Shock Value

As I was reading through Davis' Life in the Iron Mills, I remember seeing her points about the oppression of the industrial workers, and the apathy of the bourgeois middle class, but I never recall at one point being enthused to take any kind of action (if I had been living during that period). There was never any outrage, never any disgust--her passion never shone through the narrative. Perhaps this is part of the realist creed, to just tell the story and let the facts speak for themselves., but the sickness incurred by say The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. There is no shock value.

While Deborah commits a crime and is thrown in jail, and yes she is treated poorly, it just is not the same as seeing human body parts get mixed into deli meat, or having your blushing, new wife forcibly raped by your manager. These instances just seem incomparable in their tragedy. I think that perhaps Davis relies too much on the more subtle queues of her deformation or the stifling of Wolfe's art. I can see that Wolfe's creativity and intelligence are meant to be representative of the industrial working class as a whole. In the Jungle it was easy to see the traits of the oppressed within each of the characters. In Life in the Iron Mills, these traits are sort spread thin to begin with, and even then they are not centered on one or two core characters.