Secrets of the Heart:

Emotion, Narration, and

Imaginary Minds in HARD TIMES
and MARY BARTON
Jill L. Matus

ne of the greatest pleasures of reading, Alan Palmer rightly observes in Fictional

Minds, is the untrammelled imaginative access it offers to the minds of others.1
In thinking about the means by which imaginary minds are revealed in fiction
beyond first-person narrative, theorists have, for the most part, concentrated on modes of
indirect speech. Dorrit Cohn, for example, makes the distinction between psycho-narration,
a technique in which a verb of perception introduces the characters thoughts (he thought,
he wondered, he reflected) and narrated monologue, which, by subtle contrast, dispenses
with the verb of perception and allows the author to fuse narratorial and figural presence.
This technique superimposes two voices, hovering between what Cohn describes as the
immediacy of a quotation and the mediacy of narration. She has suggested that narrated
monologue gained ground in the realist novels of the nineteenth century roughly in proportion to the ascendancy of objective over obtrusive narrators, and that its use expanded
greatly in the twentieth-century psychological novel, following the unprecedented importance given to the language of consciousness.2
Unlike Flaubert, whose name is associated with style indirect libre and the use of an impersonal or objective narrator, Victorian novelists make liberal use of narrators described
(pejoratively, one might argue) as obtrusive or intrusive. To some extent then, they have
been bypassed in the privileging of objective narration, inner speech, and a particular kind
of language of consciousness that is cerebral and self-conscious. Introspective selfcommuning has been the sine qua non in much theoretical analysis of how novels convey
interiority. But a variety of Victorian novels, Hard Times and Mary Barton among them, are
interested in inarticulate and unselfconscious forms of interiority and develop techniques
for expressing them. As I shall argue in this essay, such forms of interiority merit further
scrutiny, having been overlooked in the theoretical preference for highly self-conscious
forms of inner speech.3
What is at issue here is really the conception of mind. Should it include those kinds of
response that are not quite thoughts but belong to the realm of state-of-mind revealing
emotions, not usually included in a focus on self-conscious introspection but certainly part
of theory of mind psychology? To put the question in a different way: How might narratology broaden its understanding of what constitutes an imaginary mind and the tech-

English Language Notes 48.1 Spring / Summer 2010

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English Language Notes 48.1 Spring / summer 2010

niques by which it is narrated? I propose here to explore the idea of the embodied mind or,
to put it the other way round, the thinking body, and to suggest its significance in novels of
industrial life. I have elsewhere argued that condition-of-England novels repay study
beyond their purchase on the relations of workers and masters, labor, and capital. A broadening sense of the way social conditions shape subjectivity directs us to consider the representation of emotional and psychic states in the context of social change and the
upheavals of modernity.4 In Hard Times and Mary Barton, the novelists vision of industrial
change and its attendant problems are intimately connected to the way emotional life is
conceived and understood.
The title of this essay draws attention to secretsthat which the novelists designate as
invisible, interior, unspoken, and perhaps not known consciously or through the reasoning
process.This secret realm has pre-eminently to do with the emotions, for which the heart is
a traditional symbol. In both HardTimes and Mary Barton, narrative attention to the mysteries of interioritysignalled as secrets of the heartindicates an interest in the psyche and
especially the nature of emotional knowledge. A focus on the narration of emotion may thus
prompt us to consider the relevance of affect (beyond the work of sympathy or indeed melodrama) in the social problem novel.5 Emotions are usually designated private as opposed
to public, personal rather than collective,6 but if this secret realm is understood as constructed and contingent, shaped by and reflective of the social condition, we can immediately admit the stakes involved in the novelists mediation of opaque mental processes.
Each novel demonstrates in its own way that a failure to understand the excavated secrets
of the heart is a failure to grasp the social problems it is urging readers to confront.
Fundamental, therefore, to the aims and designs of each novel is the narrators revelation
to the reader of what is undetected and unknown. In Gaskells case that means convincing
her middle-class audience that the urban poor and the laboring classes are, if we could but
penetrate their hearts, virtuous, admirable, and deserving. Consider the following apocalyptic promise uttered when the narrator describes the descent of the laboring classes into the
poverty of the hungry decades: There was Faith such as the rich can never imagine on
Earth . . . The vices of the poor sometimes astound us here; but when the secrets of all
hearts [my italics] shall be made known, their virtues will astound us in far greater degree.
Of this I am certain.7 Dickenss critique of utilitarianism calls for the admission of a crucial
and overlooked categoryhuman emotions beyond those of self-interest. Particularly in the
case of Louisa, he uncovers the mystery of the heart, an arena not amenable to facts, calculation, and statistics. When Gradgrind delivers the Bounderby marriage proposal to
Louisa she betrays no detectable emotion but the novelist indicates its presence and its
resistance to anatomizing calculation:
From the beginning, she had sat looking at him fixedly. As he now leaned back
in his chair and bent his deep-set eyes upon her in his turn, perhaps he might
have seen one wavering moment in her, when she was impelled to throw herself upon his breast, and give him the pent-up confidences of her heart. But, to

