The Opiate of the Masses, also Opium

Mary Barton is just swimming in Christian allusions, quotations, and right-out dogma, an overall message of faith that seems hardly believable in ones who suffer so, who are at every end desperate and forced into such material, physical, and moral strife that is hard to believe any kind of practical end could come from it, if we are to believe men like Engels. The message placates the rage of revolution Engels sought to incite, puts manna in the place of bread, in mouths starving for the latter, and ultimately dethrones Mary’s father from his position of steadfast and upright proletarian martyr-soldier. So, is religion here the “opiate of the masses”? How much of this unyielding martyr’s piety is authentic to a man or woman of this time, place, and station, once forced into such a perpetually hard and desperate lifestyle of labor, the only pay for which is clemming? This question comes as the result of another that this novel inspires: That of justice. In Mary Barton, just as in Silas Marner, we are introduced to the grass roots version of social government. Law enforcement is at best inept, and it is always incomprehensible to the uneducated poor. Critical decisions are made by the drawing of lots, and courts of public opinion, such as the tavern in Eliot’s novel and Jem’s factory in Gaskell’s, make decisions of real social significance that, in Mary Barton’s case especially, supersede the opinions of courts. But, like religion, the institution of justice in Mary Barton is something reconstructed by peasants in ways that make it just as accessible and practical to them as Gaskell’s novel argues, as it is intellectually restrictive and counter-productive to Engels’ conjured image of the people of post-industrial England, contented by their Bibles but “intellectually dead” and somehow complacent and unprepared in the sweeping changes that were altering their world. What Gaskell’s and Engels’ works share, however, is that their visions of solutions were hypothetical, invisible hands like Smith’s marketplace Providence: Gaskell, lost in the whimsical dream of laborers, “bound to their employers by ties of respect and affection,” with, “the Spirit of Christ as the regulating law” (374); Engels, in his own fantasy of some unified class-consciousness, “‘One and Indivisible’ Mankind” (10), leading up to actions as glorious and decisive as the Americans’ or as bloody and perpetual as France’s. And then, of course, there’s the opium, or the tobacco, or the alcohol. Oh yes, and let’s not forget the starvation. These things, like religion, do placate, but, to use Steinbeck’s terms in a context at once both anachronistic and likely upsetting to the later-day socialist, they “are the effect, not the cause.” There is a complicated irony in Marx’s phrase, “opiate of the masses,” as a reference to religion. Yes, religion placates an otherwise revolutionary, i.e.: violent, citizen, but, as we see in Mary Barton, religion is equally as effective at building the kind of moral reserve it requires to face adversity. Christ may be good, but opium was a lot more accessible, and it is but for that “golden thread” that only one character, John Barton, gives in to it, and then only after his faith is broken. While it is clear that Gaskell is motivated by the combination of a desire for class diplomacy and a somewhat naive Christian imagination, a strong, practical case for religion is made in her novel, but less by her dialog or asides than by the place where her characters don’t go: Church. The closest thing we get to a church scene is tea-time, but for these people, cut off from the pastoral institutions that Engels so bitterly scoffs at, this humble convention takes up all of the functions of a formal religious institution, and, like justice, its urban-industrial incarnation is the customized product of a particular need: It isn’t top-down from some ideologue puppet-master. It’s bottom-up, from the people who carry the Word into their homes. We spoke in class of the absence of access to healthy foods in working-class neighborhoods, but, for this brief defense of religion, I will offer another example of something common to such working-class towns: An omnipresence of both liquor stores and evangelical churches.