Women and Crowds in the Novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Harkness

Abstract

ABSTRACT Nineteenth-century literary representations of crowds in urban landscapes convey both the radical and revolutionary aspects of the working-class movement and the anti-modern aspects of chaos and collective violence. This article explores the entangled relationships between crowds and women from the decline of the Chartists in the late 1840s to the rise of the Socialists in the 1880s. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Margaret Harkness’s George Eastmont, Wanderer (1905), both narrators describe a crowd of angry rioters as the “Frankenstein-monster”. This article begins by examining Gaskell’s representations of her heroine and crowds in North and South (1854–55), and then analyses Harkness’s novels and articles while scrutinising her figurative use of the word “monster”. Despite the differences in the way women’s roles are represented in their novels, Gaskell and Harkness associate women’s bodily actions with female political statements. This analysis of women’s writing on Victorian industrial issues aims to illuminate the textuality of bodies which invites a radical reading.