Women’s Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 507 – 519

www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif

Women, mobility and modernity in Elizabeth Gaskell’s

North and South
Wendy Parkins
School of Media, Communication and Culture, Murdoch University Murdoch, WA 6150, Australia

Synopsis

This paper examines how Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South (1855) offers a unique perspective from which
to narrate the dislocations and possibilities of modernity for women. The heroine, Margaret Hale, not only functions
as a mediator in the conflicts and disruptions in the novel, she lives these disruptions, as represented first and
foremost through her mobility: Margaret does not simply move from the south to the north of England; she moves
repeatedly over the course of the novel. Emphasis thus falls on Margaret as a participant in, rather than an observer
of, modernity and the novel can be seen as an exploration of the possibilities and limitations of women’s agency in
modernity. In offering a narrative of modernity from the perspective of the middle-class woman, Gaskell presents a
complex and nuanced picture of women’s modern life, which makes an important contribution to discursive mappings
of modernity.
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Introduction (Manchester) and have emphasised Margaret’s role as

In Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South
(1855), the mobility of the heroine offers a unique
perspective from which to narrate the dislocations and
possibilities of modernity for women. Margaret is not
merely the mediating point of social disruptions and
dislocations, she lives these disruptions, represented
first and foremost through her mobility: her shifting
perspective raises the problem of the perspective from
which the problems of modernity and modern social
relations can be resolved. Previous critical discussions
of Gaskell’s novel have tended to focus on the middle
section of the novel set in the industrial city of Milton
0277-5395/$ - see front matter D 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2004.09.006
mediator in the social unrest there (e.g. Gallagher,
1985, p. 170; Kestner, 1985, p. 166). She is seen as a
kind of still-point at the centre of the novel around
which events and characters turn. By contrast, I argue
that a different reading of North and South may
emerge if the mobility of the heroine is foregrounded.
This emphasis on Margaret as a participant in, rather
than an observer of, modernity means that North and
South becomes an interesting exploration of modern-
ity and the new possibilities and limitations of
women’s agency it offered in the mid-19th century.
In presenting a narrative of modernity from the
perspective of the mobile middle-class woman,
508 W. Parkins / Women’s Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 507–519
Gaskell offers a complex and nuanced presentation of
women’s experience of modernity.1
North and South is usually associated by critics
with other industrial novels of the time as a form
of intervention in the social and political debates
on the condition-of-England question (see Poovey,
1995, p. 133). While not underestimating the impor-
tance of the Milton/Manchester section of the novel
for such concerns, I want to argue that modernity
is not represented simply in the factories and the
class struggles of the industrial city of Milton but
in the many different aspects of the cultural
experience of modernity and the subject’s respon-
ses to it that the novel explores. North and South
deploys different discourses and metaphors of
modernity: the modern city is by turns grand and
liberating or alienating and deathly; change is
presented variously as organic or historical; the
speed of modern life is exciting or sickening;
mobility can either broaden or narrow the mind.
Through these representations, North and South
captures something of what Marshall Berman has
described as the quintessential modern experience.
bTo be modern,Q Berman writes,
is to find ourselves in an environment that promises
us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of
ourselves, and the world—and, at the same time,
that threatens to destroy everything we have,
everything we know, everything we are (Berman,
1983, p. 15).
In this paper, I will address some of the different
aspects and accounts of modernity offered in North
and South, giving special attention to the novel’s
treatment of nostalgia and travel, in order to show
that it is not just an industrial novel, it is a narrative
of modernity which places a bourgeois woman at
the centre of modernity.
Now and then: modernity and nostalgia
Theorists of modernity such as Raymond Wil-
liams (Williams, 1973, p. 297) and Perry Anderson
(Anderson, 1988, p. 324) have stressed the uneven
rates of change wrought by processes of modern-
isation. Williams in particular has linked these
unevennesses with different locations, most obvi-
ously the country and the city, and emphasised
the modern experience of dislocation as the subject
moves from one location to the other and back
again (Williams, 1973, p. 15). Terence Wright has
rightly drawn attention to the conjunction in
Gaskell’s title: it is not North or South, and thus
a choice between past and present, rural or urban,
but North and South, connoting the ongoing
juxtaposition of two different locations and sets
of possibilities (Wright, 1995, p. 97).2 The move-
ment in Gaskell’s novel is not unidirectional: in
the course of the novel, Margaret moves from south
to north, country to city, seaside to metropolis—
and back again. Her brother Frederick returns from
Spain and then goes back, renouncing his English
nationality (Gaskell, 1982, p. 343); her cousin
Edith goes to Corfu with her husband’s regiment
and then returns to England; Mr. Bell, a character
who most consistently expresses anti-modern opi-
nions, moves back and forth between Milton and
Oxford; and even Margaret’s father Mr. Hale leaves
his new home in Milton to die in Oxford. It is through
this juxtaposition of locations, and the sense of
dislocatedness to which it gives rise, that the
novel captures the cultural experience of modernity
so well.
The present—what characterises it, how subjects
should respond to it—is a persistent theme in North
and South, and it is most clearly represented by
the modern industrial city; in contrast to the new
city of Milton, even metropolitan London seems
bmonotonousQ (Gaskell, 1982, p. 329) and bused-upQ
(Gaskell, 1982, p. 163) to Margaret.3 For the city
dweller in Milton, Margaret observes, bthe present is
so living and hurrying and close around himQ
(Gaskell, 1982, p. 302); its constant change is a
source of distraction and its accelerated pace demands
its inhabitants adapt and change themselves. The
modern city such as Milton requires subjects who live
in the present, according to Mrs. Thornton, who
expresses the need for the factory-owner to focus on
the present:
bThe time and place in which he lives seem to me to
require all his energy and attention. Classics may do
very well for men who loiter away their lives in the
country or in colleges, but Milton men ought to have
 W. Parkins / Women’s Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 507–519
their thoughts and powers absorbed in the work of
today.Q (Gaskell, 1982, p. 113, emphasis added).
