Balancing the Books: Reading vs Reality in 'North and South' and 'Aurora Leigh'

(source: getty images)

Throughout both Aurora Leigh and North and South, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Elizabeth Gaskell interrogate the tensions between often introspective intellectual endeavour, and material, lived experience – between reading and reality. It is a tension immediate from the very offset of Aurora Leigh, an epic poem which begins with an example of the friction between art and life – the narrator describes how a ‘portrait for a friend’ can be examined long after the cessation ‘of love’, ‘to hold together’ what ‘was and is’; art here existing to memorialise and render eternal a former lived reality. In North and South, reading is portrayed as at once palliative, consolatory, mentally stimulating and ethically paramount, but also at times inadequate in the face of the relentlessly industrial and political reality of human suffering. Both texts deal with the class-based implications of and attitudes towards reading, seeking to reconcile lived experience and active charity with literature’s philanthropic potential to effectuate change. 

Gaskell primarily figures the pursuit of reading as a vector of spiritual amelioration; the ‘learned’ figures of the novel have a heightened ability to empathise, and the characters who scorn the indulgent study of ‘dead languages’ and philosophy are generally grouped in the heartless, utilitarian roster of traders and manufacturers. However, the exceptions to this general trend, as well as the limitations explicit in an intellectual self composed of and reliant on books alone, illuminate the novel’s more nuanced attitude towards reading. In the opening chapters, Margaret fondly recalls her past days of entertainment via ‘a great box of books’, when she regretted the ‘summer’s day’ for being ‘too short to get through the reading’ she hoped to complete, a sad contrast to the limitations of her father’s later library, whose ‘book-shelves did not afford much resource’.

Later on, upon a visit to the Thornton’s, Margaret pointedly notices how ‘there was not a book about in the room, with the exception of Matthew Henry’s Bible commentaries [...]’; the seemingly incidental detail is juxtaposed by Thornton’s perceptions of the Hale’s home a chapter later, where ‘books, not cared for on account of their binding solely, lay on one table, as if recently put down’. The ownership of books serves as a social benchmark, offering the observer an insight into class, the Hales’ old, landed and educated middle class considered by the Thorntons’ emerging affluent trader class to be ‘idle’, indulgent, and hampered by impractical ‘interests’.

Gaskell doesn’t relegate Margaret’s bookish, thoughtful occupations to Helstone’s conducive setting of rural repose by any means; her studious instincts endure the radical shift in dimension and culture to ‘smoky, dirty’ Milton. Where her daily custom in Helstone is to ‘read, or have lessons, or otherwise improve [the] mind, till the middle of the day’; the protagonist reads Dante and compiles ‘a dull list of words’ – these activities prevail despite her move to Milton: her ‘employments’ one morning involve ‘a letter to Edith, a good piece of Dante, a visit to the Higginses’. Similarly, just as she ‘learned and delighted in using’ the ‘peculiar words’ of Helstone’s locals, so too does she antagonise her mother by using ‘provincialism[s]’, ‘factory slang’ and ‘horrid Milton words’, even attesting to the efficiency and utility of the ‘great many words’ she has learnt – each stands in for ‘a whole explanatory sentence’. 

Margaret’s conception of class is based more on a readerly sense of academia than on the emergent industrial class structure she discovers in the North; she insists that her family are ‘educated people’, which situates the Thorntons ‘inferior to my father’, but Bessy’s retorts signify the newly configured – and more material – tenets of class-identity: ‘they thinken a deal o’ money here’, ‘Thornton’s house is three times as big’ and ‘them ladies dress so grand’. Mrs Thornton’s invective against reading displays the converging values of the trade class – a class for whom reading and culture was an unjustifiable indulgence; she insists that reading is a ‘leisure’, ‘against [her] judgment’, ‘requires all [Thornton’s] energy and attention’ and encourages people to ‘loiter away their lives’.

Mr Thornton’s own stance is somewhat tempered; he recounts how after his father’s death he ‘was taken from school, and had to become a man’, insisting that his reading of ‘Latin and Greek’ provided ‘utterly [no]’ ‘preparation’ for ‘such a life’ as his. Margaret’s wryly feigned concern of being ‘looked down upon in Milton’ demonstrates the lack of the ‘wisdom’ she seeks – a knowledge that she is in fact ‘looked down upon’ by some, a knowledge of Milton’s customs (such as her embarrassingly fumbled and ignored handshakes), and its inhabitants’ priorities. Yet she becomes aware of her ‘ignorance’, insisting that she ‘knows so little’ and is ‘a stranger here’; she learns through experience, by ‘poking’ herself into ‘wretched places’. She also becomes able to separate ‘knowledge and ignorance’ from ‘reading and writing’, admitting that she ‘hardly know[s]’ ‘of the wisdom that shall guide men and women’ – but she remains resolute in her belief that the ideal mill worker’s ‘blind [...] obedience’ diverges from some ineffable yet fundamental human value. Books and academia alone reveal themselves not to be enough to educate Margaret of real-time politics, industry and suffering, but Gaskell never goes as far as to undermine the novel’s initial insinuation that reading and cultivated intellectualism endowed her protagonist with the original roots of empathy to grant her this capacity.

