Robert MonkVersion 1.0

Avoiding Imperialism:
Mary Barton and the use of domesticity in masking class conflict

Time after time in Mary Barton, Gaskell uses a two-fold representation in which she conveys the horrible conditions of poverty only to chastise those who would respond to them with actions of class- 'warfare' such as strikes and violence. This pattern is reflected both in the macro-pattern of the novel's two-part structure, and in individual passages. Mary Barton introduces the hardships faced by the poor as a class only to mask it in the later chapters by focusing on the moral dilemmas of individual characters. This structure is noted in Catherine Gallagher's "Causality versus Conscience", which stresses conflicts in Gaskell's intellectual background as the root cause of the masking process. While I will not disagree with Gallagher, I think it is important to realize that the intellectual fractions she sets against each other ‹ the determinism/necessarianism of the post-Enlightenment versus a reawakening conceptualizations of 'moral conscience' in the visions of movements such as the Unitarian church ‹ confronted each other in a theater of possible thought that was circumscribed by assumptions of national autonomy and conflict, and influenced by a tendency to think of England as an isolated, 'virgin isle'. Intellectual debates influenced Gaskell's habit of setting out a realist documentation of poverty only to pull it back behind the mask of various other narrative modes, but they did not operate independently. Gaskell's habit demonstrates her inability to view the problem and the threat of poverty within the context of a globally operative capitalist system, a system whose real function was itself distorted in popular consciousness by the assumption of national rivalry and conflict.
Gaskell repeatedly goes out of her way to acknowledge the presence of a majority in England's population whose existence is marginal, oscillating, and contingent on the fickle winds of international trade economies. At the same time, she emphasizes the essential innocence of the capitalist class, who are likewise unable to manage their production without interruption from the changes of world history and free from the development of global capitalism (though in their case it is only "things for show" and not "things for life" that must be foregone as the result) (Gaskell, 456). To secure a new foreign market and with it the long-term employment of the Manchester workmen, Gaskell claims that it was thus in everyone's interest that the manufacturers "beat down wages as low as possible"(221). She recognizes the presence of competition in an international economy, but rather than search its implications for any possible reconciliation of interests between worker and employer, she turns her gaze inward to the personal relations among workers, and between worker and capitalist. Gaskell's narrative framework claims to establish the means to a personal moral reconciliation of divided classes, whereas reality demanded at the least ‹ and still demands ‹ a coherent plan of reformation at the international level.
Having steeped herself in the political economy of her day, it is not surprising that Gaskell finds no fault with 'the system', which until then had only been characterized as 'the Invisible Hand' ‹ a rather favorable interpretation. But writers like Adam Smith were not taking the position of the poor as their starting-point, nor taking the perspective of the poor ‹ if only intermittently ‹ in conceptualizing industrial life. The assumed interests of the capitalist class ‹ growth, technological progress, market domination ‹ overwhelm the working-class interests that might have found voice in Mary Barton ‹ high, consistent wages and decent working conditions.
In light of her reading habits, I think it fair to challenge Gaskell's economic discourse on its own terms. Consciously or unconsciously, her justification and exculpation of the Manchester manufacturers hinges on the assumption of economic growth, and thus on the interest of moneyed investors who can profit only through growth. If the capitalist system could exist without growth, employment in Manchester could not be tied to domination of a "new foreign market". Presumably, if the system was viable without growth, it would continue on in previously established markets: the winning or losing of new markets would be irrelevant. Not only are the ultimate consequences of growth-dependent employment troubling, but it even seems unclear that employment in Manchester was thus dependent on growth: we do not meet a single employable man in Mary Barton who is not either employed or on strike (or rich). We might question further, if employment was tied to capturing the new market, how would its capture guarantee conditions any better than those already existing?
Whatever its origins, this assumption of a basic link between "new foreign market[s]" and employment levels serves imperialism and not working people.

