This is the first in an ongoing series about the stories that have shaped us, taught us valuable life lessons, and allowed us to conjure better ways of being.
What is there to say about this deeply iconic love story with its own devoted fandom? It’s not hard to see why people fell in love with this Victorian love story framed by a strong social justice narrative when the BBC aired the North & South mini-series in 2004 based on Elizabeth Gaskell’s serialized novel written in 1854.
With echoes of Pride & Prejudice, this story appeals to Austen fans and connoisseurs of a good slow-burn enemies-to-lovers romance. Add in a thought-provoking exploration of class tension, consumerism, religious dissension, and a high body count and you have the makings of a deliciously compelling love story with a surprisingly gothic subtext. It’s a story that’s ripe for fan-fic, meme-i-fication, and repetitive swooning.
It’s also an incredibly relatable story about the struggle between tradition and maternity, ethical humanity and mindless profit, caving to social pressure, and following your heart. It’s about being a fish out of water and figuring out how to make a home for yourself when your whole life has been turned upside down and you have to start over.
Margaret Hale is thrust into that narrative of rebirth at the start of the story when she had to move from her beloved rural Hesltone to the industrial town of Milton. We discover that Mr. Thornton had to live that out as a child when he was forced to leave school to provide for his mother and sister. They both go through it once last time when Margaret becomes an heiress and Mr. Thornton once again loses everything when he refuses to speculate. North & South is as much a classic Victorian social novel as it is a deeply personal story about how to keep moving forward when life is unpredictable, a narrative I desperately needed when I moved away from home in my early twenties.
The Unbearable Whiteness of Graduate School
I first came to this story in graduate school. I was beginning my second year and I writing my Master’s thesis on Mary Wollstonecraft, her life, philosophy, and novels. The first year had been a struggle. I was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico surrounded by a vibrant Hispanic, Latinx, Indigenous, & Mestizaje community. There, I fell in love with Jane Austen and decided to get my doctorate in 18th-century British literature. I wanted to understand how western Enlightenment ideologies shaped us today, for better or worse, regardless of our cultural orientations and background. If we understand the historicity of our beliefs on sexuality, gender, race, and class, we can recognize them for the constructs they are and so dismantle systemic oppression.
Yeah, I was one of those naive hopeful young women want to change the world through stories.
In some ways I still am. In others…well, let’s just say graduate school was a shock to the system. I moved to Seattle, WA where I studied at the University of Washington. It was there I had to confront a horrible reality: reading Jane Austen surrounded by fellow people of color was not the same as reading a white author in a white city surrounded by people who were uncomfortable with my presence. I was regularly stopped on the street there and asked what I was. And I knew what they were asking.
In a deeply segregated pseudo-progressive city, people were trying to categorize me. When I lived there, if you wanted to see black people, you went to the Central District. Asians? The International District. Indigenous peoples? Check out the homeless population in Pioneer Square. Hispanic and Latinx? Well, you had to go to eastern Washington for that. If you were a person of color outside those carefully constructed boundaries, you stood out. Now I’m a mestiza with mixed heritage, light skin, and a white last name. I grew up having my cultural backgrounds challenged because I didn’t perform my culture in the way people wanted me to (I have a complicated relationship to my heritage but that’s a story for another time). In Seattle? I stood out because people knew I wasn’t white…they just couldn’t figure out what I was. They wanted a neat tidy box and mixed-heritage people challenged their fragile social hierarchy. This was a city that was deeply uncomfortable with ambiguity and I had to learn quickly to adapt to those circumstances.
So…why am I talking about this in an essay that’s supposed to be about North & South? Simple. This story, the series and the novel, helped me navigate that strange world. It was hard not to over-identify with Margaret Hale who is ripped from her beloved South (New Mexico in my case) and forced to go North (okay, I wasn’t forced, but graduate school was not the scholarly utopia I thought it would be). I also realized that reading courtship novels surrounded primarily white academics was a very different reading experience from enjoying these stories surrounded by brown people in New Mexico. I was reading these stories as a cultural outsider in a city that didn’t want to acknowledge racial differences while strictly enforcing racial hierarchies.
Much like Margaret Hale trying to figure out the new social hierarchy in Milton based on earned economic advantages, I was having to adapt to the unspoken social hierarchies of academia—teaching level, grad student level, whiteness, masculinity, the unspoken social cache of liking this or that—not to mention a city built on performative liberalism and the celebration of The Well-Meaning White Person. I spent my days trying to figure it all out and my nights devouring stories that took me far far away from the stress of my academic life. I learned how to parcel subtext and understand the deadly nature of silence or a passive-aggressive faux-compliment from Jane Austen novels. I got a thicker skin reading urban fantasy books featuring leather-clad monster-hunting heroines and, to this day, I don’t know where I would have been without these stories.
