There were, of course, other industrial novels set in Lancashire before Mary Barton, notably Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s didactic Helen Fleetwood (1840) and Elizabeth Stone’s William Langshawe, the Cotton Lord (1842), but those novels degenerate into anti-industrial polemic in their exposure of the evils of industrial labor and their defense of middle-class values.3 Both focalize their explorations of working-class life from the outside in order to document the necessity of social reform. While Gaskell’s novel too shows similar documentary and reformist impulses, much of the narrative is focalized from within the working class; readers see through the eyes of working-class characters as they register the physical details of their domestic experience during a time of labor unrest.4 Characters also speak in Lancashire dialect rather than in the polite tones of the middle class or in ungrammatical syntax meant to suggest working-class speech. Written from the inside as it were, in Gaskell’s novel the narrative elements, which are associated with working-class fiction written by mostly middle-class women, are embedded in a texture of language that communicates lived experience. That observation is reflected in the contemporary reviews of Mary Barton and in the reviews of That Lass O’Lowries.5
Within the rich verbal texture of dialect speech that characterizes both novels, there are narrative elements common to both: contrasts between working-class and middle-class life; distinctive personalities among the working class rather than representative types; cross-class romance; ill-fit between a working-class woman and her class position; fallen woman and death of her child and herself; sensational scenes of fire and accidents; the indifference of the industrialist class to worker suffering that changes due to trauma; marriage or its possibility as an amelioration of previous suffering; brutality of working-class men toward working-class women; mixture of sage and comic wisdom among working-class characters; cross-class murder or attempted murder; and the achievement of some degree of cross-class understanding. Many of those elements are shared by industrial novels generally, but all overlap between Gaskell’s and Burnett’s first novels. But that overlap is of limited importance and even more limited interest for such narrative elements are part of a common mid-nineteenth century narrative stock (what we might think of as a narrative vocabulary) that both Gaskell and Burnett draw on, Gaskell’s sources being her predecessors and Burnett’s source being Gaskell. What is important concerns what Burnett does differently with those elements, a difference that is a function of context—Gaskell writing in the place she set her novel toward the end of the time in which it is set and Burnett writing in America some 30 years after the time in which the novel is set—and of personal vision and imaginative ambition. Those different places, times and motives constrain and make possible different narrative possibilities. While I will address a number of those possibilities, my focus will be on what Gerzina calls a “new kind of heroine in the industrial novel” (66). That new heroine, Joan Lowrie, is located in the same narrative space as Gaskell’s Mary Barton—both for instance are the focal point of a potential cross-class romance and both have close connections to their respective novel’s fallen woman—but Joan occupies that space differently. To get at that difference, we must begin with Mary.
The domestic and social space that Mary occupies can be mapped out as follows: domestically she is the only surviving child of John and Mary Barton, who lost a son, Tom, through illness and physical deprivation; the elder Mary dies early in the novel in childbirth; the baby does not survive. As a result, Mary takes a woman’s responsibility for her home with her father, becoming the beautiful though young angel in the house and remaining loyal to her father even as he grows bitter through political disappointment, drink and opium. Her father degenerates to the point where he beats Mary, but he quickly repents. Subsequently, having drawn the lot in his trade union’s plot for revenge against the factory owners, he murders the mill owner’s son, Harry Carson, who had been harassing Mary in his efforts to seduce her while she simply dreams of a better life for her and her father. Mary’s social space is limited since John will not allow her to work in a factory, which would, he thinks, make her more independent, so she finds unpaid work as a seamstress. She befriends a neighbor girl and walks the streets between her home and place of employment. Her only exposure to a larger world is when she goes to Liverpool in search of her cousin, who can save her neighbor (and beloved) from a false charge of murder, which her father had committed. Until that point, she leads a passive life, and as can be inferred when we learn that she knows of her father’s guilt, her main survival mechanism is silence, a silence reinforced by the injunction of her friend Margaret Jennings who advices Mary that she “must just wait and be patient” because “being patient is the hardest work we, any of us [women], have to do through life, I take it. Waiting is far more difficult than doing.”6 In her passivity she is quietly protected by her beloved Jem and her fallen Aunt Esther. After Carson’s murder, when Mary acts by tracking down her cousin before the trial at which she testifies, she finally collapses, paying for her activity with a serious illness and long-term weakness. The other social space that she could potentially occupy is delineated by her Aunt Esther; beautiful like Mary and beloved by one above her in class, she runs off with her lover, gets pregnant and is subsequently abandoned. She is compelled by circumstances to the streets to provide for her child, who nevertheless dies. This grim litany of domestic depletion, passivity and social threat suggests that Mary’s survival is a matter of happenstance. She could have been Esther, and by fleeing to Canada at novel’s end, any hope for social change in the industrial setting is muted.
Burnett assembles a similar set of narrative elements—working-class daughter of widowed, drunken and brutal father; cross-class romance; attempted cross-class murder; the fallen woman; a flight from working-class life at novel’s end and so on—but builds a very different narrative world. The most significant difference concerns her transforming the passive Mary character into the active, strong, independent character of Joan. That change from passive angel to active woman affects other aspects of Burnett’s industrial novel, muting, for instance, the moral framing of the fallen woman narrative and opening up space for working-class and middle-class women to begin to shape their own lives. Burnett builds this changed narrative world through destabilizing the rigid binaries of gender norms for both women and men. She does so not by erasing recognizable socially performed gender roles but by blurring the boundaries between them and showing how socially gendered qualities can be independent of the sexual distinctions of biological bodies.7
The opening line of That Lass O’Lowries strikes the keynote: “They did not look like women.” The “they” are the “‘pit-girls,’ as they were called; women who wore a dress more than half-masculine […] some of whom […] [with] faces as hard and brutal as the hardest of their collier brothers and husbands and sweethearts” (1). Immediately the social construction of gender and the biological division of the sexes are put in tension, the necessities of labor in the mines obliterating “all bloom of womanly modesty and gentleness,” signs of one gender convention, and replacing those signs with another, the “unwashed faces” of a “half-savage existence,” a masculine gendered image of the male body in a state of nature. This opening move suggests that the masculinizing pressures of industrial labor go against what was understood as the gender norms for women, “modesty and gentleness,” and that, Burnett’s readers would have assumed, is bad. When Joan Lowrie is introduced in the second paragraph, however, that easy judgment is hard to sustain.
Most of them [the pit-girls] were young women, though there were a few older ones among them, and the principal figure in the group—the center figure, about whom the rest clustered—was a young woman. But she differed from the rest in two or