Features of the text
North and South, originally entitled Margaret Hale, employs omniscient narrative perspective, heavily favouring the perspectives of its heroine. The narrative moves into hard social realism in progressive shifts of setting. The novel opens in London where Margaret Hale lives a privileged and cocooned social life with her rich aunt and cousin. The very opening shows Margaret’s cousin Edith: curled up on the sofa in the back drawing room in Harley Street, looking very lovely in her white muslin and blue ribbons.
Edith is the model young woman of her age, moving straight from girlhood to matrimony and then motherhood. However, the infantalisation is deliberate. Barely a woman, Edith is good humoured but shallow. She is wrapped up in protective layers of class, wealth and femininity with little knowledge of the real world. Moving swiftly from daughter to wife, Edith hasn’t had time to properly grow into her own self. Her carefree and careless life is one which the reader is encouraged to reject. This model of femininity is also explored in the shallow preoccupations and middle-class affectations of Thornton’s sister, Fanny. If one finds self-knowledge through struggle and adversity (the lot set out for Margaret) these young women are clearly uninteresting characters; Gaskell has deliberately set the bar for stereotypical Victorian womanhood particularly low.
Once cousin Edith is married, Margaret moves back to live with her mother and father in the rural idyll of Helstone. As daughter of the minister she joins her mother’s practice of doing good works for the poor. She is shocked at her mother’s suggestion that she pay attention to the rich and upcoming Gormans who ‘made their fortunes in trade’; ‘you don’t want me to admire butchers and bakers and candlestickmakers, do you mamma?’ (p. 18). Thus the narrative gently exposes Margaret’s prejudice as a gentlewoman of noble birth--a prejudice she will later come to understand and regret. She rejects a more acceptable suitor in Mr Henry Lennox, an up and coming lawyer, and this is followed by a more serious blow. A sudden attack of religious conscience finds her father unable to reaffirm a ‘fresh declaration of conformity to the Liturgy’; as a dissenter, but still a religious man, he resigns his post at the Vicarage, and to avoid the taint of any disgrace that may follow the family, decides on moving to the far Northern Industrial town of Milton with a view to seek work as a private tutor. While his dissenting from the Church of England is problematic, his choice of Milton seems sound. The hub of industry, Milton is bursting with newly-made men, who may want a little more substance in their education to justify the ostentation of well-stocked, unread libraries.
The setting, Milton, resides at the heart of the narrative; like any typical romance, Margaret’s rst impressions of the town are entirely negative: miles before they reached Milton, they saw a deep lead-coloured cloud hanging over the horizon in the direction which it lay. (p. 67)
Her first meetings with Thornton result in heated exchanges about the merits of North versus South. Margaret’s almost instant dislike and Thornton’s almost instant passion very much echo the romantic plotline of Pride and Prejudice—in fact Gaskell’s has been called an ‘industrial version’ of Austen’s most celebrated novel. Certainly, Margaret’s slow awakening to her love (in the face of her implied dishonour) echoes Elizabeth Bennet’s own epiphany under similar circumstances. The protagonists’ many heated exchanges, Margaret’s scornful refusal of a first proposal, Thornton’s inability to overcome his thwarted passion, are certainly reminiscent of Austen; they also serve as cues for a well versed reading public to recognise the probability of the romantic union of the warring parties: ‘here is love itself, always in a fury, often looking exceedingly like hatred’ remarked Margaret Oliphant, a contemporary of Gaskell (Ingham, p. xxv). Indeed, as Uglow (2008) has pointed out on this score, North and South is both ‘sexy’ and ‘vivid’. The narrative description of Thornton watching Margaret pouring tea exemplifes this:
She stood by the tea-table in a light-coloured muslin gown, which had a good deal of pink about it. She looked as if she was not attending to the conversation, but solely busy with the tea-cups, among which her round ivory hands moved with pretty, noiseless daintiness. She had a bracelet on one taper arm, which would fall down over her round wrist. Mr Thornton watched the re-placing of this troublesome ornament with far more attention than he listened to her father. It seemed as if it fascinated him to see her push it up impatiently, until it tightened her soft flesh; and then to mark the loosening – the fall. He could almost have exclaimed – ‘There it goes, again!’ There was so little left to be done after he arrived at the preparation for tea, that he was almost sorry the obligation of eating and drinking came so soon to prevent his watching Margaret. (p. 92)
This is a Darcy of approximately fifty years hence—the full sexual magnetism given fuller expansion in such minute yet suggestive descriptions of wrists, flesh, bracelets.
The social realism goes beyond the bounds of these intimate psychological portrayals. The thronging streets of Milton present a strong contrast to Helstone, which Margaret had described as ‘like a village in a poem – in one of Tennyson’s poems’ (p. 9). In Milton, the Hales have settled in the unprepossessing borough of ‘Crampton’. As its name suggests it’s a cramped and shabby part of town, surrounded by mills and mill workers. On her walks out, Margaret is shocked by the brash forwardness of the factory folk who are simply unaware of her own class distinction:
...the girls, with their rough, but not unfriendly freedom, would comment on her dress, even touch her shawl or gown to ascertain the exact material (p. 82).
She is initially confused at the lack of deference she’s paid when she offers to visit the Higgins. In the South, charity ‘basket’ visits were an expected condescension—expected but also rewarded both with prayer and due deference to the minister’s daughter. In the North, such condescension is not appreciated or wanted; she will only come to the home of Higgins on his terms, as his guest and as an equal.
