Hungering at Hope Farm in Elizabeth Gaskell's Cousin Phillis John

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

“As a child looks at a cake”: Hungering at Hope Farm in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis John Barton, whose cravings for food are wrought up “almost to an animal pitch of ravenousness,” is the first of many Gaskell characters to be visited, and sometimes convulsed, by hunger pangs. Cousin Phillis (1863-4) begins with the narrator’s “pride and satisfaction” at having taken lodgings above a pastry-cook’s shop – but it develops hunger as a “predominant feeling” both for him, of a Sunday evening, and for Phillis herself, most irrecoverably. Phillis’s unsatisfied longing is the emotion which the story ends by exploring. It connects her with Gaskell’s earlier heroines, marking her as a mute inglorious Charlotte Brontë and as a Cheshire cousin of the Margaret who “thought and wished too much” in North and South. Perhaps, however, Phillis is a displaced person not just as to county but as to genre. Her affinities, and the story’s affinities, are as much with the poems of Tennyson as with the fiction that Gaskell already had to her name. What is different about the engagement with Tennyson here is that it moves beyond Gaskell’s previous passing interest in projecting Mary Barton as Mariana (when her cry “was ever the old moan of the Moated Grange”), or in adding a heroine called Ruth to the list of the Lady of Shalott’s descendants in the Victorian novel. In the latter part of 1859 Gaskell discovers a Tennyson fit for the 1860s, and it is at his Idylls of the King that she then says she has been looking “as a child looks at a cake.” This paper will consider her own hungry absorption into Cousin Phillis of one of the Idylls which so tantalised her on that groaning shelf of books, “Lancelot and Elaine.” .

Copy Link

Recommended publications

{Read} {PDF EPUB} ~Download Sylvia's Lovers by Elizabeth Gaskell Sylvia's Lovers
{Read} {PDF EPUB} ~download Sylvia's Lovers by Elizabeth Gaskell Sylvia's Lovers. Featuring beautiful and dramatic prose, Sylvia’s Lovers by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell is a powerful and moving piece of literature. Though it is lesser known than some of her other work, Gaskell’s mastery shines through with the novel’s incredible heart and interesting and authentic depictions of working-class characters. With themes of love and sacrifice, Sylvia’s Lovers continues to reach even modern-day audiences. This edition of Sylvia’s Lovers by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell is now presented in an easy-to-read font and features a striking new cover design. With these accommodations, modern audiences are provided a lavish and accessible reading experience. E-kitap hakkında daha fazla bilgi. Yayınevi: Mint Editions Yayın Tarihi: 2021-02-09 ISBN: 9781513276410. Sylvia’s Lovers – Elizabeth Gaskell’s anti-romantic novel. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers begins in a lively, upbeat tone; its first volume is undoubtedly delightful and might, in the first instance, lead a reader to assume that the novel is meant to be primarily a romantic story. However, as you read on through the “gathering shadows” of the second volume, and the unrestrained melodrama and improbable coincidences of the third, the novel concludes as something along the lines of a love story gone wrong. It’s Monkshaven during the French Revolutionary Wars; press gangs are seizing the crews of returning whalers to force into the Navy. Sylvia’s imagination has been fired by Kinraid’s heroics in trying to protect his shipmates by having a shoot out with one of these gangs, during which he’s killed two of its members, only escaping trial through being “kicked aside and left for dead” himself.
[Show full text]
Elizabeth Gaskell and the Middle Class
University of Montana ScholarWorks at University of Montana Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers Graduate School 2009 “The Sort . of People to Which I Belong”: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Middle Class Allison Masters The University of Montana Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Masters, Allison, "“The Sort . of People to Which I Belong”: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Middle Class" (2009). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 16. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/16 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “THE SORT . OF PEOPLE TO WHICH I BELONG”: ELIZABETH GASKELL AND THE MIDDLE CLASS By ALLISON JEAN MASTERS B.A., University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, 2006 Thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in English Literature The University of Montana Missoula, MT May 2009 Approved by: Perry Brown, Associate Provost for Graduate Education Graduate School John Glendening, Chair English Jill Bergman English Ione Crummy French Masters ii Masters, Allison, M.A., May 2009 English “The Sort . of People to Which I Belong”: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Middle Class Chairperson: John Glendening In this thesis, I examine Elizabeth Gaskell’s development as a middle-class author, which is a position that most scholars take for granted.
