By the time North and South was published serially in 1854, many Victorian conduct manuals had been written, printed, and read, contributing to the social construction of the ideal woman. While the authors of conduct literature delineated the relationships of women to children, marriage, and death, female authors like Elizabeth Gaskell responded to cultural views of gender and emotional expression in complex ways. Considering in particular Gaskell’s treatment of Mrs Boucher and Mrs Hale, women who unleash their grief without restraint, this essay will explore nineteenth-century cultural and gendered understandings of ‘giving way’ to emotion. In this essay, I argue that Margaret’s struggle between emotional restraint and openness reflects Gaskell’s own grappling with the legitimacy of female emotional expression, as evidenced by the author’s personal letters and diary entries. Margaret recognises the validity of Mrs Boucher and Mrs Hale’s emotionality in response to gendered and non-gendered experiences; she eventually finds relief in expressing her own grief, signalling Gaskell’s protest against an order that suppresses women’s emotions.
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