\u201cIt was scarcely ten minutes since he had entered the house, and found Mary at comparative peace, and now she lay half across the dresser, head hidden in her hands, and every part of her body shaking with the violence of her sobs. She could not have told at first (if you had asked her, and she had commanded voice enough to answer) why she was in such agonised grief. It was too sudden for her to analyse, or think upon it. She only felt, that by her own doing her life would be hereafter blank and dreary. By-and-by her sorrow exhausted her body by its own power, and she seemed to have no strength left for crying.\u201d<\/p>\n
–Mary Barton<\/em>, page 131<\/p>\n This moment occurs just after Mary has turned Jem\u2019s offer of marriage down, and he has left the house in a rush. Mary is left to her own devices as she realizes the weight of her words and has a breakdown. The scene is incredibly tense. The tone created by Jem\u2019s anger shifts to Mary\u2019s despair, leaving a hollow feeling. There are few directly duplicate words in this section- most of them are similar to each other, and they deal with the strain of emotion on the physical body. \u201cShaking\u201d, \u201cagonized\u201d, \u201cblank\u201d, \u201cgrief\u201d, and \u201ccrying\u201d, all point towards the aftermath of an emotionally fraught situation. There\u2019s this sense of weariness, of heaviness, that has been weighing on Mary since she started seeing Henry, and now it finally drags her down, both physically and emotionally.<\/p>\n There\u2019s only one mention of a word that stands in stark contrast to Mary\u2019s despair, and that is \u201cpeace\u201d. But even then, it is written as \u201ccomparative peace\u201d, which is fair. The emotional burdens Mary has been carrying for some time- her father\u2019s luckless attempts for political change, her own wish to avoid Jem while secretly courting Henry, and even stress from events that have long since passed such as deaths of family friends- have finally spilled over, much in the same manner as she lies across the dresser.<\/p>\n There becomes a split between what Mary wants now and what she thought she wanted. On one hand, it is about her heart and her emotions, who she really loves, and on the other, it is about her hope and her logic- she hopes she can marry Henry Carson for a chance at a better life for herself, even if it means tricking herself about what she really feels. It also points to class struggle of the era- the chances of Mary genuinely being able to climb the social ladder were slim in the first place, but now they are gone completely. Not only that, but Mary has made the decision for herself- it was not entirely an outside force that caused this. Perhaps it is more about her dream, the possibility that came with it and the loss of opportunity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cIt was scarcely ten minutes since he had entered the house, and found Mary at comparative peace, and now she lay half across the dresser, head hidden in her hands, and every part of her body shaking with the violence of her sobs. She could not have told at first (if you had asked her, … Continue reading Stress and Despair in Mary Barton<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4980,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[344620],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2022"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4980"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}