A focus on the present is equally desirable as a
characteristic of factory-workers: the masters, Mar-
garet observes, bwould like their hands to be merely
tall, large children—living in the present momentQ
(Gaskell, 1982, p. 119, emphasis added). This relent-
less concern with the present associated with indus-
trial capitalism in which the masters focus on profits
and the workers should be solely concerned with
production is a feature of an instrumentalist modernity
which North and South exposes as unsatisfactory for
subjects across all classes in the industrial city. An
exclusive focus on the present robs subjects of a sense
of connection and community, which can be gained
from a knowledge and proper valuing of the past.
Discussions like this about what the present means
recur in North and South and Margaret participates in
many debates about the superior claims of the present
over the past or vice versa. These exchanges often
emphasise the role of nostalgia as a constituent theme
in the discourse of modernity, a discourse that the novel
presents as continually under construction and contest-
ation. What is striking from the outset in North and
South, however, is the degree of knowingness which
informs the tone of these conversations about past and
present; the pastoral representation of the village of
Helstone, for instance, is in these dialogues constructed
out of available cultural tropes rather than through any
kind of direct, unmediated observation of regional
differences. As Dorice Elliott has argued, bWhile some
of the characters may indulge in a nostalgic idealisation
of Helstone and of the land-based economy it
represents, such a vision of Margaret’s home is
relegated to the realm of a romantic fiction. . . even
before Helstone appears as a setting in the novelQ
(Elliott, 1994, p. 36). In the first chapter when Margaret
discusses Helstone with Henry Lennox, that exemplum
of the modern man about town, Helstone is depicted as
literary pastoral, despite Margaret’s disavowals:
dThere is the church and a few houses near it on the
green—cottages, rather—with roses growing all over
them.T
dAnd flowering all the year round, especially at
Christmas—make your picture complete,T said he.
dNo,T replied Margaret, somewhat annoyed, dI am
509
not making a picture. I am trying to describe
Helstone as it really is. You should not have said
that.T
dI am penitent,T he answered. dOnly it really sounded
like a village in a tale rather than in real life.T
dAnd so it is,T replied Margaret eagerly. dAll the
other places in England that I have seen seem so
hard and prosaic-looking. . . Helstone is like a village
in a poem—in one of Tennyson’s poems. . .T (Gas-
kell, 1982, p. 12).
Despite her intention to convey the reality of
Helstone, Margaret, without irony, quickly resorts to
literary allusion to describe her home and her deep sense
of attachment to it. Even for the inhabitant, there is no
Helstone as it really is, there is the available cultural
discourse of the village, blike a village in a poem.Q
Margaret’s idealisation of the village, however, is
influenced significantly by the fact that she has spent
long periods of time away from Helstone, growing
up largely in London with her aunt. The meaning/s
of dhomeT for Margaret are coloured by her experi-
ences of bother places,Q which seem bso hard and
prosaic-looking.Q Very early in the novel, then, an idea
of home—as an assured sense of place in the modern
world—is invoked which the forthcoming dramatic
changes will demonstrate is a precarious notion
indeed. As Rita Felski has argued, the meaning and
status of home is usually positioned in opposition to
modernity, bexisting outside the flux and change of an
authentically modern lifeQ (Felski, 1999–2000, p. 26):
bThe vocabulary of modernity is a vocabulary of anti-
home. It celebrates mobility, movement, exile, boun-
dary crossing. . . The longing for home, the desire to
attach oneself to a familiar space, is seen by most
theorists of modernity as a regressive desireQ (Felski,
1999–2000, p. 23). Yet, at the same time, nostalgia for
home was an exemplary modern disorder. First
considered a disease (and identified as such as early
as the 17th century), nostalgia became a focus of
medical attention in the early decades of the 19th
century (Roth, 1992, p. 272). The disease was
frequently found in the army, where the nostalgic
soldier’s longing to return home was so extreme that he
became ill and depressed to the point of wasting away
to death (Roth, 1992, p. 274)—literally, home sick-
ness—but nostalgia became much more widespread
and generalised through the population. As Michael S.
510 W. Parkins / Women’s Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 507–519
Roth has argued, banxiety about increased mobility in
a modern society runs through much of the literature
on nostalgiaQ (Roth, 1992, p. 277). After the mid-19th
century, however, nostalgia was no longer seen as a
dangerous, life-threatening disease but a disorder
common to modern life, although modern life could
also overcome the disorder:
If the breakdown of village isolation and increased
mobility were important factors in the increased
medical attention paid to nostalgia, the acceleration
of these same processes came to be seen as
responsible for the disappearance of the disease. That
is, with increased centralisation and improvements in
transportation and communication, one could return
more easily to the place of longing. . . [B]y the 1870s
the medical community had developed a narrative of
progress to show how modernity had provided a cure
for one of the diseases it had provoked. . . There was a
strong consensus that as a country became more fully
modernised and its people became more cosmopol-
itan, the incidence of this disease diminished (Roth,
1992, pp. 277–278, emphasis in original).
As Felski concludes:
If the experience of modernity brought with it an
overwhelming sense of innovation, ephemerality, and
chaotic change, it simultaneously engendered multiple
expressions of desire for stability and continuity.
Nostalgia, understood as a mourning for an idealised
past, thus emerges as a formative theme of the
modern: the age of progress was also the age of
yearning for an imaginary edenic condition that had
been lost (Felski, 1995, p. 40).
