But during his lonely walks homeward on these summer nights, Derrick made a curious discovery. On one or two occasions he became conscious that he had a companion who seemed to act as his escort. It was usually upon dark or unpleasant nights that he observed this, and the first time he caught sight of the figure which always walked on the opposite side of the road, either some distance before or behind him, he put his hand to his belt, not perceiving for some moments that it was not a man but a woman. It was a woman’s figure, and the knowledge sent blood to his heart with a rush that quickened its beatings. It might have been chance, he argued, that took her home that night at this particular time; but when time after time, the same thing occurred, he saw that his argument had lost its plausibility. It was no accident, there was purpose in it; and though they never spoke to each other or in any manner acknowledged each other’s presence, and though often he fancied that she had convinced herself that he was not aware of her motive, he knew that Joan’s desire to protect him had brought her there. (93)
The knowledge of Joan placing herself between him and her father may quicken Derrick’s heartbeat, marking his hope that her action is for care of him more than a desire to prevent her father from committing a crime that would lead to his own death, but he eventually asks Joan to promise him not to put herself in danger for his sake. “It was that her womanhood,—” the narrator avers, “her hardly used womanhood, of which she herself had thought with such pathetic scorn—was always before him, and was even a stronger power with him than her marvelous beauty” (171). Still constrained by thinking in binary gender categories, projecting an idea of “womanhood” as essential to Joan’s identity, Derrick tries to refigure their relation in conventional terms; he cannot understand how it is possible for a woman to interpose her physical strength between two men. Joan rejects his plea, “fur the sake o’ [her] own peace” (172). Derrick could not reach the truth behind her refusal, “and would not have reached it if he had talked to her till doomsday.” That truth is “that she was right in saying she could not give it up” (172). Here’s why: she is unafraid of her father’s violence; she knows that there is an unbridgeable social gulf between herself and Derrick; the only thing she had to hang onto is her own endurance, which I would gloss as the strength and integrity of her own body and mental resolve. “There was a gladness” in that endurance, “which she had in nothing else” (173). That gladness, I would argue, is akin to defiance for there is no social script that Joan or Derrick can imagine that would enable them to encounter each other and love each other as equals. So Joan can step out of social scripts, “she could brave darkness and danger […] she could interpose herself between him and violence,” and do those things for the sake of her own peace. “But of all this, Fergus Derrick suspected nothing. He only knew that while she had not misinterpreted his appeal, some reason of her own held her firm” (173).
In this existential situation Joan may defy social scripts, but in others she seems to embrace them. The example that challenges my reading the most concerns her conversion from indifference to acceptance of what seems to be conventional Christianity. Unlike in Mary Barton, where the discourse of the Bible, as rendered in John Barton’s repentance for killing Harry Carson and Mr. Carson’s forgiveness of Barton, functions to impose a pattern of meaning for experience after the fact, serving as a way to explain away its pain, Joan’s encounter with Christianity begins with a picture first, under which are appended words. Her initial reading is of an image:
Against the end wall was suspended a picture of Christ in the last agony, and beneath it was written, “It is finished.” Before it, as Anice opened the door, stood Joan Lowrie, with [the fallen] Liz’s sleeping child on her bosom. She had come on the picture suddenly, and it had seized on some deep, reluctant emotion. She had heard some vague history of the Man; but it was different to find herself in the silent room, confronting the upturned face, the crown, the cross, the anguish and the mystery. She turned toward Anice, forgetting all else but emotion. (101)
In the conversation with Anice that follows, Joan accepts a Bible that Anice offers as the only thing that could provide an adequate explanation for what the words “It is finished” mean in the moment pictured. Some days later Joan returns to Anice and says: “‘I ha’ not getten the words. But I thowt as yo’d loike to know. I believe I’ th’ Book; I believe I’ th’ Cross; I believe in Him as deed on it! That’s what I coom to say’” (131). In her encounter with the picture and subsequent reflections on “th’ Book,” for which she has no words, Joan’s focus is on the image of suffering, the reality of physical death and the confirmation of the significance of both through the materiality of “th’ Book.” She is responding, then, not to discourse, not to a narrative of redemption and forgiveness, but to an image of suffering—the “upturned face,” the “crown” of thorns—a feeling of “anguish” and then the silence of “mystery.” That image seems to confirm the necessity for suffering but the impossibility of attributing any meaning to it. What the image validates is the emotion. Joan may have experienced suffering as her peculiar lot, but the image of the suffering Christ projects that suffering as universal even if its meaning remains opaque.
This nondiscursive reading of Joan’s conversion, which the narrator refers to as “Joan’s strange confession of faith” in a moment focalized through Anice, is confirmed in the novel by the Reverend Barholm’s response to the news of a change in Joan that should for him have confirmed her conversion. Accurately, I think, judging the core of Joan’s new faith “emotional,” Barholm is
disinclined to believe in Joan’s conversion because his interviews with her proved as unsatisfactory as ever. Her manner had altered; she had toned down somewhat, but she still caused him to feel ill at ease. If she did not defy him any longer or set his teachings at naught, her grave eyes, resting on him silently, had sometimes the effect of making his words fail him. (205)
Barholm’s response suggests that Joan’s newfound faith involves a rejection of the discourse of Christianity, a resistance to the way Christian discourse has served the interests of the privileged, who understand Christ’s suffering as protecting them from having to suffer themselves. Joan’s insistence on emotion, on the truth of the body’s placement in a world where suffering demands a response, disrupts the formulaic discourse of the rector, “making his words fail him.”
Joan’s “conversion” highlights one figure in a pattern of change that can be read on the surface as part of her education as a woman who learns to shape her desires in conformity with Victorian middle-class values. She says, for example, in a conversation with the working-class “sage” Sammy Craddock, who accuses her of turning Methodist, that “‘it is na Methody so much. Happen I’m turnin’ woman, fur I conna abide to see a hurt gi’en to them as has not earned it’” (211). Her definition of “turnin’ woman” could just as easily be applied to the notion of becoming a man, who “conna abide to see a hurt gi’en to them as has not earned it.” Which is to say that turning a woman in Joan’s formulation means becoming a compassionate human being. In that context, then, we can read Joan’s “appeal against her own despair” when she says, “‘Is na theer a woman’s place fur me I’ th’ world? Is it allus to be this way wi’ me? Con I niver reach no higher, strive as I will, pray as I will,—fur I have prayed? Is na theer a woman’s place fur me i’ th’ world?’” (213) as a plea for finding a social space where she