me + mr thornton, episode 2

[The explanatory prologue to this post is here; episode 1 is here. Please note that this series gives a peculiarly personal reading of North & South, not the only one, and certainly not the one that I present in the classroom when I teach the series. Speaking as a historian, I’d agree that Thornton is more politically culpable than this reading allows him to be. I’m also considering here only the series as it unfolds here — not as a representation of history, or an adaptation, however successful or unsuccessful, of the novel. This interpretation thus concerns only my identification with the character as presented, though I throw in a few pieces of historical or literary commentary here and there because that’s the way I am. This is episode 2 of four episodes.]

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The same face as he wore for his encounter with Stevens in episode 1: Mr. Thornton (Richard Armitage) tries to wrestle Margaret (Daniela Denby-Ashe) into safety during the confrontation with the workers in episode 2 of North & South. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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In the previous two posts, I argued that North & South is a tale of vocational struggle and failure, and that I began watching it intensely at the point at which I felt myself to have failed most fully vocationally and was most fully unable to work creatively. Moreover, I presented an interpretation of vocational struggle as inhering strongly in a certain body of ethical principles which Mr. Thornton articulates in pieces throughout episode 1 of the series. As we move into episode 2, then, we see Mr. Thornton spending most of his time making these principles clear by justifying his ways to man, and mostly unsuccessfully. He’s doing what he thinks is right, but he’s constantly losing the battle for comprehension among his peers (though I think we can seek to understand what he is asserting). And many of the losses, quite frankly, are his fault. In this sense, the unsuccessful proposal at the end of episode 2 is simply a further example of his gathering inability to communicate effectively at the beginning of it.

To be fair, his interlocutors mostly lack the inclination to understand. His fellow bourgeois, for instance, won’t hold to any ethics, even a utilitarian one of collective interest. Their rapacity is demonstrated again at the beginning of the episode, in case we’ve forgotten it after the end of the previous segment, at another point where Armitage makes Thornton’s constant status conflicts highly visible.

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Mr. Thornton continues to demonstrate his willingness to combine with his fellow owners, even when, like Slickson, they’re not so reliable, in episode 2 of North & South.

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Mr. Thornton’s scorn of the pursuit of exclusive self-interest strides clearly to the front of this scene. His response to the sincerely puzzled challenge made by his interlocutor takes the form of an insistence on upright behavior. Would he have given into the workers’ demands? “No,” he says with defiance, “but I would ha’ told them straight.” Thornton’s almost religious rejection of pretense here is starting to look naïve, given that we as viewers have already seen both the manipulative conniving of the mill owners and the grim determination of the workers to force the manufacturers to fulfill their demands — but that’s precisely the point: Thornton concludes his conversation with the assertion that the goal is not the individual situation of any particular mill owner but rather, that holding together is supposed to prevent everyone from suffering, everyone including the workers: “it’s their lives and our livelihood.” But, given what we also already know about his connections to the other mill owners, this is not a true collectivist position, either. Even if a strike is bad for everyone, he’s still willing to let them strike if he has to. The value lies elsewhere.

Clearly under assault, holding himself in a physically defensive posture that reflects his reaction, Thornton then benefits from the narrative relief of a few moments of defense from his tiger-like mother. What she says, however, widely misses the mark of any apologia pro vita sua made in terms that we could imagine him mounting for himself here. No matter how his mother sees the world, Thornton does not see himself engaged in the bellum omnium contra omnes at this point, at least, and when we compare this third-person characterization to the man we have come to know so far, it seems — paradoxically — to point out precisely how uncosmopolitan this putative man of the world truly is.

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Mrs. Thornton (Sinead Cusack) explains to Margaret (Daniela Denby-Ashe) what she sees at stake in the threatening strike in episode 2 of North & South.