The nostalgic idealisation of her village home
which Margaret so passionately expresses to Henry
Lennox, then, articulates a profoundly modern
response to the attachments and securities of home,
rendered all the more appealing both by its precarious
uniqueness and its distance (significantly, the con-
versation takes place in London).
Margaret’s nostalgia in the opening chapter of
North and South is, however, an unusual case
as women were considered less prone to nostalgia
than men because their lives were apparently less
marked by disruption than those of men: bwhile
women were the classic objects of nostalgic affection
in their role as mothers, they were less likely to
be subjects of it. Rather than desiring the past, they
were the pastQ (Felski, 1995). Or at least this was the
case for middle-class women; as Roth notes, medical
sources considered young girls heading to cities for
domestic work to be particularly vulnerable to the
disease (Roth, 1992, p. 273): bServant girls were the
exception which proved the rule: their mobility
revealed a dangerous vulnerabilityQ (Roth, 1992,
p. 277). That Margaret does not fit the conventional
representation of the domestic bourgeois woman is
thus signalled by her exhibiting symptoms of a
disorder associated with change and upheaval, a
response more typical of the modern masculine
subject. Margaret’s life, as the novel will disclose, is
precisely marked by disruption and the kinds of
temporal discontinuities that are associated with
modernity (see Anderson, 1988) and her narrative
reveals the problematic location of women in
modernity.
Lennox’s courtship of Margaret is thus doomed
because he misreads Margaret’s nostalgic attachment
to Helstone as a sign that she is a conventional
woman, at one with her domestic and pastoral
environment, and thus outside the processes of
modernity. When Lennox pays a visit to Margaret
on her return to her parent’s home (in order to
propose), the two go sketching picturesque scenes of
rustic cottages and woodland. Margaret is, however,
peeved to find that Lennox has drawn her into his
landscape with an old cottager, that he has trans-
formed her into a subject within his own pastoral
fantasy: bI little thought you were making old Isaac
and me into subjects, when you told me to ask him the
history of these cottages,Q she complains (Gaskell,
1982, p. 25). While Margaret feels dat homeT at
Helstone and is devastated by her father’s proposed
move to the industrial north, the course of the novel
demonstrates Margaret’s adaptability to the changes of
modernity largely through her interrogation of social
and cultural processes around her and her recognition
of a certain instability in her own subjectivity which
matches the upheaval around her.
Margaret’s recognition of the fluidity of subjectiv-
ity occurs most explicitly during her return visit to
Helstone with Mr. Bell later in the novel, after the
death of her parents. The visit, in a chapter entitled
 W. Parkins / Women’s Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 507–519
bOnce and ThenQ, is almost a set-piece in the novel
in its consideration of past and present and their
discursive representations. The journey begins in a
characteristically modern way: Margaret’s blast alarm
was lest they should be too late and miss the train;
but no! they were all in time; and she breathed freely
and happily at length, seated in the carriage opposite
to Mr. Bell, and whirling away past the well-known
stations. . .Q (Gaskell, 1982, p. 384). Throughout this
chapter there is a self-consciousness in the narrative
voice in juxtaposing disparate signifiers and allusions;
for example, the description of the railway journey
is followed by literary allusions to the pastoral in
Goethe and Longfellow (bThe hot air danced over
the golden stillness of the land, farm after farm was
left behind, each reminding Margaret of German
Idyls—of Herman and Dorothea—of EvangelineQ
(Gaskell, 1982, p. 385)).4 Once arrived in Helstone,
it quickly becomes apparent that there have been
significant changes to the place, that Helstone is not
immune to the processes of modernisation. The arrival
of the new evangelical clergyman, for instance, itself
a sign of modernity and transition in the established
church, instigates changes in housing and education
and the (attempted) introduction of temperance in
the village.5 Bell, however, refuses to recognise such
changes as historically specific but resolutely presents
them as signs of the mutability of the world and
the human condition: bIt is the first changes among
familiar things that make such a mystery of time to
the young,Q he tells Margaret, bafterwards we lose
the sense of the mysterious. I take changes in all I see
as a matter of course. The instability of all human
things is familiar to me, to you it is new and
oppressiveQ (Gaskell, 1982, p. 388). Like the writer
of Ecclesiastes, Bell sees in every change only
the eternal verities of age and experience; the fact
that such transformations have taken place even in a
place as close to nature as Helstone confirms for him
that change is an inevitable, organic—rather than
historical—process.
An episode immediately following this elegiac
pronouncement, however, leads to Bell modifying his
preference for historical continuities. Visiting the
home of a young girl Margaret used to instruct, Bell
at first asserts the superiority of this type of homely
education over the parochial school the girl now
attends but on hearing a story from the girl’s mother
511
concerning a country superstition of roasting cats
alive, Bell reverses his judgement: bAnything rather
than have that child brought up in such practical
paganism,Q he concludes (Gaskell, 1982, p. 390).
Interestingly, it is the education of a girl outside the
home which here represents the benefits of modern-
isation over timeless, country customs; the impact
of modernity on women’s lives is presented as a
wholly positive force in this instance. This episode
is soon followed by Margaret’s own meditations on
the dimprovementsT at Helstone which echo both the
elegiac tone and classification of change as organic
which had characterised Bell’s earlier judgements:
There was change everywhere; slight, yet pervading
all. Households were changed by absence, or death,
or marriage, or the natural mutations brought by days
and months and years, which carry us on impercept-
ibly from childhood to youth, and thence through
manhood to age, whence we drop like fruit, fully
ripe, into the quiet mother earth. Places were
changed—a tree gone here, a bough there, bringing
in a long ray of light where no light was before—a
road was trimmed and narrowed, and the green
straggling pathway by its side enclosed and culti-
vated. A great improvement it was called; but
Margaret sighed over the old picturesqueness, the
old gloom, and the grassy wayside of former days
(Gaskell, 1982, p. 394).
