Mary Barton is a novel of misery. From start to finish, Elizabeth Gaskell details mid-nineteenth century life in the industrial North of England as an endless series of slow deaths, ineffectual mercies, acts of sheer desperation, and collapses from exhaustion. At best, the novel offers begrudging acceptance, paternalist compromise, or escapist fantasies as the only feasible remedies for the problems facing the working classes of Manchester. And yet, for all of the novel’s sustained agonies and pessimism—even in its resolutions—critics have continually read the novel as inconsistent in terms of its plot and tone. Such critics contrast the novel’s first half—
which couples John Barton’s continual failed efforts at Chartist reform with scenes of quotidian loss in the laboring community—with its second, in which John’s daughter, Mary, seeks to exonerate her husband-to-be, Jem Wilson, when he is wrongfully accused of jealously murdering the rich mill owner’s son, Harry Carson, whom John Barton himself has murdered as part of a Chartist conspiracy. Sentimental melodrama eclipses political engagement, such critics charge, and thus the novel’s reform fails because its two plots, “only circumstantially connected,”
eventually serve only “to entertain the reading public,” rather than foster political debate (Bodenheimer 196). Such readings oppose politics to romance, public to private, and import to entertainment, bemoaning “Mary’s courtship plot, for digressing from, diluting, or directly counterpointing John’s political plot with a conservative politics” (Elliott 21). It is de rigueur for critics to note that the novel was originally titled John Barton, and fantasize about what the novel might have been had Gaskell not, apparently, lost both her nerve and her protagonist.
While the novel’s most famous shoulder-shrugger, Raymond Williams, does not exactly throw Mary’s marriage plot under the critical bus, he certainly sets the tone for such readings in Culture and Society. Williams at once admires Mary Barton’s “effort to record, in its own terms, the feel of everyday life” through a method of “documentary record,” while utterly dismissing the novel’s eventual “diversion to Mary” as an unfortunate case of “publishers’ influence” that results only in “a kind of writing-off, when the misery of the situation can no longer be endured,”
presumably as Jem and Mary emigrate to Canada following John Barton’s execution for the murder (98). Williams praises Gaskell for her novel act of sympathy, noting that, for all of the potential problems sympathy poses as it works across class lines, Gaskell’s “response to the suffering is deep and genuine,” stemming from first-hand knowledge rather than from “report or occasional visit” (98). “But pity cannot stand alone,” Williams laments, and thus he reasons that
Gaskell’s narrative and juridical abandonment of John Barton in the novel’s second half resulted from her inability to comprehend the act of murder to which Barton resorts. Barton is given no trial, no courtroom scene in which his guilt is, if not exonerated, then at least explained as a result of slow-burn indignities at the hands of a cruelly indifferent bourgeoisie. Mary Barton is not Victorian England’s Native Son. Instead, Williams argues, the novel’s otherwise potentially sympathetic readers are left only with a sense of “confusing violence and fear of violence,” and thus, “Sympathy was transformed [by the novel], not into action, but into withdrawal” (98, 118).
Williams essentially charges Mary Barton’s author with a kind of naïveté. Having given shape to a text whose moral, emotional, and political implications she could neither understand nor rein in, Gaskell—in Williams’ reading—could not endure the uncomfortable contradictions of her protagonist, and so she simply let him die at the hands of the novel’s executioners.
