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  • Ghosts in the Machina:Plotting in Chartist and Working-Class Fiction
  • Rob Breton (bio)

In much Chartist and working-class fiction, a deus ex machina rescues protagonists and authors alike from what appear to be insoluble complexities of narrative. As the name implies, the "god from the machine" is a mechanical, contrived, and formulaic solution to human problems that denies process as it capitulates to an audience's desire for a comforting resolution. According toFrancis Dunn, the critique of the deus ex machina is as old as the device itself. He translates the comic poet Antiphanes, who complains that the device "covers up the incompetence of tragic poets":

when they don't know what to say, and have completely given up on a play, just like a finger they lift the machine and the spectators are satisfied. here is none of this for us.

(27)

Modern critics have continued the attack. "The god from the machine," argues Gilbert Norwood,

has long been a byword as a shameless expedient whereby a playwright "cuts the knot" and flounders out of a complication in which his own incompetence has ensnared him. Anyone who forces his plot to conclude "satisfactorily" after all with a violent jerk, unjustified by the preceding action, deserves ruthless condemnation—if he writes tragedy or comedy.

(19)

Machina plotting devices have had many detractors, from those who see them as inartistic, all-too-convenient coincidences used to bring about simple resolutions to those who see them, at best, as concessions to convention. Even TV Guide was outraged when Patrick Duffy returned from the dead and declared an entire season of Dallas a bad dream.

Others, however, have seen in the dues ex machina important ideological and artistic possibilities. Dunn suggests that the ancient [End Page 557] Greek machina can be "the most spectacular agent of...subversion," capable of "challenging the privileged role of tragedy as a literary and cultural model" (42). In The Threepenny Opera (1931), Bertolt Brecht uses a machina to emphasize the discomforting artificiality of fictive resolution. The idea—that a deus ex machina can be subversive, undercutting generic conventions and challenging cultural assumptions—is also applicable to a great deal of Chartist and working-class fiction. From Chartist stories in the 1840s to Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914), melodramatic aspects of plotting often include deus ex machina devices. Ian Haywood has argued that melodrama is implicitly democratic, and that in "the light of this... understanding, it would be wrong to judge melodrama as an early form of debased mass culture providing mythical resolutions to historical conflicts" ("Editor's Introduction," Woman's xx). In much melodrama and working-class fiction, the deus ex machina constitutes a highly interesting "ideologeme," to use Fredric Jameson's term for "the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes" (76). The new generic allowances that measure text by context and story by history should be extended to the most extreme device of melodrama in Chartist and working-class fiction, the deus ex machina.

In one of Haywood's anthologies of Chartist fiction, The Literature of Struggle, five of the stories involve blatant miracles: Thomas Cooper's "Seth Thompson, the Stockinger" (1845), and four anonymous tales, "The Widow and the Fatherless" (1838), "Will Harper: A Poor-Law Tale" (1838), "The Defender: An Irish Tale of 1797" (1840), and "The Young Seamstress" (1847). "A favorite device, frequently turned to by Chartist writers," writes Martha Vicinus, "was the rewarding of the poor but virtuous through an inheritance or the benevolence of a wealthy outsider" (11). This device was used long after the Chartist 1840s—in, for instance, D. F. E. Sykes and George Henry Walker's Ben O'Bill's, the Luddite: A Yorkshire Tale (1898) and Stacey W. Hyde's "The Apprentice" (1924). Add to these examples the novel that for many defines working-class fiction, Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, with its notorious closing sequences in which Barrington, a well- to-do member of the middle class, at least temporarily resolves the crises of the working-class heroes. This is an incomplete list, but one that nonetheless suggests a pattern. In all these stories we...

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