Re: [xmca] Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot

[Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com>]

Wikipedia continues to amaze me.  Now one doesn't "Google it" -- now we look
in Wikipedia.  Thanks for all that information--it makes sense now.
Carol

On 26 November 2010 16:07, smago <smago@uga.edu> wrote:

> According to the Wikipedia entry at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mitchell:
> Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia, to Eugene Mitchell, a
> lawyer, and Mary Isabelle, much referred to as Maybell, a suffragist of
> Irish Catholic origin. Mitchell's brother, Stephens, was four years her
> senior. Her childhood was spent in the laps of Civil War veterans and of her
> maternal relatives, who had lived through the Civil War.
>
> She was born in Georgia in 1900, 35 years following the end of the Civil
> War, and so I'm sure was exposed to accents little different from those of
> slaves, given that living conditions for southern blacks still left them in
> segregated communities that no doubt preserved speech genres and social
> languages.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
> Behalf Of Carol Macdonald
> Sent: Friday, November 26, 2010 8:56 AM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot
>
> Because I am confined to bed, I have plenty of time to read, and have found
> that Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind, first read when I was 13)can do
> slave English so well that I often have to read a sentence twice to get the
> meaning. Where would she have got that talent?  She surely had no living
> exemplars?
> Carol
>
> On 26 November 2010 05:37, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > Perhaps it is not so amazing that Gaskell understands the pretenses of
> > genteel poverty. She had four daughters, and a husband who was a
> Unitarian
> > minister and not particularly good at making money. So it was her
> practice
> > to buy cloth at an expensive store, have it professionally cut, and then
> > teach her daughters to sew their own "store-bought" clothes.
> >
> > But the really amazing thing is how she writes, from the inside, about
> > real, working class poverty, hunger, starvation, disease, death...and
> > violent revenge. In 1847 Gaskell lost her only son to typhoid fever while
> on
> > holiday in Wales. Her husband advised her to take up novel-writing as a
> > distraction.
> >
> > He probably regretted it. The novel she wrote, "Mary Barton", was so
> > clearly sympathetic to Chartism and even communism that her husband's
> > parishioners burned it publically and her best friends wrote withering
> > reviews (Marx and Engels, on the other hand, said we learn more about the
> > condition of the working class from her than from any number of works of
> > political economy).
> >
> > Sure enough although there are many, many deaths, mostly of working class
> > children. But there is only one portrayal of a middle class character who
> > has lost a son: a cruel, tight-fished mill owner called Mr. Carson. And
> it's
> > John Barton, the heroine's father, who is the murderer on a mission from
> an
> > illegal trade union, in revenge for the son's strike-breaking
> > activities. John Barton is, as Gaskell said, "the character with whom all
> my
> > sympathies went"; Gaskell originally wanted to call the novel "John
> Barton"
> > and was persuaded not to by the publisher.
> >
> > Raymond Williams remarks on this miracle of empathy:
> >
> > "It is significant that the creator of John Barton, 'The person with whom
> > all our sympathies went', drew back, under pressure from her publishers
> and
> > in her own understandable uncertainties, from full imaginative
> > identification with the act of conscious violence against an oppressor:
> the
> > explicit and untypical expression of the power of a new working class
> > organization. But that she can enter as far as she does into a world of
> > necessary class consciousness, while never losing touch with the
> individual
> > people who are forced by systematic exploitation to learn this new way of
> > thinking, is profoundly impressive and is a true mark of radical change.
> > (219) "
> >
> > Raymond Williams, The Country and The City
> >
> >
> > Now, of course, neither John Barton nor Elizabeth Gaskell can be said to
> > have "radically changed" the actual social conditions that "Mary Barton"
> > describes. But Gaskell really did change the novel forever: she was the
> > first person, LONG before Mark Twain, to do a systematic LINGUISTIC study
> of
> > working class dialects and to try to write in them. And she was also the
> > first to use the "conversations" of domestic fiction to write about
> > non-domestic issues, a technique she perfects in her revisitation of the
> > industrial themes, "North and South".
> >
> > Shortly before she died, she was accused of writing another book under
> the
> > pseudonym George Eliot. She a note to the real author joking that it was
> a
> > shame to leave so much brilliance uncredited and so much credit
> unclaimed,
> > so the next time the book was credited to her she would accept the credit
> > with pride
> >
> > Mysteriously, she signed the letter "Gilbert Eliot". I always assumed
> that
> > Gilbert was the mischievous twin brother of George, but now I think the
> > relationship was one of fairly direct paternity.
> >
> > David Kellogg
> > Seoul National University of Education
> >
> > --- On Thu, 11/25/10, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
> > Subject: [xmca] Reflexive, culturally mediated, sociality
> > To: "eXtended Mind, Culture,Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> > Date: Thursday, November 25, 2010, 8:32 AM
> >
> >
> > Some time back Larry and others were focused on primal sociality in
> highty
> > coordinated
> > interactions. Even longer ago, David Kel suggested that we read Elizabeth
> > Gaskell. Wow,
> > was he ever right! Amazing.
> >
> > I recently read a scene set about, say, 1840's rural England. Gaskell
> > depicts poor folks maintaining
> > a traditional, ostensibly prosperous, life world in the face of the
> coming
> > pressures of industrialization. In this scene,
> > a woman is having a party. As befits her situation, at the high point of
> > the
> > festivities she is
> > seated comfortably in a special spot of honor and attention, but in small
> > ways, the author
> > has told us about all the hard work she has done to make this
> > accomplishment
> > "pass" as
> > an expression of her genteel accomplishments in life. The author ends the
> > description of this
> > event by writing that the hostess "who now sat in state, pretending not
> to
> > know what cakes were
> > sent up, though she knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew that she
> > knew that we
> > knew, she had been busy all morning making tea-bread and sponge-cake."
> >
> > There, I think we have a beautiful description of culturally mediated,
> > reflexive, community and
> > the degree of intertwining that deep reflexivity seems to promote. The
> > Gaskell novels I have read
> > all excel at providing an almost micro-ethnographic sense of the richness
> > of
> > feeling/experience
> > within small, mostly face to face, English, communities.
> > And consistent with the picture that Larry is seeking to fill out.
> >
> > mike
> > __________________________________________
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