Читать книгу The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett - Thomas Recchio - Страница 9
ОглавлениеLEARNING FROM ELIZABETH GASKELL
I
At 18 years old in 1868, Burnett published her first stories in Godey’s Lady’s Book, a popular woman’s magazine, and over the next four years “[S]he had stories published […] in every magazine in America, ‘except Harper’s, Scribner’s and the Atlantic’” (Thwaite 37). She was hesitant to try the latter three magazines because, as she herself put it: “It would have seemed to me a kind of presumption to aspire to entering the actual world of literature” (cited in Thwaite 37). Despite the fact that she stated quite baldly when she sent out her first story to Ballou’s Magazine that her “object is remuneration,” she developed a sense early on that writing strictly for the market was one thing while writing at the behest of her own imaginative impulses and aesthetic vision was another. One question she must have asked herself concerns the principles that might guide her hand were she to write with ambitions of “entering the actual world of literature.” We can infer an answer to that question in two ways: by considering the literary field in America in the 1870s and by careful reading of the novels (all first published serially before being published in volume form) she published with Scribner’s in the 1870s and early 1880s. One thing we will find is deep points of contact between three of her first four published novels and three of Elizabeth Gaskell’s first four published novels. How we might understand that depth of contact depends, in part, on our understanding of Burnett’s response to her most immediate literary predecessors and how those predecessors were positioned in the literary field at the time.
Burnett was born in Manchester, England in 1849, the year after Chapman and Hall published Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton, and Burnett lived in Manchester for the next 16 years until 1865, the year of Gaskell’s death and the year Burnett emigrated to Tennessee. As her 1893 autobiography of her childhood shows, she read voraciously, everything from the Bible to histories of Greece and Rome to the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens. She read the odd periodical volume as well, even the “Blackwood” [sic Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine], “a big book and heavy.”1 Although Burnett’s contemporary reviewers detected influences from Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes and Gaskell on Burnett’s early novels, and while Burnett herself alludes to Dickens, Thackeray and their contemporaries in her autobiography, she never mentions or alludes in even the most tangential way to Elizabeth Gaskell, the most significant literary figure in Manchester during the years of her formal education in school and her informal education as an insatiable, undisciplined reader. Burnett’s ready acknowledgment of the interest and excitement with which she read the great Victorian realists, who were arguably at the height of their powers in the year she was born and through much of her childhood, and her silence about the figure quite literally closest to her own early experiences is surprising, but that silence suggests, I think, how deep Gaskell’s influence was, too deep to be named.
During the 1870s, the decade during which Burnett entered “the actual world of literature,” the major American literary magazines were reshaping themselves. Harper’s Monthly had built its reputation (and circulation) by publishing the major Victorian realists in serial before passing the full manuscripts to their book publishing arm for circulation in volume form. In contrast the Atlantic Monthly published New Englanders; according to Arthur John some 60 percent of the Atlantic’s contributors during the 1860s were from New England, notably Emerson, Longfellow and Whittier.2 That split allegiance in the American literary magazine industry presented a problem for Josiah Holland, the founding editor of Scribner’s Magazine, who set out to provide a venue to publish American authors in direct competition with Harper’s, which relied on English authors for much of its content. When Holland found that American writers were hard to find, new writers yet to emerge and established writers loyal to other publishers, he looked abroad. “He personally solicited novels from Charles Kingsley and George Eliot; he authorized the American journalist and diplomat William James Stillman to act as agent for Scribner’s in England, commissioning him to seek contributions from John Ruskin, Thomas Hughes, William Morris, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and other eminent Victorians” (John 14). The upshot is that American literary taste was continuing to be shaped by the aesthetic practices of English authors even as publishers were searching for ways to foreground the work of American authors, creating a state of literary uncertainty; American literary magazines were venues for a continuing tradition of Anglo-American literature that was being destabilized by unevenly emergent regional American writing. That uncertainty about literary authority contributed to the embrace of Burnett’s early English novels: she could be advertised as a new voice in American letters while at the same time writing in an English tradition, her novels set in England, her themes identifiable as part of a familiar genre, her characters’ speech regional, English dialect. Consequently reviewers located her work in an Anglo-American tradition, comparing Burnett to Dickens and Eliot, anchoring her among the “eminent Victorians” even as they praised the freshness of her work. That sense of freshness through the familiar, however, captures a tension that can be felt throughout her career while it marks, I suggest, the particular quality of her originality.
If American literary publishing in the 1870s was in a state of uncertainty, characterized by anxiety about the center of literary authority in American letters, the shock in 1880 of George Eliot’s death to the Anglo-American literary field exacerbated that anxiety. As Martin Hipsky has pointed out, the literary field in Britain for women became polarized toward the end of the nineteenth century: “Given the lopsided binary ‘serious’ versus ‘frivolous’ novel-writing roles, any aspiring young woman writer of the time must have felt powerfully the limited possibilities of the literary field” (28). Because the “serious” side of that binary was identified profoundly with the work of George Eliot, her death stimulated the ambitions of many British women writers. Hipsky puts the point this way:
[I]n the years following George Eliot’s death, the list of those who [tried] to match Eliot’s level of achievement is a long one […]. Patriarchal ideologies notwithstanding, the flourishing career of such a ‘consecrated’ and belaurelled predecessor, well within living memory, served as a powerful encouragement to ambitious women romance writers coming of intellectual age in the 1880s and 1890s. (28)
Burnett’s place among those so encouraged by Eliot’s example and absence is complicated for a couple of reasons. First, her first two novels were published during Eliot’s lifetime, one even having been reviewed alongside a work of Eliot’s. Any comparisons between her work and Eliot’s, then, were living comparisons. Upon Eliot’s death, among some reviewers in England and America, Burnett became the figure identified as inheriting Eliot’s mantle. Second, the void left by Eliot’s death was felt more by Burnett’s reviewers than by Burnett herself. Rather than Burnett looking to fill the space in the literary field left vacant by Eliot’s death, Burnett’s early reviewers placed her there, a lofty eminence from which one could only fall. Burnett’s literary career we might say was formed on the bedrock of the Victorian novel before being shaken by uneven and unpredictable forces in the Anglo-American literary field after 1880. Then by the time of the Great War, there was no bedrock of any sort on which to continue to build a literary career, only fragments of stone. With all the flux in the American literary publishing industry accelerated by generational changes at the highest levels of what we might crudely call the literary workforce, and with historical and technological changes in the Anglo-American world that we today associate with high modernism, Burnett’s most intimate literary antecedents have fallen by the critical wayside, visible only in side-long glances in the contemporary reviews and later literary scholarship.
Consider in that latter regard how gingerly Ann Thwaite in her 1991 biography addresses the relation between Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s. The first reference to Gaskell and Burnett occurs when Thwaite notes that on November 24, 1849, the day Francis Hodgson was born, “Not far away, Mrs Gaskell was writing a letter to Charlotte Bronte, congratulating her on Shirley. Her own Mary Barton had been published the previous year; the Manchester operatives Mrs Gaskell wrote of were the same people who were soon to fascinate the young Frances” (3). That brief passage captures in miniature a typical strategy when Gaskell’s and Burnett’s names are linked in the scholarship: the happenstance of Manchester residence is raised in order to suggest that they saw similar things, in this case factory operatives. The implication then is that any overlap in literary engagement with working-class life in Manchester at mid-century is a result of place; literary influence is not part of the equation. A more interesting example can be found when Thwaite discusses the death of Burnett’s father and the family’s financial decline: “Mrs Gaskell’s great ‘prevailing thought’—‘the seeming injustice of the inequalities of fortune’—was already evident to the small Frances” (13). Here Burnett’s experience puts her in the place of Gaskell’s working-class characters, generating a parallel perception and foreclosing any later literary connection. When Thwaite approaches the possibility that Burnett’s literary imagination may have been stimulated by Mary Barton, she is careful to overwhelm that possibility by tying Burnett’s inspiration for That Lass O’Lowries to her memory of the Junoesque factory-girl alluded to earlier, to a series of articles on Lancashire coal mines published in the Manchester Guardian during Burnett’s visit to Manchester as a young woman, and perhaps to “Kay-Shuttleworth’s pamphlet on ‘The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Class Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester,” but, she avers, “[M]ost of the material for That Lass O’Lowries undoubtedly came from real life.” Burnett, Thwaite notes as an aside, may have been “stimulated by the Reverend William Gaskell’s ‘Lectures on the Lancashire Dialect’ which had been appended to later editions of Mary Barton” (46) when she had her working-class characters speak in dialect. That’s as close as she comes to suggesting a direct link between the two novels. The material for That Lass O’Lowries, it seems, had to come from anywhere but its most obvious source, the Lancashire working-class novel most identified with Manchester, Mary Barton. Thwaite, like Burnett, seems hesitant to go there, the influence too deep for delving.
In her 2004 biography of Burnett, Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina explains the relationship between That Lass O’Lowries and Mary Barton with similar caution:
Although there is something reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton, in which a working girl is wooed by the wealthy son of a mine [sic, factory] owner and only finds strength when she works to clear the name of a neighbor accused of the seducer’s murder, Frances created in Joan a strong woman immune to traditional seduction and reluctant to marry into a rank above her. (66)
If the imprecise parallel between the heroines of the two novels is the main ground of comparison, then indeed That Lass is “something reminiscent” of Mary Barton, but the narrative materials in both novels have much more in common than Gerzina acknowledges. Gerzina suggests, however, a deeper connection when she observes that with That Lass “reaping strong reviews, and the new book Haworth’s [also an industrial novel] well under way, Frances was making a strong and viable bid to be considered a writer of industrial novels who followed in the footsteps of those such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens” (70–71). What better way for Burnett to “follow in the footsteps” of Elizabeth Gaskell in particular than to pattern her early novels on the model of Gaskell’s, replicating Gaskell’s path into the world of “actual literature”? And what better way to make her own name than for Burnett to replicate that pattern with a difference?
