Torture and Objectification of Pain in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South

Abstract

Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South(1855) portrays the “Condition-of-England-Question”. As an industrial novel, North and South demonstrates the problems in Victorian society caused by industrialism, and offers solutions, in order to educate themiddle-class reader about the conditions of the poor. As such, the novel employs characters who represent their social classes. Bessy Higgins, for example, can be considered as a spokesperson for the working class, and her status is illustrated by her pain and suffering body, the result of the disease she has developed while working in unhealthy conditions in the factory owned by Hamper. Within this framework, her illness becomes the signifier of industrialism. Her pain and bodily suffering might be regarded as “torture” since she had no other option than to work in terrible conditions. Even though torture is marked by corporeal or psychological suffering, I am also considering it metaphorically to understand Bessy’s status. In other words, she is not tortured directly and literally with the aim of torment, still, she is in pain and becomes a manifestation of it. Thus the torturer becomes the factory owner, who stands for the capitalist system, and the tortured is Bessy, whose objectified pain is denied as pain, thereby revealing the power of the torturer. As a result of this objectifica-tion, while Bessy’s tortured body becomes more apparent, her “self” becomes more and more absent. In this respect, the aim of this paper is to analyse the pain of the working-class characters, especially Bessy, in North and Southto explore their objectification through the “torture” that becomes a symbol of the power of the industrial system, and highlights the disruption of their “selves”.

Keywords

• working class
• industrial novel
• elizabeth gaskell
• north and south
• torture