 |
[email protected] |
 |
3275638434 |
 |
 |
| Paper Publishing WeChat |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
The Limitation and Development of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Social Vision
Yinghuei Chen
Full-Text PDF
XML 1306 Views
DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2017.05.001
Department of Foreign Languages & Literature, Asia University, Taichung, Taiwan
Gaskell, for all her sympathy for the lower orders, responds to questions posed by differences of class with a conciliatory spirit. She writes like a social realist, but when she is confronted with taking a position, she often opts for reconciliation or even escapism. Gaskell’s ambivalent attitude towards social classes is brought to the forefront in Mary Barton (1847), which she originally entitled John Barton. The change of the title has led to critical argument that the novel is an artistic failure, and the shift from a political novel with a clear social purpose to a domestic romance which covers up social discontent is too unprepared and comes across as a fantasy on the part of the novelist. This peculiar structure of the novel reveals the limitation of Gaskell’s social vision as a novelist. In North and South (1852), Gaskell presents the precarious situation of workers and their tense relations with industrialists in a more balanced way by giving more attention to the thinking and perspective of the employers, a narrative perspective far different from her treatment in Mary Barton which adopts the view of the working poor. The on-going social mobility and the shift of social gravity from the aristocracy to the mercantile, a historical reality which Matthew Arnold clearly delineates in Culture and Anarchy, are truthfully observed and represented by Gaskell and her representation of this new ruler class marks her progressive social view, expressing her optimistic belief in England’s progress towards an industrial future. In an interval of seven years between the publications of the two novels in question, Gaskell’s social vision had matured into critical realism.
social realist, social purpose, political novel, domestic romance, progressive social view, critical realism
Barchas, J. (2008). Mrs. Gaskell’s North and South: Austen’s early legacy. Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal. Chicago, 30, 53-66.
Carlyle, T. (1965). Past and present. R. D. Altick, (Ed.). New York: New York University Press.
Cooney, B. (2011). Violence, terror, and the transformation of genre in Mary Barton. In B. Tredennick (Ed.), Victorian transformations: Genre, nationalism and desire in nineteenth-century literature. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Eliot, G. (October 1856). Silly novels by lady novelists. The Westminster Review, 66, 442-461.
Gaskell, E. G. (2006). Mary Barton (Oxford world’s classics). (S. Foster, Ed. and intro.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gaskell, E. (1995). North and south (Penguin Classics). Patricia Ingham, (Ed. and intro.). Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Gaskell, E. (1970). North and south. D. Collin, (Ed.); M. Dodsworth, (intro.). Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Gérin, W. (1980). Elizabeth Gaskell: A biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldmann, L. (1987). Towards a sociology of the novel. London: Routledge Kegan & Paul.
Lawrence, D. H. (1985). Study of Thomas Hardy and other essays (The Cambridge edition of the works of D. H. Lawrence). B. Steele, (Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Malthus, T. (1993). An essay on the principle of population (Oxford world’s classics). G. Gilbert, (Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marsh, J. (1998). Word crimes: Blasphemy, culture and literature in nineteenth-century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
O’Neill, P. (2001). A world of deference: Paradoxes of Victorian paternalism in John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, and John Stuart Mill. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University.
Tillotson, K. (1956). Novels of the eighteen-forties. Oxford: Clarendon.
Williams, R. (1982). The industrial novels. In Culture and society (pp. 87-109). London: Hogarth.