Williams and others’ efforts to bifurcate Mary Barton into two coextensive, but very different novels miss out, however, on the novel’s sustained misery as an organizing principle that tethers together its constituent plots, milieu, and emotional registers. Thus, charges that Gaskell could not come to terms with her own creation as a political novel, and that she wrote a domestic novel instead, ignore the extent to which the novel’s private scenes and plots are in no way an escape from the miseries of industrial markets. Carolyn Lesjak argues that Mary Barton follows the larger schema of the Victorian novel, rendering labor “invisible by producing aesthetic and domestic pleasures that distract from the issues of labor”; she further contends that Gaskell’s “use of melodrama and the notion of pleasure it encompasses vitiates the problems her representations of labor and the productive sphere pose for the novel” (Lesjak 7, 15). To the contrary, what might be cruelest about Mary Barton is the way in which it figures working-class domesticity as every bit as laborious, exhausting, and obligatory as factory work. Thus, while the
novel offers sentimental tableaux as respites that stave off the coldness of material deprivation, the problem is that because such comforts are meant to offset poverty, sympathetic emotion becomes a form of subsistence unto itself. More importantly, because the novel’s working-class characters perennially face the deaths of loved as the inevitable, iterative, quotidian outcome of material want, the novel makes no guarantee that the feelings that family fosters will be
pleasurable. Produced at home as a matter of sympathetic attachment, domestic emotion doesn’t turn a profit in Mary Barton nearly as often as it is yet another form of costly expenditure.
In this way, Mary Barton explores the literal and figurative cost of domesticity’s idealization in the nineteenth century, highlighting the extent to which it was unattainable for, and even outright detrimental to, working-class families. As Ying S. Lee puts it succinctly,
“Within the logic of [Mary Barton], the full expression of thriving, bourgeois-style domesticity is only available through fantasy” (130). In this regard, critical assessments, such as those of Williams, which rely on hard-and-fast distinctions between leisure and labor, or political life and private retreat, mark oppositions that are specious at best in the novel. To speak of “public” and
“private” spheres, or spheres of production and consumption, presupposes that one has access to a home life that is not fully consumed by the logics of labor. Labor is everywhere in Mary Barton, and it is felt nowhere more pointedly than at home. This point is underscored bluntly when Mary’s Aunt Esther—exiled from the Barton household due to the avariciousness that eventually leads her to become a prostitute—testifies that “Decent, good people have homes. We have none. No; if you want me, come at night and look at the corners of the streets about here”
(219). While Esther’s street-walking is in some senses the novel’s disastrously emphatic “worst case scenario,” her interpellative “we” by no means overstates the case: all of the novel’s families are, in some sense or another, barred from domesticity. It is no small comfort that the
novel’s “writing-off” sees Mary and Jem’s self-imposed exile as the only tactic by which the couple can afford access to a hearth and home (however foreign). While it should come as no surprise that the domestic ideal was (and indeed is) available only to families of means, or that the lofty inaccessibility of such an ideal was part of what made it so desirable in a time of rapid social mobility, I want to suspend the idea that Mary Barton’s working-class characters’ homes are broken merely so that the value of the ideal might be reaffirmed. So too do I want to table the notion that Mary Barton’s working class characters suffer throughout the novel simply because pitiful characters best enable “correct” liberal sympathy from working-class readers. While both conclusions are more or less correct, they also keep us from fully engaging with the novel’s particularly nuanced and difficult economics of sympathetic emotion.
Sympathetic emotion is figured as a form of labor most often in Mary Barton when it is aligned with the work of mourning. In some senses, this is quite literal; throughout the novel, female characters perform part-time work by crafting the materials of mourning, as when Margaret Jennings notes that she cannot go out with Mary because she has “a job of work to finish tonight; mourning, as must be in time for the funeral tomorrow” (80). Historically, the novel engages in contemporary debates about the perceived extravagance of Victorian funeral customs, especially as they unevenly impacted those who were already impoverished and left without means following the death of a male breadwinner, as are the Wilson and Davenport families. Ironically, while mourning provides perennial wage labor for Margaret, she and Mary nevertheless argue over the merits of funerary practices when a neighbor who is “but badly off,”
pays for a burial so extravagant that it seems to Margaret “more like a wedding nor a funeral”
(81). Urged on by undertakers, the newly widowed Mrs. Odgen purchases mourning gowns and a feast on credit, despite the fact that her deceased husband’s alcoholism left the family without a
farthing. This leaves Mary perplexed as to “what good comes out o’ wearing mourning” as “it’s not pretty or becoming; and it costs a deal of money just when folks can spare it least” (81). In response, Margaret assures Mary that mourning “does do good, though not as much as it costs…
in setting people … something to do” (82). In Margaret’s reckoning, the emotions of grief themselves are so disabling that they come to feel costly, and so concerns over the commodities associated with mourning offer the Ogdens and other mourners “something to talk over and fix about” instead. Here, grief is not an ephemeral, cathartic process so much as an extravagant, indulgent luxury compared to which commodity fetishism seems nearly abstemious. Feeling grief requires emotional work from a subject who is already spent; conversely, wearing mourning makes material labor for another in need of some extra cash.