There were, of course, other industrial novels set in Lancashire before Mary Barton, notably Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s didactic Helen Fleetwood (1840) and Elizabeth Stone’s William Langshawe, the Cotton Lord (1842), but those novels degenerate into anti-industrial polemic in their exposure of the evils of industrial labor and their defense of middle-class values.3 Both focalize their explorations of working-class life from the outside in order to document the necessity of social reform. While Gaskell’s novel too shows similar documentary and reformist impulses, much of the narrative is focalized from within the working class; readers see through the eyes of working-class characters as they register the physical details of their domestic experience during a time of labor unrest.4 Characters also speak in Lancashire dialect rather than in the polite tones of the middle class or in ungrammatical syntax meant to suggest working-class speech. Written from the inside as it were, in Gaskell’s novel the narrative elements, which are associated with working-class fiction written by mostly middle-class women, are embedded in a texture of language that communicates lived experience. That observation is reflected in the contemporary reviews of Mary Barton and in the reviews of That Lass O’Lowries.5
Within the rich verbal texture of dialect speech that characterizes both novels, there are narrative elements common to both: contrasts between working-class and middle-class life; distinctive personalities among the working class rather than representative types; cross-class romance; ill-fit between a working-class woman and her class position; fallen woman and death of her child and herself; sensational scenes of fire and accidents; the indifference of the industrialist class to worker suffering that changes due to trauma; marriage or its possibility as an amelioration of previous suffering; brutality of working-class men toward working-class women; mixture of sage and comic wisdom among working-class characters; cross-class murder or attempted murder; and the achievement of some degree of cross-class understanding. Many of those elements are shared by industrial novels generally, but all overlap between Gaskell’s and Burnett’s first novels. But that overlap is of limited importance and even more limited interest for such narrative elements are part of a common mid-nineteenth century narrative stock (what we might think of as a narrative vocabulary) that both Gaskell and Burnett draw on, Gaskell’s sources being her predecessors and Burnett’s source being Gaskell. What is important concerns what Burnett does differently with those elements, a difference that is a function of context—Gaskell writing in the place she set her novel toward the end of the time in which it is set and Burnett writing in America some 30 years after the time in which the novel is set—and of personal vision and imaginative ambition. Those different places, times and motives constrain and make possible different narrative possibilities. While I will address a number of those possibilities, my focus will be on what Gerzina calls a “new kind of heroine in the industrial novel” (66). That new heroine, Joan Lowrie, is located in the same narrative space as Gaskell’s Mary Barton—both for instance are the focal point of a potential cross-class romance and both have close connections to their respective novel’s fallen woman—but Joan occupies that space differently. To get at that difference, we must begin with Mary.
The domestic and social space that Mary occupies can be mapped out as follows: domestically she is the only surviving child of John and Mary Barton, who lost a son, Tom, through illness and physical deprivation; the elder Mary dies early in the novel in childbirth; the baby does not survive. As a result, Mary takes a woman’s responsibility for her home with her father, becoming the beautiful though young angel in the house and remaining loyal to her father even as he grows bitter through political disappointment, drink and opium. Her father degenerates to the point where he beats Mary, but he quickly repents. Subsequently, having drawn the lot in his trade union’s plot for revenge against the factory owners, he murders the mill owner’s son, Harry Carson, who had been harassing Mary in his efforts to seduce her while she simply dreams of a better life for her and her father. Mary’s social space is limited since John will not allow her to work in a factory, which would, he thinks, make her more independent, so she finds unpaid work as a seamstress. She befriends a neighbor girl and walks the streets between her home and place of employment. Her only exposure to a larger world is when she goes to Liverpool in search of her cousin, who can save her neighbor (and beloved) from a false charge of murder, which her father had committed. Until that point, she leads a passive life, and as can be inferred when we learn that she knows of her father’s guilt, her main survival mechanism is silence, a silence reinforced by the injunction of her friend Margaret Jennings who advices Mary that she “must just wait and be patient” because “being patient is the hardest work we, any of us [women], have to do through life, I take it. Waiting is far more difficult than doing.”6 In her passivity she is quietly protected by her beloved Jem and her fallen Aunt Esther. After Carson’s murder, when Mary acts by tracking down her cousin before the trial at which she testifies, she finally collapses, paying for her activity with a serious illness and long-term weakness. The other social space that she could potentially occupy is delineated by her Aunt Esther; beautiful like Mary and beloved by one above her in class, she runs off with her lover, gets pregnant and is subsequently abandoned. She is compelled by circumstances to the streets to provide for her child, who nevertheless dies. This grim litany of domestic depletion, passivity and social threat suggests that Mary’s survival is a matter of happenstance. She could have been Esther, and by fleeing to Canada at novel’s end, any hope for social change in the industrial setting is muted.
Burnett assembles a similar set of narrative elements—working-class daughter of widowed, drunken and brutal father; cross-class romance; attempted cross-class murder; the fallen woman; a flight from working-class life at novel’s end and so on—but builds a very different narrative world. The most significant difference concerns her transforming the passive Mary character into the active, strong, independent character of Joan. That change from passive angel to active woman affects other aspects of Burnett’s industrial novel, muting, for instance, the moral framing of the fallen woman narrative and opening up space for working-class and middle-class women to begin to shape their own lives. Burnett builds this changed narrative world through destabilizing the rigid binaries of gender norms for both women and men. She does so not by erasing recognizable socially performed gender roles but by blurring the boundaries between them and showing how socially gendered qualities can be independent of the sexual distinctions of biological bodies.7
The opening line of That Lass O’Lowries strikes the keynote: “They did not look like women.” The “they” are the “‘pit-girls,’ as they were called; women who wore a dress more than half-masculine […] some of whom […] [with] faces as hard and brutal as the hardest of their collier brothers and husbands and sweethearts” (1). Immediately the social construction of gender and the biological division of the sexes are put in tension, the necessities of labor in the mines obliterating “all bloom of womanly modesty and gentleness,” signs of one gender convention, and replacing those signs with another, the “unwashed faces” of a “half-savage existence,” a masculine gendered image of the male body in a state of nature. This opening move suggests that the masculinizing pressures of industrial labor go against what was understood as the gender norms for women, “modesty and gentleness,” and that, Burnett’s readers would have assumed, is bad. When Joan Lowrie is introduced in the second paragraph, however, that easy judgment is hard to sustain.
Most of them [the pit-girls] were young women, though there were a few older ones among them, and the principal figure in the group—the center figure, about whom the rest clustered—was a young woman. But she differed from the rest in two or three respects. The others seemed somewhat stunted in growth; she was tall enough to be imposing. She was as roughly clad as the poorest of them, but she wore her uncouth garb differently. The man’s jacket of fustian, open at the neck, bared a handsome sun browned throat. The man’s hat shaded a face with dark eyes that had a sort of animal beauty, and a well-molded chin. It was at this girl that all the rough jokes seemed to be directed. (2)
Like the industrial workers in Mary Barton, described as “stunted” (9), the young women look the same, shrunken it seems from the harshness of the work environment; their masculine attire thus is ill-fitting. Not so with Joan. She wears her male jacket and hat as “naturally” as a man, her “sun browned” throat and “animal beauty” evoking a positive rendering of the notion of a “savage existence.” In Joan there is little tension between the sex of her body and the gender of her clothing; she seems simply a magnificent human being.
That does not mean that she has been spared the deprivation of her fellow pit-girls. As Paul Grace, the young, effeminate curate, explains to Fergus Derrick, a young engineer from London recently hired at the mine, Joan’s mother died “of hard work, privation, and ill treatment,” her father when not working in the mine spends his time “drinking, rioting, and fighting,” and Joan herself “has borne […] such treatment as would have killed most women. She has been beaten, bruised, felled to the earth by this father of hers, who is said to be a perfect fiend in his cups.” What shocks Grace more than those details of Joan’s existence is her response to them. “And yet,” he explains, “she holds to her place in their wretched hovel, and makes herself a slave to the fellow with a dogged, stubborn determination” (4). Grace’s precise choice of words, “dogged, stubborn determination” rather than “dogged, sullen obedience,” for example, suggests that Joan holds to her father through choice not necessity. The uprightness, strength, health and beauty of her form are not compromised by her ill-treatment. It is hard to tell whether she is what she is despite her circumstances or because of them. The question of how her strength and beauty could apparently flourish under such conditions seems to be at the front of Derrick’s mind as he reflects on what Grace has told him: He “was struck,” the narrator observes, “by a painful sense of incongruity” (9).
As readers reflect on that incongruity, we might notice parallel incongruities that reveal something of Joan’s metaphoric importance to the novel’s engagement with gender. Between the time Grace described Joan’s situation and Derrick reflected on it, Grace shares a note he had received from Anice Barholm, the physically delicate and petite daughter of the rector for whom Grace is curate. Grace has fallen in love with Anice, an emotion Derrick perceives when he notices Grace blush as he fetches the note to share. The narrator tells us the note “did not impress him very favorably. A girl not yet twenty years old, who could write such a note as this to a man who loved her, must be rather too self-contained and well balanced” (7). Having just registered that assessment, when Derrick thinks of the ill-fit between Joan and her circumstances, the “incongruity” of her life, he wonders aloud, “[I]f she [Joan] had been in this other girl’s niche […] if she had lived the life of this Anice—” (9). The “if” is not completed by a then, but one may usefully ask, might Joan also be “too self-contained and well balanced”? Might that be central to what perplexes him—that Joan retains her dignity and self-composure under circumstances where a “proper” woman should not, just as Anice maintains her self-confidence and composure in response to being loved when a girl who knew her place would be, at the very least, flustered? In this perceptive and skillful way, Burnett early in the novel suggests that the surface markings of gender may be irrelevant to the depth and strength of character in women; it is the distortions created by social gender distinctions that lead Derrick to the perception of a woman being “too self-contained and well balanced,” a perception that becomes impossible to maintain for Derrick and for the reader for whom the expression “self-contained and well balanced” woman cannot by the end of the novel contain the adjective too.
