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Abstract: By the time North and South was published serially in 1854, many Victorian conduct manuals had been written, printed, and read, contributing to the social construction of the ideal woman. While the authors of conduct literature delineated the relationships of women to children, marriage, and death, female authors like Elizabeth Gaskell responded to cultural views of gender and emotional expression in complex ways. Considering in particular Gaskell's treatment of Mrs Boucher and Mrs Hale, women who unleash their grief without restraint, this essay will explore nineteenth-century cultural and gendered understandings of 'giving way' to emotion. In this essay, I argue that Margaret's struggle between emotional restraint and openness reflects Gaskell's own grappling with the legitimacy of female emotional expression, as evidenced by the author's personal letters and diary entries. Margaret recognises the validity of Mrs Boucher and Mrs Hale's emotionality in response to gendered and non-gendered experiences; she eventually finds relief in expressing her own grief, signalling Gaskell's protest against an order that suppresses women's emotions.
Literary scholarship on the women in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855) typically centres on the role of the novel's heroine, Margaret Hale. Her character dwells at the centre of mid-nineteenth-century narratives of romance, industrialism, and individuation. However, critics have tended to ignore North and South's minor female characters, such as Mrs Hale or Mrs Boucher. When scholars have devoted any time to these two women, their focus has been on their problematic deviations from 'ideal' gendered emotionality and seeming irrationality. In contrast, feminist scholarship has hailed Margaret as a model of rational, Wollstonecraftian self-control. Another point of interest has been the isolation of mothers in Gaskell's novels. Scholars have rightly observed that much of Gaskell's own experiences with suppressed emotion have to do with motherhood; however, I suggest that her letters also reveal a need to express her feelings in relation to her other 'selves'. Margaret's longing for emotional release complicates readings of Mrs Boucher and Mrs Hale as selfish, weak women. Both characters situate their grief in gender-specific and non-gendered experiences, and Gaskell points to a need for greater understanding of both. Margaret's movement from suppressing to embracing her emotionality, coming as it does after observing her mother's and Mrs Boucher's emotional expressiveness, works as...
