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The Feminine World View Of Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
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The Feminine World View Of Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
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Xerox University Microfilms
300 North Zeeb Road
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106
74- 17,362
MANTOVANI, J u a n ita M arie, 1943-
THE FEMININE W O RLD VIEW OF ELIZABETH
CLEGHORN GASKELL.
U niversity o f Southern C a lifo rn ia , P h.D ., 1974
Language and L ite r a tu r e , general
University Microfilms, A X E R O X Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan
@ Copyright by
JUANITA MARIE MANTOVANI
197* *
THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED.
THE FEMININE WORLD VIEW OF
ELIZABETH CLEGHORN GASKELL
by
Juanita Marie Mantovani
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
June 1974
U N IV E R SIT Y O F S O U T H E R N C A L IFO R N IA
TH E GRADUATE SC H O O L
U N IV ERSITY PARK
LO S A N G ELE S. C A LIFO R N IA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, written by
,.J.uani^a..jyiar.ie..jM^tayani.............
under the direction of Aer... Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirements of
the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
Date\ysM-Ml.^.t lC L 7 . ^ . . .
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairman
This dis sertation is
dedicated
to my dear husband
by her
who best knows his value
i i
I
TABLE OF CONTENTS
page
INTRODUCTION ......................................... 1
Notes........................................... 8
CHAPTER ONE........................................... 10
Notes........................................... 77
CHAPTER T W O ......................................... 79
Notes . . . ‘..................................... 133
CHAPTER THREE......................................... 135
Notes........................................... 208
A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY.............................. 209
i i i
INTRODUCTION
An interesting outgrowth of recent social movements
for women's liberation is the increased attention being
paid by the academic world to literature by and about
women. One has only to contemplate the numbers of books
produced by the lady novelists of the last two centuries
to conclude that women have been more active and more suc
cessful in this area of literature than in any other. Many
female novelists have descended into deserved oblivion,
but others, like Elizabeth Gaskell, occupy a curiously
ambiguous position.
Though she was well known in her own day, her pres
ent following is much smaller but still enthusiastic, and
her literary reputation has undergone a selective but real
revival of late. While the Knutsford edition of her works,
with introductions by A. W. Ward,"*' and the World's Classics
2
edition edited by Clement Shorter have long been acces
sible to general readers, several new editions of individ
ual novels have recently appeared in paperback, including
3
the Norton edition of Mary Barton (1958), the Penguin
editions of Mary Barton (1970),^ North and South (1970),^
g
and Wives and Daughters (1969). Other titles, including
1
2
Cranford/ Mary Barton, North and South, Sylvia's Lovers,
Wives and Daughters, and The Life of Charlotte Bronte are
available in the Everyman's Library series (Dutton), and
the collected short stories have been republished by the
7
Books for Libraries Press (1971). All of these have ap
preciative introductions praising Mrs. Gaskell's skill as
a storyteller. Though biographical material was withheld
from the researchers of her day at her own request, at least
four studies have been done since Annette B. Hopkins' stan-
g
dard biography appeared in 1952, proving that interest in
9
her writing has not waned; these are by Miriam Alott, Mar
garet Ganz,^ Arthur Pollard,^ and Edgar Wright.^2
In his study, Professor Pollard summarizes both
positive and negative responses to Mrs. Gaskell's fiction
from 1865 to 1965 as "charming," "sensitive," "feminine,"
but also "narrow," "unsophisticated," and "simple"— and
while he agrees with H. P. Collins that "the mood of the
twentieth century is far from favourable to Elizabeth Gas-
kell" because she is "a victim of conventionality," he
upgrades his original assessment of her as merely another
"major minor novelist" to emphasize her real virtues of
"moral grasp, psychological understanding and mastery of
the feelings" (Pollard, p. 261).
Mrs. Gaskell would have been recognized as a woman
writer even if she had not discarded her pen name of Cotton
Mather Mills, Esq., fairly early in her writing career. A
born storyteller from all accounts, she disregarded the
notion that the gentler sex should remain silent in church
or in print, though this was not until she had reached the
age of thirty-eight, and after considerable persuasion
from her husband and friends. She began her literary
career tamely enough with the obligatory descriptive piece,
"Clopton House," and a couple of Sunday school tales, but
by the time of her death in 18 65, she had questioned
through her fiction most of the bases upon which the Vic
torian ideal of the good woman was founded. Her best work
is limited to a handful of titles: Mary Barton, Cranford,
North and South, Ruth, Cousin Phillis, Sylvia's Lovers,
Wives and Daughters, and The Life of Charlotte Bronte, but
she wrote much more besides; her short stories are col-
14
lected by J. A. V. Chappie and Arthur Pollard. In read
ing her biography, one is amazed that she had time to write
anything at all; a demanding schedule as the wife of a
Unitarian minister and a full home life undoubtedly account
for her failure to polish her talent or her novels as
finely as she might have done. For the most part, she
wrote hastily and without revision. She was exposed to
the horrors of Manchester urban blight as well as to the
flow of artistic and cultural thought in mid-Victorian
England. This, plus her girlhood experiences of country
life, should have qualified her to write about contemporary
political and economic problems (Mary Barton, North and
South, Ruth), or about the pastoral village existence that
was already fading in her lifetime (Cranford, Cousin
Phillis, Sylvia's Lovers, Wives and Daughters). Indeed,
she did write about all of these with some success.
Her forms were conventional— the travelogue, moral
fable, fairy tale, domestic tale and novel— as were her
moral messages: she preached brotherly love and a sort
of nonmaterialistic spirit of self-sacrifice as the keys
to happiness. Her working habits suggest a lack of concern
with the fine points of style, but her letters clearly in
dicate a continuing interest in the social problems of her
day. Her outlook was entirely her own, and through her
perceptively created characters she raises more questions
about human behavior than she answers.
The concern for a woman's place in society is found
in all of Mrs. Gaskell's novels, though the expressions of
that concern vary according to the different forms she
used. Central to nearly all of her stories is a dichotomy
that opposes the active world of business and politics
(masculine) to the passive world of social relationships
and family concerns (feminine). In each, a woman must
bridge the gap between the masculine and feminine worlds:
Margaret Hale does it in North and South by coming to her
lover's financial assistance, and Molly Gibson in Wives
and Daughters by studying and teaching herself to be in
terested in her lover's scientific work, to cite two
examples. Mrs. Gaskell's focus differs from that of a male
author chiefly because of her sex: she wrote from experi
ence when she wrote about women, and she wrote about women
almost exclusively. Hers is the feminine perspective of
an emotionally stable, socially successful and morally
sincere woman, and what she has to tell about are basically
what society calls feminine concerns: love and marriage,
domestic problems, and personal relationships, especially
in their emotional aspects.
How effectively she communicated these concerns is
another matter. Aina Rubenius has done a thorough study
of the social problems of Mrs. Gaskell's England as they
related to women, and has itemized those treated in the
Gaskell novels, but her central approach to the "woman
question" is in terms of the people Elizabeth Gaskell knew
15
or those who might have influenced her. While Mrs.
Rubenius explains how Mrs. Gaskell came to feel the way
she did about certain social issues, however, she does not
completely investigate the way Mrs. Gaskell used her fic
tional materials to make the "woman question" a genuine
experience for her readers. Though Elizabeth Gaskell's
presentation of the feminine consciousness is at times
naive, she does convey the social tensions experienced by
middle-class Victorian women.
Almost everyone who has written about Mrs. Gaskell
begins by expressing some dissatisfaction with the imper-
feet evaluations made by her critics. It is easy to become
impatient with articles and books that typically praise
Elizabeth Gaskell's "feminine" powers of observation and
her eye for detail, but condemn her inability to "think
hard enough" (Collins, p. 65), in essence, her failure to
be a Jane Austen or a George Eliot, the two great women
novelists to whom she is generally subordinated. To dwell
on what she is not obscures what Mrs. Gaskell is. More to
the point, however, is the fact that while almost every
critic sooner or later mentions Mrs. Gaskell's "feminine"
viewpoint or her "feminine" attitude as a writer, no one
is very clear as to the precise meaning of that adjective,
or about how a feminine writer differs from a feminist.
This dissertation attempts to clarify Mrs. Gaskell's
feminine world view by examining her fictional treatment
of women characters in the three central roles of daughter,
wife, and mother. Her heroines are developed through per
sonal relationships centering on the family and extending
outward to society. Beginning with a strong emphasis on
the role of daughter in early works like Mary Barton and
Cranford, and expanding to a treatment of motherhood in
Ruth, there is a psychological progression in the focus of
her fiction. North and South and Cousin Phillis examine
the heroine's tension in simultaneously filling the roles
of daughter and lover, and Sylvia's Lovers and Wives and
Daughters introduce the additional complexity of wifehood.
The roles are not easily separable, but Mrs. Gaskell de
velops a credible psychological as well as social portrait
of the feminine personality as it is affected by the var
ious relationships a woman is expected to fulfill.
Notes to the Introduction
^The Works of Mrs. Gaskell, 8 vols. (London: Smith,
Elder & Co., 1906) .
2
The Novels and Tales of Mrs. Gaskell, 11 vols.
(London: Oxford University Press, 1906-19).
3
New York. All subsequent citations are from this
edition.
4
Ed. Stephen Gill (Baltimore).
5
Ed. Dorothy Collin, Intro, by Martin Dodsworth
(Baltimore). All subsequent citations are from this edi
tion.
g
Ed. Frank Glover Smith, Intro, by Laurence Lerner
(Baltimore). All subsequent citations are from this edi
tion.
7
Cranford and Other Tales (1886); rpt. Freeport,
New York).
O
Elizabeth Gaskell: Her Life and Work (London:
John Lehman, 1952).
9
Elizabeth Gaskell (London: Longmans & Green Co.,
1960.
^^Elizabeth Gaskell: The Artist in Conflict (New
York: Twayne, 1969).
~^Mrs. Gaskell: Novelist and Biographer (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965).
12
Mrs. Gaskell: The Basis for Reassessment (London:
Oxford University Press, 1965).
i 3
H. P. Collins, "The Naked Sensibility: Elizabeth
Gaskell," Essays in Criticism, 3 (1953), 71.
9
14
The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell (Manchester: Manches
ter University Press, 1966).
15
"The Woman Question in Mrs. Gaskell's Life and
Works," Essays and Studies on English Language and Litera
ture, ed. S. B. Liljegren, Vol. V (Upsala: University of
Upsala, 1950).
CHAPTER ONE
The characterization of a woman writer1s viewpoint
as "feminine" is vague. It is one thing to say that she
writes about female characters, and another to call her
world view feminine. Yet, despite the imprecision of the
word, and the fact that it has been used to obscure as well
as to illuminate women's positions in the world of letters,
some ideas about femininity were commonly accepted in Vic
torian times and are today as well. Judith Barwick offers
~ \
a basic definition of the term in Psychology of Women; A
Study of Bio-Cultural Conflicts:
The feminine mind knows relatedness, has an intui
tive perception of feeling, has a tendency to unite
rather than separate. What is feminine? "Feminine"
is subjective, intuitive, passive, tender-minded,
sensitive, impressionistic, yielding, receptive, ^
empathetic, dependent, emotional, and conservative.
Simone de Beauvoir qualifies the notion of passivity in
women as a cultural rather than a biological phenomenon,
and the implication of this distinction is an important
one in relation to Mrs. Gaskell's novels, for it accounts
for much of what critics like Mr. Collins find wrong in
her writing. De Beauvoir remarks,
. . . the passivity that is the essential characteris
tic of the "feminine" woman is a trait that develops
in her from the earliest years. But it is wrong to
10
11
assert that a biological datum is concerned; it is in
fact a destiny imposed upon her by her teachers and
by society. . . . In woman . . . there is from the
beginning a conflict between her autonomous existence
and her objective self, her "being-the-other"; she is
taught that to please she must try to please, she
must make herself object; she should therefore re
nounce her autonomy. She is treated like a live doll
and is refused liberty.2
Feminine applies both to Elizabeth Gaskell's atti
tudes as a writer as they are revealed in the subject
matter she covered and especially in her approach to char
acterization in fiction. An analysis of her achievement
in the portrayal of women characters relies on the social
and literary conventions of her day which governed the
perception of women. The question to ask, then, is what
the nineteenth-century novel heroine was like. She was
undoubtedly based on the stereotyped image of women in
society, the good creatures of whom Mary Wollstonecraft
wrote in 1792,
Women commonly called Ladies, are not to be contra
dicted in company, are not allowed to exert any manual
strength; and from them the negative virtues are ex
pected, patience, docility, good-humor, and flexibil
ity; virtues incompatible with any vigorous exertion
of intellect.^
Most histories of popular Victorian fiction give
the same composite picture of the heroine in romantic
novels: she is well-bred, if not wellborn, gentle, retir-
4
ing, virtuous, and beautiful. Men admire her feminine
traits of passivity and domesticity. She exists to honor
her parents and spouse according to a social code that
12
emphasizes her secondary role in relation to men. This is
the sort of heroine, whose physical weakness and dependence
were the counterparts of intellectual inadequacy, of whom
Margaret Dalziel speaks in Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago:
. . . it was always taken for granted that women were
inferior to men in all really important mental and
moral qualities, and that parents had a right to the
absolute obedience of their unmarried daughters, if
not always of their sons. The heroine, therefore,
being both young and a woman, had two possible sets
of masters. Her primary obligation, established by
the law of God and of nature, and fundamental to the
social order, was submissiveness to authority. This
was her duty and her joy. (Dalziel, p. 87)
Closely linked with the concept of feminine passiv
ity in women is that of feminine emotionalism. The stereo
typed view of the Victorian heroine is one of a hyper
sensitive beauty who feels acutely and does nothing.
Another quality displayed by the true heroine is an
extreme sensibility. She is governed not by reason,
but by emotion. It was not at all necessary for her
to be clever, or well-educated, though there is less
overt hostility to the clever woman than one might
expect to find in fiction at this date. . . . No
woman could ever be as clever as a clever man. What
mattered was the feeling heart. . . . Young and
lovely, religious, submissive and dependent, confi
dent and sensitive and chaste, accepting without
question the destiny of marriage, the heroine emerges
from the pages of the popular novels and periodicals
as a well understood and consistent type. (Dalziel,
pp. 90, 97-98)
What was true of popular fiction was true of literary fic
tion as well. As Patricia Thompson says,
It would be possible without too much difficulty, by
collating the most common characteristics in the
heroines of major novelists to build up a composite
Victorian heroine— small, gentle, large-eyed and
13
loving. Her most striking resemblance would be to
Dickens' feminine ideal, for, throughout all his
prolific writings, his idee fixe about young women
never varied.5
If these descriptions hardly sound like the basis
for well-rounded characters in whom the reader can take
a serious interest, they are at least typical not only of
conventional romantic heroines, but of the social aspira
tions of real-life Victorian female readers. In her ar
tistic career, Mrs. Gaskell was to move away from the por
trayal of heroines according to a narrowly moralistic
scale of values (women as they should be) to a focus on
personal interactions (women as they are); instead of
dwelling on standards, she became concerned with behavior.
In all of Elizabeth Gaskell's works, the heroine reveals
herself through her relationships with her parents, with
her lover or husband, and with her children. The progres
sion is not only chronological but psychological.
Mary Barton is Mrs. Gaskell's first attempt at
telling a story in an extended form, and the character
development is largely mechanical, as might be expected.
This novel, however, sets a pattern for the others in that
the basic feminine problems, personality characteristics,
and personality types, are present embryonically. Mrs.
Gaskell develops a number of female stereotypes— the happy
mother, the widowed mother, the self-indulgent rich woman,
the patient spinster, the gentle friend, the unprincipled
companion, as well as the heroine herself. Though she
began the novel as the chronicle of John Barton's struggle
against the unfair labor practices and appalling living
conditions of urban Manchester, Mrs. Gaskell was requested
by her publisher to develop a romantic plot around the
daughter, Mary. The resulting structure is not wholly
satisfactory, for there is a shift midway in emphasis, and
the second half concerns the duties and obligations of
women. Mrs. Gaskell regards marriage as the natural means
of biological, psychological, and social self-fulfillment
for most women. She carefully distinguishes in the novel,
however, between the ideal of a conscious and free marital
commitment on the woman's part, and the matrimonial abuses
(forced marriages, etc.) practiced in her own day.
As happens in later Gaskell novels, the heroine is
introduced as a child, and is first seen against the back
ground of the family. This focus is particularly evident
in Elizabeth Gaskell's fiction because the average women
she wrote about could not be portrayed in any other social
setting, and because family relationships are the single
most important influence on her heroines' later lives. As
it happens, Mary Barton's mother dies in childbirth, and
part of the misery of Mary's young womanhood is indirectly
attributed to the fact that the happy home circle is de
stroyed; Mary's father becomes morose and withdrawn, and
Mary herself mourns her mother's death, not without comment
15
from Mrs. Gaskell:
. . . knowing it was a dream . . . her heart called
on her mother for aid, and she thought, "If mother
had but lived, she would have helped me." Forgetting
that the woman's sorrows are far more difficult to
mitigate than a child's even by the mighty power of
a mother's love; and unconscious of the fact, that
she was far superior in sense and spirit to the mother
she mourned. (Mary Barton, p. 24)
Mary is forced to seek work outside the home to supplement
her father's income, an unnatural situation dictated by
economic necessity. Her father "disliked the idea of part
ing with her, who was the light of his hearth; the voice
of his otherwise silent home" (p. 21), but three years
without a mother's supervision have made Mary self-willed
and vain, and she gladly becomes an apprentice at Miss
Simmonds', milliner and dressmaker.
In her role as daughter, Mary Barton is expected
to be obedient and thoughtful, and her relationship with
her father is intensified by the death of her mother:
"Between the father and daughter there existed in full
force that mysterious bond which unites those who have
been loved by one who is now dead and gone" (p. 19). His
indulgence flatters her vanity, and she deludes herself
with romantic illusions, to which Mrs. Gaskell is clearly
unsympathetic:
There was one cherished weakness still concealed from
everyone. It concerned a lover, not beloved, but
favored by fancy. A gallant, handsome young man; but
— not beloved. Yet Mary hoped to meet him every day
in her walks, blushed when she heard his name, and
16
tried to think of herself as his future wife. Alas!
poor Mary! Bitter woe did thy weakness work thee.
(p. 38)
Such vanity contrasts strongly with Mrs. Gaskell's presen
tation of true love in Jem Wilson's feelings for Mary: he
"hoped against hope; he would not give up, for it seemed
like giving up life to give up thought of Mary. . . .
Surely, in time, such deep love would beget love" (p. 38).
Just as she distinguishes between degrees of roman
tic love, Mrs. Gaskell differentiates among kinds of filial
love. Throughout the novel, she uses the secondary charac
ter of Margaret Jennings, a "sallow, unhealthy, sweet-look
ing young woman, with a careworn look" (p. 2 6), to point up
Mary Barton's shallowness. The relationship of Margaret
and her grandfather parallels that of Mary and her father,
but the reader is told time and again that Margaret's only
concern is for her grandfather's happiness: "so long as
I see him earnest, and pleased, and eager . . . you don't
know how happy we are!" (p. 37), while Mary's concern is
all for herself.
A character who is too good to be true, Margaret
represents the stereotyped Victorian idealization of woman
hood; she never complains and works at charitable deeds
until she becomes blind. She is rewarded, in poetic
fashion, with a career as singer, a handsome husband, and,
of course, with the restoration of her sight. Though Mrs.
Gaskell was willing to sacrifice convincing characteriza
17
tion to a moral purpose in a minor figure like Margaret,
she gives her heroine a dimension of realism by represent
ing her as imperfect and capable of growth. Part of the
interest of the novel is seeing whether Mary Barton matures.
Before Mary undergoes her feminine initiation, how
ever, her creator sets forth clearly the social functions
of a woman in the Manchester of the mid-50's. Her place
is definitely in the home; she is expected to show "a
girl's fondness for infants" (p. 9), and John Barton vows
that his Mary "shall never work in a factory" (p. 5),
because it leads to feelings of independence that a woman
has no business having. The hard lesson that Mary Barton
learns in the novel is to assume her proper, subordinate
place in society as the wife of a man who has shown him
self to be more honest, more noble, and more loving than
she. An aversion to women in the world of commerce is
found in all of Mrs. Gaskell's novels; except for Ruth
Hilton in Ruth, who is an orphan, her heroines work in the
home, if they work at all. Most appropriate for a woman
are "the dear feminine privileges of gossiping with a
merry neighbor, and working night and day to help one who
was sorrowful" (Mary Barton, p. 22).
Against the background of a society that conceives
of women as emotionally unstable (Mary Barton faints at
the Carson mill fire and again on leaving the witness
stand at Jem's trial), and dependent on the security of
home to safeguard their virtue, Mrs. Gaskell tells the
story of Mary Barton's flirtation with the handsome and
rich Henry Carson, who is murdered by Mary's father, and
of her realization that she really loves Jem Wilson, who
has been accused of the crime. The climax of the novel
is the trial scene where she throws maidenly reserve aside
and declares her love for Jem. She is the first of Mrs.
Gaskell's heroines to face the fact that she is in love,
and her delayed recognition of this truth is typical of
all of them. The drama of the recognition scene, which
occurs before the trial, is inherent in the psychology of
the heroine, whose development as a woman involves the
surrender of childish, romantic illusions about herself
and the world. In her infatuation with Henry Carson, she
has shown all the signs of an immature affection: she is
easily impressed by his good looks and his flattery, and
she is greedy enough to want the fine things and the social
status his wealth and his name could bring her. All these
are accidental qualities, however; nowhere does Mrs. Gas
kell say that Mary loves or even knows the essential man.
He is represented as shallow and dangerously attractive,
and his assurances of love ring hollow in comparison to
Jem's stalwart declaration. True worth is to be found in
deeds; Margaret Jennings, Alice Wilson, and her nephew Jem
demonstrate their human value by their kind actions toward
others, and their lives are marked by a spirit of Christian
19
self-sacrifice. Mary Barton's feminine maturation is her
recognition of Jem's spiritual worthiness, indeed, his
superiority to her. That it is an instantaneous recogni
tion, preceded by Mary's self-indulgent pettiness, is
psychologically consistent with Mary's character, for only
after real events force her to overcome her subjective,
emotional bias does she view Jem as better than herself.
Mary is childish in her self-absorption, but she is not
self-deceiving; once she recognizes the problem, she feels
an immediate impulse to act on her new knowledge. This
change of heart is accompanied by a need to make reparation
to the lover for the false judgment and the pain inflicted.
Thus, Mary Barton admits at the trial:
I never found out how dearly I loved another till one
day, when James Wilson asked me to marry him, and I
was very hard and sharp in my answer (for indeed, sir,
I'd a deal to bear just then), and he took me at my
word and left me; and from that day to this I've never
spoken a word to him, or set eyes on him; though I'd
fain have done so, to try and show him we had both
been too hasty; for he'd not been gone out of my sight
above a minute before I knew I loved— far above my
life. (p. 314)
In Mary Barton's case, the recognition that she
loves Jem brings with it an impulse toward reconciliation.
Though it might be supposed that an apology could easily
be arranged, the restraints on women in Mrs. Gaskell's
world make even this an impropriety. The author is in
sistent on decorum:
20
Maidenly modesty (and true love is ever modest) seemed
to oppose every plan she could think of, for showing
Jem how much she repented her decision against him,
and how dearly she had now discovered that she loved
him. She came to the unusual wisdom of resolving to
do nothing, but strive to be patient, and improve
circumstances as they might turn up. Surely, if Jem
knew of her remaining unmarried, he would try his
fortune again. He would never be content with one
rejection; she believed she could not in his place.
She had been very wrong, but now she would endeavor
to do right, and have womanly patience, until he saw
her changed and repentant mind in her natural actions.
Even if she had to wait for years, it was no more than
now it was easy to look forward to, as a penance for
her giddy flirting on the one hand, and her cruel
mistake concerning her feelings on the other. (p. 125)
Mary finds her resolution difficult to keep, however, and
when she proposes writing Jem a letter explaining her change
of heart, her friend Margaret counsels her only to patience:
"No," replied her friend, "that would not do. Men
are so queer, they like to have a1 the courting to
themselves. ..." "No dearI" changing her tone from
the somewhat hard way in which sensible people too
often speak, to the soft accents of tenderness which
come with such peculiar grace from them, "you must
just wait and be patient. You may depend upon it,
all will end well, and better than if you meddled in
it now."
"But it's so hard to be patient," pleaded Mary.
"Ay, dear; being patient is the hardest work we,
any of us, have to do through life, I take it. Wait
ing is far more difficult than doing. . . ." (p. 136)
Since Mary is not docile by nature, the typical advice to
females to endure all in silence is hard for her to accept.
She does accept it, however, and by disciplining herself
in this way, and by recognizing her folly in acting impul
sively toward Henry Carson, Mary goes a long way toward
becoming the conforming, submissive woman that Mrs. Gaskell
idealizes. How far she has moved becomes apparent
21
in the trial scene, where she is required to violate a re
quirement of feminine decorum by declaring publicly her
love for Jem. Mrs. Gaskell captures the young girl's in
dignation at the counsel's impertinent question, "And pray,
may I ask, which was the favoured lover?"
And who was he, the questioner, that he should dare
so lightly to ask of her heart's secrets? That he
should dare to ask her to tell, before that multitude
assembled there, what woman usually whispers with
blushes and tears, and many hesitations, to one ear
alone? . . . Now, when the beloved stood thus, ab
horred of men, there would be no feminine shame to
stand between her and her avowal. (p. 313)
Love is the center of a woman's life in Mrs. Gas
kell 's world, yet it can be a source of "feminine shame"
if it does not bloom in conditions of extreme propriety.
Mary's own emotional conflict, which is intensified by
the fact that she is torn between her father and her lover,
is evidence of this. She regrets her indiscretion with
Henry Carson because virtuous girls do not act that way,
and because she feels lower in Jem's eyes. But she is
prevented by social custom from doing anything construc
tive to ameliorate her situation; since woman is by nature
passive, Mary must suffer for her violation of the feminine
role (had she not responded to the mill owner's son and
encouraged his flirtatious advances, the problem would
never have arisen). She is in fact obliged to use "all
her self-restraint to prevent her from going and seeking
him [Jem] out, and (as man would do to man, or woman to
22
woman, begging him to forgive her hasty words, and allow
her to retract them" (p. 167). The only reason that Mrs.
Gaskell gives is not a rational one: it was "the whisper
ings of her womanly nature that caused her to shrink from
any unmaidenly action, not Margaret's counsel" (p. 167).
The author does not define this "womanly nature" very
precisely, but from the characteristics of Mary Barton and
the other heroines, one can get a feeling for what she
considers properly feminine.
The feminine passivity insisted on here and else
where is not reasonable, but it is conventional in Mrs.
Gaskell's representation of a male-dominated society. She
uses secondary female characters to reinforce the idea
that women must above all control their emotions: Aunt
Esther is lost to the happy home circle because she trusts
an emotional impulse and runs away with an officer who
does not marry her, thereby defying the paternal authority
of her brother-in-law, and Margaret Jennings is commended
for her patient endurance of tribulation, her devotion to
her grandfather, and her reticence in love. Such stoic
self-control may have been advocated on the basis of a
stereotyped male view of women as the weaker sex— emotional,
sensual, and even dangerous in the role of temptress. Dis
regarding the psychological reasons for such a belief and
its utter invalidity, one can see the problem that Eliza
beth Gaskell's heroines face when they encounter romantic
situations, for they cannot act as sexually responsive in
dividuals without reinforcing the stereotyped idea of
woman as seductress that goes back to Adam and Eve. Mrs.
Gaskell's rhetorical allusion to Mary Barton's "womanly
nature" does not satisfactorily explain the fact that she
deliberately frustrates Mary's instinctive desire to apol
ogize to a human being (also a man) for a human mistake,
and her understandable wish to be with her beloved. When
the character conforms to the social, cultural, and reli
gious dictate that a woman should be emotionally passive,
she is rewarded with a loving husband and a happy marriage.
The feminine repression of emotion by an act of will is a
pattern underlying nearly all of Mrs. Gaskell's romantic
plots and is no accident. Its relationship to her feminine
world view will be examined below.
The heroine of Mary Barton encounters another emo
tional problem related to her sexual identity which is not
expressed as such. Mrs. Gaskell relates Mary's dilemma
of choosing between her father and her lover to a concrete
situation that is more easily resolved than the underlying
conflict. As soon as Mary receives the fatal piece of
paper from her Aunt Esther, she knows that her father is
the murderer of Henry Carson, and that Jem is innocent.
She also knows that "her father was not suspected; and
never should be, if by any foresight or exertion of her
own she could prevent it" (p. 237) , and hence her duty is
24
clear: she must help provide an alibi for Jem, even though
it leads to her unfeminine declaration of love on the wit
ness stand. Emotionally, however, the choice is not so
clear-cut. Mary's fainting fit in the courtroom and her
consequent illness are, the reader is to believe, as much
the result of her grief and horror at knowing her father
is a murderer as of her concern for Jem. And when she re
turns home after the trial, she extracts a promise from
her lover to let her go there alone and not to ask her
why, though she is terrified, and though
. . . it was a miserable thing to have this awful for
bidden ground of discourse; to guess at each other's
thoughts, when eyes were averted, and cheeks blanched,
and words stood still, arrested in their flow by some
casual allusion. (p. 339)
Mrs. Gaskell's explanation is simply that Mary is fulfill
ing her daughterly role: "But her filial duty, nay, her
love and gratitude for many deeds of kindness done to her
as a little child, conquered all fear. She would endure
all imaginable terrors, although of daily occurrence"
(p. 341), because she feels this is expected of her, be
cause it is right. She even asks Jem not to come in with
her because she is afraid it might "fidget" her father.
Mary cannot relate to both men at the same time: though
she misses the "delicious luxury" of Jem's love, she cuts
him off to go to her father, and only wants to comfort
him when she hears he has lost his job at the foundry.
("How good he had been never to name his dismissal to her.
How much he had had to endure for her sake!" [p. 347].)
The necessity for further choice is taken out of Mary's
hands by the death of John Barton, which leaves her free
to marry Jem and emigrate to Canada to begin a new life.
Neither the heroine nor her lover ever questions the pro
priety of Mary's remaining with her father, and John Barton
himself has no idea of the problem that exists or even
that his daughter knows his secret. It is tacitly assumed
that the daughter's obligation to the parent must be
honored first; in this and in later novels, all other
relationships for the heroine are secondary. It is not
so for a man, however; when Jem Wilson declares to his
mother his intention to wed Mary, she raises all sorts
of objections, including the one of filial respect, but
he is not swayed from his resolution: his wife-to-be is
the most important person in his life.
Hence, while there is a strong emotional commitment
to her beloved on Mary Barton's part, romantic love here
is somewhat of a selfish pleasure to be indulged iri only
after the fundamental obligations to family and duty are
fulfilled. Once again, the idea is reinforced by the
secondary characters: Margaret Jennings cannot consider
marriage until her grandfather is provided for, and Alice
Wilson surrenders herself totally to the needs of others,
giving up any chance of marriage. That the true nature
of the father-daughter bond is seldom realized by either
party becomes apparent in later Gaskell novels, and in Mary
Barton, the ignorance is evident. Mary justifies her re
turn home to care for her father on the grounds that John
Earton needs her, but the reader may assume from Mrs. Gas-
kell's description of his last days that the father does
not need or care about anyone; he has completely withdrawn
from all social contact, and when Mary crosses the thresh
old, she finds him "still and motionless— not even turning
his head to see who had entered" (p. 341). The need is
rather on the daughter's part to reaffirm her love for her
father: "... his crime was a thing apart, never more
to be considered by her. And tenderly did she treat him,
and fondly did she serve him in every way that heart could
devise, or hand execute" (p. 342). There is human and
humane pity, certainly, but something else as well, an
unexpressed feeling of betrayal or of infidelity on the
daughter's part which Mary seems driven to make up for.
A mature love for parents is an outgrowth of child
hood obedience, and it is a mark of feminine conformity in
a daughter to have a loving relationship with her parents.
If the parents are secure in their role, such a relation
ship can free a daughter as she grows up to lead an emo
tionally mature life of her own, secure in her own role
as a woman. The lack of parental autonomy can handicap a
daughter severely by retarding her assumption of the adult
role. The accounts that Elizabeth Gaskell gives of a
27
heroine's childhood relationship with her parents indicate
accurately the girl's later social success as a woman.
