Knowing Your Place: Location as a Lens on Gender and Class in Houghton’s Hindle Wakes

This essay explores class and gender interactions through various settings which shape Hindle Wakes —Blackpool, Llandudno and Hindle. Houghton draws on audience expectations to infer typical transactions between genders, classes, wealth and power in these spaces. I explore the limitations of Foucault’s theory of the heterotopia and the Bakhtinian concept of the carnival, revealing each to be problematic for the study of the play. Initially, Blackpool and Llandudno seem like heterotopic sites in which societal norms are suspended, and new possible equalities are explored. However, Mary’s death severely complicates this understanding, eroding notions of Bakhtinian carnivalesque and Foucauldian heterotopia. Hindle itself, in its waking, remains the true site of lasting change.

Hindle Wakes tells the story of Fanny Hawthorne’s Wakes Week trip to Blackpool/Llandudno. There, away from the confines of parental oversight, she and Alan Jeffcote, the engaged-to-be-married son of the mill owner, liaise. They return to Hindle for the consequence, where the play begins.

Locations ‘off’ in the play seem to align very closely with Michel Foucault’s heterotopias—spaces in which normal relations are suspended or subverted. Though Cecilia Mello (2020) speaks of Houghton’s play and Foucault’s concept in the same article, theoretical application of Foucault’s ideas on Hindle Wakes remains largely tangential—a more detailed analysis is required, especially given that scenes in Hindle Wakes match some of Foucault’s description so closely. For example, we know how Alan ‘got her to come with me in the car. We went to Llandudno’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 85); that they ‘stopped at St. Elvies Hotel… [as]… Man and wife’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 94). These facts mirror Foucault’s description of heterotopic American motel rooms ‘where a man goes with his car and his mistress and where illicit sex is both absolutely sheltered and absolutely hidden’ (Foucault, 1986, p. 27). Note, further, that ‘Hindle Wakes’ refers to a slice of time where work is suspended—heterochronic, in Foucault’s terms: ‘when men arrive at an absolute break with their traditional time’ (Foucault, 1986, p. 26). In the play, similarly, rigid timetables are redundant: ‘what’s the good of a railway guide? You know trains run as they like on Bank Holiday.’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 33). ¹ New possibilities emerge, and ‘(t)here’s no telling what may happen on Bank Holiday’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 55).

Blackpool might initially be thought a place of pleasure and enjoyment, removed from societal and parental control. Contemporary audiences would likely associate Blackpool with sex. ‘(T)he seaside was often linked with stories of sexual encounters’ (Beetham, 2009,p. 26), and audiences may have half-expected some degree of sexual licence there–‘Blackpool[‘s]… reputation for sexual licence was renown (sic) throughout the country’ (Gurney, 2000, p. 304) in the decades following. ‘(M)uch official publicity material played on the theme [of sin and illicit sex], portraying girls in risqué two-piece swimming costumes…against the omnipresent phallic symbol of the tower’ (Gurney, 2000, p. 305). The air of sexual licence, and the phallic tower, are important in Alan and Fanny’s sexually-charged encounter: ‘I ran into her at the Tower at Blackpool’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 85).

Houghton’s mentions of Blackpool contrast middle-class restraint, resistant to Blackpool’s temptations: ‘wealthy manufacturers who have resisted the temptation to live at… Blackpool’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 45, emphasis added). It is a place where the older generation in the play do not choose to go: ‘Stopped at home? CHRISTOPHER: Ay! Somehow we don’t seem quite as keen on Blackpool as we used to be.’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 49).

Away from a stay-at-home parental oversight, there may be freedom but there is also danger. It is incorrect to characterise the Blackpool events in Hindle Wakes as merely ‘a joyous celebration of the freedom possible at the mass seaside resort’ (Feigel, 2010, p. 36). Critics overlook that in Houghton, Blackpool is a site of potential threat, and even of death.

