Off-campus UNL users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your NU ID and password. When you are done browsing please remember to return to this page and log out.
Non-UNL users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
Settings for class and gender in Elizabeth Gaskell's novels
Abstract
Elizabeth Gaskell uses physical settings, ranging from whole towns to individual interior details, to locate her complex view of the individual embedded in society. Gaskell selects particular details of settings to embody her social and personal values and her sense of a fluid Victorian society in which traditional class situations and gender roles may be changing. Each chapter examines how a type of built environment represents social and psychological situations. After an introduction, Chapters Two through Four focus on large structures: large and small towns, workplaces and public spaces. As metaphors for human communities, towns have surprisingly negative effects on personal autonomy and growth, but characters gain from tensions between individual desire and communal expectations. Settings such as factories and assembly halls reinforce social codes, yet Gaskell's workplaces and public places, especially railroads, provide opportunities for growth and change. Chapters Five through Seven discuss how homes of various socioeconomic classes incorporate and undercut assumptions about class and gender. In their design, furnishings, and use, middle class homes proclaim the value of both class status and individualism. They separate people by class and gender, empower middle class women, and conceal secrets of female desire. As Gaskell depicts accurately the housing of industrial workers and urban poor, she emphasizes the competence, self-help, and individual worth of working class characters. Large homes of self-made capitalists, pastoral prosperous farmhouses, and country houses of great landowners also portray class and gender distinctions. In spite of their illusion of traditional stability, these homes of wealth and/or natural beauty prove vulnerable to changes in class and gender situations. All of Gaskell's built environments show that physical settings, in fiction as in life, both shape and represent possibly shifting personal and social values in a complementary and continuous process.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature|Womens studies
Recommended Citation
Kuhlman, Mary Louise Haynes, "Settings for class and gender in Elizabeth Gaskell's novels" (1994). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9425290.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9425290