Modern psychologists concur indirectly with this intuitive
understanding of feminization, and one reason for the fail
ure of many of Mrs. Gaskell's heroines to mature without
problems is suggested in this account of normal female
development in a 1963 survey by Mussen and. Rutherford:
. . . the father's personality and interest and his
encouragement of his daughter's femininity were crucial
in the development of an appropriate sex-role prefer
ence. Feminization of the daughter depended upon a
warm relationship with a mother who held herself in
esteem and with a father who encouraged and responded
to his daughter's emerging femininity.^
The problem, of course, is that Mrs. Gaskell does
not provide many examples either of mothers who hold them
selves in esteem or of fathers who encourage their daugh
ters to be feminine. In fact, while strong filial love
is ideally the foundation of all later female social rela
tionships, Mrs. Gaskell does not hesitate to portray the
disastrous effects of its abuse by parents; hence heroines
like Ellinor Wilkins in "A Dark Night's Work," and Miss
Matty Jenkins in Cranford, have fathers who by monopoliz
ing their daughter's affection unjustly, deter them from
their natural womanly destiny of marriage and childbearing.
In both cases, the daughter, unable to perceive the parent
as anything but good, takes upon herself the psychic guilt
for the harm that results.
28
Parental interference arising from a misguided sense
of responsibility can function as an obstacle to romance,
as it does in Cousin Phillis, North and South, and Wives
and Daughters. It can become a sham for parents, covering
all sorts of abuses, as happens in Wives and Daughters,
where Mr. Gibson marries a woman he does not love, presum
ably for his daughter's sake, while Mrs. Gibson bullies her
daughter and stepdaughter in the name of motherly guidance,
and Squire Hamley attempts to control the marriages of his
sons to facilitate the disposal of his estate. At any
rate, a psychological bridge must be crossed to allow for
the natural development of the woman's capacity to love,
and this involves a separation from the parents. Since
Victorian social custom did not advocate the direct separa
tion from parents for women that it did for men, Mrs. Gas
kell usually facilitates it in the plot by having the
parent or parents die.
With feminine propriety, Mrs. Gaskell consistently
places women socially in positions passive and subordinate
to men; hence, father-figures and authoritarian males (hus
bands, brothers, etc.) are highly esteemed and will always
be obeyed by Mrs. Gaskell's wives and daughters. Such
obedience was of course characteristic of women in most of
the popular romantic fiction of the period; a remark made
about Charlotte Yonge applies equally well to Mrs. Gaskell:
29
To the end, Miss Yonge retained an unshakable belief
in the superiority of a man's mind over that of a
woman. Her fathers, husbands, brothers— when good
and high-minded— wielded an almost unlimited author
ity over their women-folk. (Delafield, p. 10)
In addition, Mrs. Gaskell gives the reader insight into
her women characters' attitudes toward their socially de
fined roles. Though they yield to masculine superiority
in the end, they are not always eager to do so. Mary
Barton, for instance, chafes at masculine patronage and
her father's, or lover's way of ordering her around, though
he means nothing by it. So does Jemima Bradshaw; so does
Margaret Hale; so does Ruth Hilton; so do Sylvia Robson
and, most positively, Cynthia Kirkpatrick. This reaction
is not restricted to young women, either; old as she is,
Lady Ludlow, in a short story titled "My Lady Ludlow,"
vehemently resists any masculine attempt at giving assis
tance or advice. So much for the theory that women like
to be dominated by men— except that at the last minute,
every single one of these characters undergoes a change of
heart, or at least a softening of spirit, that finally
leaves her open to and receptive of the very domination
she formerly rejected. What happens to these women by the
end of their respective stories is that the feminine side
of their natures asserts itself, and they capitulate to
the same men they had formerly scorned. Mrs. Gaskell re
cords a complex characteristic of feminine behavior here,
for in discussing the question of female dependence upon
30
the male, psychologist Judith Bardwick says,
. . . I suspect that girls are more emotionally depen
dent upon their fathers, that this emotional intimacy
is rewarding for both, and that if the girl is success
ful she will transfer this dependency, trust and in
timacy to her husband. . . . In other words, the
healthy girl will be selectively dependent, especially
in the important emotional relationships and especially
when she is not quite sure of her status within the
relationship. (Psychology of Women, pp. 118-19)
Once a woman has received some assurance or proof of the
man's regard, as Mary Barton does through Jem's constancy
and kindness, it is all right to give in, and to subject
herself to the new master. The dialogue in Ruth, the
scene where Mr. Farquhar finally wins his bride, is reveal
ing in this respect: the men in Mrs. Gaskell's fiction
not only expect feminine capitulation, but regard them
selves as the liberators of the women who do capitulate.
Jemima Bradshaw has given her lover playful notice that
she will not obey him if he forbids her to see her friend
Ruth, and in answer,
. . . The arm around her waist clasped her yet more
fondly at the idea, suggested by this speech, of the
control which he should have the right to exercise
over her actions at some future date. "Tell me,"
said he, "how much of your goodness to me, this last
happy hour, has been owing to the desire of having
more freedom as a wife than as a daughter?"7
In Mrs. Gaskell's world, dependence for a woman obviously
involved more than simple psychological dependence. Never
theless, her women who learn through example or experience
to master their own feelings are more likely to attract
the sort of man whose rule will only be playful. The humor
31
of the husband-to-be's speech (he knows that Jemima has
not even thought of seeking the "freedom" he mentions)
does not obscure the fact that Jemima actually will have
more freedom as a wife. Ironically, she is escaping the
stern father against whom she struggled heroically but in
effectually, by succumbing to the feminine destiny against
which she has also fought.
The qualities of femininity possessed by Mrs. Gas
kell's heroines are socially appropriate to their family
background and rank. Mary Barton is a typical enough
product of the industrial laboring class she comes from,
though as a heroine, she is somewhat more refined than
her mother was. Though Mary is portrayed almost exclu
sively in relation to her immediate family and close
friends, Mrs. Gaskell does not exclude the influences of
environment and work on her development. Mary's vanity
is fed by Mr. Carson's flattery and by her amoral friend
Sally Leadbitter, and the hard conditions of Mary's em
ployment as a dressmaker's apprentice understandably help
to shape her desire for an easy life. But the reader sees
only the externals; he does not enter into the experience
of Mary's emotions as completely as he can in a later work
like Cousin Phillis, where Mrs. Gaskell creates a different
type of heroine. Nevertheless, the groundwork was laid
in her first novel for an investigation of feminine emo
tions, and in her subsequent novels, where social issues
32
relate specifically to womanly concerns (spinsterhood and
widowhood in Cranford, and motherhood and illegitimacy in
Ruth), she expands on the family and social influences
established in Mary Barton.
Cranford represents a departure from Mary Barton in
other ways than structurally, but as everything in the
work is tied to its structure, the limitations of its form
should be considered. Cranford is a series of scenes or
vignettes which cumulatively add to the reader's knowledge
of the characters who dwell in the little village. Because
there is no tight chronology or plot, the focus is not on
the development of personal relationships; the social pat
terns are pretty well determined from the start, and the
reader does not look for striking events to give new in
sight into character, as he is cued to do by the plot of
Mary Barton. The heroine of Cranford is fifty-two years
old at the start of the book, and the crucial period of
her development as a woman is handled through flashbacks.
Miss Matty Jenkyns is a member of the society of Cranford
ladies, but as almost none of them is married, each draws
her social status from her family background. Thus the
Jenkyns sisters, as daughters of the late rector of Cran
ford, are identified in the primary role of daughter. It
is part of Mrs. Gaskell's achievement in this sympathetic
yet humorous representation of a society of "Amazons" that
she could see the potentially disastrous effects for the
33
woman who fulfills the role too perfectly. Miss Matty and
Miss Deborah Jenkyns, early encouraged to submission and
obedience by a stern father, are easily victimized by
family pressures into an existence which, while relatively
happy, leaves them emotionally scarred for life. Their
inadequacies take different forms according to their dif
ferent temperaments. Mrs. Gaskell intended no major social
criticism of spinsterhood— her tone is too gentle— but by
including the material on the history of the Jenkyns fam
ily, she establishes that family unit as the central ref
erence point for the daughters' fortunes.
Concerning the psychology of the feminine attitude
revealed in Cranford, Martin Dodsworth has said that "Cran
ford's women, either widows or spinsters, are obliged to
do without men, and therefore pretend to be as good as, or
g
even better than, men." Though he admits that Mrs. Gas
kell 's tone is at times ironic, and that she uses comic
exaggeration for humor ("A man is so in the way in the
house!"), he sees a deeper underlying manifestation of
attitude on the author's part in Miss Deborah Jenkyns'
preemptive ways, and in the death of Captain Brown, who
is a "representation of the Victorian male as a benign
deity" (Dodsworth, p. 134). Further, he finds in Peter
Jenkyns' act of female impersonation the impertinence that
perpetuates the whole tragedy of the spinster sisters'
lives. He comments on the childlike quality of the village
34
inhabitants, and on the futility of their pretensions to
grandeur:
Cranford is a kind of trimmed and tidied dream, in
which Mrs. Gaskell's unconscious hostility to the
male struggles with her awareness of the pointless
ness of such hostility to the predominantly masculine
society of her day. (Dodsworth, p. 138)
If one considers the masculine/feminine distinction
to be the dichotomy of action versus passivity that Mrs.
Gaskell uses in other novels, and applies it to the con
trast between the bustling (masculine) town of Drumble
and the quiet (feminine) village of Cranford, it appears
that many of the physical evils that invade the place,
such as the threat of robbers or the bank failure, come
from outside Cranford and involve men rather than women,
possibly a demonstration of the good-humored hostility
mentioned by Professor Dodsworth. Yet the idea of woman
as dominant is clearly amusing to Mrs. Gaskell, whatever
private grievances she may have harbored. She plays up
the plight of her spinster heroines who get along as best
they can without men. The superstitions, the foibles .of
these eccentric souls are entertaining to the reader be
cause the Cranford ladies take themselves and their virtue
so seriously. Mrs. Gaskell's characters are exaggerated,
but they are not unbelievable, as anyone who has associ
ated with elderly maiden ladies of culture and breeding
can attest, and they act precisely the way one would
expect them to, impulsively, emotionally, uncerebrally,
35
unrealistically. Sooner or later, they will require the
help of a man, who will receive small thanks for his pains
from the women who consider themselves his social superiors.
Captain Brown's kind deeds, for instance, at the
beginning of Cranford, and Mr. Smith's at the end, are
clearly praiseworthy, but in Cranford's estimation, what
really matters is the
use that was made of fragments and small opportunities
in Cranford; the rose-leaves that were gathered ere
they fell to make into a potpourri for someone who had
no garden . . . things that men would despise, and
actions which it seemed scarcely worth while to per
form. ^
It is a matter of perspective, of course, and in Cranford,
perspectives are skewed. For the gentle souls who live
there live in a past era, and their reality is shaped more
by imagination than by intercourse with the world. The
effects of their isolation are nowhere more evident than
in their ideas about men; they live in ignorance of the
opposite sex, for all their apparent knowledge:
. . . men will be men! Every mother's son of them
wishes to be considered Samson and Solomon rolled into
one— too strong ever to be beaten or discomfited— too
wise ever to be outwitted. . . . My father was a man,
and I know the sex pretty well. (p. 145)
This speech characterizes the Cranford ladies' emotional
immaturity— men, to them, mean fathers— and explains their
moral cowardice, the practice of acquiescing to others,
which Mrs. Gaskell uses for humorous effect in the fussy
primness and needless pomposity of tea parties and social
36
excursions. The whole fagade of feminine self-sufficiency
is hilariously undercut in a character like the Honourable
Mrs. Jamieson, who, though preeminent in Cranford society,
lives in fear of her butler, and whose title, her claim
to importance, she owes to a man.
Elizabeth Gaskell's perspective on her characters
makes them more than just old women who refuse to acknowl
edge the passage of time, however. In the chapters "A
Love Affair of Long Ago" and "Old Letters," she gives the
reader the historical background necessary to understand
the motivation of Miss Deborah Jenkyns, who becomes her
father's "son" to replace a lost brother, and Miss Matty
Jenkyns, who refuses an offer of marriage to a man she
sincerely loves because her father wished her to. Cran
ford is sentimental, and part of its sentiment depends on
the realization that something is missing from the lives
of the spinsters and widows, something they refuse to
acknowledge, protesting too much in the process. Even as
the reader smiles at Miss Matty's childlike simplicity of
spirit or her typically feminine fear of a man hiding
under her bed, he sees her yearning toward motherhood as
a feminine ideal:
. . . do you know I dream sometimes that I have a
little child— always the same— -a little girl of about
two years old; she never grows older, though I have
dreamt about her for many years. (p. 163)
37
It is significant that even in her dreams, Miss Matty's
child is a girl; the male world is totally foreign to her.
The fact that one is amused does not detract from the
moral point of Cranford; what is missing, in fact what
one suspects that Miss Matty might have had, is mature,
fulfilling relationships with men. Mrs. Gaskell even
provides a rejected lover who has remained unmarried. Of
course, few of her heroines are ever fully capable of
having such relationships, though their emotional growth
toward this state is duly chronicled, and even fewer
specimens present themselves in her stories as suitable
partners. But the effect of Cranford depends upon the
unstated belief that in fact such relationships can exist
(cf. Mr. and Mrs. Hearn's or Mr. and Mrs. Hoggins' radi
ance after their weddings), and that women are better off
for being married, the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson's opinion
notwithstanding.
Psychologically, the female attitude of superiority
over men is always adapted as self-defense in Mrs. Gas
kell 's fiction, as a counter to the fear of rejection.
And since the feminine fear of rejection is strongest in
relation to sexual desirability, the superior attitude of
Mrs. Gaskell's unmarried ladies is, as might be expected,
most evident as a defense against the stigma of failing
to catch a husband. There is nothing quite so pathetic
as an old maid in a society where acceptance and esteem
for women depend completely upon the matrimonial attach
ments they make. In humanizing the Misses Jenkyns and
their ironies, Mrs. Gaskell hints at the problem, but to
the extent that she lets the reader see only the surface
details of their lives, the major focus of a comedy of
manners, she keeps that problem in the background. Never
theless, one can notice how the matter of sex keeps re
introducing itself in casual references; examples like
the fear of a man under the bed or the vision of a man
haunting the kitchen come readily to mind. The ladies
of Cranford, though they pretend to be blase, are over
whelmingly curious about men. But it is a childish curi
osity, and their other childlike behavior, fears of the
dark and of strangers, elaborate social rituals for call
ing and receiving callers, etc., reflects exactly their
arrested emotional development.
The feminine domination of Cranford and the topsy
turvy state of feminine affairs in general has its roots
in the past. One notes the basic incompatibility of Miss
Matty's parents, or at least a failure to understand one
another's values in the letters which purportedly date
back to the eighteenth century. The tone of these epis
tles is good-natured, so no one can possibly take offense
but the foibles, the petty inconsistencies, are set forth
the practical-minded wife is concerned about a white
"Paduasoy" while the rector's Latinate orations indicate
39
his preoccupation with intellectual pursuits. Within the
socially approved province of each sex, she is expected
to make a home and raise a family, while his concerns are
the weightier ones of scholarship and theology. The two
worlds rarely overlap, and the parents do not share them
selves with one another until tragedy strikes in the form
of Peter's flight.
Because of her concern for order and degree, Mrs.
Gaskell is said to be eighteenth-century in her outlook;
she "liked a domesticated Nature" (Bald, Women Writers of
the Nineteenth Century, p. 104), and Cranford is a senti
mental social comedy dependent on the stereotype of a
rationally observed world where Miss Deborah Jenkyns is
fond of quoting Samuel Johnson, where emotion is something
to be feared and rigidly controlled unless it is of a
genteel sort, and where women are to take a completely
subservient part in society. But Mrs. Gaskell is above
all a realist who intends her readers to see that such a
world is too narrow for any but completely passive women.
In the measure of pity felt for Miss Matty, who does not
want to "grieve any young hearts" (Cranford, p. 60), and
eventually is forced to submit to "Fate and Love," is an
implied criticism of the social standards of the nineteenth
century. Though Cranford's effect depends totally on the
lightly humorous tone, it does not belong to the genre of
satire since, strictly speaking, literary nature presup
40
poses a corrective intent. Cranford is nostalgic and sen
timental, but Mrs. Gaskell does not attempt to explain away
her old maids' predilection for smug self-satisfaction.
The narrator, Mary Smith, establishes the Cranford dwellers'
basic humanity through complimentary remarks, and the
reader's overall impression of them is favorable. Para
mount, however, is the poignancy of their narrow world,
where caps and visiting hours are the crucial concerns of
life.
It is possible that at this stage of her writing
career, Mrs. Gaskell's ideas about women had not completely
developed; in fact, this is the thesis of Aina Rubenius's
excellent work on the "woman question" in Mrs. Gaskell's
writing. Still, as J. M. Dent observes in his "Forewords"
to Cranford, the book had to be written by a woman: "It
is, indeed, true humanity she pictures for our delight,
reflected through a woman's laughter and a woman's tears"
(p. xi), though such a judgment admittedly is an emotional
rather than an analytic response. When Mrs. Gaskell makes
fun of her spinster ladies, she does it with such obvious
good intent that any criticism of the "feminine" role or
feminine ways has at its heart the recognition of a real
potential for goodness and social usefulness in all human
beings. The humanity to be found in Cranford, as shown,
for example, in the Cranford Ladies' determination to take
care of Miss Matty when she loses her income, despite its
41
obviously unworldly ignorance of the realities of physical
nature— dollars and cents will only go so far— is far more
appealing than the businesslike, unemotional rationality
of a place like Drumble. Elsewhere, Mrs. Gaskell draws
a similar contrast between emotion and intellect, and their
corresponding outlets in fumbling good deeds or efficient,
cold management. The difference is not so much in mascu
line or feminine natures here as it is the distinct social
attitudes which Mrs. Gaskell observed in the men and women
around her, for she includes in her fiction examples of
warm, sympathetic men as well as coldly selfish women.
The women of Cranford are physically the contrary
of the standard Victorian romantic heroine, and indeed,
the idea of young love is gently parodied in the Cranford
world. But Mrs. Gaskell shares with the popular novelists
of her day the ability to depict the standard romantic
characteristics even in old maids: an excessive devotion
to parents, an utter dependence on family, a carefully
guarded virginal innocence, the cultivation of feminine
pursuits, and above all, the preservation of a romantic
outlook that incorporates a fear or ignorance of the op
posite sex (Miss Matty says, "Two people that we know
going to be married. It's coming very near!" [p. 174]).
In a word, Mrs. Gaskell's spinsters are prudish but lov
able, dwelling in a world apart, fond of children and of
animals, and entirely unrealistic: "We none of us spoke
42
of money, because that subject savored of commerce and
trade, and though some might be poor, we are all aristo
cratic" (pp. 3-4).
A word should be said about Cranford's narrator,
Mary Smith, who is an intermediary between the passive,
feminine universe of Cranford, and the mercenary, mascu
line Drumble. She, too, is a daughter, but unlike the
older generation, she is more independent in action— she
leaves her father's home for long stretches at a time—
and more intellectual: she alone is able to trace the
whereabouts of the mysterious "Aga Jenkyns." Though ex
ternally she chafes at the restrictiveness of Cranford
life, and is submissive to her father just as the Misses
Jenkyns were, she identifies early with the Cranford phi
losophy: ". . . in our love for gentility, and distate
of mankind, we had almost persuaded ourselves that to be
a man was to be 'vulgar'" (p. 10). And her father's letter,
she relates, was "just a man's letter; I meant it was very
dull" (p. 182). Altogether, she appears to share Cran
ford's sense of feminine superiority, though she is clear
sighted enough to admit the unreasonableness of the bias.
Mary Smith may be taken as a type of the potentially mature
woman, or at least one who can mediate between the mascu
line world of Drumble and the Amazonian stronghold of Cran
ford. She is neither as passive nor as credulous as the
others, and though she appreciates the true goodness of
43
the Cranford ladies, she is equally aware, by the end of
the book, that the value of rose-leaves has to be put into
the perspective of the real world:
. . . I had vibrated all my life between Drumble and
Cranford, and I thought it was quite possible that
all of Mr. Peter's stories might be true, although
wonderful; but when I found that, if we swallowed an
anecdote of tolerable magnitude one week, we had the
dose considerably increased the next, I began to have
my doubts. . . . (p. 235)
Mary cannot remain in Cranford; she has her own life to
pursue, and though Mrs. Gaskell does not say so, the reader
expects that her future will include marriage and a family.
For marriage is the central issue in all of Mrs.
Gaskell's fiction. It provides the only chance a woman has
to make something of her life and to do her part to perpet
uate Victorian society, in short, to achieve an identity.
The frustration of Miss Matty and Miss Pole, or of the
Misses Browning in Wives and Daughters, is that they have
no social existence except in terms of their families.
Miss Matty is known as "the late rector's daughter," and
Miss Faith Benson in Ruth is the minister's sister. While
a man may remain a bachelor in Mrs. Gaskell's world without
social reprisal, as does John Thornton in North and South,
or Thurstan Benson in Ruth, an unmarried daughter is looked
down upon and treated like a child long after she is of a
mature age. This may partly explain the childlike behavior,
exaggerated no doubt for humorous effect, that character
izes Miss Matty and her friends.
44
Within the family structure, it is evident that the
Jenkyns sisters embody the two extremes of feminine behav
ior found in Mrs. Gaskell's fiction. Miss Deborah is the
aggressive, order-giving, masculine woman who is also
found, good-humoredly, among Mrs. Gaskell's female ser
vants: Dixon in North and South, Sally in Ruth, Phoebe
in Sylvia's Lovers, and the Betty in Cousin Phillis and
Wives and Daughters. Miss Jenkyns' caustic nature is
allowed free rein, and she easily reflects the complete
opposite of Miss Matty's timidity. It is partly Deborah's
fault that Miss Matty never married, and she persists in
a methodical, though piously intended, oppression of her
sister. Deborah is a strong-minded woman, and though she
dies early in Cranford, her influence is felt through Miss
Matty's veneration of her every idea and habit, a venera
tion which borders on the ludicrous.
Mrs. Gaskell pleads for sympathy for Deborah, how
ever, when she records the hard life the character had to
endure as a young woman because of her brother's foolish
ness and her father's response to it; the final blame, one
notes, rests with men. Deborah had attempted to become
the son her father lost, but she lost something indefinably
feminine in the process. Miss Matty relates,
"Deborah said to me, the day of my mother's funeral,
that if she had a hundred offers she would never marry
and leave my father. . . . She was such a daughter to
my father as I think there never was before or since.
His eyes failed him, and she read book after book,
45
and wrote, and copied, and was always at his service
in any parish business. She could do many more things
than my poor mother could. . . ." (p. 88)
But such sacrifices take their toll; the daughter who "was
quite put in a corner" by the father when her brother re
turned once from India, becomes humorously defeminized.
The reader will remember that she "wore a cravat, and a
little bonnet like a jockey-cap, and altogether had the
appearance of a strong-minded woman; although she would
have despised the modern idea of women being equal to men.
Equal indeed! she knew they were superior" (p. 18). Mrs.
Gaskell never tries to demonstrate the superiority of
women, but their individuality is another matter.
In contrast, Miss Matty appears to be so colorless
and bland that the reader is somewhat unprepared for her
finest moment when it comes. It is a measure of her writ
ing ability that Mrs. Gaskell arouses sympathy for this
fairly spineless spinster who always felt sorry for her
brother Peter, but did not have enough courage to speak
out in his behalf, or in her own, for that matter, when
her lover was rejected by her family. Miss Matty finally
summons the moral courage to act in the matter of justice
to an innocent third party. In the tradition of true
womanly obedience, she has cheerfully sacrificed herself
to social and family pressures, but characteristically,
she does not require the same sacrifice of others. Virtue
in her is defined as kindness to others, meek obedience,
46
and Christian piety. However, Mrs. Gaskell hints at the
more serious consequences cf a lifetime of unquestioning
obedience: there is an unfulfilled potential for womanly
happiness in Miss Matty that will never be tapped because
she has remained an emotional child, subserviant always
to others' wishes, and never doubting anyone. Like her
Cranford sisters, she is a daughter who lives now in a
fantasy world. By asserting herself morally in the thir
tieth chapter, Miss Matty finally wins the reader's admira
tion; all the rest is pity for what she might have been.
In the end, Mrs. Gaskell has to bring the self-
exiled brother Peter home again to take care of his sister.
The question of culpability is an elusive one here, for
the major blame for the way the sisters' lives turned out
must be shared by the two men in the family. Had Peter
accepted his father's punishment for impersonating his
sister and not run away from home, or had the Reverend
Jenkyns been less strict with his son in the first place,
and later, less strict with his daughters, the mother
would not have died of grief, and Deborah and Matty would
not have had to adopt, respectively, such aggressive and
passive roles. Although the father undergoes a complete
change of heart, the damage is already done, and the pat
tern of their lives seems irreversible. Actually, Peter's
escape is a good thing for him; at least he is able to do
something useful with his life. In Mrs. Gaskell's fiction,
47
the sons in a family with an authoritarian father, and
this includes almost every family she portrayed, are less
adversely affected by paternal domination, for they have
the outlet of a school or business which is denied their
sisters.
Of the men at Cranford, only Captain Brown and Mr.
Hollingworth, both of whom die early in the story, are in
dependent, typically masculine figures. Neither is devel
oped enough to become completely known to the reader, yet
externally, each as he appears to the Cranford population
is attractive. In the Captain's kindness, and in Mr.
Hollingworth1s knowledge and hospitality, one sees what
Victorian country society valued in a man. The masculine
image they project seems to be countered by the other two
male characters in the book, Messrs. Brown (alias Brunoni)
and Jenkyns. (Mr. Hoggins, the physician, may be excluded
for the moment because he takes no direct part in the
action of the story.)
Martin Dodsworth sees in Signor Brunoni a counter
part to Captain Brown that goes beyond their identical
names; he suggests that by saving the former from illness
and starvation, the Cranford women expiate their coldness
to the latter, who of course is dead: "the women are able
to 'make up' to Brown by nursing him back to health" (Dods
worth, p. 142). He also observes, however, that the second
Mr. Brown is a far weaker character than the first: his
48
dependence on his wife and brother is a reversal of the
Victorian concept of the husband as chief provider for the
family. Another character who fails to meet the Victorian
masculine ideal is Peter Jenkyns, who, for all his wit and
charm, is a caricature of the gentleman traveler— he runs
away from home and acknowledges no sense of responsibility
for his family. By a judicious selection of details, Mrs.
Gaskell influences the reader's opinion of Peter as a
thoughtless and callow youth, one who still plays disturb
ing practical jokes when he is well past the age for them.
Still, his return to Cranford after many years' absence
is a joyous event to Miss Matty, and poetic justice is
satisfied in his assuming his rightful place as her pro
tector.
Kindness to women and animals seems to be the ster
ling quality of the other men in Cranford; Jem Hearn even
volunteers to stay out of the ladies' way, generally the
best place for a man in a society where the values are
reversed. As for poor Jem, whose marriage to the servant
girl Martha is hastened along so that Miss Matty can have
a home after the bank failure, one has the feeling— again,
humorously exaggerated— that he has been nicely managed.
That masculine activity is necessary in the "real" world
of dollars and cents is grudgingly acknowledged by Cranford
when it patronizes Mr. Hoggins, the physician, but the
possibility that a woman might lower herself to such a
49
level simply because of romantic attraction and give up
a title in the bargain is completely foreign to Cranford's
value system. Hence, Lady Glenmire is at first ostracized
when she becomes Mrs. Hoggins, which may be easily ex
plained as a jealous reaction on the part of the less for
tunate ones. The more that Cranford rejects men, the more
obvious becomes the need for them. The Cranford ladies
truly live in furnished souls. And that furniture is very
Victorian.
The accepted social order of Cranford, and the ac
cepted moral order, too, is based on the values of "pro
priety" and "humanity", according to Edgar Wright,^ and
these values are predominantly feminine; hence, they do
not belong to the mercantile environment of a Drumble.
Though Mr. Wright sees a distinction in kind between Cran
ford and Mrs. Gaskell's social fiction based on the ideal
ization of a place like Drumble, I think there is more of
a relationship between the feminine Cranford-world, say,
and the Manchester of Mary Barton or the Milton of North
and South than he indicates. Basically, all of Mrs. Gas-
kell's fiction involves some sort of conflict between
"propriety" and "humanity," and a woman must opt for one
or the other. In the early part of Cranford, one sees
the effect of observing propriety without humanity when
rules for social behavior and rigid class distinctions are
established and maintained at the expense of people's feel
50
ings. This typically feminine failing, which is later
remedied, is not so harmful as the failure to observe
either propriety or humanity, as happens in the masculine
worlds of Drumble or Manchester or Milton. That the Cran
ford ladies succeed in moving mountains to provide for
Miss Matty's future is not surprising, once they recognize
a human need.
Professor Wright sees two sides to Mrs. Gaskell1s
notion of propriety in relation to the changes that are
brought about in the story:
Cranford is not static, it has to accept interference
from the outside world. Its whole tenor indicates,
for example, a gradual shifting of the social balance;
"dubious" members such as Betty Barker, Mrs. Fitz-Adam
and the "vulgar" Mr. Hoggins are admitted, as their
worth is accepted. The point is that the values of
the traditional outlook are maintained. If one half
of propriety deals with trivialities, the other half
comprises fundamental and proven standards of conduct;
the two aspects are so intertwined that the trivial
helps support the total fabric and is part of the
pattern of stability. When customs and opinions wither
they may be allowed to drop away, but often they are
alive with the values they grew in. (Wright, p. 74)
"Withered" customs are the very point in Cranford; to the
extent that custom or "propriety" detaches itself from
"humanity," as happens humorously in Cranford, it detracts
from a society rather than enhances it. Mrs. Gaskell il
lustrates this not only in Cranford, but throughout her
fiction. There is nothing wrong with propriety in itself,
but when it is accompanied by selfishness and narrow
mindedness, as is usually the case, it dehumanizes those
who invoke it as a justification for their behavior. The
social propriety of sucking oranges privately in Cranford
has trivial consequences, but when Mrs. Gaskell examines
the propriety of accompanying one's mother to an inconse
quential party rather than visiting a dying friend, as
she does in Wives and Daughters, or the propriety of scorn
ing an unwed mother by excluding her from the social group
of acceptable people, as she does in Ruth, she has left
the realm of humor behind, and questions the basic motiva
tions of behavior which requires the blind observance of
so-called social amenities. Somehow, propriety has a way
of retarding human relationships rather than promoting
them. Of course, this is only so when people, often women,
use it as an excuse for putting distance between themselves
and others.
In the light of the meaning I have suggested that
Mrs. Gaskell attached to custom (propriety), it is not dif
ficult to understand the dilemma of the narrator in Cran
ford. As a representative of the outside world and of the
audience, Mary Smith views the Cranford society from the
enlightened perspective of her experiences in Drumble. It
has been mentioned that she "vibrates" between the real
ities represented by each. Whether they are labeled
feminine versus masculine values or idealistic versus
realistic, no one can commit himself completely to one or
the other without tragic consequences. Miss Matty and
52
others in Cranford must painfully separate themselves from
the old ways before the story can end happily.
If women are unworldly and unrealistic in their
perception of events in Mrs. Gaskell's fiction, or attach
excessive value to customs and ritualistic behavior, this
extends to their relationships with and responses to men.
Of all the male figures presented in Cranford, none could
be considered remotely sexual, except for the mysterious
Signor Brunoni, who loses all his attractiveness once he
is unmasked as plain, married Mr. Brown. On the aspect
of sexuality as a dimension of the feminine personality
in Cranford, Martin Dosworth says:
It may be said that, in acquiescing to the masculine
predominance of her day, Mrs. Gaskell is a quietist;
but this is to misunderstand the novel, which has to
do, not with the wrongs of the female at the hands
of the male, but with the consequences of attempting
to repress sexual needs under the cover of feminism.
("Women Without Men at Cranford," p. 145)
While this may be a subtle distinction, Professor Dodsworth
is right in calling attention to the atmosphere of repres
sion that exists in Cranford, a repression which is the
specific result of male dominance, one might add. Mrs.
Gaskell's irony seems to be directed at the womem them
selves, however, for their failure to participate in their
own futures. The spinsterish quirks and foibles are exag
gerated for humor, but the ladies of Cranford seem to be
fairly happy with their lot in life. Their emotional
development has been arrested in adolescence, and Mrs.
53
Gaskell takes pains to show that this is indeed sad. But
it is important to note where she places the blame for
the way things turned out: squarely on the father who
allowed authoritarian inflexibility to dominate his rela
tionship with his family, and on the son who runs away
from home to salve his pride. At the moment of crisis,
neither of these characters demonstrates the sensitivity
to and concern for others that are characteristic of the
female sex. For Mrs. Gaskell, the sin of pride has wide
spread consequences, and persons of either sex who exhibit
it are answerable for its effects on others.
