PERSPECTIVES ON THE TEXT.
There are two connected elements to North and South; it is both a classic bildungsroman (a novel dealing with one person's formative years or spiritual education) and also a morally didactic (teaching or intending to teach a moral lesson) piece of social realism. The reader follows the progress of Margaret Hale, from her position of social privilege as a naïve ‘southerner’ who scorns any association with ‘shoppy’ (manufacturing/nouveau riche) classes to her new understanding of displacements of traditional affinities and classes in the new era of the 19th century. Her move to Milton thrusts her into the centre of a very different England where a new industrial class will ultimately displace the gentry class that the Hales represent (albeit as gentrified poor). Margaret’s prejudice—and in particular her views of Mill owner, Thornton, whom she once dismissed as merely a man of trade—is slowly eroded as she begins to understand the importance of these new industries as vital economic forces, the new furnace of wealth, invention and prosperity.
However, the relentless march of new capitalism remained at odds with Christian notions of charity and dignity of the individual. It is here that Margaret Hale, who has been called by more than one commentator a ‘Christian Socialist’, can take odds with John Thornton, blending her new awareness of Thornton’s convenient libertarianism with her own views on social responsibility and universal human rights. Throughout the novel, Gaskell uses Margaret Hale as her own mouthpiece, prosecuting a steady social and economic argument intended for a middle class readership unfamiliar or even unconcerned with the treatment of factory workers. For instance, Margaret dislikes Thornton’s use of the term ‘hands’ to describe his employees; it is a reductive term that dismisses the individuality and humanity of the individual. Margaret’s friendships with Bessy and Nicholas Higgins have enabled her to see these workers as people, not mere instruments of labour. Moreover, she adopts Nicholas’ own understanding of the language of power that is constantly employed to keep workers in their place. Thornton insists that he owes no explanation to his workers concerning the ‘terms of trade’ and rails against them for demanding explanations about ‘the way we choose to spend or save our money’ and for planning to strike. His implication is that the workers will not be capable of understanding (p. 139);
Margaret argues back:
"But he – that is, my informant – spoke as if the masters would like their hands to be merely tall, large children – living in the present moment – with a blind unreasoning kind of obedience (p142). "
She later employs an anecdote of a rich father who, through misplaced concern, kept his son confined for forty years in a state of perpetual naiveté, eventually transforming him into a monster of depravity and incompetence (Ingham 1995, p.xx). This prefigures the violence of the mob, who will soon descend upon Marlborough Mills. If the ‘Masters’ dehumanise their workers, their own ‘hands’ will inevitably turn against them.
Margaret’s traditional and ‘feminine’ application of Christian charity carries strong undercurrents of a more radical agenda promoted by some of Gaskell’s outspoken contemporaries. William Carlyle, for example, was fiercely critical of the social conditions of competitive trade:
We call it Society, and go about professing openly the totalest separation.... Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war named ‘fair competition’ and so forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash payment is not the sole relation of human beings; we think, nothing doubting, that it absolves and liquidates all engagements of man. (Carlyle quoted in Uglow 1993, p. 370
Margaret, and indeed the plot line itself, also exposes Thornton’s assertion that open trade allows men of ability to rise, as masters, while others will naturally end their own level. Margaret listens with scorn as he espouses its great virtues:
"It is one of the great beauties of our system, that a working-man may raise himself into the power and position of a master by his own exertions and behaviour; that, in fact, every one who rules himself to decency and sobriety of conduct, and attention to his duties, comes over to our ranks... (p. 98). "
1 The Penguin Edition stipulated by VCAA carries a very short, limited and somewhat patronising essay by V.S. Pritchett, ‘The South Goes North’. This essay, despite its comparative modernity (it is undated, however I’m assuming it was written in the late 20th century) ts too comfortably with Gaskell’s contemporary critics’ observations that amount to enumerating the limitations of a ‘lady author’. One of Pritchett’s more provoking assertions, not backed up with any argument whatsoever, is that ‘Economics were out of her (Gaskell’s) range’. (p. 539). The argument of this Literature Perspective disagrees and shows the extent to which Gaskell could prosecute economic arguments and neatly turn the usual arguments of laissez-faire economics on its head.
