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North South (changes)

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Folks

• Margaret Hale , a pinball between passion and self-control, spirited, focused, bold, but loving and in need of love, our incipient feminist and sympathizer to the poor and trammeled, who overcomes her prejudice towards “the trades” and loses her feeling of superiority over the bourgeois community. Intolerable in her pride and stuffy in her prim religious self-righteousness, heroically stoic for her family but an emotional mush-ball within, afraid of her own sexuality, she is quite the Victorian heroine. Her attitude is so mid-Victorian, I can’t stand it: her charity is not at all forward-looking or even appropriate for Milton. A clergyman’s daughter from the gentle rural South, she models her philanthropy after old-school, traditional forms of outdoor relief, as well as the tradition of care given directly to folks by the family of the clergymen. Ultimately, her attitude towards the downtrodden is conservative even while her feminism is forward-looking. As a member of a class, she is curious, having the blood of aristocracy, yet really aligned w/”gentlemanly occupations,” she is half and half, just like her upbringing (arithmetically half in London, half in rural Helstone), partially a poorish gentlewoman (dependent on aunt for good living) and partially a rich heiress (when Mr. Bell dies), making her ideal to represent whole South. Blows to her reputation, as well as the deaths/absences of loved ones, are the final spurs to her development, in which she gains humility but confirms her good morals (honesty, dignity, generosity, etc), balancing will with prayer: so she’s not a scary feminist. Darn.

• Mr. Hale , the clergyman whose religious doubts (about the institution of the Church and its orthodoxy) precipitate the events narrated. Like the figures of pious doubters illustrated by Woolf, Strachey, and other modernists reflecting on their predecessors, he only has stormy brooding and bewilderment to throw at this new world. His Oxonian quotations provide an irrelevant though charming discourse to the book, showing that culture as such won’t help class relations, except insofar as it is religious.

• Frederick Hale , also questioning authority, as his sister and father do. He only mutinied because of the tyranny of an unfair, barbarous superior, but England don’t care about good intentions. His dangerous return to England to see his mother’s deathbed gets Margaret compromised, making her lie and be seen with an unidentified man away from home at dusk! !! He shows that rebellion entails consequences that must be obeyed, even if you are ethically correct.

• Mrs. Hale , who did not marry well for according to her family’s standards, proves Margaret’s aristocratic background She’s the hypochondriac, complaining mother who becomes respectably only through her actual illness and death. Comic.

• Aunt Shaw , who also suffers from imaginary slights and imaginary problems, represents shallow London, the mere pursuit of pleasure and leisure. She can barely tolerate coming to comfort Margaret when her father dies, and she even brings a maid then. Comic.

• Edith Lennox , Margaret’s cousin and foil, silly and spoiled and pretty, no longer the heroine of novels but a mere side-show for Gaskell’s serious heroine. Comic.

• Captain Lennox , the somewhat boring boring boring Victorian husband, formerly in military but cashes out for leisure time when he marries the heiress Edith. He’s all newspapers, current topics, clubs, smoking, and port. Comic.

• Henry Lennox , the struggling lawyer, cynical and intelligent, who wants Margaret’s hand, whose early proposal initiates Margaret into womanhood. But he leads a life of superficial glamor, his friends only saying brilliant things to make “fireworks” rather than to do anything lasting and important. Form versus content split beginning to be seen. He is too cynical for Margaret, and too indolent despite his ambition.

• John Thornton , resolute, powerful, and strong, he is the model of the self-made man who through hard work, good behavior, and perseverance rises up from a draper’s boy to a master. He believes at first that he has a total right to control his men at work, then forget them entirely when they’re off duty (absolving his sense of responsibility), resenting Parliament’s “meddling,” but Margaret changes him. Manly, aggressive, and built to battle, unlike the feminized Hale men, he is a real man of Milton, and a man behind the dialectic of Enlightenment: like a steam-engine, he doesn’t stop, and he won’t stop until “all material power yields to science” (81). He ends up wanting to help his men, but not in a patronizing, insulting way. He believes that his ends are the same as the men’s: this reflects typical political economy about laissez-faire economics (because your interests are the same as the workers’, you should get along) but also is his ultimate limitation, still not understanding the total exploitation he in practice condones. His experiments in sharing the rights to capital at the end make him truly, truly experimental, even more forward-thinking than Margaret, although he needed her ethical jolt to make him morally awake and make him reject the rational cult of independence.

• Mrs. Thornton , his iron mother, who brought him up to do right and save, and who grudgingly admires Margaret though she hates her snobbery. She is very close to John, despite the appearance to the contrary. Ultimately we are to approve of her.

• Fanny Thornton , her mother’s demon, weak and silly, whose existence makes Mrs. Thornton appreciate who Margaret is: proud and fiery. She’s married off safely before the threatened bust of Thornton’s fortune.

