THE SPLIT SUBJECT OF NARRATION IN ELIZABETH
GASKELL’S FIRST-PERSON FICTION
by Anna Koustinoudi
A dissertation submitted to the Department of English Literature
and Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy,
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
In fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
2009
Anna Koustinoudi
The Split Subject of Narration in Elizabeth Gaskell’s
First-Person Fiction
Doctoral Dissertation
submitted to the Department of English Language and Literature,
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Dissertation Committee:
Prof. Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, Adviser
Prof. Ekaterini Douka-Kabitoglou, Co-Adviser
Prof. Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou, Co-Adviser
Assist. Prof. Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Examiner
Assist. Prof. Effie Yiannopoulou, Examiner
Assoc. Prof. Domna Pastourmatzi, Examiner
Assoc. Prof. Youli Theodosiadou, Examiner
Date of oral defense: 6th February 2009
i
Acknowledgements
This dissertation has been long in the making and would have never reached completion had
it not been for the support, encouragement and generosity – material, emotional and
intellectual – of a number of people, who have stood by me all these years. The debts I owe
are many and I am grateful that the time has finally come when I can acknowledge them. It is
to my supervisor, Dr. Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, that I owe the greatest debt. With her I have experienced not only top standards of academic supervision, but also what I see as an empowering role model of scholarly excellence and commitment, hard work and perseverance. I am hugely indebted to her for her meticulous reading of my work, her critical and intellectual rigor, her theoretical guidance, her unfailing interest in and enthusiasm about my project. Dr. Parkin-Gounelas has inspired and challenged me critically and intellectually in ways that have made me, I believe, a better person, teacher and scholar. I shall always be grateful to her for this.
I am also deeply grateful to my co-advisor, Dr. Ekaterini Douka-Kabitoglou, for her emotional support, her thorough reading of my work, her insightful comments and enthusiasm for this project as well as for her useful critical and practical advice. Deep thanks are also due to my other co-advisor, Dr. Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou, for carefully reading and commenting on this thesis with genuine interest and insight and for her on-going encouragement and optimistic spirit. I would also like to express my gratitude to the members of my examining committee, Dr. Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Dr. Effie Yiannopoulou, Dr.
Domna Pastourmatzi and Dr. Youli Theodosiadou for taking the time to read the dissertation and for their insightful questions and constructive criticism. Finally, I would also like to acknowledge a twenty-year-old debt to Jina Politi, Professor Emeritus at Aristotle University, whose inspirational teaching, writing and passion for texts incited my own interest in literature during both my undergraduate and post-graduate years. ii
A number of colleagues and friends have provided me with support throughout the long process of working on this project. I am deeply grateful to Professor Nancy Weyant,
Coordinator of Reference Studies in the Humanities at Harvey A. Andruss Library of
Bloomsburg University Pennsylvania, not only for her two excellent Gaskell Bibliographies
(and their constantly updated web supplements), but above all, for her generous emotional
and bibliographical support, her interest in my work as well as for having personally kept me
up to date with the latest publications in the field of Gaskell studies. It is thanks to Nancy that
I have always been provided with material that I could not have easily laid my hands on
otherwise. My colleagues and friends Maria Vara and Despina-Alexandra Constantinidou
have also been a source of intellectual stimulation, emotional support and encouragement, so
I thank them both for helping me to cope with the pressures and demands of this project. I am
also indebted to the headmaster, Dr. Anastasios Tokmakidis, and to my colleagues at the
Intercultural Junior High School of Evosmos in Thessaloniki not only for their support and
encouragement during the final stages of my dissertation, but, above all, for their willingness
to undertake extra work-loads to relieve me of extra-curricular responsibilities that demand
considerable time and effort in a period when concentrated time was the one thing sorely
needed.
I would also like to thank the English Department of Aristotle University for funding
two of my conference trips abroad, as well as for giving me the chance to teach a number of
literary courses to undergraduate students, which was a rewarding and stimulating
experience.
My family has been my principal source of physical, intellectual and emotional
strength all these years. It is they who have so generously provided me with the love, care,
practical help and domestic stability vital for my well-being as well as for my intellectual
creativity. To my mother-in-law, my more than mother, Zografia, and to my father-in-law, iii
Thanasis, I owe the hugest debt for it is they who took upon themselves the difficult task of
taking care of my demanding household. My own parents, Chrysanthi and Stelios, have also
been supportive and readily available to me and my family throughout and I thank them for
everything they have done for us. My sister-in-law, Matina, and her family have been another
comforting presence for me and I am indebted to them for many things, big and small, but,
above all, for their life (and spirit)-sustaining sense of humour, practical advice and for
imbuing me with their positive life attitude.
Finally, this project would never have been completed had it not been for the catalytic
presence in my life of my two most beloved and precious ones, my husband Yiannis and our son Thanasis, both of whom have been a permanent source of physical and intellectual strength. To these two I am indebted in ways that words cannot describe; suffice it to say that it is to Yiannis and Thanasis that I owe everything, for it is thanks to their steadfast support, tender love and affection and genuine commitment to what gradually became a common aim for all three of us, that this project finally reached its final stage. The least I can do to express my love and gratitude is to dedicate this project to them with my deepest thanks, so I will follow Gaskell in acknowledging the greatest debt I shall ever incur: This dissertation is
wholeheartedly dedicated to my dearest husband Yiannis and our beloved son Thanasis “by
her who best knows [their] value.”
iv
Abstract
My dissertation approaches a number of Elizabeth Gaskell’s first-person works, namely,
Cranford, (1853) Cousin Phillis, (1863) “Six Weeks at Heppenheim”, (1862) “The Poor
Clare” (1856) and “The Grey Woman”, (1861) through a post-modern perspective employing
such theoretical frameworks as psychoanalytic theory, narratology and gender theory. It
attempts to explore the problematics of Victorian subjectivity from a post-modern, to be more precise, from a Lacanian perspective. All along, I assume that the narrative subjectivity which emerges from Gaskell’s texts, both as a narrating and narrated one, is split, divided and fluid rather than concrete, autonomous and whole, despite clinging to illusions of autonomy and fantasies of wholeness. This is the result of the narrating subject’s misrecognition of its own subjectivity which occurs as part of the continuation or re-enactment of the prototypical encounter between the “I” and its mirror image (Which, again, is one of misrecognition and imaginary wholeness) as experienced in infancy during what Jacques Lacan has theorized as the Mirror Stage. I see it emerging, moreover, as a process in the form of a series of subject positions, imaginary identifications and psychic investments which are discursively, and hence ideologically produced by the symbolic system, rather than as an essence or stable ontological entity or substance.
Although over the last two decades Elizabeth Gaskell has been established as one of
the major, female, authorial figures as representative of what has come to be known as classic
realism of nineteenth-century, she has seldom (if at all) been read as a writer of self-conscious
fiction in the ways that some of her more acclaimed cohorts (as, for instance, Charlotte Brontë
and George Eliot) have and this is what this thesis will partly attempt to do. Despite their
realistic frame of reference and mode of writing, which is generally informed by a belief in a
world of consistent subjects as the origin of meaning, knowledge and action, the result of
the dominant ideology of their time which is the post-Enlightment epoch of empiricism and v industrial capitalism, Gaskell’s first-person texts subtly, but firmly subvert such certainties in ways that point to the instability of the speaking subject itself. Hence, her narrators’ splitting ambivalence is to be traced – as a branch of contemporary criticism has consistently attempted to do as regards her better known industrial fiction – even in the most realistically rendered of her narratives, thus giving credit to post-modern interpretations of subject formation. According to them, subjectivity is discursively constructed and dispersed across the range of discourses (cultural, political and economic) in which the “concrete” individual participates. Moreover, this project is intent upon embracing the view that since the narrating subject is constructed in the realm of the symbolic order, which is also the realm of discourse, mediation and ideology, then it is also discursively constructed in ideology itself, which in a seemingly “natural” way interpellates it also as a gendered, class-conscious and race-conscious subject, thus forcing it, through subtle coercion, to assume a predetermined set of seemingly fixed positions in a reality which is but a series of inter-subjective positions, repetitive role playing and masquerading.
Narration, as the mutual interaction of both the narrator’s desire to narrate and the narratee’s desire for narrative, has a key role to play, of course, in the subject's “meaningful” being, since it seems to fulfill its primordial desire for a return to origins and past traumas or as
Freud would have it a “return of the repressed” via a “compulsion to repeat”, which I see as the ultimate goal of all first-person narratives in general and Gaskell’s own in particular, that of domesticating otherness and/or coming to terms with trauma by re-telling. It is in this respect that my project also argues for first-person narration as symptomatic of the desire to reconstruct the past in the “now” of narration, a model analogous to the one we encounter in the analytic situation.
vi
ABBREVIATIONS AND SHORT TITLES
C Cranford (London: Penguin, 1994).
“SWH” “Six Weeks at Heppenheim”, Cranford and Other Tales
(London: Smith, Elder & Company, 1884). pp. 189-216.
CP Cousin Phillis (London: Penguin, 1994).
“PC” “The Poor Clare”, Gothic Tales, ed. Laura Kranzler (London:
Penguin, 2000). pp. 49-102.
“GW” “The Grey Woman”, Gothic Tales, ed. Laura Kranzler (London:
Penguin, 2000). pp. 287-340.
Letters The Letters of Mrs Gaskell eds. J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard
(Manchester: Mandolin Press, 1997).
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction Theorizing Subjectivity: The Emergence of the “I” in Elizabeth Gaskell’s First-Person Fiction………………………………………………………………………………………..1
Chapter 1 Elizabeth Gaskell’s First-Person Texts in the Context of Victorian Culture and Society: Theoretical Perspectives on First-Person Narration. 1.1. Critical Reception………………………………………………………………………17 1.2. Precursors to Elizabeth Gaskell’s First-Person Fiction………………………………...27 1.3. The Philosophical, Socio-Economic and Literary Context of First-Person Narration…………………………………………………………………………….33 1.4. Split Narration in First-Person Textual Production from a Narratological Perspective…………………………………………………………………………..48 1.5. Is Narration Gendered? Gender in Narration and a Feminist Narrative Poetics……………………………………………………………………………….58 1.6. The Split Subject of Narration, Desire and the Gaze ………………………………………………………………………………………63
Chapter 2 The Communal “I”/Eye: Narrating the Individual and the Community in Cranford’s Heterotopic Utopia 2.1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..76 2.2. Cranford’s Community Narrative as a Fragmented First-Person Text…………………81 2.3. Mary Smith’s Duplicitous Strategies: The Narrator at Odds with her Text………….....99 2.4. Cranford’s Self-Conscious Heterotopic Performativity: Thematic Analogues………..116
Chapter 3 The Voyeuristic “I”/Eye: Disavowal, Defence and Voyeurism in the Narration of “Six Weeks at Heppenheim” and Cousin Phillis 3.1. “Six Weeks at Heppenheim” as a Precursor to Cousin Phillis………………………...133 3.2. The Lost Object of Narration: Identification and Substitution in Cousin Phillis…………………………………………………………………………………...144 viii
Chapter 4 The Gothic “I”: The Ghostliness of Identity in “The Poor Clare” and “The Grey Woman” 4.1. The Victorian (Female) Gothic: A Transgressive Genre with a Pathological Twist…...... 165 4.2. The Backward Glance of Narration: Narrative Discordance and the Encounter with the Sublime in “The Poor Clare”……………………………………………………….181 4.3. “The Sins of the Fathers shall be Visited upon the Children”: Transgenerational Hauntings and Traumas…………………………………………………………….202 4.4. The Ghostliness of Identity and the Lesbian Gothic as Embedded Narratives: Gender Configurations in Meta-Fictional Narrative Contexts in “The Grey Woman”…………………………………………………………………………….210
Afterword…………………………………………………………………………………...234
Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………..241 1
INTRODUCTION
Theorizing Subjectivity: The Emergence of the “I” in Elizabeth Gaskell’s First-Person Fiction.
“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar [...]. Alice replied rather shyly, “I – hardly know, sir, just at present – at least I knew who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.” “What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar sternly. “Explain yourself”. “I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir”, said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.” (Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland 53-4)
“I won’t listen to reason, […]. Reason always means what someone else has got to say.”
(Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford 182)
“I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me.”
(Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable 293)
Is the place that I occupy as the subject of a signifier concentric or eccentric, in relation to the place that I occupy as subject of the signified? – that is the question.
(Jacques Lacan, “Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious” 165)
Humanity’s preoccupation with beginnings and origins, like its obsession with gratification and power, is as primal as its own turbulent trajectory throughout history. Although the origins and nature of the desiring self and its discontents (or the “I” and its phantoms) have 2 constituted the object of an on-going ontological quest, they have remained largely unresolved issues, which have proven even harder to define from the precarious subject position of today’s post-modern subject/observer, at a time when, throughout changing concepts of the “I”, the prevailing attitude towards origins has been imbued with the notions of the copy and the simulacrum1 without a Platonic or divine original.
The thorny ontological issues of selfhood, individuality,2 identity and perception –
known by the term “subjectivity” in post-modern parlance – have always constituted a central
problematic in Western (and not only) thought, for all the redefinitions and reappraisals they
have undergone. In our times the desiring human subject, dominated as it is by the effects of
late capitalism, comodification and consumerism (with extreme poverty looming at the other
end of the spectrum – as in nineteenth-century Britain), is as much as ever preoccupied with
its own subjectivity and its objects. From Plato’s imperfect simulacrum of a heavenly
prototype (in his Republic c.a. 375 B.C.), to monotheism’s positing of the self as the created
image of a supreme being, to Renaissance concepts of humans as the source of a transparent
and meaningful universe, to Lewis Carroll’s subversion of the rational, enlightened self (in all
its Cartesian certainty) through the mouth of a female child in Alice in Wonderland (1865), to
Samuel Beckett’s dislocated, mocked “I” in The Unnamable (1953), up to Jacques Lacan’s
and other post-structuralist critics’ theorization of the “self’s radical ex-centricity to itself”
(Lacan, “Agency of the Letter” 189) in our own post-modern times, the problematic of the
hegemony of the self has followed humanity throughout its history.
1 In Jean Baudrillard’s terms, “simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality; a hyperreal […]. Henceforth it is a map that precedes the territory” (166). 2 Etymologically, the term derives from the Latin individuus meaning “undivided” or “indivisible”, rather misleadingly suggesting the notion of the “I” at one with itself. 3
Inevitably, the way we think about the “I” nowadays differs from the ways in which
it was viewed and defined in the past, in spite of the fact that in many respects it is still
heavily informed by a Cartesian rationale. The once dominant notion of an authentic,
transcendent, atomic self as a free-thinking agent, as possessor and master of nature and as
distinctly separable from other selves (as famously theorized by René Descartes in his
Discourse on Method [1637]), has been challenged and gradually – if only partially – replaced by the notion of the human subject as decentred, as a mere effect of the signifier and as a product of various social discourses and ideologies (such as gender, race and class) rather than as an ontological given. The Cartesian “I think therefore I am” model of the rational subject has been re-articulated by Jacques Lacan as “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think” (“Agency of the Letter” 166), thus underscoring the division of subjectivity, that is, the split character of the subject in terms of the gap opened up between the speaking subject and the subject of speech. It is in the same vein that, as he argues, “it is not a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak” (“Agency of the Letter”
165).
Perhaps, more than any other discipline, psychoanalysis, especially through its post- structuralist revisions, has cautioned us against the anthropocentrism of Cartesian certainty and this is one of the reasons why this thesis is largely informed by a Freudian, Lacanian, and, to a lesser extend, Kleinian paradigm. While being as anthropocentric as most other contemporary disciplines,3 psychoanalysis has nonetheless promoted a much-needed
3 In laying emphasis on the telling of individual narratives during the analytic session as part of its therapeutic practice, psychoanalysis in the Freudian tradition placed the individual at the centre of its focus, on the one hand, while cautioning, on the other hand, against belief in the coherent and undivided human subject inherited also from Romanticism, drawing attention to a self-absorbed but, at the same time, alienated self. 4 awareness of anthropocentrism’s arrogance by viewing it with suspicion. “Normally”,
Sigmund Freud observed in the 1930s, echoing the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers’ conviction, “there is nothing we are more certain of than the feeling of our self, our own ego. It seems to us an independent unitary thing, sharply outlined against everything else” (Civilization and its Discontents 2). However, Freud was quick to add that “this is a deceptive appearance. And on the contrary the ego extends inwards without any sharp delimitation, into an unconscious mental entity which we call the id and to which it [the ego] forms a façade” (2). He thus rendered, throughout the work of a lifetime, an already highly contested issue even more controversial by investing it with fresh implications and complications, which were to destabilize further the notion of a unified, stable, sharply delimited ego or self. Consequently, the principle of the rational subject as famously theorized by the philosophers of the Enlightenment received a severe blow to its narcissististic infrastructure, not least because the alleged existence of the unconscious dimension of the mind, as charted by Freud’s two topographies, rendered the “I” only partially accessible, susceptible to forces and effects beyond its immediate grasp and cognition.4
My own fascination with the problematics of the self and its implication in prose
narratives (including “grand” ones in Lyotard’s sense of the term) dates as far back as I can
remember myself to be “in possession” of a self. During my undergraduate years, in the early
4 Of course, since their inception, Freud’s controversial theories and case studies have never ceased to be met with resistance and scepticism not only by Freud’s contemporaries, but by a number of later theorists and scientists as well, mainly because the theories and case studies themselves proved resistant to mainstream scientific methods of testing and because the notion of human subjectivity as largely conditioned by unconscious forces problematizes its very centrality: “how, generally speaking, is a science possible” Cornelius Castoriadis, for instance, wonders “if human beings are defined by the existence of the unconscious, if they are […] split? How, under these conditions, is a science of the unconscious possible – that is to say, how is psychoanalysis possible?” (15). 5
1980s, I came to know it by the term “subject” in accordance with the term’s post-modern configurations. It was also at that time that I started to understand better “literature’s capacity to question, defamiliarize and even transform the sense of who or what we are” (Bennett and
Royle 122). My interest in Victorian prose was instigated by a series of passionate readings – and subsequent re-readings – of a landmark first-person narrative, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane
Eyre, and of her other novels, which then led me to the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, the author
of Brontë’s controversial biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). I subsequently
decided to focus more extensively on Gaskell’s relatively unexplored texts, whose study
brought about a further disillusionment with the notion of a stable, unified and rational, self.
All this coincided with the end of a post-graduate course in English literature, which brought
about a realization that no category – including that of the self and its constructed narratives –
in what we have come to perceive as our reality is to be taken as natural, innocent or
unmediated, a realization both liberating and disturbing at the same time.
