الفهرس 
Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and SouthOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
This research aims at studying facial features in four novels, namely Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854), George Eliote’s Adam Bede (1859), David Herbret Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925).
The task of this thesis is not merely a discussion of the treatment of the numerous descriptions of characters’ facial features within these works. The dissertation also attempts to examine how the implied author dealt with facial descriptions – whether he or she presented them as transparent and ‘readable’, or treated facial descriptions as ‘opaque’, that is, not revealing anything about the character beneath the visual surface, or ignored this question altogether. As will be illustrated, the representation of characters’ looks not only reflects the implied norms of the respective work (and thus the implied author’s), but also makes it possible to draw conclusions about the implied author’s (and even the epoch’s) general approach to the world. This is the reflection this thesis is based on.
Whereas in English literature until the 18th century, authors tended to focus on the action of the story and more or less ignored the visualising of the fictitious world, the attempts
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to visualise the intradiegetic ‘reality’ of novels have clearly and strongly increased since the 18th century, leading to a climax of ‘visualised’ intradiegetic realities in 19th-century realism. Descriptions of characters’ countenances became prominent among other (generally) detailed descriptions – of, for example, landscapes, weather, houses, rooms, clothes.
The transparent messages that were conveyed by the characters’ facial features were, for example, the social class they belonged to, the milieu they grew up in, or outer influential circumstances that changed them inwardly and therefore left traces on their features as well.
Thus, it is this research’s task to analyse the treatment of facial features preceding the fragmented postmodernist era by taking a closer look at representative works of two strikingly different literary periods, namely 19PthP century realism and early 20PthP century modernism. The novels’ treatment of the facial descriptions will reflect this, namely that it is possible to illustrate the norms and worldviews underlying the respective novels (and thus, the literary epoch it belongs to) metonymically by the presentation of facial traits in the work.
In the case of realist writers, as they mostly relied on the assumption that a face is indeed a ‘mirror’ of one’s soul, the suggestion that they generally had a positive, optimistic view of
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the world as a transparent and accessible one seems plausible and will be questioned and illustrated in the first part of this thesis.
The various reasons for the optimistic conviction of authors like Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope or charles Dickens will be included, as well. What may have had a strong influence on at least some of these authors is the famous treatise about facial descriptions by Johann Caspar Lavater published in 1775. He wrote his treatise centuries after Aristotle’s theories, the idea of facial features as unambiguous outer signs of inner traits is likewise inherent in his work. The Aristotlian analogy between animals and human beings is given up, but the strong belief in transparency is still the basis of his observations.
An investigation of the four novels to show the development from high realism through a more skeptical realism and a moderate modernism to a radical variation of the latter, will be analysed by taking a precise look at how the information on characters’ facial features is dealt with within the respective work, and how much facial information is included. The intention is to take these instances of facial descriptions as a metonymy meant to show the general worldview underlying the respective novels. Thereby, an attempt will be made to paint a miniature overview of literary
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history from Gaskell’s uncritical praising of the epoch’s epistemological basis to the radical refusal of all these norms and values in Woolf’s work. Moreover, the researcher will also investigate the different aspects of realism and early modernism as reflected in the narrative technique and subject matter.
The research falls into an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion.
UChapter OneU: Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South
North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell’s industrial novel about a family from the south of England that moves into a factory town in the north, where they are faced with difficult circumstances, was written in the 1850s, in the heyday of realism. A study of facial descriptions and their significance through the themes and techniques will be analysed. The researcher will try to show that Gaskell’s industrial novel, more than any of the other novels cited, affirms a belief in a world that is more transparent and unambiguous, that is accessible to everyone.
This can be examined or proved through a profound study of the narrative technique and characterization so as to show that the all-knowing narrator and the intradigetic characters are trustworthy readers of other countenances capable of deducing, for example, information about (other)
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characters’ hereditary background, about the outer circumstances they had to endure, about their social origin, and about their morality, from their countenances. Almost all pieces of information about characters’ personality and inner traits ‘visible’ on their surfaces are confirmed by the way characters develop and behave. This suggests that Gaskell wanted to create a fictitious world which is ultimately clearly and truthfully ‘readable’.
UChapter TwoU: George Eliote’s Adam Bede
What makes Adam Bede (1859) a relevant and interesting work for this research is the fact that the author, George Eliot, was very much interested in facial features. Again, Adam Bede is equally an important realist work as Gaskell’s novel since was published in the same decade, and thus in the heyday of English realism. Although it reflects many Victorian norms, yet as will be seen during the analysis of the descriptions of facial features in the novel, unlike North and South, Adam Bede can be seen as a kind of ”modernized realism