when her father is drunk. She is clearly beautiful, which makes Deb jealous. Mr. Clarke, an overseer at the iron mill where Hugh works. Young Kirby, son of the mill's co-owner. He feels no obligation toward the workers except "a narrow limit,--the pay-hour on Saturday night." Doctor May. He is one of the town's physicians. He feels compassion toward the workers, but the overwhelming task of improving the thousands of workers (1200 at this mill alone) prevents him from helping Hugh, even when Hugh asks for it explicitly. Instead, he gives Hugh some empty words of encouragement. Mitchell. Kirby's brother-in-law (and son-in-law of the mill owner), a man broadly educated in the classical sense who was "spending a couple of months in the boarders of a Slave State, to study the institutions of the South" (Davis, 17). A reporter (who accompanies Clarke, Young Kirby, Doctor May and Mitchell on a tour of the mill). A Quaker woman. She aids Deborah during and after prison, and provides a grave for Hugh. She provides the only sincere assistance to the poor in the story. The narrator who recounts the story is an unknown person of some higher class. "Many scholars assume the narrative voice is female." She or he possesses the korl woman statue as the only remaining evidence of Hugh's existence. The Korl Woman. A sculpture that was created by Hugh, which showcases Hugh's artistic talent. She is made out of korl. The Korl woman represents industrialism's effect on the working class. Style Life in the Iron Mills must be considered a central text in the origins of American realism, American proletarian literature, and American feminism, according to Jean Pfaelzer. The story was revolutionary in its compelling portrait of the working class's powerlessness to break the oppressive chains of industrial capitalism. Author of The Utopian Novel in America, 1886-1896 (1984) and many articles on Davis, Pfaelzer edits the volume's literary selections and supplies the substantial critical introduction, which maintains that Davis inherited the sentimental literary tradition but nonetheless wrote "common stories" that "exposed the tension between sentimentalism, a genre predicated on the repression of the self, and realism, a genre predicated on the search for individual identity." Davis's realistic depiction of the gritty, hellish mills and the impoverished workers' lives is far removed from the material advantages of the upper classes often portrayed in domestic fiction. She also uses the vernacular