Difference between revisions of "North and South (Gaskell, 1855)"

Revision as of 13:11, 14 September 2017

General

• prefatory note interesting on her perceived constraint by serialized publication in Household Words and subsequent expansion in volume form
• 17 desc of M as "so far from regularly beautiful" makes her a sister of Bronte heroines
• 33 Mr Hale leaving Church ministry -- note v good
  • 39 Margaret seems justified in her perception of moving in a fortnight to be quite fast -- when the hell did anything in a Victorian novel happen that quickly?!
• 66 repeated theme of Margaret's parents being overly reliant on her "genius for management" (60)
• 76 she "told her mother that she was no longer Peggy the laundry-maid, but MH the lady": class tied to praxis, different activities, even when the same person performs them
  • but MH argued there's something essentially ladylike in her through it all
• 81ff good description of the change in industry, the effect of it on day to day life
• 109 Mrs Hale "prouder of Frederick standing up against injustice, than if he had been simply a good officer" -- the maneuverability within class and ideology, not unlike Mr H's nonconformity (and I'd say Gaskell is at least setting up that genetic link btwn father and son's dispositions)
• Ch 15 seems to build on 14 and to really start to develop the antinomies that have been set out btwn north and south, religion and capital, manufacturing and gentry, education and industry, culminating in M's rather incisive statement to Thornton: "I am trying to reconcile your admiration of despotism with your respect for other men's independence of character" (124)
• 197-8 Margaret thinking through her encounter with Thornton - like Isabel archer - are discourses of strength and power how we are to read a rhetoricized sexual attraction?

Theme Tracking

Reading/Writing

• 20 "the well-bound little-read English Classics" in the Helstone parsonage library
• 23 "proper old Italian binding" on an ed of Dante's paradiso
• 34 Mr Hale quoting a 17c dissenter to justify leaving ministry
• 79 Thornton looking round the Hales' drawing room for the first time: "...and books, not cared for on account of their binding solely, lay on one table, as if recently put down."
• 85: Thornton: his labor and education at odds when growing up
• 113 Mrs Thornton "the classics fine for loiterers" adds a class valence to the value of reading/education as orthogonal to manufacturing respectability
• 199 M reading aloud to dying Bessy

Materiality

• 111-2 materiality of Thornton's mill -- the artificial whiteness cross ref with Dickens' "Paper Mill"
• 209 Mrs T thinking through her anticipation to MH accepting T's proposal via her needlework

Class

• 114: the multiplicity of respectabilities - fashionable London, country clergy, Milton manufacturers -- at odds when the Hales visit the Thorntons

Labor/Industry

• 118 M sets up an opposition between factory owner as capitalist and as steward in the biblical sense
• 199-200 Bessy recounting her father's conflict with Boucher - even more fine grained distinctions of groups within, in this case, the working class

Shakespeare references

• 5 compares Edith to Titania Midsummer Dream
• 7 course of true love running smooth
• 212 epigraph from Dream