Content area
Full text
For all its evangelical Christian tenets, Mary Barton underscores the errone- ousness and fatality of scapegoating the feminine, the erotic, and the romantic for social, political, and economic problems, whether a fallen woman for a working-class death, a flirtatious woman for a middle-class death, or the novel's romantic hero for a murder committed by its political hero. While factory worker John Barton blames his son's death on class-based economic inequities, he blames his wife's death on her fallen sister, Esther: 'It was she who had brought on all this sorrow. Her giddiness, her lightness of conduct, had wrought this woe'.1 In a similar rhetoric, characters blame John's daughter, flirtatious, socially ambitious Mary, for the murder of mill heir Harry Carson more than the man they believe committed the murder. Of the accused, Mary's working-class suitor, Jem Wilson, they opine: 'he's been ill-used, and - jilted ... and his blood has been up ... I don't over-blame him for this'; it was 'her light conduct which had led to such fatal consequences'. (MB, ch. 22, p. 248) Jem has not, it turns out, murdered Harry out of erotic rivalry and rash rage, but has been scapegoated for a crime plotted by trade unionists out of class rivalry and calculated revenge.
Yet in spite of the novel's clear critique of such scapegoating, many twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics have manifested the same tenden- cies to scapegoat the feminine, the erotic, and the romantic aspects of the novel for its social, aesthetic, and political failures. The criticism runs along two main lines. First, it castigates the romance of politics - that is, the melodramatic, sentimental, and romantic aspects of the political plot - for detracting from social realism and political commentary. Second, it critiques the politics of romance, Mary's courtship plot, for digressing from, diluting, or directly counterpointing John's political plot with a conservative politics.
In 1958, Raymond Williams influentially criticised the novel's romance of politics, its abandonment of its 'sympathetic' and 'imaginative' 'documen- tary record' of 'everyday life in working-class homes' for 'the familiar and orthodox plot of the Victorian novel of sentiment', which he dismissed as 'o little lasting interest'.2 In 1970, Stephen Gill maintained similarly that 'Mrs Gaskell progressively leads her reader out of the real...