engleski

A Victorian Antigone: The Dual Revolution as Narrative Intelligence in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South

Drawing on the dual revolution as a concept definitive to histories of the nineteenth century (Hobsbawm, Osterhammel), I argue that the Victorian industrial novel anticipates this concept and accommodates it as a peculiar narrative intelligence. Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) may be the finest example of how the Victorian novel combines the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution into a narrative intelligence that ultimately results in a sustained schizophrenic split across different narrative instances. Tellingly, a schizophrenic split affects also the presentation of the two revolutions in Shirley, so that the proverbial terror of the French Revolution is hegemonized around and into the Napoleonic Wars, whereas the Industrial Revolution, with profit as its hegemonizing rationale, breaks open into the terror of the Luddite riots. I propose to discuss how Elizabeth Gaskell engages with Brontë’s novel in North and South (1854), mainly by processing the schizophrenic split into the narration based in the focalizing consciousness. While the focalizing consciousness is thus promoted to a narrative apparatus where modern revolutions find their functional articulation, I argue that the story of Antigone provides Gaskell with a template where the schizophrenic residue is contained for further processing.

the dual revolution ; the industrial novel ; narrative theory ; Elizabeth Gaskell ; Antigone

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