me + mr thornton, episode 4(a)4

[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 this piece will be primarily about work. The previous parts of this piece are episode 4(a)1 and 4(a)2 and 4(a)3.]

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The position that little has changed in Thornton’s makeup is also consistent with the two subsequent scenes in which he appears: his walk to the Princeton District, and the conversation with Higgins to offer him work. At this point I have to express a rare but relatively strong disagreement with the makers of the series, who say in their comments on the episode that in Thornton’s descent to Nicholas’ lodgings, we see Thornton journeying back to his childhood and being confronted again with his own past. They may have given Armitage this stage direction, and he makes it emotionally plausible, but it’s historically inconsistent and also at odds with the Thorntons’ general behavior in the present of the series. A draper’s assistant would not have lived in a setting like this one, nor would Mrs. Thornton have worked as a cloth dyer, nor would Fanny have begged for coins. A better reading for this scene would be that Thornton’s walk down the stairs to the Princeton District reflects a sort of commentary on the insecure foundations of his pride.

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 Mr. Thornton (Richard Armitage) visits Higgins (Brendan Coyle) to offer him work at Marlborough Mills in episode 4 of North & South.

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This scene offers the key evidence for both arguments that Thornton is being transformed by his contact with Margaret, and for evidence of some kind of transformation in sum. But this scene is read much more convincingly as another sort of concession that Thornton feels himself required to make in response to a challenge to his pride, this time in reference to his sense of his own virtue. In other words — the principled person concedes his mistake and apologizes for it: “I spoke to you in a way that I had no business to. I did not believe you. I couldn’t have taken care of a man such as Boucher’s children. I have made inquiries, and I know now that you spoke the truth. I beg your pardon.” The apparent principled quality of that last statement thunders through the episode; Thornton admits he was wrong? To someone like Higgins? It makes it seem like he’s really changed. Or capable of it. But has he? Is he?

Thornton’s explicit statement of his reason for coming has nothing to do with charitable impulses: it is to offer Higgins work. Indeed, Thornton’s statement articulates his perception of Higgins’ virtue and rather than acknowledging the needs of the children, per se, or even Higgins’ desire to support them. Thornton’s words recognize Higgins as a fellow human and his proposed actions atone for the transgressions caused by his pride by proposing an avenue toward accomplishing what Thornton has said he could not do (take care of a man like Boucher’s children). Higgins’ statement in response (a list of the charges with which that Thornton has impugned his virtue — by calling him “impudent,” “a liar,” and “a mischief maker”) also specifically points out Thornton’s failure of honor. Higgins then queries whether Thornton is proposing to get along “for the sake of these of these children,” and Thornton explicitly rejects the idea that his offer involves a proposal to get along well together. Thornton thus broaches neither a charity operation nor an offer of friendship. Higgins, too, insists on his equality in the transaction, not as a recipient of charity, but as someone with principle, who will work honestly for a wage, when he describes himself as thanking Thornton, which gratitude he in turn feels is “a good deal from me.” As Thornton stresses when he shakes Higgins’ hand, he makes only an offer of work, conditional only upon Higgins’ promptness (that is, Higgins’ capacity to make good his claims in the earlier scene about being a steady worker) and upon his willingness not to make labor trouble at Marlborough Mills. In essence, what’s happened here is that Thornton is fulfilling the ethos of a classical liberal about the nature of human (or at least masculine) equality, much more than seeking to undertake any kind of charitable provision for Higgins or Boucher’s children. Margaret may have put this problem in his path, but if we take seriously what Thornton says her, what we perceive to be her charitable ethos is not the motor of the action he takes. Thornton does what he does because he finds Higgins, after checking (“I have made inquiries”), to be worthy of recognition within the scheme of the personhood of all men and the dignity of work. Or, if we want to make reference to the moralistic statements Thornton made in the tea scene of episode 1, Higgins is engaging in the sort of activity for which Thornton so admired his mother and at which he looks back with such self-satisfaction in himself. It’s not the children, or the need to address the social problem that moves him — it’s the principle. And the self-recognition that Thornton feels on the descent to the Princeton District, if it’s occurring, manifests itself differently than in a general conviction about social solidarity or his charitable obligations to his workers.

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Mr. Thornton (Richard Armitage) and Higgins (Brendan Coyle) catch each other’s eyes at the end of a shift in episode 4 of North & South.