The problematic of the self in its multifarious manifestations was a disconcerting one
for the Victorian Elizabeth Gaskell as well. A contemporary (as well as, sometimes, an
acquaintance) of such influential literary figures as Charles Dickens, the Brontës, George
Eliot, Harriet Martineau, Margaret Oliphant, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and others, Gaskell
produced work which was as varied and multifaceted5 (and if compared to that of the
5 She tried her hand at almost every literary mode available, developing into a fully-fledged, professional writer between 1847 and 1865, when she died suddenly of heart failure at the peak of her career, managing to acquire fame as well as considerable financial profit out of her published works. Gaskell was a novelist (of historical, industrial and domestic fiction), poet, biographer, essayist, reviewer, anecdotist and journalist (with a series of articles which appeared in The Pall Mall Gazette in 1865) and, in John Chapple and Alan Shelston’s words, “one of the greatest letter-writers of the Victorian period” (xi), with over 1500 letters being included in the two published volumes of her letters and with new ones still being discovered and ascribed to her by Gaskell scholars. 6
Brontës, much more so)6 as theirs. Nevertheless, the conditions under which she wrote
differed from those surrounding the more famous (at least until the 1980s) of her
contemporaries, in that Gaskell had to accommodate her writing self to pressing domestic
commitments, social work and motherhood. To these, one might also add the need to cope
with the pressures of serial publication, “a continuously important part of nineteenth-century literary culture” (Blake 65) and, in the same way as her other female contemporaries, the forces of a male-dominated publishing establishment as well. This resulted in what Hilary
Schor has termed “a curious encounter between fiction and the market” (3), in the context of
which Gaskell’s works fared well in the market, on the one hand, while seriously
problematizing various aspects of individual and social life, on the other. Thus, in a lengthy
letter written in April 1850, which was addressed to her friend Tottie Fox, Elizabeth Gaskell
writes about what she habitually called her many “Mes” in the context of expressing her
remorse for having become the owner of “so purely selfish a thing as a [new] house […]
when so many are wanting” (Letters 108). She describes the thought of it as “haunting to
[her]; at least to one of [her] ‘mes’” (108), for as she claims:
I have a great number [of “mes”] and that’s a plague. One of my mes, is, I believe, a
true Christian – (only people call her socialist and communist), another one of my
mes is a wife and mother, and highly delighted at the delight of everyone else in the
house, Meta and William most especially who are in full extasy. Now that’s my
“social” self I suppose. Then again I’ve another self with a full taste for beauty and
6 Unlike the isolated Brontës, Gaskell (who was also a passionate traveller) became part of “the complex, overlapping circles of Victorian literature, philanthropy, politics and religion” (Uglow 227), despite her Unitarian background, thanks to her successful “social self” and outspoken personality, which led to her acquaintance with a number of influential figures of the cultural/artistic establishment of the time. 7
convenience whh [which] is pleased on its own account. How am I to reconcile all
these warring members? (Letters 108)
Struggling to “reconcile all these warring members” and harmonize her many “mes” constituted a lifelong endeavour for Gaskell as a Victorian subject. Although in the above letter she is careful, in true self-effacing Anglo-Saxon fashion,7 to omit from her list of “mes”
one of the most important – actually the most glamorous, as it turned out – aspects of her life,
her literary persona, one is given the impression that the sub-text of her letter – like that of
her fiction – is particularly eloquent in undertones of what we might today term post-modern
concerns about the split nature of subjectivity. The question of how one perceives one’s own
subjectivity, on the one hand, and how others perceive it, on the other, also figures
prominently in the above letter and is suggestive of Gaskell’s personal concern with the
vicissitudes of subjectivity.
“To examine Gaskell’s life and her literary achievement”, as Deidre D’Albertis has
recently observed, is to discover a series of selves, and corresponding names, that emerge out
of the rich and ever-changing context of her encounter with ‘other minds’” (“The Life and
Letters of E. C. Gaskell” 15-16). In the latter, apart from her contemporary female authors,
were included such influential scientists as Charles Darwin (also a distant cousin of hers), as
well as most of the literary and publishing celebrities of the time, such as William M.
Thackeray and Charles Dickens, John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, and, on the other side of
7 As Ruth Parkin-Gounelas observes, although “the leading figures in the Romantic movement […] wrote of the self as the primary locus of meaning and the chief source of knowledge, this faith was relatively short-lived. In the post-Romantic age, the idea, though still current, was largely modified by the traditional Anglo-Saxon view that to be self-preoccupied is somehow […] self-indulgent, narcissistic” (Fictions of the Female Self 3-4). This notion of self-effacement was often reiterated by Gaskell, herself a product of the preceding Romantic age, both in her correspondence and in her texts. This is also implied in the above letter by her mild expressions of shame at becoming possessed “of so purely selfish” and by extension so un- Christian “a thing as a house” when “so many are wanting”. 8 the Atlantic, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Eliot Norton, to name just a few. Attempting to trace Gaskell’s shifting selves/identities throughout her development as a novelist, from her literary debut under the pseudonym of Cotton Mather Mills,8 to her being hailed as Mrs
Gaskell in the cosmopolitan, artistic circles of London in 1849 following the success of her
industrial novel Mary Barton in 1848, up to her literary establishment as Elizabeth C.
Gaskell, has been a challenge for Gaskell scholars, especially from the 1980s onwards. She
proved herself particularly deft at juggling with a number of literary “mes”, remaining, at the
same time, resistant to clear-cut categorizations.
Like her female contemporaries (as well as those who wrote and published during the two previous centuries), Gaskell attempted to assert herself and give form and resonance to her literary endeavours via inherited patriarchal structures of thought, inevitably producing her texts from within patriarchal structures of discourse. The strategies through which she sought to inscribe subjectivity were often those “of unease, subterfuge and dislocation, rather than self-revelation and self-discovery” (Parkin-Gounelas, Fictions of the Female Self 6-7).
Divided, even “plague[d]” (Letters 108) by her life’s divergent claims, and interests9
8 As Jenny Uglow notes, “by the end of 1847 Elizabeth Gaskell was already, in a small anonymous way, a published writer” (170). It was in Howitt’s Journal, edited by her friends Mary and William Howitt, that she first appeared under the pseudonym of Cotton Mather Mills (1663-1729), with a pun on Manchester’s “cotton mills”, to suggest her own Manchester connection. The name was recommended to her, as Uglow informs us, by her husband William and it was, of course, that of the American Puritan minister of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, whose name was connected with the Salem witchcraft trials, “a subject of great interest to Unitarians fighting obscurantism in the 1840s” (Uglow 172). Howitt’s Journal ran for eighteen months (between 1847 and 1848), during which Gaskell saw three of her stories published in it: “Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras”, “The Sexton’s Hero” and “Christmas Songs and Sunshine”. 9 Gaskell’s life was one of intense activity in terms of social, professional and, of course, family obligations. She possessed a remarkable ability (and energy) to combine a number of different strands of occupation besides that of professional writing. According to Shirley Foster, “a typical Manchester day […] included teaching at a nearby school, visiting a motherless family some distance away, and 9
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell née Stevenson (1810-1865), Mrs Gaskell, as her contemporaries respectfully called her, or E. C. Gaskell (her own preferred and subsequently established professional name), often resorted to her “great number of ‘mes’” to spell out and speculate on the contradictory forces, both internal and external, that beset her throughout her life.
Whether Gaskell celebrates or laments this multiplicity of selves is hard to say. However, it is precisely this undecidabilty which initially attracted me to her work as a whole and subsequently to her first-person texts as particularly expressive of the contradictions (and fictions) of subjectivity. Although significant attention has been paid to Gaskell’s industrial and, to a lesser extent, historical and short fiction, the narrative inscription of subjectivity as this emerges from her first-person texts has not received due attention so far by Victorian scholarship. However, as I shall argue, her first-person fiction has begged for analysis as a separate and complete body of texts in itself for the way it problematizes, more self- consciously than her other narratives, the ways in which the self comes to construct and be constructed by its own fictions and otherness.
It is therefore to an exploration of Gaskell’s first-person fiction that this dissertation is dedicated, in an attempt to bring into focus the ways in which her realistic and Gothic texts undercut and interrogate post-Romantic assumptions about an autonomous and coherent speaking and/or narrating subject. The primary texts to be examined are her episodic novel
Cranford (1853) as paradigmatic of what I term the communal “I”/eye in chapter two of this study, her German short piece “Six Weeks at Heppenheim” (1862), her domestic novella
Cousin Phillis (1863) both under the rubric of the voyeuristic “I”/eye in chapter three, as well
returning home to discuss another charity case, to say nothing of supervising household affairs and making arrangements for an endless stream of visitors” (Elizabeth Gaskell 42). Her connections, correspondence and co-operation with such famous philanthropists as Florence Nightingale and feminist activists such as Barbara Leigh Smith-Bodichon, are also well-documented throughout her letters. 10
as two of her Gothic pieces “The Poor Clare” (1856) and “The Grey Woman” (1861) as
instances of Gaskell’s appropriation of the Gothic “I”/eye in chapter four. The first chapter of
this dissertation provides an account of Gaskell’s critical reception, subsequently attempting
to place her texts within their contemporary historical, socio-economic, cultural, scientific
and philosophical context, tracing at the same time their embeddedness in and dependence on
earlier modes of writing, such as the sentimental first-person narratives of the eighteenth
century. A detailed exposition of my theoretical models and the ways these inform my
argument in the analysis of Gaskell’s texts is also provided in the fourth, fifth and sixth parts of the first chapter.
The essential argument of this study, then, an argument which will hopefully gain depth through particular analyses of the texts themselves, is that the mid-nineteenth-century narrating “I”, in its communal (in Cranford), voyeuristic (in “Six Weeks at Heppenheim” and
Cousin Phillis) and Gothic (in “The Poor Clare” and “The Grey Woman”) manifestations emerges as painfully divided, lacking, unstable, ailing and hence unreliable, pre-figuring, at the same time, later forms of self-conscious narration in fiction. Furthermore, it is also exposed as perfomative, especially in terms of gender configurations, a citational category, as
Judith Butler would have it, that can be seen as a simulacrum without an original and consequently at odds with post-Romantic, empiricist assumptions about the factuality, centrality and rationality of the human subject, while at the same time, clinging to illusions of autonomy.10 Plagued by its own self-awareness, the “I” is alienated both from itself as well as
10 According to Helene Moglen, the nineteenth century was a time of “the consciousness of individualism” (5) when: [S]elf-aware individuals experienced themselves as preeminent in their relationships and were intensely focused on themselves. At the social level, they believed themselves to be autonomous and independent: active agents in a world available to rational comprehension and control. Stamped by the spirit and practices of capitalism, they were acquisitive, pragmatic and competitive […]. At the psychological level, the individual’s obsession with its 11
from those whom it attempts to dominate or simply represent, including its own narrated
counterpart. To this effect, I shall argue that throughout a trajectory of configurations,
psychic investments and imaginary identifications, embedded in and conditioned by the
workings of desire and ideology (both of which underpin linguistic/discursive
representational practices), narrative subjectivity in Gaskell’s first-person fiction manifests
itself as the product of a misrecognized encounter between the subject who narrates and that
which is being narrated. Both are essentially unable to see their split character as well as the
alienating chasm opened up between them, for the former (the narrating “I”) on the level of
narration, and for the latter (the narrated “I”, or the “I” as textual character) on a thematic
level.11
This encounter of misrecognition, during which a gap opens up between the narrating
and the narrated “I”, a gap which is further reinforced by the temporal distance generated by
the retrospective character of the texts under analysis, could be seen as a continuation or re-
enactment of an earlier, equally misrecognized, prototypical encounter between the “I” and
its mirror image as experienced by the human subject in infancy during what Jacques Lacan
has theorized as the Mirror Stage. As posited by Lacan’s re-reading of Freud, this crucial
moment of identity formation, which also marks the beginning of the subject’s inscription
own interior produced a division between the self that scrutinized and the self that was watched. Subject and object simultaneously, the socially-self-possessed individual was psychologically riven. ( 4-5) This “consciousness of individualism”, which had its roots in the nineteenth century, has remained with us throughout modernity and post-modernity in ways that render Moglen’s synchronic delineation of its characteristics particularly diachronic and applicable to contemporary capitalist societies, like Gaskell’s texts themselves. 11 According to Robert Con Davis, “Lacan’s concept of narration and of narrative interpretation rests squarely on an ontological fault line, the radical split of a subject irretrievably unwhole – the subject of what Lacan calls aphanisis […]. What we are accustomed to calling unity and wholeness in form and seeing as concepts centrally important to narration and interpretation are unceremoniously ousted” (“Introduction: Lacan and Narration” 857). 12
into the symbolic system, is characterized on the one hand by a sense of jubilation and
plenitude generated by the subject’s “primary narcissism” (as Freud terms it) and by an acute
sense of ambivalence or otherness, on the other, resulting from the subject’s misperceived or
imaginary identification of his/her reflection in the mirror as a unified, undivided whole. As
Sean Homer notes, “Lacan insists that the ego, [or, for the purposes of this study, the
narrative “I”] is based on an illusory image of wholeness12 and mastery and it is the function
of the ego to maintain this illusion of coherence and mastery. The function of the ego is […]
one of misrecognition; of refusing to accept the truth of fragmentation and alienation”
(Homer 25). Moreover, as Rosalind Coward and John Ellis observe, “Lacan’s concept of the
imaginary provides a route for understanding how the positioning of a subject in relation to
language and, therefore, to social relations is always accomplished in specific ideological
formations” (76). Taking both of these observations as my starting point, I contend that this
illusory/imaginary relation (one of wholeness and plenitude, but also of ambivalence,
alienation, otherness) of the subject to its mirror image also permeates the structures of
narrative and hence the narrative “I” in any given text since narratives, as products of
linguistic/discursive practices, are deeply embedded in and informed by the same ideological
formations as those upon which human subjectivity is predicated. The narrative emergence of
subjectivity, in other words, is densely interwoven with the human subject’s inflection by the
signifier and hence by the slipperiness of the signifying process.
In addition to the concept of subjectivity, narration constitutes another key term of
this thesis, hence my use of formalist narrative theory, but also of its more contextualized
branch, that of feminist narratology in combination with gender theory, particularly Judith
12 Rosalind Coward and John Ellis note that “This is no simple process, because the imaginary wholeness which is identified in the mirror is an identification which is retained as the prototype for all identifications as the child enters cultural and specific social formations as a language-using subject” (75-6). 13
Butler’s work on the performativity of gender/ identity. “To raise the question of the nature of
narrative”, as Hayden White has argued, “is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture,
and, possibly even on the nature of humanity itself” (1), pointing to “the impulse to narrate”
(White 1) as one of the fundamental constituents of human subjectivity; and because the
substance or infrastructure underlying the mechanisms of narration is of a linguistic nature,
narrative itself, as Seymour Chatman puts it, “is a deep structure [which] needs to be
actualized in written words” (“Novels and Films” 117).13
My decision to focus on Gaskell’s first-person narration has also been dictated by the
fact that first-person texts constitute a more self-conscious form of narration, in comparison
with the alleged objectivity and extroverted character of omniscient ones. Also, because an
“I” narrative confers a greater degree of directness (because of its confessional tone) upon the
act of narration than a third-person one, its use has been connected with the problematics of
the autobiographical genre as well as identified (in a rather biased way, as a number of critics
have demonstrated) with femininity as more self-preoccupied than masculinity. Furthermore,
because the “I” denotes a preoccupation with all things personal, esoteric and subjective, it
has occasionally triggered a distrust of first-person narratives as products of a limited
consciousness, prone to partiality and hence to unreliability. However, it is precisely via her
self-preoccupied, unreliable narrators, as we shall see through a close reading of the texts
themselves, that Gaskell interrogates contemporary notions of a coherent, stable self, thus
foregrounding unreliability as the narrative strategy with the capacity to represent the very
slipperiness of subjectivity and hence of representation. Finally, one of the basic (and most
convincing, in my opinion) assumptions in favour of first-person narration as articulated by
13 It is no accident that narration, in its first-person version, has been considered instrumental in psychoanalytic therapeutic practices as the medium through which access, no matter how partial, can be provided to the unconscious.
14
narratologists such as Mieke Bal, as we shall see in chapter one of this study, is that the first-
person narrative position subsumes all other categories of narrative stance, presupposing and
preceding them ontologically. The alienated, divided, misrecognized “I”, therefore, could be
said to loom uncannily in the background of every narrative. All in all, by drawing attention to self-reflexivity in a more self-conscious way than third-person ones, first-person narratives hold out a greater, but ultimately more illusory, promise of (self-) identity.
As it will become clear from the “I”/eye duality appearing in the titles of my second, third and fourth chapters, the notion of the gaze as an integral part of narration is also of
importance to my argument in terms of how the (narrating) subject’s own misrecognition of itself comes into being. Within the Lacanian framework, the dialectic between the dynamics of seeing and being seen operate in such a way – as I hope it will become clear in the ensuing chapters of this study through the analysis of Gaskell’s texts themselves – that the “I” and the
“eye” become mutually constitutive and crucially implicated in the act of identity formation within the symbolic, via their inscription in language. To the above dialectics, we should also add what Lacan terms “the essential correlates of consciousness in its relation to representation” (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 80), the dialectic
equation of two scopic positions – namely, “seeing oneself seeing” and “seeing oneself being
seen”, which posit the gaze as the “underside of consciousness” (Four Fundamental
Concepts 83). We shall see this materialize through Gaskell’s use of voyeuristic narrators in
“Six Weeks at Heppenheim” and Cousin Phillis, via her communal narrator in the heterotopic utopia of Cranford, as well as through her ontologically destabilized, pathologized narrators
in her Gothic pieces “The Poor Clare” and “The Grey Woman”.
The narrative emergence of subjectivity is also deeply embedded in the ideologically-
conditioned desiring mechanisms underlying the function of gaze as a crucial determinant of
human subjectivity, which is characterized by the scopic drive’s impulse to see, and by 15
extension to narrate. “If seeing is an act bound to point of view”, Susan S. Lanser tells us,
“then saying [and by extension narrating] is doubly so” (The Narrative Act 4), an observation
which, from a narratological perspective, validates one of the most crucial aspects of the act
of narration, that of its indebtedness to vision and visuality and hence to the function and
politics of the gaze.
“Texts written in the past”, Helene Moglen has observed, “achieve importance for us
because we find them eloquent in the present moment [for] [t]heir resonance is cultural as
well as personal” (139). Both during her lifetime and after her death (in 1865), Gaskell’s texts
have achieved cultural and personal resonance and have since lent themselves to diverse
readings and interpretations, having produced, in Susan Hamilton’s words, “different
Gaskells” (190)14 in accordance with Gaskell’s own sense of her multiple “mes”. Though
originally conceived, produced and consumed almost two centuries ago, these texts remain
resonant for us today not only because they are telling in terms of Victorian concepts of
subjectivity as this was conditioned and contested by the individualist, capitalist society of
the time, but also because of their concerns with issues of subjectivity very similar to those of
our own post-modern, equally individualist, globalized capitalist world order. My own
inevitably post-modern approach to Gaskell’s first-person texts will attempt to shed some
light on what I consider to be an overlooked dimension of her work, that of its
problematization of the split Victorian subject.
