What We're Reading Now: "The Problems with the Pillow Plot" by Mary Mullen
Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South connects to my marriage from the very beginning. A dear friend from England who couldn’t travel to the U. S. for the wedding ceremony sent a paper bouquet made from the pages of the novel. She had heard me present my research on this novel years before. I was moved by her thoughtfulness and carried the bouquet in the ceremony.
I remember thinking that North and South wasn’t the novel that I’d choose to mark my marriage. I’m not really like the novel’s stately heroine, Margaret Hale, who carries herself with pride, although I tried to channel her walking down the aisle. I’m modest, wear wrinkly clothes and have a tendency to slouch. And my ex-husband isn’t anything like Mr. Thornton, the capitalist with a heart of gold whom Margaret eventually weds. My ex-husband’s more like an anti-capitalist with aristocratic tendencies. Mr. Thornton would hate him on both counts. Unlike he and Margaret, my ex and I hardly represented the merger of cultural differences. Although my ex-husband always insisted on the distinctions between Minnesota (his home state) and Wisconsin (mine), we were just two Irish Americans from the Midwest. My biggest objection, though, was that the novel makes marriage do too much: it solves social problems. I had no illusions that marrying the man I loved was going to change the world. I just wanted to be happy and to try to make my husband happy, too. And I guess if I’m being honest, I wanted to please my mom.
After the end of our marriage, North and South came to mean something else entirely: it taught me to let it rip.
In North and South, Margaret Hale is a problem solver. Early in the novel, her father decides to leave his position as a minister of the Church of England, uprooting his family from their rural home to follow his conscience. He can’t bear to tell his wife of his decision. He asks Margaret instead to break the news to her mother, help him make the plans, and warns her not to voice any of her objections because it will make him too sad. Devastated that her father has become a heretic, Margaret nevertheless does what he says. She deftly works to assuage her mother’s distress, shifting the conversation away from her father’s behavior and toward Milton-Northern, the industrial town where they’ll move. She solves her parents’ problems but the conversation takes a toll; when Margaret finally gets time alone, she throws herself onto her bed and cries into a pillow.
Of course Margaret Hale is a problem solver; North and South is a social problem novel. It represents the growing problems of industrialism: poverty, unjust working conditions, hunger, disease, and warns against working-class people’s attempts to solve these problems through trade unions, strikes, and riots. The novel begins with Margaret solving personal problems and then she takes it on the road. Soon she’s mediating between workers and mill owners in Milton-Northern, disrupting riots, and offering sympathy to the forlorn. Eventually, Margaret’s problem solving gets her a husband—the mill owner, Mr. Thornton, who she’s long loved—and prepares the way for a reformed capitalism that will supposedly address the social problems facing nineteenth-century England.
The novel presents Margaret as a rational thinker who can handle her mother’s weak constitution, absorb the emotional fallout from her father’s idealism, and care for workers even when she questions their understanding of political economy. Her ability to handle difficult situations impresses everyone. Her mother’s doctor declares her to be “a fine girl” because she can steadfastly hear the news of her mother’s terminal illness. Even the disapproving Mrs. Thornton, who dislikes her because she thinks no one is good enough for her son, is impressed by Margaret’s “pride and spirit” in confronting Mrs. Thornton’s not-so-subtle digs. Margaret outwardly appears a willful woman unafraid of the world, but alone she continues to collapse into muffled sobs.
Teaching the novel just days after I decided to end my marriage, I was a complete and utter mess. I could barely eat and couldn’t sleep. I vibrated two inches from my body—disconnected from myself but still able to experience a great deal of distress. I’d cry my entire 45-minute commute to campus, scurry into my office, close the door and then cry some more. I’d try to make myself presentable for teaching only to start crying as I walked to class. I kept my head down and avoided the gaze of others. I tried my best to be present and engaged for the entire 75-minute class but I wondered about the students’ experience. Worrying about being a problem rather than a professional, I’d start crying again after class.
Until my divorce, I never really noticed just how frequently Margaret Hale cries. But my semi-public unraveling helped me see her in a new light. The marriage plot presents Margaret as a rational problem-solver—a model to look up to. But the novel’s pillow plot—those private moments when Margaret can’t stop herself from crying but still tries to quiet her sobs so that no one hears—reveals that a commitment to rationality and self-restraint only works for so long.
Like Margaret Hale, I was unpracticed in the art of feeling feelings. I learned early on how to listen to other people’s emotions and soothe their distress. I didn’t choose to be a problem solver—I was assigned this role. My family relied on me to be rational, use self-restraint and balance the more fiery tempers of my mother and sisters. Because, like Margaret, I often cried when I was alone, I never considered myself as practicing self-restraint. I thought of myself as too emotional. I thought the real problem was that I felt too much.
I realized something was wrong with this role when I started dating my ex-husband. On vacation with him, my mom, and my sister, my mom took me aside to express her delight in how well he was getting along with my sister. She then followed up: “You should let him date her. She has such a difficult time meeting people, and you get along with men so easily.” I couldn’t quite believe what she was saying. When I asked my mom if she was serious, she was surprised by my irritation. “You’re so overly sensitive,” she laughed.
