Haworth’s closes by highlighting two images: a grave and a face. The grave is Murdoch’s father’s, behind which Murdoch had hidden from the rioters the unfinished invention and upon which he had purged the pain of his thwarted passion by rededicating himself to his father’s vision. That vision, once a burden and a specter, becomes his liberation and hope for the future when he makes it his own by completing the invention. The grave whose “silence was like a Presence” (374) links father and son in a story of transatlantic enterprise. But enterprise in and of itself is insufficient. It must be subordinated to a larger vision of social amelioration. And that vision is figured in the image of “a girl in a long cloak of gray almost the color of the mist in which she stood—a slender motionless figure—the dark young face turned seaward” (374). The girl in the cloak is Christian, Murdoch’s illegitimate cousin. The chapter wholly devoted to her (Chapter XXXII, “Christian Murdoch”) delineates the damaging effects of that illegitimacy to her developing sense of self. She fears the emergence of her own peculiar dark beauty, which she associates with her mother and the unwanted public attentions of men, and when she ventures into the chapel, the “objectionable female figure” of “the ‘scarlet woman’ […] figured largely and in most unpleasant guise in the discourses of Brother Hixon” (217). She had also crossed paths three or four times as a child with Rachel Ffrench on the continent, encounters both remember well. So while the romance plot of Murdoch and Rachel comes to a “fitting end,” it is replaced by the suggestion of another sort of romance. This one involves an Anglo-American man, who is “a gentleman without knowing it” (88) and a young, illegitimate girl, who takes the place of the blonde gentlewoman. The final words of that Anglo-American man in the novel, who imagines the fullness of his personal life to be centered in England as he watches the “dark young” “figure on the shore,” are, “‘when I return—it will be for you’” (374). In Murdoch’s story and his hope for its continuation there are the germs of a broader transatlantic community that Burnett extends in the third of her Gaskell-inspired fictions.
III
If America was in a sense smuggled into the Lancashire industrial environment in Haworth’s, its symbolic meanings momentary and muted, its broader material connections are implied by the invention the Anglo-American, Murdoch, brought to fruition, which serves as a metaphor for the potential effects of American technological innovation on the English economy. The stakes are public, related to changing conditions of labor and economic interests. In A Fair Barbarian America impinges on England in a different form and with a different focus. As Gerzina observes of that novel, it is “about an elegant American who shakes up a small and narrow-minded English village by her refusal to respect their petty and restrictive codes of dress and behavior” (93). That village is called Slowbridge, and it is in the words of a Harper’s June 1881 review “modeled apparently as much upon Cranford as upon actual places” (861). Cranford, as Borislave Knezevic has argued, is part of Gaskell’s imaginative effort to present in her novels “fictional mappings of England,”13 and Slowbridge is presented quite explicitly as “England” in this exchange between Octavia Bassett, the American visitor, and Lucia Gaston, her English counterpart: “‘Do you like England?’ she [Lucia] asked. ‘Is this England?’ inquired Octavia” (97). The implied answer to Octavia’s rhetorical response to Lucia’s simple question is, yes, Slowbridge is, if not England itself, an apt metaphor for a way of life that represents what it means to be English. By establishing Slowbridge as a metaphor for England and presenting Octavia as a representative American, Burnett offers an allegory for a singular Anglo-American character that combines the qualities of stability, decorum, dignity and community associated with the idea of England with an American ideal of energy, innovation, directness and mobility. The fact that the American, Octavia’s father, was born in Slowbridge and that her visit (with her father soon to follow) is to her aunt suggests that the allegory of mediation between England and America is a family allegory, a story about the reconstruction of a family that drifted apart. By drawing on the narrative world of Cranford in A Fair Barbarian, Burnett transforms Cranford’s response to the forces of social change embodied in such things as the railroad and the bank failure into an exploration of the forging of a transatlantic identity in response to America’s expanding economic importance and visibility in the world. Through the disruptive presence of the beautiful and expensively dressed and bejeweled Octavia, Slowbridge reluctantly but with increasing momentum embraces change in the small, intimate details of daily life, details that in the aggregate suggest a wider horizon of aspiration.
The first sentence of A Fair Barbarian reads: “Slowbridge has been shaken to its foundations” (5) by the arrival of Miss Belinda Bassett’s (the Miss Matty character) niece from Nevada in “‘Meriker’” (8), for in Slowbridge, it seems:
America was not approved of—in fact, was almost entirely ignored, as a country where, to quote Lady Theobald, “the laws were loose, and the prevailing sentiments revolutionary.” It was not considered good taste to know Americans,—which was not unfortunate, as there were none to know; and Miss Belinda Bassett had always felt a delicacy in mentioning her only brother, who had emigrated to the United States in his youth, having first disgraced himself by the utterance of the blasphemous remark that “he wanted to get to a place where a fellow could stretch himself, and not be bullied by a lot of old tabbies.” From the day of his departure, when he had left Miss Belinda bathed in tears of anguish, she had heard nothing from him; and here upon the threshold stood Mary Anne [her servant], with delighted eagerness in her countenance, repeating,—
“Your niece, mum, from ‘Meriker!’” (8–9)
Burnett’s intimate knowledge of Cranford can be felt throughout the passage: the Peter Jenkyns character becomes the brother who left for America, and the allusions to unease associated with the orient and the excesses of the French Revolution from the “panic” chapter become subsumed under America, a country associated here with the violation of all convention. Similarly, the ladies of Cranford’s obsession with dress is reflected in Slowbridge with Lady Theobald’s (the Miss Deborah character) concern about Octavia’s inappropriate dress and with her imposition of a standard of taste that all the other ladies in the town must emulate: “All the ladies of Slowbridge wore caps; and all being plagiarized from Lady Theobald, without any reference to age, size, complexion, or demeanor, the result was sometimes a little trying” (82). Such details permeate the novel; they are woven into the texture of the prose, revealing what a careful reader Burnett was of Cranford, and in particular how sensitive she was to the threat to the identity of the Cranford community by the accommodations necessitated by social change.14
In A Fair Barbarian as in Cranford the community’s identity is grounded in social custom and anchored by material objects, as evidenced by the centrality of tea parties to community life in both novels, and personal identity seems to be a function of community. Consequently, any change in the community threatens individual identity and any threat to individual identity threatens the community. In Cranford one narrative thread depicting a threat to the community is the Signor Brunoni story where the community anxieties associated with his appearance, which is connected to a series of “robberies,” dissipate when it is discovered that Brunoni is really a Mr. Brown, an Englishman after all.15 In A Fair Barbarian the threat is from the American girl, who intrudes on the community and threatens its values not only by behaving in ways