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13

see it, he must have overleaped at a bound the artificial barriers he had for
many years been erecting, between himself and all those subtle essences of
humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck.8
The language of the Book of Revelations here suggests that the secrets of all hearts and
subtle essences of humanity are indeed difficult to know, but it is the novelists task to disclose them before (and, implicitly, in order to pre-empt) an apocalyptic catastrophe.9
Dickens wrote to Carlyle that he hoped to shake people up in a terrible mistake of these
days;10 Gaskell declared in her preface that she wrote to amend an errorthe belief on the
part of the working classes that their suffering is uncared for. Public and private effort is necessary to disabuse the work people of this misapprehension. She also attempts to shake her
readers up by implying that if they dont heed her injunctions, England may suffer a fate
similar to that of the continent and have a revolution of the lower classes on its hands. As
mediators, both novels bring otherwise opaque and undetectable feelings to the attention
of their readers; as provocateurs, they also intend to arouse and mobilize feelings within
those readers. At several levels, then, the power and significance of emotion is of relevance.11
Narrative attention to emotion in condition-of-England novels can usefully be located in
the context of a larger history. Mid-century evolutionary and physiological psychology is
often characterized in histories of emotion as the moment when emotions, which replaced
terms like passions, sentiments, and affections, were reconceived of as a physical
rather than mental process12 In Naming the Mind, Kurt Danziger draws attention to the discursive formation of the term emotion, first regularly deployed by David Hume. At the
time Hume was writing, the term was a fairly recent derivative of motion which had been
used to describe either a physical or a social agitation. By analogy it was also applied to
mental agitation or excitement. By the early nineteenth century, the term emotion was
used to refer to non-intellectual states of mind.13 And by the second half of the nineteenth
century, emotion had replaced passion in ordinary usage.ThusThomas Dixons history
of emotions, From Passions to Emotions, charts the shift of usage and thinking as fundamental to the establishment of psychology as a secular science.14 Dixon sees a strong line
from mid nineteenth-century evolutionary and physiological psychology to the work of
William James, at the end of the century, which represents the apotheosis of this physicalizing tendency. James argued, controversially, that we feel sad because we cry and not the
other way round. Our feelings follow an automatic physiological change.
The characterization of the mid-Victorian moment as the time when emotions were conceived of as physical rather than mental operations should not, however, be overstated.
Mental physiologists of the period certainly emphasize the physical nature of emotion, but
leading figures such as William Carpenter, Herbert Spencer, and Alexander Bain all pay
attention to the mental side of feelings and emotions, while also showing that these are
dependent on the body. Perhaps the most thoroughly integrated view of mental process is

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to be found in the work of amateur psychologist George Henry Lewes, who summarizes an
emergent view of the embodied mindthe fact that all centers of the body and mind are
connectedwhich means that even the most abstract thought processes are grounded in
affect:
It is a consequence of the wonderful complexity of our organism, in which
each part plays on another, that remote and unsuspected influences produce
important results. Mental agitation will suddenly arrest or increase the secretions; imperfect, or too abundant, secretion will depress, or confuse the mind.
An idea will agitate the heart, and disturb the liver; a languid liver will disturb
the serenity of the mind; a worm in the intestine will produce melancholy, and
even madness.So indissolubly is our mental life bound up with our bodily
life.15
Lewes defines emotion as the form of cerebral sensibility which is determined by connections with the ganglia of visceral sensation. That would seem to render emotion corporeal
and physical, but from Lewess perspective every mental process begins in sensation. The
sensations of sense derived from special organs link us to the external world. Emotions, by
contrast, bring us knowledge of what is going on inside us. But those internal feelings are
surely responsive to our place in the world and our response to what goes on around us.
Love, hate, fear, reverence, disgust are excited by something outside of ourselves and thus
implicate the external world in these internal processes. Lewes demonstrates an important
aspect of some nineteenth-century thought: cognition is inadequately understood as coming from the brain alone in that all parts of the body inform and contribute to thought. Even
among physiological psychologists, then, the extent to which emotions were considered to
be automatic physiological changes in the body or cognitive, appraising, and evaluative
responses was a matter of considerable debate in the second half of the century.
Though it is not possible in an essay of this scope even to sketch out the complex field of
emotion theory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I want at least to point to the continuity and persistence of debates about the appraising or anti-intentionalist nature of emotion. A long-standing and dominant view of emotions that assumes their automatic nature
may be described as the hydraulic view. In Barbara Rosenweins summary of the historiography of emotion, the hydraulic view represents emotions as welling up and seething;
they require channeling, they overwhelm and subside.16 They are thus opposed to reason,
automatic rather than voluntary, universal, and natural. While medieval ideas of the humors
inform this model, it also accords with theories of energy that were current when Darwin
and Freud were writing. Indeed, the hydraulic view of emotions persisted in Darwin and
Freuddespite discoveries that nerve force was electricaland bequeathed a vocabulary
for discussing emotion that, as Rosenwein rightly emphasizes, remains current today. But
she also suggests that by the 1960s, the hydraulic view is to some extent displaced by a cognitive view of emotions, which emphasizes the appraising, evaluative aspect of emotional
response. Although most cognitive psychologists believe that there are certain basic emotions true of all human beingsfear and anger are on nearly everyones listit is clear that

