VERBALIZATION OF SOCIAL CONTRASTS IN THE NOVEL “NORTH AND SOUTH” BY ELIZABETH GASKELL

Abstract

The article presents a linguostylistic analysis of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel «North and South» in the context of the social contrasts of the Victorian era. The study's theoretical basis is the concepts of L. Bulahovsky, O. Selivanova, T. Yeshchenko, and I. Kochan regarding the nature of individual style and the methodology for analyzing a literary text. The paper outlines that language in a literary text performs an aesthetic and a sociolinguistic function, reflecting society's class, cultural, and ideological divisions. Based on the novel «North and South», it is traced how lexical, syntactic and intonational means serve as markers of the characters’ social affiliation: southern heroes (Margaret Hale, her family) are characterized by intellectualized, morally colored vocabulary, complex syntactic structures and reflexive intonation; instead, the northern characters (Thornton, workers) use business, economic, dialect vocabulary, fragmentary remarks and emotional exclamations. The article identifies the role of metaphor, color symbolism, and genre-intonation changes in forming spatial and social contrasts. It is revealed that Elizabeth Gaskell uses language as a means of social analysis, where each linguistic register serves as a marker of class, professional, and moral identity. Special attention is paid to the combination of the poetic style of the South with the realistic, dynamic language of the North, which symbolizes the gradual overcoming of class boundaries and the achievement of social harmony. Significantly, the language system of the novel is a holistic model of Victorian society, in which the artistic word combines aesthetic, sociological, and ideological functions, and linguostylistic analysis makes it possible to identify the deep mechanisms of interaction of language, culture, and society in literary discourse.