"Blessings left behind" : self and social obligation in the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell

Far from supporting the domestic ideology of the Nineteenth Century as many writers contend, Elizabeth Gaskell's five major novels–Mary Barton, Ruth, North and South, Sylvia's Lovers and Wives and Daughters--reflect her overriding idea that the individual could effect social change only through the achievement of moral integrity. Gaskell believes that the primary responsibility of an adult participant of community life is moral awareness, and in these five novels Gaskell creates a sort of moral mythology, or stories by which women could guide their lives. Gaskell's heroines influence their specific communities by learning the supposed "feminine" virtues of love, mercy and generosity, the "best of the human spirit." At the same time that Gaskell's novels stress these powerful and transformative female values, they also create her new mythology and generate social change, through these particular virtues embodied in and taught by her heroines. There is a progression of moral reasoning in her novels where the heroine's moral integrity involves a coherent conception of who she is and what her commitments are. Gaskell's mythology thus creates a rejuvenated, better community through these virtues, through the achievement of moral integrity and social obligation.