| Title |
Text and textile: weaving class, gender, and religion in elizabeth gaskell's novel "north and south" / |
| Translation of Title |
Tekstas ir tekstilė: socialinė klasė, lytis ir religija Elizabethos Gaskell romane „Šiaurė ir pietūs“. |
| Authors |
Plešanova, Viktorija |
| Full Text |
|
| Pages |
44 |
| Keywords [eng] |
Tekstilė, lyčių normos, religinė krizė, socialinis konfliktas, naujasis istorizmas, daikto teorija. Textile, gender norms, religious doubt, social conflict, New Historicism, Thing Theory. |
| Abstract [eng] |
There is a tight link between the imagery of material objects and their cultural significance in Elizabeth Gaskell’s industrial novels. In this thesis, I will focus on how the novelist explores gender identity as well as the issues of the religious and social spheres in Victorian England through the representation of textile, cloth production and cotton industry in the novel North and South. The paper aims at examining the implications the relation between the text and its historical context has for our understanding of Gaskell’s novel North and South. Two approaches will be applied for the present analysis: New Historicism and Thing Theory. New Historicism recognises the significance of the historical context in the analysis of the text, whereas Thing Theory explores Victorian complex relationships between material objects and human subjects. In North and South the descriptions of cloth and textile, from local to the imported ones, play an important role in the depiction of the Victorian period. Thus, different fabrics and garments that the characters of the novel possess, discuss and demonstrate symbolise the rise of the industrial economy that increased social inequality. Moreover, shawls passed down from mother to daughter reflect the hereditary nature of the attitudes towards economic imperialism and exploitative labour conditions at the cotton mills. The same shawls also embody the traditional female role in patriarchal Victorian society: women were still restricted to their domestic domain in spite of their active participation in the public sphere of life of the new industrial world. Finally, the whole textile industry becomes a lens through which the reader can take an insight into the problem of the religious crisis of the nineteenth century. The loss of faith among the working class is one of the prominent topics of the novel that is depicted through the representation of different garments and the whole textile manufacturing. |
| Dissertation Institution |
Vilniaus universitetas. |
| Type |
Master thesis |
| Language |
English |
| Publication date |
2021 |
