Artifice, Naturalism, and Symbolism in the Flowers of North and South

Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South is garlanded with flora, literal and figurative, gaudy and sublime, scientific and aesthetic. The prose itself contains clauses that grow, vegetally, like an English garden—a space created to dramatize the struggle between nature’s wildness and the human desire to impose order. In this fecund cosmology, women grow naturally and the products of their labor evince instinct, accident, artisanry, and emergence. The text casts men, on the other hand, as purveyors of order, and the growth that emanates from their industry is mechanical, characterized by repeated patterns and artificial reduplication. The novel’s title suggests that it is preoccupied with binaries, and to be sure the binary of nature and man—and of man and woman—threads through the text. But we might look to its various floral metaphors to illuminate the text’s complication of the simple thesis/antithesis of Southern agrarian beauty and Northern industrial blight; of women’s domestic sphere and men’s industrial one; and of the modern world’s ambivalent new relationship with science and nature. Gaskell’s potent floral metaphors are rarely coded “female” or “romantic,” as readers of Victorian literature might expect. Rather, they explore the imbrication of the feminine and the masculine; the industrial and the natural; the scientific and the aesthetic. Flowers, in North and South, speak a language more nuanced than romance, exerting their own logic on the text, and appearing to call for the synthesis of binaries—the marriage of metaphorical North and South.

Flowers introduce us to a central tension early in the novel when Margaret Hale and her father tour the Northern town of Milton—where they are forced to move after a decline in their circumstances—to look at potential homes. The house that interests them has a drawback: The floral wallpaper offends their delicate sensibilities: More than that, Margaret makes the claim that its pattern is in fact dangerous, expected to contribute to the ill-health of Margaret’s mother, like the bad air of the factory town, should she be forced to reside within its influence (the reader might note the analogue to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s madness-inducing wallpaper from a few decades later, which draws a similar parallel between a woman’s environment and her health; or, for that matter, the reputed final words of Oscar Wilde). An entire chapter is gravitationally centered on the pattern: Margaret predicates their acceptance of the home upon the removal of the wallpaper, with its “‘atrocious blue and pink’” roses (Gaskell 56). She steels her mother against its effects: “‘you must prepare yourself for our drawing-room paper. Pink and blue roses, with yellow leaves!’” (Gaskell 60). She approves of the home’s other attributes, to say nothing of the fact that it is the only fitting one the Hales can afford. Her father laments that the landlord is unlikely to remove the wallpaper, and when he seeks the man out, he shares Margaret’s concern about it enough to remark, “I hope I shall be able to get new papers” (Gaskell 57). The text assumes the reader’s agreement about this objective fact: That color combination, those awful flowers, constitute a hazardous vulgarity that is in some way unhealthy.

The view from the room with the wallpaper, on the other hand, is a selling-point of the home, and establishes a core binary in the novel concerning taste. The window in the room with the wallpaper frames a “‘pretty view over the plain’” (Gaskell 56). Margaret’s use of the word “plain” is interesting here, for the same word comes to mean—and thus link—three discrete concepts over the course of the chapter. The first is literal and geographical, referring to the flat topography of Northern England in the view out the window. It contrasts with the wallpaper’s baroque design. But “plain” also prefigures the assertion, a few paragraphs later, that Margaret “had never come fairly in contact with the taste that loves ornament, however bad, more than the plainness and simplicity which are of themselves the framework of elegance,” which is meant to indicate Margaret’s comparably high-class upbringing and her consequent ability to identify elegance (Gaskell 57). Her class status is contrasted, in the same chapter, to that of her future love interest, Mr. Thornton. He is the factory-owning industrialist, a self-made man who is uneducated in the “framework of elegance.” At first he seems a human extension of the wallpaper. But Margaret does note that the paper’s “vulgarity and commonness’” are not to be found in his face, which she describes as “neither plain, nor yet handsome” (not yet). Here “plain” is an antonym of “handsome.” Margaret observes that with Mr. Thornton’s “expression of resolution, no face, however plain, could be either vulgar or common” (Gaskell 60). Gaskel’s use of the slippery word, “plain,” threads an interesting needle within the narrative: it is an emblem of nature (in contrast to the wallpaper); an emblem of moral character; and can signify both elegance and unattractiveness, but not vulgarity. In the world of the novel, plainness signals honesty, good breeding, and good taste. The jury is out on Mr. Thornton’s morality at this point (he is neither plain nor handsome), but readers see in Margaret’s careful assessment of his looks which way the plot is headed. Indeed, Mr. Thornton’s character is established in the final lines of the chapter when readers realize that he has influenced the landlord to remove the offending wallpaper.

