North and South

Every time I'm in Williamsport, some combination of my mother, Ilana and Stearns are in the basement watching North and South, the BBC adaptation of the Elizabeth Gaskell novel. I tried to get into it on several occasions, but always gave up before I got 10 minutes in.

A couple of weeks ago, though, Hopkins invited Stearns and I over to watch North and South. And I watched it. And it was wonderful--a combination of a novel of manners and a treatise on economic life. It reminded me oh so much of Tocqueville--Margaret Hale, an Anglican vicar's daughter, moves to an industrial town and meets John Thornton, who runs a mill in the town. Margaret Hale is the aristocratic age bumping into John Thornton's democratic age: she doesn't know how to behave at all at first. She offends the people of the town with her charity, which appears to them to be condescending. At first, she idealistically opposes the people who run the mills, taking the side of the working masses. Interestingly, it is the industrialization itself that makes the masses peers (of a sort) with the mill owners.

The film isn't a critique of industrialization, however: it is pretty fair and balanced, I would say. The ending simultaneously affirms industrialization and recognizes its problems. Just like Tocqueville and democracy.


(picture)