Aina Rubenius dismisses Cranford in her discussion
of the "woman question" as lacking material for an anal
ysis of the feminine outlook on love and marriage, but
though there may be no explicit statement on the subject
of women's rights in that work, and though the heroine is
past the age for marrying, it does deal, by strong implica
tion, with the same questions that arise in Mary Barton—
the natural superiority of women, the relative social
places of men and women, and the nature of marriage. The
light tone of Cranford does not obscure the fact that the
local Amazons' sphere of influence is limited: "such sim
plicity might do very well in Cranford, but would never
do in the world" (Cranford, p. 221) . The Cranford world
is sterile as well; though the sexual war is a mock one,
women are the losers. Unmarried and insecure, they become
54
prey to a thousand silly superstitions and rituals, and
seek to admit to their feminine domain only those safe
males whose relationship with them will be paternalistic
and sexually nonthreatening. The Cranford women expect
men to wait humbly on them and submit wholeheartedly to
their delusions of superiority. Mary Smith's father is
partly trusted, but he has betrayed Cranford by moving
away and becoming a tradesman, and Mr. Hoggins risks his
barely tolerated status by marrying, albeit a lady from
out of town.
Miss Matty's case is saddest of all, not simply
because she has not married and had babies, though Mrs.
Gaskell makes the natural virtues of motherhood obvious
in more than one reference, but because she has never
grown up; she remains obedient to her older sister's
memory, and passes her life in ignorance of men. Yet her
life is by no means a waste, even though she and her
friends are too timid even to reproach Mrs. Jamieson's
butler for monopolizing the St. James Chronicle, and in
the final chapters, the reader learns "how a good, inno
cent life makes friends all around" (p. 215). Cranford
is revitalized by the birth of Martha and Jem's baby, ap
propriately named Matilda, and by Peter Jenkyns' return,
and the book ends on a happy note of reconciliation: "We
all love Miss Matty, and I somehow think we are all of us
better when she is near us" (p. 244).
55
Mrs. Gaskell's next major work of fiction is in
contrast a rather somber book. In Ruth, she approached
the social novel from a unique viewpoint in considering
the personal and social plight of an unwed mother and her
child. Though the theme has certainly been used elsewhere
and before Mrs. Gaskell, Hazel Mews reports that in writ
ing the book, Mrs. Gaskell "became the first among the
Victorians who actually made the fall and redemption of
a seduced woman the main theme of a full-length novel"
(Frail Vessels, p. 8 5). The novel is marred by several
serious faults, however; not only is the basic character
of Ruth unbelievable— she is patently an innocent orphan
who is seduced by a rich young man and enjoys living with
him without realizing that she has done anything wrong—
but Mrs. Gaskell tries to remedy things midway by having
Ruth repent of her sin, once she learns it is a sin, and
become the Puritan that society decrees she should be.
The other women in the novel, Faith Benson, the servant
Sally, Jemima Bradshaw and her mother, express a wide
range of attitudes toward marriage that help to complicate
Mrs. Gaskell's fictional presentation of the effects of
motherhood on an unmarried girl.
Mrs. Gaskell recorded that she was very surprised
upon the publication of Ruth to find how many more women
than men rejected it out of hand. She says,
56
I never spoke much on the subject of the book before;
and I am surprised to find how many people— good kind
people— and women infinitely more than men, really &
earnestly disapprove of what I have said & express ^
that disapproval at considerable pain to themselves.
Certainly the very hypocrisy that Elizabeth Gaskell con
demned in the book was displayed by the men and women who
rejected it on moral rather than artistic grounds, for in
paying lip service to the sanctity of Victorian marriage,
they declined to view women as individuals and lumped
them together as a type. It is much easier to prescribe
codes of conduct for unknown persons than to deal directly
with real people in a specific situation, and in Ruth, the
heroine must measure up to the social expectations of an
ideal woman, rather than be accepted for herself in her
unique situation. It is the same clash between "propriety"
and "humanity" that occurs in Cranford, but with a re
directed emphasis; Mrs. Gaskell's purpose is not at all
humorous. According to Aina Rubenius,
The changed conditions of life were making new demands
on a woman's time and work, and a new concept of her
as an independent and responsible being was taking
shape. But old ideals often clash with new, and many
women struggled with the problem of conflicting loyal
ties. ("The Woman Question in Mrs. Gaskell's Life
and Works," p. 14)
Ms. Rubenius further sees an indication of Mrs. Gaskell's
own feminine sympathies in the emphasis she gives to men
and women in her fiction:
In her books, Mrs. Gaskell never discusses per se her
own views about the relative superiority of man or
57
woman, but even the most cursory reading reveals the
fact that most of her heroines are strong, equal to
a crisis, whereas her men are often weak, liable to
break up under heavy mental strain. (pp. 14-15)
This may seem to contradict the idea of feminine passivity
mentioned earlier, but it is not actually a departure from
that trait. It will be noticed that heroism is always
forced on Mrs. Gaskell's women, and they respond actively
only when the situation requires it, when a beloved is in
danger, as with Jem's arrest in Mary Barton, or when social
justice is threatened, as with the bank failure in Cran
ford, or when human need dictates, as in the epidemic at
the end of Ruth. Personally, however, her heroines always
prefer obscurity, and find their reward in the security of
home and the admiration of loved ones. They do not seek
public acclaim, feeling that their feminine place is in
the family circle.
Ruth reveals ideas about women consistent with Mrs.
Gaskell's earlier novels, but it is also a development of
these. Not only does she present the plight of the un
married mother, but the predicament of the married mother,
in Mrs. Bradshaw? the responsibilities of wifehood, in
Jemima's courtship; and the duties of motherhood, in Ruth
Hilton's raising of her child. Though the female charac
ters are uniformly represented as emotionally and physically
strong, with the exception of Ruth herself, they are all
reduced to a state of dependency at one time or another.
58
Mentally, they think of themselves as weaker than men;
their low self-esteem makes them ill at ease in learning
situations and encourages them to submit to the masculine
domination, amounting to tyranny in places, that exists in
the novel.
As the heroine, Ruth Hilton is especially puzzling,
for most of the action revolves around her. As a woman,
or more properly, a girl— she is only sixteen when she is
seduced— most readers find her too naive to be believable,
and too good to be real. When Ruth is called a "bad,
naughty girl . . . not a lady," by a child, Mrs. Gaskell
melodramatically writes, "And so, condemned alike by youth
and age, she stole with timid steps into the house" (Ruth,
p. 71). She does not begin to emerge as a personality
until she has become a mother and has had to assume her
social responsibilities without a husband to give her
child a name. Her greatest mistake, of course, is her
basic trust in a worthless man, and she is betrayed, in
the best tradition of domestic tragedy, by a man whose
virtue is inferior to hers. After young Bellingham's
mother (one of the many evil mother-figures in Mrs. Gas
kell 's fiction), comes to collect him and neatly thwarts
what she supposes to be the "improper character's" (Ruth's)
intention of stealing her darling boy, Mrs. Gaskell leaves
no doubt that Ruth's chances for honest rehabilitation in
society are nonexistent. The story of her redemption
59
through the Christian kindness of the dissenting minister,
Thurstan Benson, and his sister Faith, is of course a con
demnation of the inadequate and hypocritical social atti
tude toward fallen women, but it has been observed that
Mrs. Gaskell fatally weakened her case by portraying Ruth
as angelically good— her sin is more a technicality than
an intentional act of immorality— and by killing her at
the end of the story, with the justification that "it was
possible that the circumstances of her life, which were
known to all, might be made effective in this manner to
work conviction of many truths" (Ruth, p. 451). As Yvonne
ffrench says in Mrs. Gaskell (Denver: Alan Swallow, 194 9),
there is about Ruth "a passiveness which makes it nega
tive . . . the virtue with which Mrs. Gaskell sought to
clothe her hangs to-day a little lifeless, like drapery
upon a clay figure" (p. 52). Miriam Allott agrees with
this sentiment, and adds that
the author's infatuation with the emotional clich4
makes her treatment of Ruth almost indistinguishable
in its moral tone, from, say, Dickens's treatment of
Little Emily in David Copperfield. Her plotting is
certainly affected by this weakness. . . .12
Ruth's sexual ignorance and the contrived circumstances of
her seduction are generally admitted to be ruinous flaws
in a well-meant but badly executed book (Ganz, Elizabeth
Gaskell: The Artist in Conflict, pp. 107-12).
If it is within the peacemaking function of the
feminine character, or of a female writer's character, to
60
reconcile opposites, this was Mrs. Gaskell*s standard
operating procedure in Ruth as well as other social novels.
It is one thoroughly disliked by David Cecil:
Her emotional capacity is no less feminine than her
intellectual. She is not a powerful writer. She
could no more express the crude, the harsh or the
violent than she could speak in a bass voice. . . .
Every discord is resolvable to her; the most hardened
sinner has his soft s i d e .13
Such a conciliatory attitude may partially account for the
weakness of plot and characterization in Ruth. For Ruth
herself is at first passive; her way of dealing with real
ity is that of meek submission to the nearest authority
figure, and every other woman in the book follows suit at
one point or another, though this seems to have nothing
to do with their previously noted ability to act in a
crisis. The province of men is to change the world, and
that of women is to adjust to the changes by providing a
force of stability, of timeless reassurance, and a source
of nurturance for men and children. In short, every woman,
regardless of her state in life, is meant to act as a
mother. Elizabeth Gaskell herself calls attention to the
importance of the mother's function at the beginning of
the novel, when she remarks on Ruth1s own lack of a mother:
She was too young when her mother died to have re
ceived any cautions or words of advice respecting the
subject of a woman's life— if, indeed, wise parents
ever directly speak of what, in its depth and power,
cannot be put into words— which is a brooding spirit
with no definite shape or form that men should know
it, but which is there, and present before we have re
cognized and realized its existence. (Ruth, p. 43)
61
This mysterious language referring to "the" subject of a
woman's life is meant to surround the subjects of falling
in love and marrying with a significance beyond the fact,
and it pinpoints accurately the woman's raison d'etre in
the Victorian mind.
Somehow, a mother in Mrs. Gaskell's world has a
sacred function; only she can provide adequate protection
for a daughter against the evils of the world, and chiefly,
against sexual exploitation. The lack of a loving mother
or mother-substitute in Ruth spells ruin for the heroine;
Mrs. Mason is clearly unsatisfactory as a chaperone for
Ruth because of her lack of sympathy, and Mrs. Bellingham
is a dominant mother who does not want a daughter-in-law.
Rurh is only saved because she is adopted by a kindly
brother and sister who function in the novel as her sur
rogate parents. In this context, Faith Benson, the minis
ter's sister who does so much for Ruth, is offered as an
example of true maternalisrn; a woman does not have to be
married to exercise her natural mothering function.
In Ruth, then, the reader is presented with the
situation of the motherless female of marriageable age
whose kindness and naivete make her an innocent victim
for a rich, unscrupulous young man. What begins as a
fairy-tale romance ends in social ruin for the seduced
and abandoned Ruth. Her sexual ignorance, though un
believable in realistic terms, serves the plot well as
62
proof of Ruth's pristine character, and as an expression
of the myth that virgins knew nothing about the physical
aspects of marriage. Ruth learns a lot in a hurry, how
ever, and in her impending motherhood, the character under
goes a transformation, a deepening and strengthening into
womanly maturity. This is not accomplished without griefs,
of course, and Ruth's new family, Thurstan and Faith Benson
and their maid Sally, must teach her the proper values and
conduct, but her rapture upon hearing that she is to be a
mother expresses the proper reverence for life that Mrs.
Gaskell feels is inherently female. (Only one of her
mother-characters, Lizzie Leigh, ever deliberately tries
to get rid of a child, and she repents this mistake for
the rest of her life.) During the course of Ruth's preg
nancy, with her self-denials, her emotional ups and downs,
the reader sees her inwardly assume the character of the
widow she has been impersonating externally, and acting
with an emotional conviction that belies the seriousness
of the falsehood that has been told to preserve her social
status.
The novel is primarily the story of Ruth's redemp
tion, of course, and that redemption is wrought by the
growing selflessness she exhibits as she learns more and
more to live with and for others, and especially for her
child, whose good influence is not left up to the imagina
tion:
63
Everything does minister to love when its foundation
lies deep in a true heart, and it was with an ex
quisite pang of delight that, after a moment of vague
fear . . . she saw her child's bright face of welcome
as he threw open the door every afternoon on her re
turn home. (p. 208)
The ideal woman and mother become identified with the
Christian concept of charity, and Ruth becomes, like her
Biblical namesake, an influence for good on everyone around
her. Mrs. Gaskell suggests that motherhood, not marriage,
can transform, strengthen, and perfect a woman in the ac
complishment of her divinely ordained mission on earth.
For the single parent, the motivation is even stronger:
"Indeed, she did not think of herself at all, but of her
boy, and what she must learn in order to teach him ..."
(pp. 185-86). Even Faith Benson is altered by the presence
of Ruth's child:
Nature has intended her warm instincts to find vent
in a mother's duties; her heart had yearned after
children, and made her restless in her childless
state, without her well knowing why; but now, the
delight she experienced in tending, nursing, and con
triving for the little boy— even contriving to the
point of sacrificing many of her cherished whims—
made her happy, and satisfied, and peaceful. (p. 195)
Mrs. Gaskell borders dangerously on the simplistic, and
she completely disregards the father's function in the
nurturing process, or the idea of parental cooperation in
the raising of children (inapplicable in Ruth, to be sure),
but her sentiment seems real enough in the light of what
is known today about feminine psychology and biology. Ac
cording to Dr. Judith Bardwick, "The only way to achieve a
64
feminine sense of identity, if one has internalized the
general norms, is to succeed in the roles of wife, help
mate, and mother— and this takes years" (Psychology of
Woman, p. 189).
Mrs. Gaskell's women do internalize the general
norm, and to the extent that Ruth is denied the roles of
wife and helpmate, she must draw her feminine identity
from the final role; she must and does become a model
mother. Mrs. Gaskell does not create very many of these,
and in contrast with such mothers as Clare Kirkpatrick in
Wives and Daughters, or Sylvia Robson in Sylvia's Lovers,
or even Mrs. Bradshaw in Ruth, Ruth is outstanding. She
learns from experience to think for herself, and her recog
nition that Bellingham's offer of marriage, when it finally
comes, is a potential trap for her child and herself re
quiring the surrender of her hard-won individuality, is a
measure of her emotional and intellectual growth. Belling
ham would have treated her solely as a pretty ornament to
his household rather than as an equal; imperiously he says
to her, "I am come to marry you, Ruth; come what may, I
will have you" (p. 299). No woman is required to submit
to such arrogant dominance. Of course, Ruth's strength
does not come without sacrifice; gone is the youthful
ebullience, replaced by a consciousness of the complexity
of human relations and a sense of her own unworthiness in
having committed the unpardonable sin for a woman. She
tells her son, "You will hear me called the hardest names
that ever can be thrown at women . . . I did wrong . . .
in a way people never forget, never forgive" (p. 340).
Margaret Dalziel reminds readers of Victorian novels of
the conventional dictate regarding a heroine's virtue:
"Since female chastity was regarded not just as virtue but
as virtue itself, it followed that loss of it, whether
voluntary or not, was the worst disaster that could befall
a woman" (Popular Fiction One Hundred Years Ago, p. 96).
Neverthelss, the experience of motherhood and her
passionate concern for her child give Ruth the sense of
responsibility and strength to cast off her sin and take
her place as a respected member of the community. Through
the device of the hidden lie, Mrs. Gaskell is able to
examine the essential nature of goodness, not in a deeply
philosophical sense, but not superficially, either. Says
Ruth, "I may be pretty, but I know I am not good" (p. 18 6).
Her goodness, as Mrs. Gaskell shows, consists in such
little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love
as she selflessly performs. It is important to notice
what sort of a heroine Mrs. Gaskell has fashioned: a woman
good with children, kind, clever, meek, retiring, and above
all, passive— a sister to the heroine of the popular Vic
torian romance. Ruth is surely intelligent— she learns
Latin and mathematics in order to teach her child— but
this side of her nature is deliberately played down to
66
emphasize her domesticity. In discussing the female types
presented as heroines in mid-Victorian English fiction,
Patricia Thompson comments on this lack of scope in the
representation of women characters:
Miss Bella Wilfer behind a newspaper was one thing.
A wife who surpassed or even equalled her husband in
intellectual capacity quite another. She is not to
be found in Dickens. Nor indeed among any of Trol
lope ' s heroines, quick-witted though they are as a
family. And yet, outside of fiction, there were
plenty of women who, without any feminist sympathies,
were fully aware of their mental superiority to men
in their circle. (The Victorian Heroine, p. 104)
Such a woman is not to be found in a Gaskell novel, even
without a husband to compete with. In fact, Mrs. Gaskell
had no high opinion of feminine intelligence, as indicated
in a letter she wrote in October 1856:
. . . I would not trust a mouse to a woman if a man's
judgment was to be had. Women have no judgment.
They've tact, and sensitiveness and genius, and hun
dreds of fine and lovely qualities, but are at best
angelic geese as to matters requiring serious and
long scientific consideration. I'm not a friend of
Female Medical Education. (Chappie and Pollard, p. 419)
A character in Ruth much closer to the average Vic
torian young women is Jemima Bradshaw, the marriageable
daughter of a wealthy Christian businessman. Unlike the
saintly Ruth, Jemima is recognizably human: she loses her
temper occasionally, has periods of moodiness, and jealousy,
and indulges herself in unchristian thoughts. Just as Ruth
once had, Jemima longs for romance and gaiety in her life.
Her mother has little influence over her or anyone else,
for that matter, and Jemima tyrannized by her father, who
67
controls the whole family, refuses to surrender her indi
viduality to make an approved marriage. In her obstinate
behavior, and in her tormented and tormenting interviews
with Walter Farquhar, the reader perceives Mrs. Gaskell's
psychological insight into the heart of a young girl.
Jemima, like other young ladies of her type, pines for her
lover when he is away from her, much as do Mary Barton and
the early Ruth Hilton, but what makes her impressive is
her own awareness of what she is doing, and her unwilling
ness to commit herself completely and unselfishly to a
relationship on someone else's terms:
For an instant she planned ,to become^ all and to be all
he could wish her; to change her very nature for him.
And then a great gush of pride came over her, and she
set her teeth tight together, and determined that he
should either love her as she was or not at all. Un
less he could take her with all her faults, she would
not care for his regard; "love" was too noble a word
to call such cold, calculating feeling as his must be,
who went about with a pattern idea in his mind, trying
to find a wife to match. Besides, there was something
degrading, Jemima thought, in trying to alter herself
to gain the love of any human creature. (p. 217)
Often, Mrs. Gaskell's heroines have an initial con
cept of men as cold and calculating, and they continually
stall their lovers on one flimsy pretext or another because
they are not ready to abandon the security of a parent or
parents' love for an unproven quantity. Hence, marriages
are generally delayed, as in North and South or Wives and
Daughters, and may even be permanently postponed, as in
"A Dark Night's Work," or "Half a Lifetime Ago," and the
68
only reason given is family commitment. Social propriety
allows the woman to control the situation as long as it
does not become explicitly sexual, but when a Jemima Brad
shaw or Margaret Hale or Molly Gibson is approached by a
man, she becomes confused and withdraws from the relation
ship, or else contains it within safe boundaries. Though
such behavior is unrealistic by modern standards, it was
apparently very correct for Victorian women: Mary Barton
does not realize that she loves Jem until she has refused
him; Margaret Hale refuses to admit that she is attracted
to John Thornton and affirms it anyway by the violence of
her denial; and Molly Gibson watches the man she loves
make love to her stepsister while maintaining that her
relationship with Roger Hamley is in the "light of brother
ly intimacy" alone (Wives and Daughters, p. 675). And the
more that Jemima Bradshaw insists that Mr. Farquhar is
nothing to her, the more miserable she becomes:
She saw that she had lost her place as the first object
in Mr. Farquhar's eyes— a position she had hardly
cared for while she was secure in the enjoyment of it;
but the charm of it was now redoubled in her acute
sense of how she had forfeited it by her own doing,
and her own fault. (Ruth, p. 242)
There is a Richardsonian streak in Mrs. Gaskell; her por
traits of feminine consciousness always leave the erotic
strictly alone while managing subtly to suggest it. One
has the impression that far more than with Richardson's
young ladies, however, Mrs. Gaskell's are reticent about
69
men because they are studiously trying to be, because it
is decorous and correct for a marriageable woman to wait
for her parents to take the initiative or at least express
their approval before a commitment is made. The cardinal
rule governing all romantic situations was "that a woman
did not allow herself to love till she knew she was be
loved" (Dalziel, p. 97).
Mrs. Gaskell goes one step further in her represen
tation of feminine psychology, however. When Jemima Brad
shaw's father dictates that she will marry the man she
really loves, she rejects Mr. Farquhar's suit as an ex
pression of outrage at the masculine patronage shown her.
Her father tells Jemima that she should be honored that
Mr. Farquhar would consent to marry her.
"Consent to marry me!" repeated Jemima, in a low
tone of brooding indignation; were those the terms
upon which her rich woman's heart was to be given,
with a calm consent of acquiescent acceptance, but
a little above resignation on the part of the re
ceiver? (pp. 218-19)
One sees the contrast between supposed masculine and femi
nine viewpoints in the sentiment attributed to the suitor
in question; Mr. Farquhar
wondered how it was that Jemima could not see how
grand a life might be, whose every action was shaped
in obedience to some eternal law; instead of which,
he was afraid she rebelled against every law, and
Weis only guided by impulse. Mr. Farquhar had been
taught to dread impulses as promptings of the devil.
(p. 214)
Impulsive or not, feminine or not, Jemima wants to be
wanted for herself, and not because she is a business com
modity. On the other hand, she holds sacred her daughterly
obligation to obey her father in all things, even though
it means heartsickness for herself. Even at the end of
the novel, she falls into the pattern of childish obedience
when she says to Thurstan Benson, "Papa says I must not go
to your house— I suppose it's right to obey him?" (p. 361),
and the minister, another authority figure, does not advise
Jemima to defy her parent, even though his command is
plainly unreasonable. Incapable of handling the romantic
situation, Jemima finally becomes emotionally as well as
physically ill, one being a sign of the other, and with
draws from all relationships. Victorian fiction abounds
in lovesick invalids of one sort or another, but Mrs. Gas-
kell's do not die of the malady; they are too robust for
that. The fact that filial obedience is so important to
her young women, however, suggests that marriage for them
may turn out to be simply a transfer of authority from
father to husband and a continuation of the same passive
submission to masculine control.
Certainly this was the commonplace female portrait
in the novels of Mrs. Gaskell's male contemporaries as
well, and it reflected the general social emphasis on mar
riage as the natural feminine role. In The Way of All
Women (New York: Putnam, 1970), Dr. M. Esther Harding
comments on the pattern marriages common in Victorian
71
society. In typical marriages of the sort represented by
Mrs. Gaskell,
The pattern of the relation between father and daughter
is carried on. The daughter-wife expects to be petted
and humored. The father-husband gives security and
expects in return to keep all decisions in his own
hands, while having a devoted but impossible child
about the house. . . . This type of marriage, though
still common, was perhaps the most usual up to the
middle of the nineteenth century. It reflected the
extreme childishness of women on the individual side
and of men on the side of relationship, which the whole
organization of society fostered. Dickens— and indeed
most of the novelists of his period— described it as
the ideal marriage. . . . (pp. 13 6-37)
For Mrs. Gaskell, it was never the ideal marriage, and one
sees in her novels an increasingly serious examination of
the premises on which marriages are based.
One marriage in Ruth in which the wife's blind obe
dience is taken for granted is that of Jemima's parents.
Her mother grumbles occasionally, but ultimately she defers
to her lord and master:
Mrs. Bradshaw murmured faintly at her husband when his
back was turned; but if his voice was heard, or his
footsteps sounded in the distance, she was mute, and
hurried her children into the attitude or action most
pleasing to their father. (p. 209)
The only instance of opposition to her husband's authority
is in the matter of her son's embezzlement, when Mr. Brad
shaw disowns the boy. This is unusual behavior for Mrs.
Bradshaw not only because of her past history of compli
ance, but because she had earlier pleaded with her daughter
to submit graciously in the quarrel over Jemima's engage
ment. When it comes, however, Mrs. Bradshaw's outburst is
72
so hysterical as to invalidate her curses and threats to
leave her husband. She is like other Gaskell mothers in
this respect, and one thinks immediately of the uncon
trolled emotionalism of Mrs. Wilson or Mrs. Carson in Mary
Barton, or of Mrs. Hale in North and South, or of Mrs.
Robson in Sylvia1s Lovers: since none of these women has
ever acted for herself, there is no rational recourse for
them in times of stress.
The marital role of parents affects their children's
development in Ruth and other novels as well. As a husband
and father, Mr. Bradshaw is a tyrant, and he is not Mrs.
Gaskell's only example; the disastrous influence of the
Reverend Mr. Jenkyns in Cranford has already been noted.
Mrs. Gaskell does not have any real suggestions to offer
toward resolving the conflicts that arise between parents
and children, or between husband and wife, except the well-
worn admonition toward charitable tolerance of one another's
shortcomings. She does not disguise those shortcomings,
however, and in her description of Squire Hamley in Wives
and Daughters is a portrait of what may be called the
typical, though not the only, domineering father in her
novels and stories:
As regarded his position as head of the oldest family
in three counties, his pride was invincible; as regarded
himself personally,— ill at ease in the society of his
equals, deficient in manners, and in education— his
morbid sensitiveness was too sore and too self-conscious
to be called humility. (p. 290)
73
Such an attitude on the part of the head of a household
could not help but affect the women inhabitants of his
domain. A better balanced family group in Ruth is the
Benson household. After the minister saves Ruth from at
tempting suicide, he and his sister take her into the
family, and Ruth gives to them the filial obedience of a
daughter. Mr. and Miss Benson are model parents in com
parison to the Bradshaws, who live neither in harmony with
one another nor with their children. A major difference
is that Thurstan Benson refuses to order anyone to act;
his suggestions are based on reason, and he trusts the in
telligence of his women to see that. In turn, he is will
ing to accept their suggestions in a serious light. Modest,
humane, kindly, Christian in the best sense of the word,
and above all, rational, Thurstan Benson is one of Mrs.
Gaskell's most idealized father figures, and one of her
memorable male characterizations.
There are two other influential members in the Ben
son family. The first of these is Sally, "a parish clerk's
daughter," who is one of Mrs. Gaskell's best portrayals of
the humorously dictatorial servant. More masculine and
realistic in her outlook and manner than feminine, she
provides comic relief from the pathetic scenes in Ruth, and
her account of a marriage proposal ranks with the antics
of Cranford for sheer enjoyment. Yet Sally is a woman, and
she responds to the feminine need to provide nurturance.
Firmly opposed to children ("I never could abide them
things" [p. 137]), she responds magnificently when she
is needed to mother Ruth's child. She has adopted the
Bensons, and she adopts Ruth and Leonard as well. It is
understandable that Sally has not married, however, for
if there is one thing she is not, it is docile; she liter
ally frightens men away by her energy and lack of senti
ment. In her own rough but well-meaning way, she attempts
to infuse her own vitality into Ruth. The other spinster
in the family is docile, however, though not obnoxiously
so. Though Faith Benson can give in to the temptation
to tell a lie for a good cause, in this instance, the con
cealment of Leonard's illegitimacy, and can become indig
nant enough to compel her brother's attention, she always
yields in the end to his superior authority., As a single
lady living under his protection (she has rejected a
marriage proposal to remain with Thurstan), she does all
the charitable things that single ladies are supposed to
do; beyond this, the major care of her life is for her
brother, and later, for Ruth and Leonard. As a surrogate
mother, she sets the example of patience for Ruth to follow.
The importance of social influences on the develop
ment of feminine character becomes evident in a comparison
of the two young girls in Ruth. Ruth and Jemima are close
to one another in age, but they differ markedly in person
ality. Orphaned when very young, Ruth has grown up a quiet,
75
serious, love-starved child, while Jemima, secure in her
family setting, is much more sure of herself, and hense
is more self-indulgent. Ruth is immediately identified as
the stereotyped heroine: pale, innocent, utterly selfless
and completely honest, she dies in the service of her un
worthy lover, and as Sally says, "Few has been as good and
gentle as she was in their lives" (p. 447). But Mrs. Gas
kell was also sensitive to the lively personality of a
Jemima, though to be sure, the character occupies a minor
place in the novel. Jemima's struggle to conquer her pride
is genuine, and her feeling that "somehow I can always to
things against a person's wishes more easily when I am on
good terms with them" (p. 382) is an unusual twist on the
common notion that the female can manipulate people easily.
When both girls face love crises, they are able to
act in spite of grief, but it is noteworthy that Ruth needs
to acquire a family before she develops the moral courage
to recognize and resist evil. Jemima, of course, has al
ways been surrounded by her family, but the sympathetic
love and domestic unity of the Bensons is not found among
the Bradshaws. Then, too, Ruth is a mother, with her
child's future to think of rather than her own. Mrs. Gas
kell more than hints that this is the real source of Ruth's
strength:
Her whole heart was in her boy. She often feared that
she loved him too much— more than God himself— yet she
76
could not bear to pray to have her love for her child
lessened. (p. 207)
For Ruth, "Everything does minister to love when its founda
tion lies deep in a true heart" (p. 208).
Mrs. Gaskell helps to destroy the myth that women
are frail, emotional creatures who must be sheltered like
household plants at the same time as she reinforces their
dependence on men. This statement may seem contradictory,
but one of the strongest impressions one gets from reading
Mrs. Gaskell's fiction is that she does not limit her view
of feminine, or human, nature to one of dominance or sub
mission. She was aware of the continuing change in human
relationships, and the ability of one person to be both
active and passive at different times and in different
situations, and she incorporates this in her fiction. In
her later novels, she was able to represent the shifts much
more subtly and more convincingly, and her later women
characters are more complicated and more interesting.
77
Notes to Chapter One
^(New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 100.
2
The Second Sex (New York, Bantam, 1961), pp. 261-62.
3
A Vindication of the Rights of Women, ch. iv, rpt.
in Women's Liberation and Literature, ed. Elaine Showalter
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 15.
4
See, for example, Margaret Dalziel, Popular Fiction
One Hundred Years Ago (London: Cohen & West, 1957); E. M.
Delafield, Ladies and Gentlemen in Victorian Fiction (Lon
don: Hogarth Press, 1937); Marjorie Bald, Women Writers
of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Russell & Russell,
1963); Hazel Mews, Frail Vessels (London: Athlone Press,
1969); Lucy Poate Stebbins, A Victorian Album (New York:
Columbia University Press, 194 6). While the major novel
ists of the nineteenth century generally managed to indi
vidualize their heroines enough to avoid pure stereotypy,
characters like Thackeray's Amelia Sedley, intended to
satirize a type, are closely related to the heroines of
popular romances by such notables as Charlotte Yonge, Mrs.
Wood, Mrs. Trollope, Mrs. Crowe, Lady Charlotte Bury, and
a host of others.
5
The Victorian Heroine. A Changing Ideal. 1837-
1873 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 167.
g
"Parent-Child Relations and Parental Personality
in Relation to Young Children's Sex-Role Preferences,"
Child Development, 34 (3): 689-707; quoted in Bardwick, Psy
chology of Women, p. 140.
^Ruth (London: J. M. Dent, 1967), p. 371. All sub
sequent citations are from this edition.
O
"Women Without Men at Cranford," Essays in Criti
cism, 13 (1963), 133.
^Cranford (1906; rpt. London: J. M. Dent, 1969),
p. 23. All subsequent citations are from this edition.
78
■^"Mrs. Gaskell and the World of Cranford," Review
of English Literature, 6 (1965), 72.
■^Letter to Anna Jameson, March 7, 18[53], in The
Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chappie and Arthur
Pollard (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1967), p. 226.
12
Elizabeth Gaskell (London: Longmans, Green & Co.,
1960), p. 22.
13
Early Victorian Novelists (New York: Bobbs^Merrill,
1935), p. 210.
CHAPTER TWO
Throughout her writing career, Mrs. Gaskell never
completely lost her concern for social appearances in her
fiction and for the propriety of her feminine characters'
actions and feelings. Though she could mock the excessive
ness of such preoccupations in Cranford, she was very much
a product of her century in restricting her own investiga
tion of feminine emotionalism to a sphere both socially
and morally acceptable. There are serious limitations in
the representation of emotions in her early heroines; in
the instantaneous reformations of both Mary Barton and
Ruth Hilton, or the passive naivete of Miss Matty Jenkyns,
there is no natural growth because the author declines to
let the reader see her heroines on any level but that of
the stereotyped ingenue, or good spinster, even in her
least admirable moments. When she raised the question of
artistic objectivity with Mrs. Gaskell, Charlotte BrontS
suggested another possible reason besides the custom of
the period for Mrs. Gaskell's reluctance to make her hero
ines anything less than nearly perfect:
. . . A thought strikes me. Do you, who have so many
friends,— so large a circle of acquaintance,— find it
easy, when you sit down to write, to isolate yourself
from all those ties, and their sweet associations, so
79
80
as to be your own woman, uninfluenced or swayed by the
consciousness of how your work may affect other minds;
what blame or what sympathy it may call forth? Does
no luminous cloud ever come between you and the severe
Truth, as you know it in your own secret and clear-
seeing soul? In a word, are you never tempted to make
your characters more amiable than the Life, by the
inclination to assimilate your thoughts to the thoughts
of those who always feel kindly, but sometimes fail to
see justly? Don’t answer the question; it is not in
tended to be answered. . . .1
Mrs. Gaskell did, of course, answer the question in
her writing, and as Charlotte Brontfi pointed out, she did
frequently try to ameliorate her characters and situations
to point a moral. What may be regarded as a literary fail
ure in the author herself, however, is nonetheless repre
sentative of the frame of reference from which she wrote.
