Blog #2: North and South and the Anthropocene

This week, I'm going to follow Dr. Rosenman's advice to deviate from the blog post prompt if something else strikes our fancy.

My post will focus on three concepts that I believe are interrelated: the physicality of the environment, illness, and class hierarchy. I will contend that all of these concepts intersect in North and South, primarily in the passages that describe the air pollution of Milton.

We learn early on in the novel that Milton is mapped by its pervasive air pollution. To quote at length:

"For several miles before they reached Milton, they saw a deep lead-coloured cloud hanging over the horizon in the direction in which it lay. It was all the darker from contrast with the pale gray-blue of the wintry sky; for in Heston there had been the earliest signs of frost. Nearer to the town, the air had a faint taste and smell of smoke; perhaps, after all, more a loss of the fragrance of grass and herbage than any positive taste or smell. Quick they were whirled over long, straight, hopeless streets of regularly-built houses...Here and there a great oblong many-windowed factory stood up, like a hen among her chickens, puffing out black 'unparliamentary' smoke, and sufficiently accounted for the cloud which Margaret had taken to foretell rain" (55 emphasis mine).

This passage contains several ideas worth developing. First, before the Hales even reach Milton, a 'deep lead-coloured cloud' fixates their attention. The spectacular quality of the smog is jarring, because Margaret had mistakenly "taken [the cloud] to foretell rain." This misrecognition is significant, because the cloud pervades the "hopeless streets" of the town, becoming not only an emblem of the town itself, but tacitly signifying its complicity in creating these "hopeless" conditions in the first place.

The second idea contained in this passage is the notion that the air pollution of Milton strafes the physical body. The air "had a faint taste and smell of smoke," or, more precisely, it effaces any "positive taste or smell"of nature that might symbolize vitality. Thus, Milton is mapped as a space of danger and risk; it is coded negatively, as a physical environment that is produced by a multiplicity of 'many-windowed [factories]."

Ecocriticism helps us understand the dynamics of this problem, both retroactively in terms of the theorization of Victorian culture, as well as its present day, 'real-world' effects on global culture. In The Future of Environmental Criticism, Lawrence Buell suggests that there is a growing need for critics interested in environmental literary criticism to pay attention to how the "'natural' and 'social' environments impinge on each other" (127). In other words, how does the physicality of a local environment come to inflect social concerns (as well as political, ethical, linguistic, and legal ones)? Drawing on Gadgil and Guha, Buell explains that one instance of this confluence is the notion of "ecological refugeeism," in which "specifically land-based peoples...[are] reduced to welfare or beggary by displacement from their home communities" (121, 120). We have instances of ecological "refugees" in North and South, albeit in two different modes. First, the Hales are "displaced" in a sense, albeit somewhat voluntarily. Second, the residents of Milton are not "refugees" in a strict sense, but they are "reduced to [a type of] welfare or beggary" as well as disease, which I will get to momentarily.

The effects of the polluted air in Milton are rendered just as dangerous as the effects of low wages. We learn that "The life in Milton was so different from what Mrs. Hale had been accustomed to live in Helstone, in and out perpetually the fresh and open air; the air itself was so different, deprived of all revivifying principle" (81). Gaskell painstakingly reminds the reader that one of the most fundamental aspects of existence--the air itself--is actually anti-ontological, a natural structural force that is "deprived of all revivifying principle" but only because human culture has made it so. The extent of these effects are further rendered in hyperbolic, fetishized terms: Bessy yearns simply to momentarily leave Milton so she can "'take a deep breath o'fulness in that air. I get smothered enough in Milton...'" (93). One of the most fundamental aspects of life itself--the air that envelops us--is fetishized as the marker of class privilege: only those who are able-bodied enough to circulate through the landscape of England have the prerogative to take a "deep breath" of air.

To make one more point (I know the post is getting long!), North and South is a text that inaugurates representations of the Anthropocene, a geological age in which human beings can, for the first time, be said to engage in collective action(s) that substantially change the physicality of Earth itself (see Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Climate of History"). Timothy Morton, in his 2013 book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, discusses how the Anthropocene was catalyzed by the invention of the steam engine and the rise of industrial capitalism (4-5), both of which heavily influence the production of air pollution seen in Gaskell's novel. I would just like to point out that, if we take Morton's basic argument to heart--in which he argues that reality is defined by "hyper objects," or objects that are so massive and diffusive in time and space that they defy all meaningful human comprehension (1-2)--Gaskell's novel suddenly takes on a different hue. The smog of Milton effectively does away with the notion of class because it subjects everyone throughout the globe to an atmosphere that is corrupted by carbon. The polluted air is a hyper object, then, a massively diffusive object that is "viscous," that pervades and sticks to our bodies, to the point that "It's not reality but the subject that dissolves...reality envelops us like a film of oil" (Morton 32, 35). In the Victorian era, in the 21st century, we can't escape something like air pollution--everyone throughout the world breathes in air that is continually infused with dangerous particles. In this sense, the Victorian age is responsible for universalizing risk by redefining what it means to occupy the space of Earth: everyone is subjected to the same volatile elements.