The wild romances of their lives

Gentle Readers,

I've really struggled with this post. I think I'm on to something but I also think I've done a poor job of explaining what the hell I mean. If you've read Mary Barton, please put your two cents in and help make this mediocre post better!

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In my previous post on Mary Barton, I was trying to get at the narrator’s complicated (and to me, still mostly obtuse) technique for using fiction to get at actual, everyday issues for real, living people. I couldn’t figure out what Barton’s was doing, and I still haven’t. I came across the following passage when reviewing the novel again, however, and have come up with the tentative beginning of a theory. Context: John Barton and his friend Wilson are trying to care for an ailing family; John is wandering about the city trying to find medicine:

It is a pretty sight to walk through a street with lighted shops; the gas is so brilliant, the display of goods so much more vividly shown than by day, and of all shops a druggist's looks the most like the tales of our childhood, from Aladdin's garden of enchanted fruits to the charming Rosamond with her purple jar. No such associations had Barton; yet he felt the contrast between the well-filled, well-lighted shops and the dim gloomy cellar, and it made him moody that such contrasts should exist. They are the mysterious problem of life to more than him. He wondered if any in all the hurrying crowd had come from such a house of mourning. He thought they all looked joyous, and he was angry with them. But he could not, you cannot, read the lot of those who daily pass you by in the street. How do you know the wild romances of their lives; the trials, the temptations they are even now enduring, resisting, sinking under? You may be elbowed one instant by the girl desperate in her abandonment, laughing in mad merriment with her outward gesture, while her soul is longing for the rest of the dead, and bringing itself to think of the cold flowing river as the only mercy of God remaining to her here. You may pass the criminal, meditating crimes at which you will to-morrow shudder with horror as you read them. You may push against one, humble and unnoticed, the last upon earth, who in heaven will for ever be in the immediate light of God's countenance. (p. 70)

My theory is that Gaskell is being deliberately cagey about which, if any side to take, in the master versus man struggle described in Mary Barton; and further, that she is doing so precisely to show that, in spite of people’s (even her own!) claims to understand the other side, they do not and they cannot. How is this useful in terms of reconciling differences, or setting the stage for the kind of social change enabled by, for example, the mutual suffering of grieving fathers?

I think that Gaskell, by being/creating so unreliable a narrator here, is reminding readers—who mostly, no doubt, began this book chock full of settled options—that they do not know enough to have the right to such opinions. Neither side truly understands the needs, desires, thoughts, actions, feelings, motivations, choices of those with whom they struggle and whom they judge every day. Alluding to that unknowability by aligning all "other" people with the characters of “wild romance”, of fiction, does not simply strengthen Gaskell’s use of story to help readers feel right so that they will act right; it also, one would hope, reminds readers to approach their fellow humans with a measure of chastening humility, to perhaps remember that only God knows how hard they've tried. It’s a literary call to quotidian mercy.

Plot spoilers galore
That we cannot really know what others’ lives are like is reiterated in the unlikely love story of Mary Barton and Jem Wilson. They have been brought up together since childhood, their fathers being best friends and their families close neighbours. It has been assumed by everyone that they will eventually marry—until, that is, Mary’s head is turned by the predatory young Mr. Henry Carson. Having commenced a dangerous flirtation with Henry, Mary begins to nurse fantasies of a different and better life than the one promised to her by her class and familial birthright; she allows herself to be unscrupulously led to dream of becoming a rich man’s wife:

"O dear," said she to herself, "I wish he would not mistake me so; I never dare to speak a common word o' kindness, but his eye brightens and his cheek flushes. It's very hard on me; for father and George Wilson are old friends; and Jem and I ha' known each other since we were quite children. I cannot think what possesses me, that I must always be wanting to comfort him when he's downcast, and that I must go meddling wi' him to-night, when sure enough it was his aunt's place to speak to him. I don't care for him, and yet, unless I'm always watching myself, I'm speaking to him in a loving voice. I think I cannot go right, for I either check myself till I'm downright cross to him, or else I speak just natural, and that's too kind and tender by half. And I'm as good as engaged to be married to another; and another far handsomer than Jem; only I think I like Jem's face best for all that; liking's liking, and there's no help for it. Well, when I'm Mrs. Harry Carson, may happen I can put some good fortune in Jem's way. But will he thank me for it? He's rather savage at times, that I can see, and perhaps kindness from me, when I'm another's, will only go against the grain. I'll not plague myself wi' thinking any more about him, that I won't."

