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'Death & Variations,' Gaskell's preferred title for North and South, hints at a worrying over the tension between uniformity and proliferation.1 If death puts a standardising stamp on every existence, it also assumes endlessly variable forms through human time and with each new life it arrests. Death provides a universal template while producing endless singularities, an impasse that distinguishes secular modernity's relation to the concept of finitude. My own death is unsubstitutably mine, we might say, since no other being has either the right or the existential office to perform my dying for me.2 As a novel about desperate demises, North and South appreciates that each individual death has an absolute singularity. The deaths of Bessie Higgins and John Boucher, to pick just two of the novel's multiple fatalities, take place within frames of subtly individualised portraiture even as they demand to be explained as consequences of modern economic practices, labour conditions and stymied political protest. They are not deaths in the abstract, as it were, but instances of death made stubbornly variable, transcending historical exemplarity. While this feature of North and South survives in Gaskell's plot, her wished-for title of course does not. Displaced by Dickens's memorable alternative, the phrase 'Death & Variations' might itself be regarded as retired or dead, a mere discarded item of Victorian literary history. But its compelling sense of both dying and deviating, ending and modifying, gives Gaskell's coinage an unexpected resonance with another form of modern imaginative culture: the literary adaptation.
Adaptation, that is to say, regularly embraces death and variations. Adapting past works of literature - such as North and South itself, which was serialised by BBC Television in 2004 - almost invariably brings into play tensions between sameness and differentiation, in the quest to preserve something old and instate a variant form. Adaptation serves ends that often encompass two conflicting processes: the reverential wish to breathe life into prior cultural objects, and the simultaneous (envious) desire to overcome or supplant a source text by rendering it in new terms, forms or media, which it had neither selected nor even perhaps foreseen as creative opportunities. While adaptations often continue to be judged on the grounds of fidelity to an original literary work, it is also as knowing...