The discursive shifts in this passage around notions
of time, change and nature illustrate well the complex-
ity of representations in North and South. While
Margaret’s meditation begins with a description of
change as an organic process, marked by the
temporalities of nature (bnatural mutations,Q like the
maturing of fruit), it is not an unmediated nature
which Margaret mourns but an ideal cultivated in a
slightly earlier period of modernity; it is the passing of
bold picturesquenessQ in favour of the new discourse
of bimprovementQ which is lamented. Both are,
however, acculturated versions of nature, (over)deter-
mined by aesthetic and/or economic discourses of
their time. The natural world—even at Helstone—is
not outside the processes of history but culturally
inscribed in historically specific ways.
Margaret then shifts to a different register for
understanding change and temporality, a religious
512 W. Parkins / Women’s Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 507–519
discourse of eternity—a dimension outside time—
through which she hopes to be able to gain a sense of
resignation and escape from the relentless upheavals
of her life:
dI am so tired—so tired of being whirled on through
all these phases of my life, in which nothing abides by
me, no creature, no place; it is like the circle in which
the victims of earthly passion eddy continually. I am
in the mood in which women of another religion take
the veil. I seek heavenly steadfastness in earthly
monotonyT (Gaskell, 1982, p. 400).
Margaret’s desire to escape history and loss
(history as loss) proves to be only temporary and
before leaving Helstone she is able to regain her
former nostalgic regard for the village (bThe place
was reinvested with the old enchanting atmosphere.
The common sounds of life were more musical there
than anywhere else in the whole world, the light more
golden, the life more tranquil and full of dreamy
delightQ (Gaskell, 1982, p. 401)). Here, nostalgia is
not a sign of a life-threatening disconnection from the
modern world but rather an indication that Margaret
sees herself as a modern subject who no longer
belongs to the pastoral world of her childhood. As a
result, Margaret is able to accept change by position-
ing herself within the flux of modern life: bAnd I, too,
change perpetually—now this, now that—now dis-
appointed and peevish because all is not exactly as I
had pictured it, and now suddenly discovering that the
reality is far more beautiful than I had imagined itQ
(Gaskell, 1982, p. 401). Margaret therefore returns
from Helstone with a new sense of possibility for her
life, although she is unable to realise this possibility
until she receives an inheritance from Bell on his
death.
Margaret represents the modern subject as opposed
to characters like Bell, her parents and Dixon, whose
excessive nostalgic affection for the past precludes
them from assimilating to modernity.6 In marked
contrast to them, Margaret’s dhealthyT form of
nostalgic affection for Helstone enables her to retain
a sense of connection to a location (dhomeT), rather
than the rootless anomie which it was feared would be
the only possible response to the dislocations of
modernity. Roth has noted an ambivalence by doctors
in the 19th century about the decline of nostalgia; bthe
nostalgia for nostalgia,Q as he puts it, bwas already
apparent by the 1840sQ (Roth, 1992, p. 278). As one
doctor wrote in 1844: bfrom the general cosmopoli-
tanism we see the result that in one becoming attached
to everything one is no longer attached to anythingQ
(Pilet, quoted in Roth, 1992, p. 278). Lack of location,
associated with an absence of ethics in modern life, is
countered by Margaret’s new appreciation of her
former home, an appreciation at once nostalgic but
also ethical: bLooking out of myself, and my own
painful sense of change, the progress all around me is
right and necessary. I must not think so much of how
circumstances affect me myself, but how they affect
others. . .Q (Gaskell, 1982, p. 400). Although Margar-
et’s response could be seen as a retreat from the
threats and challenges of a changing world into a kind
of traditional female self-abnegation, her future course
of action shows that it is better seen as an attempt to
find a place for the bourgeois woman in modernity.
Bell’s death soon after the visit to Helstone with
Margaret underlines their divergent response to the
changes of modernity; if acute nostalgia signals a
failure to accept modernity, in Bell’s case it can be
said to lead to death. North and South contains several
characters with an over-investment in the past which
prevents them from a fulfilled life in the present:
Margaret’s parents and Mr. Bell all to varying degrees
live in the past and never feel at home in the modern
present represented by the industrial city. Through the
character of Bell significant differences and debates
around issues of modernity are raised throughout the
novel. He decries the constant changes in Milton, the
city of his birth (bI do assure you, I often lose my way
[there]—aye, among the very piles of warehouses that
are built upon my father’s orchardQ (Gaskell, 1982,
p. 381)), and has a low opinion of his townsmen’s
obsession with modernity: bAs for sitting still, and
learning from the past, or shaping out the future by
faithful work done in a prophetic spirit—Why! Pooh!
I don’t believe there’s a man in Milton who knows
how to sit still; and it is a great artQ (Gaskell, 1982,
p. 330–331, emphasis added). To which Margaret
replies: bMilton people, I suspect, think Oxford men
don’t know how to moveQ (1982, p. 331). The
associations here between immobility/tradition and
mobility/modernity create a dichotomy in which these
polarised positions seem irreconcilable, although Mar-
garet proposes that if the two groups—Milton people
 W. Parkins / Women’s Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 507–519
and Oxford men—mixed more it bwould be a very
good thingQ (Gaskell, 1982, p. 331). Margaret’s
response to the dislocations of modernity is an
ethical one in proposing a dialogue between differ-
ently located subjects as a possible solution to
changes in traditional patterns of sociality.7 The
exploration of different aspects of modernity in North
and South is never simply descriptive (what is
modernity like?) but ethical (what is modernity like
for whom? how should the subject respond to
modernity?) It is this ethical focus of the novel which
depends on the centrality of Margaret; she serves as
the perspective through which womenTs position and
agency can be explored and negotiated, even as her
perspective is not a fixed one. Part of an ethical
response to modernity, North and South suggests, is to
recognise that one is situated within processes of
change, to recognise oneself as an historical subject;
to deny this—as, to some extent, does Mr. Bell—is to
refuse a sense of connection or engagement with other
subjects affected by change. In a novel concerned
with transformation, as Hilary M. Schor has argued,
the heroine represents the modern woman’s capacity
to face and adapt to change, having first acknowl-
edged that she herself is situated within change
(Schor, 1992, pp. 124–126).
