and dialect skillfully to depict realistically her uneducated immigrant characters and to emphasize their lower-class status. Davis counteracts positive images of healthy, wholesome mill girls and mills as ideal places of work. Life in the Iron Mills challenges the optimism of transcendentalism by showing how industrialism fueled by greedy capitalists destroys the natural environment and the human spirit. Literary analysis and main themes Feminism Life in the Iron Mills is one of the earliest American Realist stories published. It was Rebecca Harding Davis's first published work, first appearing anonymously in the April 1861 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. After its publication, it caused a literary sensation with its powerful naturalism that anticipated the work of Émile Zola, Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris. It was reprinted in the early 1970s by the Feminist Press with a well-known afterword by Tillie Olsen and has continued to be an important text for those who study labor and women’s issues. Anticipating post-Darwinian naturalism, Davis's most famous depiction of the redundant, dehumanizing servitude of American labor in Life in the Iron-Mills (initially an anonymous publication) may be American literature's first industrial muckraker. Its graphic probe into ethnicity, vocation, and class also encompasses, according to Pfaelzer, what became Davis's most characteristic subject and theme: strong women and powerlessness. "Life in the Iron Mills" reworks Davis's struggles with the problems of thwarted vocation, feminine longing and the alienation of an immigrant (and in an allusion to a textile mill, an interracial) industrial proletariat. Davis's is not only a dual projection of resentments at her own domestic and artistic oppression, but also an ambitious bi-gender proletarian narrative. Nevertheless, the authorial decision to use dual protagonists highlights even more greatly the sexual division of labor, the social relations between working men and workingwomen that is produced, and the very nature of the female work character. Davis takes pains to initiate her readers into the knowledge of hitherto little acknowledged social realities; she seems a pioneer exploring a territory which, by the end of the nineteenth century, would be recognized as the new American wilderness. Davis's story comes to life not as a work which is admirable because it is almost realistic, but as a work which astonishes and informs its past and present readers because it shares in and extends the accomplishments of the romance. Immigration and industrialization The story also "launched a pathbreaking exposé of the effects of