The homoerotics of manly conversation constitute Disraeli's version of a reformed politics. Because politics has been eroticized, it can be plotted in a novel; but because the erotic component of relationships has been purged of sexuality, the novel can be offered as an appropriate vehicle for political sentiment. At the conclusion of Coningsby, this transformation is graphically presented when the two charismatic boysturned-men stand side by side at the head of their country, their infatuation with each other having been converted into an infatuation with England. 'Men must have been at school together,' the narrator approvingly notes, 'to enjoy the real fun of meeting thus, and realising their boyish dreams… Life was a pantomime; the wand was waved, and it seemed that the schoolfellows had of a sudden become elements of power, springs of the great machine.'
The 'great machine' of which Coningsby and Millbrook are the «springs» thus replaces the singing machines of Manchester. In the process, of course, women-both the 'merry girl' whose voice echoed in the happy machine and Edith, who has finally become Coningsby's wife-simply disappear. Theoretically, they are represented by the men who animate the machine of national character; but since no woman has poured her ideas into Coningsby and since the psychological complexity apparently associated with women has been returned to its proper source, it is unclear how womanly influence will make itself felt or how women's interests will make themselves known. In Sybil, Disraeli does give a female character more prominence, but even there the titular character serves primarily as a source of inspiration for the man who reunites the classes in the style of Young England. When she is called on to act, Sybil becomes confused and lost; she fails to reach her father in time, and then she falls senseless in a faint. Disraeli's novels may use the Coleridgean idea of representativeness to join opposing classes in an -520- idealized compound, but in the process, they set aside another important opposition-the difference of sex.
If Disraeli reads the condition-of-England question in the light of history, Elizabeth Gaskell approaches it as a problem of epistemology. And if Disraeli counters the feminization of the novel by larding his work with 'manly conversations' and didactic asides, Gaskell uses the gendered genre to foreground sexual difference as both social symptom and cure. For Gaskell, the crisis of the 'hungry forties' should be addressed not by reforming politics or politicizing the novel, but by taking full advantage of the imaginative engagement associated with this genre and with women. This capacious mode of knowledge will bridge the gulf between England's 'two nations' by feminizing both masters and workers-that is, by teaching them to identify with each other, as women (and novelists) already do. For Gaskell, then, the novel is uniquely qualified to promote this feminine epistemology, for fiction can breathe life into the abstractions of political economy by taking the middle-class reader into the homes and minds of the poor.
As we have seen, Disraeli's political novel suspends the (class and political) differences among individuals by placing various interests side by side within a single, representative figure. Approaching the condition-of-England question through imaginative engagement rather than a political program, Gaskell presents the individual in a synecdochic rather than symbolic relation to the whole. In Mary Barton, as in Gaskell's other social-problem novels, it is possible to comprehend the problems that afflict society or to test the theoretical conclusions of political economy only by figuring these issues as individual case histories. Thus, for Gaskell, the story of the individual does not so much contain the truth of society as a whole as it provides imaginative access to the only form in which 'society as a whole' makes sense. Presumably, the identification by which the reader enters the story of the individual can become the motor of social change, just as the mill owner Carson is able to effect real improvements for his workers once he understands the feelings of the men he employs.
Mary Barton has earned its critical reputation as a social-problem novel at least in part because of Gaskell's detailed representations of the -521- deplorable conditions of working-class lives. Largely the story of three families-the Bartons; their working-class neighbors, the Wilsons; and the Carsons, who own the mill that (sometimes) employs the Manchester workers-Mary Barton graphically figures the details of poverty so as to transport the middle-class reader into places most would not see in a lifetime. Some of these places proclaim the triumph of human effort over obdurate materiality; such is the case with Alice Wilson's cellar, where 'the floor was bricked, and scrupulously clean, although so damp that it seemed as if the last washing would never dry up.' Others, however, suggest that filth is an inexorable fact of impoverished life. On an errand of mercy to a fellow worker, for example, John Barton and George Wilson descend into the cellar where the Davenports live and die.
