Esther is just one of the many 'fallen women' to whom Gaskell gave sympathetic fictional treatment; others include the lost daughter of 'Lizzie Leigh' (1850) and the heroine of Ruth (1853). In Mary Barton, the prostitute plays a more specifically didactic role than in Gaskell's other works. The younger sister of Mary's mother, Esther is so 'puffed up' with her beauty that, shortly before the novel opens, she leaves her factory work to follow a handsome young soldier. After three years and the birth of a daughter, the soldier moves on, Esther's child falls ill, and, in order to feed the child, Esther takes to the streets. Her child long dead, Esther confides her history to Jem in hopes of saving Mary from a similar fate. For, despite the fact that Esther claims that her actions have separated her from decent women 'as far asunder as heaven and hell,' she repeatedly insists that Mary resembles her or that Mary resembles her daughter-just as John Barton thinks that Mary resembles both his wife and her sister. The narrator elaborates the possibility that women are somehow all alike later in the novel when Mary mistakes Esther for her mother, of whom she has just been dreaming. These suggestions form the sentimental paradigm that Mary must resist, for, in reducing every woman to an instance of the same, the sentimental romance obliterates all the discriminations that make domesticity possible: the differences among women that render a man's choice meaningful and valorize a woman's will; the judgment that protects marriage from temptations; the moral code that differentiates between marriage and the blissful life that Esther spent with her soldier. -524- John Barton's tragedy, which dominates the second half of the novel, poses an even greater danger to Mary's domestic story than does Esther's sentimental romance, for John's inability to tolerate what Gaskell presents as the bitter irony of life drives him to a savage imitation of the mill owner's insensitivity. Although Gaskell offers several explanations for John Barton's tragic fall, her descriptions repeatedly invoke the same image with which Esther tries to distinguish herself from other women-the image of the gulf. Initially, John Barton is tormented by the material «contrast» that grows starker as times get worse. At the conclusion of the novel, we learn that a moral version of this social contrast has tortured John ever since he learned to read and that trying to reconcile what the Bible says with what men do has produced a corresponding split within him: 'I was tore in two sometimes,' the dying Barton confesses, 'between my sorrow for poor suffering folk, and my trying to love them as caused their sufferings.' The psychological version of the social contrast is momentarily resolved when John Barton responds to Harry Carson's thoughtless caricature of the starving laborers by plotting the young man's death. This resolution, of course, is not the one Gaskell endorses: in murdering young Carson, Barton has replicated Carson's sin, for John reduces Harry to a figure as grotesque as those in the caricature-an 'overbearing partner' in 'an obnoxious firm.' Killing Carson, in fact, not only widens the psychological gulf within John Barton but also imposes it upon his daughter. Once John has left home for parts unknown, Mary deals with her father's guilt by 'separat[ing] him into two persons, — one, the father who had dandled her on his knee…; the other, the assassin, the cause of all her trouble and woe.'
Thus the 'dark gulf' that haunts John Barton first as a fact about society, then as a psychological state, eventually deranges Mary. Indeed, it is this transfer of the ills of the social world into the woman's sphere by means of a male carrier that really imperils Mary's domestic narrative. Esther plays as critical a role in this process as she does in the sentimental romance, for despite her good intentions, her initial violation of domestic order has consigned her to a life on the streets of the masculine world. Now an uncomprehending watcher of the life she can no longer join, Esther inadvertently provokes the confrontation between Jem and Harry that leads to Jem's arrest. When she takes Mary the incriminating paper she finds at the murder scene, — 525- Esther literally brings a bit of the street into the home; in so doing, she unintentionally renders Mary 'the sole depository of the terrible secret' of John Barton's guilt. Desperate to save her lover without betraying her father, Mary is now thoroughly contaminated by the contradictions that mar the masculine world. Gaskell presents these contradictions as outbursts of psychological instability: Mary suffers mental confusion ('armies of thought… met and clashed in her brain'), paranoid projections of her fears ('the very house was haunted with memories and foreshadowings'), dissociation ('her very words seemed not her own'), and, finally, derangement and convulsions (''Oh, Jem! Jem! you're saved; and I am mad- and [Mary] was instantly seized with convulsions'). Even more telling, this hysteria spreads to the narrative itself: three times in the course of ten pages, the narrator breaks into the story to confess her own loss, her own guilt, her own longing for some contact with a spectral world. In the most startling of these outbursts, the narrator's parenthetical longing to sink herself in dreams seems nearly as «crazy» as the emotion that Mary fears will derange Mrs. Wilson.
