Two Women: Some Forms of Feeling in "North and South"

The significance of the episode is summed up with characteristic strength, and delicacy, not naming but expressing significance in a compressed narrative simile, literary and startlingly exotic, from The Arabian Nights: 'It was like the story of the eastern king, who dipped his head into a basin of water, at the magician's command, and 'ere he instantly took it out went through the experience of a lifetime. First she recognises Thornton's feeling: '[H]e had come, in this strange, wild, passionate way, to make known his love!', repeating the word in three tenses: 'he did love her [...] he had loved her [...] he would love her' (NS, p. 192). The conversation continues in relaxed and happy mood as the subject of clothes leads easily to talk of Margaret's homes in town and country, and she tells Bessy of the pastoral delight of forest and high common, in her spare precise description, and Bessy longs for space, air and rest, in her expressive and rhythmical dialect: 'When I have gone for an out, I've always wanted to get high up and see far away, and take a deep breath o' fulness in that air', and 'I used to think once that if I could have a day of doing nothing, to rest me - a day in some quiet place like that yo' speak on - it would maybe set me up' (NS, pp. 100, 101). 2 See Martin Dodsworth's introduction to North and South (Harmondsworth: Penguin English Library, 1970) for a recognition of the link between personal and political passions in the novel, with a different emphasis from mine; and also Jill L. Matus's Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chapter two, for a wide discussion of Gaskell's complex range of feeling and emotion. 3 Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, ed. by Angus Easson (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2008).