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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 4 page paper which examines how women’s roles and tensions are explored in the Victorian text. Bibliography lists 2 sources.
Page Count:
4 pages (~225 words per page)
File: TG15_TGegnorsou.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
fact that it was the height of the Victorian era, and women were perhaps more closely bound by social convention than ever before, not all were content to be docilely
complacent. Elizabeth Gaskell believed women should not simply serve as d?cor; she argued the time had come for them to emerge from the social curtain they were forced to
hide behind and take center stage alongside their male counterparts. However, Gaskell was a realist and knew such a dramatic transition would not be easy. Like her literary
counterpart, Charles Dickens, she recognized the power of prose to incite social change, and took her pen to task. Riding a
crest of success from her popular novels Mary Barton (1848) and Cranford (1851), Gaskell decided to push the gender envelope even further with her 1855 text, North and South.
On the surface, it appeared to be a formulaic Romantic novel, with the trials and tribulations of English country girl, Margaret Hale. However, everything changes when her minister father
is abruptly relieved of his duties and the family must move into the urban and industrialized northern town of Lancashire. Margaret has not initiated these changes (Gaskell, perhaps, realized
that would be going too far), but she accepted them, albeit with a little reluctance. First, her role in the Hale family (the traditional feminine sphere) is increased as
her the illness of her invalid mother progresses. In fact, it is left to Margaret to inform the ailing woman of their impending move. She gradually begins to
understand that "she herself must one day answer for her own life and what she had done with it" (Gaskell 416).
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