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Mrs. Thornton may believe that her son is being challenged by jealous men who wish to tear him down, but that doesn’t seem to be Thornton’s own attitude. He’s relatively unworried about the challenges of others. Indeed, in the very next scene, when he encounters Margaret in the courtyard of Marlborough Mills, Thornton completes the trio of responses to a nitpicking world that’s suspicious of the way he conducts his business by offering a defense of his behavior to Margaret that’s a virtual encomium to honesty, transparency, duty, and non-interference: another nice chance for him to highlight several of the virtues of classical liberalism laid against a Calvinist / Reformed backdrop.

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Mr. Thornton (Richard Armitage) and Margaret (Daniela Denby-Ashe) in the courtyard at Marlborough Mills, in episode 2 of North & South.

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Mr. Thornton shines here and gets his message across to us clearly, responding effectively to all his critics, although it’s not clear from later scenes that Margaret’s entirely convinced. What about the practical espousal of self-interest, the owner seems to have asked, and Thornton’s response refers to how everyone uses work to rub along in the world, lives and livelihood all caught up in one unavoidable tangle. It’s really about the struggle for dominance, his mother points out to Margaret, when she asks, politely and one suspects, somewhat uninterestedly, about the strike. Thornton’s implicit response to a philosophical description of him made out of his earshot lies in his ironic reference to Margaret about her willingness to cast him as the “overbearing master,” a role to which he juxtaposes what he calls his honest answers to what he is willing to understand as her honest questions. What about compassion and concern? seems to be Margaret’s worry — shouldn’t better-situated people like Thornton take an interest in the lives of workers? — and Thornton points out that he doesn’t seek to stand in relationship to his workers that way. “In the North,” independence is also a moral value. And he’s not abashed in the least by any of these admissions. He doesn’t apologize to anyone, he says, under pressure of having his employment practices and conditions examined by (government) examiners: what he’s doing is open for all to see. We thus conclude, at the close of a series of scenes that make the subtlety of Thornton’s position extremely clear, that his duty lies with the project he’s involved in: “the efficient runnin’ o’ the mill.” This is the task that will bring the greatest good to the greatest number.

In the end, the endearingly innocent quality this stance gives Thornton — who’s worked hard since his father’s suicide, but somehow managed to avoid not only the hard shell of bitterness that his mother has understandingly developed but also the vivid greed of his fellow nouveaux riches colleagues — is both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness. He’s suffered, but he’s stayed pure, somehow, and involved in what he’s doing. He thus succeeds in making the well-disposed viewer think that all of this striving after wind really could be all about the integrity of the work of a cotton producer and his duty to his project as seen in the mill, and not about anything else to be gained from it. So his belief in his principles makes us admire him, and strengthens his own determination, but it is also the point at which he is ultimately most vulnerable when he can no longer afford their luxury and should probably descend into an attitude that more clearly resembles a politics. Episode 1 seems to suggest that he has learned to live, more or less, with the fact that no one really “gets” him. The more pressing problem for Thornton in episode 2 thus seems not so much to be any actual ethical dilemma in which he would acknowledge that he finds himself — he knows what he’s doing, and believes in his reasons, and can say why — but the ways in with he has to live in the world with others and the uses to which his actions get put by them. Therein lies his greatest naïveté: simply, that he can’t — or won’t — look at the bigger picture as long as he’s satisfied he’s doing the right thing by his own lights, and the right thing is always the principled thing. He won’t acknowledge the lesson that every encounter in episode 2 should be teaching him: that ethics and politics can’t be meaningfully separated, or that sometimes politics are necessary.

Mr. Thornton’s problematic innocence comes to clearest expression in his side conversation with Slickson, made before the dinner party, which is a much more important index to his character than his smoldering look at Margaret a few moments earlier.

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Slickson and Thornton discuss the preparations of soldiers to protect the Irish strikebreakers as necessary in episode 2 of North & South.

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“I take this risk for myself,” Thornton tells Slickson, who expresses his worry about will happen if anyone learns of his activities. “You need not join in. I can and will protect myself and anyone tha’ works for me from any kind of violence.” Thornton worried about the effect of violence on his workers? Perhaps he’s more of a paternalist than he admitted earlier in the episode. But it’s all undertaken in service of the big project: the Irish have to be secure enough from the strikers to work. They have to be made able to keep the bigger project going.

