Inner Feeling Projection

In Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today he, in short, critiques his society and it’s infamous façade. The Gilded Age was entitled so because on the surface it appeared beautiful, full of potential for the common man and wealth for the rich, but under the golden surface was a much more base material—the dark secrets, child labor, racism, and hopelessness, of the time. Much like Mr. Twain, Rebecca Harding Davis uses her short story The Yares of Black Mountain to answer the Horatio Alger story, to pry the veneers off of Reconstruction culture. Davis uses a perversion of the common ‘quest’ style story to make subtle swipes at falsely optimistic literature. After being told that a change in scenery would cure her dying son, Mistress Denby travels to place where “civilization stops,” projecting her optimism falsely on her surroundings all the way. As stated by other travelers the scenery, at best “lacks the element of grandeur” and yet Denby looks upon everything with awe. She has put herself into a delusional environment, just like the rest of America has created a delusion of easy upward mobility.

Disclaimer I suppose: In the end of the story it turns out that the boy survives. The mother’s hopes come true. Though this is not to say that her delusion is less delusional, she allowed herself to be influenced by baseless hope.