The tensions between the social conventions of gender and a woman’s bodily composure in the world oscillate throughout the novel, conventional notions of gender encouraging sensitive, humane behavior at times and a rejection of those conventions opening space for Joan to be more fully herself. The novel struggles to establish a productive dynamic within what we might call a unified tension between conformity and resistance, both being necessary in varying proportions depending on changing circumstances for women and men to navigate the world with dignity. Conventional gender expectations, for instance, govern Derrick’s first personal encounter with Joan. Immediately after Derrick reflected on the possibility of Joan occupying Anice’s “niche,” he sees a woman sitting at the roadside. As he approaches her, she raises her head, and he sees that “Her face was disfigured by a bruise, and on one temple was a cut from which the blood trickled down her cheek; but the moonlight showed him that it was Joan” (10). He addresses her by name and offers his help, which she resists by wiping the blood away with her own hand and saying, “[I]t’ll do well enow as it is” (10). Derrick, ignoring Joan’s gesture and words “drew his handkerchief from his pocket, and […] managed to stanch the bleeding.” The narrator describes Joan’s reactions: “Perhaps something in his sympathetic silence and the quiet consideration of his manner touched Joan. Her face, upturned almost submissively, for the moment seemed tremulous, and she set her lips together […]. ‘Thank yo’,’ she said in a suppressed voice, ‘I canna say no more’” (11). That exchange is structured by conventional gender expectations, the strong man offering sympathy to the vulnerable woman, whose response hints of submission, all as prelude to the man ultimately mastering the woman. But Joan does not quite play out the role cast for her. She does not submit at that moment, and although she accepts his referral to “Thwaite’s wife” (12) for shelter that night, she insists on equalizing the encounter by offering help to him in return: “If yo’ ivver need help at th’ pit will yo’ come to me? […] ‘I’ve seen th’ toime as I could ha’ gi’en help to th’ Mesters ef I’d had the moind. If yo’ll promise that—’” (13). He promises. That exchange confirms the narrator’s assertion of an equality of strength between Derrick and Joan: “The spirit of determination was as strong in his character as in her own” (11). But despite the symmetry in personal determination, the asymmetries of gender and class suffuse the exchange, and they are simultaneously affirmed and undercut when the narrator closes the chapter with this: “‘Good night,’ he returned, and uncovering with as grave a courtesy as he might have shown to the finest lady in the land, or to his mother or sister, he stood at the road-side and watched her until she was out of sight” (13). That last sentence registers and destabilizes a range of gender and class relations: between Derrick as upper class and Joan as working class, between upper-class man and upper-class woman, between son and mother, brother and sister. We see in Derrick’s gesture of upper-class courtesy to the working-class Joan the effacement of the borders around each set of gender and class relations, an effacement grounded firmly on the inner strength and bodily symmetry of Derrick and Joan as individuals.
In contrast to Mary Barton, where the physical affinity between Mary and her aspiring upper-class lover Harry Carson is shown to be superficial and a moral snare, the physical affinity between Joan and Derrick provides a stable motif throughout That Lass O’Lowries, which unties the Gordian knot of the moral dangers of cross-class sexual relations. When Paul Grace is introduced into the narrative, “Derrick strode by his side,” the narrator adds, “like a young son of Anak [an Old Testament progenitor of giants]—brains and muscle evenly balanced and finely developed” (4). The authority Derrick carries based on his education and class is affirmed in his physical stature and, as we learn later, his ability to hold his own in a fight. Soon after the encounter between Joan and Derrick discussed above, Derrick shares his thoughts about Joan with Grace: “‘Here,’ he said, ‘is a creature with the majesty of a Juno—though really nothing but a girl in years—who rules a set of savages by the mere power of a superior will and mind, and yet a woman who works at the mouth of a coal-pit,—who cannot write her own name, and who is beaten by her fiend of a father as if she were a dog. Good Heaven! What is she doing here? What does it all mean?’” (15). Derrick’s words serve as a corrective to Grace, who when he first commented on Joan at the opening of the novel referred to her as “‘[A] fine creature’—and nothing else” (3), all body but no intelligence or character. Derrick sees someone very different, an analog for himself, a mirror of his own physicality and intellect, but in a context that defies the limits of his logic and his imagination. He apprehends the fullness of Joan’s capacity as a human being, but her environment, every aspect of her life-world, seems designed to distort her development. Why she isn’t stunted like the rest is a mystery.
The novel would seem to set, then, an equivocal situation: on the one hand an attractive, working-class, uneducated “girl” treated “as if she were a dog” by her father clearly needs protection; the conventions of gender and of narrative would predetermine that, but as suggested by the emphasis on the strength of Joan’s “will and mind” and on her offer documented above to help Derrick at the mine if ever he needs it, the power relation between the two is less predetermined. As the narrative unfolds, the question of whether Derrick is the protector of Joan or Joan the protector of Derrick is muddled. There are repetitions of the early scene when Derrick binds up Joan’s wound and arranges sanctuary for the night, but those scenes are overbalanced by Joan’s consistent shadowing of Derrick to ensure that he arrives to his lodging safely each night, putting her body literally between her father, who has vowed to kill Derrick after Derrick defeated him in a fistfight, and Derrick, who has taken his own precautions by carrying a pistol. Here is how he learns of Joan’s shadowing:
But during his lonely walks homeward on these summer nights, Derrick made a curious discovery. On one or two occasions he became conscious that he had a companion who seemed to act as his escort. It was usually upon dark or unpleasant nights that he observed this, and the first time he caught sight of the figure which always walked on the opposite side of the road, either some distance before or behind him, he put his hand to his belt, not perceiving for some moments that it was not a man but a woman. It was a woman’s figure, and the knowledge sent blood to his heart with a rush that quickened its beatings. It might have been chance, he argued, that took her home that night at this particular time; but when time after time, the same thing occurred, he saw that his argument had lost its plausibility. It was no accident, there was purpose in it; and though they never spoke to each other or in any manner acknowledged each other’s presence, and though often he fancied that she had convinced herself that he was not aware of her motive, he knew that Joan’s desire to protect him had brought her there. (93)
The knowledge of Joan placing herself between him and her father may quicken Derrick’s heartbeat, marking his hope that her action is for care of him more than a desire to prevent her father from committing a crime that would lead to his own death, but he eventually asks Joan to promise him not to put herself in danger for his sake. “It was that her womanhood,—” the narrator avers, “her hardly used womanhood, of which she herself had thought with such pathetic scorn—was always before him, and was even a stronger power with him than her marvelous beauty” (171). Still constrained by thinking in binary gender categories, projecting an idea of “womanhood” as essential to Joan’s identity, Derrick tries to refigure their relation in conventional terms; he cannot understand how it is possible for a woman to interpose her physical strength between two men. Joan rejects his plea, “fur the sake o’ [her] own peace” (172). Derrick could not reach the truth behind her refusal, “and would not have reached it if he had talked to her till doomsday.” That truth is “that she was right in saying she could not give it up” (172). Here’s why: she is unafraid of her father’s violence; she knows that there is an unbridgeable social gulf between herself and Derrick; the only thing she had to hang onto is her own endurance, which I would gloss as the strength and integrity of her own body and mental resolve. “There was a gladness” in that endurance, “which she had in nothing else” (173). That gladness, I would argue, is akin to defiance for there is no social script that Joan or Derrick can imagine that would enable them to encounter each other and love each other as equals. So Joan can step out of social scripts, “she could brave darkness and danger […] she could interpose herself between him and violence,” and do those things for the sake of her own peace. “But of all this, Fergus Derrick suspected nothing. He only knew that while she had not misinterpreted his appeal, some reason of her own held her firm” (173).
In this existential situation Joan may defy social scripts, but in others she seems to embrace them. The example that challenges my reading the most concerns her conversion from indifference to acceptance of what seems to be conventional Christianity. Unlike in Mary Barton, where the discourse of the Bible, as rendered in John Barton’s repentance for killing Harry Carson and Mr. Carson’s forgiveness of Barton, functions to impose a pattern of meaning for experience after the fact, serving as a way to explain away its pain, Joan’s encounter with Christianity begins with a picture first, under which are appended words. Her initial reading is of an image:
Against the end wall was suspended a picture of Christ in the last agony, and beneath it was written, “It is finished.” Before it, as Anice opened the door, stood Joan Lowrie, with [the fallen] Liz’s sleeping child on her bosom. She had come on the picture suddenly, and it had seized on some deep, reluctant emotion. She had heard some vague history of the Man; but it was different to find herself in the silent room, confronting the upturned face, the crown, the cross, the anguish and the mystery. She turned toward Anice, forgetting all else but emotion. (101)
In the conversation with Anice that follows, Joan accepts a Bible that Anice offers as the only thing that could provide an adequate explanation for what the words “It is finished” mean in the moment pictured. Some days later Joan returns to Anice and says: “‘I ha’ not getten the words. But I thowt as yo’d loike to know. I believe I’ th’ Book; I believe I’ th’ Cross; I believe in Him as deed on it! That’s what I coom to say’” (131). In her encounter with the picture and subsequent reflections on “th’ Book,” for which she has no words, Joan’s focus is on the image of suffering, the reality of physical death and the confirmation of the significance of both through the materiality of “th’ Book.” She is responding, then, not to discourse, not to a narrative of redemption and forgiveness, but to an image of suffering—the “upturned face,” the “crown” of thorns—a feeling of “anguish” and then the silence of “mystery.” That image seems to confirm the necessity for suffering but the impossibility of attributing any meaning to it. What the image validates is the emotion. Joan may have experienced suffering as her peculiar lot, but the image of the suffering Christ projects that suffering as universal even if its meaning remains opaque.
This nondiscursive reading of Joan’s conversion, which the narrator refers to as “Joan’s strange confession of faith” in a moment focalized through Anice, is confirmed in the novel by the Reverend Barholm’s response to the news of a change in Joan that should for him have confirmed her conversion. Accurately, I think, judging the core of Joan’s new faith “emotional,” Barholm is
disinclined to believe in Joan’s conversion because his interviews with her proved as unsatisfactory as ever. Her manner had altered; she had toned down somewhat, but she still caused him to feel ill at ease. If she did not defy him any longer or set his teachings at naught, her grave eyes, resting on him silently, had sometimes the effect of making his words fail him. (205)
Barholm’s response suggests that Joan’s newfound faith involves a rejection of the discourse of Christianity, a resistance to the way Christian discourse has served the interests of the privileged, who understand Christ’s suffering as protecting them from having to suffer themselves. Joan’s insistence on emotion, on the truth of the body’s placement in a world where suffering demands a response, disrupts the formulaic discourse of the rector, “making his words fail him.”
Joan’s “conversion” highlights one figure in a pattern of change that can be read on the surface as part of her education as a woman who learns to shape her desires in conformity with Victorian middle-class values. She says, for example, in a conversation with the working-class “sage” Sammy Craddock, who accuses her of turning Methodist, that “‘it is na Methody so much. Happen I’m turnin’ woman, fur I conna abide to see a hurt gi’en to them as has not earned it’” (211). Her definition of “turnin’ woman” could just as easily be applied to the notion of becoming a man, who “conna abide to see a hurt gi’en to them as has not earned it.” Which is to say that turning a woman in Joan’s formulation means becoming a compassionate human being. In that context, then, we can read Joan’s “appeal against her own despair” when she says, “‘Is na theer a woman’s place fur me I’ th’ world? Is it allus to be this way wi’ me? Con I niver reach no higher, strive as I will, pray as I will,—fur I have prayed? Is na theer a woman’s place fur me i’ th’ world?’” (213) as a plea for finding a social space where she can live out her compassion without physical abuse, deprivation and social censure, where her compassion can extend beyond the immediate moments of crisis to help shape a set of social relations where crisis is extraordinary rather than the norm.