[Show full text]
“Storytellers” in Elizabeth Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers
“Storytellers” in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers Takashi Kohzawa Elizabeth Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) is a story about a young woman called Sylvia Robson and her two lovers; Charley Kinraid, a specksioneer (harpooner) of whale fishing, and Philip Hepburn, a shopkeeper of a clothes shop. And the “structure of Sylvia's Lovers,” as Terry Eagleton says, “is primarily organized around a contrast between Hepburn and Kinraid” (19). Kinraid, promising Sylvia to marry her, is abducted by the press-gang, a party of soldiers in the 1790s who would conscript new recruits by force for the national army, then fighting against France. The only witness to the event, Hepburn, however, keeps it to himself, and succeeds to persuade Sylvia to marry him. When Kinraid returns to Sylvia, she realizes for the first time that Hepburn has been deceiving her. Sylvia cannot forgive Hepburn, but at the end of the novel, she has changed her mind, and has learned the importance of “forgiveness.”1 Hepburn’s deceit to Sylvia is crucial enough to harm his reputation, but, as Arthur Pollard points out, he, none the less, contributes to Sylvia’s moral growth (Pollard 196-221). Kinraid and Hepburn are also contrasted to each other in other points. Hepburn, regarding education as the most important factor for mental maturity, seems to be a somewhat pedantic character, and Kinraid is portrayed as a heroic, courageous sailor. Hepburn supports the press-gang as England’s safeguard against France, and Kinraid does not for any reason. These differences, as many critics point out, are related to their social ─69─ position.2 One is a shopkeeper, also good at banking business, who therefore represents a new type of modern capitalistic society, and the other is a sailor of whale fishing, who represents traditional society.
[Show full text]
From Cranford to the Country of the Pointed Firs: Elizabeth Gaskell's American Publication and the Work
From Cranford to The Country of the Pointed Firs: Elizabeth Gaskell’s American Publication and the Work of Sarah Orne Jewetti ALAN SHELSTON In this second of two articles on Elizabeth Gaskell’s American connections I plan first to outline the history of the publication of her work in the United States during her own lifetime, and then to consider the popularity of Cranford in that country in the years following her death. I shall conclude by discussing the work of the New England writer, Sarah Orne Jewett whose story sequences Deephaven (1877) and The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) clearly reflect the influence of Gaskell’s work. I One of the remarkable things about Gaskell’s career as a novelist is the way in which, after a late start, her career took off. She was in her late thirties when Mary Barton was published, but from then on, and in particular through the 1850s, her output was incessant. This was partly due to the fact that Dickens took her up for Household Words; it is interesting to watch her becoming increasingly independent of his encouragement and influence through the fifties decade. What is also interesting is the extent to which she was taken up abroad, both on the continent and in the USA. To some extent this is because publishers in those countries found it more profitable to publish established English authors - even if, as in the case of the Europeans, they had to translate them - than to develop native talent. It was a period when popular fiction flourished, often published in cheap and sometimes unauthorised popular series.
[Show full text]
A Survey of Gaskell Scholarship, Or Things Written Recently About Gaskell
A Survey of Gaskell Scholarship, or Things Written Recently about Gaskell MARY H KUHLMAN The body of Things Written about Elizabeth Gaskell and her works continues to increase by some geometrical proportion so that each new year sees well-crafted reviews, articles, books, book introductions and book chapters appear to delight -- and perhaps overwhelm -- the Gaskellian reader. One piece of evidence of the enormous interest in Gaskell is this fact: when in the fall of 1997 Mitsuharu Matsuoka posted an e-mail message giving a list of recent dissertations on or including Gaskell written for doctoral degrees in the United States, the list came to 64 theses completed between 1992 and 1997. What such a statistic tells us is that there is plenty of new scholarship being done and written up. Some researchers have new biographical or bibliographical information to report; others offer new interpretations of Gaskell’s works based on their expertise in related fields. Still other writers provide new insights into the literature we already thought we knew, insights that renew our own readings. New primary materials, like newly discovered letters, always catch our interest, most certainly two full-length volumes recently published. One is a relatively slight but fascinating edition: Private Voices: The Diaries of Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell and Sophia Isaac Holland, edited by J.A.V. Chapple and Anita C. Wilson (Keele UP, 1996), and reviewed by Jo Pryke in the Gaskell Society Journal in 1997. The other “primary” volume is Professor John Chapple’s biographical study, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Early Years, (Manchester UP, 1997). Combining a graceful narrative with an amazingly complete mass of detailed information, this lengthy work will be enormously useful to students and scholars interested in Gaskell’s family background and youth, because of Chapple’s authoritative organization and interpretation.
