Elizabeth Gaskell and Manchester:
Identity, Culture and the Modern City
Conference, 19/20/21 July 2005

Elizabeth Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton (1848), signaled an important shift not only in the representation of working-class life in the new metropolis of Manchester, but also a significant intervention in contemporary understandings of women’s work within the nascent factory system. As many scholars of nineteenth-century industrial fiction have observed, melodramatic assaults upon feminine virtue were fairly standard in “Condition of England” novels, standing in for concerns about the overall impact of modernization and social change. The figure of the factory girl featured prominently in this discourse on industrialization and urban crisis: as historian Deborah Valenze has noted, “by the 1830s, the notion of woman’s proper place being in the home was gaining currency, rendering factory work for women morally degrading and destructive of the fundamental relationships of the family . . . .less [than] sympathetic were the assessments of the independent factory girl, notorious for her promiscuity, coarse language, drinking, smoking, and sexual misbehavior”(86).

Gaskell acknowledges this type of the morally suspect “independent factory girl” in Mary Barton, but also questions the inevitability of her degradation through a process of mirroring or doubling on the level of character. The virtuous Mary Barton, daughter of a Chartist agitator, stands in clear contrast to her fallen Aunt Esther, a woman “riotous and noisy” (7) in her self-assertion. “That’s the worst of factory work for girls,” protests John Barton, “They can earn so much when work is plenty, that they can maintain themselves any how. My Mary shall never work in a factory, that I’m determined on”(6). The domestic milieu to which Mary cleaves, in spite of tremendous pressure both economic and social, is contrasted to the melodramatic territory of Esther’s story. This division points to a larger schism in the novel between a “public” plot of working-class violence or political protest and a “private” plot of domestic reconciliation. Although Gaskell thoroughly problematizes the public/private split it remains an organizing principle for the novel. Catherine Gallagher has argued that Gaskell’s “use of contrasting narrative forms is one of the most interesting and overlooked features of Mary Barton” (68) precisely because it leads to a perceived artistic failure. Yet “failure is the foundation of the book’s formal significance, for its very generic eclecticism points toward the formal self consciousness of later British realism” (87).

In this paper I would like to explore the surprising after-life of such “generic eclecticism” in what I read to be a latter-day inheritor of Gaskell’s formal and social concerns in the industrial novel, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003). As with Mary Barton, Brick Lane is structured around a contrast between two women, virtuous and domestic Nazneen and her spirited sister Hasina, a woman who defies tradition and acts upon her desires with often-disastrous consequences. The fates of the two sisters are explored against a backdrop of modernization and change. Nazneen leaves her Bangladeshi village for an arranged marriage, but it takes her to the confusingly secular and multicultural society of metropolitan London. Hasina marries according to her own wishes, quickly abandons what turns out to be an unhappy match, and seeks her fortune in the city of Dhaka. London and Dhaka pose the same challenge to identity that Gaskell’s Manchester did for the newly arrived laborers who formed migrant communities in a seemingly hostile, or at least indifferent, urban environment. And the two women re-shape their sense of self, and agency, in direct response to city living. As with Gaskell’s novel, Brick Lane vacillates between two genres or modes of representation. Nazneen’s narrative conforms to a traditional omniscient perspective of realist fiction, largely focusing on quotidian detail; Hasina’s story is relayed in epistolary form, through broken and idiomatic constructions, with particular emphasis on sexual danger and melodramatic plotting. Ali’s novel is often criticized for this narrative disjunction; I want to suggest that her writing participates in a project of industrial social criticism begun over a century earlier and in which Gaskell found her authorial voice. Furthermore, this critique continues to be organized primarily around questions of sexual identity for women in a traditional society under threat of modernization. Both writers link the desire to sequester or protect the domestic woman (Mary/Nazneen— who each take up the needle to maintain this fiction) to a countering fascination with the woman who is claimed as a sort of tribute by a monstrous economy or labor market (Esther/Hasina—both of whom undergo physical degradation and social ostracism). Like Gaskell, Ali insists on the identity of the sisters, rather than their difference. Nazneen eventually seeks sexual knowledge outside the bonds of marriage, calling into question her role as a submissive and dutiful wife. Hasina refuses to accept the judgment her sexual indiscretions call down upon her. Dhaka and London meet in the hybrid geography of Brick Lane; in speaking the final words of the novel, Nazneen’s Anglophile friend Razia claims a third territory for a community of women formed outside of marriage and sexual ownership: “This is England . . .You can do whatever you like” (415). Ali’s conclusion is as hopeful and “unrealistic” as Gaskell’s earlier marriage plot and emigration scenario at the end of Mary Barton. Yet endings aren’t everything. Discovering continuities between Gaskell’s and Ali’s work helps us to recognize the ongoing work of realist fiction—and generic eclecticism—as a tool in negotiating, but even more importantly commenting upon social change, particularly the work of women in an evolving global economy.

Bard College