Mary Barton

by

Elizabeth Gaskell

Mary Barton: Chapter 14 Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
A month has passed since Esther’s arrest, and she is released from prison. She is still obsessed with the idea of saving Mary, but she doesn’t know whom to petition to help Mary. Then she decides that Jem, Mary’s childhood friend, could help. She lurks outside his job; when he exits, she grabs his arm. Though at first he tries to shake her off, she tells him it’s about Mary Barton—and he stops, shocked, to ask how she knows Mary. When she explains that she’s Mary’s aunt Esther, Jem asks where Esther has been all these years. Esther tells him sharply that he should be able to guess—and that she wants him to save Mary from her own fate, as Mary now loves someone above her station just like Esther did. Jem becomes raptly interested.
Esther approaches first John and then Jem to help Mary rather than approaching Mary herself—a strategy that reveals she sees Mary as essentially unreasonable and in need of male guardianship. Esther’s claim that she wants to save Mary from her own fate—sex work—indicates that she sees selling sex as the inevitable outcome of any premarital sexual activity for women, an assumption consonant with the novel’s fearful attitude toward female sexuality outside the confines of marriage.
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Quotes
Esther explains that she fell in love with an army officer. When his regiment decamped to Chester, she didn’t want to lose their relationship—so she came with him. Though he had promised to marry her, he didn’t. They cohabited for three years, during which Esther had a baby daughter. Then, one day, the officer was sent to Ireland—and he wouldn’t take Esther and their daughter with him, though he left some money.
The army officer’s abandonment of Esther implies that men will ultimately desert any woman who is willing to have sex before marriage—another way that the novel casts premarital sexuality as socially and economically dangerous to women.
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Esther used the money to set up a little shop, but when her daughter got sick, she couldn’t work and tend her child: she sold everything for medicine and wrote to the officer begging for aid, but he never replied—she thinks he must have changed addresses. Eventually, she was so behind on rent that her landlord was going to evict her in the middle of winter—so she “went out into the street.” Wildly, Esther says that she’ll never see her child again, even in death.
Here, “went out into the street” is another euphemism for “streetwalking,” i.e. sex work. Having engaged in premarital sex and cohabitation, Esther believed herself ostracized from the mutual aid of the working-class community—and so, rather than asking her family for help, she had to support her daughter entirely alone, a situation that pressured her into sex work.
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After collecting herself, Esther tells Jem that after her child died, she traveled back to Manchester and, though she never contacted the Bartons’ directly, learned from spying and gossip that Mary was apprenticed as a dressmaker. This apprenticeship seemed like a bad idea to Esther—it required Mary to be out late and so might lead her astray—and Esther decided to look out for Mary from afar. She saw a young man, Harry Carson, accompanying Mary on her walks home, is afraid for Mary, and wants Jem to protect her—Mary’s better off dead than ruined. Jem morbidly replies, “Better we were all dead.”
Esther’s decision not to contact her family, despite her desperate straits, reveals that she sees herself as rightfully ostracized for her premarital sexual activity and for her sex work. Nevertheless, she still wants to help her remaining family, showing her community-oriented moral sense. Jem’s alarming claim that they’re “all” better off dead if Mary is ruined, meanwhile, shows the vehemence of romantic and sexual feelings in the novel—and thus of their potential dangerousness.
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Jem promises to help Mary and asks Esther to come home with him, so that he can help her find an “honest” job. Esther blesses him for his generosity but tells him that redeeming her is impossible: her life has driven her to drink, and now she is an alcoholic. Yet she insists that he promise to save Mary from such a fate. Jem promises. Afterward, Esther begins to leave when Jem asks how he can contact her again. Esther tells him she has no fixed address—he’ll have to find her in the street—and hurries away. As soon as she’s gone, Jem bitterly reproaches himself for not having urged her to come with him for as long as it took to convince her.
Despite Esther’s belief that she is irredeemable due to her sex work and alcoholism, Jem tries to help her and curses himself for not persuading her to come home. His reactions implicitly model both working-class, pragmatic, community-oriented morality and the Christian virtues of forgiveness, mercy, and generosity.
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That night in his bedroom, Jem fantasizes about killing Mary rather than letting her marry another. Yet he recognizes that killing her—who simply loved someone else—would be terribly unjust. Then he fantasizes about killing Harry, but a “still small voice” tells him that that would break Mary’s heart. Then he contemplates suicide—but he reminds himself that he promised Esther to protect Mary. He decides that he must live and keep his promise. Esther might have jumped to conclusions about Harry’s malign purposes—Harry might want to marry Mary. After all, his own mother (Mrs. Carson) was a factory girl. With this in mind, Jem plans to ask Harry outright what he means to do.
Jem’s violent and disturbing jealous fantasies hammer home the novel’s contention that sexual and romantic feelings are volatile and potentially dangerous. The phrase a “still small voice” is a biblical reference to God’s voice (1 Kings 19:12); through this allusion, the novel implies that Christian virtue prevents Jem from carrying out any acts of jealous violence against Harry. His decision to ask Harry about Harry’s intentions rather than assuming the worst shows his fair-minded generosity.
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