An alliance with Fergus Derrick is precisely the circumstance that might enable Joan to find such a space personally through marriage and socially in supporting his efforts to renovate the working environment for all the workers in the mines. Here, for instance, are the plans he presents to the owners of the Riggan collieries: “They were plans for the abolition of old and dangerous arrangements, for the amelioration of the condition of the men who labored at the hourly risk of their lives, and for rendering this labor easier. Especially, there were plans for a newer system of ventilation—proposing the substitution of fans for the long-used furnace” (219). Clearly were those plans put into effect, they would have changed the daily lives of the mining community as a whole, softening the edges of the workers’ existence, removing a cause of daily anxiety and even improving worker health, but the owners reject the plans, and Derrick resigns. Before completing his employment, however, there is an explosion in the mine, trapping Derrick and many of the miners deep underground. In a reversal of the gender roles that structured the opening and closing chapters of Mary Barton—with Jem Wilson first taking the lead in saving his father and a colleague from a mill fire and then in the end after the trial taking on the care of the delirious Mary—Joan takes on the male role. She leads the rescue team and, followed by Paul Grace, whose hands are described as “feminine” (229) and who “found himself obeying her slightest word or gesture” (231), she finds Derrick, applies first aid in the form of a “brandy flask” (233) and cradles his head in her lap as they are raised to the surface. The frontispiece of the 1877 Scribner first edition pictures Joan holding her “Davy,” a miner’s lantern, during the rescue in an image that Mark J. Noonan calls “a modern-day Joan of Arc”8 (see Frontispiece). Derrick is seriously injured, his life in question over many weeks of recovery through which Joan nurses him daily and nightly. Once he recovers, Joan leaves Riggan, feeling herself unfit to be the wife of “a gentlemon” (243). Derrick follows her, confesses his love, to which Joan responds: “I conna turn yo’ fro’ me,” but when he reaches to embrace her in the closing gesture most readers would expect, she stops him, saying, “Not yet […] not yet.” “Give me th’ time,” she pleads, “to make myself worthy” (269).
That plea would seem to negate the finely wrought destabilizing features of a novel that has so powerfully demonstrated the arbitrary and distorting qualities of conventional gender constructions. What happens to that critique when the novel ends in such a conventional way (even if that convention is disrupted by Joan’s hesitation)? Jeanette Shumaker argues that the possibility of Joan’s union with Derrick is the culmination of her “growth” into a middle-class woman: “Joan’s growth,” she writes, “despite her background of poverty and abuse, comfortingly suggests that anyone who is motivated to improve can do so—that bourgeois values, behaviors, and consequent economic ease are available to the best members of the lower class.”9 The physically extraordinary Joan, in that formulation, becomes ordinary, a model of middle-class rectitude and decorum. That view of Joan disappears later on in Shumaker’s article when she observes that “Joan presents an androgynous contrast to the feminine ideal of the era” (371). Joan is both emblem of and radical contrast to the middle-class model of womanhood. That tension in Shumaker’s argument reflects a broad tension in the novel between the evocation of a middle-class feminine ideal that values literacy, sympathy, integrity and community through images of conventional gender stereotypes, as in the figure of Anice, and the extraordinary gender-defiant strength, integrity and beauty of Joan. Perhaps, then, if we read the declaration of love and Joan’s plea to work to be worthy of her beloved in the context of what we know about Joan individually, the details of her experiences and the scope of her desires, we can see another dimension to the conventional ending.
What would, we might ask, make Joan unworthy? One answer is her limited acculturation to the social class into which her marriage to Derrick would bring her. Without that acculturation, which need not carry with it a rejection of her social origins, the possibilities for Joan to realize her capacities for personal fulfillment in her marriage relation and for her to finds ways of her own to extend the work of social amelioration for her mining community would be highly constrained. Her hesitation is an argument for education and openness to a broader social experience for her. It also suggests a shift from mere endurance to possibility for her. Were she to refuse that possibility, she would be closing off analogous possibilities for her mining community. Such possibilities would not mean that she simply becomes an example for other working-class women with the implicit judgment that community structures of working-class life need to be corrected. Whatever the particular shape her life may take as she continues the project of her own development, which she insists on doing on her own, a part from Derrick, her life would grow in relation to her working-class community. In that sense, the conventionality of the narrative closure of That Lass O’Lowries feels irrelevant, beside the point, as the convention is woven into the larger tapestry of Joan’s life. Joan’s individuality carries its own authority.
In Mark J. Noonan’s fine study of the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, he offers this assessment of That Lass O’Lowries as a novel of “working-class life”:
Especially when compared to other so-called “realistic” texts depicting working-class life during this period […], Burnett’s work offers a powerful alternative to the competitive worldview seemingly sanctioned by Victorian society. Though Burnett fails to question the socioeconomic system that produces class divisions in the first place, she does eloquently stress the human sensitivity needed to alleviate capitalism’s harsh effects. Though perhaps not a fully satisfying solution to a complex situation, her well-wrought vision was deeply humanist and subtly challenged the views of her magazine’s exclusively male editorship. (49)
Compare that assessment with Raymond Williams on Mary Barton in his Culture and Society 1780—1950: “John Barton dies penitent, and the elder Carson repents of his vengeance and turns, as the sympathetic observer wanted the employers to turn, to efforts of improvement and mutual understanding. This was the characteristic humanitarian conclusion, and it must certainly be respected. But it was not enough” (cited in Mary Barton).10 Taken together those comments suggest that Burnett went a long way to replicate Gaskell’s social problem novel of 1848 with her own social problem novel of 1877, and that both novels failed to a degree in similar ways. The difference in dates, however, and the difference in place of publication—Mary Barton in London and That Lass O’Lowries in New York—complicate the parallel. It is well documented that Gaskell’s readers were both workers and factory owners in Manchester, and that the labor conditions (wages, strikes, unemployment) were a part of the texture of their everyday lives at the time of publication. There was no parallel situation in the moment of publication for Burnett’s novel. The readers of Scribner’s Monthly, where the novel was originally published serially, were not involved in the mining industry nor were they intimate associates of Burnett at the same time, although some mine owners and mine workers may by chance have read the novel. The relation then between the novels is not between novel and social problem addressed; it is between the earlier and the later novel. Burnett’s enterprise was literary practice, not social reform. She did not merely replicate the narrative elements of Mary Barton to pursue a similar reformist goal. She seized on those elements, broke them apart, reassembled them and patched in new elements in a way that extended the imaginative possibilities of the form. In Joan Lowrie she fashioned the first in a line of novelistic heroines to come, heroines who challenge gender stereotypes in different ways, from different angles, within different social classes and to different effects. Burnett’s next novel, Haworth’s, which is another industrial novel and like Gaskell’s North and South focalizes the narrative mainly from the point of view of ownership and management, both redeploys narrative elements from Gaskell’s novel and extends her exploration of women who refuse to be fully constrained by the social roles they are asked to play, but Haworth’s adds a transatlantic element to the narrative and the romance frame resolves nothing.
II
Ann Thwaite’s biography of Burnett approaches the relationship between Haworth’s and Gaskell’s North and South as obliquely as she had between That Lass O’Lowries and Mary Barton. As Burnett was writing Haworth’s Thwaite notes, “she was conscious of looking at the critics over her shoulder this time—just as Mrs Gaskell had been when following Mary Barton with North and South. ‘The difference between this and the Lass,’ she wrote to [Richard Watson] Gilder, ‘is that then I was simply writing a story, and now I am trying to please the critics’” (58). But more than looking over her shoulder at the critics, I would suggest, Burnett was looking pretty squarely at North and South itself, drawing on character types, plot elements, dramatic scenes, and social and verbal textures that evoke the world of Gaskell’s novel. There is the mill owner who worked himself up from poverty in the figures of Mr. Thornton in North and South and James Haworth in Haworth’s, for instance, each with a supportive and long-suffering mother (the former mother hard-edged, the latter gentle and willfully innocent); there is the beautiful upper-class woman who becomes a love interest (Margaret Hale in the former, Rachel Ffrench in the latter novel); and there is a family of working-class characters who become personal interests of the upper-class characters (the Higgins family in the former and the Briarley family in the latter). In both novels the mill owners’ businesses fail in part from the effects of a labor strike and in part from investments (in the former a refusal to make a risky investment, in the latter the failure of a series of risky investments), and in both the strike dissipates in a scene where violence is directed at the upper-class woman. And throughout both novels provide details of the texture of working-class homes and the contrasting speech of different class dialects, but both focalize those things through the eyes of the upper-class (or outsider) characters. As she had done in That Lass, Burnett deploys those elements from Gaskell’s novel, refigures them and adds others to produce a narrative that evokes the social problem novel of mid-century, but refracts the material to produce a text that feels decidedly modern. I would locate that modernity in two features of the novel: the introduction of an American character who brings disruptions to the factory system associated with his scientific/mechanical innovations and his ignorance of the rules of social decorum, and the novel’s steady delegitimizing of an assumption of class privilege, which thrives through a double standard of social behavior supported by a moralistic discourse that applies only to the less privileged.
Gaskell’s novels, of course, are sensitive to the double standard of moral judgment imposed on the less privileged in their depiction of the fallen woman figure. In Mary Barton there is the seduced Aunt Esther, who takes to prostitution to feed her fatherless child, who in turn nonetheless dies, leaving Esther to live out her shortened remaining years judging herself in the strongest, absolute moral terms: “How could she, the abandoned and polluted outcast, ever have dared to hope for a blessing, even on her efforts to do good? The black curse of Heaven rested on all her doings, were they for good or for evil” (206–07). That passage captures the way in which the narrator’s language blends with the internal perception of the character, whose thoughts, rendered in indirect discourse (“the black curse of Heaven” is Esther’s self-judgment not the narrator’s), reveal how deeply she has internalized the moralized social judgment of her suffering. Similarly in Gaskell’s Ruth, when the fallen titular character thoroughly reforms herself, living what amounts to a saint’s life, she dies with a crushing sense of her guilt, which she accepts as her just lot. Her “sin” in being seduced at 16 and parentless must remain within the discourse of absolute judgment even as the novel shows a life that belies that judgment. The fallen Liz in That Lass seems immune to any sense of self-judgment. She “falls” twice, first to return to Riggan with her child, and a second time to die, her child having died in the interval. During the time when she and her child were living with Joan, Liz rejects the child, saying with distressing matter-of-factness, “It’s nowt but a trouble. I dunnot loike it. I canna. It would be better if it would na live” (67). She feels neither maternal love nor moral revulsion of her behavior and its results. Joan provides most of the basic care for the child, since the child, in Joan’s words “seems to worrit her [Liz] to death” (151). In the penultimate chapter when Liz returns, Mrs. Thwaite, who had seen her last, does not quite remember if she asked for her child, but Liz did ask for Joan; “[I]t did na seem to be th’ choild she cared about so much as Joan Lowrie” (265). Consequently, when the chapter ends with the image of Liz “with her face downward and with her dead hand against the closed door” of Joan’s dwelling (266), we have the iconography of the necessary death of the fallen woman, but its moral, either as a judgment on the woman herself or on the hypocrisy of those who would judge her harshly, is drained away. There is simply the fact of her death. Once the distortions of moral judgment are erased from the narrative, the series of events that lead to Liz’s end can be understood for what they are in strictly material, bodily terms.