So she turned on her pillow, and fell asleep, and dreamt of what was often in her waking thoughts; of the day when she should ride from church in her carriage, with wedding-bells ringing, and take up her astonished father, and drive away from the old dim work-a-day court for ever, to live in a grand house, where her father should have newspapers, and pamphlets, and pipes, and meat dinners every day--and all day long if he liked.

Such thoughts mingled in her predilection for the handsome young Mr. Carson, who, unfettered by work-hours, let scarcely a day pass without contriving a meeting with the beautiful little milliner he had first seen while lounging in a shop where his sisters were making some purchases, and afterwards never rested till he had freely, though respectfully, made her acquaintance in her daily walks. He was, to use his own expression to himself, quite infatuated by her, and was restless each day till the time came when he had a chance, and, of late, more than a chance of meeting her. There was something of keen practical shrewdness about her, which contrasted very bewitchingly with the simple, foolish, unworldly ideas she had picked up from the romances which Miss Simmonds' young ladies were in the habit of recommending to each other.
Yes! Mary was ambitious, and did not favour Mr. Carson the less because he was rich and a gentleman. (pp. 90-91)

Like Gaskell’s readers, Mary is unable to read others very well; in particular, she is very slow to realize what base desires motivate Henry Carson’s attentions to her. She is likely of a lower class than Gaskell’s readers would have been, but Mary is smart and good and possessed of valid concerns about how marriage will affect her life; these characteristics should make her sufficiently recognizable to Gaskell's audience to inspire in them enough sympathy and identification to, ironically but crucially, highlight how difficult it is to know even one’s self, never mind another person!

And Gaskell doesn’t stop here; the unlikely love story (and it is a wild romance of true, deep, and abiding love) of Mary and Jem is almost unrealized because of the terrible consequences of carrying on as though there is nothing left to know about either self or others. Jem is accused of murdering Henry Carson and barely saved from conviction and execution by Mary’s desperate efforts to secure the one witness who can speak to his true whereabouts on the fatal evening. In the process, Mary sees clearly what she’s been hiding from herself all along—and what the consequences have been for Jem who, thinking she does not love him, warns Henry to be good to her and careful of her honour, and then walks out of her life. At the trial, Mary is forced publicly to reveal everything that she has come to understand about herself:

"[The prosecutor] asks me which of them two I liked best. Perhaps I liked Mr. Harry Carson once—I don't know—I've forgotten; but I loved James Wilson, that's now on trial, above what tongue can tell—above all else on earth put together; and I love him now better than ever, though he has never known a word of it till this minute. For you see, sir, mother died before I was thirteen, before I could know right from wrong about some things; and I was giddy and vain, and ready to listen to any praise of my good looks; and this poor young Mr. Carson fell in with me, and told me he loved me; and I was foolish enough to think he meant me marriage: a mother is a pitiful loss to a girl, sir: and so I used to fancy I could like to be a lady, and rich, and never know want any more. I never found out how dearly I loved another till one day, when James Wilson asked me to marry him, and I was very hard and sharp in my answer (for indeed, sir, I'd a deal to bear just then), and he took me at my word and left me; and from that day to this I've never spoken a word to him, or set eyes on him; though I'd fain have done so, to try and show him we had both been too hasty; for he'd not been gone out of my sight above a minute before I knew I loved—far above my life," said she, dropping her voice as she came to this second confession of the strength of her attachment. "But, if the gentleman asks me which I loved the best, I make answer, I was flattered by Mr. Carson, and pleased with his flattery; but James Wilson, I—" (pp. 382-83)

This confession does not, in itself help Jem’s chances at survival. It does provide a disturbing vision of what it means to live life without closely examining one’s own motives, and the need to humbly attempt to determine both one's own and others’ wants and needs before acting.

