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Truth Telling: Testimony and Evidence in the Novels of Elizabeth Gaskell Rebecca Parker Fedewa Marquette University

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Truth Telling: Testimony and Evidence in the Novels of Elizabeth Gaskell Rebecca Parker Fedewa Marquette University Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette Dissertations (2009 -) Dissertations, Theses, and Professional Projects Truth Telling: Testimony and Evidence in the Novels of Elizabeth Gaskell Rebecca Parker Fedewa Marquette University Recommended Citation Parker Fedewa, Rebecca, "Truth Telling: Testimony and Evidence in the Novels of Elizabeth Gaskell" (2012). Dissertations (2009 -). Paper 202. http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/202 TRUTH TELLING: TESTIMONY AND EVIDENCE IN THE NOVELS OF ELIZABETH GASKELL by Rebecca J. Parker Fedewa A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School, Marquette University, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Milwaukee, Wisconsin May 2012 ABSTRACT TRUTH TELLING: TESTIMONY AND EVIDENCE IN THE NOVELS OF ELIZABETH GASKELL Rebecca J. Parker Fedewa Marquette University, 2012 This dissertation argues that Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels (Mary Barton, Ruth, North and South, Cranford, Sylvia’s Lovers, and Wives and Daughters) challenge nineteenth-century notions of what constitutes reliable, credible, and admissible truth claims. Gaskell challenges the protocols for judging truth that are emerging in the mid-nineteenth century in response to new epistemic conditions and protocols that threaten to silence female speakers, whether they are advocating on their own behalf (as defendants) or on behalf of others (as witnesses). By using the decidedly male legal system in the form of courtroom trials and interrogation- like scenarios for her female characters in their everyday lives, Gaskell shows her reading “jury” that judgments are too quickly dispensed and verdicts erroneously assumed, and she thus promotes sympathetic judgments of others, women specifically. In her fiction, she seeks temporal justice for her heroines, and, when that is unachievable, she has them seek divine justice instead. To establish the credibility of her heroines, Gaskell uses a rich array of narrative devices to critique women’s discursive abilities and to re-authorize their representations of reality. This dissertation focuses on examples of trials, evidence, and testimony as they play out via plot, character, and narration. In plot, she arranges events in order to provide her heroines with opportunities to speak and act. To establish character, she develops her heroines through description, actions, interiority, and dialogue, all of which prepare the reader to take as credible the speech of the heroine in her climactic utterance of a powerful truth. Through narrative voice, she advocates for credible judgments by incorporating moral discourse, personal disclosures, and intrusive narrators. Gaskell’s novels strive to promote sympathy, reasonable judgments, and more measured perceptions in her readers. In her fiction, she not only proclaims that women are credible truth-tellers but, by constructing her stories in ways that give female characters agency, she leads her readers to this same conclusion. i TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTING ELIZABETH GASKELL’S CREDIBLE FEMALE WITNESSES 1 PROVIDENTIAL PLOTTING 18 CREDIBLE CHARACTERIZATION 71 NARRATIVE VOICE AS ADVOCACY 131 CONCLUSION 174 WORKS CITED 184 1 Chapter 1 Introducing Elizabeth Gaskell’s Credible Female Witnesses Who has the right to speak to society? Where should such a person stand in addressing the larger community? And most important, what form must a speaker’s words assume in order to assert their validity for author and audience? Only if these questions are answered can an author undertake the kind of work Elizabeth Gaskell desired to do in addressing Victorian England. (48) – Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell’s Work Largely known as a writer of social problem novels, Elizabeth Gaskell also engaged legal concerns of her time. This dissertation argues that Gaskell’s novels challenge nineteenth-century notions of what constitutes reliable, credible, and even admissible truth claims. She reflects the public’s – and the legal community’s – anxiety regarding truth claims and the evidence that was permitted to be used to ascertain the truth. Gaskell’s novels address this anxiety through narrative techniques that incorporate different forms of evidence to open a discussion among her readers regarding gender and credibility. By using the decidedly male legal system in the form of courtroom trials and interrogation-like scenarios for her female characters in their everyday lives, she shows her reading “jury” that judgments are too quickly dispensed and verdicts erroneously assumed based on gender bias. She encourages readers to