It is not that she failed to see as justly, but that she
saw differently from Miss BrontS that bothers many of her
readers. The "severe Truth" is elusive or relative in
Mrs. Gaskell’s fiction because it is a truth of social
relations, and even her preoccupation with distortions of
fact— the motif of the ill-fated lie occurs again and
again in her stories— suggests not only a moral concern
for strict veracity, but a recognition that lying hinders
her characters from knowing, understanding, and loving one
another honestly. In the early novels, her techniques
were crude, and the manipulation of events for the calcu
lated, happy ending is noticeable. Because social pro
priety or the observance of amenities is an easy way of
81
simulating, on the surface at least, the harmony and re
latedness that is always a goal in her novels, Mrs. Gaskell
relied heavily on role-related, external manners or customs
to suggest that harmony, and did not, at first, concern
herself with individual problems of characterization that
inevitably belie surface appearances. What mattered for
her was that characters become good, not how they achieve
that goodness; that they learn to feel the appropriate
emotion, not that they be able to feel it. But though she
was optimistic by nature, she was not stupid, and she real
ized that human nature is not easily changed. Her later
novels are far less idealistic in conception, and her
ambitions for her characters, especially her women, are
far less grandiose. It is important to note, however,
that her goal remained constant: she used her art to por
tray the disastrous social effects, both for individuals
and groups, of isolation from human relationships and the
human community. Insofar as she saw her characters as
part of a community, she emphasized those socially related
traits of integration and responsibility for others that
create social harmony. With respect to women, her concern,
at first, was less with the individual than with the group,
though as she gained skill, she developed the ability to
represent in individual characters the social ills that
she perceived around her. For all of the surface tran
quillity, however, her fiction always reflects the truth
82
that personal or social harmony requires self-sacrifice,
and as the social group expected to do the most sacrific
ing, women suffer most in her novels.
Taken as a group, the novels portray women as cultur
ally disadvantaged, and certainly as socially subservient.
For all their frail appearance, they can be as strong or
stronger than men— as is dramatically demonstrated in
"Right At Last," Lois the Witch," Ruth, or "A Dark Night's
Work," but they do not get any recognition for it; there
are as many unhappy as happy conclusions in Mrs. Gaskell's
fiction. Those heroines, like Mary Barton or Molly Gibson,
who are fortunate enough to marry their lovers must endure
a good deal of suffering beforehand. And they must suffer
in silence. It is one thing for a stalwart, masculine
figure like Daniel Robson to complain loudly of an attack
of the gout, or for Henry Bellingham to be in delicate
health; a Jemima Bradshaw is considered vain and self-
centered when she pouts and is hard to please, while Ruth
Hilton must endure illness, isolation, and unmarried
motherhood alone. It is simply not expected that women
will complain.
By the same token, Mrs. Gaskell is careful of her
own complaints. What she gives with one hand— strong,
admirable women like Margaret Hale— she takes away with
the other; they are subdued by stronger, more upright men
like John Thornton. A good woman's place is considered
to be not next to, but slightly below that of a good man,
in marriage. Yet a basic dissatisfaction with marriage-as-
it-is as opposed to the social ideal of marriage comes out
in Mrs. Gaskell's portrayals of unhappy wedded life; these
are far more frequent than happy ones. The subordination
of wives to husbands does not automatically promote hap
piness; in fact, it frequently destroys it, as women sink
farther and farther into a mire of petty frustrations,
while the men go on to socially rewarding occupations. It
is significant that women's problems in Mrs. Gaskell's
fiction are always of a personal, emotional nature, while
masculine difficulties are most often centered on intellec
tual or business problems.
The matter of Mrs. Gaskell's ability to convey ob
jective truth had been raised in relation to all of her
early novels except Cranford; W. R. Greg, among others,
2
had decried her obvious bias toward labor in Mary Barton
and the adverse public reaction to Ruth was recorded by
3
Mrs. Gaskell herself. When she came to deal with the
industrial conditions in northern England again in North
and South (September 18 54), she was still "fence-sitting"
4
in her ideas, to use Arnold Kettle's phrase, and this
may have affected the reception of the novel. H. P. Col
lins, for instance, considers Margaret Hale a "quite
brilliant heroine," but faults the book for its failure
to come to a point intellectually ("The Naked Sensibility,"
84
p. 66). Since Mrs. Gaskell's handling of character de
pended on her social purpose in this roman a these, it is
well to consider that purpose before looking at Margaret
Hale as a representative heroine.
Though North and South was ostensibly an attempt
to present the grim economic picture of manufacturing
England at mid-century from the viewpoint of management
as well as labor, and thus correct for the bias against
management in Mary Barton , Mrs. Gaskell conceived the
novel as the story of one person, Margaret Hale, and
"chose to treat her theme in a manner which suggests both
a decline in her emotional commitment to social justice
and an increase in her artistic proficiency" (Ganz, Eliza
beth Gaskell: The Artist in Conflict, pp. 79-80). Her
discomfort at handling social issues in theoretical terms
has been noted above; the sympathetic Christian sensibil
ities which led her to favor good characters or moral posi
tions unfailingly led to the structural ruin of Mary Barton,
Ruth, and other novels by overly extended, melodramatic
conclucions. Yvone ffrench calls North and South "the last
of Mrs. Gaskell's attempts to offer social problems to the
world," and feels that "the interest of human relation
ships, the clash of wills and the perversities of character
are matters which come more readily to her genius than the
efforts at mediation which compassion and indignation had
formerly aroused" (Mrs. Gaskell, p. 59). Edgar Wright
85
calls attention to Mrs. Gaskell's own statement that recon
ciling multiple viewpoints within herself, or organizing
her several "me's," proved difficult, and suggests that
although the social novels (Mary Barton, Ruth, North and
South) "had been used to carry her protests and describe
realities, incidentally they had released and developed
her powers to handle the long novel" to the point where
she could concentrate exclusively on the human problems
which absorbed her interest more than social criticism
(Mrs. Gaskell; The Basis for Reassessment, pp. 144-45).
Because "romantic love plays an important part in
reconciling the ways of master and workman, of North and
South, of man and woman," the novel is "in many ways a
broader, more coherent, more balanced and temperate ex
ploration of contrasting views on social issues than Mary
Barton" (Ganz, p. 82). Mrs. Gaskell is deliberately more
restrained and more objective in this novel because of the
change in her focus, and criticism, such as David Cecil's,
misses the point completely:
It would have been impossible for her if she had tried,
to have found a subject less suited to her talents.
It was neither domestic nor pastoral, it gave scope
neither to the humorous, the pathetic nor the charming.
Further, it entailed an understanding of economics and
history wholly outside the range of her Victorian
feminine intellect. And the only emotions it could
involve were masculine and violent ones. (Early Vic
torian Novelists, p. 245)
Rather than failing to "keep to her proper sphere," Mrs.
86
Gaskell had finally found a way to suit her subject to her
own talents. At the risk of being redundant, it may be
said that
In North and South Mrs. Gaskell has finally decided
that a novel must be, primarily, not about things but
about people, not just about people but about persons.
Before this novel (Cranford always excepted) she had
been interested mainly in individuals as they were
affected by social and economic forces . . . but she
has now found that what one person means to another
is the novel's supreme concern. (Pollard, Mrs. Gaskell:
Novelist and Biographer, p. 138)
Mrs. Gaskell's working title for the novel, "Mar
garet Hale," reflects her personal focus better than the
final one supplied by Charles Dickens, in whose Household
Words it was first serialized. For Margaret is the single
character who links all the other people, events, and rela
tionships in the novel, and draws together the "three areas
of interest" which Arthur Pollard sees as unifying the
plot: "First, the association of both father and daughter,
Mr. Hale and Margaret, with the manufacturer John Thornton;
secondly, Margaret's acquaintance with Bessy Higgins and
her millhand father Nicholas Higgins; and. thirdly, Mrs.
Hale's illness and her longing to see her son Frederick
once again" (Pollard, pp. 114-15) .
The linking of the public and private elements of
the plot by a romantic love story does tend to obscure the
former and masks the social impact of the latter, as was
noted by the Blackwood's reviewer, who deplored that "the
story gradually slides off the public topic to pursue a
87
course of its own" (quoted in Ganz, p. 102). If Mrs. Gas
kell could not convincingly defend the way of life and
values represented by the manufacturing north against the
nostalgic appeal of the rural south, or argue the position
of management as appealingly as that of labor, she did
exhibit increased skill in depicting the personal elements
of the romantic conflict of her heroine.
Margaret Hale is intellectually and emotionally far
stronger than Mrs. Gaskell's earlier heroines, but she is
represented within the same social setting of family and
close friendships as Mary Barton and Ruth. The reader's
initial impression of her, therefore, is in the role of
obedient daughter, and it is not until the minister, Mr.
Hale, has renounced his living because of religious doubts,
and has moved his wife and daughter to the northern city
of Milton that Margaret is seen outside the protective
circle of the family. From the opening scene of the novel,
however, where Margaret, a "tall, stately girl of eighteen"
(North and South, p. 38), appears in mourning dress against
the festive atmosphere of her cousin's approaching wedding,
Mrs. Gaskell takes pains to set her apart from all the
other women in the novel. While, as Martin Dodsworth
notes in the Introduction to the Penguin edition of North
and South, the novel "starts three times— in Harley Street,
in Helstone, and in Milton— and only really gets under way
at the third attempt," and is very reminiscent of Charlotte
88
BrontS's novels, which start "at some distances in time
and place from the main sequence of action" (pp. 12-13),
the fact that North and South begins and ends in the same
place, Harley Street, though the setting is really Northern
Milton, underlines the personal growth of the heroine dur
ing the novel: the Margaret Hale who returns to her aunt1s
house is a woman, while the one who left: "... so glad
I am going home, to be at hand to comfort him [her father]
and mamma" (p. 47), was a child.
Of all the women characters, Margaret alone develops
as a result of her experiences. Mrs. Gaskell surrounds her
with feminine stereotypes from the outset: the silken-
curled Titania in white muslin and blue ribbon who is her
cousin Edith, her aunt Shaw, who married for convenience
rather than for love and would "moan and complain in her
soft manner, all the time she was in reality doing just
what she liked" (p. 44), and the other gossips who partici
pate in the "ladies' business" of "playing with shawls"
(p. 41). Margaret does not belong to this frivolous world,
though she has been raised in it, and the novel, which is
a Bildungsroman, chronicles her discovery of the world she
does belong to. On her resistance to and final acceptance
of her feminine nature hinges the romantic conflict of the
book, and by association, the conflicts of north and south,
of labor and management.
Hazel Mews sees Margaret Hale as a development of
Jemima Bradshaw in Ruth because she is able to think for
herself: "she has beauty but she has no submission to men
of her own age" (Frail Vessels, p. 88). Moreover, she is
socially reserved; Arnold Kettle feels that her sympathy
with the workers of Milton, the sympathy that is osten
sibly behind her objection to John Thornton and all that
he stands for, "though perfectly genuine, is essentially
aristocratic or at least paternalist in quality" (in Ford,
p. 183). Margaret's reluctance to become personally in
volved in the labor dispute except in a critical capacity
is hardly surprising; an active role like Florence Night
ingale's was hardly within the socially approved dictates
of Victorian feminine behavior, but within the bounds of
middle-class respectability she set for Margaret, Mrs.
Gaskell emphasizes the "depth and complexity" (Pollard,
p. 13 7) of her character. Though she was a family friend
of the Nightingales', Mrs. Gaskell never portrayed any of
her women as similar to Florence in independence of spirit.
In her fiction, the woman's function is always to marry
and produce children, and even a very self-determined
heroine like Margaret Hale finds her life empty without
a lover.
In noting the "bolder conception" of Margaret as a
character, Margaret Ganz suggests
that Charlotte BrontS's more emancipated view of
women's role in society influenced Mrs. Gaskell's
90
conception of her heroine's behavior in a romantic
situation (and indeed in her role as a social critic)
. . . [since] Mrs. Gaskell admired not only Charlotte's
writings but her character as eloquent a testimony to
feminine potentialities as her art. (Ganz, p. 79)
Yvonne ffrench sees Margaret Hale as "a heroine on the
classic scale, defiant, icy, melting by turns, who measures
the world by her own lofty standards, and understands no
other yardstick" (Mrs. Gaskell, p. 61).
As in other Gaskell tales, such as Cranford and
"A Dark Night's Work," the heroine's close relationship
with her father is at once a source of emotional strength
and a hindrance to womanly maturation. Temperamentally,
Margaret is her father's daughter: "Margaret was more like
him than like her mother" (North and South, p. 48), and
finds it difficult sometimes to be docile with her dull,
ill-tempered, self-indulgent mother, "who is dissatisfied
with her confined life but equally reluctant to change her
ways" (Ganz, p. 84). Mrs. Gaskell makes much of the con
trast between the mother and daughter here as well as in
other novels, and the later addition of another mother
and daughter pair in Mrs. Thornton and Fanny helps to re
inforce the false pride which Mrs. Gaskell attributes to
the mothers. Margaret is patient where her mother is
irritable, and sweet where the latter is cross. Though
Mrs. Gaskell later modified her portrait of Mrs. Hale by
introducing the episode of the banished son as an explana
tion of her anxiety, and by underplaying Mr. Hale's real
91
need to leave the ministry in the first place, the charac
ter bears no comparison to her outstanding daughter, and
indeed, she does not really understand Margaret.
Margaret and her father delight in long walks and
scholarly pursuits, while Mrs. Hale longs only for the
empty glitter of her sister's life in Harley Street. The
marital incompatibility of Mr. and Mrs. Hale is a minor
theme which Mrs. Gaskell keeps constantly before the reader,
as well as the subject of marriage itself, and the ideal
marital relationship; a point is early made of the fact
that Mrs. Hale had supposedly married "for love" (p. 46),
and should therefore be blissfully happy. But Mr. and Mrs.
Hale do not communicate intimately with one another; in
stead, both look to the daughter or to the maid for com
panionship and understanding. It is Margaret upon whom
the ex-cleric relies to tell his wife that they must leave
their idyllic life in southern Helstone for the confinement
and dreariness of a northern manufacturing town, and she is
equal to the task of simultaneously comforting her mother
and reassuring her father. In short, she is the perfect
daughter. Her rejection of a marriage proposal, though a
sound decision, causes her anxiety because she does not
want to see herself as anyone but a daughter:
In the first place, Margaret felt guilty and ashamed
of having grown so much into a woman as to be thought
of in marriage; and secondly, she did not know if her
father might not be displeased that she had taken upon
herself to decline Mr. Lennox's proposal. (p. 65)
92
The emphasis on family relationships found in Mrs.
Gaskell's writing has been regarded as one of the basic
qualities of Victorianism at its best; "at no period,
surely, was that bond of family regard and family duty so
5
vividly put before the world." In portraying the effects
of such relationships on her women characters, however,
Mrs. Gaskell also showed how much families "proved a real
drag on women's lives" (Haldane, p. 7). For Margaret Hale,
beautiful and self-confident as she is within the family
circle, has had little experience of the world, and even
less of men, as soon becomes evident. She resents Mr.
Henry Lennox's flattery ("Margaret did not quite like this
speech; she winced away from it . . ." [p. 42]), as she
resists every recognition of sexuality in herself or in
others as base and degrading. When Lennox proposes, she
immediately wishes herself "back with her mother— her
father," but then she recovers her "strong pride" and feels
assured that she has the power to "put an end to" anything
Lennox might try to do or say "with her high maidenly dig
nity" (pp. 60, 61). Margaret tells Lennox, "I don't like
to be spoken to as you have been doing," (p. 61) and her
final attitude toward his is one of "slight disdain (p. 62) .
Because Margaret is so firmly committed to her parents'
service, Mrs. Gaskell has to remove them physically from
the scene before the daughter is free to form emotional
relationships on a mature level. She repeats the formula
of Mary Barton, with the difference that Margaret never
imagines, as Mary does, and as Sylvia Robson or Cynthia
Kirkpatrick later do, that she can live a life of her own.
Margaret's primary emotional need is to feel herself needed
by her parents, which is of course an ego defense. Mrs.
Gaskell undoubtedly overemphasizes "maidenly dignity" as
a standard excuse for Margaret's behavior, but the reader
sees beyond this Victorian convention, and beyond Margaret's
self-deception.
In her encounters with the manufacturer John Thorn
ton, Margaret studiously resists all the sexual and roman
tic possibilities of the relationship. The male character
with whom she is paired represents the ideological opposite
to her theoretical, Christian attitude toward labor prob
lems, but the sexual conflict that underlies their clashes
is far more important in the development of Margaret as a
character. It should be noted that though David Cecil
criticized Mrs. Gaskell's male characters as totally uncon
vincing— "But the submissive, super-feminine character of
the Victorian woman impeded her view of them [men], even
in so far as they did come within her line of vision,"
(Cecil, p. 219)— she has also been praised for her "fine
psychological insight" in the delineation of the self-made,
nouveau riche hero of North and South. John Thornton
balances Margaret's forcefulness with a quiet reserve of
his own, and to the extent that the hero of a Victorian
94
woman-authored romance reflects involuntarily "woman's
position in society, her relations toward the other sex
and the intellectual development of women" (Van Middendorp,
p. 17), he is sufficiently sensitive to Margaret's patron
age to be hurt by it, and stubborn enough to persist in
his efforts to win her, which, according to romantic con
vention, is what she should want.
But Margaret is negative in her responses to Thorn
ton. Even when she rushes out impulsively to defend him
against a mob of rioting laborers after she has taunted
him into confronting them, she will not face her true feel
ings about him. The vehemence of her resistance is a clue
that she has deluded herself into believing she would have
acted in the same way were anyone else involved. When Mar
garet hears it suggested that she might have defended
Thornton because she is in love with him, she weeps "scald
ing tears," and laments:
0 how low I am fallen that they should say that of me!
1 could not have been so brave for anyone else, just
because he was so utterly indifferent to me— if, in
deed, I do not positively dislike him. . . . I would
do it again, let who will say what they like of me.
If I saved one blow, one cruel, angry action that
might otherwise have been committed, I did a woman's
work. Let them insult my maiden pride as they will—
I walk pure before God! (North and South, p. 247)
Of course, Thornton is not indifferent; he proposes to Mar
garet five pages later, to her utter astonishment. Though
Margaret Ganz is critical of what she calls Mrs. Gaskell's
lack of "psychological subtlety" in the working out of her
heroine's romance, she concedes that "Margaret's reluctance
in her 'maiden pride' . . . to countenance for a while
this romantic motive for her dramatic interference actually
enhances the reality of her unconscious impulses" (Ganz,
p. 100). Ms. Ganz believes, however, that Mrs. Gaskell's
emphasis on the morality of Margaret's position in telling
the lie and concealing it, and the melodramatic events
that bring about her humiliation before Thornton "over
shadow more complex psychological considerations; the real
ities of romantic passion cannot really assert themselves
amid a profusion of melodramatic devices" (p. 102). It is
just as plausible to argue that the "realities" of roman
tic passion do not exist for this heroine, despite her
"strong, assertive personality" (Ganz, p. 103), because
she is protecting herself from them by an act of will.
"Maiden pride" is a very real element in Mrs. Gas
kell's world, and a superb defense mechanism for anything
a heroine does not want to face. Its manifestation in
Margaret Hale, rather than unsubtle, seems entirely ap
propriate, given the environment and emotional limitations
that are part of the character and her surroundings. Mrs.
Gaskell did not create Margaret as a sexually self-aware
woman, and since one characteristic of her personality is
to avoid this part of her feminine nature as long as pos
sible, her responses, though exaggerated, are acceptable,
both structurally, to prolong reader interest through the
96
various episodes of the novel, and psychologically, as a
way of delineating what being a woman in Victorian England
could mean. Margaret needs time to become acquainted with
herself, but she also needs to be jolted out of her patron
izing way of looking at people. Mrs. Gaskell chose a sen-
sationalistic manner of bringing this about, it is true,
but given the character she created, psychological subtlety
is hardly in order.
The young woman's responsibility toward the family
has already been outlined. Not only does Mrs. Gaskell
idealize the daughter's proper role as the support of her
parents, much as she did in Mary Barton and Ruth, by pre
senting less admirable daughter characters for comparison
with the heroine (here, the scatterbrained Edith and self
ish Fanny Thornton), but she hints at the complex relation
ship between mothers and daughters, and between mothers,
daughters, and sons. The generation of mothers in the
novel, represented by Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Thornton, is
passionately devoted to its sons, and not so wholeheartedly
to its daughters. The reader is not surprised to find
this carryover from Mrs. Gaskell's earlier work, nor is
it surprising that the same motifs appear in the later
novels as well. The slight but definite distinction be
tween children of different sexes is but another indication
of woman's subordinate place in the Victorian family.
("Why Margaret, you must not be hurt, but he was much
97
prettier than you were" [p. 262]). As expected, Margaret
accepts her subordinate position, and arranges for her
brother's secret visit to Milton; Mrs. Gaskell notes that
"she was proud of serving Frederick" (p. 311).
A subordinate position within the family is quite
a different matter from the social subordination Margaret
experiences outside it, however. She rejects her mother's
standard practice of noninvolvement in any but trivial
events, but as a woman, she is subject to the same social
restrictions that operate in Mary Barton: it is simply
not expected that women should take an interest in mascu
line affairs of trade and world events. When Margaret
invades that world, so to speak, she pits herself against
the theorizing of men like her father, and the experiences
of men like Higgins and Thornton. That she does not im
mediately succeed in her missionary efforts— her charity
is regarded with suspicion by Higgins, she offends Thornton
by taking the workmen's side in a strike she knows nothing
about, and even her father finally begs, "Pray don't go
into similes, Margaret, you have led us off once already"
(p. 17 0)— may be due largely to her misunderstood approach
(they interpret her kind intentions as critical condescen
sion) , but the substance of her views, feminine as it is,
is totally foreign to the men as well. Where they are
practical and realistic, she is fanciful and idealistic.
That she ultimately triumphs in persuading these men to
98
value the human aspect of business relations is a testament
to her persistence, but along the way, she must learn as
much as they.
Margaret tells Thornton, "God has made us so that
we must be mutually dependent" (p. 169), but there is an
ironic gap between the impersonal sort of dependence she
talks about in relation to masters and workers, and the
aloofness she demonstrates in her personal life. None of
Mrs. Gaskell's earlier heroines had struggled so to remain
independent in the same way that Margaret Hale does; her
characteristic manner, Mrs. Gaskell relates, is one of "a
soft feminine defiance" (p. 100), which becomes complete
rigidity in matters of sex. Even the experience of walk
ing along the street in Milton represents a threat:
She did not mind meeting any number of girls, loud
spoken and boisterous though they might be. But
she alternately dreaded and fired up against the
workmen, who commented not on her dress, but on her
looks, in the same open, fearless manner. She, who
had hitherto felt that even the most refined remark
on her personal appearance was an impertinence, had
to endure undisguised admiration from these out
spoken men. . . . Out of her fright came a flash
of indignation which made her face scarlet, and her
dark eyes gather flame, as she heard some of their
speeches. (pp. 110-11)
And in the two marriage proposals she receives, her im
mediate response is a feeling of shame. In the speech
where she rejects Thornton's offer of marriage, she empha
sizes her moral outrage at his impertinence: "you owe me
no gratitude. . . . Your way of speaking shocks me. It
99
it blasphemous. . . . Your whole manner offends me"
(p. 253). This reaction, which had served Margaret before,
is of course an emotional flight from reality, a way of
banishing a threatening person or event by concentrating
on the self, and building an impenetrable wall of isola
tion. Margaret seems to be most upset by Thornton's at
tributing her spontaneous action in defending him to "some
particular feeling" (p. 254) for him, instead of the im
personal human benevolence she thinks she felt. Why is
her pride "wounded" by the proposal? Because she cannot
risk making herself vulnerable to a man she does not
really know. The Thornton she thinks she knows is a crea
tion of her imagination.
Mrs. Gaskell plays on the close relationship between
love and hate in the violence of Margaret's reaction. Un
til she and Thornton can develop mutual respect based on
personalized, individualized experiences of one another,
there can be no feeling but animosity. Margaret is sure
that Thornton had never "cared for her opinions as belong
ing to her, the individual" (p. 256), perhaps because she
was afraid to admit the possibility that he might care for
her personal self, just as she cannot accept the fact that
he loves her: "... she shrank and shuddered as under
the fascination of some great power, repugnant to her whole
previous life," which is "the threat of his enduring love"
(p. 257). Mrs. Gaskell's language is deliberate, and re-
100
inforces the fear and insecurity that underlie Margaret's
resolution to "daunt" Thornton.
In much romantic fiction, the hero appears as a hand
some stranger, and part of his fascination involves the
fact that he remains unknown. In a realistic framework,
however, there is a romantic disillusionment involving the
substitution of real, imperfect, human characteristics for
what was imagined to be perfect. In the real world, as
Annette Hopkins points out, mental patterns are "too stub
bornly persistent to be altered except through very gradual
processes" (Elizabeth Gaskell, Her Life and Work, p. 142),
and in threading the path between romance and reality, Mrs.
Gaskell must arrange for Margaret to discover the human
Thornton, but not too quickly. For this couple, there must
be a "slow growth of mutual affection . . . [which] springs
not only from sex attraction but from wholesome mutual re
spect achieved after long association" (p. 142). Interest
is sustained by the antagonism of their encounters; John
Gross feels that "the most original feature of North and
South, although Mrs. Gaskell was not equipped to do more
than hint at it, is the idea of sexual excitement being
7
entwined with social antagonism."
For Margaret, the realization that she is in love
comes far more slowly than for Thornton, and it parallels
her emotional growth from a dependent daughter anxious to
"apply to my father in the first instance for any informa-
101
tion he can give me, if I get puzzled with living here
amongst this strange society" (p. 165), rather than accept
any help from Thornton, to a mature woman who takes respon
sibility for her own destiny. Margaret has early rejected
the "petty interests" (p. 217) of most of the representa
tives of her sex, but she is not party to the "larger and
grander" (p. 217) interests of men, either. To accomplish
her reeducation, Mrs. Gaskell is forced into melodramatic
contrivances: Margaret loses first her friend Bessy
Higgins, then her mother and father, and finally, the only
remaining friend who understands her, her guardian, Mr.
Bell. Only when she is really alone does she face the
future in terms of her own needs and desires, and so gains
not only material power (she is left an heiress by Mr.
Bell), but the emotional strength to do good with it.
Her change of heart toward Thornton is a sudden
one, as noted by her critics. "In an association of this
kind there could be no gradual restorative movement, and
Mrs. Gaskell is right therefore to conclude the story by
a reconciliation that proceeds from a sudden realization,
an inrush of enlightenment and understanding (Pollard,
p. 135). It is preceded and prepared for, however, by a
gradual softening of Margaret's fierce opposition to him,
first in her realization that he knows she has lied:
c i
Oh! had anyone such just cause to feel contempt for
her? Mr. Thornton, above all people on whom she had
102
looked down from her imaginary heights till now! She
suddenly found herself at his feet, and was strangely
distressed at her fall. She shrank from following
out the premises to their conclusion, and so acknowl
edging to herself how much she valued his respect and
good opinion. (p. 356)
Margaret fights a losing battle, however:
. . . Where now was her proud motto, "Fais ce que je
dois, advienne que pourra?" If she had but dared to
bravely tell the truth . . . how light of heart she
would now have felt! Not humbled before God, as
having failed in trust towards Him; not degraded and
abased in Mr. Thornton's sight. She caught herself
up at this with a miserable tremor; here she was
classing his low opinion of her alongside with the
displeasure of God. How was it that he haunted her
imagination so persistently? . . . why did she
tremble, and hide her face in the pillow? What
strong feeling had overtaken her at last? (p. 3 58)
Margaret undergoes all the standard symptoms of love-sick-
ness in Victorian novels without recognizing them for what
they are, and wishes, like Mary Barton, to be a man, so
that she "could go and force him [Thornton] to express his
disapprobation, and tell him honestly that I knew I de
served it. It seems hard to lose him as a friend just when
I had begun to feel his value" (p. 38 5).
Margaret revisits her beloved village of Helstone,
and discovers the truth that you can't go home again; "a
sense of change, of individual nothingness, of perplexity
and disappointment, overpowered Margaret" (p. 488) , as she
realizes that she is alone in the world. Her isolation is
primarily an emotional one, and in her childhood home, she
recognizes the need for personal relationships in her own
103
life: "... love for my species could never fill my heart
to the utter exclusion of love for individuals" (p. 488).
At the same time as she acknowledges her human need for emo
tional dependence, she acquires the courage to take her
life "into her own hands" (p. 508). The feminine dilemma
is an either/or proposition in Margaret's society: either
women marry and become complete no-entities, or they don't,
and become appendages to someone else's household. Mar
garet wants neither of these options:
. . . she learnt, in those solemn hours of thought,
that she herself must one day answer for her own life,
and what she had done with it; and she tried to settle
the most difficult problem for a woman, how much was
to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and
how much might be set apart for freedom in working.
(p. 508)
Hazel Mews says of Margaret's realization:
This recognition that "freedom in working" is necessary
if the best use is to be made by a woman of her life
is new, as is the recognition that there is any prob
lem in balancing the claims of the old conceptions of
woman's duties with changed conditions. It is also a
recognition of woman's new dual role. In the past
there had been no question, woman's duty was clear, it
was held to be self-evident that she was to be "utterly
merged in obedience to authority"; but now there is
the duty of exercising her own talents, as much a gift
of God as her attributes as a woman. The balancing
of the two claims is already seen to be a difficult
feat. (Frail Vessels, p. 91)
Once Margaret has learned who she is, there only remains
the removal of the seemingly insurmountable barricade be
tween herself and her beloved, and the story ends on a
happy, humorous note. Margaret, meeker now, but with a
sense of self unequalled by any of Mrs. Gaskell's other
104
women characters, promises to be a worthy wife to the
similarly humbled Thornton. The pride of spirit which kept
the pair apart also draws them together, and it is strongly
implied that this younger generation will not repeat the
marital sins of its elders. In Margaret's case, this means
that her attitude toward her husband will not be as unsym
pathetic and selfish as was her mother's toward Mr. Hale,
or as was Mrs. Boucher's toward her strike-leading husband.
For Thornton, it means acknowledging Margaret's individual
ity and emotional support, as well as her financial assis
tance.
In 1855, Mrs. Gaskell started work on a biography
of her friend Charlotte BrontS which touches indirectly on
her portrayal of women in her fiction, and which is related
to the "freedom for working" which Margaret Hale debated
with herself. Mrs. Gaskell was intent on representing
Charlotte the woman as separate from Charlotte the writer,
in her words, "— the friend, the daughter, the sister, the
wife ..." (quoted in Hopkins, p. 163). She was particu
larly concerned about the woman's place in the world out
side the home.
Role divisions, and the conflicts arising from them,
are often the immediate concern of Mrs. Gaskell's heroines,
but the fundamental, unstated problem goes deeper; the
woman must adjust her self-concept to social expectations,
and at the same time assure herself that she is valuable
105
as a person in her own right. Mrs. Gaskell repeatedly
focuses on the sense of confusion and indirection experi
enced by her female characters, and in her understanding,
intuitive to be sure, of feminine psychology, she was
consistent with hypotheses established and verified by
the clinical and social psychologists who came after her.
The following is representative of contemporary psycho
logical thought on the relationship between self-concept
and role demands in women:
From a psychologist's point of view, many of the prob
lems besetting women can be understood as internal
phenomena— motives, anxieties, guilts, fears, low
self-esteem. But many of these negative feelings
result from society's preference for and reward of
occupational achievements and its inhibition of women
through legislation, hiring practices, differential
pay and prestige, the lack of child-care facilities,
and so on. This inevitably leads to anger, especially
among the aware and educated women. . . . The formal
ization of adult sex roles not only enhances differ
ences between the sexes, it also goes, in stereotype
form, beyond what is necessary or desirable. . . .