While there are no Esther or Liz figures in either North and South or Haworth’s, the prospect of a fallen woman hangs over the first novel and the extraordinary, ordinary presence of fallen women and their off spring is visible in the second. Gaskell evokes the shadow of the potential fallen woman in North and South through the way she depicts Margaret Hale’s hypersensitiveness to any awareness of her maturation as a sexually desirable woman. In her rendering of some events, literal meanings are charged with metaphoric meanings, with the dangers of sexual desire and its potential moral disruptions residing in the metaphors. We can perceive the potential shadow of fallenness in the quality of Margaret’s embarrassment after Henry Lennox’s surprise proposal of marriage: “Margaret felt guilty and ashamed of having grown so much into a woman as to be thought of in marriage” (27). Rather than being distressed by his presumption, Margaret seems angry at herself, at her body’s sexual attractiveness. It is as if the prospect of growing up brings with it sexual danger; to be a woman and to be desired is to be under threat. In her second surprise marriage proposal, this one from Mr. Thornton soon after the near riot during the strike (much more on the significance of that for both novels below), the excess of Margaret’s response suggests continued discomfort with her own sexuality. After Thornton declares that he loves her, “as I do not believe man ever loved woman before,” Margaret responds, “Your way of speaking shocks me. It is blasphemous” (181). While some of the energy of her response can be attributed to her anger at being misunderstood—their physical proximity during the near riot being misread as a sign of her attraction to him—the excess in its reference to blasphemy equates his desire to possess her as a violation, a desecration of the divine. That reference draws attention away from the carnality that is so central to his proposal, suggesting that the nature of the misunderstanding may be something she fears to confront directly, for were she to do so she would have to work to understand her own sexual desires.
Both proposal scenes are prefaced by moments when Margaret is on public display,11 the first after modeling the Indian shawls for her Aunt Edith at Harley Street in London and the second after having confronted the strikers openly in the courtyard of Thornton’s factory. In both cases the visibility of her body seems to invite both men to try to possess her. The connection between public visibility and the perception of Margaret’s body as an object of desire is further reinforced when Thornton sees her with her brother Frederick at the station before Frederick’s return to Spain, and Margaret lies about having been there. Thinking that Margaret’s brother must be her lover because of the lie, Thornton torments himself: “How could one so pure have stooped from her decorous and noble manner of bearing? […] And then this falsehood—how terrible must be some dread of shame to be revealed […] How creeping and deadly that fear which could bow down the truthful Margaret to falsehood!” (259). Thornton’s leap from the lie to a language of sexual violation (from “one so pure” to “dread of shame to be revealed”) further solidifies the metaphorical link between a woman’s public visibility and her sexual vulnerability.
In Haworth’s Burnett registers the fact that there may be a connection between the people one encounters in the ordinary course of daily life and the roles those people might have in narratives of fallenness. But rather than approaching those connections through the smoky distortions of an increasingly discredited moral discourse around the idea of the fallen woman, Burnett simply notes them. We can see how deftly Burnett discredits the moral judgment of Victorian discourse on the fallen woman in two examples: the introduction of Hilary Murdoch’s (the American engineer who works for and befriends Haworth) cousin, a 19-year-old girl of an unwed mother (a cousin of Murdoch’s father), and the revelation of the source of funds for the inheritance that Granny Dixon leaves to Mrs. Briarley. In Chapter X Murdoch is summoned to an attic room in Riggan where his father’s cousin, Janet Murdoch, lay dying. In the scene that follows, Burnett evokes some standard elements of the fallen woman story: Janet confesses her fallenness by saying, “I am an outcast […] an outcast!” before describing how her daughter “seemed to fasten her eyes upon me from the hour of her birth, and I have felt them ever since” (63). She is riven with guilt, her daughter a living and perpetual accusation, and she has sent for Murdoch to request that he and his mother take the girl, Christian, in. Without fuss, Murdoch agrees, and Janet says with some surprise: “You are like your father. You make things seem simple. You speak as if you were undertaking nothing.” To which he replies: “It is not much to do […] and we could not do less” (64). Murdoch then fetches his mother, and as they comfort Janet in her dying moments, Janet begs Christian, “Forgive me.” “For what?” Christian asks. “But the sentence remained unfinished.” Janet is dead, and her daughter looks intently at her while her mother’s face became “merely a mask of stone […] gazing back at her with a fixed stare” (65). So ends the chapter, and in a moment reminiscent of an Emily Dickenson poem, where the hard materiality of the tomb or the buzzing of a fly defies the human effort to project discursive meanings onto death, the tableau of repentance, forgiveness and the assuagement of a necessary guilt splinter against the hard realities of human experience imaged in the “mask of stone.”12 The next chapter begins simply, “They took the girl home with them” (66). In that grimly matter-of-fact way, the residue of Victorian moral sentiment is made irrelevant, evoked only to be corrected.
Such a corrective of sentiment is extended in the Granny Dixon bequest. Just before her death, she reveals to her impoverished, working-class family the source of the wealth that she has been hoarding for more than 60 years: “Does ta want to know where th’ money come fro’? Fro’ Will Ffrench—fro’ him. He war one o’ th’ gentry when aw wur said an’ done—an’ I wur a han’some lass” (348). The brevity and incisiveness of that revelation is stunning. Will Ffrench is the grandfather of Rachel, the upper-class woman for whom Haworth sacrificed all he had worked for and of whom Granny Dixon says, “she’s th’ very moral on him” (i.e., her grandfather) (348). Granny parlayed her beauty into financial security, and although it is unclear who Granny Dixon’s child or children might be, it is clear that she was by any definition a kept and thus a fallen women. She may not have inspired any affection—she played on her relatives’ greed to inherit her money—but she provides a hard-headed reading of what a fallen woman’s life might mean were we to abolish moral judgment and sentiment. That life would be as much an open question and just as free from or liable to blame as anyone’s. In addition, her equation of her youthful seducer, Will, and his granddaughter Rachel provides a powerful clue to our understanding of the woman who serves as the novel’s biggest puzzle: the self-contained Rachel Ffrench.
As was the case in North and South, the scene most fraught with the dangers of public exposure is when Rachel Ffrench intervenes between the strikers and the object of their wrath, Hilary Murdoch. Murdoch, the workers believe, has invented a device that will make their labor (and thus their livelihood) obsolete; Haworth circulated that idea in an effort to destroy his romantic rival. As is the case in North and South, labor conflict and sexual desire permeate the experiences of key figures in the manufacturing class if not the workers themselves. For Burnett as a writer, that confluence of social and personal tension seems to have focused and energized her narrative. In a letter to Richard Gilder, she described her difficulties in writing the early chapters of Haworth’s and then identifies the chapter that made everything from that point on smooth sailing:
After working & going through agonies untold & raving & tearing & hating myself & every word I ever wrote I have suddenly walked out into a cool place & begun to soar & have soared & soared until I don’t think I shall return to earth again […]. The room I have written it [Haworth’s] in has been a torture chamber & yet at Chapter 27 I am just tearing along & to my utter bewilderment I feel as if I have done something […] far beyond the Lass. (Cited in Gerzina 75)
Chapter 27, oddly enough, is entitled “Beginning,” and the extended narrative sequence introduced is of the labor strike and Rachel Ffrench’s response to it. It is as if the riot scene in North and South inspired what became the imaginative core of Haworth’s. While Haworth takes active measures to disrupt the strike before it starts, rallying his own men and gauging their loyalties before exploiting the uncertainty of the situation to play a protective role with Rachel, Rachel responds with excitement, relishing, it seems, the opportunity to assert her feminine and class power by an act of public defiance toward both the strikers and toward Haworth himself.
When Haworth rushes into the room to tell Rachel of the strike, he feels as he almost always does in her presence, “unstrung” (184).
“I’ve come to tell you not to go out,” he said. “There’s trouble afoot—in the trade. There’s no knowing how it’ll turn out. There’s a lot of chaps in th’ town who are not in th’ mood to see aught that’ll fret ‘em. They’re ready for mischief, and have got drink in ‘em. Stay you here until we see which way th’ thing’s going.”
“Do you mean,” she demanded, “that there are signs of a strike?”
“There’s more than signs of it,” he answered sullenly. “Before night the whole place will be astir.”
[…]
“Nothing would keep me at home,” she said. “I shall drive through the town and back again. Do you think I will let them fancy that I am afraid of them?”
[…]
She left the room, and in less than ten minutes returned. He had never before seen in her the fire he saw then. There was a spark of light in her eyes, a color on her cheek. She had chosen her dress with distinct care for its luxurious richness. His exclamation, as she entered buttoning her long, delicate glove, was a repressed oath. He exulted in her. His fear for her was gone, and only this exultation remained
“You’ve made up your mind to that?” he said. He wanted to make her say more.
“I am going to see your mother,” she answered. “That will take me outside of the town, then I shall drive back again—slowly. They shall understand me at least.” (184–85)
Rachel’s enigmatic final statement that “they shall understand me at least” raises the question of who else does she want to understand her? How far does the audience for her public display of herself extend? As a representative of her social class (her father has become Haworth’s partner in business, an aristocrat dabbling in trade), she relies on the clues of dress, her beauty and the fact that she is publicly known because of her class rank to protect her and to be tools of intimidation; if her social position is unassailable, she is unassailable. But insofar as the former working-class man and current factory owner Haworth assumes any authority over her (her father’s economic dependence on Haworth’s success reinforces any personal authority Haworth may hope to have over her), there is a gender dimension to her defiance. Her beauty may intimidate but it also attracts, and as a man of working-class origins who is attracted to her and is in fact engaged in an unspoken transaction with her father to buy her (she is the understood price of their partnership), Haworth is the most dangerous of the working men. It is he above all who shall understand her.
