Davenport sickens, the two men turn 'rough, tender nurses' to his children and wife; Job Legh's long story of going to London tells how he learned to mother his granddaughter; Jem tends the stricken Mary with maternal solicitude; and, even in the depths of his despair, John Barton responds to a child crying for its mother.
Just as she domesticates politics, so Gaskell attempts to humanize political economy by casting its harsher equations as the feminized truisms of Christianity. In the process, value becomes a matter of quality, not quantity. Thus, in the concluding interview between mill owner and workers, Mr. Carson attempts to explain the iron law of market logic. 'Two men live in a solitude,' he declaims, 'one produces loaves of bread, the other coats… Now, would it not be hard if the breadproducer were forced to give bread for the coats, whether he wanted them or not, in order to furnish employment to the other: that is the simple form of the case; you've only got to multiply the numbers.' Job Legh's response is clear: 'God has given men feelings and passions which cannot be worked into the problem, because they are forever changing and uncertain,' he counters. 'Them that is strong in any of God's gifts is meant to help the weak, — be hanged to the facts!' — 528-
Despite advocating the feminized epistemology associated with the novel, Gaskell does not reject the principles of political economy. If anything, the narrator's concluding statement that 'the interests of one were the interests of all' supports the economists' theories, just as her explanation that foreign competition justifies a temporary reduction of wages endorses the principle of laissez-faire. For the most part, however, Gaskell sidesteps the controversy surrounding political economy by avoiding disquisitions on theory of any kind. Rather than airing debates about the New Poor Law, free trade, or the wage fund, Gaskell presents the problem as one of communication and knowledge-as a conflict, that is, between the masculine refusal to know except in abstractions and the feminized imaginative embrace. Parliament rejects the People's Charter, the narrator suggests, because legislators did not want to know the conditions of the poor; the workmen in Manchester strike because the masters do not tell their employees about the foreign competition the mills face. If representatives for each side explained their interests in concrete terms, the narrator claims, mutual forbearance or even sympathy would result, as it does when Carson and Job Legh finally elaborate their positions for each other.
Despite these efforts to domesticate, so as to humanize, the masculine world of politics, theory, and work, however, Gaskell's narrator remains as aloof from its contaminating secrets as she clearly wishes her female characters could be. The narrator prefaces her summary presentation of the economic details her narrative requires with a distancing disclaimer ('I am not sure if I can explain myself in the technical terms of either masters or workmen'), and one of the two times she takes us into the world of work, she casts a Gothic mantle over the minutia of labor. In the foundry where Jem is employed, 'a deep and lurid red glared over all… The men, like demons, in their fire-andsoot colouring, stood swart around… The heat was intense, and the red glare grew every instant more fierce.' That the narrator's alienation from the masculine world of work is not simply a function of the infernal nature of smelting becomes clear from her casual denigration of less physical forms of employment. Thus the narrator dismisses medical men as compliant fools; lawyers as impatient, incompetent puppets; clerks as insensitive gossips; and policemen as 'vulgar and uneducated' adventurers, who are little better than the criminals they stalk. -529
— If Gaskell's narrative priorities suggest that the masculine world of politics and work must be cordoned off from the home, then does the overidentification that disrupts chapters 24 and 25 suggest that an equivalent darkness colors the domestic sphere? To what extent does the mental breakdown with which Gaskell afflicts Mary Barton implicate the imaginative identification that she explicitly recommends? If men could identify with each other as the narrator identifies with the women, what would happen to the psychological disengagement that political economists said was necessary for production, commerce, lawmaking, and justice? Could the domestic sphere really absorb all of these functions into itself, or is it rather protected-from women's own maddening excesses as well as from the inhumanity of men-by a strategic exclusion of that upon which its very existence depends?
Elizabeth Gaskell does not answer these questions in Mary Barton, and, although they return in many of her subsequent novels (particularly Ruth and North andSouth), she never so explicitly poses them as I have done here. For the most part, Gaskell treats class prejudice as the problem to be overcome and the «natural» attraction of one sex to the other as part of the solution to social strife. Presumably, the disorders that fester in separate spheres-the plots and politics and infernal sweat that men work up among themselves, the hysterical emotionalism that women together breed-remain unproblematic as long as marriage functions as the paradigm for proper social relations. The priority marriage must have-and the fragility of this solution-help explain why Esther plays such a crucial role in Mary Barton. The woman who lives out of wedlock must become a prostitute-the most contaminated and contaminating of all workers-because only her «fall» distinguishes moral domesticity from immoral domesticity. Moralizing domesticity, of course, goes hand in hand with defining the nondomestic world as immoral. Thus, the masculine realm that Disraeli elevated into a type of human intercourse becomes corrosive effluvia in Mary Barton. Source of so much distress but of domestic security as well, the manly world always threatens to seep into the home; every day, the woman pushes it back, just as she stanches the unspeakable current that flows beneath her cellar floor.
Given the assumptions that prevailed in England in the 1840s, it is not surprising that political philosophers and statesmen generally addressed -530- the condition-of- England question in terms of human liberty and government oversight. For the vast majority of people who wrote about these problems-even for a woman like Harriet Martineau-the representative individual was a man and the self-evident priority was to set him free. Indeed, an individual man could be considered representative and capable of freedom because he stood for and supported others; according to the theory of virtual representation, the male 'head of the household' represented the interests of his wife and children, just as he theoretically supported them by freely exchanging his labor for money. For the most part, social theorists simply set gender issues aside when they debated the Condition of England. Or, when they did discuss gender, it was to lament the chaos that industrialization had brought to the natural order: thus parliamentarians decried women working in factories; the Chartists railed against efforts to extend the franchise to women; and evangelicals and medical men lamented the number of women who walked the streets.
While novelists of the 1840s also addressed the condition-of-England question in terms of individual freedom and national prosperity, the conventions of their genre returned the issue of gender to the fore. This was true partly because only a feminized discourse such as the novel was assumed to be necessarily interested in sex. Just as men were considered representative humans and women were called 'the sex,' so the abstractions of masculinized political economy were considered «disinterested» knowledge while the imaginative forays of the feminized novel were assumed to reflect as well as dwell on the divisive «interests» of sex. Partly, the novel brings gender forward because plotting individual adventures in a direct commentary on a society where political, legal, and economic asymmetries were mapped onto sex was necessarily to imagine a gendered individual. Imagining «man» in the abstract or aggregate, political philosophers did not always think about gender-despite the fact that, as Coningsby illustrates so clearly, in a sexed society, even men together are gendered. What the novels of the 1840s tell us, then, is not how to rectify the Condition of England but how gender pervaded the social constitution of knowledge- and how, in so doing, gender was always part of the «truths» middle-class commentators discovered about the impoverished and themselves.
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Shaping Hardy's Art: Vision, Class, and Sex
