me + mr thornton, episode 3(b)

[Continued from here (episode 3a), as episode 3 was threatening to top six thousand words. There was a glitch and if you are an email subscriber, you may not have gotten the push mail, so make sure you’ve read 3(a) before you read this or it may not not make sense. Previous pieces of the argument: here the prologue; here episode one; here episode two; there’ll be one more piece of 3 coming up. Same disclaimers / warnings apply as in previous posts.]

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A quick reminder here from the previous post that I’m pursuing the reading that episode 3 most fully presents the defeat of principle for Thornton.

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The scene between Mr. Thornton and his mother shows him shaken and hurt, but still loyal to the girders and weight-bearing walls of his personality and ethics, which are heavily grounded in duty. So, given the comforts of duty and work to which we imagine Mr. Thornton retreating to lick his unadmitted wounds, it’s compelling that the next time we encounter him for an extended scene presents one of the most explicit implicit evaluations in the series of the merits of different kinds of work done in nineteenth-century industrial society: the Crystal Palace exhibition — itself, paradoxically, a place of leisure and consumption, as if those who created the objects that fill the exhibit have been compelled to bring their tribute and those who do the work facilitated by the technology presented are finally pushed fully off-stage — left behind, in Milton.

First, we stumble over Maxwell Lennox, who’s transfixed by the power of the machinery, but sees it primarily as a source of money.

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The Lennoxes, the Shaws, and Margaret at the London exhibition, from episode 3 of North & South.

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Maxwell’s brother, Henry, the world-weary technocrat, warns him away from any pipe-dream textile ambitions. Too much work — and in London, they don’t need to make cotton to make money. The constant hints that the world of textile manufacturing (the so-called “first” industrial revolution) is yielding to the complex financial instruments that appeared to facilitate the larger-scale achievements of its later stages (the “second” industrial revolution) is one chief reason to assign this series in the classroom, and here we see the conflicts around this development discussed explicitly. Why schlep? Henry seems to be saying. Here in the place where all the wonders of the entire world, old and new, can be summoned before the wide eyes of the curious, we can benefit from what Albert Einstein much later called “the eighth wonder of the world”: not Arkwright’s invention, which Thornton thought merited inclusion in the classics, but Benjamin Franklin’s “miracle” — compound interest. The point of work for the investor is not work or production, but investment in it for profit. The scene also signals that despite the influx of new men like Thornton, entrenched social elites always stand in the best position to profit from economic transformation. The discussion of work vs. money here is subtle but important, because it’s so paradoxical. The Lennoxes and Aunt Shaw are supposed to be above caring about money (underlining that you can only not care about it when you have enough), but money is the primary prism through which these men view the wonders of the exhibit. In contrast, for Thornton, who’s recently been accused of being able to think only of buying and selling, for Thornton the venial, the basely motivated, for Thornton the “tradesman,” soliciting money from investors is distasteful, and as his remarks throughout the scene reveal, his activities are emphatically not about the money.

When Mr. Thornton strolls into view, we witness him speaking to a group of men; as we learn later from Mr. Latimer, potential investors. I suspect that the scriptwriters here wanted to turn Thornton in the direction of having been influenced by Robert Owen, as indeed Gaskell seems to have tried to do in her novel, but the trajectory of the script prevents such a development from being even basically credible. Nothing’s new here. Thornton fails to articulate anything here that we haven’t heard from him before, and well ahead of the strike and his rejection at Margaret’s hands: the wonders of the technological world (from the tea scene), the need for cooperation (repeatedly in conversations with his fellow factory owners) and the belief that things will work themselves out in time (an optimism that he expressed to his mother when discussing the situation ahead of the strike). That this summary all seems new to Margaret results not from the fact that he’s saying something different from what he ever has before — only from her failure to have heard it in this combination, or even to listen very carefully, when he’s given voice to pieces of it before.

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Mr. Thornton (Richard Armitage) speaks to an attentive audience at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in episode 3 of North & South.

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Similarly, Thornton’s statement, when he notices Margaret listening, that she knows the depths to which manufacturers have descended, is not an entreaty for her to think of him differently, or even a concession that he’s behaved badly, but rather made in a bitterly facetious tone that’s calculated to irritate. When she responds that he can’t presume to know her at all, his response — undertaken as he steps toward her rather purposefully — that he tried and was mistaken points again to the mutual mistaking of principles. He says now, more or less, that he applied the wrong principles to try to understand her (“I presumed to know you, and was mistaken”) — not that he’s changing his now.

