Mary Barton Essay Research Paper Elizabeth Gaskell

Mary Barton Essay, Research Paper

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Nineteenth Century novel, Mary Barton, is an example of social realism in its depiction of the inhumanities suffered by the impoverished weavers of Manchester, England.

The main story in Mary Barton is that of the honest, proud and intelligent workingman so embittered by circumstances and lack of sympathy that he finally murders a mill owner’s son as an act of representative vengeance. In growing embittered, he becomes as a natural consequence, more isolated in his community; both humanity and faith lose their power to guide him. Mary Barton, his daughter, really loves Jem Wilson, who is arrested after having threatened the murdered man for trying to seduce Mary, and it is her efforts that produce the melodramatic last minute evidence that saves him.

Against the novelistic background of this murder and the central love stories, Mrs. Gaskell outlines her main themes of life in Manchester during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution and of the conditions that initiated the Chartist Movement.

Thus, the historical background of Mary Barton is as much, if not more important than its strictly novelistic aspects. Manchester becomes a symbol of the outrageous conditions endured by the laborers, instead of a real city in itself. It is always grimy, oppressive, and ugly, just like the lives of its inhabitants.

The only detail the author gives us is with the individual homes, not with the city itself. It is almost as if she were afraid of impairing the city’s inherent symbolism by describing any actual streets or shops. Even when wealth is shown, as with the Carsons, the setting is still ugly and drab; the only difference is that the drabness has been made comfortable with money. For example, in the Carsons’ house, just before Harry’s murder is announced, Mrs. Gaskell gives us a picture of a decadent upper-class family that is so used to indolence that it does not know what to do with itself. The author tells us that Mrs. Carson’s “sick headaches” would be cured by a little bit of housework. In other words, we are never out of sight of the fact that the Carsons rose from the same class as the Bartons and the Wilsons and are now making the lower class workers pay for their leisured indolence. Yet they are not well bred enough to do anything constructive with their time; thus, they have no real right to leisure at the expense of the laborers.

Against this setting, we see individuals, families, the social group that it concerns, fighting or succumbing to the external influence according to the strength of their moral natures and the integrity of the human heart. John Barton is not so much a victim of his surroundings as he is of both his environment and his own depravity. In this sense, then, Mary Barton never loses hold of its realism, despite the social message it is trying to convey.

The social range is limited, seldom moving beyond the world of the mills and the ill workers. The mill owners appear in the plot because of the theme of reconciliation and understanding between masters and men, but they are only shown as the modern day Dives who oppresses the working Lazarus. Mrs. Gaskell, in limiting the space and the environment, succeeds in showing us the extent to which life was cramped and conditioned by the physical, social, and mental environment of the new technologies.

Within this narrow range, Mrs. Gaskell looks closely at the problem as she sees it. Her starting point is that each human being is an individual soul deserving close contact with nature as opposed to technology. Technology, such as it was in England in he early years of the Industrial Revolution, kept men free from the blessings of nature and turned men against each other.

At the end of the novel, the main characters have found happiness by moving away form Manchester into the country and back to the glories of nature, which put them back in touch with their souls. In the meantime, before the end of the novel, they must content themselves with other outlets for their souls: Job Legh has an interest in natural history, Alice is an herbalist, Job’s granddaughter loves music. Contrasted with them is the Carson family that tries unsuccessfully to while away the time until tea: one sister half-heartedly copies music, another falls asleep over Emerson, and the third takes a nap. Mrs. Gaskell seems to be saying that the closer an individual is to technology, in the sense of embracing it, the farther one gets from nature and one’s soul. The things of the imagination and the senses must fight against the negative forces of drabness and dreariness.

Yet for all the drabness and rootlessness fostered by circumstances, the author is forced to recognize strength and vigor and a sense of purpose in Manchester. She realizes that a new power is thrusting through and that the individual suffering that distresses her is in some way a part of the inevitable change. Job Legh’s final opinion expresses this:

It’s true it was a sort time for the hand-loom weavers when power-looms came in: them new-fangled things make a man’s life like a lottery; and yet I’ll never doubt that power-looms, and railways, and all such-like inventions, are the gifts of God. I have lived long enough, too, to see that it is a part of His plan to send suffering to bring out a higher good…

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