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Chapter 6
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
Mrs. Davenport moves out of the cellar with her children and begins minding others’ children and sewing to earn money. Shortly after, the Wilsons’ twins contract typhoid. When Mary hears they are gravely ill, she goes to visit the Wilsons. Upon entering their house, she sees Mrs. Wilson tending to one deathly ill child while Alice minds the other’s corpse. Alice quietly tells Mary that the child still alive will soon die—but they need to get him away from his mother, who is “wishing” him: willing hard for him to live and thus extending his painful last moments. When Alice approaches Mrs. Wilson, the latter at first refuses to let her son go—but then she surrenders him. Shortly after Alice takes him, he dies.
The novel represents Alice as a morally good, highly religious character; as such, her sad yet resigned and peaceful reaction to the twins’ deaths suggests that the appropriate reaction to grief and loss is not Mrs. Wilson’s “wishing” against probability but rather humble, religious acceptance of the mysterious will of God.
Themes
While Mr. Wilson and Mrs. Wilson lay out the bodies upstairs, Alice tells Mary that Jem will be miserable when he returns from his overtime work and that it sometimes seems God intentionally ruins human plans so that humans will rely only on his will: Alice had been intending to visit her childhood home in the north until Mr. Wilson lost his job and needed her help.
When Alice explicitly references the will of God here, it underscores what was implied in the previous passage: the novel intends Alice as a positive model of religious humility and acceptance of whatever God gives, whether it seems good or bad.
Themes
Jem comes home from work with oranges for his sickly brothers. Alice, weeping, tells him that both have died. Jem shakes with grief. Mary, moved, touches his arm and tells him not to submit to grief, as it pains her to see him like that. Overcome by love, Jem squeezes Mary’s hand and admits that he’s happy in this moment despite everything—and she knows why. Mary looks repulsed. Jem drops her hand and internally calls himself a “selfish beast” for professing his love just then. He hurries upstairs to see his brothers’ bodies.
Previously, the novel has represented sex and romance as inherently dangerous. Here, by having Jem indirectly proclaim his love for Mary right after he’s learned of his brothers’ deaths, the novel emphasizes that romantic love is powerful, unruly, and often socially inappropriate—thus implying again that romance and sex are dangerous and must be tightly controlled.
Themes
Mary helps Alice clean the Wilsons’ house. Near morning, she goes home, lies down, and wonders why Jem reacts to her kindness as if it’s flirtation. She can’t get her tone right: either she’s cruel to him or she’s too kind and it sounds “loving.” She’s nearly engaged to Harry, a handsomer man even if she “like[s] Jem’s face best for all that.” She wonders whether she can help Jem once she’s Harry’s rich bride. Mary falls asleep, dreaming of her wedding and how she’ll help her father John once she has money.
As in the previous passage, here sexuality is represented as confusing and dangerous: Mary doesn’t understand why she sounds “loving” toward Jem when she’s not actively trying to be cruel or why she “like[s] Jem’s face best” even though Harry is better-looking—though readers can guess that Mary may be repressing romantic feelings for Jem due to the economic opportunity marriage to an employer like Harry would represent.
Themes
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