me + mr thornton, episode 4(a)2

[Previous pieces of the argument: the prologue; here episode one; here episode two; continuing with (episode 3a), (episode 3b), (episode 3c), and (addendum to episode 3). Same disclaimers / warnings apply as in previous posts. A short reminder of the way I started this series in the prologue: “What I write about Thornton … I also write of myself.” This is not a historical, but rather a personal, interpretation. Also, a quick reminder that in my interpretation I’m reading from the series alone as a document and my capacity for critical perspective on it as a human and a historian — I don’t consider the book centrally in these interpretations because I didn’t read it until I had seen the series approximately twenty times.]

[This episode is also going to require more than one installment of analysis. I’m thinking that 4(a) will be primarily about work. To make reading and commenting more easy than writing this material was, however, I’m dividing 4a into several chunks. The previous piece of episode 4 commentary is here (episode 4[a]1). There are two more pieces to this; I hope to publish them by Monday evening.]

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The apparent self-assurance of Mr. Thornton (Richard Armitage) at his sister’s wedding, here with his presumed marital interest, Anne Latimer (Lucy Brown), in episode 4 of North & South, signals everything about his performance of moral, personal, and social status in Milton. And we see it all reflected in her eager, admiring eyes: pillar of the church, upstanding man, wealthy factory owner, milieu-appropriate wedding. Of course, the second before, he’s glanced over to where Margaret is standing. Pride is an ambivalent source of self-esteem; it only means something when others notice. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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“No one could accuse me of being careless … or frivolous,” Thornton spits out. Principled behavior? Or pride in principled behavior?

If a transformation is occurring for Thornton in the series, I would argue, it develops in the progression of his responses to the experience of successively more effective challenges to his pride, just as much as (or in my opinion, rather than) his exposure to Margaret. I’ll argue below that Thornton’s larger principles don’t change much. Here I want to talk about the role of pride — by which I mean a sense of satisfaction in his own (social, moral, personal) rightness and an emotional attachment to same — in his decision-making.

Challenges to Mr. Thornton’s pride are clear in episode 1, at his second meeting with Margaret, in which he’s schooled by Margaret’s insistence that he’s not a gentleman, and by Mr. Hale’s hesitation at his announcement of his mother’s call, and when Margaret refuses to shake his hand as he takes his leave. The challenges are compounded in episode 2, when, even after he explains to her both his basic philosophical position in the millyard, and the specific application of it with regard to the strike at the dinner party, she refuses his proposal. Finally, the security of his attachment to his rightness is rubbed in his face in episode 3, when of his own volition, he abandons important ideals to hide her lies from Mason’s view for a reason (whatever it is — we differed on that in our discussion of it) that obviously fills him with self-disgust and rage. These are challenges, respectively, to the pride he feels in his social status, in his equality as a man of worth equal to that of any gentleman, and, finally, in his personal integrity and code of ethics. At the end of episode 3, however, he still has pride in his work in which to take refuge — the importance of this signaled by his grim mention of at the end of the Crystal Palace scene. And this, in the end, is what the narrative of episode 4 threatens to take away from him, and then, insofar as the loss of Marlborough Mills manages this, does take away.

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Mr. Thornton (Richard Armitage) at work, in episode 4 of North & South. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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Episode 4, in its focus both on work (in it, we’re finally granted repeated glimpses of Thornton active at his place of work) and its narrative trajectory toward the failure of Marlborough Mills, traces the contours of the last refuge of, and final destruction of, his pride. If he has nothing else in the world, Thornton has his work, and this episode gives us numerous glimpses of how involved he is in it. His work is the last piece of pride, and principle, that he has — and how he clings to both.

The thing is, and this is a complicated matter to assess: what is the relationship between principle and pride in principle? Didion commented in a remark on episode 2, which heavily treats the failure of people around Thornton to understand what he’s about, that despite his insistence that his principles are right, Thornton sells himself poorly to everyone around him. He serves a thing that only he can see. He can’t convince anyone of his vision, not even his mother, who loves him, not even his fellow manufacturers, who express their reluctant admiration of his success alternately with jibes and incomprehension. As long as he’s successful he’s invulnerable, of course, and as long as he’s invulnerable he doesn’t need to convince anyone else, but no one is invulnerable forever. I watch the billiards room scene, and I want so much to identify with Thornton because his issues are exactly mine. I am a professional, I know what I’m doing, I’m not willing to cut corners, I’m not willing to put others in the path of harm. If someone is going down in a mess that I can’t control, it’ll be me — not the people who are less able to protect themselves. This is principle, and it is correct to be principled. It is also pride — *I* will not let people down — which creates an inability to see when one’s principles are creating problems; or perhaps a stubborn insistence that one will pay the price, no matter what. But in any case, pride is a huge obstacle to growth, and a problematic one that distracts from fundamental issues at the worst possible moments.

