Silences (15 page)

It was in front of the Harding house that the long train of mules dragged their masses of pig iron and the slow stream of human life of the story crept past, night and morning, year after year, to work their twelve- to fourteen-hour shift, the six or seven days a week. The little girl who observed them grew into womanhood, into (near) spinsterhood, still at the window in that
house, and the black industrial smoke was her daily breath.

The town was Wheeling, on the Ohio, in the border slave state of what was then Virginia. When the Harding family moved there in 1836 (Rebecca was five), it was one of only a handful of steel towns in the nation. All her growing years, the slave South, the free North; the industrial future, the agrarian present, the wilderness that was
once all the past—were uniquely commingled here. In the streets, farmers were as familiar a sight as Irish and Cornish steelworkers, slaves, free blacks, commercial travelers, bargemen, draymen, Indians, and rawboned mountain people in to work at the mills.

Over the country’s single north-south National Road, snaking mostly through wilderness to this halting point, came huge vans with cotton
bales for Northern mills, returning with manufactures for the South; stagecoaches carrying passengers to and from the river boats that connected St. Louis and New Orleans with the East; and Conestoga wagons with emigrants, or immigrants still in European dress, heading west. And over all—through the night and morning river mists, through the constant changes of light—was a sense of vast unpeopled
distance from the hills that curved fold on fold far as eye could see.

“These sights and sounds did not come common to her.” The slow-moving thoughtful Rebecca absorbed them into herself with the quiet intensity that marked all her confrontation
with life, and with an unshared sense of wonder, of mystery.

She was the eldest of five children. Her father, Richard W. Harding, a successful businessman,
later City Treasurer, hated “vulgar American life” and its world of business, secluding himself evenings for what he did love: reading Elizabethan literature, mostly Shakespeare. “He was English and homesick,” Rebecca wrote of him years later. “We were not intimate with him as with our mother.” The household revolved around him. Her mother, Mrs. Rachel Leet Wilson Harding (“the most accurate
historian I ever knew, with enough knowledge to outfit a dozen modern college-educated women”), was kept busy with an ever increasing family and running the large household noiselessly.

It was a house that had servants, perhaps slaves, for necessary tasks. Public schools did not yet exist. Rebecca’s mother did the early teaching, and later there were occasional tutors, usually brought in for
her brothers. Rebecca rambled; she read. The books (Maria Edgeworth, Bunyan, Scott) were of a remote world of pilgrims, knights and ladies, magic, crusaders. But once, in her soot-specked cherry tree hideout, in a new collection of
Moral Tales
(it was years before she discovered the anonymous author was Hawthorne), she found three unsigned stories about an ordinary American town, everyday sights
and sounds, the rambles of a little girl like herself.
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She read and reread them so often that “I know almost every line of them by heart, even now.” In them her own secret feelings, so opposite to those of her complex, austere father, were verified: that “the commonplace folk and things which I saw every day had mystery and charm . . . belonged to the magic world [of books] as much as knights
and pilgrims.”

When she was fourteen (an age when most Wheeling girls had already been working in the mills or as domestic slaveys for years), Rebecca was sent—not too far away—to live with her mother’s sister in Washington, Pennsylvania, to attend the three-year Female Seminary there and be “finished.”

“Of all cursed places under the sun, where the hungriest soul can hardly pick up a few grains
of knowledge,” Olive Schreiner writes of that century, “a girls’ boarding-school is the worst. . . . They finish everything but imbecility and weakness, and that they cultivate. They are nicely adapted machines for experimenting on the question, ‘Into how little space can a human soul be crushed?’ ”
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Probably the indictment is too severe in this instance, but certainly it was not an atmosphere
conducive to learning, development, attainment. The ardent “hunger to know” (later ascribed to Hugh Wolfe and other of her fictional people) was already deep in Rebecca. She was eager for companions, for stimulus, exploration, range, substance.

Little of substance beyond religion and “soft attractive graces” was offered the young ladies. “Enough math to do accounts, enough astronomy to point
out constellations, a little music and drawing, and French, history, literature at discretion” is how Rebecca describes it.

Nor did she find satisfactory companionship. For all her classmates’ shocked delight at her irreverent wit, Rebecca’s very seriousness of purpose and “hunger to know” set her apart.

Still it was a larger world than home. It was a college town, site of (the all male, of
course) Washington College. There were more books, more current literature available. Speakers came through regularly on the college circuit, and sometimes Seminary girls were permitted to attend. There was a bracing sense of currents
and concerns of the time, and the stimulation of hearing famous figures such as Horace Greeley.

And there was Francis LeMoyne, the town physician, radical reformer,
agnostic, abolitionist (their vice-presidential candidate in 1840). “He should have lived in a . . . great arena. . . . He had the power for any work.” Unquestionably, the most challenging experience of those years was her acquaintance with him.
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This “uncouth mass of flesh,” “mad against Destiny . . . unconquerable ills,” “smothered rights and triumphant wrongs,” “inflamed with the needs and
sufferings of . . . countless lives” brought to Rebecca a troubling sense of “a gulf of pain and wrong . . . the under-life of America,” and deepened her childhood feeling of something of great mystery and portent in this “vulgar” everyday American life.

Fourteen years later, in her first novel,
Margret Howth,
she was still trying to come to terms with the meaning of LeMoyne’s radical life and
beliefs, so diametrically opposed to the precepts and assumptions of her own upbringing.