In a shocking twist of the opening scenes, we are told that ‘Mary Hollins was drowned’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 39). If understood symbolically, the death of (the virgin—?) Mary could signify Fanny’s emergent sexual maturity and womanhood, since Mary’s death occurs simultaneously with Fanny’s Llandudno liaison with Alan. Alternatively, that Fanny outruns traditional forms of ‘social death’ to which those before her were subjected as a result of unmarried sex. Possibly both of these things.

Whether Mary’s death is figurative of Fanny’s sexual maturity, or is to be dramatically understood in social terms, we might look to the important link with Gaskell’s Mary Barton . Recchio is inaccurate in stating that ‘Houghton… uses no names from Mary Barton’ (Recchio, 2012, p. 91). By naming the ‘minor’ character ‘Mary’, Houghton highlights the difference in outcomes between Gaskell’s Esther and Mary and his Fanny. ‘ I’d have been drowned with Mary if I hadn’t gone to Llandudno’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 41), internally references Gaskell’s work through the figure of Mary, as a dramatic counterpoint to the fate of his own heroine. Recchio is, conversely, more right in his argument in light of this fact— ‘ Hindle Wakes makes [Gaskell’s Mary Barton ’s] dream of female agency a reality through dramatizing the awakening of working-class culture in Manchester in 1912 from that oppressive nightmare of female fallenness’ (Recchio, 2012, p. 88). Where Gaskell’s Esther was a fallen woman, liable to social ‘death’, and Gaskell’s Mary (senior) a woman whose attentions are wholly domestic, before dying in childbirth, Fanny stands in stark contrast: a strong, sexualised, working-class New Woman.

Mary’s death in Hindle Wakes complicates an easy reading of the carnivalesque atmosphere that Cecilia Mello (2020) sees in Blackpool and which Beetham elaborates on: ‘The seaside holiday can be understood as a carnival in the Bakhtinian sense… a space and time when social roles were turned upside down and the regulations of the everyday… transgressed safely in that the social order was always reasserted at the end of the day’ (Beetham, 2009, p. 33). Suzanne Clisby’s position on young working-class women at the English seaside is more illustrative of Mary’s position. For Mary, and the women she represents, ‘such young women do not experience ‘carnival’ as the liberating radical utopianism suggested by Bakhtin (1984)’ (Clisby, 2009, p. 63), still subjected to the dominant norms of patriarchal society, and allowed no safe return to order.

Houghton, in keeping with Aristotelian unities of action, time and place, centres his story on the events in Hindle, with plot points in Blackpool recalled from memory through dialogue. In this arrangement, audiences hear of Mary’s death before they learn the truth about events in Blackpool— the events are always viewed with Mary’s death in mind. It is only in later adaptations, like Elvey’s 1927 film, that the events of Blackpool are actively staged at the beginning. It is telling that the film, rather than the written play, is the basis of Mello’s work. By presenting the carnivalesque scenes before we learn of Mary’s death, audiences straightforwardly appreciate the carnivalesque potential, before the fatal consequence has time to modify their understanding.

Foucault’s observations on ‘the mirror’ remain pertinent to Hindle Wakes . In the death of the working-class Mary, Fanny is doubly-abstracted from her formerly unempowered, working-class origin and the typical historical fate of ‘transgressive’ women. Houghton uses the dynamic to positively counterpoint societal change in the status of working-class women, and their sense of self: ‘From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there… I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am.’ (Foucault, 1986, p. 24). Fanny can observe the difference between her changed, New Woman self, and the fates of the ‘fallen’ women of her class that had preceded her.

Blackpool then, in Hindle Wakes , serves as a stage on which to present the perilous (sexual) pleasures newly available to the working-classes, particularly newly well-incomed working-class women. Houghton has summed the developing conditions of the emergent New Woman. Adaptations which actively portray the Blackpool activities, can open up the more Bakhtinian carnivalesque elements, but, after or before, Mary’s death frustrates and negates such readings, and gives Fanny’s rise, as a New Woman, a different emotional timbre.