A self-made man, Thornton’s impatience with others who live harsher lives (which are to him ‘the natural punishment’ of self-indulgence and ‘poorness of character’) is clearly depicted as careless and heartless. His foil here is neither Nicholas Higgins, the union man, nor Margaret Hale, the Christian socialist, but rather Bessy Higgins. Once a child worker, who is now dying a painful and slow death with ‘ uff on the lungs’, Bessy has done nothing to deserve her lot in life. As she lies dying, Thornton fully expounds a Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest, of going on or going under, both masters and worker. The narrator intervenes:
"He spoke as if this consequence were so entirely logical, that neither employers nor employed had any right to complain if it became their fate: the employer to turn aside from the race he could no longer run, with a bitter sense of incompetency and failure – wounded in the struggle – trampled down by his fellows in their haste to get rich – slighted where he once was honoured – humbly asking for, instead of bestowing, employment with a lordly hand. Of course, speaking so of the fate that, as a master, might be his own in the fluctuations of commerce, he was not likely to have more sympathy with that of the workmen, who were passed by in the swift merciless improvement or alteration; who would fain lie down and quietly die out of the world that needed them not, but felt as if they could never rest in their graves for the clinging cries of the beloved and helpless they would leave behind; who envied the power of the wild bird, that can feed her young with her very heart’s blood. (p. 183)"
2 Varieties of dishes are served in surplus quantities. On the other hand, Boucher’s family and many other striking workers’ families have nothing to eat. Even in work, these hard working laborers are paid so poorly that they are only able to temporarily satisfy the most basic needs of food and shelter. In the words of Karl Marx, they live on ‘minimum subsistence’ for survival. They are given no opportunities to improve their economic conditions and rise in the social hierarchy, despite the fact that they are the ones who generate capital through their labor. This is how they are ‘alienated’ from the fruits of Production. According to Marx, ‘alienation’ is an objective characterization of the worker’s situation in Capitalism. Margaret tells Thornton, ‘...I have heard... someone of the workpeople speak as though it were the interest of the employers to keep them from acquiring money – that it would make them too independent if they had a sum in the savings bank.’ Marx also said that alienation is strategic and planned.
In the end, for all his efforts, Thornton himself is crushed under the same mercantile forces that he had formerly praised. He can now fully understand that luck and circumstance have as much role to play as intelligence and hard work. Thus, with the fall of a clever industrialist, the text makes its point. Class and wealth are not naturally bestowed on the worthy; for both master and worker the more pragmatic and empathetic understanding of the social order prevails.
Another important feature of the text is Margaret Hale’s own ‘mastery’—over both her own household, and, ultimately, Thornton himself. Feminist readings will yield rich and varied interpretations of Margaret’s role and Gaskell’s intentions. One striking feature of the text is the deliberate emasculation of the father; a theme often used by women writers of and around the period.
Mr Hale is often described as ‘feminine’ in features in the novel. He also quails when it comes to acting on his family’s behalf and it is Margaret who, time and again, is called upon to act as head of the family. She is the one who breaks the news to her mother of the necessity to remove from Helstone, she is the one who organises the entire move, she is the one who recognises her mother’s illness and shields her father from its knowledge in typical, protective gestures. It is she who writes for the absent and disgraced brother, Frederic and even she (a plot device to be sure) who is entrusted to ‘see him off ’ at the station. Margaret’s authority within the household is carefully screened, even by Gaskell, with numerous and proper Victorian allusions to feminine lial duty. Indeed, she was so successful in this blind that contemporary commentators missed the fact that Margaret is undeniably the head of the Hale household. Perhaps, in part, this went unremarked as Margaret’s power could be viewed as merely wielded in the domestic sphere. Of course, subsequent feminist deconstructions of personal versus public spheres subvert this view. It is also important to note that Margaret’s initial power in the ‘private’ and ‘domestic’ sphere is later translated (via her investment in Marlborough Mills) into the public domain.
On the surface, Thornton is the patriarch par excellence; a shrewd businessman, a hard taskmaster, a man of honour and on the rise in Milton. However, his authority is compromised by three important factors; first his ‘class’—or lack of it, as a self-made man—places Thornton in an ambiguous position as a ‘typical’ Victorian patriarch. Secondly, perhaps more importantly, he has been both shaped and nurtured by his headstrong but loving mother; Thornton, in his many face-offs with Margaret, is no stranger to female authority. Finally, the impending failure of his business threatens an imminent collapse of the newly risen Master. He is only saved by Margaret’s offer of her new found inheritance—a ‘cash payment’ (to echo Carlyle) with the interesting implications as to who will be the new head of the Thornton household. Other proto-feminist elements of the text will be discussed found in Features of the Text
3 I’m thinking of Jane Austen’s tendency to sideline fatherly authority. Mr Woodhouse, father of Emma, is an aging hypochondriac; Mr Bennet, from Pride and Prejudice, fails in his fatherly duty to reign over his family and check his wayward younger daughter, despite lectures from Elizabeth; Sir Walter Elliot of Persuasion is a vain fop simply unequal to the quiet authority and good sense of the heroine, Anne.
REF:VATE