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Abstract: For readers and scholars of the nineteenth-century alike, the marriage plot has often been read as a novelistic convention. However, I argue that beyond being a mere genre trope or staid ending, the marriage plot can be read as an important literary device that allows readers to connect emotionally to the love story. The affective attachment of readers to the marriage plot allows them to reshape their conceptions of self, desire, and community. In North and South, I read Elizabeth Gaskell's use of shifting point-of-view narration and the desiring gaze of characters as her primary techniques to achieve not only readerly attachment, but the novel's sexual realism as well. Through this, readers take part in the sexual and romantic experience of the love story of North and South, and are invited to take greater agency over their own sexual and romantic desires as well as to consider how their own decisions regarding marriage can impact the wider community.
After a particular heated scene in North and South, where middle-class Margaret Hale and working-class Bessy Higgins discuss the problems facing mill workers and potential solutions, Bessy reflects on her new friend privately, saying, 'Who'd ha' thought that face - as bright and strong as the angel I dream of - could have known the sorrow she speaks on? I wonder how she'll sin. All on us must sin'.1 This ominous phrase closes this chapter, leaving readers to ponder what sins and mistakes the stubborn, yet naive Southerner Margaret will make in the North. Although this line speaks more to Bessy's own religious fervour, this line encourages readers to ponder the manner of sin which might entrap our heroine, particularly considering the content of the next chapter wherein the next mention of Margaret is John Thornton's bitter disavowal of his sexual and romantic interest in Margaret when pressed by his mother: '"She would never have me", said he, with a short laugh' (NS, pp.142-43). Within this context, Margaret's potential for sin is unconsciously linked with Thornton's concealing his desire for her, and for the remainder of the novel, it tracks the problems that this unresolved sexual tension creates for the characters. This smouldering sexual tension, which resolves in a happy marriage at the end of...