Just before the union surfaces in Twain's narrative, he brings to life how "you are tortured with the exquisite misery of uncertainty" as you grope through "an impenetrable gloom of smoke from a hundred miles of burning bagesse [sugar cane] piles…. You find yourself away out in the midst of a vague dim sea that is shoreless, that fades out and loses itself in the murky distances; for you cannot discern the thin rib of embankment, and you are always imagining you see a straggling tree when you don't…. You hope you are keeping the river, but you do not know. All that you are sure about is that you are likely to be within six feet of the bank and destruction." When Huck Finn is lost in the fog, his moral bearings are disoriented. In "Old Times" the issue is epistemological. Twain repeatedly comes back to the torment of uncertainty in a threatening, shifting, murky world. He leaves the issue unresolved, or rather he tells one more story about the demigod pilot, the savior figure who can steer a boat in his sleep and triumph over death and destruction.
After he deals with the union, the Civil War, and the railroad, however, Twain is unable to imagine the pilot as demigod. The epistemological dilemma nonetheless remains. But in place of Mr. B. and his like, who resolve the torment of uncertainty and who preside over parts I–IV of "Old Times," Twain now invokes another figure, the pilot Stephen W. Appropriately enough for a Gilded Age narrative, Stephen's identifying trait is his involvement with debt and money. The suppressed element in the figure of the true pilot is now overt. Money and debt were urgent concerns for Twain and many others in the Gilded Age. Unlike the demigod pilot, however, Stephen W. does not even temporarily resolve the issues he embodies. The jokes are -171- funny, but because money totally dominates, the tensions that impel the narrative are no longer in active play; the narrative loses force, and Twain brings "Old Times" to a close.
In "Old Times" another unresolved tension involves the lively colloquial language of the pilot as opposed to the genteel language of the landscape tradition. The narrator consciously favors "the red hue brightened into gold," the "tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal," the "leafy bough," "the unobstructed splendor," the "graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances" — all the stock language and conventional way of seeing of the nineteenth-century landscape tradition. As the cub learns the river, the stock beauty and glory fade. Instead of a charming ripple the cub who has learned his trade now sees a deadly reef, "the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats." He has also found a vital language rooted in ordinary American experience, a colloquial language Twain perfected in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
This language has a beauty appropriate to a developing realism. But Twain and other realists experienced a dilemma as they attempted to render observed American life, since they associated beauty with a set of conventions they were in the process of subverting. For Twain the new language of realism is in part connected with the masculine realm of work and with an evolving professionalism that involved a use of precise measurements at odds with the hyperbole of frontier humor and the irreverent colloquialism of ordinary speech. It was also at odds with his conscious conception of beauty. Using the gendered image of the woman's body, Twain associates beauty with femininity and deceptive surfaces, with the flush of fever hiding "some deadly disease." For the professional and the realist, "are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay?" On this view the realist sees through the surface deceptions to the underlying disease, as Isabel Archer does in her way or as the narrator of Life in the Iron Mills grapples with in hers. Especially for the early Twain and the early Rebecca Harding Davis, realists in process, no wonder if they sometimes asked whether they had "gained most or lost most by learning [their] trade."
As a pioneer realist, in Life in the Iron Mills (1861) Rebecca Harding Davis probed a crucial area of American life a generation in -172- advance of successors who by the end of the century had forgotten her achievement. More pervasively than in "Old Times," the smoke that dominates the prologue to Life in the Iron Mills embodies both the material conditions of the mills and the difficulty of penetrating through "the fog and mud and foul effluvia" to a resolution of the questions this new way of life poses for all those affected by it. Partly because of the narrator's point of view, partly because of the dislocating impact of the mill world, the revelations in Life in the Iron Mills are not fixed and absolute but problematic.
Deb, malnourished and deformed, recognizes that the Welsh mill worker Hugh Wolfe has "a groping passion for whatever was beautiful and pure — that his soul sickened with disgust at her deformity." On this view, Wolfe accepts an etherialized, middle-class aesthetics that equates "the beautiful" and "the pure," an aesthetics at odds with the powerful art Wolfe in fact creates. Even more than the narrator of "Old Times," Wolfe is divided. The narrator of "Old Times" consciously values a language of beauty quite different from the art he actually creates out of the processes of piloting. Similarly, Wolfe's achievement is to create strong, moving art from the material conditions of the industrial process. His basic material, the korl, is "the refuse from the ore after the pig-metal is run." His Korl Woman statue expresses the spiritual hunger, the oppression, and, depending on the observer, the protest, the warning, or the supplication of the men and women who work in the mills. Wolfe's creativity is inseparable from the working-class reality that permeates his life. Part of his tragedy is that Wolfe does not have a verbal, conceptual language that allows him to value what he has created.
Instead, his consciousness is penetrated by middle-class ideas of beauty that denigrate his own class and fit in with the narrator's view "of the disease of their class….a reality of soul-starvation, of living death, that meets you every day under the besotted faces on the street." The statue, however, embodies strength as well as soulstarvation; a rugged, muscular beauty, not disease. The statue embodies a more complex and nuanced view of working-class men and women than either Wolfe or the narrator is able to articulate or the upper-class observers are able to comprehend. The Korl Woman statue also speaks to the unacknowledged situation of middle-class women like Rebecca Harding Davis and the narrator, who find in the overt oppression of the workers an analogue of their own position. -173-
For Wolfe the central "mystery of his life" is the question not of class conflict but of class difference. "He seized eagerly every chance that brought him into contact with this mysterious class that shone down on him perpetually with the glamour of another order of being. What made the difference between them? That was the mystery of his life." In his art, Wolfe does not explore the difference but instead goes deep into the complex realities of his own class. "With his artist's sense," however, Wolfe "did obeisance to…the thorough-bred gentleman, Mitchell….unconscious that he did so." In light of his obeisance to the glamour of the upper class at the expense of his own class, the wonder is that Wolfe is able to produce "figures — hideous, fantastic enough, but sometimes strangely beautiful" — but not beautiful by the standards of the class he worships, standards he himself partly accepts.
Through what the narrator sees as his God-given "artist's sense," Wolfe responds not only to the sensuous glamour of the other, the genteel class, but also to the middle-class emblems of popular romanticism: "There are moments when a passing cloud, the sun glinting on the purple thistles, a kindly smile, a child's face, will rouse him to a passion of pain." Wolfe may judge himself on these genteel standards but in his actual creative work he probes rather than avoids "this vile, slimy life" that has been forced on him. He then produces powerful masterpieces like the Korl Woman instead of images of sun-touched thistles and kindly smiles.