Eschatology, Dark Ecology, and the Environmentalism of the Poor in "Life in the Iron Mills"

Critics have yet to resolve the "terrible question" posed in the epigraph and reiterated at the conclusion of Rebecca Harding Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills": "Is this the end?" Specifically, there is disagreement on how to... [ view full abstract ]

Critics have yet to resolve the "terrible question" posed in the epigraph and reiterated at the conclusion of Rebecca Harding Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills": "Is this the end?" Specifically, there is disagreement on how to interpret the story's final image of morning light that evokes God's "promise of the Dawn." Depending on one's critical orientation, this ending to a grim depiction of working class lives can be read as a sentimental reassurance, a call to social action, or even an ironic gesture. I argue that critics should attend more closely to the eschatological connotations of the word "end"; furthermore they should recognize that the eschatology figured in "Life in the Iron Mills" is not otherworldly, but grounded in the dark landscapes and experiences inhabited by the story's working class characters. Rather than mapping a notional hope onto the human and environmental injustices created by industrial exploitation, this eschatology reenvisions hope by first foregrounding the lives of working-class people and the bleak landscapes they inhabit.

In making this argument I will be putting two major, and quite different theories of environmental aesthetics into a necessary dialogue. My foregrounding of dark landscapes and the lives of those marginalized within them draws, respectively, on Timothy Morton's "dark ecology" project and Rob Nixon's work on the "environmentalism of the poor." My approach illustrates the way in which eschatology can encompass both Morton's vision of an "ecology to come" and Nixon's critique of the spiritual displacement often entailed in environmental displacement. The eschatology of “Life in the Iron-Mills,” asks readers to conceive of "the promise of the Dawn" in terms of what the narrator calls "the power of desperate need." Recognizing this power in the story's landscapes and characters helps us to appreciate the oft-unarticulated eschatological dimensions of contemporary theories of environmental aesthetics, helping us come to grips with Davis's "terrible question."