EcoGothic and Dis-eased Spaces in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton Oscar Williams College

Lucy Sheehan rightly asserts that Mary Barton is one of a set of mid-century Victorian novels which “document the social problems arising from industrialization, urbanization, and extreme destitution” (35). She also notes Elizabeth Gaskell’s strategic deployment of Gothic imagery, largely enacted by the novel’s characters who see “ghosts, witches or demons where the reader knows there are none” and “experience fractured states of perception that the reader ascribes to opium, illness hunger or fear” (38). Sheehan contends that the “fundamental instability of industrial England is reflected in the narration’s tenuous distinction between the real and the fantastic” (35). In contrast, David Ellison argues that the Gothic tropes only serve as a displacement of, rather than engagement with, working-class politics because they represent a departure from the realist mode which he deems necessary to ensure the specificity and validity of social criticism so characteristic of Condition-of-England novels (490). However, I argue here that in limiting her Gothic imagery to the urban space, which exists in stark contrast to the idealized, pastoral landscape of the countryside, Gaskell imbricates the fantastic with ecocriticism to convey the...