In Gaskell’s novel immobility is not an option; like
the most strident celebration of modernity, North and
South makes clear that stasis equates with death and
that a certain degree of mobility and change is
inevitable in modern life. Mobility, moreover, offers
new opportunities for connection, as Margaret’s
suggestion for the mixing of Milton and Oxford
people makes explicit and as the eventual marriage of
Margaret and Thornton symbolises. Both Margaret
and Thornton seek to reconcile past and present and
thus emerge at the novel’s conclusion not only as a
well-suited couple but as positive representations of
modern subjects.8 As Raymond Williams has argued,
novels like North and South explore the btension of an
increasingly intricate and interlocking society: not
only the changes of urbanism and industrialism but
the new social mobility and the ideas and education of
an extended cultureQ (Williams, 1973, p. 253). At the
same time, the novel also values locatedness and
connection, including connection with the past and
values associated with dhomeT, an important trope in
discussions of gender and modernity.9 It is through the
513
novel’s exploration of meanings of home and its
deployment of a discourse of nostalgia that North and
South seeks to find a solution to how to be at home—
physically, ethically, emotionally—in a modernity
characterised by mobility.
Travel and the agency of the mobile woman
From the opening chapter in North and South, it is
clear that not even indolent angels in the house are
immune to the compulsions of modern mobility:
Edith, Margaret’s cousin, is about to move to Corfu
(albeit reluctantly) on her marriage to Captain
Lennox. Edith, we are told,
would certainly have preferred a good house in
Belgravia, to all the picturesqueness of the life which
Captain Lennox described at Corfu. The very parts
which made Margaret glow as she listened, Edith
pretended to shiver and shudder at; . . .partly because
anything of a gipsy or make-shift life was really
distasteful to her (Gaskell, 1982, p. 7).
It is in part the pressures of empire which require
English women like Edith to set out for foreign shores
but it is not merely duty which makes women mobile.
As the Indian shawls, brought back by Edith’s father
and now passed on as a marriage gift from mother to
daughter, are displayed and admired it is clear that
the domestic locatedness of the women in Belgravia
is already positioned in relation to a modern world
that impinges on their daily lives, a world in which
leisure travel and the distances of empire are, as it
were, taken in their stride. The references to travel
and the commodities of empire in the opening chapter
of North and South support Edward Said’s conten-
tion that novelists like Gaskell baccepted a globalised
world view and indeed could not (in most cases
did not) ignore the vast overseas reach of British
powerQ (Said, 1993, p. 76). Wives and daughters of
the middle and upper classes were already implicated
in complex processes of mobility, modernity and
consumption, especially in relation to empire, unset-
tling any simple notion of the domestic immurement
of Victorian women. As the women’s admiration of
the shawls indicate, female pleasure is also associated
with mobility and the distances of empire. Margaret’s
514 W. Parkins / Women’s Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 507–519
delight in both the Captain’s travel stories and the
shawls prefigures her aptitude to adapt to unfamiliar
circumstances, despite her initial unhappiness at her
family’s dislocation to Milton. This aptitude for re-
location is situated in a novel in which mobility,
migration, travel, and exile are recurring themes in the
broader narrative, implicating all of the central and
peripheral characters.10
In contrast to the enforced mobility which was
often a feature of modernity (represented, for instance,
in the population drift to the industrial cities), North
and South also represents emerging forms of mobility
such as leisure travel to the seaside as features of
modern life which located subjects in new social
spaces and practices. The first seaside trip in the novel
is proposed by Margaret for the sake of her mother’s
health, and to ease Mrs. Hale’s traumatic tran-
sition from Hampshire to Milton. The belief in the
healthful benefits of visiting the seaside was itself
a modern phenomenon, as Alain Corbin has traced.
From the mid-18th century, the therapeutic benefits of
sea bathing had been advocated by doctors (Corbin,
1994. p. 69) and, as Corbin puts it, bVery soon, the
discovery of the virtues of sea water led to the
invention of the beachQ (Corbin, 1994, p. 70).
Originally confined to the upper classes, sea bathing
(and the associated benefits of sea air, beach walking
and appreciation of coastal beauty) led to the belief in
the seaside as not only a site for individual cure, but
for social regeneration:
the sea was expected to soothe the elite’s anxieties, re-
establish harmony between body and soul, and stem
the loss of vital energy of a social class that felt
particularly vulnerable through its sons, its daughters,
its wives, and its thinkers. The sea was expected to
cure the evils of urban civilisation and correct the ill
effects of easy living. . . (Corbin, 1994, p. 62, original
emphasis).
The seaside could inoculate one against the adverse
effects of the modern city, it seemed. By the end of the
1780s, a pattern of seaside holiday-making had
developed in England (Corbin, 1994, p. 257). Cultural
acceptance of the therapeutic values of the seaside,
together with the development of transport networks,
meant that the seaside holiday spread from the upper
classes to the middle classes and beyond. In the 19th
century, the sea coast became a destination for all
classes who could afford the fare to travel there: by
the 1840s, the railways spread to the coast making
day trips possible from the cities (Corbin, 1994, pp. 72
and 278; Urry, 1990, p. 21; Walton, 1981, p. 249).
