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Mary Barton

This study will analyze Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Mary Barton as a portrait of English society during the Industrial Revolution. The study will focus on the significance of the author's descriptions of the social classes, focusing on the members of the working classáand their relationship with their employers, the changes which Mary and John Barton undergo as a result of their socioeconomic struggle, and the author's apparent suggested solutions to the injustices of her day, which will be shown to be woefully inadequate and idealistic.

The heart of the book is the choice the protagonist, Mary Barton, must make between a rich man and a working class man. Of course, that message immediately introduces the restrictions under which women lived in the early Victorian 1840s in Manchester, England, where the story takes place. Rather than having the career and professional choices open to her which are open to the men of her time and place, Mary takes for granted that the choice she is left with is between two men. The book, therefore, is socially conscious but not as gender-conscious as our own era. The focus, in any case, is as current today as it was then--the socioeconomic injustices of a system marked by great and growing disparity between the few rich and the many poor and working.

While the novel certainly provides a detailed portrait of the struggles, the suffering and the hope of the working class in Gaskell's world, her novel is relevant and moving today because it is not a study of merely the people of a particular place and

time, but is a universal story of the suffering of good, hard-working people at the hands of a greedy few.

Gaskell leaves no secret about which side of the class struggle she is on. She gives anger and passion to the working people as they fight not only against their oppressors but merely to survive. As John, the protagonist's bitter and deteriorating father says, referring to those with the...

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Mary Barton. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 13:28, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1707552.html