An order for coarse goods came in from a new foreign market. It was a large order, giving employment to all the mills engaged in that species of manufacture: but it was necessary to execute it speedily, and at as low prices as possible, as the masters had reason to believe a duplicate order had been sent to one of the continental manufacturing towns, ...where ...they dreaded that the goods could be made at a much lower price than they could afford them for; and that ... the rival manufacturers would obtain undivided possession of the market. It was clearly their interest to buy cotton as cheaply, and to beat down wages as much as possible. And in the long run the interests of the workmen would have been thereby benefited. [pp. 220-1]

There may really have been a limited coincidence of worker and employer interests such as the one Gaskell purports to prove here, but this passage does not prove it. Even granting such a coincidence of interests, and granting worker cooperation, in the long run they would have faced pressure to take recurring wage cuts in the interests of global competition for market-dominance, or even for mere market-share. When- and wherever workers accept low wages, they put downward pressure on wages everywhere in their market. If the Manchester workmen cooperated, the Continental manufacturers would make the same pitch to their employees, putting Manchester workers in the same old position, only worse. Labor is the only productive resource that can participate in the determination of its own cost. If it foregoes that prerogative, its cost will be set at the minimum required for its own reproduction. Given its ultimate irrelevance to the condition of workers, the "undivided possession of the market" on which the passage focuses suggests its real function in the struggle for undivided possession of parts of the world.
Gaskell directs her energies inward, when they ought to have gone for some exploration of the relation between international industrial economy and the poor with whom she begins her tale. Gallagher describes the narrative structures that naturalize this misplaced focus very convincingly. But in tracing her argument it is important to remember that insofar as she steps back to consider implications of Mary Barton's masked labor-politics, she does so within a strictly national context, or at least fails to note the importance of the workers' situation in an international labor market and trade economy. The turn inward, away from labor-politics and international trade is, as Gallagher says, heavily bound up in Gaskell's contradictory ideologies, but as I showed above, it avoids confrontation not only with the labor-politics it begins to describe, but also with its own imperialism. Though the use of narrative modes is the same in both maskings, it is important to distinguish the original reasons for masking.
To explain why Gaskell oscillated in her representation of the poor, Gallagher highlights her intellectual embeddedness in a self-proclaimed 'rebirth' of personal moral responsibility (Gallagher, 64-5). A few key personalities edged Gaskell's core philosophy toward a belief in 'moral freedom', even though determinism had attained a general currency during the early eighteen hundreds.
Gallagher expresses her analysis of Mary Barton's narrative structure most concisely when she writes, "Barton's sin of abstracting Harry Carson from his domestic context is presented as the characteristic error of industrial society"(p. 85). As this quote suggests, the domestic narrative is, for Gallagher, central to Mary Barton. It persists throughout the novel, from the objects Gaskell describes in reporting Manchester's dire poverty to the domestic priorities that Mary has, even as she travels about the country collecting evidence for a court of law. Mary Barton invokes the forms of melodrama and farce only to show the evils that they work. This leaves tragedy as the realistic ground on which the novel rests, but even tragedy must be undermined, since, in the case of John Barton, it would open up the contradiction between his personal moral responsibility and the determined nature of his social position. Thus, particularly in the latter chapters, Gaskell's privileging of the domestic works to temper whatever questions John Barton's fate may raise for the reader (Gallagher, p. 68 and passim).
As I have suggested, the idea of moral freedom or moral responsibility brought with it an emphasis on the sentiment of individuals as being central to humanity and its function within the determined materiality of the surrounding world. For Gaskell, conditions of severe poverty could have no meaning without an understanding of how they were felt and thought about ‹ both by the poor who were immediately affected, and the rich, who, she felt, had a responsibility to try to eliminate them.
Above all else, the project Gaskell undertakes with Mary Barton is not, however, the elimination of class privilege or even of poverty (so long as it is only mild). Her goal rather seems to be a more cultivated (controlled) version of the increasingly class-mixed social interactions that characterized the urban settings of the new age of industrial capitalism. In describing this new modern experience, she demonstrates her prioritization of domestic strife at the cost of class struggle and comprehension of the real function of international trade in the lives of workers. Even in descriptions of 'crowds' or 'city bustle' she cannot resist the temptation to particularize and assign moral responsibility.
Her ambiguous reaction to confrontations with diverse classes is already revealed in the preface, where she asks "how deep might be the romance in the lives of some of those who elbowed me daily in the busy streets of the town" and later states: "At present, [the lower classes] seem to me to be left in a state, wherein lamentations and tears are thrown aside as useless, but in which the lips are compressed for curses, and the hands clenched and ready to smite"(Gaskell, 37, 38). The lower classes have diverging identities in the preface: their lives may have 'deep romance' or they may be clenching their fists in anticipation of doing violence to the reader (or his class). Gaskell's wonder at the potential of "deep...romance" in strangers is a part of what Gallagher described when she said "Barton's sin of abstracting Harry Carson from his domestic context is ... the characteristic error of industrial society"(p. 85). While the narrative makes some moves in the direction of melodramatic romance ‹ such as Mary's interactions with Harry Carson ‹ the 'deep romances' turn out to be the details and the crises of everyday domesticity, the problem of living up to social constructions of what is regular and normal. Reference to the domestic is Gaskell's mode for appealing to sympathy. The poor are suffering in their lack of domestic convenience and their loss of family members; Barton's tragedy is sympathetic because he lost his wife and son; Carson and Barton are ultimately reconciled through their mutual sympathy for each other's domestic suffering. Romance becomes domestic. The nearness of other classes ought to provoke an interest in the struggles common to all classes.
On the other hand, the proximity of other classes is threatening. The lower classes have clenched fists and are ready to strike. In this light, their nearness provokes fear rather than sympathy.
That Gaskell uses the image of 'elbowing' chance encounters in her preface ‹ and appeals to it again as added prompting for reform initiative on the part her own fortunate class ‹ suggests the force of novelty with which multi-class proximity must have struck her:

