The Difference between Poor and Rich

Michele Sharik
English 48A
Journal for Davis
September 30, 2009

"Man cannot live by work alone." -- Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron-Mills

"Life in the Iron Mills was not written out of compassion or condescending pity. The thirty-year-old Rebecca Harding who wrote it, wrote in absolute identification with "thwarted, wasted lives... Mighty hungers... unawakened power"; despised love; circumstances that denied use of capacities; imperfect, self-tutored art that could have only odd moments for its doing -- as if these were her own. And they were...." -- Tillie Olsen, A Biographical Interpretation (afterward to 1972 edition of Life in the Iron Mills)


A New York Times Book Review says of Life in the Iron-Mills, "You must read this book and let your heart be broken." My heart was indeed broken while reading this story. While I grew up in the 1970s, with the benefit of almost a century's worth of Labor Regulation, the setting reminds me a bit of the town where I grew up. My town was not a mill town and the conditions not as desperately grim as in Iron-Mills, but there was a great deal of poverty in the once-thriving railroad town (that rapidly ceased thriving when the railroad itself ceased operation).

I can also identify with Davis' circumstances as outlined by Tillie Olsen, with her description of "imperfect, self-tutored art that could have only odd moments for its doing," for my family was too poor to allow me to take the music lessons I so desperately wanted. Without those lessons, and in an age before YouTube and Google allowed for instant access to the goings-on of a world of art and music, my own artistic inclinations seemed to be fated to be merely unfulfilled yearnings.

I did have the opportunity to attend Conservatory, but without training in my younger years, I was woefully unprepared for the level of preparedness shown by my competitors - for "competitors" they were, not compatriots. (Such is life in a Conservatory.)

But I was not the only one affected by growing up in a rural ghost town. I saw many other people, young and old, who once had dreams, who had a glimmer (or sometimes a shedload) of talent that would never be recognized by the outside world, that would never be expressed due to the crushing weight of the responsibilities of everyday life. Perhaps they, like Hugh Wolfe, made bad decisions or perhaps it was only a lack of opportunity, financial or otherwise (or simply not recognizing that opportunity when it presented itself), but it seems to me that so much talent is wasted in the struggle of humanity to just get by.

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