Intermental thought and mutual focalization: narrative sympathy in North and South

The inability for characters to read other characters' minds accurately is a situation that the realist novel explores. Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South explores the instabilities created by this impossibility, and yet, through a combination of focalization and consciousness representation, attempts to overcome it. Techniques of fictional minds and focalization are crucial for understanding the ethical claims of the realist novel. Following Alan Palmer's recognition of 'the need for a rhetorical and ethical perspective on analyses of social minds' ('Social Minds in Fiction' 234), this article demonstrates that the Victorian understanding of sympathy is ultimately a desire for 'intermental' thought expressed through mutual focalization. KEYWORDS: intermental thought, focalization, ethics, consciousness representation, realism, social minds
A fierce debate took place within the nineteenth-century novel in particular on the nature of social minds. It had two sides. One was epistemological: To what extent is it possible [...]