However, as a subject of as well as subject to language myself and hence as another
split subject, I am well aware of the limitations, gaps and impasses that my own appropriation
14 As Hamilton notes, over the years this multiplicity of interpretations has also come from such diverse directions as “[h]eritage-granting bodies, television production studios, academic conferences and tourism industries” (190), as has also been the case with figures like Dickens, Austen and the Brontës.
16 and (narrative) treatment of Elizabeth Gaskell’s texts may engender, as well as of the inevitable risks that I take in attempting to promote my own narrative as one of significance and wholeness. Still, I believe it is a risk worth taking.
17
CHAPTER ONE
Elizabeth Gaskell’s First-Person Narratives in the Context of Victorian Culture and Society: Theoretical Perspectives on First-Person Narration
1.1. Critical Reception
In the issue of August 16th, 2007 of London Review of Books Rosemarie Bodenheimer, reviewing the new Pickering and Chatto, ten-volume edition of the complete works of
Elizabeth Gaskell, writes of Gaskell:
The contemporaries whose work came closest to her own were Dickens, Charlotte
Brontë and George Eliot, but Gaskell never practised the art of the novel as they did.
Her details do not build up to form larger patterns of interpretation and metaphor; her
voice generally lacks their double-edged ironies and strategic modulations. Although
Gaskell tended to organize novels by setting up two contrasting households and
pairing heroines, she did not employ the more intricate organization of scene against
narrative summary that ensures readers will keep reading. (17)
A year earlier, in the November 8th 2006 issue of The Times Literary Supplement, nineteenth-century scholar Heather Glen begins her review of the same (Pickering and
Chatto) massive edition of Gaskell’s collected works with the following reference to
Margaret Oliphant’s 1887 comment on Elizabeth Gaskell: “Already Mrs Gaskell has fallen into that respectful oblivion which is the fate of a writer who reaches a sort of secondary classical rank, and survives, but not effectually, as the greater classics do” (qtd. in Glen 1).
Although Glen’s article is concerned with “Elizabeth Gaskell’s Resurrection” (which is also the title of her article), the reference to Oliphant aptly serves to demonstrate how “Elizabeth
Gaskell, once hailed as a major Victorian novelist, was the victim of various kinds of condescension” (1). Margaret Oliphant, whose own nomination “Mrs Oliphant” and critical 18
reception1 ironically recall those of “Mrs Gaskell”, was not alone among female authors in
her early (and rather hasty) dismissal of Gaskell’s literary status. Among Virginia Woolf’s
essays there is one devoted to Elizabeth Gaskell. It is interesting, indeed, to see how this pre-
eminent champion of female creativity, a distinguished feminist essayist and writer of fiction
herself, also dismisses Gaskell’s works as inferior art:
A mother, a woman who had seen much of life, her instinct in writing was to
sympathize with others. Loving men and women, she seems to have done her best,
like a wise parent to keep her own eccentricities in the background. She would devote
the whole of her large mind to understanding. That’s why when one begins to read
her, one is dismayed by the lack of cleverness […] with all her humour she was
seldom witty, and the lack of wit in her character-drawing leaves the edges blunt. Her
pure heroines, having no such foibles as she loved to draw, no coarseness and no
violent passions, depress one like an old acquaintance […]. Melt them together, and
her books compose a large, bright, country town, widely paved, with a great stir of life
in the streets and a decorous row of old, Georgian houses standing back from the road.
(“Mrs Gaskell” 342-43).
Nothing could be further from the truth (especially if one recalls such passionate
Gaskellian heroines as Margaret Hale of North and South, Sylvia Robson of Sylvia’s Lovers and Bridget Fitzgerald, the heroine of “The Poor Clare”), practitioners of recent Gaskell
1 Margaret Oliphant, as Joanne Shattock observes, “was undoubtedly a writer condemned by her industry” (59). Paradoxically, Margaret Oliphant herself did not escape Woolf’s overwhelming criticism on the grounds of what Woolf perceived as Oliphant’s promiscuity in writing, as she (Oliphant) was among those few female Victorians who would try her hand at virtually every genre available, such as fiction, poetry, art, travel, history, biography, religion, as well as reviewing, journalism and translation (from the French). Thus, in Three Guineas Woolf deplores “the fact that Mrs. Oliphant sold her brain, her very admirable brain, prostituted her culture and enslaved her intellectual liberty in order that she might earn her living and educate her children” (166). 19
scholarship would undoubtedly claim, and rightly so, if one were to take into consideration the fact that the body of criticism written over the last two decades about various aspects of
Elizabeth Gaskell’s works, according to Mary Kuhlman, “continues to increase by some geometrical proportion” (25). This body of criticism has to a large extent been based upon – by identifying and problematizing them – those very same qualities, aspects and spaces of
Gaskell’s fiction, which Woolf obviously (and curiously) misses in her own reading of it, in her apparent effort, as an ardent feminist, to make an over-clear distinction between the female rebels and non-rebels of the contemporary literary scene. Indeed, it is precisely because of such qualities as sharpness of perception, subtlety of wit, acute sense of intelligence, depth of character, subtle irony, passionate and duplicitous plots and heroines
that her novels and short fiction have been re-discovered by contemporary criticism. One
cannot help being struck, however, by the superficiality and ease with which a fellow author,
as well-versed in a woman’s every-day realities (save that of motherhood) as Woolf herself,
relegates Gaskell’s fiction to an inferior position. The reason, it seems to me, may be that she
objects to the fact that Gaskell, aptly described by one of her earliest critics as “a precocious
girl, very susceptible to impressions and very quick to register all she saw” (Payne 19),
apparently chose to keep the angel alive and well (though, as I hope this study will show, in
duplicitous fashion) both in her household and in her fiction. However, this belief has been
vigorously challenged in more recent interpretations of her work, which critics like
Bodenheimer seem to overlook in their appreciation of Elizabeth Gaskell.
It is true that, as Rosemarie Bodenheimer claims, “Gaskell wrote, as she lived, in a
hurry and on the run” (17), as is also true that, like her contemporaries (such as the Brontë
sisters, George Eliot2 and, of course, her main editor Dickens), Gaskell did embody in her
2 Despite the fact that they never met, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell always entertained a deep respect for each other’s work, although Gaskell disapproved of Eliot’s lifestyle and disliked George 20
work many of the conservative (by today’s western standards) cultural values of her era,
which conferred upon her the nomination “Mrs Gaskell”, one that Linda Hughes and Michael
Lund claim typified her “as a voice of Victorian convention” (“Becoming Mrs Gaskell” 25).
It is also a fact that Virginia Woolf’s tone of tepid appreciation of Gaskell’s literary output
has been shared, up to a point, by a number of other early-twentieth-century critics as well,
with her reputation as “Mrs Gaskell” inspiring a steady decline in her initial positioning
among the major Victorian female novelists. It is in the same vein that Lord David Cecil’s
1934 view of her personality and her work echoes Woolf’s own and reflects the general
reservation3 about Gaskell’s work from the late nineteenth century until the 1950s:
We have only to look at a portrait of Mrs Gaskell, soft-eyed, beneath her charming
veil, to see that she was a dove. In an age whose ideal of woman emphasized the
feminine qualities at the expense of all others, she was all a woman was expected to
be; gentle, domestic, tactful, unintellectual, prone to tears, easily shocked. So far from
chafing on the limits imposed on her activities, she accepted them with serene
satisfaction. (Cecil 198, emphasis added)
“[I]n literature”, As John Cross notes, “charm can often be a dubious asset” (217) and
in more recent times, of course, such charming veils as Gaskell’s have come to signify
Lewis, Eliot’s partner. “How came she to like Mr. Lewis so much? I know he has his good points but somehow he is so soiled for a woman like her to fancy” (Letters 587), she wrote to George Smith on 2nd November 1859. George Eliot had always admired Gaskell’s works. As Jenny Uglow notes, “in 1856 she had ranked her with Harriet Martineau and Currer Bell [Charlotte Brontë], as one whose work stood out in contrast to the ‘Silly Novels by Silly Novelists’, and who suffered from male critics as a result” (Uglow 463-4). 3 See for example Yvonne Ffrench’s 1949 work titled Mrs Gaskell, where she also endorses the same attitude towards Gaskell’s literary stature in comparison to those of her contemporaries. She affirms that “Mrs Gaskell, unlike Miss Martineau, was no intellectual philosopher. She lacked the powerful grasp of George Eliot, the burning imagination of the Brontës. She, too, could create vividly, but her creations are of a lesser order: they proceed from knowledge and are limited to experience” (27). 21
differently, their charm having been linked more with duplicity and dissemblance4 rather than
with feminine coyness and subtlety of manners. Hence, Kathleen Tillotson’s astute 1954
observation in her Novels of the Eighteen-Forties that “Mrs Gaskell […] always combined
something of the serpent’s wisdom with the dove’s innocence” (205-6), and, in the same
year, Walter Allen’s perception of “her merit l[ying] in her recognition of the actual situation
of the world she lived in [and her ability to] describe freshly and with a due sense of its
importance” (178).
It was from the nineteen sixties and seventies5 onwards that Gaskell’s works began to fare
slightly better among critics with her industrial, or, in Carlyle’s terms, “Condition of
4Hilary M. Schor’s Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel (1992) and Deirdre D’Albertis’s Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text (1997) constitute, to my mind, the two most influential full-length studies of Gaskell’s main works that have appeared so far. They both trace Gaskell’s uniqueness as an artist precisely in her skillful manipulation of what earlier critics saw as “her charming veils”. Schor reads her work “as reflected by issues of publication and authorship, issues like changes in circulating libraries, in serial publication [as well as in terms of her] complicated relationship with other writers, with editors and publishers and readers” (8), while D’Albertis interprets her writings “as both equivocal and dissembling” (3), thus identifying Gaskell with the Spenserian Duessa/Fidessa, rather than with the “Una par excellance of Victorian letters” (2). 5 Paradoxically, the late John Geoffrey Sharps, highly esteemed as one of Gaskell’s most accomplished scholars, a declared admirer of her work and a founding member of the Gaskell Society, echoes Gaskell’s detractors (particularly Lord David Cecil) when, at one point, in his otherwise extremely well-researched 1970 work Mrs. Gaskell’s Observation and Invention, he dismisses Gaskell as inferior in rank among the other novelists of the period on the grounds of “the absence in her work of universally significant concerns” (437). One is struck, indeed, by the way Sharps interrupts his analysis of Cousin Phillis to write of Gaskell and her work: Often defective in the mere framework of their construction, her novels and tales also lack patterns at deeper levels; instead they rather touch the surfaces of life treating manners and social conditions, sometimes seriously, sometimes humorously, yet always with kindly understanding. Mrs. Gaskell was good, charming, humane, tolerant, sensitive […] but she was neither original nor profound […] she had limitations. Her range, if in one sense wide, it lacked 22
England” novels, Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855) receiving some wider
critical attention. Marxist critics such as Raymond Williams classified her together with such
Victorian literary figures as Disraeli, Kingsley, Thackeray, Trollope and Dickens, as a
novelist “who provide[s] some of the most vivid descriptions of life in an unsettled industrial
society” (Williams 99)6 and Louis Cazamian vaguely saw “[h]er finest personal qualities
contribut[ing] much to her literary work” (213). It was in his 1977 work The Literature of
Change, however, that John Lucas set the mode for a whole new approach towards Gaskell’s
literary output, by (re)placing her “in the central current of nineteenth-century fiction” (13). It
is worth quoting Lucas’s perception of Gaskell as a writer, for it was upon his appreciation of
her work that much later criticism, particularly that produced during the eighties and nineties,
was based, thus paving the way for today’s revisiting of her works by Gaskell scholars:
There is a marvellously anarchic force at work in Mrs Gaskell’s fiction. The official
side of her, liberal, pious, incuriously middle-class, pleads for a very complacent
notion of reconciliation and tries to fashion art so as to reveal its pattern. But an
endlessly rewarding unofficial side keeps pushing this pattern awry, revealing
different patterns of inevitability, of antagonism, misunderstandings, hatred. (13)
This “marvellously anarchic force” first glimpsed by Lucas subsequently fuelled a
number of sophisticated scholarly studies on Elizabeth Gaskell, both biographical and
critical, which were to proliferate during the eighties and nineties. Thus, some truly insightful
full-length studies, biographies, book chapters as well as a variety of articles on numerous
aspects of her work saw the light of publication and have continued to appear in increasing
comprehension […]. One is tempted to summarize this sort of criticism this sort of criticism by saying that there is nothing archetypal in her writings. (437) 6 However, as Jill Matus observes, “even here, though Gaskell garnered praise for focusing on the condition of the working classes, she drew criticism for offering personal rather than systemic solutions for class conflict” (2). 23
numbers during the last decade to please – even to overwhelm – the Gaskell scholar by their
diversity.7
However, throughout the eighties and early nineties, when criticism – especially that
related to the feminist paradigm – saw her work in comparison with that of her female
contemporaries such as the Brontë sisters and George Eliot, the response was almost
invariably the same. Gaskell’s literary achievement was to be classified a step below that of
her more acclaimed cohorts, echoing clearly Margaret Oliphant’s as well as Virginia Woolf’s
much earlier criticism of her. Thus, Gaskell seemed to be falling victim a second time to what
Elaine Showalter in her influential 1977 work A Literature of their Own termed “the double
critical standard” (73), by being viewed as “the heroine of a new school of ‘motherly’
fiction’” (71), as opposed to the more rebellious literary voices of her contemporaries. As
Patsy Stoneman notes in her fine 1987 full-length study of Gaskell’s work:
While a number of other Victorian women novels, like Jane Eyre, have been a major
inspiration to the current women’s movement, others like those of Elizabeth Gaskell,
have been seen as irrelevant or even counter-productive; and whereas novelists like
Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot have attracted a mass of new feminist readings,
Elizabeth Gaskell remains a respectable minor Victorian, colonized up to a point by
Marxists, but almost ignored by feminists. (1)
Similarly, Deanna L. Davies in her 1992 article “Feminist Critics and Literary Mothers”
observes:
7 For a full (and exhaustive) listing of scholarship published on Gaskell’s life and works from 1976 to 2001, I refer my reader to Nancy Weyant’s two annotated bibliographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, a real boon to Gaskell Scholars. The first one entitled Elizabeth Gaskell: An Annotated Bibliography of English Language Sources 1976-1991 was published in 1994 by Scarecrow Press and its supplement, Elizabeth Gaskell: An Annotated Guide to English Language Sources, 1992-2001, published in 2004 by the same publisher. For new entries to the bibliography after the year 2001 and up to the year 2008 see Weyant’s homepages at http://library.bloomu.edu/weyant/ as well as at http://nancyweyant.com/ 24
Unlike her contemporaries Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell has
occupied a shadowy position in feminist criticism: neglected by some critics because
of her conservative values, uneasily respected by others for achieving literary and
financial success. When seeming to warrant study at all, she has often bewildered
feminist critics who do not find in her work the kind of protest that makes Brontë and
George Eliot seen such modern women. (507)
Davies and Stoneman’s lamenting of Gaskell’s marginalization by certain feminist critical circles was reiterated often enough by Gaskell scholars during the nineties. However, by the end of the decade, there was a rapid change of response towards Gaskell’s work with a number of well-crafted reviews, articles, books, book introductions and book chapters appearing year after year.
Today, we could hardly speak of Gaskell as a minor or neglected novelist.8 On the
contrary, she has become almost as lionized as she used to be during the time she was at the
peak of her literary career, with her works increasingly appearing in Anglo-phone university
syllabuses, inviting daring readings by scholars using a number of theoretical paradigms. In
spite of this, there still remain aspects of her work that have remained unexplored, especially
those pertaining to such formal issues as those of literary technique and construction of
narrative voice. Her first-person fiction, in particular, has attracted little, if any, critical
attention as a separate body of things written within, but, also, as I shall try to argue, with an
eye ahead of the literary tradition and context of her era. Contending that Elizabeth Gaskell’s
8 See for example Shirley Foster’s recent essay “Violence and Disorder in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Short Stories”, which focuses on the subversively violent elements of her short fiction, specifically on these texts’ “voyeuristic absorption expressed through the narrative recreation […] of the destroyed or assaulted body” (16). Here, she asserts that “it is now hardly necessary to challenge the myth of cozy domesticity which accrued to Elizabeth Gaskell in the early years of the twentieth century, nor to point out that her work does far more than portray the genteel preoccupations of provincial society” (14), thus pointing out the experimental and innovative tenor of her work. 25
first-person literary endeavours are worth in-depth exploration because of their intensely
double voiced nature, this project aspires to do so by focusing on her major (longer) first-
person works, namely on Cranford, Cousin Phillis, and three of her shorter pieces: the
German tales “Six Weeks at Heppenheim” and “The Grey Woman” as well as “The Poor
Clare”, each one representing what has been respectively known by such generic terms as community narrative, domestic idyll and Gothic tale. All five, I further wish to argue, constitute experiments in textual self-consciousness by depicting subjectivity as internally and inherently divided, that is, as a desiring subjectivity, which strives to spell out those same losses and absences that have constituted it and its surrounding cosmos in the first place. By its very nature, the “I” narrative as reflective of the prototypical subject/object duality becomes, in the hands of Gaskell, fertile ground on which notions of self-knowledge and identity (i.e. the way[s] in which the self comes to know and construct its own image in language, ideology, society and history), gender, sexuality and class are played out and contested.
The problematics of the “I” has also always constituted a fundamental problem in the field of science, since according to neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, the “need to reconcile the first person and third person accounts of the universe […] is the single most important
problem in science” (qtd. in Lodge 28). At the same time, through its formal use by a female
author, the “I” narrative (especially in its Bildungsroman version), because of its confessional
(and confidential) tone, becomes a means of captivating a reading public by gaining access to
a booming mid-Victorian, male-dominated, but, at the same time, mainly female-oriented (in
terms of readership) literary market, whose rules, conventions and modes of production 26
should not only be appropriated in the subtlest possible manner, but also duly respected by
those female authors who aspired to see their work published.9
What such an argumentation naturally implies is that despite the fact that Gaskell is
writing within the inherited philosophical and literary traditions of the previous centuries as
well as within the period’s contemporary movements of Romanticism (including its Gothic
aspect) and Realism,10 her work seems to anticipate later innovative modes of writing,
prefiguring subsequent modernist paradigms in terms both of content and form. Her introspective, self-conscious narrator-characters testify to this. However, identifying the
9 Theorizing about the cultural exclusion of femininity in most aspects of public life during the Victorian era in Outside the Pale: Cultural Exclusion, Gender and the Victorian Woman Writer, Elsie B. Michie observes that “in the nineteenth century to become a professional writer was to enter a territory implicitly defined as masculine” (2). Taking Mary Shelley, the Bröntes, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell as her paradigmatic cases, that is, as instances of female authors who, unlike many others of the era, were fortunate enough to see their work published and widely read within an intensely competitive literary establishment, she claims that “the figures who surrounded and influenced them as they wrote, the individuals who functioned as mentors, literary role models, and gatekeepers to the world of publishing, tended to be men, either family members or literary professionals, often both at once” (2). In the case of Elizabeth Gaskell it was not only William Gaskell, her husband, who supervised her writing, but, mostly, it was Charles Dickens who set her on the path of making an extensive literary career by being both her mentor and her editor. 10 It is well known that as a literary movement, Realism originated in France between 1830 and 1850, with such influential representatives as Flaubert, Balzac, Zola and Maupassant. Nevertheless, the term has been an extremely elastic and controversial one, often ambivalent and equivocal, but it has over time, by some general consensus, acquired a number of qualifying – though seldom clarifying – characteristics indicative of a body of texts which present a view of the so-called human condition based on verisimilitude as well as on a worldview of stable, coherent and fundamentally unalterable individuals who can discover truth through their senses in the fashion of Locke and Descartes and “whose unfettered consciousness is the origin of meaning, language and action” (Richetti, The English Novel in History 3). My own understanding and treatment of the term in the present study as it relates to Gaskell’s texts finds its analogue in Catherine Belsey’s formulation of what she terms “classic realism”, which presents “the subject as fixed and unchangeable, an element in a given system of differences which is human nature and the world of human experience” (90). 27
distinctive qualities of Gaskell’s first-person literary attempts without making reference to the framework of literary culture that constituted their context would be an incomplete project.
