Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Elizabeth Gaskell would not be the first writer called to mind by Victorian scholars if asked to recommend reading on the topic of nature.Gaskell's status is most often defined by her examination of nineteenth century urban industrialism.Her fictions highlight her facility with character rather than depictions of landscapes.George Eliot or Thomas Hardy would be much more commonly cited.Surprisingly, Gaskell's fiction, and most especially her 1855 novel North and South and her 1864 novella Cousin Phillis record particular and consequential natural soundscapes.They have consequence because they are deliberately invested with therapeutic properties.Gaskell finds in natural sound the potential for physical and mental healing.In the earlier novel, the natural soundscapes of Helstone prefigure Margaret Hale's forced relocation and subsequent erasure from the landscape, leading to her depression.The same soundscapes then open up the opportunity for psychic renewal.In the later novella, the natural soundscape of Hope Farm is a therapeutic environment under threat of destruction from fossil fuel infrastructures.In both the novel and novella Gaskell is determined to illuminate the positive benefits to health, especially to psychic health, that the sounds of nature offer to the attentive listener.Gaskell's intervention into considerations of auditory power are important.By connecting natural sound with health and advocating for its role as a therapeutic, Gaskell makes a very early intervention in a debate that continues into the twenty-first century.That is, she proposes then examines the role that nature can play in human flourishing, or, put simply, whether being immersed in the natural world makes us feel better.There are further repercussions emerging from Gaskell's experimenting with this idea.Her work also promotes responses to natural spaces that might be considered protoenvironmentalist in character.Although written before the emergence of environmentalism as that would be understood in the twenty-first century, Gaskell's fictions reveal a nascent concern with the protection and preservation of the natural environment; a concern tied explicitly to the unique sonorous environments found only in nature.Gaskell was not alone in finding health-giving properties in natural soundscapes.The naturalist Philip Gosse, best known as the writer of popular natural histories, also saw the sounds of nature as positive for both physical and mental health in his naturalist writing of the 1850s and 1860s, most especially in A Naturalist's Rambles on the Devonshire Coast (1853) and The Romance of Natural History (1863).Similarly, Charles Kingsley's varied writings across the same period, indeed through to the end of the 1860s, also intimated the distinct benefits to health and happiness that came from natural sound as part of a broader engagement with the natural world.This is expressed most clearly in his lecture "Great Cities and Their Influence for Good and Evil" (1857) and even more energetically in "The Air Mothers" (1870).Although not the subject of this article, Kingsley's novel The Water-Babies, published in 1863, also reckons with the contrasting health benefits of urban and rural environments.Both Gosse and Kingsley provide important contexts for Gaskell's engagement with natural soundscapes; illuminating the diverse arenas where natural sound became a subject of interest through the middle of the nineteenth century.
DOI: 10.12929/jls.17.2.05
Author: Martin Willis
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4411029273