Jem is acquitted and he and Mary must and will wed, but they cannot do so at home in Manchester. Even though he is proven not guilty, Jem’s reputation is shattered as the result of the murder charge, and so they emigrate to Canada to begin again. This is where I think Gaskell makes her final, complicated commentary on the relationship between reality, fiction, and readers’ responses thereto. Jem and Mary get their incredibly improbable happy ending; they get to begin clean in a "new" and relatively empty (of any traces of their past and people who knew them) world. This too is part of the wild romance—for, of course, if Mary Barton were either a realist or realistic novel this wouldn’t happen. Jem would be hung, Mary ruined and she certainly wouldn’t have secured Jem's saving witness via a crazy and prolonged boat chase (!!). This is not, I think, intended to be a feel-good happy ending; rather, it is a happy ending whose fictionality is so extreme as to force home, one final time, the more likely fatal consequences of in reality assuming one can read and judge and decide for others while labouring under the delusion of understanding them entirely.

Brothers in the deep suffering of the heart

Mary Barton marks my first real foray into the world of Elizabeth Gaskell. I have read her biography of Charlotte Bronte and back in the dark ages, when I was still teaching the undergraduates, I led a very resistant (to everything, not only Gaskell) set of first-years through “The Old Nurse's Tale”. Based on these two examples of her fiction (for I cannot recall anything at all about what Gaskell had to say about Crazy Charlotte), I think I can say I like Elizabeth Gaskell very much, and I'm really glad I decided to include a couple more of her novels on my Vic Lit project list.

The basics: Mary Barton is a novel about Manchester, about the bitter and sometimes deadly tension between workers (and their trade unions) and the bosses/owners of the factories in which they work. This general subject is explored through young Mary's relationship with three men: John Barton, her essentially good but broken and bitter father (broken by privation, loss, and constantly having to face the terrible indifference of the men determining the course of almost every aspect of his life); Henry Carson, the pampered young son of one of Manchester's most successful merchant princes; and Jem Wilson, a young man of her own class, who is entirely devoted to her and whom she resists with all her might in the hopes that Mr Carson will marry and thus rescue her from a life of poverty. While Gaskell's novel does engage in a great deal of polemical and philosophical meditation on the issues of class difference, the value of labour, and personal responsibilities, Mary Barton is also an entirely irresistible page-turner, just an incredibly excellent read. (Unfortunately, there are plot spoilers in this post, below, but you'll be warned!)

Of course, this excellent read is complicated by the narrator's (Gaskell's? I'm not certain. I think I need to read more of her work before I attempt to unpack this relationship) flip-flopping when it comes to describing the aims and needs of the violently opposed interest groups (masters and men) she portrays. The narrator’s preface is notable for its proclamation that she will not take sides; and the narrator's initial distancing herself from the controversy is apparently the result of a careful acknowledgment of having limited information:

I had always felt a deep sympathy with the care-worn men, who looked as if doomed to struggle through their lives in strange alternations between work and want; tossed to and fro by circumstances, apparently in even a greater degree than other men. A little manifestation of this sympathy and a little attention to the expression of feelings on the part of some of the work-people with whom I was acquainted, had laid open to me the hearts of one or two of the more thoughtful among them; I saw that they were sore and irritable against the rich, the even tenor of whose seemingly happy lives appeared to increase the anguish caused by the lottery-like nature of their own. Whether the bitter complaints made by them, of the neglect which they experienced from the prosperous—especially from the masters whose fortunes they had helped to build up—were well-founded or no, it is not for me to judge. (xxxv)

Of course, the abundant footnotes to the edition of Mary Barton I read (provided by Edgar Wright) put the lie to this claim—Gaskell was sufficiently aware of the utter rottenness of the impoverished classes to know, for example, that said classes were often forced to live in basement apartments whose walls were literally dripping with human excrement lovingly provided by upstairs neighbours emptying their chamber pots out their windows—and being unable to afford anything better, and there being absolutely no safeguards in place to protect the vulnerable forced by their financial circumstances to accept such terms from unscrupulous landlords. This is just one example; Mary Barton abounds with terrible facts about the everyday realities of Manchester's poor working class.