Rachel’s understanding of Haworth as an extension of the working-class threat to her social position and personal integrity is reinforced by two events: the stone thrown at the near riot and Haworth’s physical assault on her body. The near riot begins in a manner reminiscent of the scene quoted above: Rachel dresses for it. After her father and she discuss the fact that their dinner guests would not be coming because of the unrest in the streets, Rachel goes to her room “to prepare for dinner.” When she returns, her father is startled by her appearance: “‘Why did you dress yourself in that manner?’ he exclaimed. ‘You said yourself our guests would not come.’ ‘It occurred to me, she answered, ‘that we might have visitors after all’” (232). The visitors, of course, are the strikers, who Mr. Ffrench thinks have come to terrorize him. When it becomes clear that they are after Murdoch, Ffrench’s relief is transparent, but he still flinches from any confrontation. Rachel calls out his cowardice. Then she says:
“They shall see me. […] Let us see what they will have to say to me.”
He would have stopped her, but she did not pay the slightest attention to his exclamation. The window was a French one, opening upon a terrace. She flung it backward, and stepped out and stood before the rioters.
For a second there was not a sound.
They had been expecting to see a man […] and here was simply a tall young woman in a dazzling dress of some rich white stuff, and with something sparkling upon her hands and arms and in her high-dressed blonde hair.
The rapid shifts in focalization in the quoted passage capture with skill the changing visual emphases from Rachel’s self-absorption to her view from inside the French window to the rioters’ view from outside it. From there events move quickly: the rioters demand to see Murdoch and his “contrapshun”; Rachel says he has gone “far away,” telling “the lie without flinching in the least” (236); and she then offers herself as an object of their violence, saying “If you would like to vent your anger upon a woman, vent it upon me. I am not afraid of you. Look at me!” That moment reprises her slow drive through the town during the first stirrings of the strike, and the effect is the same: “The effect of her supreme beauty and the cold defiance which had in it a touch of delicate insolence, was indescribable” (237). The men freeze in their tracks. Then Murdoch arrives, and seeing Rachel’s “life […] was in danger” draws attention to himself, defying the rioters by telling them they are wrong about his invention and that he would in any case never give it up to them. That sets the crowd off. “He saw his mistake in a second. There was a shout and a surging movement of the mob toward him, and Rachel Ffrench, with an indescribable swiftness, had thrown herself before him and was struck by a stone which came whizzing through the air” (239). Murdoch’s “sight of the little stream of blood which trickled from her temple turned him sick with rage,” and as a similar trickle of blood did with the rioters in North and South, it brought them to their senses and they flee. Next, as readers of Gaskell’s novel will learn with no surprise: “When they were left alone, Murdoch came and stood near her. He was paler than she, and haggard and worn. Before she knew what he was about to do he fell upon his knees, and covered her hands with kisses,” a clear echo of Thornton’s surprisingly timed declaration of love to the still unconscious Margaret. Finally, Rachel at first responds with suppressed anger, “then quite suddenly all her resistance ceased and her eyes fixed themselves upon him as if with a kind of dread” (240). The nature of that dread remains undefined, but the threat working-class violence poses to Rachel’s social position and the repression of her sexual response to Murdoch both seem at play. As in North and South industrial labor, social conflict and sexual desire circle each other in a kind of carmagnole as a prelude to the resolution of the tensions among them through the structure of romance—that, I would argue, is what Burnett seems to be setting up, but it would be hard to sustain such a reading by the novel’s end.
In North and South the industrial and romance plots are resolved in the marriage of Thornton and Margaret, as Margaret throws both her inherited wealth and newly focused social reform activities into Thornton’s factory reforms. The competing love interests are more a misperception of Thornton’s than real, Margaret’s feelings never in doubt to readers; she has no desire for Henry Lennox and the threat of Frederick as a rival is purely a projection of Thornton’s jealousy. In Haworth’s, however, the competing love interests are real and dangerous: out of jealousy Haworth manipulates the workers to take Murdoch’s life (a plot that Haworth disrupts in the end), and Rachel toys with Murdoch’s affections until she loses interest, at which point her wealthy French lover appears on the scene, their marriage apparently imminent. However, neither that marriage nor any other marriage takes place at the end of the novel; the relationship between Rachel and each love interest is resolved in a different way. In a conversation with her father, Rachel explains why she singled Murdoch out for particular attention: “I must be amused and interested […] [and] he has managed to interest me […] [and] the time has passed more easily […]. I have gone as far as I choose to go, and it is done from to-night” (271–72). (There are countercurrents in that scene as her father seems to suggest that she cannot simply cast Murdoch off, but when Rachel confronts him with their class difference and asks what he would want her to do, he is silent.) Murdoch takes the rejection badly, and Heathcliff-like, “his face almost wolfish” (309), he haunts the grounds of the Ffrench estate until he purges the pain of his rejection by rededicating himself to the completion of his father’s invention. Thwarted love turns out to be the fuel for inventive genius.
Haworth responds to his rejection more directly. He manipulates Rachel into a private meeting where he vents his “rage.”
She saw a look in his eye which caused her to shrink back. But she was too late. He caught her by the arm and dragged her toward him. A second later when he released her, she staggered to one of the rustic seats and sank crouching into it, hiding her face in the folds of her dress. She had not cried out, however, nor uttered a sound, and he had known she would not […]. “A gentleman wouldn’t have done it,” he said hoarsely. “I’m not a gentleman.” (298)
The precise nature of his violence in the scene is unclear, but its brevity suggests an assault masked as a kiss, the kiss a kind of stone. Thus, Haworth acts out another working-class assault, and when he loses his business in bankruptcy, there is no wealthy woman to save it. Saint Meran, the French love interest, when he learns of Rachel’s father’s disgrace, goes back to France, leaving Rachel behind, and after his bankruptcy Rachel’s father flees Riggan, leaving Rachel alone. The prospect of church bells ringing for any marriage has receded far into the distance.
Among all the narrative elements that North and South and Haworth’s have in common, the resolution of social conflict through the marriage of individuals is clearly not one of them. While we might construct a checklist of cardinal narrative elements (many of which are discussed above) and more incidental narrative elements (such as the visit by the MP from Broxton to honor Haworth’s business success at a dinner hosted by Ffrench; the MP declares to Haworth, “I congratulate England upon your determination and indomitable courage, and upon your wonderful success” (340), which echoes a similar dinner marked by similar speeches in North and South), the originality of Burnett’s novel emerges most forcefully at its close. Murdoch, the American son who completed his English father’s invention and thus assured his own personal fortune, is the focus of the ending, not the title character Haworth, who, with his mother’s support, has to return to industrial labor to survive. Having emerged from his own dark passages through his efforts to purge the pain of the loss of a love that was never his in the first place—his acceptance of his individual possibilities via the rejection of romance is an apt analog for the novel’s rejection of romance—Murdoch embraces his own capacity for labor fueled by imagination, and he sets out to pursue a transatlantic vision of the productive possibilities of labor so defined: “Murdoch had made up his mind as to what his course for the next few years was to be. His future was assured and he might pursue his idlest fancy. But his fancies were not idle. They reached forward to freedom and new labors when the time came. He wanted to be in view, and to fill his life with work” (370). By returning to America, the country where his father had hoped to find the backing to complete and market his invention, Murdoch stitches another thread that links the two countries; America is the place where his fancies for productive labor can take their clearest shape, for there, he believes, his freedom to produce, in a gesture that evokes Thomas Carlyle’s gospel of work, can find its requisite scope. He plans, however, to return in a “few years,” but to what and for what reason?
Soon after the passage quoted above, and soon after he parts with his cousin Christian with the words, “[T]ry to be happy […] Rachel Ffrench stood before him” (371). The conditions seem set for a reconciliation scene. Rachel is alone, and she regrets her rejection of Murdoch. Her presence takes Murdoch by surprise, but even though Rachel appears to want one, there is no reconciliation. Instead, Rachel names some hard truths that have been felt but not articulated. She admits that she did love him and that she repents her decision to reject him. That admission requires her, though, to violate her dignity: “That it should be I who stooped, and for this—for this! That having battled against my folly for so long, I should have let it drag me to the dust at last” (372). Her consolation, then, is that she was the one who made the choice: “‘Is it my fault that it is all over?’ he demanded. ‘Is it?’ ‘No,’ she answered, ‘that is my consolation’” (372). As a figure defined throughout the novel by her social class pride, she remains consistent in her acceptance of the consequences of that pride, which is stronger than her romantic desires. In that regard, her closing words are most apt: “‘Oh! It was a poor passion, and this is a fitting end to it!’” (373).
Haworth’s closes by highlighting two images: a grave and a face. The grave is Murdoch’s father’s, behind which Murdoch had hidden from the rioters the unfinished invention and upon which he had purged the pain of his thwarted passion by rededicating himself to his father’s vision. That vision, once a burden and a specter, becomes his liberation and hope for the future when he makes it his own by completing the invention. The grave whose “silence was like a Presence” (374) links father and son in a story of transatlantic enterprise. But enterprise in and of itself is insufficient. It must be subordinated to a larger vision of social amelioration. And that vision is figured in the image of “a girl in a long cloak of gray almost the color of the mist in which she stood—a slender motionless figure—the dark young face turned seaward” (374). The girl in the cloak is Christian, Murdoch’s illegitimate cousin. The chapter wholly devoted to her (Chapter XXXII, “Christian Murdoch”) delineates the damaging effects of that illegitimacy to her developing sense of self. She fears the emergence of her own peculiar dark beauty, which she associates with her mother and the unwanted public attentions of men, and when she ventures into the chapel, the “objectionable female figure” of “the ‘scarlet woman’ […] figured largely and in most unpleasant guise in the discourses of Brother Hixon” (217). She had also crossed paths three or four times as a child with Rachel Ffrench on the continent, encounters both remember well. So while the romance plot of Murdoch and Rachel comes to a “fitting end,” it is replaced by the suggestion of another sort of romance. This one involves an Anglo-American man, who is “a gentleman without knowing it” (88) and a young, illegitimate girl, who takes the place of the blonde gentlewoman. The final words of that Anglo-American man in the novel, who imagines the fullness of his personal life to be centered in England as he watches the “dark young” “figure on the shore,” are, “‘when I return—it will be for you’” (374). In Murdoch’s story and his hope for its continuation there are the germs of a broader transatlantic community that Burnett extends in the third of her Gaskell-inspired fictions.