...yet [John Barton] felt the contrast between the well-filled, well-lighted shops and the dim gloomy cellar, and it made him moody that such contrasts should exist. They are the mysterious problem of life to more than him. He wondered if any in all the hurrying crowd, had come from such a house of mourning [as his barren cellar]. He thought they all looked joyous, and he was angry with them. But he could not, you cannot, read the lot of those who daily pass you by the street. How do you know the wild romances of their lives; the trials, the temptations they are even now enduring, resisting, sinking under? You may be elbowed one instant by the girl desperate in her abandonment, laughing in mad merriment with her outward gesture, while her soul is longing for the rest of the dead .... You may pass the criminal, meditating crimes at which you will tomorrow shudder with horror as you read them. You may push against one, humble and unnoticed, the last upon earth, who in heaven will be in the immediate light of God's countenance. [Gaskell, 101]

This passage moves seamlessly from the perspective of the working class to that of Gaskell's upper class audience, using the novelty of a uniquely modern experience to acknowledge inequality, subordinate it to sentiment, and prod the upper class to reform, all without confronting the root cause of the lower-class threat. We begin with Barton, incensed at the gross disparity between the purchasing-power and comfort of the rich as compared to the life-threatening squalor of the poor. He realizes the sharpness of this contradiction fully in the most modern of spaces ‹ the row of shop-fronts in a bustling city. He "felt the contrast between the well-filled ... shops and the dim gloomy cellar", thus locating the contradictions of social inequality in the same realm of elbowing crowds that forms the primal scene of the novel: Gaskell's encounter with mysterious strangers in the crowded city.
Barton's response to glaring social inequality is to be "angry". Ultimately, Gaskell blames him for his anger and vengefulness because he fails to abide by the implications of her own perception: that every character has some "wild romances" in her life which, because they may include suffering, presumably gives some of them the right to be more wealthy than the bulk of people. Since it is impossible to "read" these strangers at our elbows, we are cautioned not to judge them, lest some unknown history of suffering prove to vindicate whatever appears on the surface to be a fault. Gaskell does not claim that everyone has some tragedy concealed beneath their ordinary outer appearance. But she suggests that we should assume this nonetheless. To Gaskell, not just suffering, but the mere potential of suffering is enough to preclude the possibility for any justifiable radical response to perceived inequality.
This is not the only instance where suffering forestalls judgment and action. The justifying powers of suffering are asserted again much later, when Barton meets the father of the youth he murdered, and the two men break down in tears: "Rich and poor, masters and men, were then brothers in the deep suffering of the heart"(435). Carson, the victim's father, yields to the fellow-suffering of Barton when he decides not to turn him in to the police. On his side, Barton pays homage to Carson's suffering in repenting the act of murder which he committed on behalf of his fellow strikers. So Gaskell transforms Barton's violent response to inequality into her own harmonizing discourse of suffering.
A third embedded message surfaces in the move from what "he could not ... read" to what "you cannot read" of "the lots of those who pass you in the street." If Barton is wrong in his anger toward the leisure classes he sees in public, so would 'we', Gaskell's upper class audience, be wrong to ignore the strange masses on the basis of their strangeness. There is danger beneath the strangeness of those we meet. It is not safe to let their interior lives go unregulated. It is important to note that the hidden interiors of these strangers are deviant and criminal, or if one of them is saint-like, she is "the last upon the earth": a rare case indeed! Whatever they may be to other classes, the multi-classed masses are a threat to Gaskell's audience. Gaskell wants to undermine the illusion of distance created in writing: "You may pass the criminal, meditating crimes at which you will tomorrow shudder with horror as you read them" with the 'reality' of daily interactions. There can be little doubt that the prospect of being in daily proximity to such strangers is meant to be shocking.