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There’s a short scene where Thornton encounters Margaret at her home that I’ll discuss when I get around to their romance, but, sticking in this post to the work theme and its relationship to ostensible transformation: From this point, Higgins is employed at Marlborough Mills, and the explicit confrontation of worldviews that Gaskell so loves finally comes into full force, though not truly between North and South, because both Thornton and Higgins are North. Instead, the confrontation is supposed to be one about attitudes toward work. All of Thornton’s next appearances are about work, and his responses to and attitudes about it. The general visual tone of these scenes is fascinating: dark, as if at best Milton manages a dreary, grey light filtered through coal dust during the day, but simultaneously warm and lamp-lit through the evenings. The people of Milton, it seems, are most loving in the workplace, or in the gloom, or both.

The rhetorical function of these scenes in the series is an attempt to create a sensitive “balance” around the political issues that separate the class interests in Milton (and this objective is one matter that makes this piece an effective one for the classroom). Mr. Thornton has to see the mill workers as industrious and virtuous, and not merely pursuing their own interests at his expense; Higgins (who stands in for the mill workers) has to come to see through Thornton that at least one master can attempt to be more than a parasite. I have to point out that if the series wants to maintain Thornton as a plausible marital prospect for Margaret, as someone whom she can come to see as a gentleman, it can’t simultaneously ask us to see Thornton as a typical master — and thus the project of the series is doomed to failure, simply because Thornton can never be convincingly “north” in the sense of fully embodying the actual ethos of the Milton factory owners. For a meaningful resolution to this faulty problem, and Gaskell’s failure to make North and South really confront each other, the series substitutes the Thornton / Higgins romance, which is founded on a rapprochement that relates to work and the ethos of manhood that surrounds it, and which the series, I think, feels it resolves acceptably.

And this theme is something to which I confess that, despite my reservations about Thornton’s position with regard to financing early in the episode, I respond with the deepest possible emotion, more potent for me, I think, than even my response to the scene in the billiards room with Latimer, in which I see all of my own failures articulated and framed. My response to that information: on the one hand, I adore Thornton for his principles, and I know exactly where he’s coming from; on the other, I am brought to tears by the pride and principle and fear — and guilt, and anxiety about guilt — that kept him from doing what he should have seen he needed to do to keep the mill running.

But here, where he moves back to work, I am never ambivalent. Here is the romance of work as I know it from my childhood, here we see the way that personhood is constituted through activity and commitment, we see how ethics makes us into the only kind of people we can tolerate being, here we learn where all the principles come from and why Thornton can be so unreasonably, unpleasantly tenacious about fulfilling them. Honest work makes an honest man. I see it in the fact that he’s tied himself to his desk, in the way he looks at his accounts, in the way he rubs his forehead and wearily checks his watch, and in the step he takes away from the desk once the mill whistle blows to end the shift. From the point of the series, we see these pieces to set us up for Higgins’ recognitions in the next scene; from my point of view, we see everything here that makes Thornton truly lovable. And Thornton’s sympathy for the child, waiting for Higgins, the seeds of an identification are set that are not about sympathy for a helpless child, but instead about hard work, self-improvement, fidelity — and memories of the past. Steadfastness. Being there. Because, I assume, the reason the child is out so late at night, in the millyard, is that he, too, has been working. This is the real Thornton — not the one distracted by financial problems from the details of what’s happening in the mill yard, but the one who’s on top of every detail, who knows exactly what’s going on, who takes the time to pause and admire and superintend the orderly running of the mill at shift end.

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Margaret (Daniela Denby-Ashe) makes a late supper for Higgins (Brendan Coyle) and Tommy (Spencer Wild), in episode 4 of North & South.

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Higgins gradually recognizes all of this about Thornton, too, after he starts working at Marlborough Mills, and he’s willing to express more than a grudging admiration for his employer. Even more than providing a foundation for Higgins’ softening political position, his recognition of Thornton’s work ethic is important in building up the romance of work because we can finally see Thornton positively through the eyes of someone who is neither his mother or a potential romantic partner, but indeed, an adversary. Higgins may not like Thornton, quite yet, but he has certainly moved toward respect, even noting Thornton’s developing interest in the Boucher boy, who, it seems, Thornton thinks is smart. Again, note that the point here isn’t a general interest in the education of the workers, but a desire to foster growth in someone likely to respond to it.

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Mr. Thornton (Richard Armitage) and Higgins (Brendan Coyle) discuss the possibilities of a factory cafeteria when Thornton learns after a delayed shift end that Tommy (Spencer Wild) hasn’t eaten, in episode 4 of North & South.