III
If America was in a sense smuggled into the Lancashire industrial environment in Haworth’s, its symbolic meanings momentary and muted, its broader material connections are implied by the invention the Anglo-American, Murdoch, brought to fruition, which serves as a metaphor for the potential effects of American technological innovation on the English economy. The stakes are public, related to changing conditions of labor and economic interests. In A Fair Barbarian America impinges on England in a different form and with a different focus. As Gerzina observes of that novel, it is “about an elegant American who shakes up a small and narrow-minded English village by her refusal to respect their petty and restrictive codes of dress and behavior” (93). That village is called Slowbridge, and it is in the words of a Harper’s June 1881 review “modeled apparently as much upon Cranford as upon actual places” (861). Cranford, as Borislave Knezevic has argued, is part of Gaskell’s imaginative effort to present in her novels “fictional mappings of England,”13 and Slowbridge is presented quite explicitly as “England” in this exchange between Octavia Bassett, the American visitor, and Lucia Gaston, her English counterpart: “‘Do you like England?’ she [Lucia] asked. ‘Is this England?’ inquired Octavia” (97). The implied answer to Octavia’s rhetorical response to Lucia’s simple question is, yes, Slowbridge is, if not England itself, an apt metaphor for a way of life that represents what it means to be English. By establishing Slowbridge as a metaphor for England and presenting Octavia as a representative American, Burnett offers an allegory for a singular Anglo-American character that combines the qualities of stability, decorum, dignity and community associated with the idea of England with an American ideal of energy, innovation, directness and mobility. The fact that the American, Octavia’s father, was born in Slowbridge and that her visit (with her father soon to follow) is to her aunt suggests that the allegory of mediation between England and America is a family allegory, a story about the reconstruction of a family that drifted apart. By drawing on the narrative world of Cranford in A Fair Barbarian, Burnett transforms Cranford’s response to the forces of social change embodied in such things as the railroad and the bank failure into an exploration of the forging of a transatlantic identity in response to America’s expanding economic importance and visibility in the world. Through the disruptive presence of the beautiful and expensively dressed and bejeweled Octavia, Slowbridge reluctantly but with increasing momentum embraces change in the small, intimate details of daily life, details that in the aggregate suggest a wider horizon of aspiration.
The first sentence of A Fair Barbarian reads: “Slowbridge has been shaken to its foundations” (5) by the arrival of Miss Belinda Bassett’s (the Miss Matty character) niece from Nevada in “‘Meriker’” (8), for in Slowbridge, it seems:
America was not approved of—in fact, was almost entirely ignored, as a country where, to quote Lady Theobald, “the laws were loose, and the prevailing sentiments revolutionary.” It was not considered good taste to know Americans,—which was not unfortunate, as there were none to know; and Miss Belinda Bassett had always felt a delicacy in mentioning her only brother, who had emigrated to the United States in his youth, having first disgraced himself by the utterance of the blasphemous remark that “he wanted to get to a place where a fellow could stretch himself, and not be bullied by a lot of old tabbies.” From the day of his departure, when he had left Miss Belinda bathed in tears of anguish, she had heard nothing from him; and here upon the threshold stood Mary Anne [her servant], with delighted eagerness in her countenance, repeating,—
“Your niece, mum, from ‘Meriker!’” (8–9)
Burnett’s intimate knowledge of Cranford can be felt throughout the passage: the Peter Jenkyns character becomes the brother who left for America, and the allusions to unease associated with the orient and the excesses of the French Revolution from the “panic” chapter become subsumed under America, a country associated here with the violation of all convention. Similarly, the ladies of Cranford’s obsession with dress is reflected in Slowbridge with Lady Theobald’s (the Miss Deborah character) concern about Octavia’s inappropriate dress and with her imposition of a standard of taste that all the other ladies in the town must emulate: “All the ladies of Slowbridge wore caps; and all being plagiarized from Lady Theobald, without any reference to age, size, complexion, or demeanor, the result was sometimes a little trying” (82). Such details permeate the novel; they are woven into the texture of the prose, revealing what a careful reader Burnett was of Cranford, and in particular how sensitive she was to the threat to the identity of the Cranford community by the accommodations necessitated by social change.14
In A Fair Barbarian as in Cranford the community’s identity is grounded in social custom and anchored by material objects, as evidenced by the centrality of tea parties to community life in both novels, and personal identity seems to be a function of community. Consequently, any change in the community threatens individual identity and any threat to individual identity threatens the community. In Cranford one narrative thread depicting a threat to the community is the Signor Brunoni story where the community anxieties associated with his appearance, which is connected to a series of “robberies,” dissipate when it is discovered that Brunoni is really a Mr. Brown, an Englishman after all.15 In A Fair Barbarian the threat is from the American girl, who intrudes on the community and threatens its values not only by behaving in ways that do not take those values into account but simply by being open about who she is. When, for example, Octavia announces quite openly that her mother had been a popular actress in San Francisco, who died giving birth at the age of 19, the narrator comments:
The utter calmness, and freedom from embarrassment, with which these announcements were made, almost shook Miss Belinda’s faith in her own identity. Strange to say, until this moment she had scarcely given a thought to her brother’s wife; and to find herself sitting in her own genteel little parlor, behind her own tea service, and with her hand upon her own teapot, hearing that this wife had been a young person who had been “a great favorite” upon the stage, in a region peopled, as she had been led to suppose, by gold-diggers and escaped convicts, was almost too much for her to support herself under. But she did support herself bravely, when she had time to rally. (21–22)
Miss Belinda’s identity is anchored by her domestic, material objects figured in the tea service and teapot, which are, emphatically, “her own” while they are also the objects that facilitate the most ordinary and ritualized community activity, the Slowbridge tea parties. The notion of public display unsettles her fundamentally domestic identity, an identity reinforced by the community activity of taking tea. Her hand, resting on the teapot, enables her to “support herself bravely,” the teapot a reassurance of her community values. For Belinda personal identity and community identity are one. Questions of identity, however, concern Octavia as well, and in her relationship with Lady Theobald’s granddaughter Lucia, also 19, she strives to find a kind of emotional coherence between her English family connections (and, thus, identity) and her American upbringing and home (and, thus, identity). The riddle Octavia seems set to solve is the possibility of unifying her geographically bifurcated family history and current relations with her personal identity. What community provides the material context and the shared values that can make her identity something more than mere individualism? That community does not yet exist on either side of the Atlantic for Octavia, so she herself becomes the focal point of a transatlantic community in the making, which begins to emerge in a series of personal interactions that reshape Octavia and that transform Slowbridge.
In an effort to manipulate Lucia into marrying a man who, Lady Theobald thinks, would help secure Lucia (and by extension, herself) a fortune, Lady Theobald encourages Lucia to spend time with Octavia after Octavia becomes an object of interest for the, unbeknownst to him, intended. Lucia and Octavia become friends and agree to “help each other” by each telling the other her faults. Lucia says:
“If you will tell me when I am wrong, I will try to—to have the courage to tell you. That will be good practice for me. What I want most is courage and frankness, and I am sure it will take courage to make up my mind to tell you of your—of your mistakes.” Octavia regarded her with mingled admiration and respect. “I think that’s a splendid idea,” she said. (175)
Unselfconscious courage and frankness are appropriate descriptors of the qualities in Octavia that have so unsettled Slowbridge, in addition to her visually arresting appearance. The first “mistake” Lucia points out to Octavia concerns her hair; the wavy bangs that obscure her forehead, she suggests, make Octavia resemble an actress. Octavia responds by directly cutting off the bangs, an act she instantly regrets, saying that “anyone who was used to seeing [her hair with bangs] […] would think I looked horrid,” to which Lucia replies: “They would think you prettier,—a good deal” (181). Subsequent events confirm Lucia’s assessment and Octavia concedes the point, figuratively becoming more herself in adjusting to the expectations of Slowbridge. That physical adjustment extends to Octavia’s moral bonding with the town reflected in Reverend Poppleton’s assessment of Octavia: “I wish that they [the ladies of Slowbridge] knew her—her generosity and kindness of heart and ready sympathy with misfortune” (193–94), the very qualities the ladies of Slowbridge (and of Cranford) assume among themselves, and that by the end of the novel they recognize in Octavia.
A Fair Barbarian ends with Miss Belinda’s brother, Martin Bassett, arriving in Slowbridge with Octavia’s fiancé, Jack Belasys, in tow. The wedding takes place is Slowbridge, affirming the new English grounding of Octavia’s American identity and extending that identity to her American husband in a celebration of Anglo-American unity. The Reverend Poppleton officiates, and after the wedding Octavia showers her Slowbridge relatives and friends with gifts, singling out Lucia for special notice with a gift that “dazzled all beholders.” The last words of the novel confirm that the wedding represents more than the union of two individuals.
When she was borne away by the train, with her father and husband, and Miss Belinda, whose bonnet-strings were bedewed with tears, the Rev. Alfred Poppleton was the last man who shook hands with her. He held in his hand a large bouquet, which Octavia herself had given him out of her abundance. “Slowbridge will miss you, Miss—Mrs. Belasys,” he faltered. “I—I shall miss you. Perhaps we—may even meet again. I have thought that, perhaps, I should like to go to America.”
And, as the train puffed out of the station and disappeared, he stood motionless for several seconds; and a large and brilliant drop of moisture appeared on the calyx of the lily which formed the centre-piece of his bouquet. (258)
The American presence that had so shaken Slowbridge at the novel’s opening, in the end, has become, like Octavia, an object of desire; the Reverend Poppleton, representative of the state church, the center of English village life and moral values, is drawn out from the village, yearning for an idea of America embodied by Octavia—youthful, beautiful, wealthy and an agent of social change through the making of a new community where the traditional and the vital interanimate each other. She is also, quite obviously, an object of Poppleton’s sexual desire, which becomes sublimated in his wish to go someday to America. Change, thus, does not necessarily mean the uncertainty of an unknown future; it means equally the rediscovery of the past. The tear on the lily, a flower watered with the yearnings of a man representative of the moral core of the nation and suggestive of spring—of Easter renewal—combined with the image of the train, present in embryo an image of the organic growth of an Anglo-American future. The sexual undercurrent of the novel underscores the town’s and the nation’s need for revitalization.
I am describing here a literary manifestation that anticipates some 20 years in advance what Alex Zwerdling describes as a “displacement of traditional Anglo-American rivalry and mistrust by a new spirit of concord.”16 In Burnett’s novel of 1880, deeply responsive to Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel of 1853, we see how “traditional mistrust” was woven into the fabric of individual family histories. By presenting an estranged but ultimately reconciled Anglo-American family in the Bassetts, and in basing that family in a village recognizable from its original imaginative manifestation in the 1850s as quintessentially English and fragile, Burnett anticipates a larger cultural project that created conditions within which later political, economic and social accommodations could be articulated. The concessions to their own misjudgment that the ladies of Slowbridge make in their final acceptance of Octavia, despite what they had misperceived as her crass materialism and arrogance, coupled with Octavia’s realization that she has much to learn about the importance of community customs and values, anticipate in miniature the concessions, Zwerdling argues, that had to be made between England and America as the center of imperial power shifted from London to Washington after 1898 and the Spanish-American War. “If Britons and Americans can learn to think of themselves as a single people, fulfilling their joint destiny,” he explains, “the unpleasant fact of the passage of power from one nation to the other might be ignored. The glorious fate of the ‘English-speaking peoples’ thus serves as a useful myth to assuage Britain’s inevitable resentment” (27).
