North & South Goodness

[dangermousie]

I, like many people on my flist, have been discovering the goodness that is the BBC adaptation of Mrs. Gaskell's novel. I read N&S a few years back when I was going through a Gaskell binge (I also recommend Cranford, Wives and Daughters, Mary Barton (another labor novel), Ruth, My Lady Ludlow, Cousin Phillips, Sylvia's Lovers (a flawed book but a

Comments

[dangermousie]

But brooding British men are my definite weakness. ;)

You mean some crazy people don't have this as a weakness? :P

The thing that stayed with me (so far, I am an hour in only) is actually how well it addresses class issues which is something not that many authors did (everyone in Austen, for example, is pretty much the same, even if poorer or richer or higher or lower on the totem pole).

But for example how Margaret's innate "Lady Bountiful" inclinations meet with the independence (if powerty) of mill workers. The mills might have given them a hard life, but in a way, they gave them an independence from the old rigid social order and dependence on it (witness a potential maid saying she won't work for such wages and do all that stuff because she can get better wages at the mill. I was cheering, actually).

Or, even more significatly, how Margaret and Thornton (the whole Thornton family actually0 interactions are viewed through a class prism. Mrs. Thornton is clearly conscious of the fact that traditionally, she'd be Hales' inferior and so in a way, her pushy "you are poor and your gentility is not needed and business is everything" is a reaction to that thought (her daughter reacts differently, but also to the same stimuli).

Or look at the Hales and Mr. Thornton. Both Margaret and her mother are discommoded by his forthrightness (he is as much more open than them, then Margaret was than London ladies). It has a faint feel of "what a horribly ill-bred, lower-class behavior" aftertaste. And of course, there is a degree of 'socially he is my inferior' in Margaret's attitude.

And of course look at the handshake she refuses to have with him. In her circles, it's not a thing one normally does, but in his? Everyone does it.

The other thing that struck me were the horrid working conditions. That one mill owner who boasted about not having to put the wheel that would keep cotton fluff out of workers' lungs? Horrifyingly realistic.