But North & South was the story that finally got me to admit that I was unhappy in graduate school.
I remember the first time I watched this series so clearly. I had just received feedback on a draft of my Master’s thesis from an advisor who took vicious glee in marking up each and every tiny typo and misplaced comma, going so far as to say that I needed grammar and writing lessons, despite the fact that I was given a full scholarship in part, on the strength of my writing. (BIPOC academics will know this gaslighting technique well: we are not white so we must have bad grammar. While that led to an enduring fear of typos, I can now look back from the comfort of ten years and a strong publication record and see that what he was correcting were the things any writer reads past when they’ve been staring at the same manuscript for too long.). So I did what any self-respecting graduate student would: I drowned my sorrows in good food, wine, and Austen adaptations.
There I was, watching the first episode of North & South from my old dell laptop, curled on my too-small sofa, and devouring this story about reinventing and rediscovering yourself when you’re in the midst of a city so different from what you grew up with the very customs and social hierarchies seem foreign to you. I will never forget the last line of that first episode. Margaret is writing to Edith about the stifling life in Milton. She says, “I believe I have seen hell... and it's white. It's snow-white.”
I burst into tears.
Okay, so I’d had a lot of wine. Don’t judge me! And, yes, I knew Margaret was talking about the cotton floating around the factories, not the struggles of a young woman of color in a white city, but those words and that story helped me to get real about what I was going through and that, by being open and honest with myself about my struggles (it would take another year to work up the courage to confide in any advisors), I could find a way forward. And, yes, I also realize the irony of finding comfort in a white narrative, but by the end of the fourth episode, I felt soothed, reborn, and ready to find my way through this difficult time.
We Can’t Go Back
Still, A corner had been turned after I’d consumed that story. I knew I couldn't go back to the idealized version of graduate school I’d had in my head, or retreat into the comfort of my undergrad years at The University of New Mexico—a space, I now realize years later, is more fraught than I remembered now that I’m teaching there. Just as Margaret realizes her beloved Helstone wasn’t the idyll she remembered, I had to come to terms with the fact that my undergrad life wasn’t the pure space I imagined it to be (although my hometown was and always will be the place where my heart is happiest). As Margaret says near the end of the series about her beloved Helstone, "Try as we might, happy as we were, we can't go back."
It was time to move on with things, older, perhaps wiser, but no less melodramatic a twenty-something for over-identifying with the novel heroines I studied.
So instead of constantly trying to reclaim my early exuberance for scholarly work or recreate the warm playful learning dynamics in graduate school that I was used to in undergrad, I chose to move on and figure out a new way of doing things. I started by devouring Gaskell’s book and then went on to write a whole dissertation chapter on it, using it as a time to really unpack what it meant to be a woman writer, a female intellectual, and how courtship novels, which center the domestic and internal lives of their characters, help us find our way through our own struggles in a world that isn’t designed for our success—and when we aren’t rich heiress who can throw caution to the wind, hex our salty advisors, and joyfully leave the torture of the ivory tower behind.
Studies in Social Justice
Of course, I left out the intersectional lens in my initial reading—how those things are complicated when you’re a woman of color—because I didn’t yet have the emotional distance or vocabulary for expressing it, nor the inclusive community in which I felt that I could safely unpack those issues while still fangirling over Gaskell’s story in equal measure. In many ways, I’m still unpacking my relationship to these stories and how they shape me as a woman of color—and, in turn, how my reading of them is different as a non-white woman. And let’s not forget that this story GOTZ PROBLEMS, like Gaskell’s overly-sentimental depiction of poor people whose poverty makes them “closer to God.” Hard nope in my book. And others feel conflicted about liking Mr. Thornton (if they do), given his complicity in an economic system designed to reinforce class hierarchies, even though, at the time Gaskell was writing, Capitalism was more of an equalizing force that broke down the economic barriers set up by Feudalism. Plus he runs a cotton mill and cotton was a product of enslaved labor. And we also now know that Industrialization, while revolutionary at the time, is also wreaking havoc on our environment today. But unpacking those issues is part of the joy of the story for me.
Still, Gaskell remains one of the few authors who thoughtfully unpacks and explores complex social and political issues. The fact that she shows the humanity—and the tyranny—of various fighting factions is an important reminder that living ethically and equitably isn’t as clear-cut as many would like it to be. The union leader Mr. Higgins, although his values are in the right place, literally becomes like the very thing he is fighting against, when, he bullies a desperate man into suicide. Mr. Thornton, as the rich factory owner, isn’t without his own class struggle, as a man who literally raised his family from poverty into prosperity, one of the many possibilities capitalism opened up for the working class. And yes, capitalism is a dirty word now. But in Gaskell’s time, it was also a system, however flawed, that helped break the feudalist structure that kept class mobility minimal.