While the sexes appear to have characteristic qualities
which are more or less functional in different activ
ities, traditional role divisions have been far too
restrictive for both sexes. (Bardwick, pp. 216-17)
With reference to Charlotte Bront§, Mrs. Gaskell
outlined the problem that both women must have faced, and
all women of their period who aspired to professional
status and yet wished to maintain a normal social pattern
of feminine existence, that is, a family and children:
Henceforward Charlotte BrontS's existence becomes
divided into two parallel currents— her life as Currer
Bell, the author; her life as Charlotte BrontS, the
woman. There were separate duties belonging to each
106
character— not opposing each other; not impossible,
but difficult to be reconciled. When a man becomes
an author, it is probably merely a change of employment
to him. He takes a portion of that time which has
hitherto been devoted to some other study or pursuit;
he gives up something of the legal or medical profes
sion, in which he has hitherto endeavored to serve
others, or relinquishes part of the trade or business
by which he has been striving to gain a livelihood;
and another merchant or lawyer, or doctor, steps into
his vacant place, and probably does as well as he.
But no other can take up the quiet, regular duties of
the daughter, the wife, or the mother, as well as she
whom God has appointed to fill that particular place:
a woman's principal work in life is hardly left to her
own choice; nor can she drop the domestic charges de
volving on her as an individual, for the exercise of
the most splendid talents that were ever bestowed.
And yet she must not shrink from the extra responsibil
ity implied by the very fact of her possessing such
talents. She must not hide her gift in a napkin; it
was meant for use and service of others. In an humble
and faithful spirit must she labor to do what is not
impossible or God would not have set her to do it.
(The Life of Charlotte Brontfi, p. 242)
Elsewhere, in a letter to Tottie Fox, she stated:
. . . One thing is pretty clear, Women must give up
living an artist's life, if home duties are to be
paramount. It is different with men, whose home duties
are so small a part of their life. However we are
talking of women. . . . The difficulty is where and
when to make one set of duties subserve and give place
to the other. I have no doubt that the cultivation of
each tends to keep the other in a healthy state. . . .
(Chappie and Pollard, p. 106)
While this psychological threat did not affect most
of Mrs. Gaskell's woman characters, since many of them are
content, like Mary Barton, to marry and raise a family,
it presents itself in onw way or another in all of her
later novels, where the institution of marriage is examined
in greater detail as it affects the woman's view of her
worth as an individual.
107
The problem of feminine individuality appears in
many of Mrs. Gaskell's shorter stories as well, but usually
the woman characters are so repressed by the male society
that they never have a chance to investigate objectively
the traditions and customs which restrain them. The place
of woman in Elizabeth Gaskell's shorter fiction is worth
considering at some length because her stories pinpoint the
extremes of the feminine conflict represented in the novels
as a desire for individual recognition versus the socially
learned role of passive acquiescence to men.
Miss Gallindo, in My Lady Ludlow, is one woman who
assumes a male role literally by winning and holding down
a clerks' job. Mrs. Gaskell leaves no doubt about her
ability to perform in this capacity:
But Miss Gallindo was both a lady, and a spirited,
sensible woman, and she could put aside her self-
indulgence in eccentricity of speech and manner
whenever she chose. Nay, more; she was usually so
talkative that, if she had not been amusing and
warm-hearted, one might have thought her wearisome
occasionally. But to meet Mr. Smithson she came
out daily in her Sunday gown; she said no more than
was required in answer to his questions; her books
and papers were in thorough order, and methodically
kept; her statements of matters of fact accurate,
and to be relied on. She was amusingly conscious
of her victory over his contempt of a woman-clerk
and his pre-conceived opinion of her unpracticed
eccentricity.8
In four sentences, Mrs. Gaskell dismisses most of the
stereotyped ideas about women workers. But Miss Gallindo's
victory is still shown to be hollow: though she has adopted
her dead lover's child as her own, a morally admirable thing
108
to do, she must endure the social stigma of being regarded
as an unwed mother. Here is a situation similar to that
in Ruth, but the character is an entirely different sort
of woman. Miss Gallindo is admirable in her strength, as
indeed is Lady Ludlow herself, who rules her small domain
as well as any man, and only breaks down when her last
child is killed.
Susan Dixon is another heroine who refuses to submit
her will to a man's. In "Half A Lifetime Ago," she rejects
the man she loves and the promise of a happy existence with
him to remain on her parents' farm and care for her re
tarded brother. Her motivation is explained as a loyalty
to the promise made to her dying mother to care for the
boy, but the conflict does not arise, the reader notes,
until the fiance has told Susan that the boy must not come
between them. At the melodramatic conclusion of the story,
an older, hardened Susan discovers the ex-lover's frozen
body and returns it to his wife for burial, paying for her
feat with a fever that ravages her body, and for her moral
resoluteness, and patently unfeminine conduct, in an agony
of speculation over the life she might have had.
Most of Mrs. Gaskell's women want to be dominated
by men, despite their failure to realize this, and when
they assume their proper— submissive— place, the story ends
happily. But the picture is complicated by the author's
representation of these women as perfectly capable of
109
getting along by themselves if need be. The dependence is
an emotional one, to a large extent, and leaves the woman
open to the sort of tyrannical male dominance that charac
terizes many of Mrs. Gaskell's portrayals of marriage.
Even those characters who realize the sexual basis of their
oppression generally conclude that it is more expedient for
them to remain in the old subservient role, as Theresa does
in "Crowley Castle," or Miss Gallindo in "My Lady Ludlow."
The fact that Mrs. Gaskell returned to this subject again
and again, though she has no striking solution to present,
shows that it was on her mind; the fact that the conse
quences of such repression are so often negative for the
women involved suggests that her socially ameliorative
view, or what Charlotte BrontS described as her disinclina
tion to face the "severe Truth" of human experience in her
fiction, had severe limitations.
There is a good deal of lip service paid to the
value of wifely submissiveness in marriage in all of Mrs.
Gaskell's short fiction, beginning with "Lizzie Leigh"
(1850), and carrying through "Half A Lifetime Ago" (1856),
"Right at Last"(1858), and "My Lady Ludlow" (1858), but
there is only one example of a wife's asserting herself
to assume what is normally the male role in a marriage.
This is in "Right at Last," and the excuse for Margaret
Brown's unwomanly behavior and for her direct criticism
of her husband's failure to act in his own defense, is
110
that he is unusually— at least for Mrs. Gaskell's fiction—
weak and vacillating. Indeed, Margaret does not want to
assume the leadership, and does so only as a last resort.
More often than not, however, women are portrayed
as helpless to determine their own fate. "The Grey Woman"
(1861) is a grisly tale of a wife's escape from her blue-
beard husband with the help of a trusted servant, Amante,
but even though the women evade the possessive husband for
a time, they are practically powerless in the nightmare
fantasy world Mrs. Gaskell creates for her story. She
deliberately isolates her main characters from all the
social resources usually available to women, especially
family and friends. The sense of feminine helplessness is
much more crudely expressed in the gothic stories, but all
basic emotions are exaggerated in fables. "Lizzie Leigh,"
"Lois the Witch," "The Grey Woman," "The Poor Clare," and
"A Dark Night's Work" are stories in which a fundamentally
good woman is persecuted for a real or imagined crime,
while less frequently, in stories like "Crowley Castle,"
an evil woman works a deception on the other characters.
Regardless of whether she is portrayed as basically sensual,
like Nest Pritchard in "The Doom of the Griffiths," or as
intellectual, like Theresa Crowley in "Crowley Castle,"
the woman is inescapably at the center of malevolence in
these stories, In "Lois the Witch," a beautiful orphan is
set upon by a wicked aunt and cousins who are apparently
I l l
jealous of her goodness; she is put to death when the be
lated efforts of a grotesque, would-be lover fail to save
her. In "My Lady Ludlow," a lover leaves his mother's side
against her wishes to rescue his sweetheart, and loses his
life in the attempt. In "Crowley Castle," a true wife is
done away with by an evil maid so that her mistress may
prosper in her place. The end of romance in all these
stories is always unhappiness.
In a relatively late, fairly realistic story, Mrs.
Gaskell still probes the question of a woman's responsibil
ity in marriage, and her freedom to choose a lover. The
story is "Six Weeks at Heppenheim," in which the young
woman Thekla has refused a clearly unworthy suitor whom
she once loved. She feels very guilty over this action,
however, and the narrator of the story must advise her:
"You loved an ideal man; he disappointed you, and you clung
to your remembrance of him. He came, and the reality dis-
9
pelled all illusions." Thekla would have married the
profligate Franz Weber out of pity and a sense of duty, but
in her final decision not to, she becomes a prototype of
the emotionally more educated woman, or at least one who
does not let a sense of social propriety (she has promised
to marry Franz) interfere with common sense (he is plainly
unworthy).
This is a far different case from that which the
narrator mentions in passing, about the dissimilarity of
112
certain partners in "various happy marriages, when to an
outsider it seemed as if one was so inferior to the other
that their union would have appeared a subject for despair,
if it had been looked at prospectively" (pp. 377-78). And
though Thekla "was the strong, good, helpful character, he
the weak and vain" (p. 377) , she is helpless in the face
of the decision she must make, until she is persuaded to
her decision by a man, the young lawyer-narrator of the
story, who says,
. . . the idea of the duty of self-sacrifice had taken
strong possession of her fancy. Perhaps if I had
failed in setting her notion of duty in the right
aspect, I might have had recourse to the statement of
facts, which would have pained her severely, but would
have proved to her how little his [Franz's] words of
penitence and promises of amendment were to be trusted
to. [It] . . . ended by her being quite convinced
that she would be doing wrong instead of right if she
married a man whom she had entirely ceased to love,
and that no real good could come from a course of
action based on wrong-doing. (p. 38 7)
The implication is that but for the narrator's fortuitous
presence, the idea of refusing to submit to her fate would
never have occurred to Thekla, just as it never occurs to
her to view her present situation in any but terms deroga
tory to herself:
My shame and my reproach is this: I have loved a man
who has not loved me . . . and I can't make out whether
he ever did, or whether he did once and is changed now;
if only he did once love me, I could forgive myself.
(p. 374)
It has largely been overlooked by Mrs. Gaskell's
critics that there is more of a relationship between her
113
good and her mediocre fiction than appears at first. True,
the quality of writing and the craftsmanship in her pot
boilers is frequently inferior, but interestingly, the
subject matter of these stories, recast to fit the fairy
tale settings and mode, is often the same as that of the
serious fiction. One need only look at stories like "A
Dark Night's Work," or "Lois the Witch" or "Crowley Castle"
to see the same conflict between desire and duty that Molly
Gibson later encounters in Wives and Daughters, or to real
ize that the gulf between the meekly submissive wife and
the domineering husband is the same in "Lizzie Leigh" as
it is in Ruth. Even in a transitional story like "Six Weeks
at Heppenheim," transitional in the sense that the setting
is romantic while the issues are realistic, the central
question is still the woman's right to choose her own lover,
and the central interest is the ideal criteria for such a
person. Mrs. Gaskell uses the idyllic beauty of the German
scenery and the fact of Thekla's earlier jilting to in
tensify the mundane quality of the romance that evolves
between Herr Mflller and Thekla. (It is not the girl's
virginal qualities that attract this widower, but her
maternal ones.) Certainly a story like this, coming later
in Mrs. Gaskell's career, indicates a maturing sense of
values, and as a statement about love, suggests that there
are other, perhaps better, kinds than the traditionally
romantic.
114
Aina Rubenius notes that there are separate standards
for male and female behavior in Victorian society and in
Mrs. Gaskell's novels as well. She feels that Mrs. Gaskell
might have changed her mind about woman's "naturally sub
servient" relationship to men in marriage as time passed,
and as she gained in personal maturity and artistry. Ms.
Rubenius further suggests that although Mrs. Gaskell's
earlier stories reflect a passive, respectful attitude on
the part of wives toward their husbands, an attitude entire
ly appropriate to their station, "something happened" to
her point of view along the way:
Mrs. Gaskell had epitomized her first ideal of a wife
in the early and entirely traditional portrait of Mrs.
Leigh, who lived "in the darkness where obedience was
the only seen duty of women," and who was never to
oppose or criticize her husband, even when he acted
wrongly, against his wife's moral creed and Christian
principles. This ideal had been modified when Mrs.
Gaskell wrote Ruth. Mrs. Bradshaw in that novel is
represented as doing right in opposing her husband
when he acts in an obviously unchristian way. Finally,
in Right At Last, Mrs. Gaskell stated her conviction
that it is the duty of a woman to take over the whole
responsibility and initiative, not only for her own
actions, as when Margaret marries against her uncle's
will, but also for her husband, if his moral courage
and discernment are not sufficient. ("The Woman
Question in Mrs. Gaskell's Life and Works," pp. 74-75)
What is true of wives may perhaps be equally true
of husbands. Ms. Rubenius refers to Margaret Brown, the
heroine of "Right At Last," as a messenger of Elizabeth
Gaskell's changed concept of woman's role. It should be
noted, however, that in this story, the husband is a total
coward, and that his wife finally acts out of necessity;
115
she wants very much to look up to her husband, just as she
wants her uncle to give his formal consent to her marriage,
but circumstances make this impossible. Ms. Rubenius has
done a thorough job of attaching motifs in Mrs. Gaskell's
stories to the events of her own life, and she accounts
for many of the attitudes found in the short stories in
personal terms, but regardless of their source, there is
a general implication about the meaning of femininity that
extends beyond Mrs. Gaskell's experiences.
In accounting for the so-called passages of anti
feminist propaganda in her novels and stories, it is not
certain that one must interpret passivity in one female
character, or even in one male, as a sign of weakness in
that sex, or conclude that the lack of passivity in a char
acter indicates a change in the author's attitude. The
dialogue on a wife's duty toward her husband in "Crowley
Castle" is a representative example:
. . . when he is here . . . and when he wants to talk
to you of politics, of foreign news, of great public
interests, you drag him down to your level of woman's
cares. . . . You have a great deal of judgment, if
you will but exercise it. Try and take an interest
in all he cares for, as well as making him try and
take an interest in your affairs! (Cousin Phillis and
Other Tales, p. 707)
Aina Rubenius writes, "Mrs. Gaskell's way of treating this
theme [feminine passivity] in her books developed gradually.
The first sign of a change in her attitude toward it ap
peared in 1851, and it reached its final stage in 18 58"
(p. 75). While there must indeed have been some develop
ment in Elizabeth Gaskell's social vision between the time
she began to publish in 1848 and her death in 18 65, it is
a fairly ambitious project to try to pinpoint exactly from
her fiction the dates within which her opinions on women
changed and were delineated precisely. After all, Mrs.
Gaskell had already spent seventeen years in the industrial
atmosphere of Manchester, and had been married about as
long, before she began to write. Further, feminine prob
lems belong to the whole of Mrs. Gaskell's work, and the
"revolutionary" attitude which Ms. Rubenius finds in the
stories of the late 1850's represents a development in
degree rather than kind. To conclude that Mrs. Gaskell
moved from the view that wifely obedience is of paramount
importance in a marriage to the idea that women would be
healthier for assuming all the leadership, as Ms. Rubenius
implies, is to assume that the values of any one character
are those of the author herself, a supposition which is
not borne out by her last novels.
To consider one of the examples which Ms. Rubenius
offers as proof that Mrs. Gaskell changed her mind about
feminine submissiveness in marriage, the reader is directed
to the description of obedience in the story "Mr. Harrison'
Confession."1^ Ms. Rubenius takes this scene as a straight
forward statement of Mrs. Gaskell's beliefs, neglecting
entirely the ironic implications of the obviously exagger-
ated situation. Since the whole story satirizes a number
of quaint country types, to cite this deliberately over
blown discourse on husband-worship out of context is to
attribute to it an importance which it does not have. In
the scene in question, Miss Caroline Tomkinson, the epitome
of the busybody spinster, is commiserating with Mrs. Broun-
cker, whose husband is very ill. Miss Caroline sympathizes
loudly with the "distraction of mind produced by the ill
ness of a worshipped husband" (My Lady Ludlow and Other
Tales, p. 458). Mrs. Brouncker replies with some astonish
ment, "Please, ma'am, I don't worship my husband. I would
not be so wicked." To which the ever-righteous Miss Caro
line rejoins, "Goodness! You don't think it wicked, do you?
For my part, if . . . I should worship, I should adore him,"
and the narrator of the story adds quietly, "I thought she
need not imagine such improbable cases." The last word is
given to Mrs. Brouncker: "I hope I know my duty better.
I've not learned njy Commandments for nothing. I know Whom
I ought to worship" (p. 458). The irony lies in what these
two women have revealed of themselves by their actions.
Mrs. Brouncker is a truly good, generous, loving, support
ive wife to her husband, while Miss Caroline, it must be
confessed, adores no one but herself. Deeds count far more
than words in Mrs. Gaskell's other tales, and here as well;
she does not condemn husband-worship as much as she con
demns the hypocrisy of vanity and selfishness wherever it
118
occurs. (The early date of this story— 1851— also upsets
Mrs. Rubenius' theory that Elizabeth Gaskell experienced
a "gradual awakening" to women's responsibilities which
is reflected in her writing.)
Throughout her literary career, Mrs. Gaskell por
trayed women who appear to worship their husbands, whether
they say so or not: characters like Mrs. Leigh in "Lizzie
Leigh," or Belle Robson in Sylvia's Lovers, or, perish the
thought, Clare Kirkpatrick in Wives and Daughters. But
her purpose does not seem so much the condemnation of a
specific attitude or form of behavior as it is the portrayal
of different types of wives, and the revelation of their
feminine social ideals and behavior upon themselves and
others.
Elizabeth Gaskell did not commit herself to a spe
cific viewpoint on women's rights anywhere in her fiction;
in fact, considering that her fiction has been criticized
for failing to advocate specific measures of social reform
rather than simply present social injustices,'*''*' it is not
surprising that she refused to campaign actively for the
Married Women's Property Act of 18 56, though she let her
name appear on the petition, nor that she defended herself
thus in a letter to Eliza Fox:
You ask for the petition back again without loss of
time, so I send it you although today certainly I
shan't be able to write a long letter, I don't think
it is very definite and pointed; or that it will do
119
much good,— for the Turnkey's objection (vid Little
Dorrit) "but if they wish to come over her, how then
can you legally tie it up" &c. will be a stronger
difficulty than they can legislate for[;] a husband
can coax, wheedle, beat or tyrannize his wife out of
something and no law whatever will help this that I
see. . . . However our sex is badly enough used and
legislated against, there's no doubt of that— so
though I don't see the definite end proposed by these
petitions I'll sign. (Chappie and Pollard, p. 37 9)
There is another side to the subject of feminine
subservience, or perhaps it should be termed an explanation.
This is a biological/psychological explanation. All of
Mrs. Gaskell's women have one thing in common, which is
not shared by her male characters: more than anything
else, they need to be related to other human beings in a
personal way. Carl Jung refers to a specifically "feminine"
principle of relatedness in his psychological writings,
according to which, he theorizes, a woman's sense of self-
worth is achieved not through tasks accomplished or ideas
generated, but more fundamentally, through identification
12
with others. If a woman
is out of touch with the feminine principle, which
dictates the laws of relatedness, she cannot take the
lead in what is after all the feminine realm, that of
human relationships. Until she does so there cannot
be much hope of order in this aspect of life.
(Harding, pp. 16-17)
Of course, this does not imply that a woman may not function
well in all three areas, but her basic psychological orien
tation to the world is dictated by her sex, and does not
admit to understanding through intellectual or academic
investigation. Dr. Harding, who was Jung's student and
120
has done research on feminine psychology, emphasizes the
importance of proper self-identification:
Many women suffer seriously in their personal lives
on account of neglect of this feminine principle.
They may be unable to make satisfactory relation
ships, or may even fall into neurosis and ill-health
on account of the inadequacy of their development in
this most essential direction. For this reason , a
woman's relation to the feminine principle within
herself is undoubtedly of great personal importance
to herself, yet it is not only a personal problem
but also a general, even a universal problem for all
women. It is a problem of womanhood, and beyond
that, a problem of mankind. (Harding, p. 17)
Whether one calls it a "feminine principle" or by
another name, it is clear that the women in Mrs. Gaskell1s
novels are handicapped by their uniform lack of self-knowl
edge from making the adjustments and relationships that
would bring them happiness. Certainly, then, her handling
of the theme of relatedness has far-reaching implications
for her audience. Each of Mrs. Gaskell's heroines experi
ences a personal crisis which emotionally or physically
isolates her from a loved one, and the story describes her
progress toward reconciliation. Mary Barton recognizes a
need for relatedness in herself only after she has practi
cally destroyed her chance for happiness. Ruth rejects
everyone and everything in her blind flight from North
Wales after Bellingham has deserted her, and is only saved
emotionally by the kindness of her rescuer and the strength
of her relationship with her unborn child. Margaret Hale,
perhaps the most independent of Mrs. Gaskell's heroines,
121
and certainly one who is alone a good deal, speaks for all
of Mrs. Gaskell's women as she meditates on her future,
believing that she has lost Mr. Thornton's friendship for
good:
. . . I am so tired— so tired of being whirled on
through all these phases of my life, in which nothing
abides by me, no creature, no place; it is like the
circle in which the victims of earthly passion eddy
continually. I am in the mood in which women of an
other religion take the veil. I seek heavenly stead
fastness in earthly monotony. If I were a Roman
Catholic and could deaden my heart, stun it with
some great blow, I might become a nun. But I should
pine after my kind; no, not my kind, for love for my
species could never fill my heart to the utter exclu
sion of love for individuals. Perhaps it ought to
be so, perhaps not; I cannot decide to-night. (North
and South, p. 488)
And Molly Gibson's careful disregard of the anxiety she
feels about Roger Hamley is an attempt to deaden or stun
her own heart from experiencing the full range of its emo
tional capability. In the short story "Right At Last,"
the heroine begs her guardian-uncle to consent to her mar
riage, but he disapproves. She says, "It seems so desolate
at such a time to have to dispose of myself, as if nobody
owned or cared for me" (Cousin Phillis and Other Tales,
p. 281). "Owning" and "caring" are significant words be
cause they convey the feminine need for relatedness.
While the need to belong is most frequently re
vealed to Mrs. Gaskell's women in terms of a romantic
attraction to a man, a condition they find difficult to
cope with, it can assume other forms as well: the Cranford
122
ladies form a closed female society as a substitute for the
family. The strong mother-child bond between Ruth and
Leonard in Ruth, or between Susan Dixon and her retarded
brother in "Half A Lifetime Ago" exemplify still another
way for women to fulfill their biological and psychological
need.
In the short novel, Cousin Phillis, which began pub
lication in 18 63 in The Cornhill Magazine, the problem of
feminine relatedness is presented in a very indirect manner.
Readers of this country idyll, which describes a young, in
nocent girl's meeting with a worldly engineer who unknowing
ly encourages her to fall in love with him and then leaves
her, are unanimous in their praise of Mrs. Gaskell's "abil
ity to describe nature feelingly, her skill in recording
with sympathy and imagination the homely details of simple
but dedicated lives, and her insight into the basic emotions
and secret yearnings fostered by a circumscribed existence"
(Ganz, p. 221) .
The subject is ideally suited to the deliberately
limited scope of the story— there are several emotionally
linked incidents and scenes rather than a fully developed
plot— and to the use of an eighteen year old boy cousin as
narrator. He is welcomed into the Holman family circle,
and thus is able to sympathetically observe Cousin Phillis
make the difficult transition from childhood to womanhood.
No less important, he observes and comments on the happy
123
family relationship. As the only surviving child, Phillis
has especially close ties with her parents, and her qual
ities of "maidenly affections, modesty, gentleness" (Pollard,
p. 192), are the result of their careful, Christian train
ing. It is significant that they still think of her as a
child, however, and she first appears to Paul Manning as
"a stately, gracious young woman, in the dress, and with
the simplicity, of a child" (Cousin Phillis and Other Tales,
p. 11). In the pastoral environment of Hope Farm, she lives
a sheltered life devoted to intellectual pursuits and good
deeds with her virtuous and dedicated parents, but she has
no experiential knowledge of the world beyond the farm.
When romance arrives in the person of Edward Holdsworth,
the charming and intelligent but worldly engineer who is
Paul's superior, she has no defense against loving him, and
no reason to suspect that he will not love her in return.
Here, unsurrounded by external trappings, is the very heart
of the feminine crisis that Mrs. Gaskell has hinted at in
other novels, and to which she returns in Sylvia's Lovers
and Wives and Daughters; the emotional separation from the
family, and especially from the parents, that must occur
before a woman can commit herself fully to a mature love
relationship with a man. Mrs. Gaskell handles the story
with tact and delicacy, and Phillis's joys and sufferings
are neither mawkish nor insipid.
The family relationship at Hope Farm presents what,
124
in Mrs. Gaskell's fiction, has become a typical alignment:
Phillis and her father are extremely close, finely matched
intellects who delight in Latin and Greek, in philosophy
and science, while the mother's whole world is bounded by
domestic cares. Mrs. Gaskell does not portray anywhere
what might be called a perfectly matched pair of parent-
characters, but in their apparent understanding of and ap
preciation of one another, the Reverend and Mrs. Holman
come closest to having an ideal relationship. Nevertheless,
the mother seems to be in the story "more for the setting
of the household than for herself" (Pollard, p. 192), and
she is clearly no intellectual companion for the father and
daughter. The narrator records the only ripple in the sur
face tranquillity of the family when he says:
I was rather sorry for Cousin Holman; I had been so
once or twice before; for do what she would, she was
completely unable even to understand the pleasure
her husband and daughter took in intellectual pursuits,
much less to care in the least herself for the pur
suits themselves, and was thus unavoidably thrown out
of some of their interests. I had once or twice
thought she was a little jealous of her own child, as
a fitter companion for her husband than she was her
self; and I fancied the minister himself was aware of
this feeling, for I had noticed an occasional sudden
change of subject, and a tenderness of appeal in his
voice as he spoke to her, which always made her look
contented and peaceful again. I do not think that
Phillis ever perceived these little shadows; in the
first place, she had such complete reverence for her
parents that she listened to them both as if they
had been St. Peter and St. Paul; and, besides, she
was always too much engrossed with any matter in hand
to think about other people's manners and looks.
(pp. 34-35)
125
Cousin Holman finds her chief earthly delight in seeing to
the physical needs of her family, and in this, she repre
sents the traditional model of the virtuous female. While
her husband tries to keep everything running smoothly, and
while his intentions are unquestionably good, however, one
cannot help noting a slight, very slight, hint of condescen
sion in his manner, as if she needs to be protected from
people like Mr. Holdsworth, who talks above her head in
intellectual matters because "he did not know what to talk
about to a purely motherly woman, whose intellect had never
been cultivated, and whose loving heart was entirely occu
pied with her husband, her child, her household affairs,
and, perhaps, a little with the concerns of the members
of her husband's congregation, because they, in a way,
belonged to her husband" (p. 58). Again, the narrator
remarks:
I had noticed before that she had fleeting shadows
of jealousy even of Phillis, when her daughter and her
husband appeared to have strong interests and sympa
thies in things which were quite beyond her comprehen
sion. I had noticed it in my first acquaintance with
them, I say, and had admired the delicate tact which
made the minister, on such occasions, bring the con
versation back to such subjects as those on which his
wife, with her practical experience of everyday life,
was an authority; while Phillis devoted to her father,
unconsciously followed his lead, totally unaware, in
her filial reverence, of his motive for doing so.
(p. 58)
Into the quiet Eden of Hope Farm comes a brightly
colored serpent in the form of a man. While Paul Manning
is considered family because of his youth and his kinship
126
with the mother, and is too awed by Phillis's intellectual
superiority to be considered a romantic threat, the sophis
ticated, traveled, polished but ultimately shallow Edward
Holdsworth has about him an air of charming seductiveness.
In justice to him, however, it should be noted that Holds
worth is important in the story as an outside influence,
and not as a personality. Mrs. Gaskell merely outlines
his character, and his mention to Paul that he loves Phillis
is an accident. He becomes the villain by default rather
than by any dishonorable action toward Phillis, and the
romantic attachment which Phillis forms toward him is with
an idealization that does not exist.
Mrs. Gaskell needed an unusual partner for Phillis,
because the girl is so unusual herself. As Paul explains,
in discussing with his father the impossibility of his ever
marrying Phillis, "you see she's so clever— she's more like
a man than a woman— she knows Latin and Greek" (p. 37).
And the father's predictable reply, "She'd forget 'em, if
she had a houseful of children" (p. 37), is a typically
male one (in Mrs. Gaskell's world): even the best of women
must be intellectually inferior to a man. Paul at least
perceives that Phillis represents a threat to him, while
he is no threat to her; to preserve his dignity, he con
cludes that he "would rather be taller and more learned
than my wife when I have one" (p. 38). Holdsworth is
secure enough in his own self-esteem to appreciate Phillis's
127
intelligence and beauty for themselves, and attractive
enough himself to win the whole family's affection when
he convalesces at Hope Farm; where Paul saw only "a comely,
but awkward girl," Holdsworth discovers a "WomanI beautiful
woman!" (p. 48). Holdsworth wins Phillis in many quiet
ways: describing his travels to her, reading Italian with
her, though he gives her a romantic novel for practice in
stead of the Dante she had been working at. Though Phillis
is blind to the danger of Holdsworth's worldly charm, her
father is not:
"Yes, "I like him!" said the minister, weighing
his words a little as he spoke. "I like him. I hope
I am justified in doing it; but he takes hold of me,
as it were, and I have almost been afraid lest he
carries me away, in spite of my judgment. . . . I
think he is an upright man; there is a want of serious
ness in his talk at times, but at the same time, it is
wonderful to listen to him! . . . But it is like
dram-drinking. I listen to him, till I forget my
duties and am carried off my feet. Last Sabbath-
evening, he led us away into talk on profane subjects
ill-befitting the day." (pp. 52-53)
Mrs. Gaskell covers the major events swiftly: Holds
worth1 s growing interest in Phillis and hers in him; his
abrupt departure for Canada and Phillis's resulting desola
tion, which Paul tries to alleviate by telling her that
Holdsworth intends to make her his wife; Phillis's happi
ness broken by the news that Holdsworth has married in
Canada; her consequent decline and illness, and finally her
confession, "Oh dear! I am so sick with shame! . . . I
loved him, father!" (p. 95), and the minister's painful
128
inability to realize that his child, "so young, so pure
from the world" (p. 98) could love anyone else:
Phillis! did we not make you happy here? Have we not
loved you enough? . . . And yet you would have left
us, left your home, left your father and your mother,
and gone away with this stranger, wandering over the
world! (pp. 99-100)
He cannot comprehend how Phillis could be so unmaidenly as
to allow herself to love a man who does not love her, but
more important, he interprets a perfectly natural occurrence
— a young woman's falling in love— as an act of treachery
by his child. Phillis's sorrow is made more difficult to
bear by the fact that she has never been treated by anyone
as anything but a child; hence, she has never thought of
herself as other than a child. Presumably, the knowledge
that she has failed her father in trust ("Probably the
father and daughter were never so far apart in their lives,
so unsympathetic" [p. 100]) causes her to seek an escape
in illness, a typical occurrence in the Victorian novel,
as much as her sorrow over losing Holdsworth. The whole
household rallies around Phillis during her bout with brain-
fever, and through her languid convalescence; her parents
refuse all help and nurse her themselves. It remains to
the outspoken servant, Bessy, though, to jolt Phillis back
into reality: "... the Lord has done a' He can for you,
and more than you deserve, too, if you don't do something
for yourself" (p. 108). Phillis's affirmation that "we
will go back to the peace of the old days. I know we shall;
129
I can and I will!" (p. 109), is a confirmation of her strong
will, but it is also untrue. Having experienced the pain
of a real loss, even though the romance was only conjec
tured, as Mrs. Gaskell carefully stipulates, Phillis is
still confined within the loving but isolated family circle,
with little chance of being appreciated for herself. She
has lost more than a lover clearly less sensitive and sin
cere than herself; she has lost her childhood idealism and
her emotional innocence. Her physical illness parallels
the emotional suffering of her initiation into adulthood,
with its consequent romantic disillusionment. Henceforth,
her outlook will be tempered by that experience, and she
can never be the same person she was before it happened.
