In sharp contrast to Uncle Tom’s Ca

In sharp contrast to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, when the narrator of Life in the Iron Mills sets out to introduce us to her protagonist, she is beset by difficulty. The narrator’s view of the protagonist is obstructed, first, by a failure of vision itself. It is difficult, she observes, to see anything through the stifling smoke of the mills on a rainy day. But she is not only blinded by rain and smoke; her vision is impaired as well by the indistinctness of the object at which she is looking. Wolfe is one of “the masses of men, with dull, besotted faces,” “myriads of...furnace-tenders” any ofwhom might serve equally well as the object of her contemplation.20