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15

different perceptions by different individuals of what is relevant to their weal or woe will
produce very different sorts of emotions even in similar situations.17 In the next decade,
social constructivist theories claim that emotions depend on language, cultural practices,
expectations, and moral beliefs.This means that every culture has its rules for feelings and
behavior; every culture thus exerts certain restraints while favoring certain forms of expressivity. There can be no untrammeled emotional expression in this non-hydraulic view of
the emotions because emotions are not pressing to be set free; they are created by each
society, each culture, each community.18 Rosenweins account should be augmented by
mention of affect program theory, a recent pan-universalist and non-intentionalist strand
of theory derived from SilvanTomkins and Paul Ekman and currently influential in both neuroscience and cultural criticism.19 Indeed, what is useful about Rosenweins charting process
is that it allows us to plot new developments in emotion theory on the physiological/
cognitive spectrum from universalist, bodily, and automatic to intentionalist, socially inflected, and appraisal based. As I explore in the next section, Dickens can be located on that
spectrum in ways that enliven critical discussions of his approach to psychology and his
narration of interior processes.

I. Dickens, Emotion, and the Thinking Body

In her essay The Natural History of German Life (1856), George Eliot regretted that
Dickenss art concerned itself exclusively with the external traits of individuals (specifically idiom and manners) at the expense of psychological charactertheir conceptions of
life, and their emotions. Were he able to render this interior life, she argued, his books
would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies.20 Dickens, she implies, is a fine copyist. He rarely passes from the humorous and
external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as
he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness. George Eliot sees him then as unwittingly rescued by the precious salt of his humour, which compels him to reproduce external traits that serve, in some degree, as a corrective to his frequently false psychology.21 In
spite of himself, and as a result of his mimetic talent, Dickens sometimes unconsciously
gets it right. In his 1872 essay on Dickens, Lewes lamented that [i]t is this complexity of the
organism which Dickens wholly fails to conceive; his characters have nothing fluctuating
and incalculable in them.22 These have been taken as fighting words by many stripes of
Dickensian defenders, who have in turn lauded him as nothing less than a master of psychology and symbolism.23 What I want to draw out and question here is the assumption
that a focus on external traits is necessarily a lack of attention to motive and emotion.
Dickens well knows that the description of the body in times of emotional change can do
the work of describing a state of mind. As Alexander Bain explained, physiological psychologists are committed to observation of the external: If there be any peculiar shade, tone or
colouring of emotion that has no outward sign or efficacy, such peculiarity is inscrutable to

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the inquirer. It is enough for us to lay hold of the outward manifestations, and to recognise
all the distinctions that they bring to light.24 Physiological psychologists may be committed
to observing the external, but novelists are not, unless the observation is a useful way of
mediating a mind at work. From the perspective of the following mid nineteenth-century
reviewer, however, novelists should not behave like scientists:
[M]any novelists indulge [in] the description of minute changes in the physical expression in periods of deep feeling. This is, we are convinced, unartistic
as well as false taste. . . . It would require a scientific man, intending to prepare
plates of the different emotions to note these things. The grief and the love
and the fear should absorb the attention, and not the resulting state of muscular action.25
The opinion that novelists confine themselves to the phenomenology of feeling rather than
shifts in physical expression nicely focuses perceptions of the different provinces of science
and the novel when it comes to representing the bodys mediation of emotion.
In Dickens, the bodily description of emotion is frequently deployed to speak the mind.That
is, emotions may look like they are merely of the body, which is working automatically and
by reflex, or habit, but they also reveal a cache of intangible thoughts and evaluations.
Mental and corporeal life seem so indissolubly bound up that we encounter what is appropriately in some sense called the thinking body, and certainly the body that keeps the
score in that it seems to know beyond the conscious minds attempts to regulate and reason. In his representation of emotion, Dickens implies an appraising mindthough not necessarily a unified oneoperating in the context of values and assessments. Emotions are
thus implicitly eudaimonistic, a term that Martha Nussbaum has used in her argument
about the way emotions reveal judgments about our weal or woe and are thus cognitive
at the core.26 And while the language of their expression is almost always close to the naturalizing, hydraulic view Rosenwein describes, emotions are also, as we shall see in Hard
Times critique of utilitarianism, profoundly social.
In keeping with the relative concision and broad strokes of his industrial fable, Dickenss
satire of the utilitarian upbringing of the Gradgrinds is not subtle. Chapters titled Murder
of the Innocents and characters named MChoakumchild, make it abundantly clear how
ruinous is an education based on the inculcation of facts and the eradication of imagination,
the lauding of analysis and the denigration of feeling and emotion. From the outset, it
is clear that feelings have to be quashed and tamped down in Louisa and Tom, but rather
than being eradicated, they simply become camouflaged and secret. So Louisa empathizes
with Sissy in her grief over her fathers disappearance, her empathy detectable only in a
look. Although Mr. Gradgrinds announcement that Bounderby has proposed marriage is
greeted without any visible emotion whatsoever (96), the function of the word visible
is to alert us that Louisa may indeed be experiencing emotions; it is just that she has learned
to mask and hide them. Frequently described as gazing into the fire, an activity that suggests meditation and possibly self-communing, Louisa clearly has more going on inside