Indeed, this is what has to come next.
1.2. Precursors to Elizabeth Gaskell’s First-Person Fiction
Elizabeth Gaskell started her career as novelist and prose writer in the 1840s, in the midst of unprecedented (for novelistic production) literary activity. This was a time when the novelistic genre had already established itself firmly in the eyes of an equally well- established body of readers (especially female ones),11 writers and critics, including such
illustrious (and influential) literary figures as John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and, of course,
Charles Dickens as well as his biographer John Forster, all of whom were closely acquainted with Elizabeth Gaskell and her work. It had all begun much earlier, of course, in the previous
century which had already witnessed a proliferation in prose writing (not yet to be assigned
the generic term “novel”)12 both by male and female authors, particularly in its epistolary
11 In The Woman Reader 1837-1914, Kate Flint makes extensive reference to what she calls “[t]he image of the woman reader” (7), arguing that “[t]he awareness of Victorians and Edwardians of that discreet category, ‘the woman reader’, and the hypotheses about her special characteristics, as well as her presumed needs and interests, affected the composition, distribution, and marketing of literature” (13). 12 Since its inception, the term has resisted exact categorization and/or definition. According to John Richetti, in its early stages, the novel as we know it today did not emerge as a coherent literary institution. Those early eighteenth-century narratives that have come to be called novels were: Long prose narrative[s] about largely fictional if usually realistic characters and plausible events – did not actually solidify in the minds of readers and writers as a literary type or a set of expectations for narrative in the English-speaking world until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Jane Austen and Walter Scott flourished, and when the novel in our current sense of it was accepted in Britain and elsewhere in Europe as a major literary form. (The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel 1) Similarly, J. Paul Hunter in “The Novel and Social/Cultural History” emphasizes the hybridity of the genre by proposing that: 28 form. Ian Watt in his seminal work The Rise of the Novel (1957) ascribes the rise of the genre in England to a number of socio-political and cultural factors, such as the gradual increase of literacy rates among the population, the establishment of the middle classes, the rise of capitalism and individualism, but also an increase in female authorship and, particularly, female readership. With reference to the works of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry
Fielding and Laurence Sterne, Watt’s thesis, which Marxist theorist Terry Lovell views as
“the locus classicus” (19) of contemporary attempts to provide a sound elaboration on the rise of the novelistic genre, is that “the rise of individualism is of great importance [since] by weakening communal and traditional relationships, it fostered not only a kind of private and egocentric mental life […] but also the later stress on the importance of personal relationships which is so characteristic both of modern society and of the novel” (177).13 However, Watt’s
In their own time they [novels] were most often called ‘histories’ these fictional narratives […] that chronicled the daily experiences, conflicts, and thoughts of ordinary men and women. They went by other names, too – ‘romances’, ‘adventures,’ ‘lives,’ ‘tales,’ ‘memoirs,’ ‘expeditions,’ ‘fortunes and misfortunes,’ and (ultimately) ‘novels’ – because a variety of features and traditions competed for attention in this new hybrid form […] that came to dominate the reading habits of English men and women of all classes. (9) For Wolfgang Iser in The Implied Reader, “like no other art form before it, the novel was concerned directly with social and historical norms that applied to a particular environment, and so it established an immediate link with the empirical reality familiar to its readers […] [by confronting them] with problems arising from [their] immediate surroundings” (xi). In The Theory of the Novel (1978) George Lukács laments the loss of epic certainty “in an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given” (56) by famously stating that “the novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” (88). Finally, in his recent work The English Novel, Terry Eagleton asserts that “the point about the novel […] is not just that it eludes definitions, but that it actively undermines them. It is less a genre than an anti-genre. It cannibalizes other literary modes and mixes the bits and pieces promiscuously together. You can find poetry and dramatic dialogue […] along with epic, pastoral, satire, history, elegy, tragedy and any number of other literary modes” (1). 13 Despite its generally acclaimed status as “the most successful attempt to explain the origins of the English novel” (McKeon 1), in more recent years, Watt’s work with its emphasis on those characteristics of what he has termed “formal realism”, which are said to have contributed to the 29
text has been thoroughly criticized, and rightly so, for what recent criticism has seen as its
conspicuous omission of a whole canon of female prose and fiction writers such as Aphra
Behn, Delaviere Manley, Eliza Haywood, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Ann Radcliffe,
and, of course, Fanny Burney. The first four names are only mentioned in passing by Watt,
while the names of Fielding, Lennox and Radcliffe and those of other established female
writers do not appear at all.
These women’s works, as well as those of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and
Sterne, were obviously familiar to such a voracious reader as Elizabeth Gaskell,14 as her
formation of the novel, has been challenged by a number of critics with Michael McKeon’s own work titled The Origins of the English Novel published in 1987 making the strongest case against what he sees as Watt’s “contextual dimension of the argument” (2). According to McKeon, “Watt proposes a close analogy between the epistemological premises of formal realism and those of ‘philosophical realism,’ the modern tradition of realism inaugurated by Descartes and Locke [...] and is concerned to argue a connection between the rise of the novel and the transformation of the social context of early eighteenth-century England” (2). McKeon himself proposes an alternative explanation as to the rise of the novel, “a dialectical theory of genre” (19), as he terms it, according to which this new genre emerged in response to a profound instability of literary, social and cultural categories between 1600 and 1740 as a shaping instrument designed to engage the epistemological and social debates of the age, an age during which attitudes towards truth in narrative and virtue both in the individual and in society underwent significant changes (McKeon 25-63). Also, in his book Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteen-Century English Fiction, J. Paul Hunter joins the debate arguing that: Popular thought and materials of everyday print – journalism, didactic materials with all kinds of religious and ideological directions, and private papers and histories – need to be seen as contributors to the social and intellectual world in which the novel emerged […] [with] readers, publishers and other bit players in traditional literary history play[ing] a powerful role in creating a new textual species responsive to human concerns about the structuring of everyday life as well as about feelings that flow from – and inspire – ordinary feelings. (5) 14 According to Angus Easson, among Gaskell’s early readings were included such authors as Cervantes, Defoe, Fielding, Stern, Smollett, Richardson and Goldsmith as well as “the Arabian Nights and those oriental tales that ornament The Spectator” (21). Furthermore, among the wide range of texts that Gaskell’s husband William borrowed on her behalf (she, as a woman, was not in a position to borrow anything using her own name) from the Manchester Portico Library (of which he was 30 biographers’ detailed discussions of the subject show and Gaskell’s own letters reveal.
Furthermore, as Jane Spencer’s corrective text argues, the full story goes as follows:
“Eighteen-century England witnessed two remarkable and inter-connected literary events: the emergence of the novel and the establishment of the professional woman writer” (The Rise of the Woman Novelist ix). Although for Elaine Showalter “it is impossible to say when women began to write fiction” (16), it seems that it was from about 1750 onwards that English women started to enter the literary marketplace more steadily as prose writers, particularly as novelists.15 Although, according to Cheryl Turner, “the rapid increase in women’s novels at
Chairman from 1849 until his death in1884) were included, as Shirley Foster states, “all the major periodicals of the day including the North American Review, the Dublin University Magazine, and the Revue des Deux Mondes; a large variety of fiction, including new publications, as well as old favourites by Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth and Funny Burny [as well as] historical and social studies by contemporaries such as Newman, Carlyle, Sterling, Froude, Macaulay and Ruskin” (Elizabeth Gaskell 75). To this list, according to Jenny Uglow, could be added the works of diarist Samuel Pepys, essayist Joseph Addison and such authors of sensational fiction as Horace Walpole and Bulwer Lytton as well as the famous poets of her day like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Landor, Byron, Hemans and Tennyson (Uglow 42). Shirley Foster’s article “We sit and Read and Dream our Time Away: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Portico Library” is also illuminating on the subject of Gaskell’s diverse taste in contemporary books and periodicals and the influences to which she was susceptible because of her exposure to “the latest publications of the day as well as [to the] re-reading of old favourites” (14). Finally, “she always had a weakness for tales of desire, crime, bigamy, detection – themes which run through her own short stories and novels” (Uglow 43). Also, see Barbara Brill and Alan Shelston’s article “Manchester: “A Behindhand Place for Books”: The Gaskell’s and the Portico Library” (The Gaskell Society Journal 5 (1991): 27-36) for a meticulously researched account of the Gaskells’ reading habits and tastes. 15 See, also, Jane Spencer’s essay “Women Writers and the Eighteenth-Century Novel”, where she argues that despite an indisputable male dominance in the public sphere, “some parts of it were easier of access to women than others; publishing, and especially the publication of novels was relatively open to them” (217). This she attributes, echoing Jürgen Habermas, to what she terms an “ambiguous mingling of the public and private that is characteristic of an age which, in England as well as other European countries saw the emergence of […] the bourgeois or classical public sphere – a sphere of relatively informal institutions distinct from the authority of the state” (216). 31
the end of the eighteenth century can be seen as part of a general and not exclusively female
trend” (41),16 the fact is that female literary professionalism had begun much earlier, at a time
when female authors such as Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and Lady Mary
Wroth (Sir Philip Sidney’s niece) started to write for publication. In particular, Lady Mary
Wroth’s publication of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania in 1621, nineteen years before
Aphra Behn’s birth, renders her, according to Dale Spender, “the first woman to take up her
pen for many of the same reasons that women today take up the pen – to earn money” (11),
the very same reasons that from one point onwards, by some general consensus, partly lie
behind a number of Gaskell’s literary endeavors.
With seventeenth-century literary prose and the eighteenth-century novel17 as its
precursors, the novel of the mid-Victorian period, which is the period when Gaskell emerged
as a professional, fully-fledged practitioner of the genre, both reflected and further developed
many of the characteristics of its precursor. At the same time, it had new insights to offer by
means of reflecting a host of new developments in the interrelated fields of politics, culture
and science. The nineteenth-century was a time when, as Arthur Pollard notes, “[s]cience and
16 However, as Josephine Donovan argues in Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405-1726, despite the fact that “women have long been identified – both as writers and readers – with the sentimentalist tradition, their contribution to the rise of the realist novel has not yet been recognized [although] that contribution included the development of a critical irony that was rooted in women’s marginalized standpoint and resistance to dominant misogynist ideologies” (12). 17 In her analysis of the changing patterns in the conceptual structure of the eighteenth and nineteenth century novel, Jina Politi observes that “[e]ighteenth-century thought manifests a growing concern with the relation of fiction to truth. The status of scientific truth was becoming impressive and, in the light of it, the literature of the past was subjected to the test of verifiability. The literary mind had begun to feel uncomfortable with the blatant ‘untruths’ of past imagination and endeavoured to formulate such rational rules as would reassert literature’s claims to knowledge” (Politi 25). The result is the novel’s role in the growth of self-consciousness and a preoccupation with what George Lukács in The Theory of the Novel has termed “the antagonistic duality of soul and world [and] the agonising distance between psyche and soul” (66). 32
technology together testified to man’s adventure and achievement [with] Darwin and his
associates giv[ing] man an entirely new view of himself and his place on earth” (9).
Moreover, with Utilitarianism and Evangelicalism as the two main antithetical, but also
complimentary ethical systems that converged on the concept of individualism on which the
commercial and financial principles of capitalism were based, the earlier values/policies of
protection, government interference in industry and social organization were gradually
replaced by those of free trade and competition. This was a tendency that had already begun
to manifest itself in certain texts of the previous century, as was clearly, if covertly, reflected
by the voluminous first-person epistolary writings and memoirs of both male and female writers of the period.18 Although, according to Alan Shelston, “in the nineteenth century the
writing of novels emerged from a permitted indulgence to an accepted career” (Dickens 75),
an observation broad enough to encompass the female authors of the period but also those
women writers before them, this “permitted indulgence” had transformed itself into
professionalism with relative ease, mainly because it had rarely been passed off as such – that
is, as open professionalism. Rather, a number of women authors like Ann Radcliffe and
Fanny Burney began to write fiction for personal reasons rather than profit (Spencer, The
Rise of the Woman Novelist 7). This was also partly the case with Mrs Gaskell, whose own
early experiments with writing as early as 183719 culminated in the year 1848 with the
18 In Daniel Defoe’s autobiographical novel Roxana (1724), for instance, the heroine is seen to employ a financial adviser, Sir Robert Clayton, to cater for her wealth, which she has amassed through selling sexual favours as a commodity, prefiguring in this way both the firm establishment of the capitalist values of the Victorian society as well as those contemporary market policies of our post-modern times. 19 “Sketches Among the Poor No I”, a poem in rhyming couplets of 153 lines, was Elizabeth Gaskell’s first piece to be published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in January 1837. According to Jenny Uglow, it “was almost certainly written in the summer of 1836 [and appeared] sandwiched between ‘The World we Lived In’ (an article about Peel and the constitution) and the final piece in a satirical series called “‘Alcibiades the Man.’” (Uglow 101). 33
publication (in two volumes) of her first full-length industrial novel Mary Barton, whose
contemplation and composition (at the suggestion of her husband) was the result of a tragedy
in the Gaskell family namely, the death of their nine-month old only son William on 10th
August 1845 of scarlet fever.20 The success of Gaskell’s first novel (despite the controversy
following its publication) was soon to lead to full-time, professional authorship that was to
produce a rich variety of texts21 in the form of novels (industrial, domestic as well as
historical), short fiction, and, to a lesser extent, poetry (mostly unpublished) and a biography
(that of Charlotte Brontë).
1.3. The Philosophical, Socio-Economic and Literary Context of First-Person Narration
What were the literary forms and narrative techniques that influenced Gaskell’s writings in
general and her first-person fiction in particular? As we have seen, her diverse readings
included all the known generic forms in existence since the previous centuries as well as
those just beginning to emerge in her own time, with particular emphasis on the “three-
decker” or three-volume novel and on the serial text, a relatively new and controversial,22 but,
20 At the beginning of the preface to the first edition of Mary Barton (1848) she explained: “Three years ago I became anxious (from circumstances that need not be more fully alluded to) to employ myself in writing a work of fiction” (4). It is also in her letters, where she explicitly mentions the interrelationship between her personal tragedy and her need to channel her sorrow and thought into writing in order to distract herself from painful scenes and memories: “The tale was formed, and the greater part of the first volume was written when I was obliged to lie down constantly on the sofa, and when I took refuge in the invention to exclude the memory of painful scenes which would force themselves on my remembrance” (Letters 74-5). 21 All in all, her published works include eleven novels, forty-eight short stories and a biography of Charlotte Bronte. 22 As a writer of serial literature herself, Gaskell knew well, of course, the controversial issue of serial publication which had been practiced (e.g. by Dr Samuel Johnson) since the previous century. The controversy is very successfully reflected in the famous Cranford (also published in twelve monthly installments in Dickens’s Household Words) episode featuring the argument between Miss Deborah 34
as it turned out, immensely popular and widely-accessible (because of its affordable price as
opposed to that of the three-decker novel) method of publication.23 It was this very method of
Jenkyns, Cranford’s conservative matriarch, and Captain Brown, a newcomer to Cranford, over issues of propriety in terms of literary taste and methods of publication. The scene involves two consecutive readings the first from Dickens’s Pickwick Papers by Captain Brown and the second from Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas by the antiquated Miss Jenkyns and might be said to constitute a classic Gaskell instance of textual self-referentiality and intertextuality: Captain Brown sported a bit of literature. “Have you seen any numbers of The Pickwick Papers?” said he. (They were then publishing in parts.) “Capital thing!” Now Miss Jenkyns was daughter of a deceased rector of Cranford; and, on the strength of a number of manuscript sermons, and a pretty good library of divinity, considered herself literary, and looked upon any conversation about books as a challenge to her. So she answered and said, “Yes she had seen them; Indeed, she might say she had read them” “And what do you think of them?’ exclaimed Captain Brown. “Aren’t they famously good?” “I must say, I don’t think they are by any means equal to Dr. Johnson. […]” “It is quite a different sort of thing, my dear madam,” he began. “I am quite aware of that,” returned she. “And I make allowances, Captain Brown […] I consider it vulgar, and below the dignity of literature, to publish in numbers.” “How was The Rambler published, ma’am?” asked Captain Brown, in a low voice, which I think Miss Jenkyns could not have heard. (15-17) 23 The Victorian serial, as a mirror of the Victorian philosophy of life, became the main vehicle for promoting the work of the rising stars in the literary scene of the time, with Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell being among its most celebrated practitioners. The initial (practical and economic) reasons for the development of this mode of publication had to do with the tax on paper imposed on newspapers, which could be avoided by using larger sheets of paper (known as pamphlets) with plenty more space for text; it was this extra space which was reserved for the serial publication of novels. A cheap luxury form of entertainment in perfect harmony with the assumptions and expectations of its consumers and mainly (but not exclusively) intended for the middle classes, serialization continued to appeal to a varied Victorian readership even after the repeal of the paper tax in 1861, partly because of its immense popularity with the Victorian family gatherings, where reading aloud from and commenting upon/analysing newly-released numbers of long-expected novel episodes, was very common. Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund define the serial as “a continuing story over an extended time with enforced interruptions” (The Victorian Serial 1) and assert the literary and cultural significance of periodical literature by emphasizing its relation to the growing 35
publishing in numbers or instalments, as it was commonly referred to, that became the
primary vehicle of promoting almost all of Gaskell’s fiction to a wider middle-class
readership, establishing her as a leading literary figure of the mid-nineteenth century with a
very respectable personal income that soon came to surpass that of her Minister husband. The popularity of this type of periodical or fragment literature had to do with the fact that as a
literary art form, the Victorian serial reflected the tendencies of its own time as well as the
lived experiences of those reading it in a period which was characterized by changing notions
of time, due to the technological advances in terms of mobility and transport. Thus, the
progression of a serialized work was analogous to the reader’s own sense of time progression
and, even more importantly, to the reader’s own expectations, with many serialized works
middle-class notions of capitalist values. Futhermore, in their work Victorian Publishing and Mrs Gaskell’s Work Hughes and Lund view the consumption and writing of periodical literature as a predominantly female practice, which provided women with a liberating force, and they draw a parallel between its “periodicity” and female menstrual cycles. As they claim: The serial novel, which incorporated periodicity (as well as persistence), may have been an ideal mass-market strategy not only because it was attuned to capitalism, but also because it presented structures attuned to female experience in an age when women were the major consumers of literature. […] novels appeared in weekly, biweekly and bimonthly instalments as well as in monthly parts, but the cyclic periodicity that typifies serial fiction differs significantly from the model of the whole volume and should remind us that periodicity suppressed in critical discourse has an analogue in the biological periodicity that was an important part of every Victorian woman’s life – an experience outside the confines of accepted social or literary discourse in the Victorian age. (107) Literary periodicals such as Punch, Blackwood’s, Fraser’s Magazine, the The Cornhill Magazine, The Edinburgh Review, The British Quarterly Review, The Westminster Review, Bentley’s Miscellany and Dickens’s Household Words (at a later time also appearing as All the Year Round) were among the most popular of the time with Dickens and Gaskell, of course, being among of the most serialized writers of the period. “The contents of these journals”, as Barbara Brill and Alan Shelston observe, “varied, as did their political bias, but most contained substantial articles on politics, science and the arts” (29) with Blackwoods, Bentley’s Miscellany and, of course, Household Words also containing serialized fiction. As Brill and Shelston further note, it was in Blackwood’s that in 1857 Gaskell “first read the stories that go to make George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life” (Brill and Shelston 29). 36
often being written on commission24 to satisfy particular target groups, which had already
been imbued with all those bourgeois values that promoted the ideology of the omnipotent
individual. The social context of the previous century had, of course, slowly evolved to
produce these well-known, “bourgeois values which centred on the idea of individual self-
improvement, both material and spiritual, leading to an ideal state of respectability based on a
domestic security dominated by the male breadwinner” (Bull 113), and, along with these
values those of privacy and personal value, both being centrally important qualities of first-
person fictional production. Ironically, and contrary to the established norms, Elizabeth
Gaskell was to become the main breadwinner of the Gaskell household after 1848 with every one of her subsequent novels after Mary Barton becoming a best-seller, and, for that matter, a celebrated outlet for exercising a whole range of narrative potentialities, including first- person narration. Some of these she inherited from the first-person narratives and the epistolary tradition of the previous centuries, and some she practised as part of the nineteenth-century first-person paradigm.
