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A contribution to: Space/Time

Edited by Jessica Gildersleeve and John McKeane

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 4

Modern Humanities Research Association

open

Abstract.  Addressing the (hitherto relatively neglected) question of spatial relations in Elizabeth Gaskell’s industrial novel North and South (1855), this essay draws on Raymond Williams’s concept of the ‘knowable community’, as well as nineteenth-century notions of the æsthetics of the picturesque (as elucidated by Linda Austin and Nancy Armstrong), to examine Gaskell’s construction of class and social space. I employ close reading of the text and critical synthesis to demonstrate that Margaret Hale, posited as a ‘spatial mediatrix’ and ethnographer of the nascent industrial metropolis of Milton/Manchester, progresses from a conception of working-class life as essentially picturesque – æsthetically stimulating, but lacking in material substance – to an appreciation of the complexity and materiality of social spaces. Margaret is a flâneuse, who attempts an active identification with the urban environment and its inhabitants. By enabling Margaret to view her own position in society relative to that of others, Gaskell makes visible the ‘knowable community’ of the industrial urban poor, and demonstrates the importance of moving beyond an æstheticized mode of comprehending this community’s material concerns and conditions. Paradoxically, however, a consistent lack of subjectivity and interiority in Gaskell’s representations of the members of this community testifies to their status as ‘urban rustics’, a term the author uses to describe a version of the deindividuated choral mode that Williams identifies as characterizing George Eliot’s 1859 portrait of rural life, Adam Bede. While Gaskell’s novel succeeds in introducing its heroine and its reader to the private spaces of the industrial working classes, it ultimately stops short of bestowing fully formed and individualized consciousnesses on the knowable community it renders visible, thus negating its social and literary effectiveness. Significantly, however, Gaskell’s novel comes to terms with the loss of an idealized rural past, and the ascendance of the urban, in a way that Eliot’s seems, finally, unable to countenance.

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