The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Thomas Recchio
thinks have come to terrorize him. When it becomes clear that they are after Murdoch, Ffrench’s relief is transparent, but he still flinches from any confrontation. Rachel calls out his cowardice. Then she says:
“They shall see me. […] Let us see what they will have to say to me.”
He would have stopped her, but she did not pay the slightest attention to his exclamation. The window was a French one, opening upon a terrace. She flung it backward, and stepped out and stood before the rioters.
For a second there was not a sound.
They had been expecting to see a man […] and here was simply a tall young woman in a dazzling dress of some rich white stuff, and with something sparkling upon her hands and arms and in her high-dressed blonde hair.
The rapid shifts in focalization in the quoted passage capture with skill the changing visual emphases from Rachel’s self-absorption to her view from inside the French window to the rioters’ view from outside it. From there events move quickly: the rioters demand to see Murdoch and his “contrapshun”; Rachel says he has gone “far away,” telling “the lie without flinching in the least” (236); and she then offers herself as an object of their violence, saying “If you would like to vent your anger upon a woman, vent it upon me. I am not afraid of you. Look at me!” That moment reprises her slow drive through the town during the first stirrings of the strike, and the effect is the same: “The effect of her supreme beauty and the cold defiance which had in it a touch of delicate insolence, was indescribable” (237). The men freeze in their tracks. Then Murdoch arrives, and seeing Rachel’s “life […] was in danger” draws attention to himself, defying the rioters by telling them they are wrong about his invention and that he would in any case never give it up to them. That sets the crowd off. “He saw his mistake in a second. There was a shout and a surging movement of the mob toward him, and Rachel Ffrench, with an indescribable swiftness, had thrown herself before him and was struck by a stone which came whizzing through the air” (239). Murdoch’s “sight of the little stream of blood which trickled from her temple turned him sick with rage,” and as a similar trickle of blood did with the rioters in North and South, it brought them to their senses and they flee. Next, as readers of Gaskell’s novel will learn with no surprise: “When they were left alone, Murdoch came and stood near her. He was paler than she, and haggard and worn. Before she knew what he was about to do he fell upon his knees, and covered her hands with kisses,” a clear echo of Thornton’s surprisingly timed declaration of love to the still unconscious Margaret. Finally, Rachel at first responds with suppressed anger, “then quite suddenly all her resistance ceased and her eyes fixed themselves upon him as if with a kind of dread” (240). The nature of that dread remains undefined, but the threat working-class violence poses to Rachel’s social position and the repression of her sexual response to Murdoch both seem at play. As in North and South industrial labor, social conflict and sexual desire circle each other in a kind of carmagnole as a prelude to the resolution of the tensions among them through the structure of romance—that, I would argue, is what Burnett seems to be setting up, but it would be hard to sustain such a reading by the novel’s end.
In North and South the industrial and romance plots are resolved in the marriage of Thornton and Margaret, as Margaret throws both her inherited wealth and newly focused social reform activities into Thornton’s factory reforms. The competing love interests are more a misperception of Thornton’s than real, Margaret’s feelings never in doubt to readers; she has no desire for Henry Lennox and the threat of Frederick as a rival is purely a projection of Thornton’s jealousy. In Haworth’s, however, the competing love interests are real and dangerous: out of jealousy Haworth manipulates the workers to take Murdoch’s life (a plot that Haworth disrupts in the end), and Rachel toys with Murdoch’s affections until she loses interest, at which point her wealthy French lover appears on the scene, their marriage apparently imminent. However, neither that marriage nor any other marriage takes place at the end of the novel; the relationship between Rachel and each love interest is resolved in a different way. In a conversation with her father, Rachel explains why she singled Murdoch out for particular attention: “I must be amused and interested […] [and] he has managed to interest me […] [and] the time has passed more easily […]. I have gone as far as I choose to go, and it is done from to-night” (271–72). (There are countercurrents in that scene as her father seems to suggest that she cannot simply cast Murdoch off, but when Rachel confronts him with their class difference and asks what he would want her to do, he is silent.) Murdoch takes the rejection badly, and Heathcliff-like, “his face almost wolfish” (309), he haunts the grounds of the Ffrench estate until he purges the pain of his rejection by rededicating himself to the completion of his father’s invention. Thwarted love turns out to be the fuel for inventive genius.
Haworth responds to his rejection more directly. He manipulates Rachel into a private meeting where he vents his “rage.”
She saw a look in his eye which caused her to shrink back. But she was too late. He caught her by the arm and dragged her toward him. A second later when he released her, she staggered to one of the rustic seats and sank crouching into it, hiding her face in the folds of her dress. She had not cried out, however, nor uttered a sound, and he had known she would not […]. “A gentleman wouldn’t have done it,” he said hoarsely. “I’m not a gentleman.” (298)
The precise nature of his violence in the scene is unclear, but its brevity suggests an assault masked as a kiss, the kiss a kind of stone. Thus, Haworth acts out another working-class assault, and when he loses his business in bankruptcy, there is no wealthy woman to save it. Saint Meran, the French love interest, when he learns of Rachel’s father’s disgrace, goes back to France, leaving Rachel behind, and after his bankruptcy Rachel’s father flees Riggan, leaving Rachel alone. The prospect of church bells ringing for any marriage has receded far into the distance.
Among all the narrative elements that North and South and Haworth’s have in common, the resolution of social conflict through the marriage of individuals is clearly not one of them. While we might construct a checklist of cardinal narrative elements (many of which are discussed above) and more incidental narrative elements (such as the visit by the MP from Broxton to honor Haworth’s business success at a dinner hosted by Ffrench; the MP declares to Haworth, “I congratulate England upon your determination and indomitable courage, and upon your wonderful success” (340), which echoes a similar dinner marked by similar speeches in North and South), the originality of Burnett’s novel emerges most forcefully at its close. Murdoch, the American son who completed his English father’s invention and thus assured his own personal fortune, is the focus of the ending, not the title character Haworth, who, with his mother’s support, has to return to industrial labor to survive. Having emerged from his own dark passages through his efforts to purge the pain of the loss of a love that was never his in the first place—his acceptance of his individual possibilities via the rejection of romance is an apt analog for the novel’s rejection of romance—Murdoch embraces his own capacity for labor fueled by imagination, and he sets out to pursue a transatlantic vision of the productive possibilities of labor so defined: “Murdoch had made up his mind as to what his course for the next few years was to be. His future was assured and he might pursue his idlest fancy. But his fancies were not idle. They reached forward to freedom and new labors when the time came. He wanted to be in view, and to fill his life with work” (370). By returning to America, the country where his father had hoped to find the backing to complete and market his invention, Murdoch stitches another thread that links the two countries; America is the place where his fancies for productive labor can take their clearest shape, for there, he believes, his freedom to produce, in a gesture that evokes Thomas Carlyle’s gospel of work, can find its requisite scope. He plans, however, to return in a “few years,” but to what and for what reason?
Soon after the passage quoted above, and soon after he parts with his cousin Christian with the words, “[T]ry to be happy […] Rachel Ffrench stood before him” (371). The conditions seem set for a reconciliation scene. Rachel is alone, and she regrets her rejection of Murdoch. Her presence takes Murdoch by surprise, but even though Rachel appears to want one, there is no reconciliation. Instead, Rachel