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초록
Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills stands as a foundational realist text that exposes the biopolitical logic of industrial capitalism. Set in a polluted and claustrophobic mill town, the novella foregrounds diseased and deformed bodies—particularly those of Deborah and Hugh—as material inscriptions of exploitative labor regimes. These figures are not merely victims of economic precarity but are positioned within a modern apparatus of power that determines whose lives are protected and whose are rendered disposable. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics, disciplinary power, and normativity, this paper argues that Davis’s narrative reveals how industrial modernity manages, regulates, and hierarchizes life. The contaminated environment and grotesque corporeality of the working class function not simply as realist description but as biopolitical markers of exclusion. Deborah’s gendered domestic labor and Hugh’s unrecognized artistic aspiration demonstrate the internalization of disciplinary norms and the foreclosure of deviant forms of subjectivity. Moreover, religion operates less as a site of transcendence than as a mechanism of moral normalization aligned with middle-class ideology. Moving beyond feminist recuperations and labor-realist interpretations, this study reconceptualizes Life in the Iron Mills as a narrative that not only represen‘ts class oppression but also renders visible the processes through which life is differentially valued, managed, and abandoned under industrial capitalism. Ultimately, the novella reveals that the failure of recognition, care, and solidarity is not incidental but structurally produced within a biopolitical order that governs life through selective protection and systemic neglect.