Indeed, arguably Margaret is implicitly aware of the rift between reading and reality, or learning and living. As early as Chapter IV she demands of her father: ‘what in the world do manufacturers want with the classics, or literature, or the accomplishments of a gentleman?’, and although the remark is seemingly hostile and derisive, its gist is emphasised repeatedly, in Higgins’ decline of Mr Hale’s offer to ‘read [him] some remarks in a book’: that ‘book-stuff goes in at one ear and out at t’other’, that ‘the truth in yon Latin book’ is ‘gibberish and not truth to me’; in Dixon’s criticism of Mr Hale for ‘always reading, reading, thinking, thinking’; and in Bessie’s restless pain: ‘don’t go on reading. It’s no use’ – this crucial need for the extraction of utility and ‘use’ in everything marking Milton’s industrial utilitarianism.

Mr Hale’s ‘pedantry’ seems out of touch, exhibited in his lack of understanding of Thornton’s patently emotion-fuelled ‘lukewarmness about Greek literature’; and in Chapter X’s portrayal of the dislocation of understanding which severs Thornton’s endeavours to elucidate the ‘suffering’ of Milton’s inhabitants from Mr Hale’s response: he returns Thornton’s individualist musing on ‘self-indulgent, sensual people’ with an academically appraising, yet odd and inapposite comment: ‘but you have the rudiments of a good education’. Mr Hale’s inability to confront the lived suffering of Milton’s workers, and instead to fall back on a discussion of ‘Homer’ demonstrates the breach between words and materiality, the inadequacy of academia alone to solve human issues – and he realises it at points, even echoing Bessy’s words: ‘I have been reading to-day of the two thousand who were ejected from their churches [...] but it is of no use – no use’.

Margaret gradually realises this limitation, dissuading him from reading Higgins ‘the fourteenth chapter of Job’, instead advocating ‘sympathy’. Mr Hale’s inability to reconcile an introspective pursuit of intellectual advancement with an active display of the moral developments (such as charity or political work) allegedly espoused by such a pursuit, condemns him partly guilty of Dixon’s indictment – that he should’ve more ‘minded missus, and let the weary reading and thinking alone’. This ability to reconcile academic empathy with social philanthropy is a tussle entirely embroiled with that of reading and reality, and is not only embodied in the empathetic and charitably-motivated Margaret, but also within the novel itself. Pamela Corpron Parker described North and South as encompassing ‘a rhetoric of fictional philanthropy’: that Gaskell’s literary contributions were intended as ‘benevolent gifts to an ignorant and needy readership’, hoping to effectuate ‘social change’. North and South is the product of Gaskell’s own endeavour to reconcile the lived suffering and the active philanthropy which characterised her role as a church minister’s wife, with fictional suffering and literary humanitarianism.

If Gaskell intimates that reading is the occupation and inspiration (albeit one inadequate alone) of the empathetic and benevolent, Barrett Browning’s establishment of reading is more explicitly as an activity wielding the power to foster moral superiority and enhanced sensibility. Romney attests to literature’s ability to pervade and modify worldly experience: ‘the book brought down entire the bright June-day’, and Aurora repeatedly emphasises the special qualities of the ‘poet’s heart’, which can ‘swell to a pair of nationalities’, expanding to encompass national sentiment. Barret Browning’s depiction of reading in Aurora Leigh advocates an immersive, ‘headlong’ and strikingly bodily activity: ‘living art’ is ‘burning lava’, ‘full-veined, heaving, double-breasted’ and ‘sets [our bosom] beating’. ‘Blood’ and ‘brain’ – a metonymic reconciliation of life and learning, perhaps – coalesce, in ‘rhythmic turbulence’, an image whose oxymoronic intimations slightly undermine the confidence of Aurora’s certainty that there is no tension between reading and reality: ‘the world of books is still the world’. Aurora’s largely self-guided education is comprised of ‘books, books, books’, contrasted by her Aunt’s harsh pedagogical utilitarianism: ‘a little algebra’, ‘mathematics’ and ‘a general insight into useful facts’ is spurned by protagonist and author alike, superficial, incoherent in its fragmentedness, and likened by Aurora to ‘water-torture’.

