
The Winter's Tale
Stefania Ciocia salutes the strong women in Blanche McIntyre’s production for the Globe.
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Sep
21
Sep
29
There are many aspects of Elizabeth Gaskell’s
extremely readable and engrossing novel which make it fascinating to the modern
reader, the historian and the student of English literature. It is a mixture of
autobiography, social document, feminist tract and an endearing love story. It first appeared in the pages of Charles
Dickens’ periodical Household Words
in 1854 and then in novel form in 1855. This was a time when the Industrial
Revolution was at full throttle: machinery was replacing the old manual tools
and workers were being conscripted into a uniform force. Like many artists of
the time, Gaskell was interested in the relationship between the growing number
of industrial workers and their masters as well as the changing role of women
in the new and shifting social world.
Gaskell had touched on industrial relations in her
previous work, Mary Barton (1848) but in North
and South she returned to the topic in a more balanced manner. Remembering
the criticism she received for not presenting a fair picture of employers in the earlier novel, she attempted to
rectify the balance by her presentation of the character of factory owner, John
Thornton who gradually – and it is a cunning and subtle transformation –
engages the sympathy of the reader and wins the love of the heroine, Margaret
Hale.
It is through the perceptions of Margaret that we
assimilate the author’s ideas and presentiments concerning the contrasts
between the North and South, the real and the metaphorical boundaries that seem
to separate the country as represented by the main protagonists. Helstone, -
the epitome of ‘South-ness’, ‘one of the most out-of-the-way places in
England’, where Margaret is living at the beginning of the novel, is portrayed
in glowing terms: ‘All other places in England that I have seen seem so hard
and prosaic-looking, after the New Forest. Helston is like a village in a poem
– in one of Tennyson’s poems.’ Idyllic then and easily contrasted with Milton,
the northern town situated in the harsh and Swiftian-sounding Darkshire.
Margaret and Thornton reflect their individual
backgrounds: she, the product of genteel southern civilisation and culture; he,
of the material and practical strivings of a growing industrial state. It is the forceful natures of the two main
characters, each forged by their different geographical and social upbringings
that is the real focus of the differentiation in the novel: Thornton is North
and Margaret is South.
Once Margaret is established in her new northern
home and we perceive the seeds of conflict and romance between her and the
Rochester-like factory owner John Thornton, the novel comes alive. True to
Gaskell’s interests and belief in social issues of her day, the troubled
development of their relationship does not take place, as it might in a Jane Austen
novel, against the backdrop of dinner parties and balls, but in the grittier
surroundings of the brutal uncompromising world brought about by the industrial
revolution where employers and workers
clash in the first organised strikes. It seems as though our two central
characters stand on either side of the great divide here: Margaret, sympathetic
to the poor, whose courage and tenacity she admires and among whom she makes
friends, while Thornton, (prickly as his name suggests) a member of the nouveau
riche mill-owning class, is practical and holds a disdainful attitude towards
the workers he employs, and is suspicious of their loyalty.
Margaret and Thornton have
fixed ideas about the world; both, in different ways, make no allowance for
‘human passions getting the better of reason’. Their love is not blocked, as in
more conventional novels, by circumstances, tricks of fate if you like, or by
the intervention of others; they are their own enemies, kept apart by pride,
misconceptions and a clash of deeply internalised values.
Margaret learns and develops and Gaskell constantly
reminds us of her learning curve, which involves Thornton also. He teaches
Margaret lessons about atmospheric science, industrial ecology and political
science. She even learns new semantics from her father who tells her, ‘Don't
call the Milton manufacturers tradesmen’ and that the noun ‘manufacturer’
designates a social class she has not previously known. In charting her
education, Gaskell is also providing the same function for the reader. She
brings us gently to appreciate the North and the function and attitude of men
like Thornton.
Gaskell seems to suggest that in some ways Margaret
fails to fully comprehend how she was acclimatised to her life in Milton by the
time she leaves. When she returns to her
former home Margaret discovers that her lovely Helston has changed in the few
years since she lived there: ‘There was change everywhere; slight, yet
pervading all’ In fact, Gaskell here represents by the pervasive sense of loss
and change in the physical setting the losses and changes in Margaret's
personal life. Further, this experience brings Margaret to reflect from her
‘own painful sense of change,’ that ‘The
progress of all around me is right and necessary.’ That Margaret grasps this
lesson in a single chapter signifies that she has already mastered many
previous lessons in wisdom. It is she
above all, along with the reader, Gaskell hopes, who comes to realise that
change and progress, whatever form they take, are inevitable and necessary.
Arthur Pollard in Mrs Gaskell, Novelist
and Biographer (1965) asserts that in this novel Gaskell has achieved a
coalescence between personal and public stories in the relationship of the two
major characters. Therefore, the marriage of Margaret and Thornton symbolises
the union of not only two very different people but also two very different
ways of life. Gentility has united with commerce, Gaskell suggests, as a beacon
for the future. North has been allied to the South.
The novel has received scant attention from dramatists. The first television adaptation was in 1975 when Patrick Stewart played Mr. Thornton and Rosalie Shanks played Margaret Hale. In 2004 the BBC aired an excellent version with Daniela Denby-Ashe and Richard Armitage in the lead roles.