Urban Vision and Gender in Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England and Gaskell’s North and South
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Both Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South wrote specifically about Manchester in the 1840s in their treatment of industrial capitalism. Despite their common roles as observers and investigators of social problems in Manchester, critics have not yet fully examined the issue of urban spectatorship in relation to gender in both texts. By comparing how both Engels and Gaskell observed and expressed their experiences of Manchester in the 1840s, this paper seeks to explore how his or her urban vision is deeply influenced and complicated by his or her status in the conventional cultural binary of male as spectator and female as spectacle. This paper demonstrates that Engels’ urban spectatorship ends up reproducing its particular unequal power relationship between the observer and the observed so that the working-class remains as the Other in the eye of the onlooker. Gaskell’s urban vision, on the other hand, is inevitably shaped by a sense of anxiety and contradictions inherent in being the Other in the mid-Victorian era, yet it simultaneously illustrates how successfully a female writer is able to negotiate these contradictions in a complex manner to offer a powerful critique of social inequities.
Abstract
Both Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South wrote specifically about Manchester in the 1840s in their treatment of industrial capitalism. Despite their common roles as observers and investigators of social problems in Manchester, critics have not yet fully examined the issue of urban spectatorship in relation to gender in both texts. By comparing how both Engels and Gaskell observed and expressed their experiences of Manchester in the 1840s, this paper seeks to explore how his or her urban vision is deeply influenced and complicated by his or her status in the conventional cultural binary of male as spectator and female as spectacle. This paper demonstrates that Engels’ urban spectatorship ends up reproducing its particular unequal power relationship between the observer and the observed so that the working-class remains as the Other in the eye of the onlooker. Gaskell’s urban vision, on the other hand, is inevitably shaped by a sense of anxiety and contradictions inherent in being the Other in the mid-Victorian era, yet it simultaneously illustrates how successfully a female writer is able to negotiate these contradictions in a complex manner to offer a powerful critique of social inequities.
참고문헌 (20)
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