Life In The Iron Mills

In this story, art and art-making plays a complicated role. While art helps the characters in the story to imagine lives and circumstances beyond their own, it ultimately does nothing to change any lives (at any rate, not for the better). It is used for different ends in the story: sometimes as an authentic revolutionary expression, but also sometimes to reinforce the very status quo that it seeks to challenge. 

At the end of the story, the narrator reveals that she now owns Hugh Wolfe’s sculpture, which led to his encounter with the four upper-class men touring the mill, and indirectly to his prison sentence for theft. Her relation to this sculpture is in uneasy one. Unlike the more refined and decorous objects that sit in her home—“[a] half-moulded child’s head; Aphrodite; a bough of forest-leaves”—the sculpture has a disturbing immediacy about it, so much so that she usually keeps it “hid behind a curtain” (64-65). It is the one artwork in her home that “seems to belong to and end with the night” (65), rather than to fit in comfortably with her comfortable life. Yet the narrator also finds hope in the sculpture’s undiminished capacity to disturb—even while its maker has died by his own hand in jail—and the last line of the story suggests that the sculpture might literally point the way towards a better world: “While the room is yet steeped in heavy shadow, a cool, gray light suddenly touches its head like a blessing hand, and its groping arm points through the broken cloud to the far East, where […] God has set the promise of dawn” (65).