The first-person novel of the eighteenth century and the epistolary narratives of the same period, with their emphasis on the textual inscription of consciousness and subjectivity
and their play with the discrepancy between subject and object in the acts of remembering,
narrating and recording, seem to have influenced stylistically nineteenth-century first-person
24 Dickens’s editorial interference in and authority over Gaskell’s works when she wrote for his weekly Household Words is well known, as is also the fact that their relationship was one full of tensions and misunderstandings (especially during the serialization of her industrial novel North and South), because of Dickens’s repeated rearrangement of Gaskell’s material, as well as because of their divergent opinions on serial publication. The most characteristic case of such interference was his replacement in the first episode of Cranford of Gaskell’s reference to his own (also serial) Pickwick Papers, in the scene where Captain Brown is run over by a train while fully absorbed in reading its last number, for that of Hoods Poems, which Gaskell promptly rectified when Cranford appeared in volume form. 37
narratives in general and Gaskell’s own in particular.25 Referring specifically to the first-
person narrative of this period, the German scholar Erich Kahler observes that it was “the
liberation of sentiment in the eighteenth century, and the insights resulting from that
liberation, [that] altered the forms of expression [as regards the way] the ego engaged in
monologue and in dialogue [thus becoming] the vehicle of the new narrative” (143). In other
words, first-person narration as a formal device employed in epistolary prose writing came to
be the new technique for exploring the inner recesses26 of the psyche and its relation to what
lay both within it and without. Similarly, in his recent study on the epistolary genre, Joe Bray
argues that “the epistolary novel is more than an incidental participant in this ‘increased
interest in consciousness’ [and is as] fundamental to the novel’s development of increasingly
sophisticated ways of representing individual psychology” (2). Bray also emphasizes that as a
generic form, the epistolary text “has too often been treated as an isolated, digressive episode
in the history of the novel as a whole […] an early, experimental form which faded away
25 See for example Linda S. Kauffman’s work Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre and Epistolary Fiction (1986) and her more recent Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction (1992), where she argues for the epistolary mode’s influence on the nineteenth as well as twentieth-century textual production. She contends that “the epistolary mode has a broader function than many other modes. It is able to combine with other kinds; the very looseness of its conventions has made it resilient, adaptable, and relevant in diverse historical epochs” (Kauffman xiv). Kauffman also talks about the key characteristics of the genre, which include, “writing in the absence of the beloved, mourning the inadequacies of language, transgressing generic boundaries, subverting gender roles, staging revolt through the act of writing” (xii). 26 In Narrative Technique in the English Novel, Ira Konigsberg elaborates on the eighteenth century’s obsession with perception as the “basic act of awareness in the human mind” (7) and also notes that “[o]ne of the reasons for the frequent use of first-person narration in novels of the eighteenth century was the interest in individual perception” (7), thus rendering perception the goal of point of view. By the end of the century, however, the general shift of focus from the first to the third-person style of narration paved the way for the celebrated omniscient style of narration which became the dominant form throughout the nineteenth-century. 38
once the third-person novel begun to realize its potential in the hands of Jane Austen27 and
George Eliot” (1). The implication of Bray’s argument is that the way(s) in which it inscribes self-consciousness (not as part of a coherently transparent universe, but as a mediated, transient entity in a state of flux), and its preoccupation with representing inner life and private experience, render the epistolary narrative a precursor not only of the nineteenth century first-person paradigm, but also of the later modernist fiction of Woolf, Joyce, Proust and Beckett (7), whose texts are wholly preoccupied not only with the vicissitudes of their
own production, but also with the problematic nature of authorial subjectivity.
Widely read epistolary narratives such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa and Frances Burney’s Evelina, as well as autobiographical first-person ones like Daniel
Defoe’s Roxana and Moll Flanders are, indeed, concerned with representing the complicated nature of the inner lives of their female protagonists in ways that emphasize individual self- perception and the subsequent textual recording of the self perceived. Ruth Perry is certainly right when she identifies the epistolary narrative as “the novelistic form which emphasizes the mental life of characters” (xii), a form which is “about subjective realities […] consisting as they do of the outpourings of lavish consciousness heightened by suffering and by isolation” (114).
Both the novel-in-letters and the first-person novel were largely influenced, of course, by the dominant philosophical texts and debates of the time, with John Locke’s An
27 Interestingly, Bray also notes that Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility was initially written as an epistolary novel entitled “Elinor and Marianne”, which was later transformed (probably in late 1797 or early 1798) into the third-person narrative that we know (1). This argument has been put forward, according to Bray, by the critics R.W. Chapman in Jane Austen: Facts and Problems. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948) and B.C. Southam in Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts: A Study of the Novelist’s Development through the Surviving Papers. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964) 39
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690),28 George Berkeley’s A Treatise
Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and David Hume’s A Treatise of
Human Nature (1739) being critical texts in this respect. Locke’s concern with the subject/object duality and his exploration of the human mind, particularly of the way in which the individual perceives both the external world and itself, directly confronted the ever-intriguing epistemological and ontological issues of knowledge, identity and consciousness. For Locke, in particular, “consciousness is the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind” (115) and it is within this context that perception of oneself is seen as prior to perception of one’s external reality, which means that the perception of our own subjectivity (the self as object) comes before our perception of objects as such. Elaborating on the concepts of “Substance”, “Man” and “Person”, Locke seems to connect the latter with the notion of the self (“Person, as I take it, is the name for this self” [344]) and how this self perceives both itself and its external objects:
This being premised to find wherein personal identity consists, we must consider what
Person stands for; which, I think, is a thinking, intelligent Being, that has reason and
reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times
and places; which it does only by that consciousness, which is inseparable from
thinking, and as it seems to me essential to it: It being impossible for any one to
perceive, without perceiving, that he does perceive. (335)
28 The Dissenting Gaskells were, of course, no strangers to Locke’s empiricist philosophy. As Jenny Uglow notes with regard to Unitarianism which formed Gaskell’s religious background: Unitarians […] rejected as unknowable, and therefore impossible, such mystical doctrines as the Trinity and the Divinity of Christ. In England, after Dissenting ministers were ejected from Church in 1662, Unitarianism developed within a strain of Presbyterianism strongly influenced by the ideas of Hobbes, Locke and Newton and by the rationalism and science of the Enlightenment […]. In the Dissenting Academies one of the texts studied was Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. (Uglow 5-6)
40
Thus, for Locke, it is the primacy of our self-perception that sets all subsequent acts
of perception in motion through the intervention (and mediation) of consciousness, the latter being crucially important in that it determines personal identity, “[f]or since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and ‘tis that, that makes every one to be, what he calls self; and
thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal
identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being” (335). However, Locke is quick to theorize that
the link between consciousness and identity is valid only when the former can be extended
backwards to past actions or thoughts, admitting that it is not always possible for
consciousness to be connected with the past self. Significantly, he argues: “If there be any
part of its Existence, which I cannot upon recollection join with that present consciousness,
whereby I am now my self, it is in that part of its Existence no more my self, than any other
immaterial being” (345). Having claimed earlier in his text that “if the same Socrates waking and sleeping do not partake of the same consciousness, Socrates waking and sleeping is not the same person” (342), Locke advances the idea that it is possible for the same man to be different persons at different times and for identity to be discontinuous and split rather than unified, whole and undivided.
This rather transient (and revolutionary) notion of the self was rather unfavourably
received by Locke’s contemporaries and was to have serious moral, religious as well as
literary repercussions/implications that gave rise to much controversy and debate for the next
decades, not least because the possibility that, in Locke’s own terms, “the same Man [can
have] distinct incommunicable consciousness at different times” (342) and hence different
selves, exerted huge influence on the way consciousness was represented in the novel,
particularly in the first-person narratives of both the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This
influence is particularly evident in the way first-person narrators try to recollect their own
past thoughts and emotions, in an attempt to join the narrating and the experiencing self in the 41
now of narration, whereby most often than not the notion of a continuing and continuous identity is shattered and their effort is all made in vain because of the complexities and discrepancies such a project generates.
George Berkeley’s theory of subjective idealism took Locke’s theories of the mind a step further by claiming that “all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind – that their being is to be perceived or known” (A
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge 25-26), a theory also reflected in
David Hume’s claim in A Treatise of Human Nature that “we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appear’d in that narrow compass. This is the universe of the imagination, nor have any idea but what is there produc’d” (114). Thus, the subject of perception and imagination that is, the individual as the focal point of the universe and as an all-seeing entity, which both perceives its own external world and sees itself perceiving, paved the way not only for the highly subjectivist Romantic paradigm, but also for the realistic novel of the early and mid- nineteenth century with its attention to and probing into the consciousness and inner life of its characters. It also gave a fresh boost to an already existing autobiographical mode of writing, mainly in the form of the Bildungsroman, one of the most representative genres of the period as regards first-person narration and its discontents.
Having established itself as the dominant literary genre of the late eighteenth century, the novel continued to grow in popularity and dominance throughout the nineteenth century,29 reaching its apogee in the middle of the century, the period when Elizabeth Gaskell
as well as the Brontës, George Eliot and others were writing and publishing their works. Both
29 As Sean Purchase also argues in Key Concepts in Victorian Literature, “whereas the preceding Romantic age (c. 1789-1830) was dominated by poetry, it was during the course of the nineteenth century that poetry was, perhaps for the first time in English literary history, eclipsed by the novel as the most popular form” (145). 42 in its third-person version, but even more so, in its first-person one, the novel “dramatized”, according to Ira Konisgberg, “a significant awareness of the individual’s relationship to reality developing in the culture of the time [since it] most directly confronted the problem of perception in both its narrative technique and its subject matter” (5-6). “[A]s if a crypt for the individual psyche were being excavated” (168), to use Erich Kahler’s apt phrase, due to their confessional tone, the first-person novel and the novel-in letters reflected the psychological state of their narrators, thus rendering their narrative techniques both a symptom of and a vehicle for their psychological condition and hence, a form of talking therapy later to be identified and termed so by Sigmund Freud. Kahler further argues on this:
The most important impetus to internalization is the psychic and temporal immediacy,
the spontaneity and contemporaneity of the narration, ushered by these two narrative
forms. The “I” of confessions and of letters actually signifies the first step in a
displacement of narrative centre of gravity from the outside to the inside, a
displacement which henceforth […] is set up inside, in man’s innermost self, and
consequently events themselves are more and more shifted to the interior of the
narrating ego. (168)
Such “a displacement [or replacement, as it seems to me] of narrative centre of gravity from the outside to the inside”30 was to become the basis for much of nineteenth century literary production with the highly subjectivist Romantic paradigm during the later part of the eighteenth and the first three decades of the nineteenth century dominating the
30 Despite the prevailing, mid-nineteenth-century aesthetic imperative which favoured omniscience as a more objective mode of narration and as more attuned to contemporary scientific advancements and empirical thought, the first-person narrative mode both persisted and flourished throughout the century, advancing (and consolidating) through most generic forms the idea of the self and all that is related to it as central and indispensable. The ideological implications of the self as the centre of the world thus became fertile ground on which the emerging capitalist bourgeois world order firmly established itself. 43
literary scene of the period. If this reversal (or return) of focus from the outside to the inside
were to be considered also in terms of its socio-economic dimension, it would certainly have
to be viewed as part of the rising ideology of individualism, which, as a matter of course, became closely intertwined with those of consumerism and capitalism. Thus, the philosophical context underlying the “I” of confessions and that of letters conveniently
converged with the corresponding socio-economic backdrop of the period, in that both came to establish a solid and unified individual as a central concept in Victorian society and culture. A number of contemporary texts in the fields of political economy, science and sociology published in the mid-Victorian period reflect this tendency. Seminal texts such as
Darwin’s The Origin of Species, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Samuel Smiles’s Self-
Help, all three published in 1859,31 explicitly dealt with the needs and desires of the
individual with Darwin’s evolutionary theories on diversity, natural selection and the survival
31 Based upon Darwin’s evolutionary, anti-creationist model, Mill’s and Smiles’s texts deal explicitly with the problems arising from the individual’s conflictual relation to society. Mill’s text focuses on what he calls the “sovereignty of the individual” (125) at the same time posing questions as to its rightful limits as well as to those of society. An advocate of the doctrine of Utilitarianism, whose main tenets called for the promotion of the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people, Mill argued for the individual’s liberty of thought, feeling and expression on all subjects allowing for society’s intervention of power only in those cases where harm to others was to be prevented. Smiles’s Self-Help, “the most successful of most Victorian self-improvement books” (Purchase 82), also concerns itself with the individual and her/his duty to pursue self-improvement, but, also a willingness to assist those financially, morally and intellectually inferior. Smile’s text aligns itself with those middle-class ideals which promoted the well-known Victorian, bourgeois values of self- reliance along with self-control as well as industry, diligence, perseverance, frugality and courage, the very qualities that, paradoxically, both questioned and endorsed individualism and its accompanying capitalist values. The famous opening remark in Self-Help namely, “[h]eaven helps those who help themselves” (1) encapsulates Smile’s central argument and reflects his own obsession with the notion of the self permeating his text throughout. Thus, he begins his treatise by stating that “the spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual […] help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates” (1). 44 of the fittest neatly adapting themselves to the contemporary socio-economic and political spheres.32 The result was what became known as “Social Darwinism”, a term applied by the philosopher, psychologist and sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)33 to society, thus drawing a parallel between Darwin’s scientific ideas of evolution and natural selection and the economic evolution and survival of society. The same ideas were also to be transferred to the spheres of commerce and economy emphasizing and encouraging individual enterprise along with self-improvement and competitiveness in a world of free trade, especially after the successful passage of the Repeal of the Corn Laws Act in 1846. This was an Act that further promoted and enhanced the ethos of individualism, an ethos paradoxically imbued also with
32 In her article “History, Science and Social Change: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Evolutionary Narratives”, Louise Henson observes that “[r]eligious nonconformism and bold intellectual thought” (13) were part of the philosophical upbringing of Charles Darwin (a distant relative of Gaskell’s) and Gaskell herself both of whom were born and bred in families of Dissenters. Thus, as Henson notes, “[d]evelopmental theories, which sought to account for changes that modified the natural and the social worlds in time, were particularly attractive to Nonconformists, and many Dissenters were enthusiastic supporters of organic transmutation, or what later became known was evolution” (13). 33 Drawing upon the theories of John Locke as well as upon the associationist psychological model of David Hartley in the eighteenth century, and, later on, in the nineteenth century, upon James Mill’s and John Stuart Mill’s so-called physiological psychological model, early British psychologists such as, Alexander Bain, William Carpenter, George Henry Lewes, Henry Maudsley, James Sully and, of course, Herbert Spencer introduced a type of scientific psychology, one whose basic tenets were seen to derive from the natural sciences, with particular emphasis on the affinities between mind and body. Herbert Spencer, in particular, strove to apply Darwin’s evolutionary theory to psychological issues by combining associationism with evolutionary concepts in order to explain the ways in which the internal forces of the human mind constantly negotiated with those external to it. One should bear in mind, of course, the interdisciplinary character of Victorian psychology in Athina Vrettos observation that: [P]sychology in the nineteenth century was not a coherent discipline, but rather a collection of works by writers who drew upon philosophy, social theory, evolutionary theory, physiology, neurology, alienism, and psychiatry. These writers also drew upon creative literature for insight into human behavior, motivation and psychological development and for examples of […] insanity and other abnormal conditions. (69) 45 the Protestant values of altruism, philanthropy, self-effacement and self-sacrifice, all three becoming a vital ingredient of what should, among others, constitute proper femininity and
/or proper feminine code of living and behaviour.
In terms of its dissemination in Victorian literary production, the bourgeois, capitalist ideology of the individual is a rather complicated one. By bringing together the antithetical, mutually exclusive concepts of individualism, self-effacement and self-sacrifice (as these were advocated by the established church in complicity with the state), it succeeded in promoting both the idea of the uniqueness (and sacredness) of the “free-thinking” individual, but also the idea of the individual’s indebtedness to and duty towards family and society. It thus constructed subjects who constantly found themselves at odds both with their society and their own subjectivity in their effort to reconcile their opposing demands. The mid-
Victorian novel could be characterized as the locus classicus of such tensions, particularly in its first-person, Bildunsgroman version, where the individual hero/heroine undergoes numerous conflicts and bears her/his tribulations bravely before finally either coming to terms or falling apart with what lies both inside and outside of oneself as well as with the otherness of both oneself and society.