• Higgins, one of the union leaders. Our exemplar, he loves his children, adopts those of his dead buddy (even though they fought), and is willing to listen to the other side of the story. He’s an avowed materialist, not believing anything but what he sees—until the death of his daughter makes him crawl back to religion. He doesn’t think that abstract knowledge will help anyone because it doesn’t mean anything until it is actually known and delivered—which is a very difficult process. He shows us how Enlightenment doctrine is incompatible with the processes of capital.

• Bessy Higgins, the cotton-mill worker who dies of consumption acquired at work through ingestion of the “fluff” wafting around the factory, despite the existence of (expensive) machines that will solve the problem (and indeed machines which the workers resisted b/c they were hungrier without the fluff). She’s a tool, disgustingly angelic and one-sided. Ick.

• Dixon , the faithful maid who follows her unfortunate young lady into her marriage with Mr. Hale, then follows them everywhere (never losing her airs, her pride of being with a “gentlemanly” family). She’s impertinent but loyal. loyal, a gentle inquiry into the vagaries of aristocratic service.

Themes

• Shame and sexuality
• Freedom versus authority
• Class and gender
• How to live: leisure or work
  • Like Marx, Thornton believes that only work will make people truly good and happy
• Changing nature of the social world
  • The middle class is truly beginning to be formed, as the marriage between decaying aristocracy/gentlemanly classes and the capitalists, now something different from “those in trade”
  • Aristocrats don’t really come into picture except as the past (ie, it’s Margaret’s background, proving her significant positioning within the tale of manufacturing conflict), but you have the gentlemanly classes (law, military, religion, symbolized by the Shaws, Hales, and Lennoxes) still chafing against the manufacture/trade classes, which are also against working classes, which can be either agricultural or manufacturing
  • Stable opposition that Marx sees in having only the owners versus only the depressed is not seen clearly
    • Who has the truth? Well, the living truth is probably Gaskell’s, though the economic truth is Marx’s
• Feminism
  • Flirts with it, but ultimately comes to nothing
    • Edith talks about the horrors of her becoming a blue-stocking, becoming too “strong-minded” and not caring enough about her clothes… but she never gets to even try because she will marry Thornton before then
    • Thus, her energy will be contained in the same way it always has been: in the spirit of the clergyman’s wife “helping out” the poor
  • She’s too filled with shame at her sexuality to be a fully fleshed out heroine
  • She is bold and direct, wants her freedom, so she begins to be feminist: “she tried to settle that most difficult problem for women, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working.” (416)
  • Like Jane Eyre, the hero must be damaged (business threatened with ruin) so that she can marry him with her glory in tact. And here, she gets money too, making her even “better” than him.
    • Yet the proposal scene shows her being a harmless cub in his arms.
• Problematic Promises of the Enlightenment: Gaskell powerfully shows how faulty and flimsy the Enlightenment promises are
  • 228: they assume people are machines
    • The narrator explains the strike: both workers and masters “reckoned on their fellow-men as if they possessed the calculable powers of machines, no more, no less; no allowance for human passions getting the better of reason” (228)
    • They also believed that the Irish scabs would be just like them, understanding the workers’ plight… but they didn’t.
  • They are used to keep people down: Thornton argues that his helping them would be trammeling their independence (121), using “freedom” as an argument against justice
  • Margaret shows that everyone insisting on their “rights” and not their duties, leads to strife
    • She believes that religion will solve the problems. Add religion to industry, not change industry, and it’ll get better.
  • 122: Everyone (masters and workers) wants to believe himself ruggedly independent, not needing anything from anyone, but Margaret argues that everyone is helplessly interdependent
    • ie, Enlightenment value of independence and freedom is seen as illusory, not understanding how community and family truly work
  • Higgins on the subjective differences of man being greater than their theoretical equality; on “truth” not being there; and on the inability of science to persuade
    • Mr. Hale tells Higgins to read books of political economy, which will explain everything scientifically
      • But he has read those books, and they didn’t help: too boring, don’t talk at all about Rights (ie, _promises of the Enlightenment are incompatible with political economy). and doesn’t matter anyway because people are so different
    • Literacy is easy to get, but it won’t solve everything: apparently, people are put on equal playing field by literacy, but he shows that the differences among people—all reacting differently—ruins this possibility for an equal playing field.
      • For Higgins, there is NO universal truth at all because people are different
    • “And I’m not one who think truth can be shaped out in words, all neat and clean, as th’ men at th’ foundry cut out sheet iron” (230)
      • Works cannot transmit clearly, so reading isn’t the salvation of the Enlightenment we think it is
  • Sound Economic Principles naturalize business transactions
    • “sound economical principles” show that “there must always be a waxing and waning of commercial prosperity,” in which some masters will sink and never be seen from again, says Thornton
      • Thus, science is in complicity with business: by saying it’s an impersonal law, you are thus freed from any obligation to alleviate the pain or change the system
    • “he was not likely to have more sympathy with that of the workman” once he admits he doesn’t sympathize with the losing maters
    • “Passed by in the swift merciless improvement or alteration” (152)
      • This Darwinian language comes about five years before the publication of Origin, so you see how well Darwin and capital agree
      • Whether or not Darwin was influenced by rhetoric about free trade and invisible hand, we do see that scientific and economic rhetoric reinforce one another to maintain status quo
• Stuff
  • The food and objects of Empire and of new modernity proliferate: fruits, wall-paper, cloth and cotton from the colonies, Indian shawls, coffee, tea
  • Officially, Gaskell is “against” mere materiality: “commotion about trifles” (11), thinks Margaret
    • Cf James in Ambassadors, the gloves!
  • Objects are repeatedly used to make people feel better, opposing the material solutions of the Shaws with the superior spiritual solutions of Margaret
• Gossip
  • Margaret’s reputation is ruined, put into question by gossip
  • About her throwing her arms around Thornton to protect him from strike
  • About her being out at night w/strange man
  • About her lie about not having been out there