But these dangerous characters may be rehabilitated. Their radicalness is linked backward to Barton's, for they and Barton belong to the same category of desperation, a category which Gaskell hopes can be eliminated by the prompt attention of the wealthy classes to the wants of the impoverished ones.
This link between the general stranger and the particular Barton involves more than just a common denominator of desperation. If we consider Gaskell's statement in the preface about wanting to reveal the hidden "romance" of the strangers who elbowed her, the function of the passage above seems to have even another component. That is, that the generic figures it evokes are also particularized within the rest of the narrative. The "wild romances" Barton fails to read into strangers are the ones Gaskell set out to present in this novel. The suicidal derelict corresponds to Mary's wayward Aunt Esther; the murderer to her father, John Barton.
The intimate presence of these strangers in the person of the novel's primary characters makes their rehabilitation all the more important to the comfort of its audience. Through the working-class Barton family, the desperation of strangers becomes directly linked with the workings of industry and capitalism ‹ with the processes over which Gaskell's audience has authority. The image of chronic proximity with multi-classed strangers is Mary Barton's primal scene; it proclaims a new kind of experience in modern society and positions that experience so as to simultaneously moderate the radical reactions of the poor to their own poverty, and to shame and threaten the rich into a kind of circumscribed uncomplacency.
Gaskell's commitment to particularizing those elbowing strangers is closely related to the circumscription of her vision for social reform. It also has as its source the tradition of moral individualism that Gallagher describes. Whatever else it may be about, Mary Barton was designed to persuade workers and employers of their common interests. That it does so by appealing to domestic strife rather than a rigorous consideration of economic processes allows it to ignore the fact that international capitalism is structured to keep wages low. Only through some kind of pressure ‹ direct threat, political, or collective bargaining ‹ can workers ensure their interests are considered.

Bibliography
Gaskell, Elizabeth (1985), Mary Barton
New York: Penguin Books, Inc.

Gallagher, Catherine (1985), The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: social discourse and narrative form 1832 - 1867
"Causality versus Conscience: The Problem of Form in Mary Barton"
Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Notes
*competition on world market = common interest betw. worker and employer ---NOT!
*failure of primary characters to settle adequately without imperialist apparatus
*erasure of villains
if there were to be a villain, it would be Harry Carson; his murder is not totally condemnable, and without it, there would be no reconciliation with Gaskell's self-figure, Carson Senior.
*Sanchez-Eppler: the bodily component of sentimental readership as revelation of moral truth (p. 37)
*Threatening masses as modern phenomenon: Steinbeckian crowds (223). Link to crowds at elbow.
*Barton's absence from negotiations caused by mercy-visit to a beaten scab's bed: birth of brotherhood-suffering and the foreclosing of radical action as justifiable. (223 and ?)
*"[Barton] acted to the best of his judgement, but it was a wildly erring judgement (219).

and her condemnation of labor movements that act in accordance with a transnational understanding of the development of capitalism.