The link between mourning, labor, and domesticity is articulated differently when John Barton mourns for his wife—also named Mary—after her death early in the novel. Bereft in what ironically feels like a very crowded home, Barton’s thoughts run not just to memories of happier times with his wife, but also linger longingly over the literal mess of things left in her wake:
He thought of their courtship; of his first seeing her, an awkward beautiful rustic, far too shiftless for the delicate factory work to which she was apprenticed; of his first gift to her, a bead necklace, which had long ago been put by, in one of the deep drawers of the dresser, to be kept for Mary. He wondered if it was there yet, and with a strange curiosity he got up to feel for it; for the fire by this time was well nigh out, and candle he had none. His groping hand fell on the piled-up tea-things, which at his desire she had left unwashed till morning—they were all so tired. He was reminded of one of the daily little actions, which acquire such power when they have been performed for the last time by one we love. He began
to think over his wife's daily round of duties: and something in the remembrance that these would never more be done by her, touched the source of tears, and he cried aloud. (Mary Barton 52)
Throughout the novel, grief responds not to pure absence, but rather to a sense of wrongness about what stays around in lieu of that which has passed away. Mourning takes up lodging with resentment. A cruel twist comes when readers realize that commodities—however cozy—are by no means assured things in the working-class economy of the novel; characters regularly take objects to the pawnbroker’s when times are hardest. Here, though, for the moment at least, the domestic ephemera of Victorian fiction—so often derided as mere set pieces in service of bourgeois realism—has a rich afterlife of its own as the sympathetic and sentimental tether between widower and wife. In contrast to the singularly totemic, plainly decorative “bead
necklace,” buried in a drawer and left discarded by Barton’s shifty thoughts, the everyday objects of the Barton household simply linger, calling up the “little actions” of affectionate care that Mary, the mother, performed. John Barton feels his loss not through the spectacle of grand love passed away, but through a “daily round of duties” that has simply gone undone. This response seems oddly pragmatic, and indeed it throws into relief John Barton’s unfitness for domestic life;
it is not surprise that his life as a widower takes place largely out of doors and in the company of other men. But, in a precociously feminist twist, Mary Barton’s ruined domestic continually articulates domestic labor as labor, even as the value of such work is only resonates through its loss. Moreover, this labor is felt as a labor of love; it is not just a mechanical necessity when it is
“performed … by one we love” (52). In mourning duties undone, John Barton ascribes a sense of profound emotional value to his wife’s domestic work, and in that way her work is felt as equally functional and sentimental. Work and sympathy are linked enterprises in Mary Barton.
