Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Out of This Furnace, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Immigration and American Identity
Industrialization and Destruction
The American Dream vs. Reality
Women’s Work
Capital vs. Labor
Summary
Analysis
Mikie and Agnes visit Mary every day, while Dobie sends her a letter and money order every two weeks. Mary eventually stops asking when she can leave the sanitarium, yet she never doubts that “someday she would leave, as healthy and strong as ever.” She shares a room with a “fragile, rather homely girl from Uniontown” named Agatha Holloway. A former schoolteacher fated to the sanitarium by a bad haemorrhage, Agatha is relentlessly chatty, and she regales Mary with stories about her fiancé, a perfectly pleasant auto garage worker named Walt Button. He visits Agatha once a month. Mary tolerates Agatha, but her stories remind her of Mike.
The relentless positivity of Mary’s hospital roommate, Agatha Holloway, reminds her of Mike. However, Agatha and Walt Button are in many respects the mirror image of Mary and Mike in their younger days. Like Mike, Agatha is a restless and optimistic dreamer who has big plans for her life with Walt, just as Mike had big plans for his life with Mary. Walt, meanwhile, is a steady, sometimes struggling worker who tries to support Agatha, much in the way a working Mary once supported Mike’s ambitions.
Themes
Anna writes Mary to fill her in on developments back home. John still works in his saloon-turned-speakeasy, while Francka’s son, Andy, got married. Kracha is now boarding with Francka in Homestead, where she keeps him drunk on homemade moonshine. Lad Dexter was killed in an airplane crash during the war, and his family opened a new operating room in the hospital dedicated to his memory. Mary continues dreaming about Mike, so much so that she often wishes “the dead could take with them the memories of the living.”
In this passage, so many of the people in Mary’s family and social circle go through changes in their lives while Mary’s life remains caught in a sickness-induced limbo. Day in and day out, her surroundings do not change and her thoughts about Mike do not stop. While his memory should be a comfort, it instead becomes a torment; a constant reminder of the life she wants but cannot have.
Themes
Though she is confident that she will get well, Mary cannot help but think about death, especially how the children will react. She imagines Johnny and Mikie as grown men who find jobs outside of the steel mill and live in houses “away from the mill where there [are] grass and trees.” She hopes that Pauline will eventually find a husband but cherishes having her around to help with the housework. She smiles as she thinks about her future grandchildren. Mary tells the children stories about Mike, especially since Agnes and Mikie barely knew him before he died. She gives the girls every detail about how she and Mike met. “The first time he ever looked at me twice was when I came back to Braddock after being away with the Dexters all summer,” she recalls, “I was all in white.” The girls listen to her with rapt attention.
The mill town has robbed Mary of the life she wants, so she copes by retreating into the fantasies of her mind, in which her children grow up and her husband is still alive to see his family prosper. She does her best to make Mike alive through story so that her children can learn more about him. In her last moments on earth, while stuck in a sanitarium, Mary tries to reconstruct through words and memory the family life that the steel mill tore away from her. This storytelling demonstrates yet another way in which women’s work is crucial to keeping families together, this time in an emotional sense.
Themes
Still, Mary’s condition does not improve. Often alone with her thoughts, she wonders how and why her life took such turns. She marvels at “the contrast between what she and Mike had been and what they had become, between the dreams of their youth and the hard reality the years had brought them.” At one point, she nearly convinces herself that Mike’s death was all a dream, and that she will return home to find him there waiting for her. She falls asleep with a smile on her face and does not wake up.
Mary’s tragic death is Bell’s way of showing readers how the steel mills take the lives of people who never even set foot inside of them. Mary is as much a victim of American industry (and the impossible American Dream) as Mike is. The mills paid Mike a pittance wage, left him unable to provide for his family, and forced Mary into a life of hard labor that ultimately killed her. Even more tragic is the fact that there are thousands more people just like Mary and Mike whose lives the mills also cut short.
Themes
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