Christianity and Class in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton

Building on Karl Marx's theories of alienation and on modern theories of tragedy, this article argues that in Mary Barton Elizabeth Gaskell creates a new kind of tragedy based on unprecedented social and political circumstances. In creating a protagonist whose consciousness emerges as inseparable from his material circumstances, Gaskell shifts ideas about both the human and novelistic subject and, consequently, about the nature of both heroism and tragedy. Gaskell weaves together radical politics, Christianity, and human tragedy in order to portray the political and economic inequities that legalize and institutionalize human suffering, and the moral impoverishment of a system that deforms and destroys.