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17

than she lets on. At one point, she tells her mother: I was encouraged by nothing, mother,
but by looking at the red sparks dropping out of the fire, and whitening and dying. It made
me think, after all, how short my life would be, and how little I could hope to do in it (57).
But if the dying fire seems to speak her depressive despair at this moment, Dickens also
explains her fire-gazing later as the attempt to discover what kind of woof Old Time, that
greatest and longest established Spinner of all, would weave from the threads he had
already spun into a woman. But, his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his
Hands are mutes (95). When her father mocks her for seeming to consult the chimneys of
Coketown as she gazes into the distance, Louisa responds: There seems to be nothing
there, but languid and monotonous smoke. Yet when the night comes, Fire bursts out,
father!(99). Statements such as these foreshadow the smoldering embers within Louisa
that may one day conflagrate.
In this regard, Louisa is a less successful product of Gradgrind philosophy than Bitzer,
whose mind was so exactly regulated that he had no affections or passions (116). Exactly
what attracts Harthouseone of Dickenss several, careless, heartless villainsto Louisa is
indeed her mystery. She baffles penetration. He is fascinated by her features whose natural play is so locked up, that it seemed impossible to guess at their genuine expression
(127). But Harthouse soon discerns that she brightens in the presence of her brother Tom
and he is thus able to bring tears to her eyes by talking aboutToms lack of consideration for
her: The woods floated before her, for her eyes were suffused with tears.They rose from a
deep well, long concealed, and her heart was filled with acute pain that found no relief in
them (170). Fire bursts out, feelings are locked up, and pent up; they arise from a deep well.
This is par excellence the vocabulary of the hydraulic view, with (as in fire bursts out) an
occasional analogical migration to the incendiary. Having pulled herself back from the brink
of disgrace, Louisa confronts her father:
. . . it has been my task from infancy to strive against every natural prompting
that has arisen in my heart; if you had known that there lingered in my breast,
sensibilities, affections, weaknesses capable of being cherished into strength,
defying all the calculations ever made by man . . . would you have given me
to the husband whom I am now sure that I hate? (209)
No general laws or rules, she continues, can control the passions unless they shall be able
to direct the anatomist where to strike his knife into the secrets of my soul (211). In the language of heart and soul, Dickens indicates the personal judgements and assessments that
emotions entail. They too have their wisdom and their knowledge, identified with the very
core of identity.Through Louisa, Gradgrind comes to admit that he has underestimated and
discounted the wisdom of the heart for that of the head. In the denouement of the novel (a
hoist-by-ones-own-petard moment, if ever there was one) Mr Gradgrind asks Bitzer, who
has apprehended the guiltyTom, if he has a heart. Bitzer replies that circulation couldnt be
carried on without one. Bitzers inability to feel any emotion whatsoever reveals at some
level that he is unlike Louisa andTom, and suggests that the regulation and socialization of
emotion may indeed be horribly successful.

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English Language Notes 48.1 Spring / summer 2010

By means of his scathing satire on the pedagogy of utilitarianism, Dickens anticipates