You went down one step even from the foul area into the cellar in which a family of human beings lived. It was very dark inside. The window-panes many of them were broken and stuffed with rags, which was reason enough for the dusky light that pervaded the place even at mid-day… On going into the cellar inhabited by Davenport, the smell was so foetid as almost to knock the two men down. Quickly recovering themselves, as those inured to such things do, they began to penetrate the thick darkness of the place, and to see three or four little children rolling on the damp, nay wet brick floor, through which the stagnant, filthy moisture of the street oozed up; the fireplace was empty and black; the wife sat on her husband's lair, and cried in the dark loneliness.
John Barton may be 'inured to such things,' but this description stresses that the narrator and the reader are not. The work of the novel is to make the contrast between the material conditions of such characters and those of the reader so vivid that men like Carson (and the reader), who have the power that money supposedly brings, will see this contrast as a mockery of the interests that Gaskell presents as common to all. At the conclusion of Mary Barton, Mr. Carson nurtures the «wish» that expresses Gaskell's polemical position:
that a perfect understanding, and complete confidence and love, might exist between masters and men; that the truth might be recognised that the interests of one were the interests of all, and, as such, required the consideration and deliberation of all; that hence it was most desirable to have educated workers, capable of judging, not mere machines of ignorant men; and to have them bound to their employers by the ties of respect and affection, not by mere -522- money bargains alone; in short, to acknowledge the Spirit of Christ as the regulating law between both parties.
In order to emphasize the injustice of the material contrasts that separate rich from poor, Gaskell stresses what everyone shares: the desire for domestic well-being. So prominent is the domestic sphere in Gaskell's novel that every event, every topic of political controversy, every social and economic fact of life is filtered through the lens of domestic concerns. Gaskell's only references to the controversial issues of her day-the New Poor Law, for example, factory inspectors, and the high incidence of industrial accidents-present these facts as the material from which the poor must devise a 'plan of living' their domestic lives. Similarly, the workers' presentation of the People's Charter to Parliament in 1839, which Disraeli converts into an extended dramatic episode in Sybil, occurs offstage in Mary Barton; Gaskell figures the impact of Parliament's rebuff not in political terms but as a blow to John Barton's dwindling optimism and therefore as a further erosion of the domestic stability he and his daughter so precariously maintain. Typical of the priority Gaskell assigns to domesticity is her treatment of England's most aggressive foray into international affairs, the economic expansionism we call imperialism. References to England's imperial exploits pepper the middle third of Mary Barton, for Will Wilson, Alice's godson, earns his living as a hand on a trading ship. We discover in passing that Will has been to Africa, Sierra Leone, China, Madeira, and both Americas. Gaskell construes Will's travels, however, strictly in terms of their potential impact on the home. His trips figure most prominently as absences for Alice, not as adventures or dangers for him, and the only exotica he brings back-a dried specimen of a flying fish and a tale about a mermaid-are immediately absorbed into domesticating contexts. The flying fish becomes part of Job Legh's naturalist collection, and the mermaid is first debunked and then supplanted by a real enchantress, as Job's granddaughter Margaret «enthralls» Will with her lovely singing.
Just as domestic concerns subsume foreign matters in Mary Barton, so the domestic story gradually absorbs the other plots that vie for attention. As Catherine Gallagher has argued, Mary Barton contains several competing plots, each of which is associated with a specific narrative mode. Among these are a farce, which is enacted by the mill -523- owner's son Harry and by Sally Leadbitter, an apprentice at the milliner's; the sentimental romance associated with the young Mary and her fallen aunt Esther; and the tragedy of John Barton. For much of the novel, these narratives impede and threaten to disrupt the orderly progress of Mary's maturation and marriage to Jem Wilson. The farce and the sentimental romance dominate the first half of the novel. The cynical Harry Carson, who courts Mary partly for her beauty and partly for the fun of the chase, and the «plain» and «vulgar-minded» Sally Leadbitter first tempt, then try to coerce Mary into imitating a sentimental romance. Gaskell makes it clear that sentimental heroines exist only in literature; in the working-class world of Manchester, adopting the sentimental perspective can only lead to the catastrophe dramatized by Esther.
