An alliance with Fergus Derrick is precisely the circumstance that might enable Joan to find such a space personally through marriage and socially in supporting his efforts to renovate the working environment for all the workers in the mines. Here, for instance, are the plans he presents to the owners of the Riggan collieries: “They were plans for the abolition of old and dangerous arrangements, for the amelioration of the condition of the men who labored at the hourly risk of their lives, and for rendering this labor easier. Especially, there were plans for a newer system of ventilation—proposing the substitution of fans for the long-used furnace” (219). Clearly were those plans put into effect, they would have changed the daily lives of the mining community as a whole, softening the edges of the workers’ existence, removing a cause of daily anxiety and even improving worker health, but the owners reject the plans, and Derrick resigns. Before completing his employment, however, there is an explosion in the mine, trapping Derrick and many of the miners deep underground. In a reversal of the gender roles that structured the opening and closing chapters of Mary Barton—with Jem Wilson first taking the lead in saving his father and a colleague from a mill fire and then in the end after the trial taking on the care of the delirious Mary—Joan takes on the male role. She leads the rescue team and, followed by Paul Grace, whose hands are described as “feminine” (229) and who “found himself obeying her slightest word or gesture” (231), she finds Derrick, applies first aid in the form of a “brandy flask” (233) and cradles his head in her lap as they are raised to the surface. The frontispiece of the 1877 Scribner first edition pictures Joan holding her “Davy,” a miner’s lantern, during the rescue in an image that Mark J. Noonan calls “a modern-day Joan of Arc”8 (see Frontispiece). Derrick is seriously injured, his life in question over many weeks of recovery through which Joan nurses him daily and nightly. Once he recovers, Joan leaves Riggan, feeling herself unfit to be the wife of “a gentlemon” (243). Derrick follows her, confesses his love, to which Joan responds: “I conna turn yo’ fro’ me,” but when he reaches to embrace her in the closing gesture most readers would expect, she stops him, saying, “Not yet […] not yet.” “Give me th’ time,” she pleads, “to make myself worthy” (269).
That plea would seem to negate the finely wrought destabilizing features of a novel that has so powerfully demonstrated the arbitrary and distorting qualities of conventional gender constructions. What happens to that critique when the novel ends in such a conventional way (even if that convention is disrupted by Joan’s hesitation)? Jeanette Shumaker argues that the possibility of Joan’s union with Derrick is the culmination of her “growth” into a middle-class woman: “Joan’s growth,” she writes, “despite her background of poverty and abuse, comfortingly suggests that anyone who is motivated to improve can do so—that bourgeois values, behaviors, and consequent economic ease are available to the best members of the lower class.”9 The physically extraordinary Joan, in that formulation, becomes ordinary, a model of middle-class rectitude and decorum. That view of Joan disappears later on in Shumaker’s article when she observes that “Joan presents an androgynous contrast to the feminine ideal of the era” (371). Joan is both emblem of and radical contrast to the middle-class model of womanhood. That tension in Shumaker’s argument reflects a broad tension in the novel between the evocation of a middle-class feminine ideal that values literacy, sympathy, integrity and community through images of conventional gender stereotypes, as in the figure of Anice, and the extraordinary gender-defiant strength, integrity and beauty of Joan. Perhaps, then, if we read the declaration of love and Joan’s plea to work to be worthy of her beloved in the context of what we know about Joan individually, the details of her experiences and the scope of her desires, we can see another dimension to the conventional ending.
What would, we might ask, make Joan unworthy? One answer is her limited acculturation to the social class into which her marriage to Derrick would bring her. Without that acculturation, which need not carry with it a rejection of her social origins, the possibilities for Joan to realize her capacities for personal fulfillment in her marriage relation and for her to finds ways of her own to extend the work of social amelioration for her mining community would be highly constrained. Her hesitation is an argument for education and openness to a broader social experience for her. It also suggests a shift from mere endurance to possibility for her. Were she to refuse that possibility, she would be closing off analogous possibilities for her mining community. Such possibilities would not mean that she simply becomes an example for other working-class women with the implicit judgment that community structures of working-class life need to be corrected. Whatever the particular shape her life may take as she continues the project of her own development, which she insists on doing on her own, a part from Derrick, her life would grow in relation to her working-class community. In that sense, the conventionality of the narrative closure of That Lass O’Lowries feels irrelevant, beside the point, as the convention is woven into the larger tapestry of Joan’s life. Joan’s individuality carries its own authority.
In Mark J. Noonan’s fine study of the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, he offers this assessment of That Lass O’Lowries as a novel of “working-class life”:
Especially when compared to other so-called “realistic” texts depicting working-class life during this period […], Burnett’s work offers a powerful alternative to the competitive worldview seemingly sanctioned by Victorian society. Though Burnett fails to question the socioeconomic system that produces class divisions in the first place, she does eloquently stress the human sensitivity needed to alleviate capitalism’s harsh effects. Though perhaps not a fully satisfying solution to a complex situation, her well-wrought vision was deeply humanist and subtly challenged the views of her magazine’s exclusively male editorship. (49)
Compare that assessment with Raymond Williams on Mary Barton in his Culture and Society 1780—1950: “John Barton dies penitent, and the elder Carson repents of his vengeance and turns, as the sympathetic observer wanted the employers to turn, to efforts of improvement and mutual understanding. This was the characteristic humanitarian conclusion, and it must certainly be respected. But it was not enough” (cited in Mary Barton).10 Taken together those comments suggest that Burnett went a long way to replicate Gaskell’s social problem novel of 1848 with her own social problem novel of 1877, and that both novels failed to a degree in similar ways. The difference in dates, however, and the difference in place of publication—Mary Barton in London and That Lass O’Lowries in New York—complicate the parallel. It is well documented that Gaskell’s readers were both workers and factory owners in Manchester, and that the labor conditions (wages, strikes, unemployment) were a part of the texture of their everyday lives at the time of publication. There was no parallel situation in the moment of publication for Burnett’s novel. The readers of Scribner’s Monthly, where the novel was originally published serially, were not involved in the mining industry nor were they intimate associates of Burnett at the same time, although some mine owners and mine workers may by chance have read the novel. The relation then between the novels is not between novel and social problem addressed; it is between the earlier and the later novel. Burnett’s enterprise was literary practice, not social reform. She did not merely replicate the narrative elements of Mary Barton to pursue a similar reformist goal. She seized on those elements, broke them apart, reassembled them and patched in new elements in a way that extended the imaginative possibilities of the form. In Joan Lowrie she fashioned the first in a line of novelistic heroines to come, heroines who challenge gender stereotypes in different ways, from different angles, within different social classes and to different effects. Burnett’s next novel, Haworth’s, which is another industrial novel and like Gaskell’s North and South focalizes the narrative mainly from the point of view of ownership and management, both redeploys narrative elements from Gaskell’s novel and extends her exploration of women who refuse to be fully constrained by the social roles they are asked to play, but Haworth’s adds a transatlantic element to the narrative and the romance