Elizabeth Gaskell and Simplicity

Many of Gaskell's most appealing characters are marked by simplicity. Embracing a simplicity of character and appearance, they embody its associated qualities of honesty, authenticity, purity, and transparency. This chapter first outlines the significance of the aesthetic of simplicity to Victorian Britain's self-fashioning as a Protestant nation and how its conceptual associations were grounded in Protestant theological assertions of unmediated access to the divine. Knowledge of this heritage is vital for understanding how Gaskell's novels establish a thorough understanding of simplicity's more complex mechanisms. Through analysis of Mary Barton (1848), North and South (1854– 5), Ruth (1853), and Wives and Daughters (1864–6), I demonstrate Gaskell's multifaceted exploration of simplicity in its potential for undermining class discrimination through its cross-class invocation of honesty and authenticity, its association with the naturalist's attentiveness and caring responsiveness, and her aligning of simplicity with authenticity and impulse over rationalism and legalism that enables a defence of passion. Also key to Gaskell's depiction of simplicity is a recognition of its limitations and complexity, seen primarily in the ways simplicity's status as a style makes it open to manipulation.