The Awakening Of Ecological Consciousness In Mrs. Gaskell's North And South

Since the nineteenth century, industrialization and urbanization in Britain have not solely accelerated technological innovation and wealth accumulation, but also aggravated such conflicts as environmental crisis, class hostility and gender discrimination. Mrs. Gaskell's novel North and South distinctly reveals such problems and sends out a foresighted ecological appeal for a harmonious world. For a long time, however, critics focus their commentary of this novel on such themes as class relations, alienation of commodity, gender inversion as well as religion, family and death. Most of these researches are carried out separately, with no sufficient regard to the innate relationship between various social crises and environmental crisis, and the novel's inherent ecological consciousness still remains beyond the critical horizons. The cognition about Mrs. Gaskell's creative achievements has yet to be deepened. This thesis, based on previous and current commentary, makes an attempt at exploring the awakening of ecological consciousness throughout the novel.The central viewpoint of this thesis is that an ecological consciousness in North and South awakens in the threefold adversity of environmental, labor-relation and gender-relation crises. Environmental crisis keeps eroding human health; labor-relation crisis devastates social stability; gender-relation crisis deprives women's basic equality and freedom. The triple crises are intricately related and mutually influenced, which makes the ecological problems even more complex. However, the roots of all these crises—anthropocentricism, hierarchal dualism and androcentricism—are homologous and can be traced to the conception of dominations, namely, human domination of nature, masters'domination of workers and male dominant of female. With a serious concern about various crises, the novel actively explores a solution and conveys a strong appeal for a reformed ecological relationship through a detailed description about three ecological transformations. In the first place, the fictional scene turns from the southern village Helstone to the northern industrial city Milton, which is not only a geographical but an environmental conversion. The serious environmental crisis and survival predicaments in Milton make a sharp contrast with the peaceful wilderness and agrarian life in Helstone. This contrast implicates a strong aspiration for the restoration of human's harmony with nature. With the worsening environment, the dualistic opposition between masters and workers gets sharp and class hostility intensified, but the novel, through the reconciliation between Higgins and Thornton, molds a great transformation of labor-relations from hostility to mutuality and coexistence, which can be seen as an appeal for the harmony between two classes. Intertwined with the previous two transformations, female identity also experiences an evident shift from subordination to equality. Margaret Hale grows from a domestic girl into a full member of her community with equal dignity and independence. It is, therefore, an appeal for the harmony between two genders. To summarize, the novel authentically conveys the awakening of ecological consciousness in such territories as human-nature relations, labor relations and gender-identity relations, and finally appeals for a harmonious world characterized by equality, mutuality and symbiosis.The thesis explains the causation of ecological consciousness in North and South with reference to the theory of eco-criticism and the whole demonstration is based on textual analysis. It fully investigates the root causes underneath various crises with an analysis of their manifestations, and attentively explores the ecological concern, ecological wisdom, and ecological demands inherent in the novel by examining its triple transformations. It is the inherent ecological consciousness that makes the novel once again show its vitality in most newly-industrialized countries even one and a half centuries after its publication. Up to now, this consciousness gradually comes to maturity and perfection, and ultimately constitutes a set of moral principles to conduct people's behavior in the process of industrialization, because only with reference to these values can human evade going astray and successfully build up a harmonious world. In the meantime, to make a more objective and comprehensive understanding of Mrs. Gaskell'creative achievements, it is also necessary to further an ecological inquiry of her industrial novels.