The Female Protagonist's Multiple Selves

In reading chapters from Langland’s Nobody’s Angels, I was struck by one a motif that ran through several of her discussions of Victorian protagonists. In analyzing members of the middle-class mentality, Langland notices that some characters must develop multiple sides to themselves in order to secure their place in terms of both class and society as a whole. This becomes apparent when discussing Dickens’ Little Dorrit, and although she applies this to the herioines of Gaskell’s Cranford and Wives and Daughters, I believe it can be applied to Gaskell’s North and South as well.

Langland pulls from Dickens’ narrative in order to create a picture of Amy Dorrit’s world: “Dorrit’s actual labors as seamstress outside the prison walls – labors to procure luxuries for her father – must be disguised from Mr. Dorrit to salvage his allusions of familial grandeur. Because Mr. Dorrit, buoyed up by his daughter’s efforts, makes a greater stand ‘by his forlorn gentility,’ then ‘over and above other daily cares, the Child of the Marshalsea had always upon her the care of preserving the genteel fiction that they were all idle beggars together.’ She must now exert herself ‘to keep up the ceremony and pretense of his having no idea that Amy herself went out by the day to work.’” (98) Although housed in a debtor’s prison since birth, Amy must deal with her father delusions of grandeur. Once a gentleman, she must strive to keep him at ease within his beliefs that they are still members of the gentry. Amy is thus forced to hide a whole side of her self from her father – she provides for him both physically and mentally.

When speaking of Gaskell, the author, Langland remarks that she was the “picture of a woman comfortable with the concept of multiple selves, with the fluidity of identity and subjectivity to which her life gives rise.” (115) Though it is not exactly similar, I see consistencies in the multiple selves of Gaskell’s protagonist Margaret Hale from North and South. Margaret arrives in the industrial city of Milton as a gentlewoman born and bred in the south of England. Though she arrives in the new city as the daughter of an unemployed clergyman, she nonetheless brings the airs and affectations of her southern lifestyle. There thus begins a confrontation between the southern lady she was and the northern woman she becomes. Her sympathies for the working conditions of the cotton mills and her growing love for Thornton, the factory owner, begin to develop a sense of this multiple self.