"She wanted no part of Christian passivity..."

2 June 2022: In my research for my entry on "Life in the Iron Mills," by Rebecca Harding Davis, I came across an article by Janice Milner Lasseter that shows the original text (and an 1865 version) included an extra paragraph that she speculates James Fields removed. Lasseter compellingly argues that if that paragraph is considered, it would more fully explain Davis's view of "social justice" (175). 

The whole article is well worth a read, but I find myself drawn to this section, about Davis's view of herself as a Christian writer: “She would articulate their [the people she wrote about] suffering, their pain. She wanted no part of Christian passivity as a way to endure social injustice; rather she strove, as the holograph and 1865 texts illustrate, to create an artistic and rhetorical strategy that would effect structural changes within the capitalist economic system” (Lasseter 184).

So many of the pieces I've read make a similar sort of point--that Davis points outside the text for solutions, that readers need to do more than just read. And here we can see how she truly bridges sentimentalism and realism (though that simplifies both concepts). But it also strikes me as startlingly relevant for Christians today. We have to do more than just talk. We have to do the work of social justice. 

I am reminded of this post from last week, about another article that made me draw connections between the nineteenth century and our world today, specifically about how these texts called their contemporaries to actions but also still call us to action today. 

Work Cited

Lasseter, Janice Milner. “The Censored and Uncensored Literary Lives of ‘Life in the Iron Mills.’” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, vol. 20, no. 1–2, 2003, pp. 175–90. EBSCOhost.