And then, of course the Lennoxes and Aunt Shaw catch up to Thornton and Margaret.

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Henry Lennox and Mr. Thornton finally meet in London, in episode 3 of North & South.

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When Henry and Mr. Thornton come face to face, the two worldviews collide head on, and we see in the juxtaposition that Thornton is the principled one, both in the sense of having principles, and in the sense of having the sort of principles we think Margaret would wish him to have. Though it’s difficult from Denby-Ashe’s at best tepid acting in this scene to discern much of what Margaret thinks or feels, at least the script forces her into a lukewarm defense of Thornton undertaken, one suspects, at least as much out of embarrassment in reaction to Henry’s cutting and condescending words as out of a desire to represent Thornton’s intellect fairly or accurately. (“All the way from Milton,” Henry remarks, as if traveling from dirty north of England involved the equivalent of a pilgrimage from Darkest Africa, and Thornton were as exotic as the other displays at the exhibition by the colonized peoples of the British Empire.) The social hierarchies clearly work their subjugating magic, as well: by saying Henry’s name first during the introduction, as the classical canon of European manners tells us, Margaret signals that she finds him to be the more important or socially superior person. The contrast between the usage of Henry’s Christian name, which signals their relationship by marriage, in contrast to her employment of Thornton’s surname, reminds us yet again of her social separation from Thornton.

The exchange with Henry, moreover, demonstrates Thornton’s ongoing loyalty to principle, which is now taking its initial, halting steps in the direction of the catastrophic dénoument of episode 4. Latimer later tells us that Thornton was disappointed by the demands of the potential investors whom he came to London to meet; the subtext of this pronouncement suggests that Thornton refused to dissimulate or make false promises. Depending on how we feel about his adherence to his principles, what seemed like naïveté in episode 2 is now starting to look self-destructive. Given the previous conversation about money between the Lennox brothers, moreover, it seems clear that the use of the word “dabble” in the ensuing lines has two meanings. Here, “dabble” means not only “engage in casually,” but also “invest in,” since that is what Maxwell would want to do. So Thornton’s rejection of Henry’s approach is a double one: by asserting that he is “not sure [he] would know how to dabble,” he states an important principle — manufacturing cotton is not a casual enterprise for him — but he also rejects the apparent hint at a possible investment (even if we as viewers imagine that Henry is mostly saying this taunt or subordinate Thornton, a trap into which we are probably happy he does not fall). A smoother man, a man less focused on the one thing — the duty — at the center of his enterprise, would follow up with some kind of patter to provoke a discussion of investment. It’s gotten to the point that the collision of Thornton’s focus on his principles with his financial interests is impendingly obvious. And yet, even now, Mr. Thornton, who is no fool, will not make nice.

The scene closes, then, with Mr. Latimer’s remarks about “starry-eyed Londoners.” As always, in the world of North & South, the technocrat gets the last word. (To foreshadow, I hope tantalizingly: in episode 4, it’s the technocrat rules the day.) In consonance with the resigned way that Thornton looked at the mill yard during his earlier long scene, the viewer is given the sense here that work as a principled attitude toward the world is beginning to rankle on a personal level. If just moments before, he spoke to his audience about technological advances and wonders with enthusiasm, here he describes his machinery, with his jaw clenched, as an obligation. They may admire it, as they are viewing a zoo (a telling choice of metaphor, one that suggests that he himself feels he’s been put on pointless display), but he still “ha[s] to live with it.” His principles may be grim, but he still has them.  Isn’t that the point? Whatever else you don’t have — love, investors — you’ve still got your beliefs. What’s new in Thornton in this scene is not his principles — it’s his clenched jaw, and his apparent resentment of things he claimed before to love. He turns away to end the conversation.

This turn from the camera is one of two points in the series where I sense the greatest identification with Thornton and his moral dilemmas. He feels trapped. Just how trapped, and what he’s willing to do about it, we see in the concluding pieces of episode 3.

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To episode 3c.

~ by Servetus on February 4, 2012.