The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Thomas Recchio

of Burnett approaches the relationship between Haworth’s and Gaskell’s North and South as obliquely as she had between That Lass O’Lowries and Mary Barton. As Burnett was writing Haworth’s Thwaite notes, “she was conscious of looking at the critics over her shoulder this time—just as Mrs Gaskell had been when following Mary Barton with North and South. ‘The difference between this and the Lass,’ she wrote to [Richard Watson] Gilder, ‘is that then I was simply writing a story, and now I am trying to please the critics’” (58). But more than looking over her shoulder at the critics, I would suggest, Burnett was looking pretty squarely at North and South itself, drawing on character types, plot elements, dramatic scenes, and social and verbal textures that evoke the world of Gaskell’s novel. There is the mill owner who worked himself up from poverty in the figures of Mr. Thornton in North and South and James Haworth in Haworth’s, for instance, each with a supportive and long-suffering mother (the former mother hard-edged, the latter gentle and willfully innocent); there is the beautiful upper-class woman who becomes a love interest (Margaret Hale in the former, Rachel Ffrench in the latter novel); and there is a family of working-class characters who become personal interests of the upper-class characters (the Higgins family in the former and the Briarley family in the latter). In both novels the mill owners’ businesses fail in part from the effects of a labor strike and in part from investments (in the former a refusal to make a risky investment, in the latter the failure of a series of risky investments), and in both the strike dissipates in a scene where violence is directed at the upper-class woman. And throughout both novels provide details of the texture of working-class homes and the contrasting speech of different class dialects, but both focalize those things through the eyes of the upper-class (or outsider) characters. As she had done in That Lass, Burnett deploys those elements from Gaskell’s novel, refigures them and adds others to produce a narrative that evokes the social problem novel of mid-century, but refracts the material to produce a text that feels decidedly modern. I would locate that modernity in two features of the novel: the introduction of an American character who brings disruptions to the factory system associated with his scientific/mechanical innovations and his ignorance of the rules of social decorum, and the novel’s steady delegitimizing of an assumption of class privilege, which thrives through a double standard of social behavior supported by a moralistic discourse that applies only to the less privileged.

      Gaskell’s novels, of course, are sensitive to the double standard of moral judgment imposed on the less privileged in their depiction of the fallen woman figure. In Mary Barton there is the seduced Aunt Esther, who takes to prostitution to feed her fatherless child, who in turn nonetheless dies, leaving Esther to live out her shortened remaining years judging herself in the strongest, absolute moral terms: “How could she, the abandoned and polluted outcast, ever have dared to hope for a blessing, even on her efforts to do good? The black curse of Heaven rested on all her doings, were they for good or for evil” (206–07). That passage captures the way in which the narrator’s language blends with the internal perception of the character, whose thoughts, rendered in indirect discourse (“the black curse of Heaven” is Esther’s self-judgment not the narrator’s), reveal how deeply she has internalized the moralized social judgment of her suffering. Similarly in Gaskell’s Ruth, when the fallen titular character thoroughly reforms herself, living what amounts to a saint’s life, she dies with a crushing sense of her guilt, which she accepts as her just lot. Her “sin” in being seduced at 16 and parentless must remain within the discourse of absolute judgment even as the novel shows a life that belies that judgment. The fallen Liz in That Lass seems immune to any sense of self-judgment. She “falls” twice, first to return to Riggan with her child, and a second time to die, her child having died in the interval. During the time when she and her child were living with Joan, Liz rejects the child, saying with distressing matter-of-factness, “It’s nowt but a trouble. I dunnot loike it. I canna. It would be better if it would na live” (67). She feels neither maternal love nor moral revulsion of her behavior and its results. Joan provides most of the basic care for the child, since the child, in Joan’s words “seems to worrit her [Liz] to death” (151). In the penultimate chapter when Liz returns, Mrs. Thwaite, who had seen her last, does not quite remember if she asked for her child, but Liz did ask for Joan; “[I]t did na seem to be th’ choild she cared about so much as Joan Lowrie” (265). Consequently, when the chapter ends with the image of Liz “with her face downward and with her dead hand against the closed door” of Joan’s dwelling (266), we have the iconography of the necessary death of the fallen woman, but its moral, either as a judgment on the woman herself or on the hypocrisy of those who would judge her harshly, is drained away. There is simply the fact of her death. Once the distortions of moral judgment are erased from the narrative, the series of events that lead to Liz’s end can be understood for what they are in strictly material, bodily terms.

      While there are no Esther or Liz figures in either North and South or Haworth’s, the prospect of a fallen woman hangs over the first novel and the extraordinary, ordinary presence of fallen women and their off spring is visible in the second. Gaskell evokes the shadow of the potential fallen woman in North and South through the way she depicts Margaret Hale’s hypersensitiveness to any awareness of her maturation as a sexually desirable woman. In her rendering of some events, literal meanings are charged with metaphoric meanings, with the dangers of sexual desire and its potential moral disruptions residing in the metaphors. We can perceive the potential shadow of fallenness in the quality of Margaret’s embarrassment after Henry Lennox’s surprise proposal of marriage: “Margaret felt guilty and ashamed of having grown so much into a woman as to be thought of in marriage” (27). Rather than being distressed by his presumption, Margaret seems angry at herself, at her body’s sexual attractiveness. It is as if the prospect of growing up brings with it sexual danger; to be a woman and to be desired is to be under threat. In her second surprise marriage proposal, this one from Mr. Thornton soon after the near riot during the strike (much more on the significance of that for both novels below), the excess of Margaret’s response suggests continued discomfort with her own sexuality. After Thornton declares that he loves her, “as I do not believe man ever loved woman before,” Margaret responds, “Your way of speaking shocks me. It is blasphemous” (181). While some of the energy of her response can be attributed to her anger at being misunderstood—their physical proximity during the near riot being misread as a sign of her attraction to him—the excess in its reference to blasphemy equates his desire to possess her as a violation, a desecration of the divine. That reference draws attention away from the carnality that is so central to his proposal, suggesting that the nature of the misunderstanding may be something she fears to confront directly, for were she to do so she would have to work to understand her own sexual desires.

Both proposal scenes are prefaced by moments when Margaret is on public display,¹¹ the first after modeling the Indian shawls for her Aunt Edith at Harley Street in London and the second after having confronted the strikers openly in the courtyard of Thornton’s factory. In both cases the visibility of her body seems to invite both men to try to possess her. The connection between public visibility and the perception of Margaret’s body as an object of desire is further reinforced when Thornton sees her with her brother Frederick at the station before Frederick’s return to Spain, and Margaret lies about having been there. Thinking that Margaret’s brother must be her lover because of the lie, Thornton torments himself: “How could one so pure have stooped from her decorous and noble manner of bearing? […] And then this falsehood—how terrible must be some dread of shame to be revealed […] How creeping and deadly that fear which could bow down the truthful Margaret to falsehood!” (259). Thornton’s leap from the lie to a language of sexual violation (from “one so pure” to “dread of shame to be revealed”) further solidifies the metaphorical link between a woman’s public visibility and her sexual vulnerability.

In Haworth’s Burnett registers the fact that there may be a connection between the people one encounters in the ordinary course of daily life and the roles those people might have in narratives of fallenness. But rather than approaching those connections through the smoky distortions of an increasingly discredited moral discourse around the idea of the fallen woman, Burnett simply notes them. We can see