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The purpose of this study is to show how Elizabeth Gaskell creates a sense of place and why place is important in her novels. Gaskell's life and works indicate an interest in place and an ability to recreate it, but, although most critics mention her descriptive powers, few examine how a sense of place is achieved. Indeed, setting as a tool of analysis has received critical attention only fairly recently. Here the term 'place' has been chosen because it embraces the social, physical, and personal aspects of setting as well as the objects with which spaces are furnished, and for the purpose of discussing its significance a model of the novel has been devised which shows the interrelationships of character, action, setting, language, and ideas, as well as the influence of context (Introduction). Gaskell creates a sense of place in many unobtrusive ways, but particularly important are point of view, windows as vantage points, the connection of place with memory, and similarities in perception between scenes in the novels and fashions in painting (Chapter One). An analysis of Ruth illustrates the interrelationship of character and place. Ruth's journey mirrors her spiritual development, and character is often revealed through response to environment or the displacement of emotions onto it, while place is also used to signify innocence and to emphasize the plea for understanding of the unmarried mother and her child (Chapter Two). Places in North and South represent important aspects of newly industrialized Britain, and are significant to the novel's vision of a coherent society; an examination of how apparently irreconcilable communities are shown to be mutually dependent underlines the importance of place to the novel's ideas (Chapter Three). Wives and Daughters has a complicated plot based on a number of parallel, interlocking stories each centred on a home in the neighbourhood of Hollingford. How event, story, and plot are connected to these places shows their relationship with action (Chapter Four). Thus is an appreciation of Gaskell's literary achievement enhanced, and place shown to be a significant element in her novels.

No abstract available. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal,1980.

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Typescript (photocopy).

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Both contemporary and modern critics recognize the industrial, regional, and personal conflicts in North and South. There are, however, other conflicts which Mrs. Gaskell treats and resolves. This study emphasizes inner struggles resulting from repressive Victorian sexual mores. An examination of conflicts at a deeper -level than has previously been attempted clarifies motivations of individual characters, reveals a conscious and unconscious pattern within the novel and gives a fuller appreciation of Mrs. Gaskell's psychological insight. Included for discussion are examples of the Victorian feminine stereotype and the use of religion as sexual sublimation. A major portion of the paper concerns the growth of the heroine, Margaret Hale, from repressed sexuality to an acceptance of womanhood in Victorian society.

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In a Victorian Britain in crisis, Chartism was as it remains an exemplary site for contestation of various forms of authority--social, political, theological, historical, and literary. When Carlyle in his Chartism essay demands what "the under classes intrinsically mean," he discounts "these wild inarticulate souls" unable to recognize or express their own true state (122). But even as Carlyle authorizes detached observation, he also helps cement those unpredictable alliances that haunt his work. In an increasingly statistical culture, the representation of Chartism has much to tell about technologies of power, the cultural inflection of difference, and the production and reproduction of knowledge, value, and legitimacy. Thus, it seems timely to re-examine Chartism and its diverse representations within and beyond the so-called social-problem novel. Like other forms of knowledge production, the novel both helped shape and was reshaped by Chartism which tested to the limit the novel's pretension to adequate representation of a common world. / Such investigation indicates the importance of interpretation despite its being attacked by everyone from political economists to postmodernists. I thus interpret Victorian reform through its literary mediations, and in relation to the kinds of authority and accounting associated with a history and theology in crisis. In reading for reform largely male middle-class experts, I deploy a double strategy, reading them to bring out the power and agency of the underrepresented, and realigning texts and contexts to reform the ways they are read. While Carlyle and Peter Gaskell defined the terms of succeeding debates on Chartism, they did not fully determine the interpretations of their own words or other pertinent evidence by the underclasses or by writers like Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Kingsley. By the forms of their fiction, these two writers helped legitimate the lives and utterances of the working classes and exposed the class- and gender-based hierarchies of literary genres and social and political conventions. Elizabeth Gaskell and Kingsley rework such authoritative discourses as history and theology and reform reading and writing in ways that frustrate the efforts of literary taxonomists then and now, and accept the burden of interpretation to make a difference in the literary and social scene. / By socializing and historicizing literary categories in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin and others, I aim to escape those intellectual "tramlines" that have constrained commentary. The careful generic and other demarcations and hierarchies of traditional critical discourse and unexamined allegiance to stable notions of class, gender, nation, and religion have operated against the disruptive power and productivity of the work of Gaskell and Kingsley. Equally, whereas historians like Dorothy Thompson turn to "empirical data" (Chartists x) to dispel the confusion of interpretations of Chartism, my practice is theoretical, as my story of the past is continuous with my understanding of the present. Even Gareth Stedman Jones (part of the linguistic turn in historical studies) cannot sufficiently rethink Chartism when he concedes determining force to government policy and Carlyle's terms, although he usefully shifts attention from the economic to the political. He operates, however, within a rigid binary logic that separates the social and political while underplaying the cultural and a range of linguistic practices and forms of dissemination that constituted Chartist identity.