'Present All in All': Multiplicity and Self-Construction in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South

Abstract

Critical attention to Elizabeth Gaskell's novel North and South (1854-55), and to nineteenth-century British women's writing as a whole, has tended to reduce its tensions into polarized conflicts: the "public sphere" versus the "private sphere," the working class versus the middle class, and so forth. This project argues that instead of attempting to resolve what are seen to be the core binary oppositions that make up personal identity, North and South, in fact, points toward embracing the series of "selves" defined through identification with others on a multitude of spectra. Gaskell ultimately suggests that personal identity is multitudinously constructed, with each subject concurrently embodying and performing the different significations of several unique axes rather than merely swinging back and forth between two opposing points. The two protagonists of North and South, Margaret Hale and John Thornton, move through these various dimensions sequentially at first, this movement facilitating their growing awareness of the breakdown of their previously-held beliefs in their own binarily-constructed identities, and then finally they inhabit or embody them simultaneously. In other words, Margaret and Thornton begin their respective journeys with firmly-held conceptions of their own identities based on a contrast between themselves and what they perceive to be their polar opposites. Ultimately, the narrative of North and South makes it clear that it is not enough for these characters merely to transgress or blend the supposedly opposing, dichotomous spheres between which they are said move. Rather, Gaskell develops both Margaret's and Thornton's self-conceptions from an inadequate and inaccurate attitude of binary contrast into the acknowledgement and acceptance of identity based around multiplicity and the embodiment of what they had previously believed to be separate from and threatening to their subjectivity. This shift in personal self-conception is the core of Gaskell's solution to the wider social conflicts she presents, what enables the workplace reform found in the narrative, and it is reflected in the general structure of multiplicity found throughout the novel.