Mary Barton

Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton provides an in-depth look at the class structure of Victorian England. Gaskell underscores the large gap between the rich and the poor and the fact that there was...

In Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Mary Barton, we essentially find determinism operating as a secularized notion of the Calvinist concept of predestination. Destiny for Gaskell, however, is not divinely...

In chapters 10–12 of Elizabeth's Gaskell's Mary Barton, Mary's beloved Jem has been arrested for murder, and Mary must find a way to prove to his innocence. Let's look at some of the themes that we...

In her essay “Rethinking the Reality Effect,” Elaine Auyoung discusses cognitive processes that shape how readers of realist fiction make sense of the written word to create a fictional world based...