Note: This example is based on a literary analysis paper I wrote when I was a student. The text analyzed here is not from our course — it's here to show you what close reading looks like when it's broken out of essay format and into something more visual. Your project will use readings from our class. — Sarah Karlis

Hunger of the Soul and the Body

Tracing a metaphor through Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills

The Framework: Marxist / Class Criticism

Marxist criticism looks at how economic conditions and class structures shape people's lives, choices, and fates. It asks questions like: Who has power and who doesn't? How do material conditions — poverty, labor, access to resources — determine what's possible for a person? When a character fails or suffers, is it because of personal weakness, or because of a system that was never designed to let them succeed?

This reading uses a Marxist lens to argue that Hugh Wolfe's downfall isn't a story about one man's moral failure — it's about what happens when an economic system starves people of everything that makes life worth living.

The Angle

Throughout Life in the Iron Mills, Rebecca Harding Davis describes her characters as hungry — but the word keeps changing meaning. It starts as literal, physical hunger: people who don't have enough to eat. But as the story continues, hunger becomes something else entirely. Their souls are hungry — for love, nurturing, equality, beauty, and most of all, hope.

This page tracks how Davis uses that single word to build toward the downfall of Hugh Wolfe.

1. Hunger as a Physical Reality

The first time we encounter hunger in the story, it's straightforward — people who don't have enough food.

"This [was] the first food that had touched her lips since morning."
— Davis, p. 17, describing Deborah

Janey enters the scene and is also described immediately as hungry — perhaps sick with hunger from lack of food.

What to notice: Davis introduces Deborah and Janey with hunger as one of their defining traits. She's establishing it early and making it physical — we can feel it. This isn't subtle. She wants us to understand these people are literally starving before she starts doing something more complicated with the word.

Marxist lens: Davis doesn't present hunger as bad luck or personal circumstance. These are iron mill workers. Their hunger is a product of industrial labor — they work grueling hours and still can't feed themselves. The system extracts their labor and gives back less than survival.

2. The Shift: Hugh Isn't Hungry

Here's where it gets interesting. When we finally meet Hugh, Davis does something unexpected.

Deborah "saw that he was not hungry, — was eating to please her."
— Davis, p. 21

Why this matters: After setting up physical hunger as the defining condition of these characters' lives, Davis tells us Hugh isn't hungry for food. He's eating to be kind to Deborah, not because he needs to. So if everyone around him is starving and he isn't — what is he hungry for?

Davis answers almost immediately:

"A reality of soul-starvation, of living death."
— Davis, p. 23

Hugh has "a fierce thirst for beauty" and an insatiable desire to "be — something."
— Davis, p. 25

The metaphor has shifted. Hunger is no longer about food. "Soul-starvation" and "living death" — Davis is telling us that what's killing Hugh isn't poverty alone. It's the absence of beauty, purpose, and hope. Notice the word "fierce" — this isn't a mild longing. And "insatiable" — a word that literally means cannot be satisfied. Davis is building toward something.

Marxist lens: Hugh's "soul-starvation" is what Marxist critics would call alienation — the way industrial labor separates workers from creativity, beauty, and meaning. Hugh isn't just poor. He's cut off from everything that would let him feel human. The economic system doesn't just underfeed his body; it starves his inner life.

3. The Statue: Hunger Made Visible

Hugh's hunger stays internal until other characters discover his carvings. Then it becomes something everyone can see.

The statue is described as hungry — not for food, but for something "to make her live."
— Davis, p. 33

What the statue represents

The statue is Hugh — or at least, everything he feels and can't say. It reflects his hunger for beauty and hope, his desire for "something to make her live." He carved his own soul-starvation into a physical form. The statue is hungry the same way Hugh is hungry.

What happens next

When visitors praise the statue, it doesn't satisfy Hugh's hunger — it increases it. Getting a taste of recognition and respect makes the gap between his life and his desires even wider. The compliments don't feed him. They make him hungrier.

Marxist lens: The visitors who praise Hugh's art are wealthy, educated men — the class that benefits from the same system that traps Hugh. They can see his talent and do nothing about it. They admire the product of his suffering without questioning the conditions that produced it. This is the class divide made visible: the bourgeoisie consuming working-class art while the artist starves.

4. "Mad with Hunger" — The Breaking Point

Davis describes Hugh, at the moment he holds the stolen money, as "mad with hunger."
— Davis, p. 45

Look at what Davis has done with one word across the entire story:

Deborah's hunger = literal, physical, about food
Hugh's hunger = spiritual, about beauty and hope
"Mad with hunger" = hunger has become a force that controls him

The word "mad" is doing a lot of work here. It means both insane and furious. Hugh's hunger has gone from a feeling to a force — something that drives him to act against his own morality. The stolen money represents everything he's been starving for: the possibility of a different life.

After this battle was lost, "what followed was mere drifting circumstance."
— Davis, p. 50

This is the line that seals it. Davis is saying the rest of the plot doesn't matter. The important moment already happened — the moment hunger won. Everything after is just consequence.

Marxist lens: Hugh's crime isn't greed — it's desperation. The money represents access to a class he'll never belong to. From a Marxist perspective, the "moral failure" here belongs to the system, not to Hugh. He was set up to break by conditions designed to keep workers in place. Davis's phrase "mere drifting circumstance" suggests that once the system has done its work on a person, individual choices barely matter anymore.

What This Adds Up To

Davis uses hunger as a through-line that evolves across the entire story. It starts as something we understand instinctively — not having enough to eat — and gradually transforms into something more abstract and more dangerous. By the time Hugh is "mad with hunger," the word has accumulated so much weight that we understand his crime not as a moral failure but as the inevitable result of a system that starves people of everything that makes life bearable.

His hunger is caused by the circumstances of his life and his own inability to control it. When it's finally gone — when he's in the jail cell with nothing left to hope for — he has no energy to fight. The soul-starvation that Davis named early in the story is what kills him in the end.

Reading this through a Marxist lens doesn't change the plot — Hugh still steals, still goes to prison, still dies. But it changes what the story means. Without the framework, it's a tragedy about a flawed man. With it, it's an indictment of an economic system that creates the conditions for that tragedy and then punishes the people who break under them.

This example demonstrates close reading: pulling specific passages from a text, paying attention to word choices and patterns, and building an interpretation from the evidence. Your project doesn't need to look exactly like this — but it should show this kind of attention to the actual language of the text you're working with.