With people eternally clemmin’, two plots, an industrial plot and a romance plot, come together nervously, unsuccessfully: a cop-out

Folks

• John Barton, normal representative of the typical working man; getting involved in Chartism, he ends up getting chosen to shoot owner’s son. His extreme remorse seems to give him redemption. Full of sympathy but not exactly a subtle thinker, he nonetheless thinks a lot, and he sees everything as All Bad All the Time. He falls from a mixture of his own character and external circumstances.

• Esther Barton, Mary’s aunt; she buys pretty clothes with her wages till turned a prostitute after an elopement fails, who wants to make sure Mary doesn’t follow her lead. Her downfall literally made Mary’s mother (otherwise healthy) die. She conveniently dies.

• Mary Barton, our beautiful young woman who works at dressmaker’s who is born weak but will become stronger through events: by the end of the book, she will journey to Liverpool by herself, find Jem by herself in a race down the Mersey, face a murder trial, admit of her love for Jem publicly to save him, and get almost deathly ill. Due to her being influenced by her aunt’s compliments and by sentimental culture, she wants to marry a gentleman, she turns down her childhood sweetheart (Jem), wants to marry Henry Carson to secure her future, but then rejects Henry and realizes she loves Jem after all and decides to save him from being convicted of her father’s crime by journeying to Liverpool to get the alibi. She marries Jem and they move to Canada.

• Sally Leadbitter, a witty, bold girl who becomes so extroverted because of her unattractive person. She ridicules everything.

• George Wilson, friendly neighbor; his wife Jane, isn’t very nice.

• Jem Wilson, the son, another working-class dude, an engineer who can invent things, who loves Mary and (having fought with Henry over Mary) is accused of shooting Henry

• Will Wilson, Jem’s cousin, a sailor who can supply Jem’s alibi, and will marry Margaret.

• Henry Carson, rakish son of mill-owner, attracted to Mary. A lover of mimicry and farce, never seeming serious, he dies when shot by John Barton after his insensitive caricature of the workers during negotiations (as Falstaff) outrages them..

• John Carson, the heartbroken father, who wants to kill whoever killed his son, but who forgives John Barton in the name of religion

• Job Leigh, the friend of the family, who can’t take very good care of his daughter when the wife dies though he tries. Quite maternal.

• Alice Leigh, who goes mad as a reward for her lifelong piety, showing that religion can be the means of redemption in a crazy world

• Margaret Legh, his daughter; blinded, but at end recovers her sight and will marry Will Wilson.

Themes

• Emigration
  • Seen as cure for Esther, for the new couple that’s been shunned by their old community
  • It solves problems rather patly
  • The further Mary gets out of the place, the better, beginning with trip to Liverpool: domestic England is a problem
• Determinism versus Free Will
• Tragedy
  • Gaskell meant it to be a tragedy, tho’ it wasn’t received as such
• Redemption
• Inequality
  • Rich style of Carsons versus poverty of everyone else
• Critique of levity
  • Light-heartedness of Sally and Henry doesn’t fare so well
• Critique of sentimentality
  • Mary’s wish to marry a gentleman
• Domesticity
  • Gaskell seems to offer a good home life as a treat for successfully accepting unfair industrial life
  • Home fetishized: it’s hard to get to places if you’re poor
• Gender
  • Gaskell’s preface codes her political affiliation as maternal love
  • Rise of manufacturing life is centered towards the man
    • Male factory owner is hero (see Carlyle, “On Heroes and Hero Worship”)
  • Definition of the middle class revolves around its women
    • They are leisured (unlike workers)
    • They are moral (unlike nobles)
  • Showalter, A Literature of Their Own
    • 1840-80: Feminine
      • Profusion of women novelists
      • Conflicted: obey or resist?
      • A failure: they hide behind pseudonyms and have disclaimers about being a woman; they are paralyzed
    • 1880-1920: Feminist
      • More explicitly protesting and political
    • 1920-now: Female
      • New stage of self awareness
  • Should we see these books as failures?
    • You still have the ideas articulated ina public sphere: you can’t take away what you said with an ending
    • Look at New Woman novelists
    • For me, the stilted ending of Barton leaves questions in your mind
• Religion
  • Religion is politically progressive, radical
  • Victorian Christianity was one place to protest capitalism in
    • You might suffer your whole life, but you get to die in the right way and will get heaven, and that makes up for all.
  • Religion understands people as passionate, while capital does not
  • Religion is to solve problems of political economy.
• My idea of “perforation”
  • When the outside comes inside
  • The relics of sea journeys from Will Wilson
    • Empire shows itself even in domestic sphere of the poorest workers
  • Shows how empire works in tandem with the condition of the workers yet can help them (as British citizens who can emigrate)
  • There is no impermeable space.