Perhaps the final few paragraphs of the story are
a little too bright for the delicate colors that precede
them. Bessy is another of Mrs. Gaskell's indomitable
servant-characters, and her exhortation to Phillis to stop
moping is undoubtedly well meant, but rather beside the
point. It is in character for her to be concerned about
doing rather than being, but for the sensitive Phillis, it
is not so easy to consider her little love affair incon
sequential. Tied up in it is her whole self-concept, and
her self-respect. She cannot escape in the old childhood
ways, nor can her parents make everything right again, as
they did when she was a child. But in encountering a new,
unexplored part of herself, she finds the strength to deal
130
with what must be dealt with, and in her resolution to do
something, change her environment for a while, she expresses
her willingness to go on, to live rather than die to her
self. Hazel Mews notes that
Mrs. Gaskell, for all her sympcithy for Phillis's dif
ficulties, yet puts back upon the girl herself the
final responsibility for regaining her old peace and
self-respect within an accepted and familiar environ
ment of inadequate opportunity but strong family
affection and family duty. (Frail Vessels, p. 94)
The responsibility is Phillis's and she accepts it,
but the problem, one notices, is not, and Mrs. Gaskell is
not above pointing a moral for parents who dominate their
children out of a mistaken sense of love. As Yvonne
ffrench writes,
Minister Holman and his wife, by their refusal to
admit the fact that Phillis is no longer a child but
a full and independent individual, are thus robbed
of her confidence and stricken by her despair. How
ever they may reproach Paul Manning the fault is
theirs; theirs the responsibility for their own over
possessiveness. It is Paul himself, not the parents,
who understands the tragedy of Phillis's young feel
ings. (Mrs. Gaskell, pp. 95-96)
By narrowing her scope to a single, isolated family,
and by focusing intensely on the experiences of one young
woman in that family, Mrs. Gaskell avoided having to manu
facture the kind of plot which made her earlier romantic
stories contrived and melodramatic. Her concern in Cousin
Phillis is purely with the psychology of human response to
human needs, and she makes every detail count. The accuracy
of her portrayal of Phillis's awakening to love and attempt
131
ing to hide it from her family is far more convincing than,
say, Mary Barton's sudden realization that she is in love.
The reader not only sympathizes with Phillis; he under
stands why she must act the way she does. This represents
not so much an increase in Mrs. Gaskell's understanding of
feminine nature as it is a refinement in her artistic abil
ity to portray women characters in psychological depth.
As Arthur Pollard says with reference to Mrs. Gas-
kell's "subtle understanding" in representing young women's
responses to love,
From the fairly elementary situation of Mary Barton
she progresses through the trying and tender story
of Margaret Hale and the tempestuous chronicle of
Sylvia Robson to the parallel but so different ex
periences of Molly Gibson and Cynthia Kirkpatrick. . . .
The mere listing of these four girls' names is a re
minder of the variety of Mrs. Gaskell's young women.
Together they illustrate her comprehension of both
the depth and complexity of the female soul. (Mrs.
Gaskell: Novelist and Biographer, p. 253)
Phillis's "I can and I will!" is an acknowledgment of the
inevitability of the moment: life must go on. She is
strong enough to accept it without breaking; her illness
is not fatal, and Mrs. Gaskell does not provide a worthier
lover at the last moment to reward Phillis for her good
ness. Life is its own reward, but life, and love, do not
exist in physical or emotional isolation, as Phillis
learns. She is left in the state of needing to be meaning
fully related to the world, and since all she has is her
family, she must begin again with them.
132
In North and South and Cousin Phillis, Mrs. Gaskell
indicates the complex psychological needs of her heroines
for family affection and romantic love, and explores their
difficulties in finding or accepting them. She continues
to elaborate on these themes in greater detail in her last
two long works, Sylvia1s Lovers and Wives and Daughters.
133
Notes to Chapter Two
Letter to Elizabeth Gaskell; in Elizabeth Gaskell,
The Life of Charlotte BrontB (London: John Lehman, 1947),
p. 382.
2
Rev. of Mary Barton, Edinburgh Review (April 1849);
cited in Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties
(London: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 207.
3
See above, p. 56.
4
"The Early Victorian Social-Problem Novel," m
From Dickens to Hardy, ed. Boris Ford, The Pelican Guide
to English Literature, VI (Baltimore: Penguin, 1958),
p. 178.
5
Elizabeth Haldane, Mrs. Gaskell and Her Friends
(1931; rpt. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries
Press, 1970), p. 7.
g
Gerada Maria Kooiman-Van Middendorp, The Hero in
the Feminine Novel (New York: Haskell House, 1966), p. 90.
7
"Mrs. Gaskell," m The Victorian Novel, ed. Ian
Watt (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 224.
g
My Lady Ludlow and Other Tales, The Knutsford
Edition, V (London: John Murray, 1906), p. 173. All sub
sequent references are to this edition.
9
Cousin Phillis and Other Tales, The Knutsford
Edition, VII (London: John Murray, 1906), p. 394. All
subsequent citations of Cousin Phillis are from this edi
tion.
"^In My Lady Ludlow and Other Tales, pp. 405-91.
"^Cf. Kettle, p. 181, or Tillotson, p. 202.
134
12
Two Essays on Analytical Psychology; cited m M.
Esther Harding, Woman's Mysteries, Ancient and Modern
(New York: Pantheon, 1955), p. 17.
CHAPTER THREE
With the publication of Sylvia's Lovers in 1863,
Mrs. Gaskell returns to the writing of longer fiction (her
last full-length novel, North and South, had been published
serially in 1854), and her final novels reflect a sustained
interest in character development and interaction. She
continues to fd)cus on the problem of feminine identity,
but by restricting the social background to a minor but
essential role, she can elaborate more on the psychological
aspects of her heroines' development. Though Sylvia's
Lovers and Wives and Daughters are worlds apart in mood,
since the former is Mrs. Gaskell's closest approach to
genuine tragedy, while the latter is, if not a domestic
comedy, informed by a serene tone that never leaves the
happy outcome in doubt, they share a carefully ordered
ideal of feminine, and by extension, human behavior that
subordinates pleasure to duty and passion to reason. The
contrast between this ideal and the human failure to achieve
it underlies the psychological conflicts that Mrs. Gaskell
represents with mature insight and depth in her two com
pletely different heroines. What interests the reader is
how the women respond to the inevitability of their situa
tions .
135
136
Sylvia's Lovers is the only novel for which Mrs.
Gaskell did painstaking historical research; the background
of the press-gangs and the arbitrary impressment by the
Admiralty at Whitby during the war with France in the
17 90's is remarkably accurate.'*' But in this novel, unlike
Mary Barton or North and South, where social unrest figures
in the plot, Mrs. Gaskell does not allow political or eco
nomic questions to dominate the story of the personal con
flicts of her main characters. The historical element is
interesting in its own right and it reinforces the progress
of the personal drama, but it always remains subordinate
to the themes of love and loss that dominate the novel,
and "never monopolizes the reader's attention at the expense
of characterization" (Ganz, p. 234).
Certainly Mrs. Gaskell criticizes the inhumanity of
naval impressment, and she develops strong reader sympathy
for Daniel Robson, who is hanged for leading a riot against
the Admiralty representatives. But the novel is firmly
focused on Sylvia Robson, the daughter who falls deeply in
love with a handsome sailor, and on Philip Hepburn, the
shoekeeper who wins her for a wife through treachery. The
reader's interest is sustained by the psychology of these
characters: there is genuine development in their person
alities and a limited change, not only as a result of their
experience of external events, but as a consequence of their
dynamic effect upon one another. Mrs. Gaskell had hinted
137
at much the same thing in North and South, where she re
cords the strong effect of John Thornton on Margaret Hale,
but in Sylvia's Lovers the effect is more impressive be
cause of the qualities with which she endows her heroine,
and the insight she gives into Sylvia's and Philip's feel
ings and thoughts.
Mrs. Gaskell's own title for the book at one point
was "Philip's Idol," a name she did not really like, but
which she felt aptly characterized the subject of the novel.
The change to "Sylvia's Lovers" suggests a shift in focus
from the man to the woman, and indeed, the story is really
Sylvia's. For it is she who occupies Philip Hepburn's
thoughts at the same time as hers are centered on Charley
Kinraid, and in exploring Sylvia's responses to love and
marriage, Mrs. Gaskell broadens the story from that of a
simple romance gone wrong to an examination of the social
institution of matrimony and its effects upon those who
enter it. That this is done within a strict moral context
is both an asset and a liability to Mrs. Gaskell's artistry,
as will be demonstrated below.
Sylvia Robson is a characteristic Gaskell heroine,
and her family background, particularly the marital rela
tionship of her parents, is predictably important in her
early development. The reader learns early in the story
that the husband dominates in the Robson marriage. Daniel
138
. . . was a man who had roamed about a good deal— been
sailor, smuggler, horse-dealer, and farmer in turns;
a sort of fellow possessed by a spirit of adventure
and love of change, which did him and his own family
more harm than anybody else. He was just the kind of
man that all his neighbors found fault with, and all
his neighbors liked. Late in life (for such an im
prudent man as he was, one of a class who generally
wed, trusting to chance and luck for the provision for
a family), Farmer Robson married a woman whose only
want of practical wisdom consisted in taking him for
a husband. (Sylvia's Lovers, p. 3 0)
Mrs. Robson, a "quiet, taciturn wife" (p. 31), is a typical
if somewhat unpopular farmer's wife; she prides herself on
her housekeeping, and looks down on her less fastidious
neighbors. The daughter identifies more with her excitable,
sociable father, but she respects her mother's practicality
even as she resents it: "Ay! but mother's words are scarce,
and weigh heavy. Feyther's liker me, and we talk a deal
o' rubble; but mother's words are liker to hewn stone. She
puts a deal o' meaning in 'em" (p. 11).
The opposition between the parents who, despite ex
ternal differences, appear to be genuinely devoted to one
another, works to Sylvia's advantage; she can easily manage
her father and use his easygoing acquiescence to indulge
her pleasure-loving nature against her mother's practical,
self-denying common sense. Here is the pattern familiar
in Mrs. Gaskell's fiction of father and daughter bonded in
a special way, while the mother remains an outsider. But
Sylvia's relationship with her mother is represented in
this novel as equally important as the relationship with
139
her father, a departure from the pattern of earlier novels
like North and South or Cousin Phillis, where the heroine’s
sincere respect for her mother does not quite cover up the
fact that she is emotionally and temperamentally much
closer to the father. Though it might be suggested that
part of Sylvia's later attentiveness to her mother stems
from a wish to protect herself from the possibility of
further pain in a close relationship with anyone else, she
has been represented all along as having "more insight
into her mother's heart than Daniel" (p. 37).
Mr. Robson enjoys his daughter's beauty and the at
tention it indirectly brings him as the possessor of an
attractive thing:
To his looser, less-restrained mind, it was agreeable
to hear of, and still more to see, the attention which
his daughter's beauty received. He felt it as reflect
ing consequence on himself. He had never troubled his
mind with speculations as to whether he himself was
popular, still less whether he was respected . . . he
perceived, without reasoning upon it, that the gay
daring spirits were more desirous of his company when
Sylvia was by his side than at any other time. (p. 105)
There is a touch of fatherly possessiveness in Daniel's
attentions toward the daughter, but there is much masculine
pride as well; Daniel is inclined to be a braggart, and an
attractive daughter must be shown off. The mother, how
ever, who is "a touch better educated than her husband"
(p. 37), responds very differently to her daughter's femi
nine maturation: "She was uncomfortable, even while her
140
motherly vanity was flattered, at the admiration Sylvia
received from the other sex. . . . All this made Bell un
comfortable, though she could hardly have told what she
dreaded" (p. 104). Philip Hepburn takes after his aunt
rather than his uncle; he is visibly upset by what he re
gards as the "cheapening" of Sylvia's dignity by her father,
who takes her to the tavern with him. Yet he cannot ex
pect his aunt to do anything about the situation, for she
would never dare to question her husband's conduct:
She really believed her husband to have the serious
and important occupation for his mind that she had
been taught to consider befitting the superior intel
lect of the masculine gender; she would have taxed
herself severely if, even in thought, she had blamed
him, and Philip respected her feelings too much to
say that Sylvia's father ought to look after her more
closely if he made such a pretty creature so constantly
his companion. . . . (p. 108)
Daniel, an ex-whaler, favors the romantic suit of
the adventurous specksioneer Charley Kinraid, as does
Sylvia herself, while Belle holds out for her comparatively
colorless, business-minded nephew, Philip Hepburn. It
seems as if Belle has repressed the sexual side of her
nature, while father and daughter have not; in the family
circle, when Daniel recounts to Sylvia and Philip the de
tails of how he had "won the sober Isabella Preston long
ago" (p. 113), she is "half-ashamed at having the little
details of her courtship revealed" (p. 113). Daniel manages
\
to summarize the family relationship, including the parental
relationship, when he talks about courtship:
141
She [Belle] were a woman, and there's niver a woman
but likes to have a sweetheart, and can tell when a
chap's castin' sheep's-eyes at her; ay, an' afore he
knows what's he's about hissen. She were a pretty
one then, was my old 'ooman, an' liked them as thought
her so, though she did cock her head high, as being a
Preston, which were a family o' standin' and means i'
those parts aforetime. There's Philip there I'll
warrant is as proud o' being Preston by th' mother's
side, for it runs i' t' blood, lass. A can tell when
a child of a Preston takes to being proud o' their
kin, by t' cut of their nose. Now Philip's and my
missus's have a turn beyond common i' their nostrils,
as if they was sniffin' at t' rest of us world, an'
seein' if we was good enough for 'em to consort wi'.
Thee an' me, lass, is Robsons— oat-cake folk, while
they's pie crust. Lord! how Bell used to speak to
me, as short as though a wasn't a Christian, an' a'
t' time she loved me as her very life, an' well a
knew it, tho' a'd to mak' as tho' a didn't. Philip,
when thou goes courtin', come t' me, and a'11 give
thee many a wrinkle. A've shown, too, as a know well
how t' choose a good wife by tokens an' signs, hannot
a, missus. Come t' me, my lad, and show me t' lass,
an' a'11 just tak' a squint at her, an' tell yo' if
she'll do or not; an' if she'll do, a'11 teach yo'
how to win her. (p. 113)
Daniel and Belle Robson serve a number of purposes
in the novel. Daniel's passionate impulsiveness, which
ultimately leads to the deaths of both husband and wife (he
is hanged for inciting a riot, and she dies of grief several
years later), contrasts with Belle's silent prudence to
create a "perpetual tension between them in their home life"
and "a long contest of attrition in their marriage . . .
[which] is destined to flash out more dramatically and de
cisively in the lives of Sylvia and Philip" (Pollard,
p. 214). The Robson marriage has its ups and downs, but
on the whole, both parents are consistent in the roles
142
they play, and those roles are determined by the society
in which they live. The naturally inferior position of
women is taken for granted, though Mrs. Gaskell does offer
the following in explanation of the country custom of men
socializing only with other men:
Amongst uneducated people— whose range of subjects
and interests do not extend beyond their daily life—
it is natural that when the first blush and hurry of
youth is over, there should be no great pleasure in
the conversation of the other sex. Men have plenty
to say to men, which in their estimation (gained from
tradition and experience) women cannot understand;
and farmers of a much later date than the one of which
I am writing would have contemptuously considered it
as a loss of time to talk to women; indeed, they were
often more communicative to the sheep-dog that ac
companied them through all the day's work, and fre
quently became a sort of dumb confidant. (p. 76)
The only undercutting of male superiority occurs indirectly,
as in Sylvia's clever management of her father's irritabil
ity during his attack of the gout.
The deep attachment of husband and wife, however un
equal their relationship, becomes evident when Daniel is
imprisoned and later executed. Unlike the capable Mrs.
Thornton of North and South, who is self-sufficient in her
own right, or the unfeeling Mrs. Kirkpatrick of Wives and
Daughters, who uses her widowhood as an excuse to manipu
late people, Mrs. Robson goes completely to pieces. Mother
and daughter exchange roles, as Sylvia takes reluctant
command of the situation and of her mother, and provides
strength and reassurance to this emotionally shattered
woman. The effect is to reinforce the superiority of the
143
male sex, however, for even in his fallibility, Daniel
represents everything to his womenfolk. Mrs. Gaskell
characterizes him thus:
In fact, Daniel was very like a child in all the parts
of his character. He was strongly affected by what
ever was present, and apt to forget the absent. He
acted on impulse, and too often had reason to be sorry
for it; but he hated his sorrow too much to let it
teach him wisdom for the future. With all his many
faults, however, he had something in him which made
him be dearly loved, both by the daughter whom he in
dulged, and the wife who was in fact superior to him,
but whom he imagined that he ruled with a wise and
absolute sway. (p. 213)
No human relationship is an either/or situation, and Mrs.
Gaskell wisely indicates the overlapping, the greay areas
of responsibility and devotion that characterize the Robson
marriage. What matters is how the characters have related
to one another, and in their mutual satisfaction, despite
the predictable day-to-day stress, they are more complete
personalities than either would be alone. It is fortunate
that Belle is able to become a proper wife and bear all
tribulations in silence, and as Arthur Pollard observes,
"The lesson of her faithfulness and forbearance is not
wasted when we read of her daughter's troubles in her mar
riage" (Pollard, p. 215). For although Philip Hepburn
attempts to make every allowance for Sylvia, in effect,
to play the woman's acquiescent role, the relationship is
doomed when Sylvia refuses to play any role at all but
that of indifferent participant.
144
The strong emphasis on marriage in Mrs. Gaskell's
last two novels is, perhaps, the natural consequence of the
author's desire to promote social unity; or perhaps it re
presents a natural consequence of the supposedly romantic
preoccupations of the feminine mind. It is nevertheless
true that even as Elizabeth Gaskell promotes marriage as
the highest and worthiest goal for her heroines, she always
distinguishes, and especially in the last two novels, be
tween admirable and unadmirable kinds of marriage, between
suitable and unsuitable partners for her female characters,
and between selfless and selfish motives for marriage. In
keeping with what one would expect to be the greater psycho
logical insight of a mature artist, her later presentations
of marriage are not the idyllic sort found at the conclu
sion of Mary Barton. Rather, she examines the personalities
of the men and women in the roles of husband and wife to
distinguish between the role and its player, and to record
the psychological effects of their relationship on one an
other. She consistently uses humor to undercut conven
tionalized notions of romance. Thus, she can mention mar
riage in chapter one of Sylvia's Lovers in the same breath
as she denounces the royal practice of impressing seamen:
There was just another motive in the minds of some
provident parents of many daughters. The captains
and lieutenants employed on this service were mostly
agreeable bachelors, brought up to a genteel profes
sion, at the least they were very pleasant visitors,
when they had a day to spare; who knew what might
come of it? (p. 8)
14 5
The heroine of the novel is very much her father's
daughter, and this is both the source of her charm and a
partial cause of her sorrows. "In fact, her peculiarity
seemed to be this— that every one who knew her talked
about her either in praise or blame; in church, or in
market, she unconsciously attracted attention; they could
not forget her presence, as they could that of other girls
perhaps more personally attractive" (p. 105). In a word,
Sylvia is mercurial in her moods, but this inconstancy
indicates a deeper instability as well, and the childish
pleasure she takes in the prospect of a new cloak or the
prospect of a funeral where she can see the latest fashions,
suggest a lack of particularity that makes her future life
more difficult to bear. Sylvia's attitude is well captured
in the response she makes to her young friend, Molly Corney,
in the first dialogue of the novel: "I'm going to have a
new cloak, lass, and I cannot heed thee if thou dost lec
ture" (p. 11). As a matter of fact, Sylvia does not heed
anything that does not concern her personally or directly,
and Mrs. Gaskell makes the price of her learning to listen
to "lectures" a high one. She does not condemn Sylvia's
impulsiveness as inappropriate feminine behavior so much
as she suggests it is irresponsible human behavior, and
herein is the tragedy of Sylvia's life.
Sylvia is a different type of heroine from all of
Mrs. Gaskell's others because of her strong individualism,
146
and she presents a different set of obstacles for her
creator than did, say, Mary Barton or Jemima Bradshaw, with
whom she shares many feminine aspirations. For Mary and
Jemima are basically complacent in acquiescing to the rigid
social demands placed on them, and though Mrs. Gaskell
maneuvers her plots to make their lives turn out happily,
it seems to be a reward for their final submission to the
yoke of feminine responsibility: each sacrifices her indi
vidualistic, stubborn pride (Mary has dreamed of marrying
into wealth and Jemima has imagined that she is being
treated as an object) for the love of a good man, and under
goes a character change as a result. Sylvia, however,
neither wants to sublimate her desires nor to behave pas
sively and decorously: the Bront&an influence is obvious.
Believing that her true love, Charley Kinraid, is dead,
Sylvia withdraws emotionally from all relationships; an
excessive devotion to her mother's care, and later to her
daughter's, are her only outlets. Both of these are non-
therapeutic in the sense that no emotional growth takes
place in Sylvia, but they have the admirable effect of
keeping her sane.
The focus throughout is psychological, and though
Sylvia is presented as an unsophisticated country girl,
her situation and her response to it are far from simple.
In the course of the novel, Sylbia is transformed from a
willful, romantic child into a disillusioned, bitter woman,
and her defiant actions in the latter part of the story
are attributable not only to the traumatic losses of her
lover and her father, but to the basic qualities of her
character. In tracing Sylvia's first, tentative feelings
of love for Charley, and her cold response to Philip's
overtures of friendship, Mrs. Gaskell is conventional:
there is the usual romantic self-deception about the hero
ine's true feelings, the sudden shyness before the beloved
— Sylvia refuses to kiss the candlestick (Charley himself)
at the New Year's party— the physical beauty that accom
panies love, the joy of the lovers' mutual recognition of
passion, and grief in the loss of the beloved. Even the
death of a parent is represented elsewhere in Mrs. Gaskell'
fiction. What she has not dealt with elsewhere, however,
and what adds psychological complexity to this novel is
the problem of sexual jealousy on several levels. Philip
Hepburn is obsessed with a passion for Sylvia that encour
ages him to become irrationally jealous of his more suc
cessful rival for her affection, and to lie to Sylvia
about Kinraid's fate, thereby tricking her into marrying
him. On a lesser level, Hester Rose must content with
her feelings of jealousy toward Sylvia, who treats Philip
with indifference before their marriage and with outright
contempt after her discovery of his deception. Hester,
of course, loves Philip devotedly, but he is as blind to
148
her affection as is Sylvia to his for her. Sylvia herself
becomes jealous of the woman Kinraid eventually marries.
And parental possessiveness adds still another element of
suspicion to the web of jealousy that surrounds Sylvia's
and Kinraid's romance: the Robsons believe the Corney
girls' assertions that Philip was the troth-plighted lover
of Bessy Corney, and Hester Rose's mother deplores Philip's
choice of Sylvia over her own daughter, while Kester, the
Robson's trusted servant, looks down on Philip as not good
enough for Sylvia. Mrs. Gaskell is sensitive to the con
sequences of misplaced affection, and in her handling of
the multiple effects of the behavior of all these indi
viduals, she heightens the tragedy of a romance gone wrong.
This is a side of love that she had investigated in Cousin
Phillis, but linked with marriage as it is in Sylvia's
Lovers, the effects are far more destructive.
Central to the tragedy is Philip Hepburn himself,
a believable and oddly enough, even compelling character,
who is more prosaic but also more substantial than his
rival. Within a colorless exterior, there is a passionate
emotionalism that is all the more convincing for its un
expectedness. Philip is self-educated and a devout church
goer; he does well in business and is a respectable citizen
and dutiful relative. But he is not the man for Sylvia,
as her mother perceives: "I used to think that she and yo'
might fancy one another, but thou'rt too old-fashioned like
149
for her; ye would na1 suit . . (p. 108). In the light
of his sober character, Philip's love for Sylvia is all the
more difficult to bear.
To Philip she was the only woman in the world; it was
the one subject on which he dared not consider, for
fear that both conscience and judgment should decide
against him, and that he should be convinced against
his will that she was an unfit mate for him, that
she never would be his, and that it was waste of time
and life to keep her shrined in the dearest sanctuary
of his being, to the exclusion of all the serious and
religious aims, which, in any other case, he would
have been the first to acknowledge as the object he
ought to pursue. (pp. 110-11)
Mrs. Gaskell builds sympathy for his fumbling at
tempts at courtship as she relates Charley Kinraid's seem
ingly effortless captivation of Sylvia. On the subject
of love, Philip, for all his knowledge of academics, is
ignorant. Alice Rose has to tell him, "Lad! it's not
schooling, nor knowledge, nor book-learning as carries a
man through t' world. It's mother-wit. And it's noan
schooling, nor knowledge, nor book-learning as takes a
young woman. It's summat as canna be put into words"
(p. 209). The progress of Philip's capitulation to his
passion (he prays, "Give me Sylvia or else I die") is
narrated with careful insight; Mrs. Gaskell focuses on
his inner turmoil at the fatal moment when he decides to
betray Kinraid:
. . . He was conscious that he had said something
in reply to Kinraid's adjuration that he would deliver
his message to Sylvia, at the very time when Carter
had stung him into fresh anger by the allusion to the
150
possibility of the specksioneer's "running after other
girls," for, for an instant, Hepburn had been touched
by the contrast of circumstances. . . . But Hepburn
began to wonder what he himself had said— how much of
a promise he had made to deliver those last passionate
words of Kinraid's. He could not recollect how much,
how little he had said; he knew he had spoken hoarsely
and low almost at the same time as Carter had uttered
his loud joke. But he doubted if Kinraid had caught
his words.
And then the dread Inner Creature, who lurks in
each of our hearts, arose and said, "It is as well: a
promise given is a fetter to the giver. But a promise
is not given when it has not been received."
(pp. 190-91)
In order to bring out the difficult and irrecon
cilable situations of both Sylvia and Philip, Mrs. Gaskell
has to maintain a balance of good and bad qualities in
both characters. It is imperative that though his deser
tion of Kinraid and his deception toward Sylvia are con
temptible, Philip be recognized for the noble qualities
he possesses. That Sylvia finally comes to realize the
value of the love he has for her, too late, is no justifi
cation for his actions, but it is an ironic climax to the
series of reversals that have marked the Hepburn marriage.
Philip is granted his wish, but like Midas, he discovers
belatedly that his idolatry has cut him off from the en
joyment of his possession. Sylvia has realized that the
marriage was wrong from the start; long before the wedding,
where as a bride she appears dressed in mourning, she had
told Philip, "It's not in me to forgive; sometimes I think
it's not in me to forget" (p. 306). Sylvia proceeds to
dwell on her past losses and ignores her husband, much to
151
Philip's despair, whereupon she tells him, "Our being wed
were a great mistake; but before t' poor old widow woman
[her mother] let us make as if we were happy" (p. 315).
Margaret Ganz sees a similarity between the tragic
stature of John Barton and Philip Hepburn, since "both are
destroyed because an obsessive commitment to a particular
objective leads them to deny the claim of a higher moral
ity," but she finds Mrs. Gaskell's portrayal of the latter
"a more sophisticated apprehension of the complex motiva
tions often responsible for the betrayal of those values
which ought most to be cherished" (Ganz, p. 232). Philip
fails to see that his love is not returned with the same
force. When he is confronted with the evidence of his
crime, he can only beg, "I know this, I have loved you as
no man but me ever loved before. Have some pity and for
giveness on me, if it's only because I have been so tor
mented with my love" (p. 327). But Sylvia can only vow
never to live with him as his wife again. It is not until
she sees in the paper (she has learned to read) the an
nouncement of Charley Kinraid's marriage to Miss Clarinda
Jackson "with a fortune of £10,000" that she begins to per
ceive the value of Philip's devotion:
The idea was irresistibly forced upon her that Philip
would not have acted so; it would have taken long
years before he could have been induced to put another
on the throne she had once occupied. For the first
time in her life she seemed to recognize the real
nature of Philip's love. (p. 374)
152
And it is not until Sylvia has learned through
suffering to bear the pain and adversity of her life with
patience, until in effect she has given up the attitudes
of a spoiled child for those of a responsible woman, that
she begins to feel "the value of such enduring love as
Philip's had been" (p. 419), and can admit that Philip was
right about Kinraid's shallowness. In the final recon
ciliation scene, Sylvia appears to have undergone a com
plete reversal as she begs Philip's forgiveness and casti
gates herself for her neglect of him. Here she fulfills
Mrs. Gaskell's ideal of human responsiveness to others'
needs, but it has taken a dramatic rescue and the heroic
sacrifice of her husband's life to bring her to this aware
ness .
Mrs. Gaskell blames neither Sylvia nor Philip com
pletely for their victimizing of one another. In Sylvia's
position as wife and mother, this is particularly signifi
cant, for her conduct throughout most of the novel runs
opposite to the idealized passivity and acquiescence of
Mrs. Gaskell's good women. As Margaret Ganz observes,
Though Sylvia's early frivolity and impulsiveness,
and her eventual lack of mercy and charity, would
seem to make her the significant agent of Philip's
destruction, the author avoids the oversimplified
standard portrayal of woman as the heartless de
stroyer of man's peace of mind. She projects con
vincingly the seeming paradox of two very dissimilar
natures basically destroyed by the very same flaw:
the inability to control their passions. (Ganz, p. 245)
153
Having created two completely emotion-directed
characters, but being intellectually out of sympathy with
any sustained display of irrationalism in a social setting,
Mrs. Gaskell has to resort to contrivance to end the novel.
In an article entitled "The Making of Sylvia's Lovers,"
John McVeagh theorizes that Elizabeth Gaskell was working
with two separate strands of plot at two different times,
and because of the gap in the writing of the novel, plus
her tendency to become distracted while working on her
stories, she had written two complete segments which she
2
could not reconcile m the final section of the novel.
Moreover, because of her publisher's demand for length,
she had to pad the story further with meaningless material,
further weakening the effect. McVeagh cites Elizabeth
Gaskell's letters to her publisher and to friends during
the two-year period of the writing of Sylvia's Lovers to
substantiate his claim that she grew tired of the novel
midway through, and only finished it because it stood in
the way of another commitment that she wanted to work on.
He argues that Mrs. Gaskell began the novel with good in
tentions, but that her method of handling the two strands
of the story separately rather than interweaving them, and
the long chronological gap between the writing of the two
sections worked against her, and that by the time she got
to the conclusion, she had lost her original creative
impulse. He further suggests that Mrs. Gaskell might have
154
been working simultaneously on both Sylvia's Lovers and
"A Dark Night's Work," an interminable horror story which
he calls "the worst thing she ever wrote," and that the
melodrama of the latter contaminated the final section of
the former.
That there is structural weakness in Sylvia1s Lovers
is undeniable, and there are more reasons for it besides
the ones Professor McVeagh suggests. He observes that the
first volume of the novel, the Charley Kinraid-Sylvia Rob
son love story, is a "happy" volume: "Youthful romance is
celebrated, the turn of the year is an occasion for festiv
ity, and . . . the imagery of the volume suits its joyful
theme" (p. 273). By contrast, the second book is conscious
ly darker in tone, telling the story of Sylvia and Philip
Hepburn and a romance gone wrong. Professor McVeagh cor
rectly concludes that given the plot she elected to follow,
Mrs. Gaskell's greatest difficulty in Volume III was the
reconciliation of the two completely different tones, and
that she did not wholly succeed in surmounting it. But
seen in terms of her attitudes towards woman's role in love
and marriage, it is not surprising that the story does not
work on a thematic level.
Sylvia's romance with Kinraid is depicted as highly
emotional; she follows the inclinations of her heart, in
the best romantic fashion, scarcely aware of the jump from
pure physical attraction to a love so consuming that Kin-
raid's "death" physically alters her disposition. There
is no mention here of the familial or social obligations,
or the sort of prudent judgment and conscious weighing
of suitors' virtues which other Gaskell heroines have been
praised for: Sylvia does not imitate Margaret Hale's refus
al of Henry Lennox in North and South, or Ellinor Wilkins'
rejection of Ralph Corbet in "A Dark Night's Work." Her
love for Kinraid is an irrational, all-consuming passion
directed toward a man she hardly knows. Such emotionalism
was hardly compatible with Mrs. Gaskell's tendency to em
phasize the shoulds in human relationships; as a social
moralist whose earlier works advocate obedience to law and
the consideration of the common welfare before self-ser
vice, she did not feel that people could yield completely
to their emotional inclinations without some recrimination.
Emotions, especially women's feelings of love, are to be
kept in check, to be subjected to reason, as Ruth Hilton
learns and Mary Barton discovers. Likewise, Sylvia cannot
be allowed to indulge herself in emotional excess at the
expense of their social community, in her case, her family.
Such selfishness is intolerable because it emphasizes the
individual thrust of passion and negates the need for
relatedness out of which a sense of community evolves.
Sylvia loves Kinraid entirely for herself, and Philip loves
Sylvia in the same way, with a smothering sense of posses
sion that destroys the individuality of the beloved. If
156
Sylvia is wrong in loving as violently as she does, Philip's
sin is far worse, for the moral issue in his case is not
only one of self-control, but of the deliberate manipula
tion of others' lives and feelings for his own purpose.
Hence, a moral retribution is required of both characters:
Sylvia must learn to discipline her desires, and Philip
must not only recognize that he has misplaced his values
by adoring Sylvia above God "(Child," said he, once more,
"I ha' made thee my idol; and if I could live my life o'er
again I would love my God more and thee less" [p. 424]) ,
but also answer for the community discord brought about by
his lies. Mrs. Gaskell could not bring the novel to a
morally satisfying conclusion or define an ideal sort of
love without demonstrating moral recognition and growth in
the main characters. This was the task she faced in Book
III, and she chose to sacrifice art to morality.