twentieth-century treatments of the social construction of emotions. While emotions appear
to be a strictly private matter, the mode of education satirized in the novel reveals that they
are a public one of some consequence. A utilitarian culture would ultimately produce a
breed of Bitzers, in whom emotion was so subordinated that relationship and community
as we know it would be entirely different. The managed heart is a term used in twentyfirst century emotionology to emphasize the social production of emotion; analysts of
socially-produced emotion go so far as to suggest that what people think about feelings
they will eventually feel. Bitzer has been so quickly and successfully processed that he no
longer experiences emotion at all. The heart under such management becomes just an
organ of circulation as Bitzer has been catechized to define it. As an admonishing example
of socialization that discounts and eradicates emotion, Bitzer reveals the damage that such
pedagogy may do, and reinforces the idea that the mysteries of the heart cannot be uncovered, explained, or easily tutored by utilitarian rational choice theory.
An apt example of the novels interest in the hearts mysteries, and how they can be mediated without the use of conventional indirect speech, is to be found in the narration of
Sissys fathers disappearance. Did he basely desert his daughter or did he break his own
heart alone so as not to pull her down with him? (282). Although Dickens hints at the
answer, he leaves the resolution to that question deliberately undecided, perhaps indeed as
a way of emphasizing the mystery. To the extent that a reason is provided, it is done so by
means of a typical Dickensian narrative strategy, which is independent of psychological narration, yet allows the reader to understand a particular kind of emotional exchange and, as
a result, to know the minds of those engaged in it. An early scene in Hard Times engages
the question of Jupes motivation in leaving his daughter and provides an account of his
angry and uncharacteristic beating of his performing dog, Merrylegs. Sissy relates the last
time she saw her father:
Father, soon after they came home from performing, told Merrylegs to jump
up on the backs of the two chairs and stand across themwhich is one of his
tricks. He looked at father, and didnt do it at once. Everything of fathers had
gone wrong that night, and he hadnt pleased the public at all. He cried out that
the very dog knew he was failing, and had no compassion on him. Then he
beat the dog, and I was frightened, and said, Father, father! Pray dont hurt the
creature who is so fond of you! O Heaven forgive you, father, stop! And he
stopped, and the dog was bloody, and father lay down crying on the floor with
the dog in his arms, and the dog licked his face. (63)
It is after this incident that the broken Jupe disappears, leaving both the circus and his
daughter forever. The account of his angry beating of his dog is elicited when Louisa asks
Sissy whether her father was always kind to her, wonderingan important word in this
novelwhat must have been going on in the mind of Sissys father to have abandoned his
daughter. Louisa has been hearing about the imaginative stories Sissy used to read her
father, also a source of wonder, as is the circus itself. The inference is that without wonder,

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19

we lack the ability to imagine what goes on in the minds and hearts of others. By the same
token, Dickens gives us information enough in the account of Jupes uncharacteristic anger
with his dog to form some understanding what was going on at an emotional level inside
the failing circus performer. The succession of clauses joined by the co-ordinating and
lends a biblical cadence to the narration, signaling perhaps the import and consequence of
this moment in Jupes life.
In the absence of more conventional interior narration, we cannot know exactly how Sissys
father felt, but Dickens counts on the fact that Jupes exhibition of displaced anger will provide a compelling substitute rendering. We imagine that Jupe understands and reflects on
his impulsive attack. We imagine that he realizes the extent to which he is broken down and
weakened, having been brought to such a point of frustration, humiliation, and despair that
he vents his feelings brutally on the undeserving Merrylegs. The point is that an external
account of this emotionally charged scene reveals motives and a state of mind that do the
work of more obviously psychological narration. When Sleary later says we cannot know
whether Sissys father deserted his daughter basely or went away to break his heart alone
so as not to pull her down with him, we are in fact better informed than the circus-master
about which alternative to choose. The most revelatory action of Sissys father, whom the
reader never meets, is his displaced anger, uncharacteristic and therefore indicative of his
broken heart.
My next example shows how Dickens uses narration of the thinking body along with conventional indirect discourse, a combination that serves several rhetorical ends. Fred Boege
long ago pointed out that it is not usually until a character is on the point of death that
Dickens opens up his or her interiority and reveals secret thoughts and states of mind.27
This inner excavation occurs a bit earlier in the case of Stephen Blackpool, one of the few
characters in the novel whose interiority is conventionally mediated by the narrator in free
indirect discourse. Dickenss representation of him is also, however, dependent on the way
that Blackpools emotions can be read through the body. In addition to, and even in opposition to, his delineated thoughts, we need to know what his body is saying, and what evaluative emotions it is expressing. In Chapter 13, after a long dream sequence expressing a
range of emotions and prefiguring his death by falling, Blackpool experiences a kind of waking dream in which he comes close to allowing his abhorred wife to poison herself. He
watches her reach for a bottle of perchloride, which has been used to dress her wounds.28
Stephen has been seen as a singularly simple, long-suffering, and uncomplex character,
unassailably virtuous and unshakeable in his goodness, though recently Tamara Ketabgian has written persuasively of the anger and destructive potential of industrial culture
which he represents and the way it is indirectly intimated rather than spelled out in the
text.29 Though Ketabgian does not discuss the scene involving the near poisoning of his
wife, it hints at depths of negative affect within Stephen while also aptly demonstrating
Dickenss need to keep him blameless.

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Dickens relies on descriptions of affect and bodily change rather than using free indirect discourse to accomplish the communication of problematic affect. The dramatic power of the
scene is focused on the poison bottle. The moment Stephen lays eyes on it he begins to
shake and tremble: He turned of a deadly hue, and a sudden horror seemed to fall upon
him (84). Dickens does not wish to spell out the meaning of his terror at seeing it, but since
he repeats the reactionhis eyes again fell on the bottle, and a tremble passed over him,
causing him to shiver in every limb (85)he wants us to grasp it through Stephens emotional and physical reaction. A further violent fit of trembling causes Rachael to ask what ails
him, upon which he stutters something about what he was thinking when walking home.
These we remember were thoughts that swell anger and indignation, and resentment. He
has recently asked how he is to be ridded o this woman (75). The emotion and physical
response inspired by the poison bottle suggest Stephens desire (understandable from the
narrators point of view) to murder his wife. Rachael having woken up and prevented the
drinking of poison, he then explains that he was in such despair, the sight of the bottle made
him think of doing away with himself or his wife or them both. But while the action is taking place, the narrative presents his emotional responses and his inability to act in such a
way that makes him seem desirous of her death only, and complicit in it had she drunk the
poison.The description of emotional change in Stephen thus allows Dickens to hint at dark
motives but to preserve the characters goodness by leaving possible murderous intentions
undeclared until they have been avertedand even then, in hindsight, linking them up with
more redeeming thoughts of self-destruction.