North Versus South

• Northern manufacturing culture versus Southern culture (represented both by London and by the rural areas)
  • Northern Culture
    • Hectic pace
  • Southern Culture
    • Slow pace
• Urban Milton versus rural Helstone
  • City
    • Manchester/Milton: unhealthy, cloaked in fog, (59) “straight, hopeless streets” that are too regular to be natural; full of power and energy; unique and curious like all other manufacturing towns and thus worthy of touring; changing (Mr. Bell “loses his way” even though he was born there; his father’s orchards now all mill land)
      • “none walking for mere pleasure” (418)
      • The people are courageous and powerful, but they are selfish and focus on the material part of life too much
    • Cities, according to Margaret: “Their nerves are quickened by the haste and bustle and speed of everything around them, to say nothing of the confinement in these pent-up houses” (301)
      • A Simmelian understanding of the city, but with a twist to understand how poverty turns the awesome city into the sickening city
    • The present is so busy, no time to think about anything else
  • Rural
    • Slow pace, “soft and relaxing”
    • Difficult to act in emergencies, slothful, slow to change: stagnates
    • Superstition and cruelty (cat story: “Roasted!”)
    • Inclined to revel in the animal part of life
    • No past or future to care about or anticipate, just the present
  • Upshot: You have to have both to have a good character, to see past the now
• Trade professions versus gentlemanly professions (military, law, religion)

Manufacturing

• Risk: “floating capital” not as good as security of land (212), Mr. Thornton realizes
  • Speculation: he doesn’t do it because he doesn’t want to risk depriving creditors of their money, but this time he guessed wrong, and it worked great
  • “credit was insecure, and the most stable might have their fortunes affected” by goings-on halfway around globe
  • Credit could be affected just by gossip: “idle breath may, at such time ,cause the downfall of some who might otherwise weather the storm” (418): the factory and finance genre of gossip is credit that insubstantial but powerful thing.
• Anti-local
  • Manufacturing: far away, he says, “his word [would] pass like gold” (419), yet he is “alive to distant, and dead to near things” (419)
  • This is globalization.
• Strike
  • Embodied
    • People’s bodies become like animals, only dull force
    • Margaret’s body becomes sexualized
  • Gothic and animal imagery
    • Gaskell uses tropes of primitivism and Gothic literature to convey force of the modern mob
• Evil Unions
  • Gaskell wants you to think that the unions are more tyrannous than the masters
  • By demanding membership and ostracizing the ones who do not join, they are the biggest problem
  • Attributes suicide of Boucher and subsequent break-up of the family to the union that “made” him join and “made” him get so upset that he made a mob, rather than to situation at large.
• Solution?
  • Thornton
    • Margaret cannot get him out of his initial “wise despotism over the ignorant” position entirely, but he does begin to care about their fates, not to let them work “in parallel” but never touching
    • Wish to get to know the workers (going beyond cash-nexus, he says, quoting Carlyle, will take out the rancor of the relationships, if not solve the problem completely)
    • His plans tend to allow people access to the privileges that capital brings (if not capital itself): very cool indeed, although it’s not where Marx would like to see it go!
      • Yet he only does it “outside” of work time, as it were, leaving industry as it was intact.
      • Note how Higgins sees that Thornton still acts as a boss during work time, but acts like a friend after work time.
  • Thornton’s marriage with Margaret
    • Symbolic of the new leading spirit of Britain: she loses her snobbery, and he gets more polished, polite, and refined
    • Shows that Gaskell is still slightly paternalistic
    • Their marriage, with Margaret leading him to make improvements and be a better man, is just the one Gudrun rejects with Gerald in Women in Love, mocking it completely
  • Gaskell’s Solution: Don’t just think of your rights: remember your duties (which are religiously themed)
    • Religious critique of the culture of rationality
    • People are not machines
  • So, solution is very, very limited, but Gaskell manages to hit a perfectly Victorian compromise of allowing free trade but also giving conscience and religion its own time as well.