The split in the action between Blackpool and Llandudno showcases the social divide between classes in the play. The working-class Fanny and Mary are (at least allegedly) holidaying in the working-class Blackpool. In contrast, the wealthier, middle-class, manufacturer’s son is in Llandudno: ‘Alan had telegraphed from Llandudno on Saturday’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 34). This pattern matches one widely observed in the late nineteenth century: ‘where working-class demand was heaviest… the "better-class" visitor began to retreat to quieter and more select holiday and residential haunts’ (Walton, 1981, p. 250)— a fact reflected in the frequent visits there made by the class-conscious Mrs Jeffcote: ‘Llandudno… I’ve been there many a time… I’m so fond of the place’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 67).

The move to Llandudno reflects Alan’s wealth and social status. Alan’s place in society, from a family transitioned into the middle-classes, is well captured by Houghton, who has Alan ‘stopping there. Run short of brass’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 34). His family’s class position has shifted, and Houghton shows travel from a typical of working-class location to a middle class one, though with financial difficulty, as Alan cannot quite touch the settled financial security of established middle-class people.

Furthermore, the entry of the well-incomed working-class Fanny to Llandudno suggests that she is not of the ‘rougher sort’, and also might even be seen as an example of a very upwardly-mobile working-class – a younger version of Mrs Jeffcote, who: ‘has worked at the loom in her time, though you’d never think it to look at her now’(Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 96). This is telling. Mrs Jeffcote’s working-class roots are hidden in her social ascent, illustrating that a choice must be made between social advancement and class solidarity, at least for women of Mrs Jeffcote’s generation.

Alan represents an aspirant middle class, nascently displacing the aristocracy’s privileged position in England. Llandudno ‘was… favoured by the petit bourgeoisie and by the middle and upper-middle classes… middle-class patronage was beginning to eclipse that of the older aristocracy’ (Stuart, 1959, p206, quoted in Parry, 2002, p. 144). This reflects Alan’s self-image as someone: ‘with the confidence of an aristocrat born’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 59).

Middle class characters in the play are keen to defend their class-positions, and in Llandudno, we see this writ large— it aimed to be an exclusively middle class, a distinctly non-working class, resort: ‘except when a cheap trip comes in one seldom sees any of the genus ’Arry and ’Arriet and the behaviour of the throngs who meet on the Promenade daily and nightly is most excellent’ ( Llandudno Advertiser , 28 August 1886, cited in Parry, G. (2002), p. 144).

Llandudno, the haunt of the prejudicial middle-classes, is the place of Fanny’s sexual maturity, but one that is filled with barring exclusivity and possible scorn and danger. Fanny seems obliged to choose between social advancement, abandoning her class position (working-class Blackpool), or to retain class solidarity and accept social death, ‘drowned with Mary if [she] hadn’t gone to Llandudno’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 41). Yet even here, Fanny has taken her pleasure, has asserted her sexual equality with Alan, her ‘little fancy’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 104).

Mary’s death and Fanny’s escape pose challenges to Foucault’s theory. As heterotopia, both Blackpool and Llandudno do not straightforwardly invert societal norms and values, they heighten and enforce them. Mary’s death demonstrates that the norms and values of society are not only still present in the alleged heterotopia, they are made extreme and fatal. Fanny must choose between death in her class or else class-abandonment and self-renunciation in Llandudno, where she must pretend to be a wife, losing even her name, like the women in the generation before her.

The preceding incidents have consequences which are brought back home to the small Lancashire town of Hindle— a place of modernity, where the industrial revolution is working to shape social change. It is there we see reversals of the traditional North/South divide, in gender- and in class-hierarchies.

‘This play is about Lancashire people’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 31), Houghton tells us in the ‘Note on the Lancashire Dialect’. Hindle Wakes is a regional play, albeit one that achieved international recognition. However, Harry Stopes sentimentalises regionality and the provincial in stating that Alan ‘Jeffcote’s worldview, as described by Houghton…did not recognize centres and peripheries, or if it did it reversed them: Manchester was central, London was not.’ (Stopes, 2019, p. 95). A statement which is very wrong, then very right. His view is rather that ‘Manchester he looks upon as the centre…more important than London….[and even that] …Manchester is merely the office for Hindle’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 59). ‘Centrality’ per se has not been rejected, only reformulated. Stopes is overly-romanticising when he jettisons hierarchies of centrality altogether, only to bring them rushing back in again. Audience views are being changed, but not in the way that Stopes would like to imagine.

