Stories of Industrial Pain as Told by the Factory “Hand”: Gaskell’s Bessy Higgins as the Critic of the Factory System

Pain generally lacks a voice, but “when it at last finds a voice, it begins to tell a story” (Elaine Scarry 3). In Victorian literature, bodies in pain tell the harrowing tale of how they contracted the illnesses from which they suffer, and more importantly, they expose the ills of society that cause and aggravate the pain of suffering individuals. From the long roll-call of the ailing bodies in Victorian literature, this paper focuses on that of Bessy Higgins in Elizabeth Gaskell`s North and South. As Gaskell has Bessy represent, contextualize, track down the pathogenesis of the disease that pains her body as well as that of other factory workers, her understanding of the fundamental problems that debilitate the factory“hands” and her views on how the sick societal body of Britain`s industrial towns should be nursed back to health are exposed. Bessy`s stories of pain undercut the validity of Victorian medical theories―which tended to perceive “emotional fluctuation and excess” experienced by women as the causes of their maladies (Vrettos 27)―by revealing the industrial rather than personal factors that push her body into its debilitated state. By examining these stories in depth, this paper aims to demonstrate that Victorian “sick-spaces” were not only places wherein gendered power struggles and social corrections occurred, but also spaces that forced one to examine the socio-economic instability of the worker`s lives under the exploitative factory system and to find solutions to reduce the industrial pain that permeates the bodies of the “hands.”