North and South (1855 Novel) - Literary Analysis - Construction - False Starts

False Starts

The novel shows three beginnings, two of them not the real start to the story that is eventually told: the first with the wedding preparations in London, the second the heroine’s return to Helstone, and the third, often considered the real start to the story tells of the departure for Milton in Chapter 7. The first chapters, according to Martin Dodsworth, are false leads on what the novel is about, not out of the author’s clumsiness; instead, they tell the reader what the story is not about. Bodenheimer (p. 283), however, interprets these early chapters, not as false starts but as consistently showing Gaskell’s theme of both societal and personal “permanent state(s) of change” and therefore, integral to the novel. These early chapters in different places have also been taken to mean a theme of mobility in the novel: In moving from one place to another, the heroine learns to understand herself and the world better and it advances Gaskell’s intent to show Margaret’s going where Victorian women were not supposed to go—the public sphere.

The beginning chapters of North and South seem to be a novel of manners in the style of Jane Austen (Nash, 2007) with preparations for a" good "marriage in London with a silly bride and a lively and intelligent heroine and, later, in the peaceful country village of Hampshire, a bachelor in search of a good fortune ( Henry Lennox) woos and is rejected by the heroine (O'Farrell, 1997, p 58). But Deirdre David, in Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels, published in 1981, suggests that Margaret’s abandonment of London society means she is not in her place in the South, and that her adjustment to the North is, therefore, not ironic (O'Farrell, 1997, p 161).

Elizabeth Gaskell wrote a novel of manners, but in the broader context of an industrial novel about inhabitants of the Black Country, where young girls like Bessy die of " cotton consumption", capitalists disregard legal obligations, and workers refuse prophylactic facilities, instigate strikes or create riots (O'Farrell, 1997, p 58). The novel could be criticized, as Martin Dodsworth did in 1970, for giving the love affair precedence over the industrial context and for dwelling too much on the emotional conflict between Margaret and Thornton. But North and South is not simply an industrial Pride and Prejudice: Margaret, by speaking, asking questions and giving advice (outside the role of a Victorian woman from a good family), acquires stature and a public role, thus challenging the notion of separate spheres (see Masculine and Feminine Roles above) (Stoneman, 1987, p. 167). Although aware of her social and cultural superiority, she befriends Bessy Higgins, a young woman of the working class, gradually abandons her aversion to Shoppy people and, recognizing the qualities of Thornton, crosses the boundaries between social classes, to consider herself "not good enough" for him. And if the novel ends in Harley Street, where it started, Margaret’s estrangement from the vain and superficial world of her cousin Edith and Henry Lennox is better emphasized—she chooses Thornton and Milton (Pollard, 1967, p. 111).