I read Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson Gaskell's North and South (1854) on the Kindle. It's a long novel, but I don't know how long because when I don't have a book to heft, I don't know how many pages I've read and how many more are left. I can only say that I became impatient after a couple of days and started to think that Mrs. G. was being paid by the word. But just when I thought the novel would never end, I stroked the Kindle one more time, and by gosh and by golly, Mr. Thornton finally proposed to Margaret and bam! it was all over in a flash. I was unprepared. If I had been reading an old-fashioned "book," as we used to call them, I would have known that I was approaching the last page, and my reaction would have been much different. Instead of shock, closure.
North and South was originally published in parts, twenty of them, and therefore was consumed over a period of months. Later it appeared in book form, so that enthusiastic readers might binge for a long day or two -- a very different experience than reading in discrete chapters, and one I prefer. Kindle-reading is a third way. It's less satisfying to me because I want the weight of the book in my hand and I want to track my progress by means of the physical act of turning the page. Electronic reading will no doubt become the norm; something gained, no doubt, but something also lost. I think I would have been more satisfied with the novel if I had a solid object in my hands rather than words on a screen. Strange to say, but I honestly feel that it would have been a better novel.
North and South is self-consciously "progressive." Those money-hungry northern industrialists turn out to be decent people after all. The strikers may be misguided and impatient, but they have a genuine grievance. Women might be able to live richer lives with a dollop of liberation.
I confess that I am troubled when I read books that were progressive their own time but that seem reactionary now. I know, and I've been taught, that I should be more historical, less time bound, less, as they say, "presentist." Nevertheless, I was astonished, even offended, that Margaret Hale was to be branded a loose woman because she was seen with a guy at a railway station, unchaperoned. Good thing the man who was with her turned out to be not a potential lover, but her brother, otherwise her gross impropriety would have banished her, lifetime, from the list of the eligible-for-marriage.
I know that Mrs. Gaskell wanted us to think well of the mill-workers, but why the heck did she make them speak in an impenetrable provincial lower-class dialect which makes them seem sloppy, and ignorant-- another species entirely, less than human? Even though I tried to resist, the characterization of the masses left me alienated and angry.
And then there's a problem particular to me: every time one of her characters failed or suffered grievous injury or died (there are a number of spontaneous deaths in North and South), Mrs Gaskell felt obliged to invoke an all-purpose explanation -- "God's will!" "God's will" whether thoughtful or just a tic, becomes, in this ostensibly progressive novel, a justification for political passivity and quietism.
I like this novel better when I read it the first time -- in 1963. Although it's unchanged (except for the kindling), I myself seem to have become much less empathetic and more cantankerous. Age?
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