II. Unconscious Affections: Mary Barton

In Hard Times the problem is that emotions are managed and discounted in utilitarian philosophy, whereas they need to be more fully acknowledged as the basis of ethical agency.
In Mary Barton the paradox is that spontaneous and even unconscious emotions are a crucial aspect of agency but may also be dangerously disruptive and therefore need to be subjected to reasoned analysis. In this regard, Gaskells Unitarianism contrasts with Dickenss
anti-utilitarianism. Unitarianism has been called the religion that thinks; reason (as well as
spirit and sentiment) is the responsibility of the individual who wishes to live a Christian
life.30 As Joseph Childers points out, in Unitarianism one is as likely to be wrong-headed as
wrong-hearted. John Bartons problem is that his heart is in the right place but he lacks education and wisdom. He feels keenly for his fellow laborers, but, the narrator asks, What
availed his sympathy? No education had given him wisdom; and without wisdom, even
love, with all its effects, too often works but harm (199). And in a letter describing the genesis of the novel, Gaskell writes that she tried to imagine what the inequalities of fortune
would seem like to a man full of rude illogical thought, and full also of sympathy for suffering, which appealed to him through his senses.31 Note that he kindly stops on his murder mission to take a lost Irish toddler home, showing that while reason has gone astray,
sympathy and fellow feeling, beneficent emotions, persist.

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21

Just as sympathy must be educated in order to be effective, the will is necessary to govern
emotion. Gaskells fear of the trade union or combination is that it is a crucible for excited feelings and lacks the direction of a high and intelligent will; incapable of being misled
by passion or excitement (203). Without the exercise of will, as one authoritative mental
physiologist explained, the individual becomes a thinking automaton, destitute of the
power to withdraw his attention from any idea or feeling by which his mind may be possessed, and is as irresistibly impelled, therefore to act in accordance with this, as the lower
animals are to act in obedience to their instincts.32 Accordingly, Gaskells remarks about the
absence of a high and intelligent will are revelatory of middle-class fears that workingclass resistance and solidarity are likely to be unreasoned or misguided.
Although the will is generally understood to be crucial in controlling emotion, there are also
ways in which the power of unconscious affections or emotions is of singular importance
in Mary Barton and frequently trumps the exercise of will. Gaskells Unitarianism demonstrates a synthesis between the Necessitarian Utilitarianism of Joseph Priestley and the
new style of teaching of James Martineau, the latters emphasis falling on feelings and personal example over rationally conceived, all embracing solutions. According to Catherine
Gallagher, Gaskell shifted from Necessitarianism towards Martineaus emphasis on free
willa religion of Conscience rather than one of Causalitybut free will alone is only part
of the story. As Jenny Uglow rightly suggests, Gaskells fiction acts out Martineaus great
moral truth of the contrast between the emancipating energy of unconscious affections and
the feebleness of the self-interested will.33 Gaskell herself wrote: I do not think any influence acts permanently well but what is unconsciously exercised by its possessor.34 The
question of unconscious affections, which could in common parlance be called the knowledge of the heart as opposed to the head, is thus of some consequence. Gaskells views in
this regard give rise to a vocabulary of depth and instinct, as in fibers of the heart and secret
oracles of the soul. The various instances in which this language is used suggest that it is
not enough to know with the head; unless the heart has been won, the springs of action will
be wavering and unreliable. One obvious way in which this conception of influence works
is the emotional designs of the novel on the reader. Feelings of compassion and sympathy
need to be aroused and marshaled in middle-class readers; they are an equalizerrich and
poor, masters and men, were then brothers in the deep suffering the heart (431)and it is
only through their inculcation, the novelist signals, that the novels project of changing
hearts and therefore minds can be realized.
Gaskells representation of the power of unconscious emotions is, however, a rather doubleedged sword that privileges at the same time as it denigrates. For example, she writes in the
case of John Barton about the instinct of love, by which almost his body thought (94). And
of Mary Barton: Although Mary had hardly been conscious of her thoughts, and it had been
more like a secret instinct informing her soul, than the result of any process of reasoning,
she had felt for some time (ever since her return from Liverpool, in fact), that for her father
there was but one thing to be desired and anticipated, and that was death! (439). In both

