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Chapter 33
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Mary Barton, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Employers vs. Workers
Sexuality and Danger
Christianity
Poverty and Morality
Empathy vs. Ignorance
Summary
Analysis
Jem returns to Liverpool and waits impatiently at Mary’s bedside for her recovery. Eventually she is no longer delirious, simply exhausted. One day she wakes up, sees Jem, beams happily—and then blushes deep red. An overjoyed Jem runs to find Mrs. Sturgis. After that, Mary recovers rapidly. Yet while Jem has many reasons to return with her to Manchester—for example, he needs to start clearing his name of lingering guilt at work—he worries about the effects of a reunion with John on Mary. One day, on a slow outdoors walk, Mary tells Jem that she must go home alone—and begs him not to explicitly discuss why. He agrees, though he vacillates over whether his agreement is right.
Mary’s deep red blush upon seeing Jem suggests her maidenly shame at having proclaimed her love for him in court. Her shame and modesty around Jem contrast with her easy flirtation with Harry Carson; given the novel’s conservative sexual politics, it seems likely that Mary’s shamefacedness, shyness, and embarrassment around Jem are supposed to testify to the goodness, truth, and social appropriateness of her love for him, in contrast to the dangerous, unashamed boldness of her flirtation with Harry.
Themes
When the day comes for Mary to travel home, she is terribly sad to leave Ben Sturgis and Mrs. Sturgis, who have been so kind to her. By the time Mary and Jem reach Manchester on the train, she is extremely pale, trying to gather her courage to see John if he’s home. She’s terrified to live with a murderer, yet her love for her father makes her long to tend to his moral and psychological “wounds.” When she and Jem reach their neighborhood, she asks him to go and wait for her at Job’s place; if she doesn’t come find him in half an hour, he should go to Mrs. Wilson. When Jem protests her coldness, she tells him she loves him as much now as when she proclaimed her love, but she must do what’s right or regret it her whole life.
Mary’s attachment to Ben Sturgis and Mrs. Sturgis reminds readers of how much these two virtual strangers did to help Mary, another subplot that insists on the respectable working class’s pragmatic and altruistic morality. Mary’s belief that her father must be suffering moral “wounds,” meanwhile, indicates her implicitly Christian belief that committing evil acts like murder spiritually harms the person who commits the acts. Thus, precisely because he is a murderer, John is in need of help.
Themes
Mary hurries into her house, where she finds John sitting frozen by the cold fire grate, his face skull-like and miserable. Mary immediately sees John, though a murderer, as her “dear father” and tries to tend to him. She goes out to buy food for him with money she received for serving as a witness. On her way home, she stops in to Margaret and Job’s, where Margaret greets her happily. When Job mentions that Mary is regaining some of her color after her illness but looks more like her father now, Mary blanches. She tells them that her father is home but seems unwell.
John’s skeletal appearance hints that the violent revenge he took on Harry has damaged his spirit so badly that it has made him physically sick. John’s sickness accords with the novel’s implicitly Christian idea that sinful acts like murder corrode the spirit of the sinner, harming them and causing them to suffer.
Themes
Job wants to visit John right away, but Mary tells him that John is too unwell and that he and Margaret should wait to visit until Mary gives the go-ahead. She kisses them goodbye and flees home. For the next three days, Mary tends to a weak, nearly silent John. After three days, Mary goes to Margaret and Job’s again. There she runs into Jem, who lovingly asks her to come visit Mrs. Wilson. She says must return to her father.
Job’s desire to visit the sick John shows his practical, altruistic morality: his first reaction to an ailing friend is to try to see and cheer up said friend. Yet when Mary deflects Job’s offer, it suggests that she thinks John’s crime has to some degree exiled him from the moral community to which he once belonged.
Themes
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On the fourth day, Mary spies through the window Sally coming to visit. Rather than let her in, Mary meets her at the door. Sally, seeing John over Mary’s shoulder, is happy enough not to enter, but she wants to question Mary, a “heroine” in the papers, about the trial. When she asks whether Mary regrets not borrowing her black scarf, Mary snaps that she wasn’t thinking about it at the time. Sally replies that she’d forgotten Mary was “all for” Jem and says that if she testified at a trial, she’d “pick up a better beau than the prisoner.”
Sally, in her superficiality, serves as a foil for Mary in a way that makes Mary look better to readers. Though Mary flirted with Harry, she is not obsessed with public opinion, clothes, and finding “a better beau” the way that Sally is. Thus, the novel positions Mary as a good girl who made a mistake with Harry, in contrast with the dangerously shallow Sally.
Themes
Sally tells Mary to come back to Miss Simmonds’s to work. When Mary indirectly alludes to the possibility that she’ll marry Jem, Sally informs her that Jem has been fired: his coworkers didn’t want him there even if he had an alibi. Sally leaves, and Mary is rushing to go see Jem when John abruptly speaks, asking Mary to tell Jem to come at eight that night.
Here, the novel teases out the ongoing dangers of romantic intrigue not only to girls and women but also to working-class men like Jem: though Jem was acquitted of Harry’s murder, his association with the murder through the Harry-Mary-Jem love triangle has lost him the job with which he was supporting not only himself but also his aging mother.
Themes