At first, my ex-husband tried to support me in my efforts to abandon the role of problem solver and live life on my terms. He’d remind me that what I wanted mattered and warned me against becoming a “pure externality”—that is, an interiority defined entirely through other people’s emotions. But it got complicated quickly. Eventually I felt like he, too, depended on me prioritizing his emotions. During one fight near the end of our relationship, my ex-husband calmly told me that I was selfish when I used “When you ____, I feel _____ because ______” statements in our conversations. I tried to explain how such a declaration made me feel but that only made matters worse. Around this time, I stopped sleeping.
At the time, I thought I was repressing my feelings out of love. Looking back, I know I was also acting out of fear.
In a 1981 keynote address to the National Women’s Studies Association, Audre Lorde encourages women to use their anger—to not let it give way to guilt or be silenced by fear. She suggests that anger is the proper response to injustice. She keeps it concrete, cataloguing the many racist behaviors enacted by white feminists that can only be answered through rage. She also warns that white women don’t always get it; they can’t handle Black women’s justifiable anger toward them and they can’t feel their own. One white woman asks Lorde for instructions on how to feel her anger. Lorde turns the question back to her: “How do you use your rage?” Then she notes, “I have to turn away from the blank look in her eyes, before she can invite me to participate in her own annihilation. I do not exist to feel her anger for her.”
White women are well-practiced in acts of self-annihilation that also harm others. They turn themselves into ghosts—disembodied spirits, out of touch with their own feelings, afraid of the embodied feelings of others. I was one of these ghosts.
I could rage about social problems—the unjust structures of institutions, the mediocrity of white men, the exploitation baked into the system of things—but I couldn’t embody anger on my own behalf. I spent the summer marching in the streets in the midst of an uprising, screaming “No justice, no peace” until my voice was hoarse. It felt important to use my body to disrupt the all too ordinary rhythms of white supremacist violence; and yet, at the same time, I didn’t feel the same certainty about my marriage. I knew that it had become a tired sexist structure and I ended it out of exhaustion. But exhaustion is not anger. The settlement document dividing our assets granted him over 65% of our shared things. Seeing the numbers, I nearly vomited. I asked him if he thought this settlement was fair. Yes, he quickly wrote back. I told him that it made my stomach hurt and let things be. I wanted the relationship to end without a fuss and I was afraid of upsetting him. As Lorde suggests, taking the easy way out has consequences.
“When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar,” Lorde asserts. I desired the insight of anger—I welcomed it in. But during the end of my marriage and throughout the divorce, I was stuck in the deadly and safely familiar—feeling shame and forcing others to witness my self-annihilation. Anger brings knowledge and inspires change. I knew this abstractly—I agreed wholeheartedly with Audre Lorde. Yet I couldn’t practice it in my own life. The resulting blankness was horrible—for me, for others. I wanted out of the pillow plot.
No one ever encourages Margaret Hale to use her anger. Instead, this woman who has “despised people for showing emotion—who have thought them wanting in self-control” becomes the exemplar of emotional labor in the novel.
As critics have long lamented, North and South doesn’t address structural conditions, it seeks to change hearts and minds. Mr. Thornton becomes “master over his own anger” and learns to curb his resentments toward his workers. In turn, a worker, Nicholas Higgins, begins to worry about his employer’s “woeful looks.” The novel acknowledges that there will still be social inequality and strikes but celebrates the fact they will no longer be “bitter, venomous sources of hatred.” Now that mill owners have sympathy for their workers and their workers have sympathy for them, everything will feel better even if nothing really changes.
But Lorde argues that there is a different way. For her, “anger is loaded with information and energy.” This information and energy can transform the world and make structural change. It is embodied knowledge. But acquiring this knowledge is not easy. Fear of its force can also lead to self-annihilation and keep deadly things familiar and firmly in place. Trying to access my anger and use it as Lorde suggests, I found myself wondering why the novel worked so hard to create a social world where everyone cries alone. What’s so bad about feeling feelings rather than managing them? What would it mean for feelings to be public rather than private affairs?
It doesn’t take much digging to see that however much love the novel has for workers (not really very much, it turns out), it also has a great deal of fear. A dramatic riot scene supposedly illustrates the unruly public emotions that must be managed through personal interactions and force of will. Gaskell describes the free-floating affects: “there was a restless, oppressive sense of irritation abroad among the people; a thunderous atmosphere, morally as well as physically.” Margaret has no capacity to understand this, she feels the force of these public feelings but “she did not know what they meant—what was their deep significance.”
Analyzing this passage in class with a stomach ache and swollen eyes, I found myself wanting to learn about the “deep significance” of this public feeling, too. Not so I could comfort others—I longed for my problem-solving days to be relegated to the past—but so my own restless irritation could be released into the world. For me, this thunderous atmosphere did not seem oppressive, although Gaskell insists that it was. It seemed almost utopic—here was a group of people who refused to stay home and muffle their sobs. They trusted that their emotions were telling them something that others had to hear. They were sharing their insight. They were letting it rip.
Mary Mullen writes and teaches in Philadelphia. She has published work in the Chicago Review, North Dakota Quarterly, The Nonconformist Magazine, The Rambling, and Hyped on Melancholy. She is currently writing a hybrid memoir, “Ghosts in the Marriage Plot.”
