Write an essay in which you say how four of our major writers–Rowlandson, Franklin, Thoreau, and Douglass–would respond to and interpret the short story, “Life in the Iron Mills,” by Rebecca Harding Davis. The main objective, here, is for you to demonstrate both an understanding of Davis’s story and an understanding of some of the main concerns and ideas of Rowlandson, Franklin, Thoreau, and Douglass. You should write a minimum of five paragraphs, one in which you summarize the main themes or morals of “Life in the Iron Mills,” and one each for those four writers. Your essay should be no shorter than 800 words.
Your claims for each writer’s response to the story should be based on what you know about those writers’ ideas, derived from texts of theirs that we have read, as well as ideas that were characteristic of the times they lived in and the circles they moved in (i.e., 17th-C/Puritanism/Calvinism, 18th-C/the Enlightenment, 19th-C/Romanticism, 19th-C/Reform/Anti-Slavery). For each of the four writers you should refer to specific passages of their writing in support of your claim. (Summaries plus page numbers will do; full quotations are not required.)
There are different ways to make this manageable. For instance, you might organize your thinking by saying how you think each of the four writer’s would respond to key scenes, such as the scene where Kirby, May, and Mitchell discuss Hugh’s situation in life, and Hugh’s responses to all that; or to the story’s ambiguous ideas about religion, as seen in Hugh’s visit to the church and Deb’s later life with the Quakers. For each of our four writers, bring in whenever possible their core ideas, rather than peripheral ones, and, for Davis, focus on ideas or themes that are central to the story, not peripheral.
Finally, when making claims, don’t just throw around assertions. As always, provide good reasons for your claims and evidence for those reasons. The book my class uses is “The Norton Anthology American Literature Shorter Ninth Edition Beginnings to 1865