Style

• Realism
  • Tons of domestic details, incl. dialect
• Common Language
  • Gaskell believed that overly formal language isn’t a necessity for being a hero: heroism can sound common
• Shakespeare allusion
  • In the negotiating room
  • According to Gallagher, it shows us that you can’t laugh any longer at the lower classes (Gallagher 70)
• Crazy-quilt of styles
  • Melodrama, domestic novel, detective story, tragedy, homily
  • First half about the domestic sphere, second about the legal sphere
  • Gallagher argues that the contradictions about determination versus free will (character versus the events that happen to a person) require Gaskell to vacillate among various narrative styles to avoid looking the contradiction in the face. (Gallagher 75
  • We are so busy expecting problems with Mary’s romantic life that we forget to pay attention to John Barton.
    • Second half of the book makes you forget the first part (which is deterministic)
• Unsuccessful
  • Gaskell killing or exporting off her troublesome characters shows that at present there’s no way to reconcile all of the conflicts
  • Her demonization of the unions makes them a caricature and a melodramatic trope instead of realism (murder, really), also figuring anger of lower classes as violent and immoral
  • Mary can be seen as a girl who doesn’t know her place, who overreaches, so that Henry’s death is lucky for her, and she goes back to her proper place, marrying the other worker, but has to go away to Canada because of the shame she brought herself saving Jem
  • She wants to solve industrial problems by giving everybody faith and by everyone hoping for life after death.
  • The problems are given as systemic, yet the solutions are private.
  • Yet it’s accessible, and you have to give brownie points for raising the topic, and in such a digestible fashion
  • It shows Gaskell’s concern for the working class, but we have to wait for North and South to see a truly important figuring of the Condition of England question.

Background

• 1815 Corn Laws
  • Protectionist measures forcing them to buy domestic corn
  • Seen as unfair: food more expensive this way
  • Seen as hurting manufacturers (less goods bought) and workers (expensive food)
• 1832: Reform Bill: Parliament representation now shifts towards middle class
  • Away from nobles only
  • Now, industrial towns have MPs
• 1840s: Hungry Forties
  • Social unrest, starvation
• Industrial Novel
  • Uses melodramatic devices to dramatize industrial life
• 1846 Corn Laws repealed
  • Rise of free trade
  • Seen as triumph for bankers, merchants, manufacturers
• 1848: Mary Barton and Jane Eyre published
  • Revolutions everywhere except England
  • Marx and Engels are in London at this time
  • It does, however, have Chartism
• Chartism
  • Estb 1836 of working class men
  • 1st official organized movement
  • Had a Charter to bring over to Parliament: tried over and over
  • Demands
    • Universal male suffrage
    • Secret ballots
    • Equal electoral districts
    • Annual elections
    • Pay for MPs
    • No land required for MPs
  • Considered a failure
    • Economy got better
    • Demands were too stiff
    • But, they captured English imagination
• Raymond Williams, first cultural materialist
  • Likes Barton, at least first half
  • See Culture and Society