In the first half of the 19th century, in fact, coastal
resorts grew faster than manufacturing towns (Urry,
1990, p. 18) and by the end of the 19th century seaside
holidays were a working-class institution (see Walton,
1981).
Margaret’s plan to take her mother to the seaside,
bto get a breath of sea air to set her up for the winterQ
(Gaskell, 1982, p. 51), then, was in keeping both
with sound medical opinion of the time (Corbin, 1994,
pp. 69–73 and 87) and with a developing pattern of
leisure travel (with which Mrs. Hale was already
familiar, having spent two weeks at Torquay—a resort
brecommended to convalescents and more generally to
all those suffering from symptoms of debilityQ (Corbin,
1994, p. 71)—during her engagement (Gaskell, 1982,
p. 52)). It is, further, a sign of the precarious class status
of the Hales that even as they prepare to move to
Milton, where Mr. Hale believes living will be more
economical in their straitened circumstances, they
maintain the signifiers of gentility, such as an invalid’s
seaside holiday at Heston, a distance of bthirty milesQ
from Milton (Gaskell, 1982, p. 51). The resort town of
Southport, approximately that distance from Man-
chester, was a middle-class destination (in contrast to
Blackpool), a place of bgrand public buildings, broad
avenues and gardensQ (Urry, 1990, p. 23; see also
Corbin, 1994, p. 278). Although Margaret intends the
visit to ease her mother’s transition to the north, even a
northern seaside town was noticeably different from its
southern counterparts: bIt had a character of its own, as
different from the little bathing-places in the south of
England as they again from the continentQ (Gaskell,
1982, p. 58). Margaret sees signifiers of dnorthern-nessT
everywhere in Heston: bThe country carts had more
iron, and less wood and leather about the horse-gear;
the people in the streets, although on pleasure bent, had
yet a busy mind. The colours looked grayer—more
enduring, not so gay and prettyQ (Gaskell, 1982, p. 59).
Even pleasure resorts, it seems, bear the marks of the
industrial capitalism, which defines Darkshire. Never-
theless, the pleasures and distractions of the seaside
produce a series of impressionistic sensations for
Margaret, in a passage evocative of modernist texts
 W. Parkins / Women’s Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 507–519
that record the fleeting sensory experiences of the
observing subject:
. . .the unusual scenes moving before her like pictures,
which she cared not in her laziness to have fully
explained before they passed away; the stroll down to
the beach to breathe the sea-air. . .; the long misty sea-
line touching the tender-coloured sky; the white sail
of a distant boat turning silver in some pale
sunbeam:—it seemed as if she could dream her life
away in such luxury of pensiveness, in which she
made her present all in all, from not daring to think of
the past, or wishing to contemplate the future
(Gaskell, 1982, pp. 59–60).
Such disconnectedness, celebrated, for instance, in
Baudelaire’s figure of the Parisian flaneur, the painter
of modern life, the man of the crowd (Baudelaire,
1972, pp. 399–400), which offered all sorts of
possibilities for new observations and chance encoun-
ters freed from the constraints of traditional social
relationships, is for the middle-class daughter only a
temporary respite from familial duty and economic
realities. Only certain kinds of subjects, North and
South implies, have the autonomy to live for the
moment, to disregard ties of affection or obligation, to
delight in bthe transient, the fleeting, the contingentQ
of modernity (Baudelaire, 1972, p. 403). Margaret’s
dmodernistT moment is immediately followed by a
return to the harsh everyday realities; she leaves
Heston to find lodgings in Milton with her father.11
Later in the novel, however, when the death of her
parents and her inheritance from Bell have given her a
greater independence, Margaret returns to the seaside
(albeit with her aunt Shaw and the Lennoxes (Gaskell,
1982, p. 414)). Instead of the trip to Cadiz she had
hoped for, Margaret goes to Cromer which she
concludes may be best for her anyway: the Norfolk
coast in autumn could supply the bbodily strengthen-
ing and bracing as well as restQ which Margaret
needed (Gaskell, 1982, p. 414), in line with contem-
porary medical opinion which believed visiting the
coast in cooler months was the most therapeutically
advantageous time (Corbin, 1994, pp. 63–64). This
trip to the seaside in North and South, however,
reflects not merely the medical but the Romantic
discourse of the seaside as a bfavourite spot for self-
knowledgeQ (Corbin, 1994, p. 164):
515
[Romantic artists] powerfully enriched the means of
enjoying the beach, and stimulated the longing
inspired by this fluctuating boundary. They renewed
the meaning, and enlarged the significance of practi-
ces that were already solidly established. They
provided models of contemplation, or rather of
confrontation, that gradually displaced previous pre-
scriptions for the enjoyment of wind, sand and sea.
The Romantics gave a fresh impetus to the way
people rode on horseback, walked, or wandered along
the sea-shore, or the way they posed on the head-
land. . . They came in search of themselves, hoping to
discover—or better yet, perhaps, to rediscover—who
they were (Corbin, 1994, pp. 163–164).12
Margaret’s trip to Cromer clearly invokes this
Romantic motif of the heroine engaged in the
contemplation of nature and self:
She used to sit long hours upon the beach, gazing
intently on the waves as they chafed with perpetual
motion against the pebbly shore,—or she looked out
upon the distant heave, and sparkle against the sky,
and heard, without being conscious of hearing, the
eternal psalm, which went up continually. She was
soothed without knowing how or why. Listlessly she
sat there, on the ground, her hands clasped round her
knees, while her aunt Shaw did small shoppings, and
Edith and Captain Lennox rode far and wide on shore
and inland. The nurses, sauntering on with their
charges, would pass and repass her, and wonder in
whispers what she could find to look at so long, day
after day. . . (Gaskell, 1982, pp. 414–415).