Houghton chooses Lancashire because it was a real-world centre of large-scale societal change. The region features prominently in the history of the fight for women’s democratic recognition. ‘Lancashire must occupy a special place in the minds of feminist historians. The radical suffragists sprang from an industrial culture which enabled them to organize a widespread political campaign for working women like themselves' (Liddington, 1979, quoted in Massey, 1994, p. 197). In the Lancashire of the time, women were beginning to ‘wake up’, were beginning to find economic independence which led to social empowerment: ‘it was from this base of organized working women that arose the local suffrage campaign of the early twentieth century’ (Massey, 1994, p. 196). Here, Houghton could expose the gender divide and the peculiar socio-economic dynamics of Lancashire mill towns at the time meant that it could be inverted. Emmeline Pankhurst, campaigning for female suffrage in The Importance of the Vote (1908; 2012), elucidates: ‘I know the cotton workers of Lancashire… more women earn wages than men. You find daughters earning more money than their fathers. You find wives earning more money than their husbands’ (Pankhurst, E.(1908), in Moynagh, M., & Forestell, N. (2012), p. 147). Economic prosperity here could lead to inversions of traditional gender dynamics and social emancipation. Fanny herself is acutely aware of this at the close of the play: ‘I’m a Lancashire lass, and so long as there’s weaving sheds in Lancashire I shall earn enough brass to keep me going’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 108).

While the issue of women’s votes isn’t central to the play, we can see in the preceding paragraphs that women’s position and participation are key themes of Houghton’s drama. It is telling that ‘ The Vote , a magazine of the women’s movement recommended a visit of the performance to its readership.’ (Gaberthuel, 1973, cited in Lackermayer, 2008, p. 109). While not a ‘suffrage playwright’ per se , we can see that Houghton, in the depiction of Fanny, does create a lead that addresses many of the concerns typical to those writers: ‘suffrage playwrights… [gave]… their female characters… personal agency… to triumph over… restricted and adverse circumstances … the heroine of suffrage plays… could wake up and recognize her predicament… refuse orthodox ideas about womanhood and positively alter her seemingly untenable circumstances’ (Tilghman, 2011, p. 350, emphasis added).

Houghton does, in fact, reference the issue of female suffrage, which was a live political topic of the era: ‘JEFFCOTE: There’s no fathoming a woman. And these are the creatures that want us to give them votes!’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 106)— failing (perhaps comedically?) to notice that it is precisely the unfathomability of women’s concerns which necessitates their suffrage. The reliability of paternalistic male figures to speak on behalf of the interests of their wives and daughters is further undermined by Christopher: ‘I’ve not said all that my missus told me to say’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 56), meaning that she must come and speak in her own person: ‘JEFFCOTE: If your wife wants to say anything to me, she’s welcome.’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 56). Fanny, too, wants to speak for herself: ‘It doesn’t suit me to let you settle my affairs without so much as consulting me’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 98). Such progress stands in contrast with the attitudes of the conventional, ‘old-fashioned’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 88) Beatrice, who, if her father is to be believed, will ‘do what I tell her’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 82). Such is the patriarchal control, they hardly bother to give her even the most basic information about her circumstances, questioning ‘what’s it got to do with her?’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 75).

And however fair and just Jeffcote seeks to be towards Fanny, he is much less inclined to allow decision-making power to his own wife, telling her: ‘I wear the breeches in this house.’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 71)

Indeed, the prospect of her taking on his work functions is mentioned as a humorous aside, unthinkable: ‘ (Jocularly dropping into dialect.) Eh, lass! Thou’d better come and manage mill thyself’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p48). Mrs Jeffcote recognises her husband’s proclivity for family control, refusing to promote Alan ‘because it would mean parting with some of that power you’re so fond of’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 48).