In the end, as we will learn later, it’s precisely the frightened kibitzers who profit most from this particular action by Mr. Thornton — even as it’s the first step toward his own mill’s bankruptcy, and even though none of them will step in to help him, as we learn later. At dinner, Thornton outs himself at first as a sort of traditionalist — he doesn’t want to manufacture abroad, he says, but it’s logical that others should if they’re dissatisfied with profits at home. Even as he acknowledges the movements in international cotton markets, as he has in a previous conversation with his mother intended to explain why it is that he’s experiencing difficulties (“the Americans are floodin’ the market”), he thus seems to think he can carve out his own little niche. Thornton as Candide will wait for the difficulties in a “young” industry — that’s seventy years old by now — to iron themselves out. The capacity of the self-interested to profit from his position, in contradiction to his own principles, seems foreshadowed at the dinner table, where Mr. Thornton advances the classical liberal argument against charity in situations like this (it prolongs the suffering of the needy) and is applauded, loudly, by owners who’ve shown repeatedly that they’re more worried about their own capacity to manufacture than about the lives of their workers, and whose primary concern is the work that’s not getting done and, one assumes, the profit that’s slipping through their fingers.

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The dinner table conversation at the Thorntons’ in episode 2 of North & South.

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That Thornton ends up the victim of precisely the kind of manipulation by his fellow owners that they have accused Margaret of falling prey to in taking a basket to the Princeton district thus escapes him. His dinner guests accuse her of giving material aid to strikers and dismiss her justification that children are starving with the insistence that their father “knows what to do” (go back to work). Joining in this chorus, Thornton characterizes her as naive or potentially illogical — and yet, surrounded by connivers on every side, he himself sticks to a similarly obdurate stance that is also being manipulated for the pursuit of personal or factional advantage. We do not like him, here, not only because he seems so ridiculously blind to the nuances of the conversation going on around him, but also because he conspicuously abandons her to her conversational fate by turning to the women on his left. Yet none of this is malevolent. On the contrary, he brings in scabs from Ireland, not out of malice, or the sort of vengefulness that his mother articulates in an earlier scene when she says, “I’d teach them that I was master and could employ who I liked,” but rather to insist on his point — which he articulates as “not giving in.” This is a man who lives every second in the grip of principle and will deal with the associated difficulties.

On this reading, then, Thornton’s ongoing problem at the end of episode 1 and throughout episode 2 is thus not so much any inherently problematic nature of his own stance, but the ways in which other people interpret the opinions he embraces (the Hales, and especially Margaret, who can’t accept what seems to them like an abdication of conscience) or benefit from his actions (the other mill owners, who are nowhere near as ethical as Thornton but nonetheless profit from the broken strike). That his action against the workers is not personally malicious is underlined by his refusal to prosecute Boucher, as well as his insistence to Margaret in the proposal scene that the rioters “will get what they deserve.” Unsurprisingly, given his social status and class / milieu, the sufficiency of the rule of law looms large in his thinking. But the problem threatening on the horizon at the end of episode 2 is the way that his inability to see anything but principle — whether details, whether the big picture, or even at times the content of the principles themselves — is starting to catch up with him. He’s made his arrangements with regard to the strikers, and yet falls victim to Margaret’s entreaties to go out there and speak with them, to consider the detail of the situation over the inflexibly articulated problem. And once he’s in the situation of standing before them, even so, he won’t concede his point, or even a conversation on that point. When will he send the Irish back? Never.