It seems, in other words, that our narrator's refusal to take sides is no refusal at all, but rather a shockingly politician-esque rhetorical sidestepping designed to invite the audience to implicitly doubt the working class's claims. This undermining of their claims becomes more explicit when she actually goes so far as to claim that the lower classes’ perceptions are wrong:

Carriages still roll along the streets, concerts are still crowded by subscribers, the shops for expensive luxuries still find daily customers, while the workman loiters away his unemployed time in watching these things, and thinking of the pale, uncomplaining wife at home, and the wailing children asking in vain for enough of food—of the sinking health, of the dying life of those near and dear to him. The contrast is too great. Why should he alone suffer from bad times?

I know that this is not really the case; and I know what is the truth in such matters; but what I wish to impress is what the workman feels and thinks. True, that with child-like improvidence, good times will often dissipate his grumbling, and make him forget all prudence and foresight.

But there are earnest men among these people, men who have endured wrongs without complaining, but without ever forgetting or forgiving those whom (they believe) have caused all this woe.

Among these was John Barton. His parents had suffered; his mother had died from absolute want of the necessaries of life. He himself was a good, steady workman, and, as such, pretty certain of steady employment. But he spent all he got with the confidence (you may also call it improvidence) of one who was willing, and believed himself able, to supply all his wants by his own exertions. And when his master suddenly failed, and all hands in the mill were turned back, one Tuesday morning, with the news that Mr. Hunter had stopped, Barton had only a few shillings to rely on; but he had good heart of being employed at some other mill, and accordingly, before returning home, he spent some hours in going from factory to factory, asking for work. But at every mill was some sign of depression of trade; some were working short hours, some were turning off hands, and for weeks Barton was out of work, living on credit. It was during this time that his little son, the apple of his eye, the cynosure of all his strong power of love, fell ill of the scarlet fever. They dragged him through the crisis, but his life hung on a gossamer thread.

Everything, the doctor said, depended on good nourishment, on generous living, to keep up the little fellow's strength, in the prostration in which the fever had left him. Mocking words! when the commonest food in the house would not furnish one little meal. Barton tried credit; but it was worn out at the little provision shops, which were now suffering in their turn. He thought it would be no sin to steal, and would have stolen; but he could not get the opportunity in the few days the child lingered. Hungry himself, almost to an animal pitch of ravenousness, but with the bodily pain swallowed up in anxiety for his little sinking lad, he stood at one of the shop windows where all edible luxuries are displayed; haunches of venison, Stilton cheeses, moulds of jelly—all appetising sights to the common passer-by. And out of this shop came Mrs. Hunter! She crossed to her carriage, followed by the shopman loaded with purchases for a party. The door was quickly slammed to, and she drove away; and Barton returned home with a bitter spirit of wrath in his heart to see his only boy a corpse! (pp. 24-25)

The poor are set up here as irrational, emotionally immature, and inconsistent; their feelings and fleeting impressions are set up against the facts the narrator is in possession of—or, more precisely, what she claims to be in possession of, for she notably doesn't explain either how or why she knows this to be true. Tricksy, aren't you, Mrs. Gaskell! I think what's going on here is twofold: first, she is worming her way into her likely comfortably middle class readers' bosoms so that she may strike a blow at their feelings and force them to empathize with the suffering around them, a tactic perhaps arising out of the notion that feeling correctly will lead to behaving correct. (Harriet Beecher Stowe famously tried this with Uncle Tom's Cabin, published just four years after Mary Barton.)

Plot spoilers begin now
The specific mechanism of this imagined sympathy and resultant social reconciliation is a gruesome and heart-breaking one: the death of children. John Barton loses his son to the poverty he can't escape; much later, he deprives the elder Mr. Carson of his son, and it is through this sickening parallel that Gaskell's idealized social healing begins. John Barton, literally dying of remorse for murdering Henry Carson, repents enough to see Mr. Carson, the boss, as a person for the first time:

"Have I had no inward suffering to blanch these hairs? Have not I toiled and struggled even to these years with hopes in my heart that all centred in my boy? I did not speak of them, but were they not there? I seemed hard and cold; and so I might be to others, but not to him!--who shall ever imagine the love I bore to him? Even he never dreamed how my heart leapt up at the sound of his footstep, and how precious he was to his poor old father. And he is gone—killed—out of the hearing of all loving words—out of my sight for ever. He was my sunshine, and now it is night! Oh, my God! comfort me, comfort me!" cried the old man aloud.