Marian’s less privileged education is incomplete – she has ‘no book-learning’, and her disparate pedagogical journey, formulated in parts – ‘half a play of Shakespeare’s’ and having ‘to guess the bottom of a page’ – provides her with a poetic sensibility, Aurora believes, which manifests itself physically on her ‘lips and lids’. Although Marian feels a deep emotional affinity to literature (she allows books to ‘hurt’ her, and ‘fragmentary phrases’ reach her ‘soul’), suggesting the potentially radical power of reading to dismantle class boundaries, her fractured education still bears a ‘jangling influence’ upon her. The power of reading and radical education thus eludes romanticism, unable to transcend class boundaries; Marian’s connection to literature is never allowed to extend to the literally ‘heartfelt’ – the ‘throbbing’, ‘pulses’ and ‘blood-beat’ which characterise Aurora’s. 

Although the poet’s readerly self is one of empathy, ‘double vision’ and a perennial quest for some ‘central truth’, Aurora’s unsettlingly positioned, ‘ill-lodged’ poetic heart connotes a detachment between the organic female body and the poetic sensibility previously celebrated – perhaps the self-conscious sensibility reading and intellectual endeavour can foster is somewhat contrived and aestheticised. Indeed, at times Barrett Browning questions the tension between fiction and reality; Aurora struggles to square having her ‘books/ appraised by love’ while she ‘sit[s] loveless’ – ‘books succeed,/ and lives fail’ – legacy and fame are not substitutes for real-life love.

As Kirstie Blair noted, both Aurora and Romney devote their ‘hearts’ to social and political ends, with the heroine’s endeavour to create world-changing poetry and Romney’s ‘philanthropical self-sacrifice’ commanding their actions. The tension between life and learning is transfigured into a tussle between the universal and individual – as Blair concludes, the ‘social heart is complementary to the heart of the individual’; by the poem’s end, Aurora has established a unity between life and learning, allowing ‘the poet and philanthropist’ to ‘stand side by side’ as ‘united souls’. Their marriage epitomises the reconciliation of universally lived suffering and active charity, with poetic sensibility and a belief in the potential of literature to effectuate change. Through Aurora and Romney’s marriage, Barrett Browning breaches the ‘clash’ between ‘philosopher against philanthropist, academician against poet, man against women’ – and it is this same ‘clash’ of ostensible polarities which Gaskell mediates in North and South. 

Ultimately, for both Barrett Browning and Gaskell, the most crucial level of reading is its human, empathy-driven level. When Higgins asserts that he ‘can read [Margaret’s] bonny face like a book’, he performs the act of reading in its most fundamental and authentic form, finding ‘insight’ in ‘what had been passing in [Margaret’s] mind’; in doing so, he conducts his own act of charity, causing ‘Milton [to] become a brighter place to her’ having ‘found a human interest’. Social change is effectuated in both works by conversations and lived experience, but the philanthropic and spiritual potential of literature is complementary to and reconcilable with real world suffering and actions, a conclusion implicit in the emphatic rhetoricity of both works of literature themselves, works existing to influence readerly opinion. 

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Gaskell, Elizabeth, North and South, (Penguin Classics, 1996)

Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, Aurora Leigh, (OUP Oxford, 2008)

Secondary Sources

Blair, Kirstie, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart (2006)

Clausson, Nils ‘Romancing Manchester: Class, Gender, and the Conflicting Genres of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South’, The Gaskell Society Journal 21 (2007): 1–20, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45185937

Cordner, Sheila, ‘Radical Education in Aurora Leigh’, Victorian Review 40, no. 1 (2014): 233–49, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24497047

Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth, ‘Aurora Leigh: The Vocation of the Woman Poet’, Victorian Poetry 19, no. 1 (1981): 35–48, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40003145

Kuhlman, Mary H, ‘Education Through Experience in North and South’, The Gaskell Society Journal 10 (1996): 14–26, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45185621

Parker, Pamela Corpron, ‘Fictional Philanthropy in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and North and South’, Victorian Literature and Culture 25, no. 2 (1997): 321–31, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25058392

Taylor, Olivia Gatti, ‘Written in Blood: The Art of Mothering Epic in the Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’, Victorian Poetry 44, no. 2 (2006): 153–64, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40002625