The moral thrust of Sylvia's Lovers was complicated
by problems of characterization. Sylvia is initially por
trayed as too willful, too self-centered, and too spoiled
to change easily, and the sort of emotional about-face she
does at the end of the novel is unconvincing as a result.
Indeed, she must be hard-hearted if the reader is to sympa
thize with Philip's predicament in loving her. For although
Philip manipulates circumstances to drive Sylvia into a
marriage she does not want, Mrs. Gaskell shows clearly that
Sylvia, unlike the ideal helpmate, makes no attempt to
157
adjust to it once the vow is made. That Mrs. Gaskell fills
the last section of the novel with a rambling, melodramatic
account of Philip's suffering and repentance is unfortunate,
but there was really nothing more she could do with Sylvia
as a character or with the Sylvia-Philip relationship until
she had emphasized Philip's admirable qualities sufficiently
to balance his sins of deception and possessiveness. The
reader sees a side of Philip's character which Sylvia does
not, and the pathos of their reunion is intensified by
Sylvia's final recognition of her husband's true worth.
The girl's belated change of heart at the end of the
novel is prepared for through the good influences of those
around her, but it grows primarily out of her motherhood
rather than from her husband's love; her devotion to and
sense of responsibility toward Philip's and her child,
Bella, is the means of her softening. Philip's final act
of heroism is fittingly the rescue of this child. In this
sense, at least, the novel has thematic unity, and charac
ters like Molly Corney, who is transformed in the final
volume into the pretentious shopkeeper's wife she had shown
every sign of becoming in the first, and to whom Professor
McVeagh strongly objects as an unrealistic character, pro
vide the measure of contrast needed to demonstrate Sylvia's
changed personality. (Parenthetically, it might be added
that there is nothing strange about meeting a childhood
friend years later and finding that one has nothing in
158
common with the person, contrary to Professor McVeagh's
observation. Children and young people generally do not
choose their friends on the same basis that adults do.)
A distinction should be drawn between Mrs. Gaskell's
conscious choice to impose a moral necessity on her self-
willed characters, and the charge most often made that she
was incapable of representing strongly felt emotion. No
one who rereads the climactic interview of Sylvia, Philip,
and Kinraid upon the latter's return from his impressment,
for instance, or the closing scene of the novel, can agree
that as a feminine writer of romances Mrs. Gaskell habit
ually avoided realistic emotion in her fiction. The remarks
of David Cecil, for instance, who writes, "Even such re
pressed intensities as might reasonably be supposed to come
within her view, even such violent emotions as ladies in
vicarages did feel, are beyond Mrs. Gaskell's imaginative
range" (Early Victorian Novelists, p. 210), or of H. P.
Collins, might indeed apply to her early novels, but are
inappropriate to Sylvia's Lovers;
It is not so much that there is evasion of realities
in religion and realities in sex, as that the author
is not deliberately conscious. The impulse to com
pleteness is lacking, the writer all-too-consciously
bludgeons herself with violent and disagreeable in
cident, not too well reproduced, but she does not
focus passion intellectually. ("The Naked Sensibility,"
p. 66)
On a realistic level, Sylvia's Lovers is a debunking
of romantic love. Molly Corney's marriage to a Newcastle
159
shopkeeper early in the book sets the stage for a loss of
romantic illusions:
"A reckon a've done pretty well for musel', and
a'11 wish ye as good luck, Sylvia." . . . but Sylvia
was silent. She was disappointed; it was a coming
down from the romance with specksioneer for its hero.
Molly laughed awkwardly, understanding Sylvia's
thoughts better than the latter imagined. . . .
(pp. 99-100)
One by one, the unrealistic characters pay a high price
for substituting dreams and wishes for the practical real
ities of marriage. Everyone who loves unwisely or too
well— sensually as opposed to spiritually— comes to grief.
Sylvia spurns the staid, mercenary Philip in favor of Kin
raid's flashy virility, and loses both men— for Kinraid,
whose love for Sylvia, it is implied, is only one of his
many passions, is easily contented with another woman when
Sylvia is no longer available. And Philip leaves home for
foreign military service when his monstrous lie is dis
covered, after lavishing his affection on an unresponsive
Sylvia. Ironically, Philip has turned away from Hester
Rose's sincere love to chase a girl who "never liked Philip
at the best of times" (p. 62). Of Philip's insane desire,
Mrs. Gaskell says:
He was like too many of us, he did not place his future
life in the hands of God, and only ask for grace to
do His will in whatever circumstances might arise; but
he yearned in that terrible way after a blessing which,
when granted under such circumstances, too often turns
out to be a curse. And that spirit brings with it the
material and earthly idea that all events that favor
our wishes are answers to our prayers. . . . (p. 152)
160
This is admittedly an unconvincingly pious tone for a
writer as sophisticated as Mrs. Gaskell is elsewhere, but
she is serious in showing directly and by implication the
effects of self-centeredness. Had Philip mastered his
emotion and subjected it to the control of intellect, like
John Thornton or Jem Wilson, it can be presumed that he
would not have come to later grief.
If emotional excess is not acceptable in men, nei
ther is it appropriate for women. It leads Sylvia— lied
to by Philip, trapped by motherhood into renouncing Kin
raid yet deserted by him when he marries another— to
become "a woman who finds out she's been cheated by men
as she trusted; and who has no help for it" (p. 380).
More acceptable to Mrs. Gaskell's generation, but never
theless psychologically unhealthy, is the patient suffer
ing of unrequired love which leads Hester Rose to become
a sister in thought and deed to Philip, who treats her
coldly, and to take comfort in her Bible while he pursues
Sylvia. She resists the admission of her love in every
way: "0 mother! mother," wailed out Hester; "I never
thought as anyone but God would ha' known that I had ever
for a day thought on his being more to me than a brother"
(p. 381). Such complete self-abnegation is unusual, of
course; Mrs. Gaskell relates that Sylvia "wondered how
she herself should have felt toward anyone who had come
between her and him [Kinraid] and wiled his love away,"
161
and that she marvels at "Hester's unfailing sweetness and
kindness towards herself from the very first" (p. 362).
There is much unjustifiable oversimplification of
the psychology of feminine emotional relationships here,
but one can see the same motif of patient endurance at work
in other Gaskell novels. Growth through suffering is the
common lot of female characters; Mary Barton prays that her
lover will be saved even though she does not "deserve" to
see him again; Ruth Hilton chooses her child's welfare and
her own moral vindication over Mr. Bellingham-Donne's seduc
tiveness, even though it is a real struggle to give him up;
Cousin Phillis comes through her lovesickness a stronger
if soberer person; Molly Gibson undergoes the anguish of
seeing her beloved rejected by her stepsister. And there
are other sterling examples of uncomplaining feminine
stoicism in Mrs. Gaskell's short stories, whose heroines
are either required to pay for thoughtless behavior with
an unhappy life, like the "Grey Lady," or are rewarded for
deeds of generous self-sacrifice with the esteem of rela
tives and friends, like Thekla in "Six Weeks at Heppen-
heim." Maturity for Mrs. Gaskell's women means self-
discipline and self-control, and the whole behavior of
women in marriage is tied to her observance of these prin
ciples; flighty, immature women like Mary Barton or Lizzie
Leigh or Sylvia Robson, must learn the hard way what wiser
women like Margaret Jennings or Hester Rose already know,
162
that trust in providence and the patient endurance of in
evitable hardship are the only sure ways to happiness.
Concerning the relationship between romantic love
and the woman's role in marriage, Sylvia's Lovers reiter
ates an idea stated implicitly rather than explicitly
throughout Mrs. Gaskell's fiction, namely, that matrimony
may not always be a particularly pleasurable union for a
woman, but it can be a virtuous one, given the wife's.high
role. In Sylvia's Lovers, contrasting feminine views of
marriage are held by the two women who represent extremes
of negative and positive attitudes toward wifehood. Molly
Corney, the practical, unsentimental and opportunistic
tradesman's wife who has married for wealth and status,
says, "Some folks is happy in marriage, and some isn't.
It's just luck, and there's no forecasting it. Men is such
unaccountable animals, there's no prophesying upon 'em"
(p. 375) . The spiritual, idealistic Hester Rose has a
traditional concept of marriage; she is disturbed by Syl
via's treatment of Philip, particularly after Sylvia has
repudiated him, for this "want of love towards him had up
rooted him from the place where he was valued and honored"
(p. 358). Hester is indignant at seeing Philip's "love
disregarded and slighted, and his life embittered by the
thoughtless conduct of a wife!" (p. 358). Her advice to
Sylvia shows plainly that she considers the husband to be
lord and sovereign in marriage; she tells her to "put away
163
the memory of past injury, and forgive it all, and be, what
yo' can be, Sylvia, if yoh've a mind to, just the kind,
good wife he ought to have" (p. 3 81).
The exhortation to selflessness, Christian forbear
ance and forgiveness which Mrs. Gaskell offers again and
again to her heroines is an unsatisfying solution to the
fictional problems she creates because it completely avoids
any direct confrontation or personal growth, and substitutes
instead a blanket passivity considered appropriately femi
nine. Mary Barton, Ruth Hilton, Margaret Hale, Phillis
Holman, and Sylvia Robson are distinct personalities, though
they share a human need for self-identity and for mature
relationships based on an adequate understanding of and
acceptance of self. What happens to each, however, is the
same; she is encouraged to submerge her sense of self in
the love or service of another person or ideal without ever
investigating the extent of the sacrifice required. For
women who marry, the success or failure of the relationship
depends almost entirely on the character of the husband:
Jem Wilson and John Thornton are shown to be morally up
right, and hence good marital risks, while Philip Hepburn
is not.
Mrs. Gaskell is quick to fault marriages based on
false idealism or pure opportunism, however, and she punc
tures the myth that married life is more rewarding than any
other state. But to go further than this would have re-
quired a full-scale investigation of that most sacred Vic
torian institution, the family, an investigation Mrs. Gas
kell was not prepared to undertake. Instead, she sacrifices
her women's psychological and emotional needs to a moral
ideal. The daddy's girls remain daddy's girls, even when
the father is replaced by a husband, and possessive mothers
continue to be possessive without understanding the whys
or wherefores of their instinctive need for children. Mrs.
Gaskell's men have a whole world of commerce and politics
to expand into and possess, and through which to define
their individuality, but this society is forbidden to women.
And the once chance open to the young girl for self-defini
tion is marriage, which too often is no escape at all, as
Mrs. Gaskell shows. The closest tangible things for a woman
to possess are first her parents, and then her children.
Significantly, she does not possess her husband; legally,
and in every other sense, he possesses her. She must com
ply, however, because there isn't anything else to do, and
her affiliative need is strong; hence, traits of selfless
ness, perceptiveness, and thoughtfulness are encouraged by
word and example in Mrs. Gaskell's novels, as means for
women to secure and retain the favor of significant others.
In all of Mrs. Gaskell's portrayals of marriage,
there is an unreconciled tension between the physical domin
ation of the male and the not always happy acquiescence of
the female. The husband either exerts his authority as
brute force, as does Mr. Bradshaw in Ruth or Daniel Robson
in Sylvia's Lovers, or he makes unilateral decisions affect
ing his wife without her consent, as does Mr. Hale in North
and South. The short stories in particular abound in exam
ples of such male dominance: "The Grey Woman," "The Moor
land Cottage," and "A Dark Night's Work" illustrate the
strong male control which leads to certain death (sometimes
literally) for a woman unless she escapes. Though Mrs. Gas
kell did not verbalize it directly, her whole literary out
put seems to dramatize the suffocation of the feminine
spirit by Victorian social mores. Perhaps this is why her
women characters are definitely retiring in demeanor; their
sphere of influence is the house and hearth, and they have
no choice but to stick to it. To cite but one example from
the same period as Sylvia's Lovers, the heroine in "A Dark
Night's Work" (18 63) passes up the chance for a happy mar
riage and a normal social life in order to preserve the
memory of her late father as a just and upright man. Though
such behavior is clearly neurotic, Elizabeth Gaskell does
not really condemn Ellinor Wilkins for such incredible
fidelity; rather, the girl is rewarded with a marriage of
sorts at the end of the story which, while unbelievable,
at least reassures the reader that Ellinor has done the
right thing. It seems that just as in Cranford, the world's
disfavor is here visited upon a meek and defenseless woman,
but there is no recourse save passive acquiescence to the
166
fate of being manipulated by men if the woman is to be ad
mired.
Though many women were agitating for women's rights
in the 184 0's and 1850's in England, no mention of any such
activity ever appears in a Gaskell novel; Mrs. Gaskell
I
avoids the problem by deliberately avoiding contemporary
settings. In portraying the disaster that can befall a
marriage when the wife fails to uphold her responsibilities,
as happens in Sylvia's Lovers, she handles a contemporary
problem from a traditional point of view. For though the
Hepburn marriage is doomed from the start because it is
founded on a lie, the reader must blame Sylvia as well as
Philip for its demise once the fatal vow is made: both
characters demonstrate bad faith. In choosing to treat
the rights of her women characters within the context of
human responsibilities, Mrs. Gaskell shows no favoritism
towards the sex; if anything, she emphasizes the social
inequalities that continually force females into a disad
vantaged role. The tragedy of Sylvia's Lovers is one of
overwhelming insensitivity, but the moral issue is affected
by the psychological complexity of emotional causes and
reactions.
In her final novel, Mrs. Gaskell was no less con
cerned with the social position of women in relation to
men, but she chose to treat her characters against a happier
social background, with a consequent shift in emphasis.
167
The effect of characters on one another's lives is equally
as important here as in Sylvia's Lovers, but the society
is self-contained, and the quality of those lives is very
different. More than any of Mrs. Gaskell's other novels,
Wives and Daughters focuses on the social aspects of mar
riage. Among other problems, social class relationships
and interclass marriages are examined, and the artificial
snobbery that is amusing in Cranford comes under strong
attack.
Wives and Daughters can be classified as a domestic
novel of manners, owing much to the atmosphere of Cranford.
Though it is lengthy, slow-paced, and fairly plotless, it
brings to life in Miss and Mrs. Kirkpatrick two of the most
interesting and psychologically most complex personalities
Mrs. Gaskell ever created, as well as a host of entertain
ing secondary characters. Since as in Cranford, the world
of the story is self-contained (characters leave for London
and more distant places, but Mrs. Gaskell does not follow
them there), the author is free to study the sphere of femi
nine influence and all the problems of feminine social and
emotional autonomy as they affect specific individuals, and
to make comparisons among the beliefs and values held by
her characters. She creates the incredible Clare Kirk
patrick as a contrast to all the female virtues so carefully
stressed in other novels. Together with her daughter Cyn
thia, Mrs. Kirkpatrick, later Gibson, is paired off against
168
another mother and daughter in the story, Mrs. Hamley and
Molly Gibson, with complex results. Though the Kirkpatrick
ladies are suitably punished for their vanity and selfish
ness in the course of the story, there is no moralizing in
Mrs. Gaskell's handling of them; moreover, the good women
who have done no wrong must endure even greater suffering
and disappointment at the hands of men. Mrs. Hamley is
frustrated in her marriage and disappointed in her oldest
son, Molly Gibson is deserted by the father she loves to
distraction, and Aim4e Hamley, the ex-servant, is left a
widowed mother in a foreign land with no friends.
The thematic concerns that dominate the novel, to
take a clue from the title, are the specifically feminine
states of wifehood and daughtership, and all the characters
in the book are related by virtue of their connection with
one of the wives or daughters of the Gibson family. The
novel, a panorama of life in an English country village
of the early nineteenth century (no specific dates are
given, but Mrs. Gaskell means for her readers to understand
that it takes place at a time when the effects of the In
dustrial Revolution had not yet spread to rural England),
focuses on the motherless Molly Gibson, whose father de
cides to remarry in order to provide his daughter with the
feminine supervision he feels she needs. Mr. Gibson marries
not for love but from a sense of duty, and one of the mar
velous pieces of irony of many in the book is that he mar
169
ries partly to preserve his daughter from the romantic
overtures of one of his love-struck students, a certain
"Mr. Coxe, aged twenty" (Wives and Daughters, p. 84). His
new wife, a former governess who has grown tired of sup
porting herself and her daughter by her own labors, takes
over the doctor's home and his life in a manner that is
suitable punishment for him, but which adversely affects
the innocent Molly. She, meanwhile, is forced to adjust
to a new mother and sister who are very different in char
acter and temperament from herself.
The story of Molly's adjustment, and of the new Mrs.
Gibson's machinations to marry her own daughter to a young
neighboring squire who is already secretly married, occu
pies the greater part of the novel. As a contrast to the
family thus formed, Mrs. Gaskell creates the local aristo
crats, Squire Hamley, his wife and two sons, and Lord and
Lady Cumnor's household. These last are the greatest local
personages, through whom Mr. Gibson has met his future
wife: Clare Kirkpatrick had been employed in the past as
the Cumnor family governess ans is still a sort of re
tainer, and Doctor Gibson, of course, is fortunate enough
to be allowed by the family to attend on them.
Points of comparison and contrast appear everywhere,
and the reader is always certain of the moral superiority
of a good mother or sister or brother in contrast to a
selfish one. Though it sounds rather cut and dried in
170
summary, Mrs. Gaskell manages to fuse tone and perception
to fashion a book which has rightly been called one of the
most underrated novels in English (words of Laurence Lerner,
"Introduction," Wives and Daughters, p. 27). Henry James
praised it highly in his review in The Nation:
So delicately, so elaborately, so artistically, so
truthfully, and heartily is the story wrought out,
that the hours given to its perusal seem like hours
actually spent, in the flesh as well as in the spirit,
among the scenes and people described, in the atmo
sphere of their motives, feelings, traditions, associ
ations. (Vol. II, p. 246, February 22, 1866)
In the first line of the story, "To begin with the
old rigmarole of childhood," Mrs. Gaskell establishes a
base that is neither totally realistic nor totally fantas
tic, and in the course of the novel, she uses a romantic
plot to make psychologically cogent comments about human
nature. Her point is that human qualities are timeless;
therefore the period setting does not really matter: its
function is to add charm to the reproduction of country
life, but the conflicts between generations, the reader
recognizes, will go on as long as the family structure
described by Mrs. Gaskell continues to exist. Those family
conflicts center around problems of self-knowledge in which
Mrs. Gaskell gives the advantage to youth. They involve
"the encounter of convention and individuality, responsibil
ity and inclination" (Pollard, Mrs. Gaskell: Novelist and
Biographer, p. 229). Professor Pollard calls attention to
the three parallel fears around which the story centers:
171
Mr. Gibson's fear for Molly, Squire Hamley's fear for his
sons, and Molly's for her father's remarriage (Pollard,
p. 228). The male fears are shown to be unrealistic be
cause they are based on inadequate knowledge of the people
involved or upon the fathers' insufficient trust in their
children's autonomy. Molly's fear, of course, is a very
real one, but she is powerless to do anything about it
except adjust to reality. The action of the story is really
a series of reactions, for conflict arises from the wrong
choices that certain characters make on the basis of their
insensitivity or selfishness, and the effects of these
choices on others. The perspective is always feminine,
though; Mrs. Gaskell "does not try to make much of the life
of men with each other" but rather "records what a woman
would see, the sardonic frustration of a Gibson, or the
amiability and subsequent puzzled despair of a Squire Ham-
ley" (Pollard, p. 252).
Mrs. Gaskell plays off her various families— the
Gibsons, the Hamleys, the Cumnors— well against one another
to achieve a balance of personality types as they reflect
what have been described earlier as particularly feminine
interests; she is concerned, for instance, with motiva
tions for marriage, with the relationship between romantic
love and marriage, and indeed, with the definition of the
latter as a separate entity unrelated to the former. More
than any of these, however, she is concerned with the truth
of self-knowledge on which all deep human relationships
depend. Practical matters such as the everyday drudgery
of life or occupation are left vague, though even in the
"house in the town in the shire in the county," people
labor for their daily bread and cheese; about the only
work that is ever done by the Gibson ladies consists of a
daily stint of embroidery or hat-trimming. Events happen,
but Mrs. Gaskell uses plot as a vehicle to get characters
into situations where they can react to one another and
thus shape one another. The many marriages and alliances,
the confusions and speculations and cogitations about ro
mance indicate that at least in this novel, love does make
the feminine world go round.
This is apparent from the very start of Wives and
Daughters. Mr. Gibson, who along with Squire Hamley is
one of the principal male characters and father-figures in
the book, has some unusual ideas about love and marriage.
As a professional man, he is predictably devoted to his
work, ignorant of women as people, and easily embarrassed
by emotional displays. He is not a simple character, how
ever, though Mrs. Gaskell implies rather than states this.
The reader senses the close relationship between feither
and daughter, but Mrs. Gaskell merely says,
. . . his domestic affections were centered on little
Molly, but even to her, in their most private moments,
he did not give way to much expression of his feelings
his most caressing appellation for her was "Goosey,"
173
and he took a pleasure in bewildering her infant mind
with his badinage. He had rather a contempt for de
monstrative people, arising from his medical insight
into the consequences to health of uncontrolled feel
ing. He deceived himself into believing that still
his reason was lord of all, because he had never
fallen into the habit of expression on any other than
purely intellectual subjects. (p. 63)
Except for Philip Hepburn, Mrs. Gaskell's male characters
are rarely developed enough to be psychologically complex;
they are interesting, but they exist as background for the
heroine's involvement, and only come forward at the proper
moment to fulfill their function in the plot— generally
to claim the lady's hand in marriage, if they are suitors,
or to give it away, if they are fathers.
If men can manage the world of commerce and science,
however, it is still only women who can take care of the
little, personal things that really matter. Mr. Gibson
realizes this instinctively, perhaps, when he gives in
structions for his daughter's education to her governess
(a Miss Eyre— Mrs. Gaskell was not above having a bit of
literary fun, it seems):
on't teach Molly too much; she must sew, and read,
and write, and do her sums . . . if I find more learn
ing desirable for her, I'll see about giving it to
her myself. After all, I'm not sure that reading or
writing is necessary. Many a good woman gets married
with only a cross instead of her name; it's rather a
diluting of mother-wit, to my fancy; but, however, we
must yield to the prejudices of our society, Miss
Eyre, and so you may teach the child to read. (p. 65)
One is not sure, here, whether the good doctor really
means what he is saying, but enough other instances are
174
given in the novel to indicate that he probably does,
though Mrs. Gaskell plays up the humorous side of his atti
tude. She records that Miss Eyre listened "in silence,
perplexed but determined to be obedient to the directions
of the doctor, whose kindness she and her family had good
cause to know" (p. 65). The typical sexual stereotypes
are set forth clearly and unquestioningly. Though Mrs.
Gaskell does not adopt a particular stance toward Mr. Gib
son, except to portray him as a well-meaning but neverthe
less fallible human being, at least she does not espouse
his attitude, either. For a time, he provides emotional
support for Molly, but as the reader sees him, he is also
narrow and insensitive.
Of course, Mr. Gibson wisely places his daughter in
the care of Mrs. Hamley, who represents all the qualities
of gentleness and sweetness that the feminine sex is ca
pable of possessing, and for that, he is to be commended.
Women are almost always romantic and men realistic in Mrs.
Gaskell's world, and the characters who consistently deviate
from this pattern are there for contrast. So too in Wives
and Daughters: when the practical Roger Hamley is placed
in the unmasculine situation of having to comfort the griev
ing Molly, he does not know how to act. And his father the
Squire, who gives way to (feminine) emotionalism in moments
of stress, is a comic figure because of his atypical reac
tion. Mr. Gibson, by contrast, never deviates from the
175
masculine stereotype: decorous at all times, he is the
ideal gentleman, polite, reserved, sensible, in control
of himself and others, never emotional. (Other Gaskell
portraits of this type include Thurstan Benson in Ruth,
John Thornton in North and South, and Mr. Holman in Cousin
Phillis.) There is a strong suggestion of paternalism in
all of Mrs. Gaskell's males; they appear as all-wise, all-
powerful providers of total security.
The highest representative of the corresponding
feminine ideal is Molly Gibson, whose goodness wins for
her the love of the talented Roger Hamley. But though she
portrays Molly as a girl of sterling character, it is not
certain that Mrs. Gaskell totally approves as retiring a
role for women as the one Molly plays. Certainly Mrs.
Gaskell did not herself believe in the educational code
outlined by Mr. Gibson for Molly, whereby Miss Eyre "taught
Molly to read and write, but tried honestly to keep her
back in every other branch of education" (p. 65), only be
cause her father "was always afraid of her becoming too
much educated." Yet Mrs. Gaskell was practical enough to
see that education could be a drawback for a woman; it
makes characters like Margaret Hale and Phillis Holman
threatening to some men.
As in Mrs. Gaskell1s earlier works, the characters
of Wives and Daughters fall into two groups, those who are
completely good, and the less than ideal. There are matched
176
pairs of wives— Mrs. Hamley and Mrs. Gibson— and of daugh
ters— Molly and Cynthia, together with secondary characters
like Lady Harriet and Aim4e Hamley, who provide different
perspectives on feminine nature at the same time as they
define unmistakably Mrs. Gaskell's concept of ideal behav
ior. The same is true of the masculine characters: Osborne
Hamley and his brother Roger offer a contrasting study in
types, as do Mr. Gibson and Squire Hamley. That the author
succeeds in creating lively and amusing characters in both
categories is to her credit, for without a falsely imposed
moralism, her humorist's vision is far more effective.
The story begins with Molly Gibson as a little girl.
She is a reserved, serious, very gentle, and supremely
charitable young lady much in the tradition of Ruth, Mar
garet Hale, Ellinor Wilkins, and Phillis Holman, and like
them, matures during the course of the novel into an ad
mirable woman. Margaret Ganz terms her "basically serious,
intelligent, patient and sensitive, and . . . capable of
empathy, forbearance, loyalty, and self-sacrifice" (Ganz,
p. 163). As a child, she has learned to depend upon her
father for everything. Their relationship of love and
loyalty is that of master and slave, though neither recog
nizes it as such. Molly playfully tells her father at one
point that she "would like to get a chain like Ponto's . . .
and then I could fasten us two to each end of it . . . and
we could never lose each other" (p. 58). Mrs. Gaskell
177
handles the repartee skillfully, and the tone of the whole
relationship is at once poingnant and lighthearted, but she
is serious about describing her seventeen year old Molly's
brokenhearted sense of desertion when her father marries
- -
again. Like her predecessors in earlier Gaskell novels,
Molly retains an enduring devotion to her father, even
after he has, in effect, rejected her. She suffers most
because she cannot help him, just as she suffers later when
she cannot help Roger Hamley in his infatuation with Cynthia
Kirkpatrick. Her love is pure because it is selfless, and
her sensitivity leads her to extraordinary sacrifices in
behalf of those she loves. Thus, when she realizes that
Cynthia needs her help, she can risk the censure of the
local society at being seen alone with the land-agent
Preston because she is not distracted by an exaggerated
idea of her own importance. In this respect, the theme of
social propriety functions in the world of Hollingford,
just as it does in the world of Cranford. Standards of
behavior operate in an ironic way in Wives and Daughters,
for the characters who are most concerned with social ap
pearances (propriety), are usually those most blind to the
realities of their own and others' needs. As Arthur
Pollard explains,
The characters are aware of standards, of the need to
behave in certain ways and to stand in any one of a
series of predetermined attitudes to other members of
the community. They know how they are expected to
178
act. To achieve such ends some of the characters take
courses of action which it is an important part of the
novel's irony to show producing results other than
those intended. Thus Gibson would protect Molly as
she grows into womanhood. The standards expected of
her must be fostered and developed. The guide he
chooses for her, however, his second wife, is about
the most unfortunate person he could have seriously
chosen for the task. (Pollard, p. 227)
Molly and her father have an idyllic relationship
which is destroyed when he remarries. In her characteris
tic way, Molly continues to try to please her stepmother,
but with little success. The Cinderella story has a twist
to it, however, for the stepsister, who should hate Molly,
grows to love her instead, and though Cynthia never becomes
the good woman that Molly is, she is influenced by Molly's
example. In comparison with Molly, she is vain and self-
centered, and Mrs. Gaskell suggests one reason why when
she has Cynthia tell Molly:
I'm not good, and I told you so. Somehow, I cannot
forgive her [Clare] for her neglect of me as a child,
when I would have clung to her. Besides, I hardly
ever heard from her when I was at school. And I know
she put a stop to my coming over to her wedding. I
saw the letter she wrote to Madame Fl&chier. A child
should be brought up with its parents, if it is to
think them infallible when it grows up. . . . I have
grown up outside the pale of duty and "oughts."
(p. 261)
Cynthia is one of Mrs. Gaskell's greatest creations:
she is her mother's daughter and knows it, but she is
honest enough and knowledgeable enough about herself that
the psychological complexity of her selfishness becomes
interesting. As Margaret Ganz says,
179
Avoiding the temptation of again exploiting vanity for
humorous purposes [as she does with the character of
Clare], Mrs. Gaskell shows us through Cynthia that self
involvement can have psychological manifestations very
different from an almost preposterous selfishness, and,
most unconventional step of all, that it is not incom
patible with generous instincts, psychological discrim
ination, and the graces of humor and wit. (Ganz,
pp. 173-74)
As in Mary Barton, Ruth, and Sylvia's Lovers, Mrs.
Gaskell emphasizes the importance of parental guidance in
shaping the female child. Molly has always had the support
of her father's love, and even after his unfortunate re
marriage, the bond remains strong between them. Cynthia,
however, though bright enough and desirous of being good,
has been weakened by lack of discipline and emotional
warmth; her mother has farmed her out to a boarding school
to shift for herself. Consequently, Cynthia realizes,
. . . I am not good, and I never shall be now. Per
haps I might be a heroine still, but I shall never
be a good woman, I know. . . . I'm capable of a great
jerk, an effort, and then a relaxation— but steady,
every-day goodness is beyond me. I must be a moral
kangaroo! (p. 253)
Such honesty is remarkable in a Gaskell woman; there is no
vacillation or self-deception about Cynthia, and this is
the source of her attraction as a character. She obviously
has the capability to do many things, but she does nothing
except squander her time and talents on trivialities. She
uses her honesty as an excuse for confronting the reality
of her situation and acting within it, and in this all-too-
human failing, together with a self-loathing that manifests
180
itself in superficial flirtations, Cynthia easily becomes
Mrs. Gaskell1s most complex psychological characterization.
She exerted herself just as much to charm the two
Miss Brownings as she would have done to delight
Osborne Hamley, or any other young heir. That is
to say, she used no exertion, but simply followed
her own nature, whish was to attract every one of
those she was thrown amongst. The exertion seemed
rather to be to refrain from doing so, and to pro
test, as she often did, by slight words and expres
sive looks against her mother's words and humours
— alike against her folly and her caresses. (p. 261)
Cynthia wants to be loved, but she is afraid at the same
time: "it's born in me to try to make every one I come
near fond of me, but then they shouldn't carry it too far,
for it becomes very troublesome if they do" (p. 453). Her
method of dealing with her own uneasiness is to repress it:
"I try not to care, which I daresay is really the worst of
all; but I could worry myself to death if I once took to
serious thinking" (p. 486). It is significant that when
she finally becomes engaged, it is to a man who "liked me
just as I was" (p. 657), with whom she has only to be her
self and who expects nothing more from her. Then she can
give way to her natural desires for warmth and affection,
and eliminate the stoicism which has been a pose all along;
she admits to Molly, I believe I cared for him when he of
fered all those months ago, but I tried to think I didn't;
only sometimes I really was so unhappy, I thought I must
put an iron band round my heart to keep it from breaking,
like the faithful John of the German story . . ." (p. 657).
181
Cynthia's indiscretions lead her to become involved
with men (or at least a man) while still very young, while
the more naive Molly does not even realize when she has
fallen in love. As daughters, the two are as different as
night and day. Molly devotes herself slavishly to her
father and later to her stepmother, but Cynthia cannot
understand the Gibson values; she has learned to ignore
her mother's carping with a lack of concern that amazes
Molly. And if, as Mrs. Gaskell suggests elsewhere, a
daughter's behavior indicates the kind of wife she will
later be, there is a further reinforcement of the virtues
of humility and self-sacrifice in Molly's example, for
much as Cynthia despises her mother's ways and hopes to
avoid them, she cannot help having some of her mother's
emotional coldness in her, and it is only by marrying a
very dominant man to whom she can be (for her) submissive,
as she finally does, that she can hope to find happiness
in life. Cynthia is Mrs. Gaskell's strongest rebel against
the feminine stereotype, and even in her marriage to Mr.
Henderson, the reader has no doubt that she will continue
to live on her own terms.
