ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Gaskell describes an imminent confrontation between workers and bourgeois factory owners in Apocalyptic terms - only to deconstruct the clear lines of good and evil that most Apocalyptic commentators were projecting onto battles between labor and management. In order to understand Gaskells use of Apocalyptic discourse in context, it is necessary to examine more closely its use by her middle-class contemporaries within the Anglican church and other orthodox Protestant churches. She uses Apocalyptic allegory as what Bakhtin might call a mediating discourse through which class inequities and gender inequities can simultaneously be addressed. In North and South, she suggests that the different forms of oppression experienced by middle-class women and the working class are also religious problems. She does frame the novel’s climactic clash between labor and management in Apocalyptic terms, but only to deconstruct the clear lines of good and evil that Apocalyptic writers were projecting onto labor disputes.