She graduated as valedictorian, still hungry to know. The “larger life” away from home was over. It was 1848. She was seventeen. Even had she wanted to go on with education, there was but one college in the entire country that would admit a female, the scandalous, unthinkable (abolitionist) Oberlin. The massed
social structure prescribed one sphere, one vocation for a woman of her class: domestic—marriage, or serving as daughter, sister, aunt where needed. Only in case of extreme economic necessity did a girl or woman of her class live away from home, with but one “respectable” occupation open to her—teaching (at a third of a man’s pay).

That summer, a few hundred miles north at Seneca Falls, the first
women’s rights convention in the world was being held. Their Declaration spoke of the situation of women as:

            
a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman. . . . He has monopolized nearly all profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. He closes against her all avenues to wealth and distinction
which he considers most honorable to himself. . . . He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her. . . . He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

It is doubtful that Rebecca read the Declaration. Even
if she had, it is doubtful that the seventeen-year-old girl would have seen in it a description of her circumstances. To her they were personal, singular; something awry, unnatural
in her
to harbor needs, interests, longings for which there seemed no place or way or precedent.

She was a dark, vigorous, sturdily built girl, with a full, handsome face that decades later was to become the most admired,
sketched, photographed face of its generation in the person of her famous son Richard. In her own time, when what was prized in female features was delicacy, her appearance was probably considered unfortunate—for a girl. Her manner was direct, “unvarnished,” quiet.

The Wheeling to which she returned, and in which she was to be immured for the next thirteen years, was not Boston, nor Amherst,
nor Concord—nor even Washington, Pennsylvania, with college circuit lectures, traveling theater, a Francis LeMoyne. It was a yeasty, booming industrial town of nearly 13,000 people, but with no intellectual or literary circles of any kind. The fever for gold, just beginning in California, had long dominated here; the heavy industrial smoke, manifesting its own kind of gold dust, pervaded more than
the atmosphere.

The social life open to Rebecca in her own class was with young men intent on making the most of the possibilities for “getting on,” and with young women whose concern—natural under the circumstances of but one sanctioned vocation—was with getting asked into the most advantageous possible marriage. All social activities were calculated toward these ends. Rebecca did not involve
herself in the expected social round.

Whatever the reasons were—subtle family ones,
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the lonely pull of obviously unshared interests—among them must have been Rebecca’s refusal to remain in situations of emptiness, of falsity, of injuries to her sense of selfhood
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where there was choice. She stayed almost exclusively within the family circle.

As the eldest daughter in a large household, even
one with servants, there was much help to be given her mother in the commonplace, necessary tasks of caring for family needs, younger children; keeping the atmosphere pleasant, especially for her father. The bonds of love were strong—she writes of “the protection and peace of home”—but they were not bonds of mutuality. She had to keep her longings, questionings, insurrections, secret.

She could
not even freely discuss literature. She had come home excited over living native writers. “We were in the first flush of our triumph in the beginnings of a national literature . . . these new men—Holmes and Lowell and Hawthorne—were our own, the indigenous growth of the soil.” To her father, all literature had ended with Shakespeare; the United States was incapable of culture. No other viewpoint
was expressible.

Nor was there any of LeMoyne’s concern with “the unhelped pain of life.” All through the fifties—that earthquake decade of antislavery, bleeding Kansas, women’s rights, the fugitive slave law, Dred Scott, John Brown, the struggle for a ten-hour workday—her family and its circle stayed removed, indifferent, when not hostile. Except through reading, Rebecca was shut in their narrowness.
She tells of one family, “radicals, believers in divorce and women’s rights, refusing to eat sugar or use cotton” (products of slavery), furthermore visited by John Brown. Naturally they were “social outcasts.” Rebecca did not question the taboo.

Thirteen years are to go by before the seventeen-year-old girl-valedictorian emerges as the thirty-year-old author of
Life in the Iron Mills.
Shrouded
years. The outward, known facts are so few, it is to the writings one must turn to piece together what those thirteen years must have been.

In Rebecca’s first published fiction, there is a gallery of girls before marriage, devoted to their families, especially their usually difficult fathers. They are “hungry to make some use of themselves, . . . undergoing fierce struggles to tame and bind to
some unfitting work, the power within.”
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They responsibly carry out household tasks “though heart and brain need more than this.” Unlike those dear to them, they are “hurt” by

            
the filth, injustice, bafflings in the world . . . she [Dode] never glossed them over as “necessity,” or shirked them as we do: she cried hot, weak tears, . . . over the wrongs of the slaves about her, her old
father’s ignorance, her own cramped life . . . these passion-fits were the only events of her life.

Throughout her work, there is another recurrent figure: proud, vulnerable young women, subjected to indignities and rejection because their appearance and being do not fit the prevailing standards of female beauty or behavior. Young men say to them patronizingly: “You are built for use, but not
for show.” They are made to feel shame for their energy and strength, which “they cannot remember to dissemble into fragility that appeals.” They are penalized because they cannot “blush and flutter and plume themselves when a man comes near.” They are “freaks” for their “rare sincerity” or “seriousness.”

If they attract, they at the same time repel:

            
He took her short, thick hand
in his delicate fingers, but dropped it again quickly. The fiery spirit in his veins rose to meet the heat in hers . . . but he really could not bear to see a young girl with a paw shaped like a man’s.

When they love, it is in an agony of intensity—love most often unspoken, or despised; or if mutual, having to be denied.

There are older women, realizing that theirs is to be the social obloquy
of the unchosen, the unmarried, “loathing themselves as one whom God had thought unworthy of every woman’s right—to love and be loved, . . . their strength drying up within them, jeered at, utterly alone.” “We laugh at their trial,” Rebecca goes on to say. “I think the quick fagots at the stake were fitter subjects for laughter.” Like the younger women, they school themselves to maintain dignity,
integrity; they armor, imprison themselves in “the great power of reticence.”