A Feminist Reading Of North And South

Elizabeth Gaskell(1810-1865)is a well-known British woman writer in the 19 th century.Her works are rich in content and distinct in theme,like Mary Barton and North and South,with working-class living conditions and humorous themes of rural Cranford life.From the feminist perspective,Wife and Daughter reflects two themes:love and marriage,and Ruth tells the story of a fallen girl who saves herself.She also writes historical novels such as Sylvia’s Lover.She is normally considered a feminist writer because most of the characters in her works are women and her stories mainly reflect their living conditions and sufferings.However,some critics argue that she is actually a patriarchal writer because her works never break out of the framework of patriarchal society,but instead bring female characters back to the family as “the angels in the house”(Elizabeth Langland,1995).This study attempts to reveal Gaskell’s real attitude towards the oppressed women in the Victorian era by analyzing several female characters in the novel North and South,based on the theories put forward by three famous feminists,Virginia Woolf,Simone De Beauvoir and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.In North and South,Mrs.Gaskell creates many characters from different social classes with different personalities(Yvonne French,1949).There are some special women characters,such as Hannah Thornton,who embodies Woolf’s “androgyny” theory.Maria Hale is an example of the submissive attitude towards the patriarchal society,who embodies Beauvoir’s theory that women are “formed”.Edith Shaw Lennox and Bessy Higgins show that economic relationship is the root of the oppression on women in family market which is the idea of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.Gaskell sets these contrasting female characters.The female characters who resist the oppression of the patriarchal society all have happy endings in the end,while the female characters who choose to give in to the society all end their lives in the form of death or disease.Based on the feminist theory of the three feminists,the writer of the thesis will analyze these female characters from different classes.They take different attitudes towards the oppression of the patriarchal society which indicates Mrs.Gaskell’s encouragement of the oppressed women’s active resistance and brave pursuit for a happy life.It is hoped that the analysis of Gaskell’s work North and South from the feminist perspective will be helpful and enlightening to those who are interested in and those who are pursuing a study on Mrs.Gaskell and her novels.