Gaskell’s first-person fiction (both realistic and non-realistic) inevitably reflects such tensions in the same way that her own life as well as the fiction and lives of her contemporary women writers did. By 1850, already the mother of four and writing full-time under the pressing demands of serial publication, Gaskell was struggling to reconcile a writing career and the “paramount”, as she called them, duties of a wife, mother and social worker, constantly, as her letters often reveal,34 torn between opposing roles, trying to resolve the conflict of home duties and a creative individual life.
34 Writing to her friend Tottie Fox, herself an artist (a painter), Gaskell openly expresses those tensions: 46
For Gaskell, art in general and writing in particular were not just a refuge from the
many, tedious duties of her daily reality. They were forms of expressing the needs of the
inner self, but as such, they were also to be taken as a sign of unchristian self-indulgence, far
removed from the Anglo-Saxon ideals of womanly self-effacement and self-sacrifice.
Plagued by feelings of guilt, which were further fuelled by her Unitarian background, Gaskell confessed to Tottie Fox:
If Self is to be the end of exertions, those exertions are unholy – there is no doubt of
that – and that is part of the danger in cultivating the Individual life; but I do believe
we all have some appointed work to do, whh no one else can do so well; Wh. is our
work; what we have to do in advancing the Kingdom of God; and that first we must
find out what we are sent into the world to do, and define it and make it clear to
ourselves, (that’s the hard part) and then forget ourselves in our work, and our work in
the End we ought to strive to bring about. (Letters 107)
The cultivation of the “Individual life” and the foregrounding of the self (in all its coherence and stability) both as an end in itself and as part of the pursuit of artistic creation/goals, is officially renounced by Gaskell more that once in her correspondence, by being mistrustfully viewed as “a weakening of the art which has crept in of late years”
(Letters 547). Her well-known criticism of and advice to the aspiring novelist Herbert Grey on his work The Three Paths once again echoes Goethe’s claim that “Every healthy effort
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 part of their life. However, we are talking of women. I am sure it is healthy for them to have the refuge of the hidden world of Art to shelter themselves in when too much pressed upon by daily small Lilliputian arrows of peddling cares […] I have felt this in writing. I see others feel it in music, you in painting so assuredly a blending of the two is desirable (Home duties and the development of the Individual I mean) […] I have no doubt that the cultivation of each tends to keep the other in a healthy state, my grammar is all at sixes and sevens I have no doubt but never mind if you can pick up my meaning. (Letters 106) 47
[…] is directed from the inward to the outward world” (qtd. in Booth 67) and reflects her own
official attitude as to what constitutes appropriate channels for one’s wish “to narrate”:
I think you must observe what is out of you, instead of examining what is in you. It is
always an unhappy sight when we are too conscious of any of the physical processes
that go on within us; & I believe in like manner that we ought not to be too cognizant
of our mental proceedings, only taking note of the results. But certainly whether
introspection be morbid or not, it is not \a/ safe {for a nov} training for a novelist. It is
a weakening of the art which has crept in of late years. Just read a few pages of De
Foe &c – and you will see the healthy way in which he sets objects not feelings before
you. I’m sure the right way is this. You are an electric telegraph something or other.
(Letters 541)
Interestingly enough, feeling – or suspecting – the true state of affairs in her own writing
practices, towards the end of her letter to Herbert Grey, she continues: “Please don’t thank
me. But try and follow my advice for I am pretty sure that it is good. You know everybody
can preach better than they can practise” (547, emphasis added).
According to Jenny Uglow, “[t]heoretically, Gaskell’s model of the writer was as an
objective recorder [and] like John Ruskin in the first volumes of Modern Painters (1840)35
[…] she merged the expressive ideal with an older aesthetic inherited in part from the eighteenth century, of a literal ‘truth’ to nature, of accurate representation of facts and events”
(Uglow 211). The fact is that in writing her industrial novels Mary Barton and North and
35 The Victorian sage John Ruskin, whose work was greatly valued by most contemporary novelists (including George Eliot), was also a favourite of Gaskell’s and his work Modern Painters bore special significance for her. As Mrs. Gaskell’s American friend, Charles Norton, reports in one of his letters: “One day as we were traveling in Italy, Mrs. Gaskell and her daughters and I were talking about the books we would choose if we were shut up in prison or on a desolate island. At last we agreed to choose one book by a living author, and when it came to Mrs. Gaskell’s turn to tell us what she had chosen she said ‘Modern Painters’” (qtd. in Uglow 424). 48
South, both texts representing what has been termed documentary realism, Gaskell fully subscribes to the ideal of the artist as an objective recorder of reality as reflected by Ruskin’s naturalist ideal throughout his Modern Painters according to which “[g]reat art accepts
Nature as she is” (qtd. in Billington 5). However, in those instances of her fiction where
Gaskell resorts to a first-person narrative technique, this seems to be informed by a different aesthetic, one clearly belonging with (but also departing from, thus prefiguring modernity) the subjectivist Romantic paradigm of the preceding period, and against which, in dubious frankness, she cautions young, aspiring novelists like Herbert Grey.
1.4. Split Narration in First-Person Textual Production from a Narratological
Perspective
‘I’ and ‘He’ Are Both ‘I’
(Mieke Bal, Narratology 21)
In other words, a “he”/“she” pronominal reference always presupposes an “I” as the original source of the enunciation, and, as such, the “I’’ gains precedence over the he/she cluster.
Interestingly, having posed the question, “[t]o what does the distinction between first-person and third-person novels refer?” (Bal 21), Mieke Bal proceeds to explain:
As soon as there is language, there is a speaker who utters it; as soon as those
linguistic utterances constitute a narrative text, there is a narrator, a narrating subject.
From a grammatical point of view, this is always a “first person”. In fact, the term
“third-person narrator” is absurd: a narrator is not a “he” or a “she”. At best a narrator
can narrate about someone else, a “he” or “she” – who might, incidentally, happen to
be a narrator as well. (22)
Bal uses the following example to illustrate her argument: 49
a. I shall be twenty-one tomorrow.
b. Elizabeth will be twenty-one tomorrow.
c. (I say:) I shall be twenty-one tomorrow.
d. (I say:) Elizabeth will be twenty-one tomorrow. (22)36
Given the above hypothesis, third-person narration, which is the mode commonly used to
denote what is termed an omniscient, and thus a more objective mode of narration, could be
considered a pseudo-objective enterprise and what eventually remains and/or prevails, is only
the first-person subject of enunciation, under which the third-person one is subsumed, the
former, however, being an equally problematic entity, because inherently divided and always already at odds with itself.
A number of questions arise out of such arguments as regards their applicability to
Gaskell’s own first-person narrative strategies, such as how would Gaskell’s first-person works prove such hypotheses? Also, to what extent does Gaskell’s choice of specific narrative strategies testify to and prove the primacy of the highly subjective use of “I” in lieu
36 In his Narrative Discourse Gérard Genette also advances the same hypothesis when he talks about the traditional distinction between third-person and first-person narrative, a distinction which for him is technically inaccurate and possibly misleading. He observes: [T]hese common locutions [the first-person and the third-person narrative] seem to me inadequate, in that they stress variation in the element of the narrative situation that is in fact invariant – to wit, the presence (explicit or explicit) of the “person” of the narrator. The presence is invariant because the narrator can be in his narrative (like every aspect of an enunciating in his enunciated statement) only in the first “person” […]. The novelist’s choice […] is not between two narrative postures (whose grammatical forms are simply an automatic consequence): to have the story told by one of its “characters”, or to have it told by a narrator outside of the story […]. Insofar as the narrator can at any instant intervene as such in the narrative, every narrating is, by definition, to all intends and purposes presented in the first person. (243-44) Hence, Genette’s coinage of the commonly-used terms “homodiegetic” and “autodiegetic”, which both describe a first-person narrator, who is either one of the characters in the narrated story (that is, a homodiegetic narrator) or the main character of the narrated text , in this case an autodiegetic narrator. 50 of the impersonal he/she mode of narration and what are its implications in terms of gender encoding as well as in terms of the production, manifestation and regulation of desire? The remainder of this chapter will try to explore and illuminate these issues.
If Gaskell’s preaching against extreme subjectivity and introspection, as part of the narrative process, testifies to her attempt to break free from Romantic aesthetic conventions and to attend to the more accepted narrative method of omniscience, her own use of first- person narration in the texts under examination speaks otherwise. Despite her wish to free herself from what Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction terms “the tyranny of subjectivity” (69), subjectivity and its discontents constitute a basic concern of hers in many ways. My contention is that in her first-person texts, Gaskell transcends Romantic assumptions about the primacy of subjectivity by moving a step further in depicting subjectivity as both inherently split and ideologically conditioned by gender and class values.
She also moves in the direction of meta-fiction, with her self-conscious narrators often attempting to draw attention to the process of narration itself by explicitly commenting on their very act of (often compulsively) performing it. Eventually, it could be argued, Gaskell subverts Romantic values, while at the same time endorsing them, through the self-conscious, unreliable, self-deceptive, discordant narrators she constructs. Her communal narrator (one who tells her own story in the context of a community of others) Mary Smith, in Cranford both sides with and distances herself from the narrated world of her text in her effort to cope with uncanny feelings of anxiety, aggression and hostility towards Cranford’s fragmented, heterotopic, but, at the same time all too pleasantly familiar world. Moreover, the male, self- absorbed narrators in Cousin Phillis and “Six Weeks at Heppenheim”, though intent upon acting purely as eye-witnesses to the stories of their heroines, Phillis Holman and Thekla respectively, end up narrating their own traumatic stories (with homodiegesis turning to pure autodiegesis) instead, which are replete with male fantasies of the marginalized, objectified 51
female other. More importantly, they prove to be narrator-agents, rather than mere
observers,37 as originally declared, of the events narrated, for they interfere with them ( by
shaping and determining their outcome) in a conspicuous (and occasionally indiscreet)
manner. Finally, Gaskell’s respective male and female narrators in her Gothic tales “The Poor
Clare” and “The Grey Woman” testify to a seriously disrupted narration – partly the result of
the presence of a number of minor embedded narratives and multiple narrators – marred by
the invasion of terror, persecution, trauma and, of course, the workings of desire. In all five
cases the boundaries between “subjective” and “objective” become blurred and difficult to delimit, for one can detect the presence of what Julia Kristeva, from a psychoanalytic perspective, terms “delirium”, that is:
A discourse which has supposedly strayed from a presumed reality […] [where] the
speaking subject is presumed to have known an object, a relationship, an experience
that he is henceforth incapable of reconstituting accurately […] because the knowing
subject is also a desiring subject, and the paths of desire ensnarl the paths of
knowledge. (“Psychoanalysis and the Polis” 307)
Moreover, the “paths of knowledge” themselves can be put into question, I would argue, if
one takes into account both the split character, in terms of temporality,38 of the act of
37 The distinction between narrator-agents and narrator-observers (as is also that between reliable and unreliable narrators) is Wayne C. Booth’s and appears in his influential 1960 work The Rhetoric of Fiction, where he defines the former as narrators “who produce some measurable effect on the course of events” (153-154) as is exactly the case with the male narrators of Cousin Phillis and “Six Weeks at Heppenheim”. 38 I am referring, of course, to the crucial concept for narrative poetics and practice of the duality of the narrative act, or in Gerald Prince’s terms “temporal distance […] between the narration and the narrated” (Narratology 29), that is, the distinction between the time of narration, which belongs with the present, and the time of the narrated, which belongs with the past (though there are numerous instances of texts where the two converge), in the same way that the experiencing and the narrating selves belong with the past and the present respectively. This type of temporal distance (when it 52
narration per se as well as the split nature, in terms of stability and coherence, of the narrating
subject,39 a subject always in the grip of ideology and desire. Using Lacanian terminology,
Kristeva further elaborates on the subject:
We normally assume the opposite of delirium to be an objective reality, objectively
perceivable and objectively knowable, as if the speaking subject were only a simple
knowing subject. Yet we must admit that, given the cleavage of the subject
(conscious/unconscious) and given that the subject is also a subject of desire,
exists) renders all texts, particularly first-person ones, problematic in terms of reliability, not least for reasons of the accuracy of the narrators’ memory, especially in those instances of texts where there is a considerable time lapse between the two narrative moments, as is the case with Gaskell’s texts. Mieke Bal elaborates on the subject of memory as this is implicated in first-person narration. She writes: Memory is an act of “vision” of the past but, as an act, situated in the present of the memory. It is often a narrative act: loose elements come to cohere into a story, so they can be remembered and eventually told. But as is well known, memories are unreliable – in relation to the fabula – and when put into words, they are rhetorically overworked so they can connect to an audience […] Hence, the “story” the person remembers is not identical to the one she experienced (147). 39 The distinction between the experiencing and the narrating selves is formally addressed by means of differentiating between the two concepts of the pronoun “I” to denote “the subject of enunciating” and “the subject of enunciation”, which from a narratological perspective, could stand for the “subject of narration, as exemplified by Emile Benveniste’s two levels of enunciation in Problems in General Linguistics (1966). Narrative texts as discursive acts enable a speaker/narrator “to posit himself as a subject” (Benveniste 224), in other words to refer to and articulate herself/himself as “I”. Benveniste stresses the discursive character of subjectivity and argues that “the form of I has no linguistic existence except in the act of speaking in which it is uttered. There is thus a combined double instance in this process: the instance of I as the referent and the instance of I as the referee. The definition can now be stated precisely as: I is the individual who utters the present instance of discourse containing the linguistic instance I” (218). Similarly, Mieke Bal defines the function of the narrating agent of a text exactly as such: “a linguistic subject, a function and not a person, which expresses itself in language that constitutes the text” (119). 53
perceptual and knowing apprehension of the original object is only a theoretical, albeit
undoubtedly indispensable, hypothesis. (“Psychoanalysis and the Polis” 307)
From a narratological point of view, the concept of “delirium”, as analyzed by
Kristeva, with its distinct Lacanian tones of split subjectivity, could be applied to what is
termed unreliable narration/interpretation of an “objective” reality40 (for narration entails also
vision and interpretation) and could well be used to describe the unreliable, first-person
narrator of a text. The textual persona of the narrator that functions as an acting, speaking and
narrating subject and whose crucial agency and mediation41 act simultaneously to shape,
interpret and impart a given narrative to the narratee, constitute, for Gaskell, the medium
through which she attempts (whether consciously or unconsciously it is hard to determine) both to conduct her critique of Victorian social conventions and to deconstruct notions of stable, individual identities, coherent selves and clear-cut, gendered subject-positions. To be
40 Of course one should bear in mind the issue of any given text’s ambiguous (in terms of objectivity) status by virtue of the fact that it is exactly that, a text to be narrated, rather than a concrete entity (with all this might imply), one depicting a possible version of an always already mediated and ideologically conditioned reality as perceived by individuals. Susan Lanser adopts a similarly relativist view on the subject of narrative objectivity. She writes: “the cardinal rule for narrating fiction is that the narrating ‘I’ are [sic] not to be taken for the author’s claims [since] the “I” who speaks in fiction is simply and wholly a fictional ‘I’ [for] fiction defines itself by the pretended quality of its speech acts” (“The ‘I’ of the Beholder” 209). 41 In A Theory of Narrative, F. K. Stanzel uses the term “mediacy” to refer to the “‘audible’ voice of a text’s mediator/ narrator” (4) and postulates three narrative situations that “render the mediacy of narration” (4). These are the “first-person narrative situation, […] [where] the mediacy of narration belongs totally to the fictional realm of the characters […] [with] the world of the characters [being] completely identical to the world of the narrator, […] the authorial narrative situation [where] the narrator is outside the world of the characters [with] the narrator’s world existing on a different level of being from that of the characters […] [and] the figural narrative situation [in which] the mediating narrator is replaced by a reflector-character” (4-5). Clearly, the narrative voice of the texts under analysis in the present study share elements of all three categories of Stanzel’s typology with their narrators/characters vacillating between the world of the narrated and that of the narratee. 54
more specific, Gaskell’s narrative strategies, which I shall be calling dissembling strategies of
narrative ambivalence and which materialize as narrative discordance and narrative cross-
dressing, render first-person narration in the texts to be analyzed a locus of dissonance, self-
deception42 and misrecognition, all three emanating from the narrating subject’s entrapment
within a narratological imaginary, where narration is simultaneously a gratifying and a deeply
unsettling act full of “delirious” undertones. This is so because of Gaskell’s narrators’ general
tendency to display a lack of self-awareness (despite being self-conscious of their act of
narration), and, in the cases of Cousin Phillis and “Six Weeks at Heppenheim”, also a lack of
vision in terms of their actual agency and positioning in the text in the way such a lack is
perceived both by the text’s other characters and by the reader/narratee sequence. Moreover,
in the case of Cousin Phillis and “The Grey Woman” the two narrators, a male one in the
former and a female one in the latter, also fail to perceive/see their own sexual orientation,
which is a homoerotic one in both cases.