One character that goes unmentioned in articles on the play, whose daily life is made subservient to the dominant class, and who is largely defined by domesticity, is Ada, the Jeffcote’s maid. We can meaningfully extend Julianne Pidduck’s argument that modern adaptations of period dramas ‘present domestic servants as the ‘silent counterpoint[s]’ to the romance and self-discovery of middle- and upper-class protagonists’ (Pidduck, 2004, p. 123) to the emancipated, working-class Fanny Hawthorne in Houghton’s 1912 drama. Jeffcote’s remark that Ada ‘wants wakening up’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 65), might be well matched with early works in the New Woman, where theorists used similar imagery (See Grand, 1894, p. 271) ² . Indeed, it is surprising that more has not been made of the title of the play, too, given that ‘Hindle Wakes’ could refer to an awakening in outlook of the town, a fact that many critics are silent on.

In terms of wider gender norms, one need not delve far into the play to see that women, while treated formally with ‘respect’—enforcing the obligation to marry a ‘wronged’ woman— are imagined very negatively. Consider how Mr Hawthorne speaks about his own daughter: ‘She won’t be driven, not any road. I had a dog just like her once’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 55). They are subjected to casual domestic violence in their upbringing: ‘CHRISTOPHER: Happen I could have managed lads better. I never could clout a girl properly […] JEFFCOTE: I’d have had a damn good try! (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 55)’. Fanny, however, escapes such patriarchal control, and, conversely, it is Alan that is ‘brought to heel’. By the close of the play, Alan remains in the (albeit grand) parental home, having been the ‘little fancy’ of Fanny, who at the close, is freed from parental control and financially independent.

If gender norms are reversed in the play, then Houghton is no less challenging to traditional class hierarchies. The wealthiest characters of the play are shown to be the coarsest, and Fanny, in a precarious position, is shown to be morally virtuous.

Upon hearing of the affair with Alan, Mrs Hawthorne suspects that Fanny has acted as a ‘gold-digger’, intent upon securing her future with a wealthy husband: ‘I wonder if she’s done this on purpose, after all. Plenty of girls have made good matches that way’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 44). She is defended, surprisingly, by Jeffcote, who reassures his wife that ‘She’s a straight girl... It’s not been a matter of business with her’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 68). The most conclusive evidence of this, of course, is Fanny’s refusal to marry Alan, even when he concedes to it: ‘I don’t want to marry Alan… And what’s more, I haven’t the least intention of marrying him’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 98).

In stark contrast to the principled Fanny, however, stands Sir Timothy Farrar. Stage directions inform us that he is a ‘rough Lancashire man… much the coarsest and commonest person in the play’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 73). Despite being unconcerned with his infidelity, when Alan’s inheritance is jeopardised, Farrar performs a quick volte-face: ‘Dost tell me thou can believe I don’t wish Alan to marry Bee just because of what thou’s said about leaving thy brass? JEFFCOTE: I do’ (Houghton, 1912/2012, p. 82). Farrar is the gold-digger, Fanny not, and the working-class Fanny is morally elevated above the upper-middle-class, Sir Timothy.

Houghton chose Lancashire as his setting because it had a panoply of social classes and gendered situations— allowing much interplay between ideas of New Woman-hood versus traditional patriarchally-dominated roles, both present in the society of the place at that time. In Hindle he shows us real social and political changes being sometimes enacted, as Hindle ‘wakes’.

Houghton’s choice of setting effectively utilises audience expectations of Blackpool, Llandudno and Hindle, subversively demonstrating his heroine’s power to overcome class and gender boundaries. However, Mary’s death in particular poses severe challenges to our understanding of Blackpool and Llandudno as carnivalesque heterotopias. They are not carnivalesque, the humourous element is removed by the tragedy. They are not straightforwardly heterotopic, they magnify rather than invert class and gender prejudices. Later cinematic adaptations like Elvey’s have obscured the extent to which Mary’s death acts as a filter through which to view events. In its true position in Houghton’s play, it frames and colours what we come to learn about the sites of supposed pleasure and freedom. It is in Hindle itself, as a seat of the industrial revolution, that further and lasting change is fought for—Home is where the revolution is.

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