Burnett’s contemporary critics could not have anticipated the thematic resonance of A Fair Barbarian, a resonance that became more audible after the turn of the century. Most would have agreed with the reviewer in the April 1881 issue of The Literary World, who concluded a review of the novel with these words: “Mrs. Burnett’s manner is at her lightest in it, well suited to a sketch designed simply to amuse the reader, with only the faintest shadow of a moral lying within any of its outlines.”17 As I have suggested, however, the comic cultural collisions and reconciliations in A Fair Barbarian have a double resonance. The first is literary: that novel and the two industrial novels that preceded it are part of Burnett’s effort to establish her literary authority on the model of her most culturally intimate predecessor, Elizabeth Gaskell. In effect, Burnett develops a literary practice in which she deploys recognizable narrative components and refracts her own intentions and writerly voice through those components in order to make them speak differently in a familiar idiom.
In the January 1885 issue of the British periodical Time the English socialist, feminist writer Clementina Black (1853–1922) wrote a critical assessment of Burnett’s career, “The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett,” which provides an apt framing of her place in the Anglo-American literary field.18 The American critical establishment had drawn specific comparisons between Burnett and Dickens and Burnett and Thackeray (see Richard Henry Stoddard’s December 17, 1881, piece in The Critic, for example)19 and had placed her among the “seven writers who hold the front rank today in general estimation” (see James Herbert Morse’s “The Native Element in American Fiction” in the Century Illustrated Magazine in July 1883),20 but Black’s assessment is unusual in the quality of its nuance. Rather than pointing to specific comparisons—such as Stoddard does when he writes, “She impresses me as understanding her suffering and sinning characters as fully as Dickens ever understood his—as having a more genuine affection for them, and as never at any time caricaturing them”—Black identifies a literary strategy that characterizes Burnett’s fiction as a whole during the first decade of (and arguably throughout) her career:
It is not easy to find a final word on Mrs. Burnett’s work, or to venture a conjecture as to its further development. It has gone on steadily improving, and its latest level is high. Its weakness, I suspect, lies where much of its charm, and even its strength, lies—in its versatility. Mrs. Burnett reminds us now of one writer, now of another; the likeness is never servile, her work is often equal, sometimes superior to the work resembled, and it has always a distinct flavour of its own, but the flavour is seldom quite so marked as the likeness. As there are people so quick to catch the accent that you may almost guess at their last companion, so you might range Mrs. Burnett’s stories each in a different place on your bookshelves, and each beside its literary next-of-kin.
In Black’s formulation, the strengths and weaknesses of Burnett’s novels are the same; in an argument that smacks of oxymoron, Black asserts that the versatility of the novels is a function of their accentual relations to other novels. Although the accent feels native at first, not long after its origins come to the fore, the voice is not quite native, just as Burnett herself may be said to have been not quite English, not quite American; she writes in one accent and then in the other but in a tenor that is distinctively hers. To locate Burnett’s place in the literary field, then, is to locate her in relation to others who preceded her and have stepped aside as it were (as in the death of Dickens in 1870 and George Eliot in 1880), opening a space for her. But she does not fit comfortably into one space; her work, though accented, is her own.
Another way to get at the paradox I have been struggling to pin down is to place Burnett’s early novels in the context of the broader publishing practices of the period. In an essay called “Directions and Volume of Our Literary Activities” in the January 1894 issue of Forum, Ainsworth R. Spofford, the then Librarian of Congress, wrote the following: “In the field of book literature there appears a marked tendency toward reproduction of standard authors, and this may be hailed as a wholesome symptom both of the public taste and of the judgment of publishers who cater to it. In general terms it may be said that this is an age of compilation rather than creation.”21 The 1880s and 1890s saw an explosion of a series of standard authors produced by publishing giants like Macmillan in England and Harper’s in the United States and by a multitude of small publishing houses such as the Dodge Publishing Company in New York and the Henry Altemus Company in Philadelphia. This was also a time when those same publishers printed uniform editions of the work of living authors, marking that work in its material form as the continuation of a tradition. Consequently, when readers took a Scribner edition of a Burnett novel in their hands and noted the embossed cover and the frontispiece and in-text illustrations, the form of the book established a familiarity for readers who would then read the novel in the context of the many novels by other authors that have preceded it. But that familiarity may also have enabled Burnett to inflect her narrative material differently, as suggested by Stoddard’s rhapsody over Joan Lowrie:
She is a glorious creature—elemental, primitive, cast in the mold of the mothers of the [human] race—the daughters of Job, as they live in the vigorous drawings of Blake, or the Daughters of Men, whom the Sons of God saw were fair. She belongs to a sisterhood of heroic heroines whom the novelists of the period are fond of delineating […] but she overtops them all in massive simplicity and thorough womanhood.
Joan is familiar and unfamiliar, drawn from a complex narrative and visual history but rendered somehow with “massive simplicity,” as if the Biblical narrative and romantic illustrations fuse into a figure that is somehow purer, more accessible to Burnett’s readers who can feel something of that mythic history in the figure of a working girl.
The second resonance of the cultural collisions and reconciliations in Burnett’s early novels is a by-product of the first. That is, in pursuing her literary project throughout her career as a novelist, Burnett provided voice, image and story to emergent political, cultural and literary developments in the relationship between her mother country and her adopted homeland. That is to say, her literary ambitions were enabled and constrained by her particular historical context and her intimate personal history as an Anglo-American woman forging a literary career between 1877 and 1922. Her particular strategy located her in a space on a transatlantic literary field defined by a tension between residual literary values associated with Victorian realism and emergent literary values associated with modernism, a term that points to qualities that also define what Rita Felski calls “the popular sublime.” Aspirations toward the sublime in popular forms of narrative, Felski suggests, “seek to familiarize the ungraspable, to materialize the transcendent, thereby setting up a field of tension between the otherworldliness they invoke and its depiction through familiar and established conventions.”22 The difference between that and literary modernism could be articulated by changing the adjectives “familiar” and “established” to “unfamiliar” and “innovative.” We might say, then, that Burnett’s literary practice was pulled back to the world of Elizabeth Gaskell and forwarded to the world of Henry James then past (or through) James into the world of popular romance, a world that James himself evoked in a high modernist way in, for instance, The Portrait of a Lady, his novel that was published serially in the Atlantic just prior to the time that Burnett’s Through One Administration (the central text in my next chapter) was running in Scribner’s.
Notes
1The One I Knew Best of All. London: Frederick Warne, 1893, p. 110.
2Arthur John. The Best Years of the Century: Richard Watson Gilder, Scribner’s Monthly, and Scribner’s Magazine, 1870–1909. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1981, p. 13.
3See Joseph Kestner’s Protest and Reform (1985), especially pp. 70–81 and Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction (1988), especially pp. 69–84 for detailed discussions of Stone’s novel.
4See especially Chapter Six, which contains the well-known description of the typhoid-infected Davenport damp cellar home on Berry Street in Manchester.
5The deep literary connection between the two novels and Burnett’s diversions in her handling of female characterization and the psychology of the fallen women are not, however, registered in the critical history of the Victorian industrial novel. It would be enlightening to place Burnett’s two industrial novels in the context of arguments made in, for instance, Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1958), Louis Cazamian’s The Social Novel in England, 1830–1850: Dickens, Disraeli, Mrs. Gaskell, Kingsley (1973), John Lucas’s The Literature of Change (1980), Catherine Gallagher’s The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 1832–1867 (1985), Josephine Guy’s The Victorian Social Problem Novel (1996) and Susan Zlotnick’s Women, Writing, and the Industrial Novel (1998) among others.
6For a discussion of the significance of silence in relation to the fallen woman, see Thomas Recchio’s “Elizabeth Gaskell as ‘A Dramatic Common’: Stanley Houghton’s Appropriation of Mary Barton in Hindle Wakes.” The Gaskell Journal, vol. 26 (2012): 88–102, 127.
7Gaskell too destabilizes gender norms in Mary Barton, but she does so by revealing the nurturing qualities of Jog Legh, who dresses as a woman in his attempt to care for his newly orphaned granddaughter. The cross-dressing Job is also the novel’s amateur naturalist.
8Mark J. Noonan. Reading the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine: American Literature and Culture, 1870–1893. Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 2010, p. 49.
9“A Secret Garden of Repressed Desires: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s That Lass O’Lowries.” Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 32 (2002): 363–78 (369).
10The Norton Critical Edition of Mary Barton, edited by Thomas Recchio, 2008, p. 485.
11For an extended exploration of the significance and dangers for women in the Victorian era to be on public display by venturing into the street unaccompanied or being otherwise visible, see Deborah Epstein Nord’s Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City. A willful manipulation and reversal of the dangers of such visibility is enacted by Rachel Ffrench in Haworth’s.
12See Emily Dickinson’s “I Hear a Fly Buzz” and “I Died for Beauty” for the most apt examples.
13“An Ethnography of the Provincial: The Social Geography of Gentility in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford.” Victorian Studies, vol. 41 (Spring 1998): 405–26 (405).
14The Slowbridge of A Fair Barbarian might be productively added to the communities discussed in Nina Auerbach’s Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (1978), adding it to the literature of village fiction in England and America in the nineteenth century.
15For a detailed analysis of that point, see Thomas Recchio’s “‘Charming and Sane’: School Editions of Cranford in America, 1905–1914.” Victorian Studies, vol. 45, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 597–623.
16Alex Zwerdling. Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London. New York: Basic Books, 1998, p. 22.
17“Current Fiction.” Literary World, vol. 12, no. 9 (April 23, 1881): 23, 146.
18Clementina Black. “The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett.” Time, vol. 12, no. 1 (January 1885): 72–85.
19R. H. Stoddard. “Frances Hodgson Burnett.” The Critic, vol. 1, no. 25 (December 17, 1881): 345–47.
20James H. Morse. “The Native Element in American Fiction.” Century Illustrated Magazine, vol. XXVI, no. 3 (1883): 362–75.
21Ainsworth R. Spofford. “Directions and Volume of Our Literary Activities.” Forum (January 1894): 598–604.
22Rita Felski. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995, p. 120.