apply all their God-given faculties to the task of judgment and to 2 use each judiciously to critique abuses of any one. Gaskell uses the basic elements of fiction – plot, character, and narration – to engage Victorian crises of truth-telling, which arose from a variety of epistemological developments, notably in law and theology, and that have particularly crucial implications for women. Gaskell has been credited for innovations in realistic narrative, and her sense of an ethical literary vocation has been acknowledged. Building on the work of Jan-Melissa Schramm, who treats Gaskell as one example of literary interventions in Victorian crises of truth-telling at the intersection of law and theology, I offer an analysis of Gaskell’s narrative innovations that are aimed at providing new authoritative bases on which to authorize women’s speech. Gaskell’s fiction presents a rich array of narrative devices to critique women’s discursive disabilities and to re-authorize their representations of reality. To illustrate this argument, I focus on examples of trials, evidence, and testimony in Gaskell’s novels as they play out via plot, character, and narration. In instances of legal and quasi-legal incidents in these works of fiction, Gaskell challenges the protocols for judging truth that are emerging in the mid-nineteenth century in response to new epistemic conditions and protocols that threaten to silence female speakers, whether they are advocating on their own behalf (as defendants) or on behalf of others (as witnesses). She seeks to create a body of jurors – her readers – who more nearly represent a jury of women’s peers, readers who have been converted to an inclusive view of reality, in distinction to the masculinist and often exclusionary view represented by the law. She uses fiction – the novel specifically – because it provides different ways of authenticating female characters as truth- tellers. 3 In plot, she is able to arrange events in order to provide her heroines with opportunities to speak and act. By characterizing her heroines as rational and, therefore, credible, she makes their utterances persuasive. Through narrative voice, she advocates for credible judgments from her reader. In this dissertation, plot, character, and narration have been deliberately separated in order to analyze Gaskell’s strategy in persuading her readers of judging others, women specifically, more sympathetically. In fiction, these elements of course are combined, and their interdependence underscores the significance of Gaskell using each one to forward her agenda. Much of Gaskell criticism has overlooked the subtle contributions that she made to the Victorian novel, specifically the ways that she gave her female characters voice and credibility – a daunting task in the nineteenth century. Pam Morris notes the “prevailingly patronizing attitude taken to Gaskell by many critics from the time of her death until well into the first part of this [the twentieth] century” (xiii). Well-known gibes from Henry James and David Cecil contributed to a culture of criticism that did not entertain the possibility that Gaskell might be up to something of true and lasting value in her body of work.1 The impression that she presented “‘a minimum of head’”2 predominated until the 1950s when interest in social problem novels returned attention to Gaskell’ work. More recent discussions of women writers who previously had been dismissed as “lady novelists” do include Gaskell, but, as Morris points out, Elaine Showalter mentions Gaskell only in passing 1 Henry James “describes[s] Gaskell’s qualities as ‘the offspring of her affections, her feelings . [and] so little of an intellectual matter . we should say that in her literary career as a whole she displayed, considering her success, a minimum of head’” (qtd. in Morris xiii, emphasis added). See Henry James, an unsigned review of Wives and Daughters, Nation (February 22, 1866) 464. Reprinted in Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage, ed. Angus Easson (London: Routledge, 1991) 463. Similarly, David Cecil writes, “‘[S]he was all a woman was expected to be; gentle, domestic, tactful, unintellectual, prone to tears, easily shocked. So far from chafing at the limits imposed on her activities, she accepted them with serene satisfaction’” (qtd. in Morris xiii). See David Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists (London: Constable, 1934) 198. 2 See James, Nation, 464. See also the previous footnote. 4 in A Literature of Their Own while Gaskell is entirely omitted by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (xiii, xxxiv).3 There is, however, a current shift in criticism, as scholars take Gaskell’s social problem and domestic novels seriously. Critics such as Deirdre d’Albertis, Josie Billington, Christine L. Krueger, Hilary M. Schor, Patsy Stoneman, and Jenny Uglow contribute to a body of work that deals with Gaskell as Elizabeth
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