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Chapter 37
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
Shortly after John’s funeral, Jem finally proposes the Canada-immigration plan to Mrs. Wilson one evening, she agrees to come, saying she’s had no great affection for England ever since it arrested a good boy like Jem. Another evening, an embarrassed Mary asks how Jem learned about her flirtation with Harry. When Jem admits that Esther told him, Mary suggests they go visit her—and Jem, realizing that Mary doesn’t know about Esther, gently explains that Esther is in fact a homeless sex worker. Mary, horrified, insists they must find and help Esther. Jem searches for Esther, but the closest he gets is a landlady who tells them that Esther was dying and that she wanted to be in the open air when she did.
Esther didn’t reveal her true profession and situation to Mary because she assumed that Mary would be disgusted. Yet when Mary learns that Esther is a homeless sex worker, she immediately wants to help Esther—whereas when she thought Esther was a well-off housewife, she was repulsed by Esther’s apparent coldness. Thus, the novel suggests that knowing the facts of someone else’s situation is central to empathizing with them and wanting to help them. Given that Mary is positioned as a “good” character, the novel—despite its sexual conservatism—also suggests that helping rather than condemning sex workers is the right thing to do.
Themes
Then one night, Mary and Jem are sitting together at the Bartons’ house when Esther’s face appears in their window. They rush outside and find her collapsed. Job and Margaret come by, and the four of them get Esther into bed. Later in the night, Esther wakes and asks, “Has it been a dream, then?” Upon touching her locket, which holds a lock of her dead daughter’s hair, she realizes it hasn’t been a dream. She holds the locket, cries, and eventually dies. The mourners bury her in the same grave with John Barton, under a tombstone with a quotation from Psalm 103: “For He will not always chide, neither will he keep his anger forever.”
Esther dies without getting her life back on track, a conclusion to her storyline that emphasizes the danger of premarital sexual activity and sex work for Victorian women even as the novel presents Esther as a good-hearted and sympathetic character. That Esther and John share a grave suggests a parallel between their “sins.” Although—per Psalm 103—both characters can expect eventual forgiveness from a merciful God, Esther’s sex work and John’s violence permanently exiled them from the less forgiving Victorian society that surrounded them in this life.
Themes
Once in Canada, Mary, Jem, and Mrs. Wilson live in a wooden cottage with a garden and an orchard. Mary and Wilson have a son named Johnnie. One day, Jem comes in with letters bearing good news: Margaret’s cataracts have been removed, she can see again, and she and Will are getting married. Will is planning to bring Margaret with him on his next voyage to America, and Job will come too.
The story ends on a note of successful community- and family-oriented life, suggesting that—for those characters who did not commit “sins” like sex work or murder—honest labor, Christian faithfulness, and working-class morality are enough to ensure people a reasonably happy ending.
Themes