The terms “discordant narration” and “narrative cross-dressing” (to which I shall
return shortly to discuss in more detail) as discursive practices in the way(s) they relate,
among others, also to notions of gender encoding and performativity are important to my
approach because they constitute Gaskell’s specific narrative strategies by means of which
42 In his essay “The Self-Deceptive and the Other-Deceptive Narrating Character” Amit Marcus offers a “working definition” of what he calls “the self-deception thesis”, according to which “self-deception is a mental state in which the subject is motivated (as opposed to harbouring a conscious intention) to believe in a specific proposition or state of facts. This motivation causes the subject to enact certain mental strategies and behavioural patterns that convince him or her of the truth of P, despite his or her exposure to information that tips the scales towards accepting the truth of the proposition (or state of facts) not-P” (1). Self-deception can also entail what Marcus terms “other-deception”, although the two are often difficult to distinguish in terms of the complex issue of narrative truth, not least because, as Marcus observes, “the other sees us, to a certain extent, the way we see ourselves, so that in deceiving ourselves we may deceive others” (1), and vice versa. In both Cousin Phillis and “Six Weeks at Heppenheim”, the male narrators practically revel in their own self-deception and lack of vision. 55
desire and the need/compulsion to narrate are mutually implicated in the act of narration,
“procuring for the subject both jouissance and stability” (Kristeva, “Psychoanalysis and the
Polis” 308). What is more, all five narrators can be characterized as compulsive tellers who
display an existential motivation to narrate, with narration entailing a justification for
existence and vice versa, thus accounting for the narrating subject’s textual presence. They are also “embodied narrators”,43 to use F. K. Stanzel’s term in that “the narrative process and the narrator’s experience form an entity” (93), that is, “the motivation to narrate […] originate[s] […] in the need for an organizing overview, in search for meaning on the part of the matured, self-possessed ‘I’ who has outgrown the mistakes and confusion of his former life” (93). Finally, all five narrators are also employed as both internal and external focalizers44 (or, in Mieke Bal’s terms, “focalizors”), in that they are presenting the events in
43 According to Stanzel’s narratological model: The contrast between an embodied narrator and a narrator without such bodily determination, that is to say, between a first-person and an authorial third-person, accounts for the most important difference in the motivation of the narrator to narrate. For the embodied narrator, this motivation is existential; it is directly connected with his practical experiences, with the joys and sorrows he has experienced, with his moods and needs […] [whereas] for the third- person narrator there is no existential compulsion to narrate. His motivation is literary- aesthetic rather than existential. (93) 44 The concept of focalization, according to Steven Cohan and Linda Shires, “consists of a triadic relation formed by the narrating agent (who narrates), the focalizer (who sees), and the focalized (what is being seen and, thus, narrated – in the case of mental life: emotion, cognition, or perception)” (95). The term has often constituted the subject of debate among theoreticians in the field of narrative poetics since its inception by Gérard Genette in his influential Narrative Discourse (1972), where he distinguishes between “the two instances of the focalizing and the narrating, which remain distinct even in ‘first-person’ narration” (194). Genette used the term to refer to “a restriction imposed on the information provided by a narrator” (Edmiston 729) and it could also be used to describe the centre of consciousness (as its distinct visual dimension also denotes) by means of which a text is visualized, or, in Genette’s terms, focalized, through a particular character, who often happens to coincide, as is the case with the texts under analysis here, with the narrator of the text. “Internal focalization” refers to a first-person narrator’s presentation of his story from the vantage point of her/his experiencing 56
their dual capacity as young characters within the fictional world and as mature tellers of that
younger self. Technically speaking, they are external to the diegesis, but not to the fictional
world they are depicting. They are “dissonant”, rather than “consonant” tellers (Cohn,
Transparent Minds 145-61),45 viewing their past selves retrospectively by distancing
themselves (occasionally) from their past ignorance and delusions, while at the same time
providing the narratee with subsequent knowledge. Above all, however, they are discordant tellers and, in three out of the five texts to be discussed, they also cross gender boundaries.
According to Michal Glowinski, “a story can either inform or misinform the reader”
(104), which means that a narrator’s accurate or inaccurate imparting of information in the
process of narration is always a possibility (not to say a given), especially in the case of a
first-person fictional narrative situation, where the narrator usually proclaims her/his
subjective position. For Glowinsky, “the first-person novel is a very specific form of
self, without any interference on the part of the narrating self. In this case, the narrator relies on his/her experiencing/earlier/younger self to visualize the events and characters of the story in the way he/she perceived them at the time during which they unfolded. On the other hand, “external focalization” is applied when the narrator views events and characters from his/her present position in space and time that is, from the vantage point of the narrating self, with the latter often passing judgment or commenting upon the experiencing self. Chatman’s distinction between the perceptual and conceptual points of view (the former corresponding to the narrator’s experiencing self and the latter to the narrating self) in his Story and Discourse (1978) and Cohn’s “consonant” and “dissonant” narrators in her Transparent Minds (1978). Chatman, however, rejects the idea that a narrator can perceive. He/she can only conceive of the younger self’s perceptions. As he observes: “it makes no sense to say that a story is told ‘through’ the narrator’s perception since he/she is precisely narrating, which is not an act of perception” (Story and Discourse 195). One could, of course, contradict this position simply by stating that the act of narration presupposes some degree of both perception and conception, for one cannot possibly narrate what he/she has not, even remotely, formed some idea of by having exercised these two faculties. 45 Conversely, in Dorrit Cohn’s scheme, consonant self-narration presupposes the presence of a narrator who, rather than relying on her/his mature self and hindsight, identifies with her/his younger self and views things from zero distance. 57
narration, one where both the narrator’s possession and lack of knowledge [or adequate
information] play an equally important role” (109).46 In other words, it is a type of narration
that can hover between total reliability and total unreliability. Thus, “a mis- or disinformed
narrator, unwilling or unable to tell what ‘actually’ happenened” (Cohn, “Discordant
Narration” 307), is eligible for what Dorrit Cohn has recently termed “discordant narration”.
This type of unreliable narration is, according to Cohn, “of an ideological kind [and] is
attributed to a narrator who is […] inducing one to look behind the story he or she tells, for a
different meaning from the one he himself or she herself provides [and whom] the reader
experiences […] as normatively inappropriate for the story he or she tells” (307). Thus, it is
suggested that the narrated text be read “against the grain of the narrator’s discourse,
providing it with a meaning that, though not explicitly spelled out, is silently signalled to the
reader behind the narrator’s back” (“Discordant Narration” 307). Above all, discordant
narration exposes the narrator for what he/she really is in the texts to be analyzed, namely,
“an artfully created vocal organ whose ideology [often] clashes with that of her/his tale”
(“Discordant Narration” 307). It further connotes (or proves), as I wish to argue, the writing,
and hence, the narrating subject’s own discordant status, ambivalent position, indeterminacy
and duplicity in its capacity as the focal point of reference within the text she/he desires to
narrate. As a result, the narrative consciousness through whose mediation we see things, the
very centre of narration itself, fails to hold. Before exploring the split status of the subject of
narration further, however, it is only proper to discuss the “gendered” properties, or rather,
46 Of course, as Susan S. Lanser observes, one should always be aware of the fact that “a narrator can be perfectly reliable with respect to the ‘facts’ of a given story, but unreliable regarding opinions and judgements about the story world […] [i]ndeed, a narrator might even be reliable about some facts and not about others” (The Narrative Act 40). According to this distinction, the narrators of the texts under analysis in the present study do not so much display a factual kind of unreliability, but rather, they are to be regarded as unreliable with respect to the opinions and judgments they offer, which are at odds with what the text itself signifies. 58 possibilities of the narrating and the narrated subjects in some detail first, for gender (whether explicitly or implicitly manifest within the text) is crucially important in the narrative act, not least for its duplicitous, shaky and performative character.
1.5. Is Narration Gendered? Gender in Narration and a Feminist Narrative Poetics
The narrative voice and
the narrated world are
mutually constitutive. 47
(Susan S. Lanser, The Narrative Act 4)
Looking for signs of gendered difference as these relate to the ways in which the tropes of metaphor and metonymy are reflected in the narrative strategies of male and female writers in a number of Victorian novels, feminist narratologist Robyn R. Warhol poses the following straightforward question: “Do male and female novelists write differently?” (“Narrating the
Unnarratable”). The answer she provides is equally straightforward:
[Y]es, if the novelists in question are Victorian, [for] in a time and place where the
specificity of femininity was as strictly confining and prominently displayed as tight-
laced corsets and voluminous hoopskirts […] gender affiliations left their traces
47 Lanser further elaborates on the concept of narrative voice in terms of the crucial issue of the mutual interdependence of the narrating and the narrated subject in the act of enunciation and their subsequent dependence on language itself in her book The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. She explains: If seeing is an act bound to a point of view, then saying is doubly so. Human discourse is predicated not only on a relation between a seeing subject and a seen object, but on a multifaceted and dynamic interaction between subject and object and one or more listeners, the perceived object, and language itself. The relation between subject and object, itself no simple matter, is thus immensely complicated by the entrance of words. (4) . 59
everywhere in middle-class culture, including the text signed by a woman or by a man.
(“Narrating the Unnaratable”)
Similarly, in her work Fictions of Authority, Susan Lanser focuses on the “social properties
and political implications of narrative voice” (4) adopting a critical stance towards the
essentially formalist orientation of traditional narratology. She convincingly argues that,
“narration entails social relationships and thus involves far more than the technical
imperatives of getting a story told” (Fictions 4) and that the grammatical gender of the
narrator “is a site of ideological tension made visible in textual practice” (Fictions 4-5). In an
attempt to extend both critics’ comments further in terms of how they apply to Gaskell’s
texts, I want to add that the act of narration becomes an even more complicated enterprise
when the cultural category of gender, which is as fluid and unstable as that of the narrating
subject, comes to the fore in some sort of disguise, that is, when narrative discordance is
combined with some form of narrative (and, occasionally also literal, as in the cases of
Cranford and “The Grey Woman”) cross-dressing. This is the case when a female author
chooses to employ a male narrator (as Gaskell does in Cousin Phillis, “Six Weeks at
Heppenheim” and “The Poor Clare”) and vice versa. When, moreover, the narrator is
ambivalent both towards his/her degree of agency (as in Cranford, Cousin Phillis, “Six
Weeks at Heppenheim” and “The Poor Clare”) and towards his/her politics in the text or when s/he fails to realize his/her sexual orientation (as in the cases of Cousin Phillis and “The
Grey Woman”), then, the encoding of gender in discursive practices, along with the desiring mechanisms which regulate its production and distribution within the narrated text, becomes
an even more complicated issue to address. This is even more so, when as in “The Grey
Woman”, we are also presented with an external, first-degree narrator of unspecified gender, who withdraws from his/her narrative completely shortly after introducing us to the text’s internal, female narrator. The very same mechanisms are, indeed, those which also determine 60
the production of subjectivity by means of an elaborate network of identifications, ideological
allegiances, shifting identities, masks and masquerades both on a thematic and on a narrative
level.
The cross-dressing narrative technique is mainly a product, according to Ute Kauer, of
the eighteenth-century culture and literature, which seem to be “preoccupied with masks and
masquerades […] both in literature and every-day life”48 (“Masks and Masquarades”). The
“age of disguise” (Castle 2) as it has been called, with its widely-practiced first-person
epistolary writings represented by such literary figures as Defoe (with Roxana) and
Richardson (with Pamela and Clarissa), who employ this particular narrative device to represent female consciousness through the very centre of a masculine one, extended its influence upon the literary practices of a number of nineteenth-century writers of both sexes49, including those of Elizabeth Gaskell.
48 The cultural importance of these masquerades is duly emphasized by Terry Castle in her work Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction, where she notes that “throughout the eighteenth century the masked assembly, that ‘promiscuous gathering’, was at once a highly visible public institution and a highly charged image – a social phenomenon of expansive proportions and a cultural site of considerable potency” (2). 49 It was used, for instance, by Charles Dickens in ten chapters of Bleak House (1852-53), all bearing the title of “Esther’s Narrative”, which alternate with the other chapters of the novel narrated in an omniscient voice. Among women writers, it was used by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein (1818), by Charlotte and Emily Brontë in their novels The Professor (1857) and Wuthering Heights (1847) respectively as well as by George Eliot in her Gothic piece The Lifted Veil (1859). The employment of the four male narrators by these female authors, namely, Victor Frankenstein, William Crimsworth, Mr. Lockwood and Latimer has been interpreted as an attempt on the part of their creators to define their own position as “lonely outcast[s], barred from education and inheritance” (Gilbert and Gubar, The Norton Anthology Literature by Women 355) In the case of Brontë and Eliot, it has been read as the woman writer’s (who, it should be noted, has her work published under a male pseudonym) anxiety about the precarious state of her veiled identity. In the case of Eliot’s The Lifted Veil moreover, as Ruth Parkin-Gounelas notes, the tale’s “unresolved and deeply depressing mood […] [reveals] Eliot’s anxiety at this time about the revelation of the secret of her identity as Marian Evans, 61
As a “cultural sign”, to use Kauer’s own phrasing, “[c]ross-dressing, be it literal or in the form of narrative cross-dressing […] reveals aspects of a cultural anxiety […] when gender roles are concerned” (“Masks and Masquarades”). To say this is to imply that gender, like such categories as ethnicity and class, which are also seen as constituents of identity,50 is no longer perceived as a coherent and stable entity, but as a culturally defined discourse; the frequency of the use of narrative cross-dressing in the eighteenth-century novel testifies to this.51 Moreover, the narrative masking (and masquerading) as the opposite (or other) of what one has been culturally (as well as biologically/anatomically) conditioned to believe one is, challenges traditional roles, while at the same time revealing a high degree of uncertainty as to one’s “actual” discursive gender position. Thus, stemming from the writer’s own
and also, perhaps, of her relationship with G.H. Lewes” (“Phantoms of Secrets” 188-189). Incidentally, both The Professor and The Lifted Veil have often been interpreted as unsuccessful attempts by two relatively inexperienced fiction writers and as a dramatization of the two writers’ “internalization of patriarchal cultures definition of the woman as ‘other’” (Gilber and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic 466). 50 As an exponent of feminist narratology, Susan S. Lanser considers the narrator’s gender to be of primary importance in the act of narration, not least because gender distinctions are also central to cultural communication between individuals in every day communication. She further observes that “identity includes such aspects of social status as profession, gender, nationality, marital status, sexual preference, education, race and socioeconomic class. Of all these categories, gender is the most universally central to linguistic activity in Western culture, because Indo-European languages are notably marked for gender distinctions” (The Narrative Act 166). 51 Kauer also explains that the foundations of the issue of the division of private and public selves, as part of our western concept of what we call individuality, lie with the eighteenth century and they are to be seen as part and parcel of the cult of the sentimental tradition and its emphasis on the individual’s retreat to the innermost recesses of the mind and its concentration on an authentic self that has to be maintained against influences from the outside (“Masks and Masquarades”). Also, in The Cultural Psychology of the Self, cultural psychologist Ciarán Benson notes that terms like “self”, self-knowledge, self-made, self-knowing and self-deception” were originally used in the seventeenth century (67). 62 imprisonment within what I shall call a culturally-incited gender Imaginary,52 narrative cross- dressing becomes the means by which the narrating subject revels in fantasies of its own, speaking either from the position of the excluded and marginalized other, as when a male author chooses to speak through a female narrating persona, or from the privileged discursive position of the allegedly dominant masculine gender, as when a female author constructs a male narrative voice.
The motives behind a male writer’s decision to employ a female narrator are probably different from those behind a female writer’s choice of a male narrating persona. According to Madeleine Kahn, “[w]omen are borrowing the voice of authority,53 [while] men are seemingly abdicating it” (2),54 while Susan Gubar emphasizes that cross-dressed men are often perceived as clowns or psychopaths, whereas women in male attire exert a certain type
52 My term “gender Imaginary” constitutes a combination of Jacque Lacan’s and Judith Butler’s post- modern theories of the subject and in using the term I have been inspired by both theorists’ work on the (gendered) subject. If for Lacan, the Imaginary, as the human subject’s fascination with the relation between itself and its image during the Mirror Stage only reveals the fiction of the subject’s sense of totality, for Butler, the subject’s identification with and adoption of a female/male gender position possesses a purely Imaginary dimension in that this gender position is only an ideological fraud, an illusion and an imitation (in Butler’s own phrasing, “a stylized repetition of acts” [The Judith Butler Reader 114]) of a non-existent original either/or gender category. 53 To this effect, Annette Federico claims that the mid-Victorian woman speaking from a male perspective has the difficult task of reproducing a voice which trivializes her experiences, while at the same time maintaining an alternative, subtextual authority – her own – with its insider’s knowledge of the conditions of women’s lives (329). Of course this type of double perspective (and double consciousness) in literature once again signifies the woman writer’s marginal position within a patriarchal capitalist establishment of which she occupies an inferior subject position. 54 Interestingly, in her analysis of rhetoric and gender in the eighteenth-century novel, Kahn uses the term “narrative transvestism” to “refer to this process whereby a male author gains access to a culturally defined female voice and sensibility but runs no risk of being trapped in the devalued female realm” (11). Thus, by using the mask of the other sex, eighteenth-century writers, such as Richardson and Defoe only succeed in re-inscribing the binary opposites male /female, since the female mask only serves to strengthen male identity. 63
of erotic attraction (Gubar 483). Gaskell’s cross-dressers, both female and male, do seem to
verify Gubar’s comment and are to be seen in her texts both on a thematic and a narrative level. While, for instance, in Cousin Phillis, “Six Weeks at Heppenheim” and “The Poor
Clare” narrative cross-dressing is adopted by the narrators, in Cranford and in “The Grey
Woman”, although narration is assigned to a female narrator and no such thing as narrative cross-dressing occurs,55 there is conspicuous literal cross-dressing by certain characters who,
as I intend to show in the chapters that follow, essentially function as their narrators’ doubles
in their capacity as clowns (like, for instance, Paul Jenkyns in Cranford) and as expendable,
eroticized figures (as the servant Amante in “The Grey Woman”). In either case, what ensues
from both narrative and literal masquerading and cross-dressing in Gaskell’s texts is parody,
indeterminacy, division, loss and ambivalence, a sense, in the final analysis, that, as Margaret
Doody observes, “we are all fictional creators of ourselves” (27), or, for that matter, a sense
that the narrating subject, regardless of its gender position, is split, divided, never at one with
itself and its desire, because of the psychic – and gaping – gap between the two dimensions of
the “I”, namely the specular and the social “I” as Jacque Lacan terms it in his mirror stage
theory (“The Mirror Stage” 5).
1.6. The Split Subject of Narration, Desire and the Gaze
I am led, therefore, to regard the function
of the mirror-stage as a particular case of
the function of the imago, which is to
55 It should be noted, however, that in the case of “The Grey Woman”, as we shall see in chapter four, as well as using Anna Scherer as her main, autodiegetic narrator, Gaskell also attempts to avoid the markers of gender by making use of an external narrator in the first four pages of the story, whose gender remains totally unspecified throughout the text and who disappears completely once he/she has presented us with the main female narrator. 64
establish a relation between the organism
and its reality – or, as they say, between
the Innenwelt and the Umwelt.
(Jacques Lacan, Écrits 4)
My post-modern reading(s) of Gaskell’s first-person texts see narration (along with a whole range of narrative gender positions that it reflects) as inherently divided, that is, as a direct effect of the divided subject itself which, in turn, emanates from the instability of the signifier
(language). If the human subject and its desire(s) are to be realized in the symbolic order, which is governed by the slippery and unstable linguistic sign-system, then the cultural products (objects) of the human subject cannot but reflect such instabilities. According to
Teresa de Lauretis, “subjectivity is engaged in the cogs of narrative and indeed constituted in the relation of narrative, meaning, and desire; so the very work of narrativity is the engagement of the subject in certain positionalities of meaning and desire” (106); hence, the instability and unreliability of all narratives.
