Life in the Iron Mills, and Other Stories
What is the setting of Life in the Iron Mills, and Other Stories by Rebecca Harding Davis?
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The setting of "Life in the Iron Mills" is a town, presumably in Virginia or Ohio, where iron mills are the major industry. The town is dark and gloomy because of the constant smoke from the fires at the mills. The dark, dusty atmosphere is metaphoric of the poverty in which many of the mills workers live, a sad life in which both physical and emotional hunger is a constant. The setting of "The Wife's Story" begins in New York and moves to Newport as the family in the story are forced to move because of economic difficulties. In "Anne," the setting is a prosperous ranch that the heroine of the story has run and made successful on her own. The setting moves to a train on which the heroine is attempting to run away, but that train crashes, a metaphor for the crushing of the woman's beliefs in the opportunities she felt she missed out on in her youth.
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