Margaret’s seaside (pre)occupation is carefully
distinguished from that of her companions, whose
shopping and horse-riding were conventional pas-
times at the seaside resort in the 19th century. Her
solitary meditations on the shore are presented as a
time for assessing her past experiences and planning
her future; the contemplation of temporality and
human mortality was particularly evoked by the
ocean, which, as Corbin says, seemed bunaffected
by historical changeQ (Corbin, 1994, p. 169) and thus
a respite from the relentless changes of modernity for
the Romantic traveller. For once, Margaret seems to be
positioned outside modernity—in contrast here to her
fellow travellers—and yet her activity is inflected by
516 W. Parkins / Women’s Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 507–519
an aesthetic discourse, which was itself a response to
and critique of modernity. As Lisa Tickner has argued,
for the Romantic subject, the beach bis charged with a
distinctly modern (and privileged) kind of self-
awarenessQ (Tickner, 1999, p. 72).13
Margaret’s seaside contemplation is, however, not
simply a meditation on the contrast between maritime
infinitude and human mutability; it is an attempt both
to historicise her own past experiences and determine
her future occupation:
But all this time for thought enabled Margaret to put
events in their right places, as to origin and
significance, both as regarded her past life and her
future. Those hours by the sea-side were not lost, as
any one might have seen who had had the perception
to read, or the care to understand, the look that
Margaret’s face was gradually acquiring (Gaskell,
1982, p. 415).
Throughout the novel, Margaret has struggled with
issues of female agency whether chafing at the social
constraints placed on her activity in London or
burdened by her excessive family responsibilities in
Milton. At Cromer, Margaret considers her future now
that she has the greater autonomy afforded by
independent means and less pressing family obliga-
tions; an instance, the novel suggests, of a uniquely
modern problem and opportunity a bourgeois woman
may confront:
When they returned to town, Margaret fulfilled one
of her seaside resolves, and took her life into her own
hands. Before they went to Cromer, she had been. . .
docile to her aunt’s laws. . . But she had learnt, in
those solemn hours of thought, that she herself must
one day answer for her own life, and what she had
done with it; and she tried to settle that most difficult
problem for women, how much was to be utterly
merged in obedience to authority, and how much
might be set apart for freedom in working (Gaskell,
1982, p. 416).
Margaret’s desire—and her dilemma—is how to
become a modern, self-governing subject, which, as
Rosemarie Bodenheimer has argued, was also the
concern of New Woman fiction later in the century:
what are modern women to do? (Bodenheimer,
1988, p. 64). Back in London from Cromer,
Margaret announces that she bmust make herself
some [duties]Q (Gaskell, 1982, p. 417), she must
become a self-determining subject because the
traditional feminine duties are not appropriate to
her situation. As a result of her broadened
experience among the poor in Milton and the
resources of her new inheritance, it is implied,
Margaret takes on a role as philanthropist or social
investigator, an emerging new occupation for mid-
dle-class women in the second half of the 19th
century (Walkowitz, 1992, pp. 53–57). Her newly
claimed agency is here signalled by her mobility
around London:
dI can’t think,T [said Edith] dhow my aunt allowed her
to get into such rambling habits in Milton! I’m sure
I’m always expecting to hear of her having met with
something horrible among all those wretched places
she pokes herself into. I should never dare to go down
some of those streets without a servant. They’re not fit
for ladiesT (Gaskell, 1982, p. 427).
As Edith says, Margaret’s greater autonomy had
developed from her Milton experience where, as
Bodenheimer has argued, bthe intense activity at the
centre of the Milton section offer[ed] the possibility of
active women’s lives in connection with the develop-
ing industrial cultureQ (Bodenheimer, 1988, p. 63).
But in Milton Margaret’s brambling habitsQ had led to
the impugning of her sexual reputation, when she was
observed by Thornton at a distance from home at dusk
with an unknown male companion (in fact her brother
Frederick). What Thornton had interpreted as a
traditional—if unsanctioned—form of social beha-
viour (a courting couple walking at dusk) was in fact a
much more mundane modern pastime (waiting for a
train); punctuality, not morality was the issue. North
and South represents not only the transition between
traditional and modern forms of society, represented
by the rural and the urban, but the shifts in patterns of
sociality and gender identity associated with these
locations. While middle-class women may have been
in the process of gaining greater scope for their lives
they were still not free from the social disapproval
arising from their nonconformity with traditional
feminine roles, and mobility could still be read as
sexual impropriety.
 W. Parkins / Women’s Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 507–519
The mobile woman in the 19th century could also
be the woman without a home, exiled from domes-
ticity, the (sexually) wandering woman, the fallen
woman. The flight of Lady Dedlock in Bleak House
(1853) or the roaming of Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede
(1859) are only two examples among many novels of
the period in which mobility was a metaphor for
fallenness. Amanda Anderson has argued that the
Victorian obsession with the trope of fallenness is
evidence of a profound cultural anxiety around agency
in relation to modernity:
Mechanisation, degrading urban environments, social
determination, laws of causation, commodification,
the disruptions of desire, the constraints of cultural
forms and narratives—these are the forces that, singly
or jointly, lurk behind portrayals of the sexually
stigmatised (Anderson, 1993, p. 2).
