One scene in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South represents a split in
Margaret’s sympathetic allegiances between a poor human and a non-human animal.
Upon returning to Helstone, the oft-idealized home of her youth, Margaret meets
with a woman (identified as “Susan’s widowed mother”) who is feuding with
another woman of the village, the source of conflict being that the latter
caught and killed the former’s cat, because “according to one of the savage
country superstitions, the cries of a cat, in the agonies of being boiled or
roasted alive, compelled (as it were) the powers of darkness to fulfill the
wishes of the executioner” (390). Susan’s mother does not object to the
ritualistic killing itself, but rather she disapproves of the fact that it was
her cat that was destroyed in the process. The encounter with Susan’s mother
both highlights Margaret’s privileged class positioning and, as Jaffe describes
in Scenes of Sympathy, reveals Margaret’s
anxiety about retaining her middle-class identity.
On the one hand, Margaret’s talk with
Susan’s mother represents an attempt at policing the behavior of the lower
classes. After listening to the tale of the cooked cat, Margaret attempts to
teach Susan’s mother about the sympathy that she as a proper woman possesses,
but to no avail: “Margaret listened in horror; and endeavoured in vain to
enlighten the woman’s mind; but she was obliged to give up in despair...Margaret
gave it up in despair, and walked away sick at heart” (390). Margaret does her
duty (the charitable responsibility of a middle-class parson’s daughter) in
trying to educate the woman, but because Susan’s mother fails to understand
Margaret’s entreaties, Margaret is able to distance herself from this more
backwards social group. Margaret would never do that to an animal or think in
that superstitious manner; therefore, she is superior to the people who would
treat or think about animals in that way. For Jaffe, “sympathy in Victorian
fiction is always about the construction of social and cultural identities,
about the individual subject’s relation to the group” (23). Significantly, in
showing her sympathy for animals, Margaret is depleting her relationship with
other Helstone natives, those who it is less appealing for her to be identified
with.
A key reason for Margaret to disidentify
with Susan’s mother is that this divide makes Margaret feel more firmly placed
within the middle class, especially important at a time when class positioning
is incredibly unstable. Jaffe points out that “[t]he ‘objects’ of Victorian
sympathy are inseparable from Victorian middle-class self-representation
precisely because they embody, to a middle-class spectator, his or her own
potential narrative of social decline” (9). This uncertainty of class seems
particularly difficult for a single woman without parents like Margaret, so it
is important for Margaret to identify herself with the middle-class through her
evolved understandings of animal welfare. David Perkins describes the rise of
the animal rights movement during the 18th century and the class
implications of the newfound sympathy for animals in Romanticism and Animal Rights, noting the convenient understanding
that “the genteel were pure of cruelty while the lower orders were imbued with
it” (18), and he adds that focusing on animal suffering over that faced by
humans represented a way of maintaining the social hierarchy: “For many
persons, animals offered themselves as a conscience-appeasing surrogate for
human sufferers, whose relief they were less ready to champion, perhaps because
it might involve or symbolize a riskier alteration in the social order” (4).
While I would not argue that Margaret ever ignores human suffering entirely,
her total condemnation of the mother’s perspective and her belief that Susan’s
mother cannot be educated in a way that Margaret sees to be right both imply to
a certain extent that some people of the lower orders are beyond saving; thus, in this instance, Margaret is helping to maintain the social hierarchy by espousing to an extent
a belief that it cannot be changed.
Works Cited:
Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.
Jaffe, Audrey. Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction.
Ithaca, NY:
Cornell UP, 2000. Print.
Perkins, David. Romanticism and Animal Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.
Print.
Valerie,
ReplyDeleteI think you picked a good scene to illustrate Jaffe’s suggestion of the intersection of class and sympathy. What I think is interesting is that while Margaret sympathizes with the cat in this case for the very fact that it is an animal, whenever the lower classes are described in animalistic terms there appears to be a lack of sympathy from both the narrator and the characters. In fact, the woman’s inability to be “enlightened” by Margaret could arguably place the woman closer to the status of beast than of human. This lowering of the woman’s status, however, fails to make her any more of an object of sympathy to Margaret. While the obvious answer is that she is still human and not an animal, I think there might be something here to push further.
Yes, Deirdre, I think your statement about Margaret possibly putting “the woman closer to the status of beast than of human” is especially evident in the fact that the woman remains nameless in the narrative, as there is something incredibly dehumanizing about saying that someone is not even important enough to have a name.
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ReplyDeleteValerie,
ReplyDeleteI really like that you pointed to Margaret's return to Helstone, because it really is important and thinking more about Thornton and Margaret's relationship, I had almost forgotten it entirely. Given the novel’s title, it seems Gaskell was quite preoccupied with the differing regional conceptions of class, and the comparison between Helstone and Milton provides the most striking comparison to this end. I wish we had more dialogue between Susan and Margaret so we could see for sure what arguments she was making.
Thinking of our class’s discussion of “justice” last week and your focus on animals here, I am reminded of the most prominent political philosopher working in Gaskell’s time in England, John Stuart Mill, who interestingly argued that animals should be considered in his utilitarian system where justice is defined is that condition where the most pleasure is afford to the greatest number of people. I wonder if Margaret had something like this line from Mill’s Utilitarianism in mind when talking to Susan: “Nothing is more natural to human beings, nor, up to a certain point in cultivation, more universal, than to estimate the pleasures and pains of others as deserving of regard exactly in proportion to their likeness to ourselves. ... Granted that any practice causes more pain to animals than it gives pleasure to man; is that practice moral or immoral? And if, exactly in proportion as human beings raise their heads out of the slough of selfishness, they do not with one voice answer 'immoral,' let the morality of the principle of utility be for ever condemned.” In other words, if we gain pleasure from hurting animals, then based on principles of utility, we should consider ourselves immoral in that act. Regionally, the difficulty with this viewpoint comes when considering the farmer who must hurt animals in order to eat them and raise them for human consumption. In Milton, meat consumption was mediated through butchers while in Helstone, individuals would have been closer to the act of killing.
I agree with the conclusion you draw here, Valerie, and think that it is crucial for coming to terms with Margaret’s character. Although she wants relations between the classes to improve, she never (to my knowledge) criticizes the hierarchical structure of these relations. It is difficult to know whether this is because she is content with the social hierarchy (having been raised, after all, in an aristocratic society) or believes that there is no alternative under industrial capitalism (perhaps such an alternative is not even conceivable in her mind). I would argue that altering this hierarchy would entail some degree of violence, which is antithetical to Margaret’s religious perspective. What she desires, instead, is for the classes to learn to exist together peacefully by realizing that each is necessary to the other’s livelihood.
ReplyDeleteThis becomes quite clear if we consider her critical attitude toward the strike. Rather than supporting something that can positively change the workers’ lives, she objects to their decision to rise against the masters. Furthermore, as we know, she puts herself between Thorton and the strikers in a desperate attempt to stop the escalating violence. Margaret’s action here can also be interpreted as an attempt to save Thorton or to halt the revolt, but her repugnance to violence is in my view what animates it. I do not have a problem so much with Margaret as I do with the novel’s general stance toward class conflict. I think, ultimately, that it seeks to pacify this conflict in order to preserve the status quo and establish a semblance of social harmony.
I hadn't thought about this scene in terms of class, but you're right -- it not only de-idealizes the south, paving the way for a new valuation of the north, but causes Margaret to disidentify with the uneducated rural woman.
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