Leisure Spaces and Technology

• Dinners
  • Edith wants to have new ones, unlike her mother’s stuffy ones: these ones are supposed to be more relaxed and fun, all about glittering argument and beauty
• Trains
  • Allow them to get where they need to be
  • 208: Thornton’s useless journey: he gets out of town just long enough to think through his troubles: just long enough of a vacation to get healthy again, so to speak
    • A miniature version of going on vacation for your health, and of Margaret’s stay at Cromer later on
• Train Stations, North v South
  • In her journey back to Helstone, Margaret compares the two types
  • North: brisk, everyone busy, commuting, business everywhere
  • South: lazy, deserted because it’s not vacation season; people just stand there watching the trains go by, having nothing else to do
• Bathing towns and seaside towns
  • Seen as the glimmering chimera beyond Milton
  • Torquay (the Shaws’ normal vacation), Italy (where Mrs. Shaw goes), Corfu (where the new couple is),
• Heston (51, 58)
  • It’s the seaside associated with Milton, the North
  • It is more “purposeful” than other seaside towns in England or Europe
  • Even the shop-people decline to loaf in their doorways, preferring to do useless work (unrolling and re-rolling of ribbons) than to be completely taskless
  • Shows the tendency of leisure to be not-so-leisure after all
  • But it does keep her mother safely occupied and restful (“set her up for the winter” 51) while she and the father get the real house ready in Milton.
  • It exists in the book to give the greater contrast to Milton
• Cromer
  • It’s the seaside associated with London, the South
  • It is truly quiet: she merely sits on the beach
  • It’s a place for peaceful reflection and regaining health
  • She gets her health and beauty back because of the equanimity the sea brings her: it’s so monotonous, it gives her a blank canvas to think upon
    • For Gaskell, you need this only sparingly, and you should return to hustle and bustle once you’re cured, not wallow in it
    • Cf Adorno’s point about vacation priming you for getting back to work: Margaret uses vacation time in this way

Style

• Gaskell gets near critiques of language, but doesn’t really put them into play in her own structuring of the novel
  • Higgins shows some doubt about the communicative value of words
    • “And I’m not one who think truth can be shaped out in words, all neat and clean, as th’ men at th’ foundry cut out sheet iron” (230)
    • Yet Gaskell does write her novel without much thought about style
  • She does understand the people aren’t machines
    • They have passion too, not just reason
    • Yet she uses characters as machines (ie, Bessy)
• Gaskell uses old tropes to convey new sights
  • Her Gothic imagery and primitivist language to describe the mob
  • She can’t find new ways to describe it, so she reverts to tropes
• Use of literary epigraphs
  • Each chapter heading has its own epigraph from English literature, just like George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda
  • Unlike Eliot, however, the allusions are transparent: if the quote mentions a father lost, the dad dies in the chapter; if the quote talks about motherly love, the chapter will show a mother comforting a child
  • Gaskell’s intertextual world shows a homogeneous literary world where everyone seems to agree with her
  • Unironic
  • She doesn’t have a sense of literature fighting against itself, but thinks all authors are in agreement with her
• Plot: echo of Pride and Prejudice because of the moral problems and growth of the lovers, as well as other more specific likenesses (ie, the embarrassing first proposal rejected with raging dignity)
• Use of dialect: regionalism
• Omniscience: Gaskell does know everything about her characters that she wishes to show
• Sense of moral purpose of art
  • 407: Margaret’s disapproval of the brilliant table talk of the intelligent young diners at Harley Street shows a belief that all communication must have moral purpose behind it

Theses

• Credit works just like gossip (418)

Question

• I could interpret this book cynically, saying that Margaret only works on Thornton’s behalf, on the behalf of capitalism, because all of her efforts tend to keep the status quo
• But that would be too cynical. It would be to ignore the variety of the book, the tons of people and situations that are supposedly represented by the word middle class or bourgeoisie. It doesn’t really work that pat.
• To say that it does and to judge the book negatively acts as if Marx is the ultimate judge of everything, to use Marx as a standard for Gaskell. But what can Gaskell herself say about capital that he can’t say? Well, she can show its lived heterogeneity.
• So, try to see what Gaskell herself says about capital. ie, what about Thornton in effect changing the distribution of the power of capital, if not of capital itself.