The bcoercive logicQ of conventional narratives
which chart the downward path of the fallen woman
demonstrates the battenuated agencyQ of the fallen
woman (Anderson, 1993, p. 9) so that fallenness may
be understood bin relation to a normative masculine
identity seen to possess the capacity for autonomous
action, enlightened rationality, and self-controlQ
(Anderson, 1993, p. 13). In North and South, by
contrast, Gaskell offers a critique of the self-determin-
ing male subject Anderson describes. It is ultimately
Thornton’s failure as a self-determining subject,
which enables Margaret to most fully exercise her
agency in saving his factory. The shifting perspectives
offered by Margaret’s experience of different locations
have the potential to undermine the notion of a unified
self—as Gallagher points out, it becomes harder to
maintain the cohesion of subjectivity in an increas-
ingly complex society (Gallagher, 1985, p. 171)—but
also form the basis of her capacity to act meaningfully
in the world. Margaret’s mobility does not represent
the rootlessness—and predetermined narrative—of
the fallen woman but the agency of the modern
female subject.
Conclusion
This article has deliberately omitted focussing on
the central Milton section of North and South,
517
choosing instead to concentrate on more peripheral
episodes in the novel in order to examine the
complex representation of women and modernity
Gaskell offers. Bodenheimer has rightly emphasised
the importance of events at Milton, particularly
Margaret’s actions during the riot, for providing the
heroine with the opportunity to achieve a sense of
agency and autonomy in a new social space for the
bourgeois woman, the industrial city:
. . .Margaret’s most significant experience is to
become a human agent in her own right—a process
that means living with the doubleness of her
actions, like the men who act and decide in the
public sphere. Gaskell’s revision of the myth of the
rescuing heroine lies precisely in that refusal to
keep her dpureT and separate from the activities
generally associated with the male, the public, and
the system (Bodenheimer, 1988, p. 67).
Bodenheimer, however, describes this new image
of the possibilities of a woman’s life as bmaternalQ
because it is ba negotiation of simultaneous crises,
and a continual pressure of responsibility for
actions that bear heavily on the lives of othersQ
(Bodenheimer, 1988, p. 64). I have argued here that
such social complexities and the responses to them
by the central female subject, as described across
the many locations and cultural sites which North
and South covers, are specifically modern and
historical rather than maternal (with its connotation
of essentialism and timelessness), and enable
Gaskell to explore both the experiential and the
ethical dimensions of modernity. North and South
represents modernity as a process in which women
participate and considers how women’s location
within modernity may offer new possibilities for
agency, especially through ethical intervention and
dialogue to address some of the dislocations of
modernity. Despite the novel’s conventional hetero-
normative ending, in which the heroine’s marriage
assures her of a traditional social location as wife
and mother, the novel suggests other potential roles
and activities for women which were newly
available in 19th-century modernity and, in the
process, intervenes in the construction of discourses
of modernity to insist on women’s place within it.
518 W. Parkins / Women’s Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 507–519
Endnotes
1
While my emphasis here is on the depiction of women’s
modernity in North and South, Gaskell’s novel also warrants
consideration alongside other novels of the period which explored
similar issues related to women’s experience of modernity, such as
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Shirley (1849) (with which
Gaskell herself of course would have been familiar). The mobility
of middle-class women in this period was also becoming visible
through the travels and writings of women such as Frances Trollope,
Anna Jameson, and Harriet Martineau. Space does not permit,
however, the consideration here of the expanding possibilities for
agency offered by travel for middle-class women in the period.
2
An important distinction between Wright’s argument and
my own is that Wright sees this juxtaposition in terms of the
human condition of mutability, whereas I am arguing for the
historical specificity of the processes of change described in
North and South.
3
This distinction between new and old cities is, however,
problematised in the novel. When Margaret returns to the Harley
Street house towards the end of the novel, linguistic linkages
between industry and domesticity, business and leisure, work to
establish a connection between seemingly disparate cultural sites:
bThe wheels of the machinery of daily life were well oiled and went
along with delicious smoothness,Q we are told (1982, p. 372); the
family were engaged in the bfull business of the London seasonQ
(Gaskell, 1982, p. 373).
4
Goethe, Hermann, and Dorothea (1797) and Longfellow and
Evangeline (1847).
5
See also Elliott (1994, p. 36) on this point.
6
See also Wright (1995, p. 115) for a similar point.
7
It is also a response, which recognises the mutual imbrica-
tion of the country and the city that characterised modern
capitalism from the 18th century onwards, according to Williams
(1973, p. 264).
8
Thornton’s eventual transformation into such a subject is first
prefigured by his acknowledged need for education from Mr. Hale.
bTo be sure,Q Hale tells Margaret, bhe needs some of the knowledge
of the past, which gives the truest basis for conjecture as to the
future, but he knows this need,—he perceives it, and that is
somethingQ (1982, p. 167). As Bodenheimer notes, however,
Thornton’s change of tutors in the course of the novel demonstrates
his stronger commitment to the present: bDefining the present as a
time of dmen groping in new circumstances,T he switches tutors,
abandoning the acquisition of gentility offered by Mr. Hale’s
classical tradition in favour of the keen social intelligence of
Nicholas HigginsQ (Bodenheimer, 1988, p. 59).
9
For a recent discussion of the significance of home in feminist
responses to modernity, see Young (1997).
10
Margaret makes the following moves over the course of the
novel: from Helstone to London to Helstone to Southport to Milton
to London to Oxford to Helstone to Cromer to London.
11
The novel, of course, also makes clear the class implications
of travel; even Margaret’s temporary respite at Heston is out of the
question for the working-class invalid, Bessy Higgins, who can only
dream of the countryside to escape illness and death in Milton (see,
e.g., Gaskell, 1982, p. 100).
12
Corbin’s examples include Byron and Shelley, as well as
artists like Turner and Friedrich (1994, pp. 165–170).
13
And thus the beach in Romanticism is distinguished from its
other representations in art: as a site for natural history; a place of
traditional work; or ban increasingly demotic space of urban leisureQ
(Tickner, 1999, p. 72).
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