Social Class and Hierarchy Theme Analysis

The Go-Between is fundamentally a drama of social hierarchy. The story is set in late-Victorian/Edwardian Britain around the turn of the 20th century, a time when class dominated society, and primarily explores these ideas in two related story lines: through its primary character, Leo, who narrates the book retrospectively about his experiences when he, a middle class boy, was invited to spend the summer at the high class estate of has schoolmate Marcus’s family; and through the love affair between the upper class Marian (Marcus’s sister) and the local farmer Ted, in which Leo gets caught up as a go-between. Through these intertwined stories, the novel shows how social class functions as a system of power that both makes people (such as Leo) accept it as natural and right, as well as how—in the disastrous consequences of Marian and Ted’s affair—these same social conventions, however refined, will brutally destroy those who go against its codes of acceptable behavior.

The overwhelming and rigid power of the social hierarchy impacts all aspects of Brandham Hall life, from meal times—breakfast is announced by a gong—to clothes. Before his visit, Leo hadn’t paid much attention to how he dressed: “Hitherto I had always taken my appearance for granted; now I saw how inelegant it was compared with theirs; and at the same time, and for the first time, I was acutely aware of social inferiority.” Though it’s not spoken about in the open, all the characters (except, to a degree, Leo) are fully aware of and affected by social hierarchy. That’s why, when Lord Trimingham arrives to Brandham Hall, the Maudsleys are all on edge—as a Lord and the hereditary owner of the estate, he outranks them.

While it is true that sometimes the upper class and the servant/working class might appear to mix, as when the two come together at the cricket match and following meal, these occasions always occur on the terms of the upper class, as if it is doing the lower class an honor by attending. After the cricket match and meal, for instance, Marcus comments: “Anyhow, we’ve said goodbye to the village for a year. Did you notice the stink … Three times I nearly had to cat [throw up].” All of this is why Marian and Ted enlist the class-ignorant Leo as their go-between—their love affair is the most intimate form of mixing, and they know that they have to keep it secret. Eventually, though, the affair is discovered by Marian’s mother Mrs. Maudlsey, who had architected Marian’s engagement to Lord Trimingham in order to secure her own family’s ascent into an even higher class. Mrs. Maudsley’s subsequent nervous breakdown along with Ted’s suicide—which can be read as his passionate acknowledgement that society will never allow him to be with Marian—make clear just how profoundly society will punish this transgression against class.

There is a direct relationship, Hartley suggests, between the strictness of social codes and the extremity of the consequences when these codes are disobeyed. Love is only permitted to exist between those people whose social standings are in proportion. The fact, as explained in the novel’s epilogue, that Marian and Ted’s love child is falsely presented as the product of her marriage to Lord Trimingham is final proof that Marian and Ted’s love was forbidden and remains so. The social order must be maintained: even when Marian was caught, the need for the Maudsleys and Trimingham to avoid embarrassment was more important than being honest about the father of the child. When, at the end of the book, the elderly Marian asks Leo to carry one last message, this time to her grandson (the eleventh Lord Trimingham), this is the forbidden knowledge that she hopes to communicate: that her and Ted’s love was real and nothing to be ashamed of. That she needs Leo to take the message to her estranged grandson implies that society still refuses to allow such thinking.