Rebecca Harding Davis Analysis

Conflict and tension can be seen as going hand in hand when discussing the early ideals of America. Two authors in particular, Rebecca Harding Davis and Harriet Jacobs, focus on the pitfalls hidden within the might of industry of the era, and life as a slave and paradoxical nature freedom can have when it forms, respectively. Davis uses the story of Wolfe and his cousin to show the conditions which hold the greatness of America up in the light, hiding the workers in the shadow below. Jacobs writes of the attic as a place of confinement, a place taking freedom away, yet it also represents freedom to choose her own prison, as she is trapped because she chose to be trapped, rather than being used for forced sex. Tensions exist within both as an outside observer looks in, the dream of America clashing with the reality of what fuels it, as well as the paradoxical nature of choosing to be imprisoned to gain freedom rather than being free but chained to a …show more content…
The tension within the story comes from the character of Wolfe, who has suffered with his work for the industry of the American machine, his own mind and body in conflict with the dream of American greatness and productivity. Davis writes, “He knew how in these long years he should slowly die, but not until soul and body had become corrupt and rotten” (1728). Deborah sees how the men of Wolfe’s ilk will be in the years to come, what the work put in producing iron for the country would do to them, and she sees the terror which will come from greatness. How the two sides will clash and one will come out from the conflict better, the workers against the dream, and the dream will win in that tension, that conflict, just as the law won against Wolfe in the