In this novella, the author is trying to depict for us the
difficulties of working class life. She is trying use the story to scold the upper
classes for the ways in which they are treating their workers. This means that she is
trying to appeal to the upper classes (who are the main ones reading books for leisure
in her time) on an emotional level. This is the purpose of the rhetorical questions --
to help her engage this audience.
Teachers are encouraged
to ask students questions that will get them to think as they listen to a lecture or
read a book. This is what the author is doing here. The rhetorical questions in this
story generally are meant to draw the reader more personally into the story. They are
meant to force the reader to think about the conditions that are faced by the
workers.
Look at a few of the rhetorical questions -- they
have to do with the conditions the workers face and are meant to get the reader to think
about and/or feel these conditions. For example:
A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town
of iron-works? The skysank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. What do you make of
a case like that, amateur psychologist? You call it an altogether serious thing to be
alive: to these men it is a drunken jest, a joke,--horrible to angels perhaps, to them
commonplace enough.
What if it be stagnant and slimy here?
It knows that beyond there waits for it odorous sunlight, quaint old gardens, dusky with
soft, green foliage of apple-trees, and flushing crimson with roses,--air, and fields,
and mountains.
In each case,
the point is to make the reader think and to contrast the lives of the workers with the
readers' lives.
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