#nthattemptatit

[thatscarletflycatcher]

Hi, I looked through your recent posts about north and south to try and see if you had posted about your specific topic but couldn’t find it and didn’t want to risk serious spoilers. I’d love to know what exactly you’re writing on and what your perspective/research question is so I can keep that in mind while reading and ask some informed/related questions.

Hi!! I'm really sorry it took me this long to answer.

One way of explaining it would be this:

It is often jokingly said that North and South is "Pride and Prejudice for Socialists" and "Pride and Prejudice and Labor Disputes", which is a funny joke, but of course not entirely accurate -Gaskell is by no means writing Austen pastiche, and definitely a whole lot of people lured in by this description are shocked and put off by the novel when they find it doesn't have the lightness, satire and quick wit of P&P.

Gaskell is often presented within the "authors to read next" once one has finished Austen, and that is on first approach, a rather strange thing, because they are very different in pretty significant ways. Where Austen writes satire and comedy, Gaskell writes heartfelt, sometimes sentimental drama. Rarely someone dies in an Austen; rarely no one dies in a Gaskell. Courtship is central to Austen; parent-child relationships are central to Gaskell. Austen writes contemporary pieces; most of Gaskell's work is historical. Austen writes mainly from the gentry space, Gaskell from the professional middle-class space. Even when they coincide in the confidentiality of their prose, Austen is more like the friend with the latest gossip, and Gaskell more like an old aunt telling old-life stories by the fire. And yet, there is something to the connection. They certainly feel closer to each other as storytellers than, for example, how Gaskell's work compares to Dickens or Charlotte Brontë, which were authors she personally knew and interacted with.

My intuition is that the similarity or connection people see is through the ethical world their works seem to inhabit. Austen has been described as an Aristotelian more than once; Aristotelian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre dedicated most of a chapter in his After Virtue (a well known text to anyone who has studied ethics in a philosophy school or as part of a philosophy degree) to argue that she is one of the last representatives of the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues. In very summarized summary, through an ideal image of the accomplished gentleman or the accomplished lady, Austen draws the picture of virtues as habits that make a person better and make that person more fully human. Honesty, generosity, patience, prudence, justice, wisdom, are not theoretical imperatives but lived modes of being in Austen. In that sense one can say that Austen is ethical. She focuses on personal character and growth.

Gaskell has that line in the background, but seems most interested in community dynamics as mediated by friendship, and to friendship Aristotle dedicates two full books (chapters) of his ten-book Nicomachean Ethics; friendship is central and essential to the Aristotelian understanding not only of ethics but of politics (and ethics and politics are to him a continuum strongly connected by justice). Again, too long to explain and I don't want to bore anyone XD but for Aristotle a flourishing human community is one where the citizens are friends -that is, people that strive to better themselves and promote the common good by associating with each other to pursue these goals. Aristotle also has an extended notion of friendship; what we call "friendships of convenience" and think of as false friendships, he thinks are legitimate if partial forms of friendship, structured around pleasure or utility.

My original goal was to present this Austen-Gaskell continuity and defend the idea that Gaskell's work represents an Aristotelian understanding of ethics-politics through the way it draws communties and relationships within those communities, and the sketched solutions she presents to community problems. I wanted to maybe make a comparison between the more detailed perspective of N&S, and then discuss the idealized community in Cranford, the community in crisis in My Lady Ludlow, and the vicious community in Lois the Witch. Alas, my advisor, a reasonable person, said I'd have enough with just N&S and deep down I know he's right XD

Hope that explains it (?) and please feel free to reach out again!

I have been asked about it before here, and I told it a different way there.