Culls

Since Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton is a document not only of social reformism, but also, in spite of her claims to the contrary, one of political economy, it would seem proper to analyse it as such. But this would be to overlook the complex of problems it creates by interlevening the regulative ideologies of domesticity and imperialism. Certainly, the novel's outward purpose is, as Gaskell says, to alleviate "the agony of those suffering without the sympathy of the happy"(Gaskell, 38). She wants it to demonstrate to her own (upper-middle) class the urgency of giving to the poor some sign of sympathy. But this reformist ideology is not the core of the novel. It is a symptom of the limitations in the Classical Liberal economic theory that informs Gaskell's ultimate judgements on the workers' individual and collective conduct. Gaskell's faith in reformism as the means of bridging the widening chasm between factory-worker and factory-owner relies on such contemporary writers as Adam Smith, who emphasized the mechanics of 'the' economic system, but failed to situate that system outside the ideologies of nationhood and colonialism. By accepting the situation of this "system" within the limitations of nationalism, Gaskell's extention of contemporary political economy into the moral-sentimental economy of domestic life Gaskell inscribes a new, ultimately conservative nationalism into the ideological regulation of working class domesticity.
Gaskell's failure to examine economic relations from an internationalist (anti-nationalist) perspective impinges massively on the focus, form(?) and content of her narrative, yielding some telling contradictions. Both as popular romantic fiction and as a document of reformism, Mary Barton forms and is formed by the ideology of nationalist imperialism that circumscribes it. It is this mutual relation between the sentimental ideologies and narrative strategies of a popular fiction, reformism, and the more blatantly power-centralizing functions of nationalist imperialism that I will examine here. In the process it will become clear that the domestic objects (Woman, food, privacy, identity) regulated within the sentimental ideology of the popular novel are not easily separated, on the basis of function, from the colonies, industries, economies, trade-policy, and laws regulated through the ideologies of nationhood and imperialism. Gaskell's basically conservative reformism merely masks the process by which imperialism determines her moral social vision.

Why does Gaskell abort her economic analysis at the point of immediate circumstances, passing over the chance to really explore what capitalism does for workers? While Gallagher's analysis of narrative modes goes far toward highlighting the conflict between determinism and moral individualism that pervades Mary Barton, I think it fails to explain scenes such as this one, where it is not individual versus environment that is the problem, but rather group versus environment. As Gallagher notes (Gallagher, pp. 74-5), Gaskell characterizes "the people" as "ungifted with a soul" and lacking "a knowledge of the difference between good and evil"(p. 220). Thus, for a group to be determined by the environment of global capitalism should not in itself have posed a problem for Gaskell as she negotiated her own determinist and individualist ideologies. There would have been no ideological contradiction if she described how the capitalist system determines workers' lives.

The position from which Gaskell's narrative begins offers some hope for revolutionary re-visioning of industrial relations, but falls short. The overt message of the novel as a whole is to prompt only a little broader awareness of poverty on the part of the rich, and even this prompting is often accomplished through appeals to self-preservation and self-interest.

It is because nationalism promotes competition among 'national' industries and discourages transnational determination of wage-levels. If the Manchester strike fails, it is ultimately because it takes place within a national theater. Its pressure on wage-rates translates into pressure on investment capital to move elsewhere, yielding local unemployment in the long run. If the same basic strategies were applied without the handicap of nationalist ideology, the problem of foreign competition would not arise in the first place. Without international restrictions ‹ either through labor organization for higher wages or through government interference, capitalism grows itself indefinitely, using the surplus produced by increasing productivity to continue increasing its productivity without increasing its contribution to humans. Isolated labor movements such as the one Gaskell describes in Manchester do not affect this system in the long run: they merely chase existing capital away to unorganized places. The fantastic returns generated by capitalism can be claimed only through international interventions, and it is precisely this kind of intervention that Gaskell will not or cannot consider.