Through her friendship with the Higgins family, the narrator guides her middle class readership into the simple living and the monotonous suffering of the poor. Gaskell’s Unitarianism and impatience with the stoicism that looks towards a better life in the hereafter, is also on display. Bessy and Margaret are the same age—Bessy’s short life has been full of privation and now a slow death is only ameliorated by her strong conviction of heaven and her feverish repetition of the Book of Revelations. When Margaret gently attempts to sway Bessy to allow her to read ‘the clearer parts of the Bible’ (p. 165), Bessy declares ‘No I cannot give up Revelations, it gives me more comfort than any other book i’ the Bible’ (p. 166). If religion is ‘the opium of the masses’ Higgins finds his own relief in drinking. Facing despair at the slow death of his daughter, coupled with the crippling inequities he has faced in his own life, Higgins is becoming a religious sceptic, verging on a form of socialist atheism. Through the sympathetic narration of Bessy, however, Gaskell presses her readers to revise Thornton’s statements about the underclasses’ sinful, ‘sensual’ ways. Bessy can understand her father’s need to occasionally escape his grim realities:
I sickened at the thought of going on for ever wi’ the same sight in my eyes, and the same sound in my ears, and the same taste i’ my mouth, and the same thought (or no thought, for that matter) in my head, day after day, for ever. I’ve longed for to be a man to go spreeing, even if it were only a tramp to some new place in search o’ work. And father – all men – have it stronger in ‘em than me to get tired o’ the sameness and work for ever. And what is ‘em to do? It’s little blame to them if they do go into th’ gin-shop for to make their blood ow quicker, and more lively... (p. 164)
Higgins of course ‘reforms’. Gaskell cannot encroach too far upon the sensibilities of a contemporary audience, hers being a time when nineteenth-century temperance groups were particularly popular. He turns back to God and away from the drink, thus making him far more palatable as an upstanding member of the working class.
Gaskell’s sympathetic regard for the working classes is metaphorically enjoined by her faithful rendering of the Lancashire dialect. As Ingham has argued, when Gaskell has her heroine begin to adopt the slang of factory hands she is undertaking a radical departure from standard novel writing conventions:
From early in the nineteenth century there was a clear convention that narrators and other middle-class characters with suitably high moral standards (like Oliver Twist) use ‘standard’ English. (p. xvii)
The reverse (having a worthy protagonist use non-Standard English) was barely ever enacted—certainly not by a heroine. Thus, when Margaret tells her mother that Mary Higgins is ‘slack of work’ she is adopting factory dialect and Gaskell is simultaneously endorsing the validity of this language. When admonished by her mother for using ‘horrid Milton words’ (p. 285) she defends her choice. She likens her adoption of working slang to her cousin, Edith’s adoption of ‘military’ slang as wife of a Captain, but further she claims: ‘... if I live in a factory town, I must speak factory language when I want it’ (p. 285), offering to explain to her mother the de nition of a ‘knobstick’ (strike-breaker) and championing the use of such terminology as useful. When her mother claims she wants no knowledge of such ‘vulgar sound(s)’ Margaret explains that she’ll ‘have to use a whole explanatory sentence’ to convey the correct meaning. In a text that pits competitive discourses of socialism, (reforming) Christianity and Trickle-Down economics, the heroine’s endorsement of the language of the workers carries powerful undercurrents of authorial approval. Acknowledging a language is, simultaneously, acknowledging a culture and, further, to understand that language is to enter into further understanding of a culture. Gaskell and her heroine understand this and pit the language of the workers against the language of the Masters—both are given voice, and both a chance to explain their positions.
When Margaret revisits Helstone and the South after the death of her father, her romantic notions of Southern life are, once and for all, put to rest. Margaret had long ago acknowledged to Higgins (who was considering a move to the South) the horrors of rural labour. Upon her return trip to Helstone her romantic notions are shattered altogether. She hears of one neighbour cruelly roasting alive another neighbour’s cat to break a curse. She sees signs of change everywhere: picturesque cottages have been pulled down and her own former home is in the process of undergoing extensive renovations to accommodate the new Minister’s large family. If she had imagined the South as Thornton had put it much earlier in the novel as a place of ‘slow days of careless ease’ she is at first upset to see that little Helstone has moved on without her. The dichotomy of North/South, progress and provincialism, is eroded with her final reactions:
‘After all it is right’ said she, hearing the voices of children at play while she was dressing. ‘If the world stood still, it would retrograde and become corrupt...Looking out of myself, and my own painful sense of change, the progress all around me is right and necessary.’ (p. 486)
The inversion of the North and South binary is further embodied in the character of Mr Bell. Bell, the Oxford Don and family friend of the Hales, owes much of his wealth to his many investments in the North. He is in fact, the landlord of Thornton’s Mill. Far from being ensconced in an ivory tower in the South, Bell has a keen sense of capital and Gaskell, through him, exposes the intertwined economies of the North and South. Genteel, well born people like Bell who overtly shun the petty cares of the manufacturing classes are shown to be utterly dependent upon the industrial North, not only for the money, but to sustain the status of ‘gentleman’ of (comparative) leisure.
The schism between masters and men is also at least partially eroded, but not entirely broken. If Higgins must relent in his radicalism when he swallows his pride to ask Thornton for a job (although he’s still a member of the Union), Thornton must go further. Like Margaret, he must come to see his workers not as hands—a mass as unthinking as the machines they operate—but as individuals who deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. He does this when he visits Higgins’ home and the two strike a bargain and shake hands ‘man to man’. Ironically, just before his own descent into probable bankruptcy, Thornton finally sees his workers as people, and this, the narrative strongly implies, will make him a better ‘Master’. This may be an updated version of Pride and Prejudice but Darcy always was, underneath it all ‘the best landlord, and the best master’ and always ‘affable to the poor’.
Elizabeth merely had to change Darcy’s manners; Margaret had to change Thornton’s mind.
Ref: VATE Literature Perspectives