We might see Margaret’s décor-proviso as an act of agency on the part of a female protagonist. Women, after all, are meant to have their power limited to the domestic sphere. But we see in this chapter how critical that sphere is, how thoroughly it ripples out into the world of men from within, and how it influences life and death (indeed Margaret’s mother does not survive their relocation). We see through contrast that the flowers skulking up the walls of the sitting room are not real or honest or plain. They, like the goods produced in Mr. Thornton’s textile mill, are the products of industry, part of the generative male world that defines the North: They exist without nature’s stochasticity, forcing inhabitants to live inside their repeat. “Living inside their repeat” also describes the repetitive motions of the town’s working-class factory employees, who are forced to repeat the same actions all day, like machines, in order to produce patterns like the vulgar wallpaper—patterns that might be simulacra of nature but are without nature’s “plain” and healthful properties. The actions of workers in the agrarian South, on the other hand, involve nature directly, or involve direct and artisanal manipulation of natural elements on the part of individuals, as in, for instance, traditional modes of spinning, weaving, and decorating fabric (or paper). Both locations involve man’s intervention in nature, but the North utterly decouples the natural (read: female) from the lives of its inhabitants, factory owners and factory workers alike: It is located squarely and exclusively in the masculinist ethos of the industrial. This is the unbalanced world into which the Hales move, a world of smoking chimneys and “the ceaseless roar and mighty beat and dizzying whirl of machinery… Senseless and purposeless [the] wood and iron and steam in their endless labours” (Gaskell 379). Gaskell presents this world as one in sore need of synthesis with the natural—and, via the transitive property, with the female. Good thing Margaret and her keen eye for the healthful and plain are about to change the town’s wallpaper, so to speak, and the heart of one of its pivotal industrialists.

Roses feature once again in the novel’s final pages, this time as evidence of the change that Margaret has wrought, representing the synthesis of so many of the novel’s binaries. Mr. Thornton and Margaret have changed one another. He is softened—she wiser. Both have learned humility. Margaret has just saved his factory from financial ruin and they both apprehend for the first time the mutual love that has been maturing, as slowly and steadily as vegetation, over the course of the plot. In the book’s final action, Mr. Thornton shows Margaret the roses he picked in her Southern hometown, and dried to keep. She recognizes their unique patterns: “‘They are from Helstone, are they not?’” she says. “‘I know the deep indentation round the leaves,’” To which he replies, “‘I wanted to see the place where Margaret grew to what she is” (Gaskell 395). The flowers are symbolic, but of much more than romance: Mr. Thornton is acknowledging Margaret’s uniqueness, her “growth” in Helstone mirroring the growth of the flowers. The blossoms, deciduous to Helstone, are likewise unique, having their own rivets and corrugations.

The admission of the roses’ distinctiveness demonstrates Mr. Thornton’s moral conversion: In the early days of the text, Mr. Thornton saw his male and female employees as those blue and pink roses in the ugly wallpaper: Identical, featureless, utterly fungible. Now he sees them as individual human beings. His appreciation has become both naturalistic and aesthetic. He finally deserves Margaret, and their union satisfies a narrative arc that argues for synthesis. The novel is bookended with roses, conceptually at war with each other. The English garden is a metaphor for the its thesis and an apotheosis and extension of its logic: Nature’s wildness is anarchy without man’s intervention; but man’s rationality without nature’s/women’s emergence, individuality, and chance is dehumanizing. Women and men are only “plain” and healthy when they collaborate—when they find the middle way. The pressed flowers at the end have been pressed by human hands, and that weds industry and nature with another preoccupation of the Victorian era: That of scientific naturalism, a curiosity about the world of nature and nature’s relationship to man.

Works Cited

Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. W. W. Norton and Company, 2005.