f striking a pose that is distinctive for what it is not--which is, of course, the past-tense narrative convention of a novel. Novelists before and after Davis often begin with present tense: the ini tial description of the door in The Scarlet Letter; "Call me Ish mael," which opens Moby Dick; the observation about attitudes toward marriage that begins Pride and Prejudice; and the comment about happy and unhappy families that begins Anna Karenina are examples of this type. But the story does not begin until narra tive past tense describes and explain lives, as for example when Hester Prynne emerges from be hind the door. Life in the Iron Mills is undoubtedly fictional and not journalistic in the manner of today's New York Times. The determinedly accurate immigrant dialect and the fact that the omniscient narrative explains (for example) Hugh's undiscovered artistic soul demonstrate this: "Then flashed before his vivid poetic sense the man who had left him,--the pure face, the delicate, sinewy limbs, in harmony with all he knew of beauty and truth. In his cloudy fancy he had pic tured a Something like this" (Davis 40).
Nevertheless, the journalistic structure of language in Life in the Iron Mills is a conceit inviting the reader to
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