Critical Narrative
Illustration of Witch Trial
Readers of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Sylvia’s Lovers might rightly express skepticism that her work belongs in a book about protest. If it does, they might concede, it would clearly stand in tension with contemporary efforts to theorize its centrality to a well-functioning democracy. In both North and South, protestors are regarded by other characters and the narrator with worried suspicion. The narrator of North and South seems to share the view of its protagonist, Margaret Hale, who first sympathizes with a group of protesting cotton mill workers who have “starving children at home” and are simply trying “to get higher wages” before describing the crowd collectively as “some terrible wild beast” and “a troop of animals” whose “wild beating and raging” could only be tamed by the calmer authority of their employer and master (CH. XXII). Elaborating on the contrast between their animalistic incivility and the mill owner’s capacity for a more coolly humane rationality, the narrator goes on to say,
Margaret felt intuitively, that in an instant all would be uproar; the first touch would cause an explosion, in which, among such hundreds of infuriated men and reckless boys, even Mr. Thornton’s life would be unsafe,—that in another instant the stormy passions would have passed their bounds, and swept away all barriers of reason, or apprehension of consequence. (CH. XXII)
Collective dissent of this kind can all too easily and “in an instant,” according to Margaret, become “riot” (CH. XXII). Sylvia’s Lovers shares this view. The novel takes the Press Gang Riots during the Napoleonic Wars as a key historical context and plot point, referring to the “riotous state” into which those protests threw civil society and the lives of decent, innocent people like Sylvia (CH. III). Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels thus express doubt about the likelihood that protest—particularly agonistic physical protest—will yield meaningful social and political change.
Gaskell’s short fiction, however, tells a different story. In place of the “rolling angry murmur” of an assembled mob in North and South (CH. XXII), her short stories carve out a space for protest to have power and purpose, though of a very different kind: namely, silent protest. Having focused on writers who conceptualize communities of dissent in the foregoing chapters, I pivot in this chapter and the next to a more granular exploration of two kinds of protest that remain key, and hotly debated, tools of resistance in our world. While I explore silent protest as a type of passive resistance in this chapter, I explore the more agonistic kinds of violent protest (which Gaskell appears to reject as productive) in the next and final chapter before turning in my CODA to a discussion of the nineteenth-century literary legacy of 20th- and 21st-century political dissent. In this chapter, I begin making that case by arguing that Gaskell’s shorter fiction prefigures modern conceptions of non-violent dissent that we tend to associate with more recent political movements.
Review of The Shadow on Wall, The Spectator (November 1904)
A type of passive resistance, silent protest takes a variety of distinctive forms in Gaskell’s short fiction, including characters who refuse to speak when commanded to do so and also narrators who decline to tell us something that a character has supposedly said. Gaskell’s collection of stories Lois the Witch, and Other Tales offer particularly apposite cases of this, including two tales—the novella “Lois the Witch” and the short story “The Crooked Branch” that open and conclude the collection. Those stories are both concerned with judicial proceedings, providing apt contexts for contemplating the resistive power of not speaking when commanded by a legal authority to confess or give testimony. This chapter explores the ways in which Gaskell’s fiction theorizes silence as its own non-verbalized rhetoric of resistance. Rather than read silence as non-rhetorical, I reveal the ways in which Gaskell’s writing represents and performs the peculiar rhetorical power of not speaking in contexts where someone in a position of authority claims to have the power to compel another person to speak. In other words, just because someone does not speak does not mean that they are not participating in a rhetorical exchange. Having clearly heard the command to speak, their refusal to respond is nonetheless a response, albeit non-verbal, that only has meaning in the context of the rhetorical occasion of the command. We are, of course then, communicating something when we refuse to response to an order to say something. We are just communicating non-verbally in the rhetorical exchange that presumes we will respond. The fact that, in Gaskell’s stories, the refusal to response also produces more rhetoric, including further commands and verbalized expressions of bafflement by the person who has demanded the response and not received it, underscores this fact. The rhetorical occasion for the exercise of that command (and the authority that undergirds it), inversely also grants rhetorical power to the resistance against that command as its own kind of non-verbal rhetorical dissent against the command. Gaskell’s fiction thereby provides a way to shed light on some rhetorical origins and dimensions of modern conceptions of passive resistance which the more modern history of lunch-counter sit-ins and bodily occupations of space tend to imagine as taking a more physical than rhetorical form.