Melodrama and the Production of Affective Knowledge in Mary Barton

Abstract

In The Condition of Working Class in England (published in German in 1845 and in English in 1887), Friedrich Engels offers following argument about English workers' press rightly denounces as murder: If one individual inflicts a bodily injury upon another which leads to death of person attacked, we call it manslaughter; on other hand, if attacker knows beforehand that blow will be fatal we call it murder. Murder has also been committed if society places hundreds of workers in such a position that they inevitably come to premature and unnatural ends. Their death is as violent as if they had been stabbed or shot. Murder has been committed if thousands of workers have been of necessities of or if they have been forced into a situation in which it is impossible for them to survive. Murder has been committed if workers have been forced by strong arm of law to go on living under such conditions until death inevitably releases them. Murder has been committed if society knows perfectly well that thousands of workers cannot avoid being sacrificed so long as these conditions are allowed to continue. Murder of this sort is just as culpable as committed by an individual. (108-09) That quotation provides an apt description of two of primary points of emphasis in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton: a sensitive, nearly documentary presentation of impact on working-class families of being deprived of necessities of life and chain of personal causality through to its consequences in an act of individual murder. Gaskell brings those points of emphasis together at end of novel in often criticized deathbed scene between John Barton, murderer of Harry Carson, and Mr. Carson, victim's father. She does so through a melodramatic, ethical tableau that figures two men as morally equal; role Carson played in social murder of Barton's young son Tom (among others) and Barton's shooting of Carson's son are implied in scene as morally equivalent. Gaskell's narrative, in this reading, fills empty space between abstraction of (a form of without a particular perpetrator to blame and thus a crime that is not actionable) and physical realities of an individual through a chain of causality set in motion by conditions and fulfilled through a series of chosen actions. Engels tried to fill that same space in his text through accumulation of detail after detail of inhumane living conditions among working classes, which culminates in his claim that There can be no doubt that in England war is already being waged (149). Despite that, for Engels, obvious fact, It is ... somewhat surprising that bourgeoisie should remain so complacent and placid in face of thunderclouds which are gathering overhead and grow daily more threatening (149). How could middle classes not see what should be so visible a threat to their own well-being, a threat they themselves are responsible for creating? In addition to well documented literal invisibility of working classes because of urban architectural design as one possibility, another is that by 1840s (after passage of New Poor Law in 1834), for middle classes working class had become little more than an abstract, economic, rather than category. Gaskell's novel challenges such perceptions with insight that affective, sympathetic experience through narrative reading can stimulate a cognitive response in thought and reflection, figurations of narrative enabling a depth of knowledge otherwise inaccessible to consciousness. For her middle-class readers, working class can become visible, embodied individuals. Deploying scenic figurations from melodrama, Mary Barton communicates through what Elaine Hadley calls the melodramatic mode, a mode that seems to have served as a behavioral and expressive model for several generations of English people (3). …