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English Language Notes 48.1 Spring / summer 2010

cases, Gaskell draws attention to the operation of unconscious, intuitive knowledge, and
uses the word instinctive, indicating the habitual closeness and intimacy of characters,
even as it assigns them to a status closer to the animal or primitive than civilized human
being.
Often Gaskell writes about emotions and feelings as a replacement or substitute for language.That would seem to reinforce the association of the working classes with inarticulacy, a view already sounded in the preface where the people are referred to as suffering
dumbly.35 But, less pejoratively, the use of feelings to telegraph information means a frank,
sincere, and direct message where words do not get in the way. To alter the adage slightly,
one picture of the bodily changes wrought by emotions is worth a thousand words describing states of feeling. So after Mary hears Margaret singing, the narrator tells us: When it
was ended, Marys looks told more than words could have done what she thought of it
(111). And [w]ith heart and soul, though in few words, Jem promised that if aught earthly
could keep her from falling, he would do it (192). Job feels sorrowful about the want of
power in his words, while the feelings within him were strong and clear (455). And even
when words are required, it is better that they come straight from the heart rather than find
embellishment in learning and textuality:
Mrs Wilson was weeping herself long before she had ended this speech, which
was so different to all she had planned to say, and from all the formal piety she
had laid in store for the visit; for this was hearts piety, and needed no garnish
of texts to make it true religion, pure and undefiled. (445)
The pivotal scene of Marys refusal of Jems proposal demonstrates the deep-seated,
unconscious emotional knowledge that trumps consciously-held conviction. After Mary has
sent Jem packing, she shakes with violent sobs and could not say why she was in agonised
grief. It was too sudden for her to analyse or think upon it. She only felt . . . that her life
would be dreary and blank (152). Her emotional reaction unveiled her heart to her (152).
The (dare I say) rather clichd language here encourages the view that Gaskell tends
towards sentiment or even melodrama in the use of excessive or exaggerated emotion; but
to stop at that somewhat formulaic phraseology is to miss the interesting work the novel is
doing in giving a kind of primacy to emotional knowledge.
Drawing frequently on phrases such as secret spring of joy, the passionate secret of her
soul (152), and the secret oracle of our souls, the narrator indicates that the knowledge
emotions convey is secret because it may not yet have come to consciousness.The privacy
and secrecy of emotion and the heart is given a public dimension in the courtroom scene,
which makes a spectacle out of what the novelist has coded as private. And yet it also shows
that affect quickly becomes a public matter when the law is involved. Motive and motivation being closely allied to emotion and feeling, the question of the accuseds feelings about
the murdered man and of Marys feelings about Jem, and her relation to Harry Carson are
relevant, even though the prosecutors questions seem themselves motivated by prurient
interest: And who was he, the questioner, that he should dare so lightly to ask of her hearts

Jill L. Matus

23

secrets? In the case of Jem, the attempt to mask the expression of emotion gestures to the
complexity of what he is feeling after Mary and Wills testimony: The prisoner hid his face
once more to shield the expression of an emotion he could not control, from the notice of
the over-curious (391).
Deliberately crafted as the novels crisis and climax, the trial is also an affective watershed
that leaves its participants in emotional disarray. After her crisis on the witness stand,
Marys distracted brain had lost all guiding and controlling power over her words (395).
Jem too after the trial is prone to tears: the elasticity of his heart had been crushed out of
him by early sorrows, and now, especially, the dark side of everything seemed to be presented to him (398). In this regard we may note that Gaskell feels unconstrained by middleclass constructions of masculine reticence in portraying tears and gusts of feeling in
working-class men. Emotions and their expression are thus shown to be indubitably social.
The emotional culture of the working classeslike Dickenss circus cultureis open and
spontaneous in comparison to that of other classes.
It is a common criticism of both Dickens and Gaskell that they offer an affective and individualized solution to social problems rather than a systemic and economic one. But the dismissal of emotional shiftsa change of heartas a solution has perhaps concealed the
ways in which both novelists focus on affect as part of the problem. While Dickens demonstrates the psychic effects of a utilitarianism working hand in glove with industrialization,
and offers a satiric vision of a brave new world under the emotionally defunct Bitzer,
Gaskell explores the power and danger involved in the necessary situation of emotions at
the heart of moral agency. Moving beyond free will alone to include the energy of unconscious affections, she attempts to work out the place of emotion as an informant and energizer of thought and action.
Both novels represent emotion as far more than autonomic bodily effect. Although emotion
can be read through the body, it provides a revelatory form of access to the mind and its
levels of consciousness, its deep-seated evaluations and appraisals. In developing ways to
narrate the thinking body, both novels affirm the importance of interior conditions as a
legitimate concern of the condition-of-England novel.
Jill L. Matus
University of Toronto

NOTES
An earlier version of this paper was given as a lecture at The Dickens Universe, UC Santa Cruz, 2008.
1

Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 10.

Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction in Theory
of the Novel: A Historical Approach, ed. Michael McKeon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2000), 501.
2

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English Language Notes 48.1 Spring / summer 2010

See Palmer, Fictional Minds, 9.