Of the wives in the story, the gentle Mrs. Hamley,
who becomes Molly's mentor and unofficial mother-substitute,
is the good daughter grown up and married. Though her
wedded life sometimes causes her grief, as Mrs. Gaskell
pointedly hints, she never complains. Says Mrs. Gaskell:
182
. . . it was one of those perplexing marriages of
which one cannot understand the reasons. Yet they
were very happy, though possibly Mrs. Hamley would
not have sunk into the condition of a chronic in
valid, if her husband had cared a little more for
her various tastes, or allowed her the companion
ship of those who did. (p. 73)
The reader is given to understand that Mrs. Hamley genuine
ly loves her husband and he her, but if any sacrifice is
to be made in the relationship, there is no question as to
who should make it. Squire Hamley's wife becomes the
exemplar for all those women troubled by the conflict
between duty to spouse and self-interest: "... she used
sometimes to wish that he [her husband] would recognize
the fact that there might still be something worth hearing
and seeing in that great city . . . [but she] gave up her
sociable pleasure in the company of her fellows in educa
tion and position" (p. 74), because her husband felt out
of place anywhere save at home. As Mrs. Gaskell suggests,
this eventually cost Mrs. Hamley her health: "... de
prived of all her strong interests, she sank into ill-
health; nothing definite; only she never was well" (p. 74).
Love has different meanings for different people;
the Squire is deeply concerned about his wife's health,
but he does not know what to do about her illness. In his
characteristically short-sighted but well-meaning way, he
tells her,
Nay, my dear, we loved each other so dearly we should
never have been happy with anyone else; but that's a
183
different thing. People aren't like what they were
when we were young. All the love nowadays is just
silly fancy, and sentimental romance, as far as I
can see. (p. 89)
For the Squire, and for most of Mrs. Gaskell's men, love
is a simple matter to be settled with a word; no one, he
thinks, can love the way he does. It involves no respon
sibility, no extraordinary commitment. What he does not
know, of course, is that sincere love is very much alive
in his own son, whose affection he sarcastically brands
as "sentimental romance." It is Mrs. Hamley who, just
before this, has defended the youngest son's right to
choose a wife without being disowned for his choice, in
sisting that parents should not interfere with their mature
children's decisions, "Not if they loved each other, and
their whole happiness depended upon their marrying one an
other" (p. 89). Of course, she is thinking of the effect
of love upon her own life, and her concern goes beyond
herself to others, in contrast to her husband's. Thus she
remains an inspiration to her husband, children, and
friends, fading away at last like a flower when her earthly
work is done, in true Victorian fashion.
In this goodhearted woman, Mrs. Gaskell again per
sonifies the marriage dilemma that can exist for an intel
ligent, capable woman married to a man who is clearly not
as gifted. Should she do as she pleases, and henpeck her
husband if he protests, a la Lady Cumnor? This tactic only
184
works when the husband is sporting enough to endure it, and
from the way that Mrs. Gaskell satirizes Lady Cumnor, she
does not seem to have approved of her behavior. The only
alternative, short of the perfect balance of male and fe
male strengths and weaknesses which always remains a much
to be desired ideal, is for the wife to forgo her own
wishes and submit complaisantly to the husband's, as Mrs.
Hamley does. However much Mrs. Gaskell may approve this
solution in theory, it is made clear in the novel that
Mrs. Hamley pays dearly for her love, and that more aware
ness on the Squire's part could have made her life much
happier.
Mrs. Hamley lives for others without drawing atten
tion to herself, but unlike her, Mrs. Gibson is given to
substituting the word for the deed whenever she can. Clare
Kirkpatrick Gibson's whole life, in fact, is constructed of
words and dramatic poses. Margaret Ganz commends Mrs. Gas
kell 's sophistication in creating this imaginative impostor:
Securely ensconced in that solipsistic universe where
self is the supreme authority, instinctively rejecting
the impediments which logic and feeling might present
to her plan for a comfortable and carefree life, Mrs.
Gibson shadows forth in an endless and versatile flow
of talk that eternally comic incongruity between ap
pearance and reality, between the virtues she claims
to possess and the human weakness which invariably
asserts itself in the midst of her professions. Much
of the portrait's power depends not on the unmasking
of Mrs. Gibson's pretensions but on the imaginative
form these pretensions assume. (Ganz, p. 168)
Beginning with her encouragement of Mr. Gibson's
185
marriage proposal, ostensibly for the purpose of mothering
his daughter but really to gain financial security for her-
self and a life of ease, she stands in the novel as the
representative of a peculiar brand of evil, the sort of
hypocrisy that is repulsive because its practitioner dis
guises reality in an attempt to abnegate all personal re
sponsibility for self through willful ignorance. The
reader knows that Mrs. Gibson is incapable of perceiving
the truth in any given situation because she has already
decided in her own mind how things should be— it is then
a simple matter of pretending that they are so. Like a
three year old child, she reasons that if one pretends hard
enough, the pretense will become the truth. If woman is
the creator of illusions, the weaver of deceitful lies, as
she has often been represented in literature, then Mrs.
Gibson is that woman, exonerated only by her total igno
rance of her actions. And since she acts without aware
ness, there is no point in trying to change her, or in
expecting that she will change. Mrs. Gaskell has repre
sented a character incapable of adjusting in any other way
to the world she lives in, and therein is the mark of
Clare's failure. Her very name is an appropriate irony,
for no light of goodness or intelligence penetrates her
schemes to use social propriety for her own advancement.
Yet Mrs. Gibson is pitiable in one sense because she is
so ingenuous. No one is taken in by her except herself,
186
and, for one fatal moment, at least, Mr. Gibson. And the
things she wants— money, social position, respect, and
power— are shown to be tawdry in comparison to the things
she misses: love and companionship, self-fulfillment, and
the respect of others. The novel makes a definite state
ment about spiritual versus material wealth, and about
ritual versus the needs of the moment: the implication is
that only the Molly Gibsons of the world can be truly
happy, for only they know how to love unselfishly, and how
to value the love of others. The whole motif is closely
interwoven with the theme of marriage.
In Wives and Daughters, Mrs. Gaskell describes two
marriages in some detail, and prepares for two more, not
an unusual practice for a Victorian romance, certainly, but
one which contributes happily to the balanced comparisons
she draws in this story. Since the topic of marriage was
of tremendous social concern to Mrs. Gaskell's contempo
raries, and since the "courtesy books" for wives and wives-
to-be sold unfailingly well (she even makes ironic refer
ences to Mrs. Chapone in My Lady Ludlow and Cranford),
there was a built-in social interest among her female
readers which had been cultivated in fiction for the hun
dred years preceding her by such novelists as Richardson,
Burney, Austen, and Edgeworth. According to the romantic
marriage convention, the bride was to be ever-pure, the
groom handsome and strong, and within the holy bond of
187
matrimony there would be perfect harmony forever, since
woman for the man is made. Mrs. Gaskell was certainly not
the first to question this myth, but while she condemns
inadequacies of character rather than the institution it
self as causes of matrimonial discord, she also satirizes
a materialistic side of marriage that many writers of ro
mance, such as Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgwroth, and Char
lotte Yonge, pretended did not exist. Clare's discontent
with her poverty seems to be her primary motive in seeking
another husband:
Now here, money is like the air they breathe. No one
even asks or knows how much the washing costs, or
what pink ribbon is a yard. AhI it would be different
if they had to earn every penny as I have! They would
have to calculate, like me, how to get the most plea
sure out of it. I wonder if I am to go on all my life
toiling and moiling for money? It's not natural.
Marriage is the natural thing; then the husband has all
that kind of dirty work to do, and his wife sits in
the drawing room like a lady. I did, when poor Kirk
patrick was alive. Heigho! it's a sad thing to be a
widow. (p. 131)
"Poor Kirkpatrick" has no existence of his own in the novel;
he is only mentioned as the late (and much mourned) husband
of the present Mrs. Gibson, and is only visualized in terms
of the services he provided or the useful errands he did
for his beloved spouse.
In Elizabeth's Gaskell's catalogue of mistaken
motives for marriage set forth in Wives and Daughters are
material gain (Clare's purpose in marrying Mr. Gibson; an
indirect manifestation of self-love), fear of blackmail
188
(Mr. Preston's way of acquiring Cynthia), and self-indul
gent vanity (Cynthia's motive in accepting Roger Hamley as
her fiance). All are inadequate because they direct the
relationship back on the individual.
The subject matter of sexual roles in marriage and
of a woman's place in relation to her husband or family
are used to raise more questions in Mrs. Gaskell's fiction
than she provides answers for. The cultured Mrs. Hamley,
for instance, experiences a growing alienation from her
husband, which she tries to counterbalance by spending more
and more time with her older son, Osborne, who shares her
aesthetic interests. The Squire's chief pleasures are
those of a gentleman farmer. Yet the couple is still ap
parently in love. The flighty, self-seeking Mrs. Gibson,
who has little or nothing in common with her dedicated and
serious husband, fails to establish a happy home life for
her family or herself. The difference between these two
wives, Mrs. Gaskell makes it clear, is that the admirable
one sacrifices her desires to those of her husband, and
thus merits praise and emulation. But what about the ef
fect on Osborne Hamley? Surely his effeminacy, his un
realistic expectations of himself, and his poor relation
ship with his father are to some degree the result of his
mother's possessiveness. He marries secretly a woman from
a lower social class who asks nothing of him, and only
wants to love him, and she in turn is forced to suffer
from want and neglect. Mrs. Gaskell does not investigate
the causality in depth; Osborne is simply dismissed as a
fairly worthless young man to make way for the more substan
tial Roger.
As the representative of the younger generation of
wives, Molly Gibson works even before her engagement to
avoid the pitfalls present in the Gibson and Hamley mar
riages. She schools herself in Roger Hamley's occupation,
purely out of interest, she tells herself, but the reader
knows that she wishes to understand the field because it
interests him. And her perseverance is rewarded: when
Roger writes from abroad about his activities, his fiancee,
Cynthia, is bored with the letter, but not Molly: "Perhaps
the details and the references would make the letter dull
and dry to some people, but not to her, thanks to his for
mer teaching and the interest he had excited in her for his
pursuits" (p. 460). This attitude contrasts with Cynthia's
she finds his studies tiresome— she "received his letters
with a kind of carelessness, and read them with a strange
indifference" (p. 458)— and thinks his standards of conduct
impossibly high— "I've never lived with people with such
a high standard of conduct before; and I don't quite know
how to behave" (p. 456). One suspects that Cynthia's atti
tude represents that of the typical Victorian woman; though
she is by no means stupid, her interests are confined to
the nonintellectual, feminine ones of clothes, gossip, and
190
cultural pursuits. And in this case, she is not really in
love; she has made the engagement solely out of a desire
for respectability and security, and to placate her mother.
She rejoices in her sudden freedom when she ends the en
gagement because she does not like the duplicity she has
had to practice (pretending to be as good as Molly); she
does not give a thought to Roger.
Cynthia is a coquette, and to her, lovers are to be
accumulated aS' one accumulates souvenirs of a vacation.
The pain she inflicts is that of thoughtlessness rather
than intent: "Oh, what a relief! It seems to be my fate
never to be off with the old lover before I am on with the
new . . ." (p. 656). Cynthia's behavior is quite under
standable if one assumes that an early rejection of the
child by a mother can result in that child's emotional
withdrawal from threatening situations as a means of self-
defense, even though natural inclinations would prompt her
to seek love wherever she can find it.
The importance of the parent-child relationship in
determining future social adjustment further underscores
the reciprocity of the mother and daughter roles, but it
also affects mothers and sons. From Mrs. Gaskell's per
spective, both sets of parents, the Hamleys and the Gib
sons, injure or damage their children in some way. Osborne
Hamley cannot meet his mother's unrealistic expectation of
poetic greatness nor his father's desire for his son's
191
academic brilliance and a professional career. Conversely,
Roger Hamley is underestimated by his parents and is made
to feel inferior to his brother, whereas he actually pos
sesses superior academic ability. Between the two brothers,
a deliberate contrast is drawn; Mrs. Gaskell makes frequent
allusions to the "femininity" of Osborne's demeanor and his
"feminine" nature and interests (her words), while she
speaks of Roger's solidly masculine bookishness and rough
manner. Osborne, of course, is man enough to have already
married and fathered a son, but the role he plays at home
is one born of excessive flattery and self-indulgence.
Roger Hamley is the unassuming, generous son who
makes no demands on the family, and eventually gains fame
and honor through his diligence and scientific brilliance.
He becomes a captive to Cynthia's superficial charms, but
he is not the first man in the novel to be taken in by a
woman. Roger is fortunate enough to escape, but Mr. Gib
son, for all his medical acumen, cannot perceive Mrs. Kirk
patrick's perfidy until it is too late. Mrs. Gaskell
allows the sorrowful Molly to reflect on the marriage (or
mismarriage) that results):
It seems as if there was not, and never could be in
this world, any help for the dumb discordancy between
her father and his wife. Day after day, month after
month, year after year, would Molly have to sympathize
with her father, and pity her stepmother, feeling
acutely for both. . . . It was all hopeless, and the
only attempt at a remedy was to think about it as
■ — tittle as possible. (p. 458)
192
During the week that Mrs. Gibson goes to London with Cyn
thia, Molly and her father reconstruct their old relation
ship, and plan to do "everything that is unrefined and
ungenteel" (p. 487). Mrs. Gaskell adds that "they were
quite like bride and bridegroom" (p. 488).
Men may excel at business and theology and science,
but in Mrs. Gaskell's world, they are usually poor students
of human nature; indeed, the only individuals who are per
ceptively aware of people-as-people are either "feminine"
by sex or by association: the scholarly Mr. Bell in North
and South, the youthful narrator of Cousin Phillis, Hester
Rose in Sylvia's Lovers, and Faith and Thurstan Benson in
Ruth. Of course, there is no clear-cut dichotomy; what
Mrs. Gaskell values above all is sensitivity and truthful
ness in both sexes, and her main argument is that any other
qualities without these promote misery. One does not have
to delve very far into the character of Clare Kirkpatrick
Gibson, for instance, to discover that all her petty snob
bery and bribery, her aims and pretensions to grandeur, are
the desperate attempts of an immature personality to make
sense out of an otherwise totally baffling world. The game
becomes the reality, and she is unable to escape the mother-
role she has created for herself because she does not per
ceive that she has created it. The comic effect of the
novel grows out of the reader's double perception of the
characters; he sees them as they think they are and as they
193
really are. It is helpful, too, that Mrs. Gaskell uses the
medium of a fairy-tale plot in Wives and Daughters to pro
vide a dramatically simple basic conflict over which ‘ uhe
complexities of personal reactions evolve; a wicked step
mother replaces a real one, and the alienation from the
father must be overcome by the lover and the heroine. Na
turally, the lover eventually replaces the father. Mr.
Gibson reflects, " 'Lover versus father!' thought he, half-
sadly. 'lover wins"' (p. 701).
It has been said that Mrs. Gaskell's greatest pre
occupation as a writer is with the nature of truth, for in
most of her novels, a character is able to further himself
by a deliberate falsehood (Ganz, p. 163). Whether her in
vestigation of falsity and its effects consciously extended
beyond the level of verbal deception or not is debatable,
but many of the characters in her fiction are by and large
not living with true knowledge of themselves, and the
author presents these people for the reader's moral judg
ment. In relation to her heroines, a lack of Self-knowl
edge almost always revolves around sexual self-awareness;
many of them fail to value their lovers properly either
because they are emotionally not yet out of childhood, or
else are looking for glamor, excitement, and fantasy in
a love relationship. Like fairy-tale princesses, they
want to be rescued from the prison of a drab life. Mary
Barton, Margaret Hale, Ruth Hilton, Phillis Holman, arid
194
Sylvia Robson fit this mold, and until they acquire enough
self-knowledge to realize what they really want, they can
not adjust to the real-life princes at hand. This sort of
self-delusion extends to the older women in Mrs. Gaskell's
fiction who see themselves as eternally young. Mrs. Kirk
patrick, for instance, thinks of herself as the eternal
ingenue, and adjusts her values to perpetuate the role
until she has no existence outside it. The spinsters of
Cranford also wear blinders: they are happy in their seclu
sion from the stress represented by Drumble, but their ex
perience of life is so circumscribed that they still look
at the world like children fascinated by magical tricks and
tales of ghosts and robbers.
It is not enough to see oneself clearly, apparently,
unless one can also act when a situation requires action,
and this is frequently another test for Mrs. Gaskell's
heroines. Cynthia Kirkpatrick, one would think, at least
has a chance to be saved because she has a fairly clear
perception of what she has become, but she is strangely
helpless in that knowledge, and seems to be without motiva
tion. Like Ruth Hilton, but perhaps not quite so ignorant
of the ways of the world, she has made a mistake at a young
age and has been forced by the sensual Mr. Preston into a
clandestine relationship she does not want but cannot seem
to end. It takes the unhesitating courage of the virginal
Molly to embarrass the man into behaving like a gentleman,
195
and her striking appearance and power over him echo that
of the virtuous maiden who vanquishes evil powers by her
goodness in fairy tales and myths. And when the long-
suffering Molly is rewarded in the end with the brilliant
Roger Hamley for her husband, as she surely would have
been had Mrs. Gaskell lived to finish the novel, there is
a further testimony to the power of feminine virtue. Roger
comes to recognize his infatuation with Cynthia as childish
and unrealistic and to appreciate Molly's intrinsic worth;
beside her steadfast support, he is inferior.
The psychological characterization in Wives and
Daughters is the best that Elizabeth Gaskell ever produced.
Even Molly Gibson, who could easily have been a failure
as another innocent, long-suffering paragon of Victorian
female virtue "has attributes of humor and insight which
make her somewhat atypical" (Ganz, p. 162). And her step
mother and stepsister, who could also have been simply
representative of a type, are instead complicated and indi
viduated portraits. Especially with Cynthia, Elizabeth
Gaskell succeeds in creating a personality that is appeal
ing despite the character flaws that prevent her from
achieving the selflessness she envies in Molly. Cynthia
is Mrs. Gaskell's best argument for the virtuous idealism
she advocates in women; because Cynthia is emotionally
shallow but intellectually perceptive, she is prevented
from experiencing deep sorrow and joy alike. Her personal
196
tragedy is the recognition that she cannot change. Mrs.
Gaskell could have yielded to sentiment and had Cynthia
reform at the end, but this would have been an artistic
and psychological dishonesty. In both Sylvia * s Lovers and
Wives and Daughters, the author shows herself to be working
in a different vein from her earlier novels: not only does
she create women who are humanly imperfect rather than par
agons of virtue, but she works with the consequences of
that imperfection and probes the social alternatives open
to her heroines for action. Rather than adopting the
stoical attitude that everyone is totally responsible for
his or her own problems, she moves in the later novels to
the position that interpersonal relationships determine
much of the context in which personal problems are solved.
She does not negate individual moral responsibility; she
simply makes provision in the world of her fiction for the
complexity of responsible action.
Wives and Daughters resolves more clearly than any
of her other novels the dilemma that Mrs. Gaskell was never
quite comfortable with; that her moral preferences and her
artistic sympathies were sometimes not compatible with one
another worked to the greatest disadvantage in her earlier
fiction. Her idealized women, characters like Margaret
Jennings, Ellinor Wilkins, or Hester Rose, who remain im
possibly good are also impossibly static, and the reader
can respond to them only on the level of their moral per-
197
fection. The frailer, more subject to temptation charac
ters like Mary Barton, or Sylvia Robson, or Cynthia Kirk
patrick, are recognizably more lifelike, but they are also
admittedly more thoughtless and certainly more selfish.
That Mrs. Gaskell was sensitive to the problem of
Victorian women is evident; but she was realistic enough
to know that social reforms cannot always be legislated.
Her female characters are restless, frequently bright, and
obviously capable of more than the simple housekeeping
chores they are assigned. They possess individual and in
quiring minds. Yet they are relegated to the less impor
tant (in terms of the religious and social power structures)
and harmless functions of community life, however important
these are said to be. Their beauty is an inspiration to
men and their maternity the heart of the home, but the home
is, after all, not the whole world. Though Mrs. Gaskell
does not negate the standard female virtues, her fiction is
in itself a statement to men and women alike that women can
be equally as heroic as men (Mary Barton), equally as in
telligent (Cousin Phillis), or equally as courageous (North
and South). In addition, they can be more humanistic,
compassionate, and sensitive (Cranford), or conversely,
more threatening ("Mr. Harrison's Confessions"), more
thoughtless (Sylvia's Lovers), or more cruelly destructive
("Lois the Witch"). But they must always be thought of as
passive, gentle creatures, largely dependent on male patron-
age and protection.
The male domain in Mrs. Gaskell's fiction is a place
apart, where the evils of buying and selling take place, it
is true, but where thinking and creativity exist, and where
there is glamor and excitement ("Oh! many things are right
for men which are not for girls" [Ruth, p. 211]). Men ap
pear hard and cruel, more concerned with an abstract idea
of justice than with individual human problems; by contrast,
women are ideally sympathetic and kind (Mary Barton, North
and South, Wives and Daughters). One would think that the
sexes might thus counterbalance one another, but that does
not always happen; the separation motif is represented in
novel after novel. Molly Gibson "could not imagine how
she had at one time wished for her father's eyes to be
opened, and how she could have fancied that if they were,
he would be able to change things in Mrs. Gibson's charac
ter" (Wives and Daughters, p. 458). Though married life
has its drawbacks, the isolation of a totally feminine
world is worse; it produces no change or creativity, and
leads to a narrowed perspective and a preoccupation with
trivialities. And the isolation of a totally masculine
environment is no better; the manufacturing world of Mary
Barton and North and South, or the political and legal one
of Ruth and Sylvia's Lovers is a jungle which excludes
human concerns and operates only for profit or personal
gain. There is a possibility for the two worlds to over-
199
lap: the merging of northern and southern (male and female)
perspectives in North and South is an optimistic projection
into the future, as is the conclusion of Wives and Daugh
ters, where the central couple seem to have a mutual trust
and openness with one another that promises growth and
happiness for both. In earlier novels like Mary Barton,
the final union of the viewpoint couple seems antithetical
to the social background against which they are represented,
and they are shown emigrating to another country to begin
their life together. What started as a tentative effort to
unite the best of the male and female worlds had become an
established necessity by the end of Mrs. Gaskell's writing
career, for even the unhappy romances in Ruth, Sylvia's
Lovers, and Cousin Phillis are unhappy specifically because
a natural union has been frustrated by human wilfullness.
That Mrs. Gaskell was opposed to the unrealistic,
openly sentimental or sensationalistic playing up of roman
tic love in the popular fiction of her day as grossly un
fair to women can be seen from her own writing. The glamor
of romance is given far more weight in the earlier novels
than in the later ones. Mary Barton and Ruth Hilton fall
captive to a weakness for flirtatious gentlemen, but the
most admirable heroines— Margaret Hale, Phillis Holman,
and Molly Gibson— are women very much in control of them
selves and aware of their social and personal responsibil
ities. They do not occupy themselves with romantic fanta
200
sies and daydreams— both Margaret and Molly are outraged
when such a possibility is suggested to them. Certainly
Mrs. Gaskell does not denigrate the importance of romantic
love; its fragile beauty and transforming power are evi
dent even in the ill-fated love relationships, but she is
clear-sighted enough to put it into perspective, and to
suggest in her fiction that women who have useful, digni
fied activities that involve them as human personalities
in the social community are much happier people than women
who are merely decorative fixtures in their own homes.
Her suggestions as to what women should, do are
vague. In Mary Barton, the reader is told that factory
work for women is "out of the question . . . on more ac
counts than one" (p. 21) if a girl is respectable; the
only alternatives for city-dwelling women are "going out
to service and the dressmaking business" (p. 21). None
of these occupations is ideal— Mrs. Gaskell apparently has
too much first-hand experience of labor conditions in mid-
Victorian Manchester to believe that— nor is the nursing
work that Ruth Hilton turns to as a last resort in Ruth.
She becomes a governess, but this station, too, has its
drawbacks, as numerous governess-romances in Victorian
literature testify.
Other Gaskell characters are employed as shopkeepers,
a very suitable occupation for gentle old maids like Miss
Matty Jenkyns, or for retiring young women like Hester Rose.
201
General good deeds for the deserving poor and for needy
acquaintances fill the time of women like Margaret Hale and
Molly Gibson, while farm work occupies Sylvia Robson and
Phillis Holman. Few women venture professionally into the
(male) business world: Miss Matty's shopkeeping is as much
an outlet for nervous energy as it is a source of income.
Hester Rose finally does become a partner in the Foster
brothers' store in Sylvia's Lovers, but she puts in twice
as much work as a man to earn the promotion, and then it
is only given to her out of sympathy: an unmarried spin
ster with a mother to support, she lacks the husband who
should assume the burden of dealing with the world outside
the home. Miss Gallindo secures a position as clerk in My
Lady Ludlow, but she is subjected to a rigid apprenticeship
under a disapproving (male) employer.
Though all of Mrs. Gaskell's female characters work
at something, they are not all self-starters. Cynthia
Kirkpatrick talks of going to Russia as a governess, but
the reader knows she will never leave the comforts of civ
ilized England. Perhaps Mrs. Gaskell*s involvement with
Charlotte BrontS's biography convinced her, if she wasn't
already certain, that governesses lead a sorry life; her
governess characters, notably Clare Kirkpatrick, do not
fare especially well. For rich women, life is considerably
easier; they may occupy themselves with philanthropic deeds
as they wish— Lady Cumnor in Wives and Daughters, and Lady
202
Ludlow in My Lady Ludlow, choose different modes of social
involvement, but for each the primary impulse is not pecu
niary. As for the poorest of Mrs. Gaskell's ladies, there
is no time to think about roles and values and the rest;
in the struggle to keep body and soul together, women like
Bessy Higgins or Lizzie Leigh or Aunt Esther are not always
victorious.
But for the middle-class women, with whom Mrs. Gas
kell seems to share a real affinity, there is a genuine
dilemma. They are supposed to be the pillars of society,
influencing their children for good, encouraging their
husbands, and making the home a happy place. Yet all of
these activities are other-directed and offer the woman a
sense of accomplishment, self-satisfaction, and personal
achievement only as a secondary end or not at all, a psycho
logically intolerable state unless she is emotionally very
secure. As an individual, she hardly exists. Of the
mother-characters Mrs. Gaskell creates, few come close to
fulfilling the role completely; most of them live in a
world of their own, understanding neither husband nor chil
dren. And her young wives seem destined to a similar sub
missive fate, with the exception that some of them seem to
understand their husbands better, and to accept willingly
the (vague) role they are called to play. If the reader
can appreciate a Margaret Hale or a Molly Gibson, he can
also appreciate the virtues of tolerance and compassion
203
that enable these characters to see their world realisti
cally at the end, and to maintain their serenity in spite
of the evils they encounter.
Women are the great stabilizing force of Mrs. Gas
kell 's fictional world. Mary Barton and Margaret Hale
become their fathers' sole emotional support, and Ruth
Hilton functions as a center of calm for the Bradshaw fam
ily. After her father's death, Sylvia Robson turns all
her effort toward pleasing her mother; it is the only thing
that gives her pleasure or comfort. Lady Ludlow maintains
order in her small domain, Phillis Holman is the apple of
her parents' eye, and Molly Gibson is a source of inspira
tion to all whom she meets. This feminine strength, which
is usually more psychological than physical, carries over
into marriage, and the men who are left widowers by their
wives' deaths feel the loss keenly: John Barton, Mr. Hale,
Squire Hamley come immediately to mind. Only Mr. Gibson
appears to have felt little grief over the death of Molly's
mother, but the reader knows he is not easily given to emo
tional displays, and also that Molly's mother was not his
true love.
A similar case can be made for the wives who lose
their husbands. Perhaps all that Mrs. Gaskell is saying
is that people miss those they have become dependent upon,
and that Mmes. Wilson, Robson, or Thornton will adjust to
their loss as befits their natural temperaments. Neverthe
204
less, in the long run, Mrs. Gaskell's widows fare better
than her widowers. With the exception of Mrs. Robson, they
are vigorous and active; they recover swiftly, or at least
they adjust quickly, and carry on with life. It is doubt
ful that Mrs. Gaskell intended consciously to set up a
feminine example of human superiority, but a faint tinge
of the Cranford hauteur that excluded men from that small
world sometimes relegates the sex to its own sphere in
other novels as well, and in her scale of values, the abil
ity to empathize with people, generally described as a
feminine trait regardless of the sex of its possessor and
because it is a socially outgoing quality, is valued above
the ability to make money.
To her Victorian readers, then, and to those who
have read her fiction since, Mrs. Gaskell offers a view of
women which is neither totally romantic nor completely
realistic. If Victorian society segregated women and tied
them to the home, Mrs. Gaskell shows how they participated
in their own enslavement; indeed, her fiction offers some
of the best propaganda for continued conformity: unques
tioning obedience, total sublimation of the self to pious
ends, etc.— values which the whole human race would do well
to aspire to, but which are antithetical to economic and
political competition. At the same time, the reader sees
the psychological inadequacy of such conformity; those
characters who choose it totally are deprived-of their in
205
dividuality in proportion to their acquiescence. This
realization, together with the generally shrewd psychologi
cal insights she communicates, makes Mrs. Gaskell worth
reading. Or as George Sand said,
Mrs. Gaskell has done what neither I nor other female
writers in France can accomplish; she has written
novels which excite the deepest interest in the man
of the world, and yet which every girl will be the
better for reading.3
The moral problems Mrs. Gaskell presents generally
require a feminine choice between egotism and altruism and
are not startling in their novelty. To be fair, one must
acknowledge that Mrs. Gaskell did not locate women or the
woman question precisely on a social continuum. She her-
4
self provides a good answer to readers like Charles Shapiro,
who feels that she did not take her writing "seriously"
enough as art to create characters with any degree of cred
ibility :
When I had little children I do not think I could have
written stories because I should have become too much
absorbed in my fictitious people to attend to my real
ones. . . . Besides viewing the subject from a solely
artistic point of view a good writer of fiction must
have lived an active and sympathetic life if she wishes
her books to have strength and vitality in them. When
you are forty, and if you have a gift for being an
authoress you will write ten time as good a novel as
you could do now, just because you will have gone
through much more of the interests of a wife and mother.
(September 25, 1862, Chappie & Pollard, pp. 694-95)
Arthur Pollard feels that Mrs. Gaskell's diverse
interests helped rather than hindered her writing career:
The tension between the demands of her fictitious
people and her real ones remained with Mrs. Gaskell to
206
the end of her life, but there is no doubt, as she her
self recognized, that the demands of the real ones
which had necessitated her living an active and sympa
thetic life enriched her books immeasurably. (Mrs.
Gaskell; Novelist and Biographer, p. 19)
Mrs. Gaskell firmly believed that the feminine ex
perience of life was inseparably bound up with domestic
• *»
activities, and she devoted her artistic talent to stating
this again and again. When one speaks of Mrs. Gaskell as
a particularly "feminine" writer, however, perhaps one
ought to ask, "Which Mrs. Gaskell?" For her fiction seems
to reveal several different aspects of her femininity,
moving from the naive glorification of hearth and home in
Mary Barton to a view of the emotionally developed woman
in Wives and Daughters. Through her novels there is a
movement inward as well, a sharpening of her focus on the
psychological awareness of her female characters. Though
it is tentatively and imperfectly realized in places, and
though Mrs. Gaskell could have been more frank, her inter
est in woman as an individual person and at the same as
part of society makes her insight valuable. The tension
which results is as much a part of the whole as anything
else in her writing: though one is aware of the conflicts
in life, there is not always anything one can do about
them.
Like the narrator of Cranford, Mrs. Gaskell's women
vibrate between two worlds: the external, narrowly moralis
tic, idealistically ordered existence which society dictates
for them, and the turbulent inner world of private feelings
which do not answer to reason. Though she does not explore
very far into that world, she does not deny its existence,
and it is possible that she would have investigated it
further had she lived longer. The facts that her fiction
deepened in scope during the eighteen years of her writing
career and that her women characters become increasingly
more complex in themselves are encouraging signs that she
realized the limits of her orthodox morality. Within the
boundaries that she established for herself, she fashioned
a world that emphasized human responsibility above every
thing else. In that, she was very Victorian. But in por
traying the human need for relatedness and love as seen
from a feminine perspective, in her sympathetic approach
to human weakness regardless of sex, and her genuine enjoy
ment and appreciation of people, she is timeless.
208
Notes to Chapter Three
Arthur Pollard, Introduction, Sylvia1s Lovers
(1914; rpt. London: J. M. Dent, 1964), p. vi. All sub
sequent citations are from this edition.
^Modern Language Review, 65 (1970), 272-81.
3
Muriel Masefield, Women Novelists from Fanny
Burney to George Eliot (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson,
1934), p. 189.
4Charles Shapiro, "Mrs. Gaskell and 'The Severe
Truth,1" in Minor British Novelists, ed. Charles A. Hoyt
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967),
pp. 98-108.
A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
209
A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Mantovani, Juanita Marie
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Core Title
The Feminine World View Of Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
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English
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