Diminishing Violence: Strategising Character in Industrial Fiction

Abstract

In Mary Barton and Felix Holt, Gaskell and Eliot distract readers from the violence within their novels in a number of ways: the early definition of character, the use of time to distance events, and the interruption of the narrative with long passages of time concentrating on a parallel domestic story. Their strategy is to defuse the fear of violence even as they present it. Showing violence as a result of suffering undermines the notion of the working-class man as an animalistic brute, an ‘other’ who is not quite human. Shown to be vulnerable to the pain of others, he becomes capable of suffering himself and worthy of sympathy. Accordingly, the structures of the novels are designed to suggest that violence is avoidable but through domestic change rather than political upheaval, by improving the workers' lives rather than by restructuring society.