The issue of how he feels about Margaret in the wake of her injury immediately runs him up against his convictions again, and his gets his mother’s back up as well, though finally, we see where all this manipulation of moral and ethical abstractions comes from. In response to his openly emotional concern about Margaret — a detail problem — Mrs. Thornton insists that “everything was done properly,” and as he later discusses with his mother his plan to propose, they agree about what Thornton insists “he will have to say” because, as Mrs. Thornton says, he is “bound in honor.” Mrs. Thornton, in turn, notes the significance of having to overcome pride as a reason to admire Margaret — presumably because she knows how difficult it is to free oneself from certain sorts of abstractions.

This problem of his principled inflexibility or inflexible principles is signaled again in the proposal scene, not so much by Margaret’s revulsion at his suit: he anticipated this rejection, despite his mother’s reassurances, potentially because he believes in principles and well knows that Margaret’s exclude him. But the communication difficulties over principle re-emerge immediately as the proposal conversation begins, for example, in his wrong-footing of Margaret, which begins with insistence on another principle — his right to feel grateful or express gratitude. His back is up by the time that she insists that he should “only be reasonable” — but obviously, she’s pushed the “principles” button with this question, as he responds: “Are you sayin’ that I’m unreasonable?” He’s able to finesse to some extent her accusation that he is not a gentleman — the main reason she offers to try to forestall what she experiences as an unwelcome proposal — by relativizing it: “I’m well aware that, in your eyes at least, I’m not a gentleman” (my highlights), but his next line is only comprehensible in light of his position about principle: “but I think I deserve to know why I am offensive.” You have articulated my behavior as an example of a rule, he seems to be saying, that I don’t understand. Tell me the principle that turns me into an offensive man.

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Mr. Thornton (Richard Armitage) responds to Margaret’s (Daniela Denby-Ashe) statement that Bessy Higgins is dying in the proposal scene, episode 2 of North & South.

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The next conversational turn in the scene is fascinating, and it reveals just exactly how badly Thornton has misunderstood Margaret. She plays her own role in this miscommunication, naturally. My students always insist that she rejects him for exactly the reason she states (“You shouldn’t [love me]. Because I do not like you. I never have”) even as I confront them with an argument that the “gentleman / tradesman” binary means that the money she smells on his paws prevents her from seeing him as honorable in the way she would her father, or Frederick, or even Henry Lennox or her brother-in-law. Whatever we believe about her reasons, in any case, it’s clear from this scene that Margaret has not yet “seen” Thornton, and as romantic viewers, many of us don’t quite believe her reasoning for her earlier action (would she rush out into that mess to protect him solely on principle?). We end up sorry for him, the sincere lover so badly misunderstood. But he also misunderstands, badly, as his own next statement reveals. He is completely incapable of processing the reproaches that she appears to be making, even after she tells him she’s sorry. She offers him a detail — Bessie’s illness — as an explanation for her clumsiness in dealing with him, and then apologizes — an apology that he immediately interprets on the level of a principled concession in which he refuses to believe.

Because he cannot understand it as anything than a further articulation of a principle, her apology only angers him. “For what?” he expostulates in response to it. “That you find my feelings for you offensive? Or that you assume because I am in trade I’m only capable of thinking in terms of buying and selling? Or that I take pleasure in sending my employees to an early grave?” You do not know who I am — he seems to be saying in conjunction with his rejection of her definition of gentlemanliness — but by hitting these specific points (unspecified behavioral objectionability and his right as a person to put the question to her; a putative excessive or exclusive market orientation; and the kicker: exploitative behavior, which I suspect he feels is the most unfair of the three points, and the reason he articulates it at the end, by this point in clear anguish) he also indicates: you do not know what my principles really are. You do not see who I am because you will not understand my principles.

He says he is asking her to marry him because he loves her, not because he has any thought about her reputation. I think the dialogue in the scene, its organization, and its inclusion of all of these objections on his part to specific assumptions she’s made about him indicates something additional, however. I am principled, I do live up to your standards, he seems to want to say. Look at me for these things. They are the best things about me. And you do not see them.

He wants her, I think, to love his principles as much as he does.

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To episode 3a (Episode 3 is published in three parts).

~ by Servetus on February 1, 2012.