Mary Kracha Character Analysis

Mary is Kracha’s eldest daughter and the focus of the novel’s third part. She is Mike’s wife and the mother of Dobie, Pauline, Mikie, and Agnes. Mary is born in Pennsylvania and is a rambunctious child who constantly gets dirty, much to Dorta’s weary amusement. As a teenager, Mary takes a job caring for the young son of the Dexters, a well-off American family. The time she spends working in the Dexters’ large, ornate home and traveling with them to their seaside vacation retreat alerts her to the vast socioeconomic gulf that separates wealthy Americans from working-class “Hunkies.” While Mary works for the Dexters she begins dating Mike, and the couple soon wed and dream of someday achieving a fraction of the success the Dexter family has. Throughout the novel, Mary’s experiences as a mother, wife, and businessperson who keeps boarders in her home epitomizes the hard, unappreciated lot of working-class women in Braddock. While the steel towns center around an exclusively male labor force and the physical, dirty, and dangerous nature of men’s work in the steel mills, Mary’s short existence demonstrates how women in charge of steelworkers’ families endure lives that are as hard as men’s lives—but without the recognition and respect afforded to men. Without unions to represent them or wages to earn, the work lives of women like Mary remain both largely invisible and utterly indispensable. Mike’s stagnant wages only add to the burden of the mentally and physically taxing work Mary performs. Death also defines much of Mary’s life: her mother, Elena, dies when Mary is a young girl, and Mike’s sudden death in a mill accident leaves her to raise her four children alone. She is therefore the third tragic figure in Bell’s story, as the stress of widowhood and the ceaseless work just to make ends meet takes a heavy toll on her health. She contracts Spanish influenza and/or consumption and spends a year in a sanitarium, where she dies before reaching the age of forty.