Graziano, Anne. “The Death of the Working-Class
Hero in Mary Barton and Alton Locke,” JNT: Journal of Narrative
Theory Vol. 29, No. 2 (Spring 1999): 135-57.
Graziano discusses the status and especially the death of John Barton and
Alton Locke in the novels of Gaskell and Kingsley. On the one hand,
it may appear that the authors’ aversion to extreme working class radicalism
have led them to kill off their heroes out of sympathy to higher class loyalties.
However, Graziano argues that a close examination of the structure of the
novels reveals a more complicated reason for the demise of Barton and Locke
than the authors’ political conservatism. “. . . it is not a turn
away from a positive representational status so much as a development
of early implications and contradictions that accounts for the heroes’ ‘fall’”
(136-7). The heroes’ failure and deaths “are enacted through
the constraining opportunities and conventions of the genre. And thus
the politics of the moment cannot adequately explain why Gaskell and Kingsley
begin with potentially viable heroes and end with corpses” (151).
Alton Locke
;
Gaskell (Mary Barton)
;
Characterization in Novels
;
Social and Political Views
.
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