See my Mary Barton and North and South in Jill L. Matus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to
Elizabeth Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 2743.

I am using the term affect largely synonymously with emotion here and not in the way certain contemporary theorists distinguish the two. For example, Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the
Death of the Subject (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), regards emotions as signifying the
psychological interior aspect of feeling, and affect as the physiological. If we bear in mind the etymology of emotion, and its deployment in physiological psychology based on associations with motion and
agitation, it is worth exploring how emotion, once used to designate the automatic and physical has
now come, in contemporary affect theory, to signify its opposite.

Richard Fabrizio argues that HardTimes is a keen description of the psyche forged out of socioeconomic conditions. His emphasis is on the psychopathology of the family in nineteenth-century Coketown.
See Fabrizio, Wonderful no-Meaning: Language and the Psychpathology of Family in Hard Times, in
David Copperfield and Hard Times, ed. John Peck (New York: St Martins Press, 1995), 21954.

7 Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, ed. Edgar Wright (Oxford: Oxford Worlds Classics, 1998), 64. Subsequent references use this edition and will be made parenthetically within the text.

Charles Dickens, Hard Times: For These Times, ed. Kate Flint (London: Penguin, 2003), 99 (emphasis
added). Subsequent references use this edition and will be made parenthetically within the text.

9 Both authors invoke the language of Revelations in references to the judgement day and the last trumpet and in this also echo Carlyle, an acknowledged influence, fierce critic of Benthamite philosophy, and
the originator of the phrase condition-of-England. Gaskells epigraph to the novel is a quotation from
Carlyle; Dickens dedicates the novel outright to him.
10 Quoted in Deborah A. Thomas, Hard Times: A Fable of Fragmentation and Wholeness (New York:
Twayne, 1997), 11.
11 While both are rhetorically adept at evoking and harnessing it in their readers, and while the novelists
designs on the readers emotions cannot be separated from the representation of emotion in fictive characters, I am primarily concerned here with the way a focus on emotions may shift perceptions about the
narration of interiority.
12 The remainder of this section summarizes my lengthier treatment of the subject in Shock, Memory and
the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4347.
13 Thomas

Brown could write that [e]very person understands what is meant by an emotion and what
they understood was that emotions were non-intellectual states of mind. See Kurt Danziger, Naming the
Mind: How Psychology Found its Language (New York: Sage, 1997), 4142.

See Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

14

15

George Henry Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life (New York: Appleton, 1860), 2:13031.

See Barbara Rosenwein, Worrying about Emotions in History, The American Historical Review 107,
no. 3 (2002): 82145. See also William Reddys account of the current state of emotion theory in The
Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001).

16

17

Rosenwein, Worrying about Emotions in History, 836.

18

Rosenwein, Worrying about Emotions in History, 837.

Affect programs refer to emotions such as fear, surprise, anger, disgust, and joy which are treated
as short-term, facial expressions that are non-voluntary, stereotypic, autonomic, and transcultural. Ruth
Leyss recent work critiquing contemporary affect program theory draws attention to the influence,
among cultural critics as well as scientists, of neuroscientific work on the pan-universal, automatic

19

Jill L. Matus

25

nature of emotions. She sees the turn from intentionalist theories as occasioned to a large extent by
SilvanTomkins and subsequent disciples such as Paul Ekman. See Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz
and After (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); on affect theory see Brian Massumi, The Autonomy of Affect, Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 83109; Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory; and Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press, 2004).
20 Thomas

Pinney, Essays of George Eliot (London: Routledge, 1963), 271.

21

Pinney, Essays of George Eliot, 271.

22

George Henry Lewes, Dickens in Relation to Criticism Fortnightly Review 17 (1872): 149.

23

See Deborah Thomas, Hard Times, 20.

24

Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1865), 29.

25

A Novel or Two, National Review (October 1855): 34950.

See Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003).
26

27

Fred Boege, Point of View in Dickens, PMLA 65 (1950): 90105.

Dream or reality, he had no voice, nor had he power to stir. If this be real, and her allotted time be
not yet come, wake, Rachael, wake! (88). It is not clear to whom these urgent words should be attributed. Are they narrated monologue, a narrative strategy allowing the author to fuse narratorial and figural presence, or is the narrator alone conjuring Rachael to wake?

28

See DeborahThomas, HardTimes, 90, andTamara Ketabgian, Melancholy Mad Elephants: Affect and
the Animal Machine in Hard Times, Victorian Studies 45, no. 4 (2003): 64976.

29

30 Joseph Childers, Novel Possibilities: Fiction and the Formation of Early Victorian Culture (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 174.

See J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard, eds., The Letters of Mrs Gaskell (Manchester: Mandolin, [1966]
1997), 74.

31

32 William

B. Carpenter, Principles of Human Physiology, 5th ed (London: Churchill, 1855), 627.

See Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative
Form 18321867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) and Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A
Habit of Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 131.
33

34

Chapple and Pollard, eds., The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, 836.

35 On

literacy and inarticulacy see Matus, Mary Barton and North and South, 3235.

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