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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 HONESTY ADMITS DISCOURSE: LYING IN THE FICTION OF ELIZABETH GASKELL by Dorothy Heissenbuttel McGavran A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 1994 Approved by MCGAVRAN, DOROTHY HEISSENBUTTEL, Ph.D. Honesty Admits Discourse: Lying in the Fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell. (1994) Directed by Dr. Mary Ellis Gibson. 246pp. Variously deemed a motif, an image or a puzzling preoccupation, lying links all of Elizabeth Gaskell's works, and its political implications are far more important than critics have recognized. Lying, this dissertation argues, is the key that opens up Gaskell's values, purposes, and methods, including her own linguistic shifts and suppressions. Moreover, twentieth-century theorists of discourse and power such as Foucault and Bakhtin have helped locate lying as one of the linguistic tools for expressing and dealing with cultural change. For Gaskell, lying does not represent a turning away from truth but an expansion of the grounds for truth. Examination of the lies in her six major novels and many of her shorter works confirms that Gaskell was interrogating current assumptions of truth by encouraging inspection of motives and reinterpretation of values. In Gaskell's fiction, lies bubble up from long-built suppression, forcing disturbing questions of gender, power, and truth to the surface. Gaskell forces reexamination of the situation of the fallen woman and her place in society. She examines justice and the law in her historical works and their subversive subtexts, often pitting the laws of human beings against the laws of God and finding a wild but more genuine justice emerging in the voices of marginalized people. Always an educator and a moralist, Elizabeth Gaskell admits and values oral cultures and multiple literacies, but insists on a special kind of reading of contexts as well as of texts required by those who would be moral agents. She opposes double standards of honesty for men and women and deplores the practice of cunning and mendacity considered necessary for some women in the marriage market. Thus while disclaiming that there is one absolute truth, Gaskell pursues truth by admitting discourse. by Dorothy Heissenbuttel McGavran APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation has been -approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Dissertation Advisor Committee Members * "6 %ACL Date/of Acceptance by Committee T^jwL 22, 19H Dat& of Final' Oral Examination ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Mary Ellis Gibson for her guidance and contributions at every stage of this work. As a widely read Victorian scholar, as a careful reader and editor, and as an encourager, Dr. Gibson has helped me with the growth of this dissertation from its conception, through its awkward stages, to its present identity. I am also thankful for the English Department at UNCG, which nourishes sound scholarship without idle intimidation, and particularly for the guidance of my committee: James Evans, Randolph Bulgin, and Charles Davis—great teachers all. I am obliged to Queens College and the encouragement of my colleagues and friends, the interest and stimulation of my students, and the arrangement of schedules and leave-time by administrators over the past six years. I remember my father, Ernest G. Heissenbuttel, for the deep humanism of his vision and the example of his life as a reader and teacher of literature. I am indebted to my husband, James H. McGavran, for such resources as his scholarly mind, library contacts, and book-toting energies, but most of all for his close reading of these pages and good-humored encouraging and enduring of this process. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page APPROVAL PAGE ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii CHAPTER I. LYING AND THE TRUTH: "TO SEPARATE THE UNA FROM THE DUESSA" 1 II. ELIZABETH GASKELL, UNITARIAN: RUTHLESS FOR REFORM 48 III. LYING AND THE LAW: "IT WERE SHAME FOR T' FIRE BELL TO BE TELLIN' A LIE" 89 IV. LITERACY, LEARNING AND LYING: DYING IN ONE'S OWN LANGUAGE 130 V. LYING AND THE PATHOLOGICAL USES OF INFORMATION: WIVES, DAUGHTERS AND "MORAL KANGAROOS" 172 CONCLUSION 222 BIBLIOGRAPHY 233 iv 1 CHAPTER I LYING AND THE TRUTH: "TO SEPARATE THE UNA FROM THE DUESSA" Hamlet: "If you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty" (3.1.107-8). When Sissela Bok researched the topic of lying in the mid-1970s, she found very little written on it. In fact, she found that the index to the Encyclopedia .Qf Philosophy contained no reference to "lying" or to "deception" while over 100 were given under the heading "truth" (5). Bok hypothesized that philosophy was hesitant to look closely at the reasons people lie before exploring the theory and meaning of truth (xx). Bok believed, when she first published Lying in 1978, that it was "high time" to take up the actual everyday choices people have to make in determining whether to lie or not. She was not interested in the malicious lie. As she put it, I want to stress the more vexing dilemmas of ordinary life, dilemmas which beset those who think that their lies are too insignificant to matter much, and others who believe that lying can protect someone or benefit society. We need to look most searchingly, not at what we would all reject as unconscionable, but at those cases where many see good reasons to lie. (xxi) Over one hundred years before Sissela Bok, another woman 2 explored the same questions in fiction. Elizabeth Gaskell began writing novels for publication about 1845. Her great concern was to write the truth, yet she dwelt on and indeed seems preoccupied with the causes and effects of lying. Is it ever "right" to lie? Are good and moral people ever justified in lying to serve good ends? Is it ever right to lie in response to unjust laws, institutions and individuals? Gaskell opened up the field of novelistic discourse to include people's everyday linguistic attempts to articulate the "vexing dilemmas of ordinary life." Variously deemed a motif, an image, or a puzzling preoccupation, lying links all her works, and its political implications are far more important than critics have recognized. In fact, though it is common to divide her novels into the social action novels—Mary Barton. Ruth, and North and South—and the rural idylls—Cranford and Wives and Daughters—and to think they—as well as the historical novel Sylvia's Lovers—are not of a piece, all her fiction should be considered in every analysis which does justice to her achievement. In her 1990 review of Gaskell criticism, Hilary Schor claims that the novelist "has yet to receive the range of critical intelligence, careful reading, and cultural shake-up that she deserves" ("Elizabeth Gaskell" 369). I find lying to be the key that opens up Gaskell's values, purposes, and methods, including her own linguistic shifts, dodges, and suppressions. Moreover, twentieth-century theorists of 3 discourse and power such as Foucault and Bakhtin have helped me to locate lying as one of the linguistic tools for expressing and dealing with cultural change. I have concluded, consequently, that lying in Gaskell's novels does not represent a turning away from truth but an expansion of the grounds for truth. "Ground" is context, and therefore the spatial setting on which Gaskell founds her fictional worlds. Kenneth Burke's Grammar of Motives explores the scenic word ground as it is used in philosophy for describing motives. Burke says, "*0n what grounds did he do this?' is translated ^What kind of scene did he say it was, that called for such an act?'" (1001). By pursuing the lie and the grounds for it, Gaskell subverts the comforting myths of middle-class complacency, takes the back door to truth, and aims to expand the awareness and sympathy of her readers. Moreover, Gaskell found the grounds for truth in her own backyard.