[Show full text]
Performance and Performativity in Elizabeth Gaskell’S Cranford and Ruth
PERFORMANCE AND PERFORMATIVITY IN ELIZABETH GASKELL’S CRANFORD AND RUTH BY Copyright 2008 Eta Farmacelia Nurulhady Submitted to the graduate degree program in English and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master’s of Arts Dorice Williams Elliott Ann Wierda Rowland Iris Smith Fischer Date defended: 22 April 2008 The Thesis Committee for Eta Farmacelia Nurulhady certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis: PERFORMANCE AND PERFORMATIVITY IN ELIZABETH GASKELL’S CRANFORD AND RUTH Committee: Dorice Williams Elliott Ann Wierda Rowland Iris Smith Fischer Date approved: 29 April 2008 ii Abstract This thesis analyzes the aspects of performance and performativity in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford and Ruth. Gaskell shows through her characters how gender and class intertwine, involving the notions of cultural, social, and economic capital. Although contested concepts, performance and performativity can be significant tools in analyzing how Victorian narratives such as Cranford and Ruth could subvert dominant assumptions about gender and gender roles. The first chapter discusses Elizabeth Gaskell, the concepts of performance and performativity, and Victorian doctrine of separate spheres. The second chapter analyzes how the Cranford ladies in Cranford perform stylized repetition of certain acts to maintain their identity. The third chapter shows performances in Ruth and how the heroine acquires her gender by accreting its behavior, strengthening the understanding of Ruth by using the notion of performativity. The fourth chapter consolidates the main points that performance and performativity help to show: how Cranford challenges the stereotype of a “redundant woman,” and Ruth challenges the stereotype of a “fallen woman.” iii Acknowledgement I thank God the Almighty, Allah SWT for every single blessing granted to me.
[Show full text]
Jewusiak, University at Buffalo
NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENDER STUDIES # ISSUE 7.3 (WINTER 2011) The End of the Novel: Gender and Temporality in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford By Jacob Jewusiak, University at Buffalo <1>Since Cranford’s publication (1851-3), critics have had difﬁculty reconciling the novel’s modular storytelling with the teleological arc of a conventional novel narrative. A reviewer in Graham’s Magazine (1853) writes that while Cranford inspires “pleased attention” from the reader, “there is hardly any thing that can be called a plot” (448); similarly, the Athenaeum (1853) unﬂatteringly refers to Gaskell’s novel as a “collection of sketches” where “there is hardly a solitary incident which is not of every-day occurrence” (Chorley 765). In contemporary Victorian studies, Andrew Miller addresses this concern by suggesting that Cranford displays a “conventional teleological structure” that coexists “with a cyclical movement, an alternative narrative form which emerges out of and represents the routines and material culture of everyday life” (93). Reference to circular, cyclical, or static models of time appear consistently in Cranford criticism addressing a wide variety of issues such as memory, sympathy, and narrative repetition. (1) While metaphors like linearity and cyclicality are useful for thinking about the problematic relation between plot and time in Cranford, they do not address fully the temporal complexity that links the novel’s unusual form to Gaskell’s gender concerns. <2>As Barbara Adams points out, a mélange of different times structures any individual’s temporal experience—“time-frames, temporality, timing, tempo, a relation to the past, present, and future and…clock and calendar time” (37).
[Show full text]
Download Cousin Phillis, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, Penguin
Cousin Phillis, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, penguin popular classics, 1995, 0140621946, 9780140621945, . Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - It is a great thing for a lad when he is first turned into the independence of lodgings. I do not think I ever was so satisfied and proud in my life as when, at seventeen, I sate down in a little three-cornered room above a pastry-cook's shop in the county town of Eltham. My father had left me that afternoon, after delivering himself of a few plain precepts, strongly expressed, for my guidance in the new course of life on which I was entering. I was to be a clerk under the engineer who had undertaken to make the little branch line from Eltham to Hornby. My father had got me this situation, which was in a position rather above his own in life; or perhaps I should say, above the station in which he was born and bred; for he was raising himself every year in men's consideration and respect. He was a mechanic by trade, but he had some inventive genius, and a great deal of perseverance, and had devised several valuable improvements in railway machinery. He did not do this for profit, though, as was reasonable, what came in the natural course of things was acceptable; he worked out his ideas, because, as he said, 'until he could put them into shape, they plagued him by night and by day.' But this is enough about my dear father; it is a good thing for a country where there are many like him.
