all traveling together. But they prove false, “mere hucksters,” who “had made a trade of art and humanity . . . until they had lost the perceptions of their highest meanings.”
The train is wrecked. She is brought back home, “petted like a baby”:
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. . . .
At such times [she] will say to herself, “Poor Anne!” as of somebody whom she once knew that is dead.
Is she dead?
Probably to the end of her days, a creature unknown to those around her lived on in Rebecca, a secret creature still hungry to know; living (like Audrey) ecstatically in nature, in the sea, summers; living (like Anne) “with her own people, elsewhere” in the year-round red-brick house.
Seldom does she appear in the books and stories and articles that kept on and on (so many that it would take several years just to read all she wrote in her lifetime). In her seventies, she still kept grinding them out. This is but a sampling: “Temple of Fame,” “Curse of Education,” “Ignoble Martyr,” “Country Girls in Town,” “The Disease of Money-Getting,” “Is It All for Nothing?” “In the Grey Cabins of New England” (about the “starved, coffined” lives of spinsters), “New Traits of the New American,” “Under the Old Code,” “The Black North” (about the furor aroused by President Roosevelt’s inviting Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House—nothing so delighted Rebecca as exposing northern racist hypocrisy), “Recovery of Family Life,” “Story of a Few Plain Women,” “Undistinguished Americans,” “Unwritten History.”
She died in 1910, age seventy-nine, writing almost to the last moment. No literary journal noted her passing.
Life in the Iron Mills and Margret Howth were already so obliterated by 1891 that Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, in their The Working Class Movement in America, could write:
. . . one of these days the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of Capitalism will be written.
And here we are tempted to ask, “Where are the American writers of fiction?” With a subject, and such a subject, lying ready to their very hands, clamoring at their very doors, not one of them touches it . . . there are no studies of factory-hands and of dwellers in tenement houses; no pictures of those sunk in the innermost depths of the modern Inferno.
On the occasion of her death, The New York Times did resurrect the fact that a half century before—before the Inferno had emerged as the overwhelming dominant of American life—a work on the subject had appeared. In its newsstory-obituary (“Mother of Richard Harding Davis Dies at Son’s Home in Mt. Kisco, Aged 79”), it told how:
In 1861 she sent to the Atlantic Monthly a story entitled “Life in the Iron Mills,” depicting the grinding life of the working people around her. . . . It attracted attention from all over the country . . . many thought the author must be a man. The stern but artistic realism of the picture she put alive upon paper, suggested a man, and a man of power not unlike Zola’s.
They did not mention that she had preceded Zola by two decades.*
The Dictionary of American Biography memorializes her in an estimate denying stern and artistic merit altogether:
. . . without guidance or knowledge of literary art save as she had gained it from voluminous reading, she began early to write fiction. . . . Though often crude and amateurish in workmanship, these stor
ies were nevertheless remarkable productions, distinct landmarks in the evolution of American fiction. Written when the American novel was in all its areas ultra-romantic and over-sentimental, they are Russian-like in their grim and sordid realism.
Landmarks, unless they loom large in landscapes often visited, tend to become weed-grown tombstones over the forgotten dead, noticed only by accident.
Even the sense of landmark has been obliterated. Rebecca Harding Davis is a name known today only to a handful of American Studies people and literary historians. Few have read any of her work; fewer still teach any of it.**
Myriads of human beings—those who did the necessary industrial work in the last century—lived and died and little remains from which to reconstruct their perished (vanished) lives. About them as about so much else, literature was largely silent, and the charge can be levied: Nowhere am I in it.
No picture, poem, statement, passing them to the future
Unlimn’d, they disappear.*
To those of us, descendants of their class, hungry for any rendering of what our vanished people were like, of how they lived, Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills is immeasurably valuable. Details, questions, Vision, found nowhere else—dignified into literature.
She never wrote anything of its near-classic quality after.
Once, at Harvard’s Widener Library, in that time of my trying to trace what had happened to Rebecca Harding, out of one of her books—John Andross?—fell an undated presentation card:
For Mr. C. E. Norton
from R. H. D.
Judge me—not by what I have done,
but by what I have hoped to do.**
Poor Rebecca. The cry of every artist (of every human). But Proust is right. There are no excuses in art. Including having been born female in the wrong time/place.
A scanty best of her work is close to the first rank; justifies resurrection, currency, fame. Even that best is botched.
Here or there in even her most slipshod novels, stage-set plots, moldering stories: a grandeur of conception (“touches, grand sweeps of outline”), a breathing character, a stunning insight, a scene as transcendent as any written in her century, also confirm for us what a great writer was lost in her.
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