Like the industrial workers in Mary Barton, described as “stunted” (9), the young women look the same, shrunken it seems from the harshness of the work environment; their masculine attire thus is ill-fitting. Not so with Joan. She wears her male jacket and hat as “naturally” as a man, her “sun browned” throat and “animal beauty” evoking a positive rendering of the notion of a “savage existence.” In Joan there is little tension between the sex of her body and the gender of her clothing; she seems simply a magnificent human being.
That does not mean that she has been spared the deprivation of her fellow pit-girls. As Paul Grace, the young, effeminate curate, explains to Fergus Derrick, a young engineer from London recently hired at the mine, Joan’s mother died “of hard work, privation, and ill treatment,” her father when not working in the mine spends his time “drinking, rioting, and fighting,” and Joan herself “has borne […] such treatment as would have killed most women. She has been beaten, bruised, felled to the earth by this father of hers, who is said to be a perfect fiend in his cups.” What shocks Grace more than those details of Joan’s existence is her response to them. “And yet,” he explains, “she holds to her place in their wretched hovel, and makes herself a slave to the fellow with a dogged, stubborn determination” (4). Grace’s precise choice of words, “dogged, stubborn determination” rather than “dogged, sullen obedience,” for example, suggests that Joan holds to her father through choice not necessity. The uprightness, strength, health and beauty of her form are not compromised by her ill-treatment. It is hard to tell whether she is what she is despite her circumstances or because of them. The question of how her strength and beauty could apparently flourish under such conditions seems to be at the front of Derrick’s mind as he reflects on what Grace has told him: He “was struck,” the narrator observes, “by a painful sense of incongruity” (9).
As readers reflect on that incongruity, we might notice parallel incongruities that reveal something of Joan’s metaphoric importance to the novel’s engagement with gender. Between the time Grace described Joan’s situation and Derrick reflected on it, Grace shares a note he had received from Anice Barholm, the physically delicate and petite daughter of the rector for whom Grace is curate. Grace has fallen in love with Anice, an emotion Derrick perceives when he notices Grace blush as he fetches the note to share. The narrator tells us the note “did not impress him very favorably. A girl not yet twenty years old, who could write such a note as this to a man who loved her, must be rather too self-contained and well balanced” (7). Having just registered that assessment, when Derrick thinks of the ill-fit between Joan and her circumstances, the “incongruity” of her life, he wonders aloud, “[I]f she [Joan] had been in this other girl’s niche […] if she had lived the life of this Anice—” (9). The “if” is not completed by a then, but one may usefully ask, might Joan also be “too self-contained and well balanced”? Might that be central to what perplexes him—that Joan retains her dignity and self-composure under circumstances where a “proper” woman should not, just as Anice maintains her self-confidence and composure in response to being loved when a girl who knew her place would be, at the very least, flustered? In this perceptive and skillful way, Burnett early in the novel suggests that the surface markings of gender may be irrelevant to the depth and strength of character in women; it is the distortions created by social gender distinctions that lead Derrick to the perception of a woman being “too self-contained and well balanced,” a perception that becomes impossible to maintain for Derrick and for the reader for whom the expression “self-contained and well balanced” woman cannot by the end of the novel contain the adjective too.
The tensions between the social conventions of gender and a woman’s bodily composure in the world oscillate throughout the novel, conventional notions of gender encouraging sensitive, humane behavior at times and a rejection of those conventions opening space for Joan to be more fully herself. The novel struggles to establish a productive dynamic within what we might call a unified tension between conformity and resistance, both being necessary in varying proportions depending on changing circumstances for women and men to navigate the world with dignity. Conventional gender expectations, for instance, govern Derrick’s first personal encounter with Joan. Immediately after Derrick reflected on the possibility of Joan occupying Anice’s “niche,” he sees a woman sitting at the roadside. As he approaches her, she raises her head, and he sees that “Her face was disfigured by a bruise, and on one temple was a cut from which the blood trickled down her cheek; but the moonlight showed him that it was Joan” (10). He addresses her by name and offers his help, which she resists by wiping the blood away with her own hand and saying, “[I]t’ll do well enow as it is” (10). Derrick, ignoring Joan’s gesture and words “drew his handkerchief from his pocket, and […] managed to stanch the bleeding.” The narrator describes Joan’s reactions: “Perhaps something in his sympathetic silence and the quiet consideration of his manner touched Joan. Her face, upturned almost submissively, for the moment seemed tremulous, and she set her lips together […]. ‘Thank yo’,’ she said in a suppressed voice, ‘I canna say no more’” (11). That exchange is structured by conventional gender expectations, the strong man offering sympathy to the vulnerable woman, whose response hints of submission, all as prelude to the man ultimately mastering the woman. But Joan does not quite play out the role cast for her. She does not submit at that moment, and although she accepts his referral to “Thwaite’s wife” (12) for shelter that night, she insists on equalizing the encounter by offering help to him in return: “If yo’ ivver need help at th’ pit will yo’ come to me? […] ‘I’ve seen th’ toime as I could ha’ gi’en help to th’ Mesters ef I’d had the moind. If yo’ll promise that—’” (13). He promises. That exchange confirms the narrator’s assertion of an equality of strength between Derrick and Joan: “The spirit of determination was as strong in his character as in her own” (11). But despite the symmetry in personal determination, the asymmetries of gender and class suffuse the exchange, and they are simultaneously affirmed and undercut when the narrator closes the chapter with this: “‘Good night,’ he returned, and uncovering with as grave a courtesy as he might have shown to the finest lady in the land, or to his mother or sister, he stood at the road-side and watched her until she was out of sight” (13). That last sentence registers and destabilizes a range of gender and class relations: between Derrick as upper class and Joan as working class, between upper-class man and upper-class woman, between son and mother, brother and sister. We see in Derrick’s gesture of upper-class courtesy to the working-class Joan the effacement of the borders around each set of gender and class relations, an effacement grounded firmly on the inner strength and bodily symmetry of Derrick and Joan as individuals.
In contrast to Mary Barton, where the physical affinity between Mary and her aspiring upper-class lover Harry Carson is shown to be superficial and a moral snare, the physical affinity between Joan and Derrick provides a stable motif throughout That Lass O’Lowries, which unties the Gordian knot of the moral dangers of cross-class sexual relations. When Paul Grace is introduced into the narrative, “Derrick strode by his side,” the narrator adds, “like a young son of Anak [an Old Testament progenitor of giants]—brains and muscle evenly balanced and finely developed” (4). The authority Derrick carries based on his education and class is affirmed in his physical stature and, as we learn later, his ability to hold his own in a fight. Soon after the encounter between Joan and Derrick discussed above, Derrick shares his thoughts about Joan with Grace: “‘Here,’ he said, ‘is a creature with the majesty of a Juno—though really nothing but a girl in years—who rules a set of savages by the mere power of a superior will and mind, and yet a woman who works at the mouth of a coal-pit,—who cannot write her own name, and who is beaten by her fiend of a father as if she were a dog. Good Heaven! What is she doing here? What does it all mean?’” (15). Derrick’s words serve as a corrective to Grace, who when he first commented on Joan at the opening of the novel referred to her as “‘[A] fine creature’—and nothing else” (3), all body but no intelligence or character. Derrick sees someone very different, an analog for himself, a mirror of his own physicality and intellect, but in a context that defies the limits of his logic and his imagination. He apprehends