“Political Agencies of the Oppressed, Silent Protest and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lois the Witch, and Other Tales” is an exhibition that focuses on the shorter fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell. This collection includes the strange novella “Lois the Witch,” a story set in Salem, Massachusetts during the witch trials as well as a ghost story called “The Crooked Branch,” which tells the story of a mother and father who die from grief when called to testify against their wayward son at his criminal trial. Women and the working poor are the main characters of stories that chronicle what the narrator relays as grave injustices suffered by them because they do not have the kind of social, political or legal power that other (white men) do. Women are executed for the imaginary crime of witchcraft and the working poor are put in an impossible ethical position when the law demands they incriminate the child they had committed to protect and love unconditionally. These stories are, as the exhibition suggests, central to the collection (the first and last in it) and also to Gaskell’s more radical ideas about the political agency of oppressed peoples. Rather than insist that the only way oppressed peoples can resist their oppressors is by actively fighting back, Gaskell fills these stories with scenes of silent protest: refusals to confess or testify that provide these characters with a way to temporarily assert some agency in a system that refuses to acknowledge their basic human rights. Weaving together close readings of these fictional texts and modern works of moral and political philosophy, my exhibition makes a case for Gaskell’s substantive contribution to the history and theory of passive resistance (including silent protest) and democratic dissent.
Credits
Maeve Adams