I often return to her studies after a hard week in academia, or, frankly, Twitter, when the conversations seem to be angry, polarizing, and fueled by a self-righteous need to be right, rather than a genuine desire to foster more humane, inclusive spaces or generate tangible positive change. Gaskell offers me a new way forward, asking me to explore all sides of an issue, think through each layer, and look for the most humane and ethical solution. She also often cautions me not to become, like Higgins, the very thing I’m trying to work against. It is no small thing to fight for equity without hardening your heart or losing your own fundamental sense of humanity in a system that increasingly makes you feel as if you are a cog in a wheel and not a living, breathing being.
Her solution, it so often seems to me, is not to fix all the world’s injustices, a truly Sisyphean task, but to live well (humanely, responsibly, lovingly) and make our proverbial corner of the world a better place.
HEAs are Possible
North & South is still a book I go back to a few times a year when I need the solid comfort of a familiar story and a guaranteed HEA, a HEA, moreover, that doesn’t shy away from the very real social and economic issues that we’re still grappling with today. If I’m getting witchy about it (I am the Bruja Professor, after all), this story helped me conjure a way forward at a time when I could only see heartache and roadblocks. I couldn't go back, I didn’t like where I was at the moment, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t manifest a better future for myself. And I know I’m not the only fan who over-identified with Margaret Hale (what’s the fun of stories if you can’t put yourself in a character’s shoes?), nor the only one who used her journey as a template for their own. That’s the magic of a good story: we find hope, healing, and a profound sense of being seen, even if those stories are about people that don’t look like us.
So did I find my Mr. Thornton there, teach him how to be a more ethical human, let him watch me suggestively adjust my bracelet, and live happily ever after as a sudden heiress in my proverbial Milton?
No. Seattle wasn’t for me.
I moved back to New Mexico just as soon as I could and established my teaching and writing career there. Hey, sometimes it takes getting to know yourself a little bit better before you’re ready for a romantic HEA. Or maybe I just needed to be in a city that’s more inclusive. It’s probably a little bit of both.
Regardless, this was a book that told me HEAs are possible, even in a messy, complicated world.
Taking Responsibility for Your Life
I’m now returning to this story in the middle of the pandemic and all I can think about is the ending of both the book and the series when Margaret becomes an heiress. In the book, she increasingly shows her autonomy, especially once she becomes an heiress, by advocating for her bother, rejecting the quiet hurtfulness and banality of polite society learning her financial responsibilities, and, later, in being alone in a room with Mr. Thornton to discuss finances and, yes, love.
The TV series perfectly captures this sense of agency and empowerment when the now-rich Margaret tells her cousin and aunt, “I am of age, and I am of means…it is time for me to take responsibility for my life…I would like to make my own decisions for my day-to-day life…I would like to keep to my room if I wish. I would like not to go to the Piper’s if I wish. and I don’t. I can’t stand them. I don’t like London society.”
She says this, of course, after surviving terrible trials, including being uprooted from her home, suffering the loss of loved ones, and many other experiences. So when she voices this, it is not as a petulant child, but as a fully autonomous woman who knows her own mind and knows, likewise, that it is useless to cater to social convention.
This has become something of a personal goal of mine, especially these past few years when the pandemic has eroded my desire to be seen as accommodating or nice and, in fact, has made me realize how often I’m asked to sit with discomfort (overwork, emotional labor, extroversion) so that others don’t have to be accountable or share in the labor or because it is so much easier to just maintain the status quo. Now, however, I think I would like to be more of a Margaret Hale, a woman of age and means, taking responsibility for my life, and making my own decisions about what will make me happiest (which, like Margaret, doesn’t include not liking much in terms of society, ha).
She then ends that speech with those important lines about her beloved Helstone: “I learned something when I went back to Helston expecting it to be the paradise I knew as a child. Try as we might, happy as we were, we can’t go back.”
I reflect on this line again as I look back to pre-pandemic life when negotiating the third year of the pandemic and those lines have a whole new meaning to me when I feel pangs of nostalgia for the way things were. The wisdom in those words, however, are still the same as 15 years ago when I first heard them: We can’t reclaim or go back to the ways things were. The only solution is to move forward into the life we want to live.
In any case, Gaskell’s story stayed with me and I’m only just now rediscovering how it has shaped me as a woman, as a writer, and as a romantic. As for what it taught me about romance…well, that’s a topic for another post. What I will say for now, though, is that North & South taught me about the importance of “delicious silence.” If you know, you know, wink wink.
What do you love most about this story?