Mary Barton, North and South, Shirley

• Mary Barton: No marriage between the heroine and the manufacturing dude because she’s too far down in class
  • We aren’t yet to the sentimental literature of the late Victorian era and Edwardian era that fantasizes about the shopgirl marrying the owner’s son
  • Religion also seen as the truer fix
  • But it doesn’t really advocate change in the book itself (just relies on depicting the problems, like Eliot’s early realism)
• Marriage in N and S and Shirley
  • Critics tend to see it as an opt-out, throwing a symbolic social tie to gesture vaguely towards a desire to see the conflict resolved
  • But why can’t we see it as an example of hist mat? You can’t ignore the fact that the marriage happens only after the “conflict of opposites” (Margaret arguing against Thornton; Caroline against Moore; when Caroline is sick, Shirley takes her place a bit) induces changed behavior in the male protagonist, despite his assertion that his basic ambition hasn’t changed, just gotten more socially responsible
    • That does retain the two positions at a higher level: that’s dialectical, rather than a simple neutralization of problems
• Another relation to hist mat
  • Robert Moore’s mysterious absence of a half-year from the neighborhood: revealed to be an Engels-like journey to London and Birmingham to investigate the state of industry there
  • Moore visits the poor and tries to get down to the “cause” of their problems
  • He needs empirical evidence, just like Engels decided HE needed
• Caveat
  • At no point do these books critique the system as such—they do not want to dismantle it—but they want to alleviate the system
    • As such they are more like MPs of the time than they are like socialists
• Engels Question
  • Did Gaskell and Engels know of each other in Manchester?
  • Did Engels really say that he thought Mary Barton an accurate portrayal?
  • Did Gaskell talk to Bronte about Engels?
• Genre/Theme
  • The different genres identify different ways they code the industrial problem within an existing cultural framework: Bronte does republicanism and Enlightenment conceptions of man via a Romantic one; Gaskell uses religion
  • Romanticism
    • Why is Shirley Romantic? The cultural moment it’s set in (smack dab in middle of Romantic period; Napoleon and Wellington); the leisure activities they partake in (landscape portraiture, touring the scenery of England, watering holes, looking at books of engravings); the flights of fancy
  • The Woman Question
    • Mary Barton reinforces woman’s role, while N and S has a strong female character who nonetheless tries to reconcile her needs and thoughts with a domestic role (she won’t become a bluestocking, she promises her cousin)
      • Melodrama: Why is this book so eclectic? Notice that Shirley is also critiqued as eclectic (G H Lewes for example said so)
    • But in Shirley, we have two radical feminists (Shirley acts like a man and calls herself the Captain and says she will run for magistrate; Caroline is quiet but seethes with revolutionary thoughts, esp the need for women to have occupation, and I’d actually say Cary’s the more radical one!!)
    • Bronte wants to encode the industrial problem as a part of a larger social malaise that includes the diminished role in female society that leads to illness, waste, and unhappiness; as well as the fight of the individual for freedom of choice regardless of gender (Shirley’s fight against her uncle only seems gender oriented because of the genders they happen to be; if you pay attn to the actual arguments and substituted male names for female, it would still work as an argument); and the ill-balanced see-saw of manufacturers versus patriots (Orders in Council debacle)
  • Shirley: Romantic political struggle
    • Setting during Napoleonic Wars, after which state sovereignty will be the vogue (end of empires; states self-determined)
    • ie, during early discussions of Enlightenment ideals coming into question and fighting….
    • Bronte is best described as a Romantic, I’d say
  • North and South, Mary Barton: Religious Dissent
    • N & S encodes industrial problems within larger context of religious doubt
    • Margaret Hale is shocked at her father’s dissent; the union leader Higgins regains his faith by end of book
    • Mary Barton: less about the dissent, more about forcing religion down your throat as an excuse
      • It’s a really stupid argument, but Higgins’ arguments about materialism and about religion not helping him in North & South DO help Gaskell in the end show that she isn’t unaware of the arguments against religion
• Still Gaskell doesn’t want a revolution. Nor does Bronte, who could see in the strikes an heroic attempt at class independence but who declines to portray them as such (instead, they are irreligious drunkards who lead the susceptible to ruin)