Feminist critics have underscored the death of the mother as a particularly pernicious event in Victorian fiction. For many critics, the trope of the dead mother is troubling because it does not embody maternity in fully realized, if fictional subjects, but instead disembodies the maternal as an ideological, narrative, and psychosexual lack. Carolyn Dever argues that the frequent absence of mothers in Victorian fiction is both conspicuous and ironic, suggesting that
“Rigidly idealized categories of identity—the Victorian ideal of maternity, for example—depend precisely on the absence and ineffability of the original model, and thus the trope of material absence is one of the most powerful tools in the maintenance of the nineteenth-century maternal ideal” (6). From a different angle, Natalie McKnight suggests that the nineteenth-century shift to domesticity entailed an over-emphasis on motherhood that made it particularly fraught. Because
“Mothers are often missing in [Victorian] works,” she offers that “the complex of emotions surrounding the idea of the mother, and the contradictory and impossible expectations of
mothers, make these creatures something better left out of the story because of the confusion and antipathy they inspire” (18). With particular relevance to Mary Barton, Barbara Thaden argues that the mother’s death is crucial so that the novel’s narrative of female desire can take shape;
Mary’s lack of a maternal influence leads her into a love triangle with Jem and the deceitful Harry Carson. Importantly, though, the loss of Mary the mother is far from an end to
domesticity—or domestic care—in the novel. Maternal loss in Mary Barton does not
foundationally disfigure the fabric of the social or indeed the narrative in any traumatic way;
rather, it is an everyday, economic principle under the aegis of emotional and bodily starvation—
and there, precisely, is the rub. To consider Mary Barton’s social life as nothing more than a
“compensatory structure” for the death of Mary’s mother, to use Dever’s phrase, is to grant mothers a foundational status that they are denied outside the purview of bourgeois domesticity.
Mary Barton’s take on mothering is thus, as McKnight suggests, ambivalent. In keeping with Dever’s model, Mary Barton establishes mothering as the gold standard by which good sympathy is judged. This is evident in John Barton’s accusation against the factory owners, in which he questions his fellow Chartists, “And what good have [the mill owners] ever done me that I should like them? … If I am sick do they come and nurse me? If my child lies dying … does the rich man bring the wine or brother that might save his life?” Essentially, John Barton charges the bourgeoisie of Manchester not with being immoral or exploitative employers, but with being un-motherly. What the mother’s death leaves us in Mary Barton, then, is an intense appreciation for the value of the emotional and material labor performed by mothers, coupled with a complete dissociation of that labor from one’s status as a literal mother. Indeed, the novel’s most tender depiction of mothering is performed not by Mary Barton, Sr., but by Job Legh as he nurses Margaret, his granddaughter, in drag (152). The loss of literal mothers
necessitates a reorganization of mothering as a communal practice. In this way, then, even if the novel does to some extent take the death of the mother as formative for its plot—left widowed, John Barton’s grief moves him into more overtly public life as a leader of Chartist reform—it more emphatically underwrites a broader ethics of care whereby the sympathetic labor most often associated with motherhood comes to be a communal practice performed by any number of characters, regardless of their sex, gender, or kinship relation to individuals in need of care.
Such a potentially capacious form of sympathetic attachment and emotional care seems particularly well suited to deal with the novel’s diminishing emotional returns and early deaths.
Faced with the possibility that any singular attachment may be lost, the broader forms of attachment characterized by the novel’s working-class characters seem like a good scheme for sustainable, if not profitable, emotional investment. Accordingly, this broader form of
attachment and care is continually connected with the socialization of grief; mourning signals immediate, urgent emotional need, and so it becomes the basis for the novel’s entire network of sympathetic attachment. Immediately following the above passage detailing John Barton’s mourning for his wife’s undone duties, Mary is depicted as stepping in to pick up the slack,
“mechanically” helping her “neighbor in all the last attentions to the dead” before she is “kissed and spoken to soothingly,” sobbing slightly, but reserving “the luxury of a full burst of grief till she should be alone” (52). Again, grieving is a costly “luxury” in Mary Barton; but where John Barton gives himself leave to mourn over domesticity, Mary must first get the widower’s house in order by making the proper arrangements. In the first of many instances wherein Mary—for all her supposed romantic flightiness—serves as a sympathetic machine for both characters and readers alike, this scene highlights the extent to which Mary’s first care is care itself. Indeed, throughout the novel, characters’ profound senses of bewildered loss are temporarily suspended in the service of coming to the aid of another, as does Mary here, and as she perennially looks after her father throughout his home presence in the novel.
Betensky argues that the major flaw in Mary Barton’s reformist project is that it
inadvertently demonstrates that the bases for working-class political concerns are “erroneous…
inadvertently demonstrates that the bases for working-class political concerns are “erroneous…