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I’m always amused that my students want to call the project that Thornton proposes a “soup kitchen,” and thus turn him into a socialist do-gooder as opposed to a utilitarian liberal. This scene offers the best evidence for the “Thornton’s moral transformation argument,” but it’s still a weak one. Again, it’s really another piece in a mosaic about work that the series script is building for us, one that started in episode 1 with a conversation about a ventilating wheel in the sorting room. The scene here is weighted toward proving to Thornton that even people with union sympathies have an interest in delivering good work — although after his principled declaration that “work wasn’t finished,” Higgins offers a self-interested reason for justifying his desire to keep Marlborough Mills from going under and (apparently) working overtime without pay, thus undercutting his own point. Thornton isn’t suggesting a communal cooking scheme because he feels he’s responsible for paying for it, nor due to expressing any general idea that people should not go hungry, but for purely utilitarian reasons: if men eat well, they work well (something he sees some of his fellow masters as being too short-sighted to recognize — exactly the same argument he made earlier with regard to the ventilating wheel). And feeding Tommy is justified not in terms of supporting children in need of assistance: but so “he’d have fit minds to do his studying.”Again, we see Thornton the detail-oriented master, caring about every detail in his operation, lurking around corners, late at night, when he certainly could be in bed. Thornton, who will work out every detail. Because that is what a principled person does.

These scenes move us in a number of different potential directions as viewers. On the one hand, which warms my heart, we see here a rehabilitation of work as an ordering principle for building a society, one that can unite both manufacturer and worker. Moreover, we see Thornton once again taking refuge in, defending, and living out the sort of principles that he seems to have abandoned — to his own self-disgust — in episode 3. It’s as if, after having his foundation shaken by after his self-betrayal with regard to Margaret, Thornton’s finally realized again what’s important and come back to the roots: work, and production. And, as we know, we are seeing him go down with the ship. If it’s pride that’s at work here, at least pride in something we can subscribe to. If, on the other hand, we suspect that this was a road he would not have to go down, one which he is traveling due mostly to his pride, what we see through the trajectory of his failure as a manufacturer is a stronger, even more insistent insistence on the kind of ethos he espoused at the beginning of the series, particularly in episodes 1 and 2. In short, I would argue, Thornton does not really change. Or, if you must have that he changes: in the face of strike, failed proposal, and financial downturn / failed financing, he becomes in the end more fully the person he was all along, more fully committed to the things he had always believed. And the fact that he does so when they serve nothing at all, when they can bring him little or no hope for gain, either in terms of winning fair maiden or even keeping control of his factory, makes me respect, love, and identify with him even more.

Perhaps the most concrete demonstration of Thornton’s reinvigorated capacity to live up to his own principles can be found in the scenes that follow, which depict an apparent developing collegiality or even friendship with Higgins.

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Waited upon by Mary (Kay Lyon), Mr. Thornton (Richard Armitage) and Higgins (Richard Armitage) eat together in the makeshift cafeteria at Marlborough Mills in episode 4 of North & South.

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The script really falls down on the audience here — Thornton’s musing here that he wouldn’t have eaten “stew” recently is a laughably blatant social and cultural history boner — but beginning with this scene, we see that emotions between the men, which started on the basis of a willingness to acknowledge each other as principled actors, and then the verification on both sides that the other was honest, steady, industrious, and not solely self-interested, can now move further. They have recognized each other as men of principle. Again, I don’t think this represents a transformation on Thornton’s side so much as an acknowledgement, or awareness, that he has finally met someone in Milton who is fundamentally at least potentially like him. And here we see, also, that Higgins has become able to see Thornton as a person, and to notice not only his principled industry, but the way in which it makes him lonely …

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Higgins (Brendan Coyle) informs Mr. Thornton (Richard Armitage) of the death of Mr. Hale in episode 4 of North & South.

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…which is why it is significant that Higgins (rather than anyone else in the series script) is the one who recognizes what a shock Mr. Hale’s death will be to Thornton. Higgins can see Thornton’s pain and struggle because he, too, has struggled to serve a vision that ultimately was not convincing enough to his fellows that it could be realized; Higgins sees in Thornton (and gradually, Thornton in Higgins) a man of romantic principle. In the end, then, it’s the theme of work that brings Thornton and Higgins together precisely because it is the single thing that could allow both of them to see each other as principled people who have, and will, suffer for their espousal of principle: with the misunderstanding of their families and their fellows, with the need to work long hours, with the imminent threat of the failure of personal and social vision. In the end, then, the friendship with Higgins is not an index of Thornton’s capacity to change so much as it is a reaffirmation to Thornton, and the viewer, that the principled, proud person Thornton was all along is who the renewed focus on work of episode 4 rehabilitates him to be. Thornton does not change substantially in episode 4; he becomes even more, returns to being the person he was all along.

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to 4(a)5, which I hope to post tomorrow

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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 29, 2012.