[Show full text]
Information to Users
INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 Nortfi Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 9427678 The tie that binds: The idealization of sisterhood in Victorian literature Chambers, Diane Marie, Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 1994 UMI 300 N.
[Show full text]
Elizabeth Gaskell and the Short Story
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Lincoln Institutional Repository Elizabeth Gaskell and the Short Story cd ELIZABETH LUDLOW AND REBECCA STYLER Abstract: Elizabeth Gaskell was the author of over forty short stories. Despite the resurgence in Gaskell criticism over the past three decades, these stories have only recently begun to receive the attention they deserve. Following an account of how the Victorian short story has been re-evaluated by literary critics, this introductory survey illuminates Gaskell’s key contributions to the development of the genre. Our discussion is structured around several areas of critical investigation that have been at the forefront of Gaskell studies over the past few years. These include: the position of Victorian short fiction in relation to predominant accounts of the form’s development; Gaskell’s engagement with the periodical press and the Victorian literary marketplace; her response to the connection between short stories and the Christmas season; and her deploy- ment of supernatural and sensational tropes. The image that emerges is that of a professional woman of letters who used shorter fiction as a space to experi- ment with new narrative methods, unusual characterisation and contentious themes. Concluding with some reflections on the two-part review in All the Year Round, newly attributed to Gaskell in July 2015, we suggest how Gaskell’s engagement with the ‘ungodly spinnings’ of French ballad and narrative tradi- tion might have helped shape her own practice as a master of the form. The Short Story, Modernists, Victorians It is a commonplace in short story criticism that the short story in Britain reached its heyday through the literary movement of Modernism.
[Show full text]
The Two Timothy Coopers
University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln The George Eliot Review English, Department of 2004 The Two Timothy Coopers Barbara Hardy Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ger Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Hardy, Barbara, "The Two Timothy Coopers" (2004). The George Eliot Review. 467. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ger/467 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in The George Eliot Review by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. THE TWO TIMOTHY COOPERS By Barbara Hardy Once or twice when I read and re-read the scene of the railway survey in Middlemarch I felt a sense of niggling lost connection, then one day I belatedly found it. George Eliot had copied the name of Elizabeth Gaskell's Timothy Cooper, in Cousin Phillis, for her character in Middlemarch. Eliot wrote to Gaskell1 that she felt an affinity with 'the feeling which inspired "Cranford" and the earlier chapters of "Mary Barton'" and had read Cranford when writing Scenes of Clerical Life and Mary Barton when writing Adam Bede. When The Moorland Cottage was proposed as source for The Mill on the Floss she said she had not read it. She writes about Ruth, The Life of Charlotte Bronte and Sylvia's Lovers, but as far as I know never mentions Cousin Phillis, serialized in The Cornhill Magazine between November and February, 1863-4, six years before Eliot began to brood over Middlemarch, nine before her novel began its serial appearance.
[Show full text]
Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford: "The Importance of Living the Truth" As Its Unifying Theme
Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Master's Theses Theses and Dissertations 1962 Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford: "The Importance of Living the Truth" as its Unifying Theme Donald Joseph Racky Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_theses Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Racky, Donald Joseph, "Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford: "The Importance of Living the Truth" as its Unifying Theme" (1962). Master's Theses. 1777. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_theses/1777 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1962 Donald Joseph Racky MRS. GASKELL'S CBAlU'ORD: "'l'B:E IMPORTANCE OF LIVDG '!'HE TRUTH" AS ITS tJIIlI'Yll'tG TBDIE by Donald Racky, Jr. A 'fhesis Submitted to the Faculty at the Graduate SChool ot Loyola UcU verai t;r in Partial Fult1ll.tDent or the Requirements tor the Degree ot Master of Arts Donald Joseph Racky, Jr., was born in Chicago, Illinois, January 21, 1937. He was graduated from St. Augustine High School, Holland, Michigan, June, 1954; attended Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania, 1955 to 1958J and was graduated from Loyola University, Chicago, Illinois, June, 1959, with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English. He began his present graduate studies at Loyola University in June, 1959.
[Show full text]