Consuming Subjects: Women and the Market in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South

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Notes

See for example Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950, pp. 91–2; Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Politics of Story in Victorian Society Fiction, pp. 53–69; Catherine Gallagher, Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832-1867, pp. 166-184; Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City, pp. 165-176.

While Josephine Guy argues that “[t]he mid-nineteenth-century novels which we now call ‘social-problem’ or ‘industrial’ novels—principally Hard Times, Mary Barton, North and South, Alton Locke, Sybil and Felix Holt—were not described and identified as a group by their nineteenth-century readers or critics” (3), there is clear evidence to the contrary. The Manchester Weekly Advertiser, for example, not only calls North and South “a manufacturing novel” in its unsigned review of 14 April 1855, but it also draws a direct comparison between North and South and two earlier “manufacturing novels,” Mary Barton and Hard Times (Easson 338). Similarly, Gaskell herself refers to a forthcoming “manufacturing novel” in a letter to publisher Edward Chapman, for example (Gaskell, “Edward Chapman” 72).

Indeed, this canon of fiction and North and South's place within it has remained remarkably unchallenged since Williams and Kettle published their respective analyses in the 1950s. Thus Catherine Gallagher, for example, adopts their canon of novels without question in Industrial Reformation of English Novel 1832–1867 (1985). As she notes: “In the 1950s, Kathleen Tillotson, Arnold Kettle, and Raymond Williams discussed the definitive criteria for this subgenre and selected the major novels it should include. I have not thought it necessary to dispute their selections” (269, n. 1).

As Erika Rappaport notes, a number of nineteenth-century commentators associated the female consumer with another familiar female figure on the Victorian streets, the prostitute, a woman already mired in the marketplace as a commodity, rather than as a consumer. Not only was female public appearance heavily coded as sexual in the nineteenth century, but the association of the woman shopper and prostitute was also compounded by their physical proximity in Britain's urban spaces. In an era when many burgeoning shopping districts, like London's West End, were also “well-known prostitute haunts” (Rappaport 31), contemporary observers agonized over the difficulty of distinguishing respectable from disreputable women. Furthermore, consumer appetite was even seen as a contributing factor in women's fall into prostitution, as commentators feared women would sell themselves to pay for coveted goods and products. As Maria Valverde has argued, Gaskell explicitly plays on this anxiety in her other industrial novel, Mary Barton, through the character of Esther, a young woman whose “love of finery” turns her from a factory girl into a street-walker (Valverde 170).

Ruskin invites his reader to “look round this English room of yours,” suggesting that his reader's preference for “accurate mouldings, and perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of the seasoned wood and tempered steel” (41) prevents workers from expressing their own imagination or invention. As such, it reduces the “flesh and skin” of the workers who made these objects into nothing more than “leathern thongs to yoke machinery with” (41).

Marx defines use-value as “[t]he utility of a thing. . . . Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that of the commodity” (303). Exchange value, he notes, “presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort, a relation constantly changing with time and place” (304). While Adam Smith had argued that the value of commodities lay in their exchange value in the eighteenth century, importantly, theories of exchange value changed over the course of the nineteenth century. Political economists in the first half of the nineteenth century maintained exchange value was determined by the quantity of labor expended in the creation of the commodity. However, while commentators like Thomas Malthus located this value in the worker's body, calculating it in terms of the amount of food necessary to compensate for the effort expended in the creation of the commodity, by the mid-nineteenth-century, the notion of labor became increasingly abstract. No longer referring to the specific labor expended in the creation of a specific object, Marx suggests in Das Kapital that labor was now understood as an abstract, homogenous and universal standard (306). As a result workers who found themselves in direct competition with machinery saw the value of their labor fall, though their own bodily exertion had not changed.

Similarly, Elaine Freedgood argues that in Mary Barton, “[c]urtains can be things and commodities; they can retain their objectness and social relations at the same moment that those qualities are becoming fetishized” (75).

Significantly, North and South does not attempt to defetishize the Indian shawl, unlike Margaret's print dress. Rather the Indian shawl functions in the novel only as an “exotic foreign artifact” and symbol of “proper Englishness” (Daly 237), both meanings which serve its role as a marker of class status.

As Deborah Nord Epstein argues “a woman's occupation of public space does more than unsettle her domestic and private identity; it threatens her respectability, her chastity her very femininity” (117). For further discussion, see Epstein, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City; Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London; Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture.

Significantly, Margaret resists both consumption and consummation in North and South, rejecting two marriage proposals before finally accepting Thornton at the close of the novel.

Gaskell had believed she was to serialize the novel in twenty-two rather than twenty issues of Household Words. She blamed this confusion for the novel's rushed conclusion: “at last the story is huddled & hurried up. . . . But what could I do? Every page was grudged” (Gaskell, “Anna Jameson” 328).