The eyes of John Barton grew dim with tears. Rich and poor, masters and men, were then brothers in the deep suffering of the heart; for was not this the very anguish he had felt for little Tom, in years so long gone by, that they seemed like another life!

The mourner before him was no longer the employer; a being of another race, eternally placed in antagonistic attitude; going through the world glittering like gold, with a stony heart within, which knew no sorrow but through the accidents of Trade; no longer the enemy, the oppressor, but a very poor and desolate old man.

The sympathy for suffering, formerly so prevalent a feeling with him, again filled John Barton's heart, and almost impelled him to speak (as best he could) some earnest, tender words to the stern man, shaking in his agony. (p. 431)

Both men go through the fire and this, rather than hardening their hearts further and re-inscribing the harsh boundaries separating them, begins to affect larger social change in Gaskell's Manchester. For not only does the man begin to see the master as human, but the master's perception of John specifically and workers generally undergoes a paradigm shift. The expansion of each man's soul under the pressure of crushing grief leads to real social improvements:

It took time before the stern nature of Mr. Carson was compelled to the recognition of this secret of comfort, and that same sternness prevented his reaping any benefit in public estimation from the actions he performed; for the character is more easily changed than the habits and manners originally formed by that character, and to his dying day Mr. Carson was considered hard and cold by those who only casually saw him or superficially knew him. But those who were admitted into his confidence were aware, that the wish that lay nearest to his heart was that none might suffer from the cause from which he had suffered; that a perfect understanding, and complete confidence and love, might exist between masters and men; that the truth might be recognized that the interests of one were the interests of all, and, as such, required the consideration and deliberation of all; that hence it was most desirable to have educated workers, capable of judging, not mere machines of ignorant men: and to have them bound to their employers by the ties of respect and affection, not by mere money bargains alone; in short, to acknowledge the Spirit of Christ as the regulating law between both parties.

Many of the improvements now in practice in the system of employment in Manchester, owe their origin to short, earnest sentences spoken by Mr. Carson. Many and many yet to be carried into execution, take their birth from that stern, thoughtful mind, which submitted to be taught by suffering. (pp. 457-58)

Feeling right leads to right action in Mary Barton; cultivating a Christ-like brotherhood amongst all makes everyone more content and more comfortable. But seeing the lower classes as people, with whom Carson's class must develop and nurture a symbiotic rather than despotic relationship, neatly sidesteps the issue of class difference and the power imbalance inherent therein. Indeed, while Gaskell aims at destroying the notion of factions here, she seems to want to do so without questioning the ingrained social hierarchy that gave birth to them. In Gaskell's social labour market, class isn't the problem—the problem is that chaos ensues when the classes don't keep to their allotted responsibilities. This position was not, of course, an unusual one; what is unusual in Mary Barton is, I think, the effort Gaskell puts into trying to be fair about the clashing perspectives she describes. From the perspective of early 21st-century forward-thinking uber-enlightenment (ha!), her apparently implicit belief in the correctness of class distinctions is unattractive and unfair; but no doubt it seemed rather revolutionary at the time.

I'll be interested to see if Gaskell addresses these issues again in later works. While she was 37-ish when Mary Barton was published, it seems like a young novel to me, by which I mean her authorial skill in unpacking the implications of her own narrative choices don't seem entirely developed here. The fact that John Barton must die, in spite of his profound spiritual unfolding at the end of his life, and the fact that Mary's aunt Esther must also die in spite of her desire to change and live (especially given Jem and Mary's sincere wish to take her to Toronto (!!) with them to start over), reminded me of Dickens's clumsy killing off of Smike in Nicholas Nickleby. These characters, in the hands of new novelists, seem too difficult to reconcile to their otherwise neat conclusions, and so they mun go. Dickens, in my experience so far, became increasingly adept at handling the utmost of human characters' complications and so I am hopeful that Gaskell did the same—but only time shall tell!