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Under pressure to repay his loan to Mr. Latimer’s bank, Mr. Thornton (Richard Armitage) expresses his views on “idiot money schemes” in episode 4 of North & South. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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As much as it pains me to say this (and if you knew the exact details of the parallels in my life to the failure of Marlborough Mills that I draw in my head when I watch episode 4, you might better understand just how badly it it does), I have to take seriously the possibility that Thornton’s pride in following his principles contradicts his actual principles, and this potential contradiction is openly visible in the conversation with Latimer. In the world in which Thornton lives, the success of his mill is dependent on market forces that operate outside of his entire control. His failure is not one of having borrowed money, or even having borrowed money at the wrong time — every capitalist manufacturer borrows; every manufacturer is a Hochstapler — but rather a failure to capitalize out of his borrowing. Given the situation in which he finds himself globally, with reference to the entire market, the financial stability of his manufacturing enterprise is dependent not just on borrowing to manufacture (a non-speculative necessity that he has clearly accepted), but on creating a balance of investment to keep his capital flow in place across periods of difficulty and shocky commodity and manufactured goods markets like the ones he’s just experienced (and which were notoriously common in the newly-globalized and globalizing nineteenth century).

Thornton won’t speculate — which is understandable, as we are told in episode 1 that this was the reason for the demise of his father. But, if the point of his principle, and the reason he continues to espouse to our ears the utilitarian aspects of the logic of classical liberalism, is not harming others, then in choosing not to speculate, he has learned the wrong lesson. (It’s not this particular speculation I mean, by the way — that’s just a device to advance the plot — but instead, in the sense that Mr. Latimer offers in the billiards room, the resort to “more modern financial procedures” as a general policy; or in the sense that Fanny means when she superficially articulates the viewpoint that all business is risk; or in the sense that Margaret means when she expresses her surprise to Fanny that Thornton would contemplate participating in a risky venture.) In short, if Thornton’s goal is not to harm others, he has to do whatever he must to keep his mill in business, since a failure harms precisely the people to whom he is presumably referring. In the end, the calculation about any particular investment has to be his; but his refusal to participate in modern financing altogether clearly puts him at an unacceptable risk — and ultimately in an untenable position. By refusing to get with the times, Thornton is putting his pride in maintaining his principle (“don’t speculate”) over his adherence to the substance of the actual principle (which is articulated more fully in this episode than in anywhere else in the series as “don’t harm others”). I understand that the issues involved are acute for him because of the role his father’s failure played in the developing course of his life — and clearly, the insistence on repaying his father’s creditors, who’d given up hope of repayment, is as much a matter of fulfilling to the letter the demands of traditional morality as of pride. But by refusing to protect himself financially, Thornton takes exactly the same kind of risk for which he blames his father and for the outcomes of which he has already been paying almost all of his life. In the end, then, his principles make him as much of a utopian dreamer as both his father, the failed speculator, and Margaret, the failed moralist. He prefers, apparently to substitute a belief in the possibility of an outcome that is futile for an honest self-assessment of the actual applicable circumstances. And as a result, he fails in exactly the way that both of them have.

What Mr. Thornton doesn’t understand: you can get so preoccupied with maintaining the principle that you lose track of what’s important about the principle.

What Mr. Latimer understands, and Mr. Thornton doesn’t: if you don’t play the game everyone is playing, eventually you will not be playing at all.

You can ask yourself: do you want to play at all? That’s a legitimate question. But it’s generally not answered in the negative by people who are playing as enthusiastically as Thornton appears to be, all the way up until the last twenty minutes of episode 4. The reading that the message of the series concerns stopping to smell the roses is confounded slightly by the fact that, apart from the romance, the only signal in that direction is Thornton’s tense farewell from the Crystal Palace exhibition. That piece of evidence is significant for a different reading of this story, and I will come back to it. But even so, it’s not entirely clear from the last episode that stopping the game is anything Thornton wants to do, despite his struggles with the business. He may not be happy every second, but he’s involved and he’s proud of the nature of his involvement. The failure of Marlborough Mills — that most personal of all of Thornton’s enterprises, so personal that, as his mother notes, he houses his family inside of it, as a witness to all his achievements — is a failure not only of business, and skill, and principled behavior, but the exposure that the role his pride in all of these plays in their demise. It is a failure of vision, so that when he loses Marlborough Mills, in short, he loses everything.

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[So, in the conflict between work and virtue as their own reward, and the possibility that Thornton misunderstands his own principles because he’s blinded by his emotional attachment to them, and thus causes his own demise, I have at least to consider the possibility that the reading offered above is more accurate than the one I’d prefer. G-d, it hurts to write that.]

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to episode 4(a)3.

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Don’t forget about the North & South global rewatch, scheduled for June 1 and 2! Times are here. Directions for connection are here.

~ by Servetus on May 27, 2012.