Already [Mrs. Wilson's] senses had been severely stunned by the full explanation of what was required of her, — of what she had to prove against her son, her Jem, her only child, — which Mary could not doubt the officious Mrs. Heming had given; and what if in dreams (that land into which no sympathy nor love can penetrate with another, either to share its bliss or its agony, — that land whose scenes are unspeakable terrors, are hidden mysteries, are priceless treasures to one alone, — that land where alone I may see, while yet I tarry here, the sweet looks of my dear child), — what if, in the horrors of her dreams, her brain should go still more astray, and she should waken crazy with her visions, and the terrible reality that begot them?
Such interruptions differ both from the narrative asides in Disraeli's novels and from other narrative interpolations in this novel. Unlike the former, this digression does not present the author's position didactically; unlike the latter, it does not emphasize the contrast between the narrator and her subject matter but bespeaks an identification so powerful that the boundary between character and narrator threatens to dissolve. In so doing, the three digressions in chapters 24 and 25 signal that the feminized genre may be as susceptible to a hysterical breakdown as are the female characters of Mary Barton. In the narrative, the characters' derangements originate in contamination that has invaded the womanly world from outside: trying only to pro-526- tect the home and tell home truths, Mrs. Wilson and Mary find themselves possessed of knowledge about men that will destroy their families; worse still, they find themselves subpoenaed to testify in court-that is, to make the most private knowledge public, to be themselves the violators of the domestic integrity that by rights they should defend.
I will return in a moment to the narrator's derangement. For now, it is important to see how Gaskell restores domestic order to what has become a hysterical narrative. More decisively than the economic crisis that threatens starvation, more persistently than the sentimental fate that Esther embodies, the woman's inability to remain immune to the contaminating mysteries of the masculine world imperils domestic stability and narrative coherence. All Mrs. Wilson knows is that Jem owns a gun, that it once belonged to his grandfather the gamekeeper, and that men sometimes «practice» (for what?) in the shooting gallery. Mary knows both more and less of this mysterious masculine universe. Going through her father's closet like a detective in search of clues, Mary discovers the other half of the incriminating paper, a woolen gun case, and some 'little bullets or shot' ('I don't know which you would call them,' the narrator hastily adds). John Barton's motives, by contrast, remain impenetrable to Mary (and, if her competing explanations are any indication, to the narrator): 'His actions had become so wild and irregular of late, that she could not reason upon them.'
Unable either to understand or to defend against the darkness that oozes into the home from this masculine sphere, Mary Barton's only recourse is to absorb its duplicity and, when forced, to substitute her womanly secret for the revelation the court solicits. Required to testify at Jem's trial, the reeling Mary holds 'the tremendous secret [of her father's guilt] imprisoned within her' and releases instead 'what woman usually whispers with blushes and tears, and many hesitations, to one ear alone,' the secret of her love for Jem. While the narrator approves of Mary's confession, the fact that a woman must publicize this most intimate of all truths to hide a man's incomprehensible guilt attests to the damage that domesticity has suffered here. Mary's subsequent madness and convulsions constitute the woman's last defense against the disorder of the outside world. Only when John Barton voluntarily confesses and he and his other victim-Harry's father-find common comfort in the loss each has suffered can the domestic narrative resume. So great is the damage, however, that this narrative can -527- only begin again in far- off Canada, which Gaskell depicts as 'primeval'-that is, still unsullied by men.
While the narrator of Mary Barton repeatedly insists that the gulf between the classes can be bridged by knowledge, then, her narrative suggests that the gulf between the sexes will remain a gaping wound. In order to contain the ominous implications of this conclusion, Gaskell repeatedly seeks to absorb the masculine world into woman's sphere. She seeks to domesticate politics, for example, not only by subordinating narrative accounts of trade unionism and Chartist meetings to domestic events, but also by translating the political language of rights into a discourse about domestic needs. Thus we learn in passing that, with John Barton, 'need was right,' and, in the extended speech in which he rouses his companions to vengeance against the masters, Barton speaks of the needs of children, not the rights of men. 'Our share we must and will have; we'll not be cheated. We want it for daily bread, for life itself; and not for our own lives neither… but for the lives of them little ones, who don't yet know what life is, and are afeared of death.' In keeping with this domestication of politics, Gaskell provides a gallery of men who act as mothers: John Barton and George Wilson carry their babies at the novel's opening; as Ben