The subject-object relation, or, in Jacques Lacan’s terminology, the “relation between the organism and its reality” (“The Mirror Stage” 4), constitutes a basic concern of his theories on the subject56 in general and of his mirror-stage theory in particular, not least
56 Lacan’s acknowledgement of his debt to as well as his reformulation of Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory (as exemplified in Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics [1916]) of the unified linguistic sign, are well known. In his essay “Lacan’s Science of the Subject”, Dany Nobus notes: The most conspicuous difference between Saussure’s and Lacan’s Diagrams concerns the position of the signifier and the signified relative to the bar that separates them. Whereas in Saussure’s schema, the signified and the signifier are located above and beneath the bar respectively [suggesting their unity and mutual interdependence], in Lacan’s version their position has been interchanged […]. Lacan’s algorithm underscores visually the incompatibility of the two terms [in that] the signifier is written with an upper-case letter (S) and the signified appears in lower-case type(s), and is italicized. (53) 65
because of “the way it brings together crucial questions relating to the subject and the image,
the formation of the ‘I’ via its transformation in the mirror” (Parkin-Gounelas, Literature and
Psychoanalysis 6). Thus, the “deflection of the specular I into the social I” (“The Mirror
Stage” 5), marks, for Lacan, the “moment in which the mirror-stage57 comes to an end” (5)
In Lacan’s own terms, his algorithm S/s (which he elevates to the status of a “primordial distinction” [“The Agency of the Letter” 149]) is read as: “The signifier over the signified, ‘over’ corresponding to the bars separating the two stages” (“Agency of the Letter” 149), clearly denoting the primacy of the signifier over the signified. 57 Jacques Lacan’s famous paper “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the ‘I’ as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” was delivered at the sixteenth International congress of psychoanalysis in Zurich on 17th July 1949. For Lacan, the mirror stage along with the Oedipus complex constitute “the most important functional ‘moments’ undergone by the human subject” (Mellard 12). The mirror stage, in particular, occurs between the sixth and eighteenth month in the infant’s life and marks the beginning of the human subject’s recognition of itself as “I”, shortly before the subject’s entrance into the realm of language and symbolization (the symbolic order) as it also marks the establishment of the “imaginary order”, which will continue to affect the subject for life. What characterizes the mirror stage is the subject’s illusion of its own plenitude and totality (represented by such terms as ideal-I or the ego-Ideal [le moi]), where in reality there is only bodily fragmentation and chaos. Hence the subject’s subsequent misrecognition (méconnaissance) of its fragmented hypostasis as totality and wholeness. The characteristic of the mirror stage’s misrecognition, is that “the function of méconnaissance that characterizes the ego in all its structures” (“The Mirror Stage” 6) will henceforth be tied to the subject’s fantasy image of itself, an image replete with narcissistic phantasies of the “I” throughout life, and will continue to assert its influence on the subject even during the time the latter is situated in the symbolic order. The third term of Lacan’s schema, the “Real”, “emerges as a term, linked to the symbolic and the imaginary: it stands for what is neither symbolic nor imaginary, and remains foreclosed from the analytic experience, which is an experience of speech” (Écrits ix-x). It virtually stands for all that is impossible to represent via the symbolic properties of language. “[I]t is that”, as Ruth Parkin-Gounelas notes, “which constitutes loss or trauma, both at the bodily level (primary separation from an original phantasized oneness) and at the level of speech (the ‘missed encounter’ between signifier and signified)” (Literature and Psychoanalysis 99), what occasionally provides a link to that ultimate form of desire known in Lacanian terminology as Jouissance, which is, according to Colette Soler, a form of pleasure “that remains alien to any form of symbolization, that in no way reaches the unconscious but may haunt the imaginary form of the body” (93). Thus, the Real, among others, also 66
and the human subject – which from now on also emerges as the subject of the unconscious58
– is thrust into the realms of signification, representation and symbolization. This is a
“dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations” (5), but which will always carry along with it the traces of the Imaginary order in the way the subject will subsequently perceive – by actually misrecognizing – both itself (via a series of subject positions and multiple identifications) and its immediate reality constituted by the symbolic order (what Lacan terms the big Other).59
coincides with the ultimate unrepresentable given, death itself. In his Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis Lacan notes: The problem involved is that of Jouissance, because Jouissance presents itself as buried at the center of a field and has the characteristics of inaccessibility, obscurity, and opacity; moreover, the field is surrounded by a barrier which makes access to it difficult for the subject to the point of inaccessibility, because Jouissance appears not purely and simply as the satisfaction of a need, but as the satisfaction of a drive. (qtd. in Braunstein 104) In Lacan’s later period of teaching the mutual interdependence and equal significance of his three registers (the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real) through which he came to argue for the utter division of the human subject, was graphically represented in the shape of three interlaced circles, his famous Borromean knot. 58 Although it was Freud who introduced the concept of the unconscious in both his first and second topography, as the locus of what is repressed in the human subject, it was Lacan’s famous definition of the unconscious being structured like a language which constituted a major breakthrough in the field of psychoanalytic discourse(s), especially as regards its implications in the analysis and interpretation of literary narratives. As Lacan puts it, “[t]he unconscious is constituted by the effects of speech on the subject, it is the dimension in which the subject is determined in the development of the effects of speech, consequently the unconscious is structured like a language” (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 149). 59 As Bruce Fink notes, “the Lacanian subject is neither the individual nor what we might call the conscious subject (or the consciously thinking subject), in other words, the subject referred to by most of analytic philosophy. The consciously thinking subject is, by and large, indistinguishable from the ego as understood in the school of ego psychology” (36). Hence, Lacan’s well-known antithesis to the practitioners of this type of psychoanalytic practice (ego psychology) prevalent mainly in the United States, due to its failure to point to the ailing subject (analysand) the reality (and drama) of its divided subjectivity. 67
The anti-Cartesian frame of thought underlying Lacan’s theory evidently implies that
with the individual’s entry into the symbolic order, the ego, which is already “split and
divided between ego ideals (others) and an ideal ego” (Ragland, Essays 19), becomes a
subject; and subjectivity, far from being a unified or transcendent essence, is, rather, a
process during which the divided subject, continually (re)activated and (re)positioned within culture’s diverse discourses, is but an effect of language and signification.60 The mirror
stage’s significance for the human subject, then, resides in the fact that it initiates the
negotiation as well as the conceptualization of the fundamental (for western thought, and not
only) difference between what lies within and what lies without the speaking/narrating
subject, a difference, whose acknowledgement and acceptance – via language’s symbolic
properties – is a prerequisite for the subject’s successful insertion into the realm of culture
and its objects. Such an insertion, however, presupposes the individual’s transition from the
position of the ideal I (ego) to that of subject and its subsequent adherence to the process of
symbolization (and its vicissitudes), which will henceforth mediate between what lies within
and without the subject’s reality. This is a reality, however, with which the speaking
/narrating subject is doomed to be in perpetual discordance due to “the function of
méconnaissance (“The Mirror Stage” 6); in other words, the subject (the “I”) is doomed to
perpetually misrecognize itself in practically every aspect of its mortal journey into being as
we know it. “Forever after” Ellie Ragland tells us, “a person’s sense of being will vacillate
because humans must anticipate their own images/ideals in the opaque mirrors of the other’s
60 Ellie Ragland further notes: Lacan’s theory of the ego is of a piece with his rejection of models of mind that persist in the Freud one generally knows: the Cartesian Freud who split mind between rational (realistic) and irrational (fantastic) processes […] [because] Lacan’s own clinical experience led him to describe the object of scientific inquiry – the unconscious – by logical and topological formalizations rather than in the Freudian terms of evolutionary biology. (Essays on the Pleasures of Death 20) 68 gaze [and] all successive separations, or identificatory mergers, replay the original drama of taking on a being from the outside and then repressing it” (Essays on the Pleasures of Death
38). Naturally, the act of narration, both as part of the analytic situation and as literary practice can be no exception, as we shall see, not least because the subject’s misrecognition of itself also depends on the workings of desire.
Revisiting Freud’s famous account of the fort-da game,61 during which the child attempts to come to terms with maternal loss through repetition by “staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach” (“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 225), Lacan proceeds to make a further observation; he states that “the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing and [it is] this death [that] constitutes in the subject the eternalization of desire” (“The Function and Field of Speech” 104). In other words, what
Lacan implies is that the subject’s initiation into the realm of desire is wholly dependent on the signifier, as well as on the subject’s necessary loss/lack of its original sense of wholeness,
61 In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” Freud stresses the significance of his little grandson’s game as he himself observed it when the child was one and a half years old: The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it […] What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive ‘o-o-o-o’. He then pulled the reel out of his cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’ [‘there’]. This, then, was the complete game – disappearance and return. As a rule, one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act. (225) As James Mellard observes: Lacan uses the tale of the grandson’s game with a sewing spool to suggest what happens in the mirror phase. [He] regards the child’s behavior as at once an exhibition of symbolization and as a fantasy activity [...]. The symbolization is exhibited in the spool that stands for something else – the child’s mother [while] the fantasy is exhibited in the pre-verbal child’s finding a momentary satisfaction in the activity. Both symbolization and fantasy satisfaction […] are built on a loss, a lack a want of “being”. (14)
69
a lack which is precisely what constitutes it in the symbolic order as a subject of the
unconscious. In his Seminar 2 Lacan notes: “Desire always becomes manifest at the joint of speech, where it makes its appearance, its sudden emergence, its surge forwards. Desire
emerges just as it becomes embodied, in speech, it emerges with symbolism” (qtd. in Parkin-
Gounelas, Literature and Psychoanalysis 230).
Desire for objects (either material or aesthetic), or, desire and its objects, seems to be
a universal phenomenon and if “[e]verything emerges from the structure of the signifier”
(The Four Fundamental Concepts 206), as Lacan never tires of telling us, then desire as a
prerequisite, among others, of all aspects of human creativity (including both the subject’s
desire to narrate as well as its desire to act as the recipient of narration – both positions being
of immediate relevance to the present study), also emerges at the moment of the human
subject’s initiation into the symbolic. As Lacan has famously put it, “man’s desire is the
desire of the Other” (“The Direction of the Treatment” 264), with “the notion of the Other
with a capital O as being the locus of the deployment of speech” (264). Perhaps one of the
most characteristic (and unequivocal) formulations of Lacan’s theories on desire and its
presuppositions can be traced in the following statement, a linguistic instance of what is
termed a “performative sentence/speech act”, articulated in the affirmative and declarative
modes, and in the present tense, so that the statement gain illocutionary force (Fromkin et al.
215):
What I, Lacan, following the traces of the Freudian excavation, am telling you is that
the subject as such is uncertain because he is divided by the effects of language.
Through the effects of speech, the subject always realizes himself more in the Other,
but he is already pursuing there more than half of himself. He will simply find his
desire ever more divided, pulverized, in the circumscribable metonymy of speech. The
effects of language are always mixed with the fact, which is the basis of the analytic 70
experience, that the subject is subject only from being subjected to the field of the
Other, the subject proceeds from his synchronic subjection in the field of the Other.
(The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 188)
What we have, then, according to the Lacanian schema, is that model of anti-Cartesian
subjectivity according to which the subject (in all its manifestations) is as much determined
by its own divided state as by the world surrounding it and which it inhabits (and is inhabited
by),62 with its equally divided desire functioning as the driving force that dogs the subject’s urge for satisfaction63 on all fronts, both biological and intellectual. However, the “subtle
structures of desire […] must conform to some conceptual model […] in order for our
62 This mode of the subject’s being (and bearing) in the world, through relatedness, is one close to what Donald Davidson terms a “triangular nexus of causal relationships involving the reactions of two (or more) creatures to each other and to shared stimuli in the world that supplies the conditions necessary for the concept of truth to have application” (83). As he puts it, “[t]he ultimate source (not ground) of objectivity is […] intersubjectivity” (83). In Lacanian dialectics, however, the very subject of perception is an inherently divided one (the crucial moment of division is that which takes place during the mirror stage), which is what precludes it in the first place from any sound/reliable perception both of itself and of what lies outside it. Thus, as the subject perceives, it misrecognizes at the very same moment. 63According to Lacan’s translator, Alan Sheridan: Lacan has linked the concept of ‘desire’ with ‘need’ (besoin) and ‘demand’ (demande) in the following way. The human individual sets out with a particular organism, with certain biological needs, which are satisfied by certain objects. What effect does the acquisition of language have on these needs? All speech is demand; it presupposes the Other to whom it is addressed, whose very signifiers it takes over in its formulation. By the same token, that which comes from the Other is treated not so much as a particular satisfaction of a need, but rather as a response to an appeal, a gift, a token of love. There is no adequation between the need and the demand that conveys it; indeed it is the gap between them that constitutes desire, at one particular like the first and absolute like the second. Desire (fundamentally in the singular) is a perpetual effect of symbolic articulation. It is not an appetite: it is essentially eccentric and insatiable. That is why Lacan co-ordinates it not with the object that would seem to satisfy it, but with the object that causes it. (Écrits viii-ix) 71
longings to be knowable” (Clayton 33). Narrative constitutes one such conceptual mode through which desire and its workings become “narratable”, to use Peter Brooks’ term
(Reading for the Plot 85). According to Brooks’ model of “textual erotics”, which, as he
notes, is based on that of Freud and Lacan (Reading for the Plot 37), “[n]arratives both tell of
desire – typically present some form of desire – and arouse and make use of desire as
dynamic of signification” (37). Literary narrative is one, among other sublimating substitutes,
that culture (via the symbolic) provides us with, as recompense for the primordial lost object,
which can only be recaptured in the Real with the advent of death or else through the
momentary intrusions of the Real (as the impossible aspect of representation) into the
symbolic in the various forms of artistic creation.
But how does desire manifest itself in and as literary narrative, particularly in its first-
person version? One of the dominant means is through the object most pertinent to it that is,
through the gaze.64
The notion of the gaze, as that which determines human subjectivity within the scopic
field, has been an influential one in current discussions on representation, because of the way
it relates to notions of seeing and visibility not only in the domain of the visual arts, but also
in that of literary narratives. Since narrating also implies seeing and such terms as “point of
view” and “narrative perspective” are invariably used to confer a visual dimension upon the
act of narration, then the notion of the gaze and how this determines/informs a given
narrative is crucial to any study of literary narrative. Because, as John Berger in his
influential work Ways of Seeing claims, “the relation between what we see and what we know
64 The other three objects as causes of desire are, according to Lacan, the breast, the feces and the voice, which along with the gaze, constitute the four primordial partial objects linked to the small object a, a signifier for that which is for ever lost to the subject after its entry to the symbolic and which is to be perpetually substituted by “belief systems, transference relations, knowledge systems, and so on [all of which] can serve as fillers for endless, bottomless holes of loss that, nonetheless, cough out narcissistic pieces of jouissance” (Ragland, Essays 171). 72
is never settled” (7), my use of the notion of the gaze (as the manifestation of the scopic
drive) subscribes to the Lacanian idea of the gaze as split and divided in relation to the eye (in
much the same way as is the subject itself) within the dialectics of the subject-
object/perceiver-perceived.
As the manifestation of desire and the unconscious the gaze functions as an
intermediary between the subject who sees (or narrates) and that which is visible by
interrupting ordinary (perspectival) vision and thought. This culturally incited desire to see,
which grounds both subjectivity and meaning, is an effect of the subject’s immersion in the
symbolic order (Other), whose desire coincides with the subject’s own desire, and whose primordial, “all-seeing” gaze envelops the subject. “I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides” (Four Fundamental Concepts 72), Lacan tells us,
extending/appropriating Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological theory expounded in
his work on perception65 The Visible and the Invisible. For Lacan, the field of subjectivity in the way the latter is caught between the intersubjectivity of desire (as desire of the Other) and the gaze, with both Other and gaze being external to it. Thus, there is no such thing as a self- certain subject, not only due to its “signifying dependence” (Four Fundamental Concepts
77), but also due to its total exposure (as a “given-to-be-seen” [74]) to the pre-existent gaze of the symbolic order.
65 Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s conception of vision in his work The Visible and the Invisible is an anti- Cartesian one, especially in terms of the assumption that the human subject is in a position to see the world from an external vantage point. Rather, Merleau-Ponty’s model of vision holds that the subject can only see things from a particular position within the world assuming that it is, at the same time, also constituted as an object to be seen. This reversibility in vision posits the subject in its dual capacity as both seer and seen; hence, the split between the eye and the gaze. As Lacan puts it, “Merleau-Ponty points this out, that we are beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world. That which makes us consciousness [the symbolic order, the Other] institutes us by the same token as speculum mundi […]. The spectacle of the world, in this sense, appears to us as all-seeing” (The Four Fundamental Concepts 75). 73
What ensues from the above is that narration, be it that which takes place between
analyst and analysand or that between a first-person narrator and a narratee in literary texts,
as the product of split subjectivity, is inevitably a split discourse also subjected to the
alienating effects of the symbolic order and the signifier. According to Robert Con Davis
“narration, too, operates like a language, is a language, and manifests linguistic operations in various ways. Narration exists, finally within the context of an unconscious ‘discourse’ within the bounds of what Lacan calls the ‘discourse of the Other’” (“Introduction”: Lacan and Narration” 848).
Although one would clearly be wrong in taking for granted the existence of such a thing as a uniform or unified Victorian period as such, Elizabeth Gaskell’s first-person texts,
as products of a specific female Victorian subject, inevitably reflect (wholly or partly) and
are subjected to (or “interpelleated” by, as Althusser would have it) what is euphemistically
called the spirit of the age, or, the ideologies permeating the structures of society before as
well as during the reign of Queen Victoria. “To be a Victorian subject”, as Hillis Miller notes,
“meant to be subjected to specific social, historical and material conditions, including the
economic and technological conditions under which literature was then written, published,
distributed and consumed” (Victorian Subjects vii) and Gaskell both fell victim to and
appropriated those structures. In the process of textual production and writing as a Victorian
desiring subject on Victorian subjects, however, Gaskell (through her narrators) exposes the
Victorian (gendered) subject, for all its inheritance of the celebrated “I” of the Age of
Reason, for what it is: divided and split, never at one with itself, a primordial source of
ambivalence and aggression, a side-effect of the signifier and its vicissitudes, a series of
positionalities and performative acts caught within the confines of its own desiring phantasies
and misrecognitions, always coveting substitutes to replace an irreplaceable primordial lost
object, “our lost/impossible jouissance” (Stavrakakis 53). “[T]he word subject means ‘thrown 74
under’ [and] it names the way the self is always subject to something other than itself,
something beneath it or beyond it”, Hillis Miller observes (Victorian Subjects viii), and
Gaskell’s first-person, self-conscious narrators testify to this by falling prey to their own
divided subjectivity and discourse. In its triple manifestation as a communal, as a voyeuristic
and as a Gothic I/eye, Gaskell’s first-person narration provokes our gaze in a world which is
“all-seeing but not exhibitionistic” (Four Fundamental Concepts 75), in Lacan’s terms.
However, “[w]hen it begins to provoke it [our gaze] the feeling of strangeness begins too”
(75). Narratives, as cultural objects, provoke our gaze, for they function as mirrors which reflect our own split images/subjectivities.
75
CHAPTER TWO
The Communal “I”/Eye: Narrating the Individual and the Community in Cranford’s Heterotopic Utopia
I owned that my pet apprehension was eyes - eyes looking at me, and watching me, glittering out from some dull, flat, wooden surface; and if I dared to go up to my looking-glass when I was panic-stricken, I should certainly turn it round, with its back towards me, for fear of seeing eyes behind me looking out of the darkness.
(Cranford 158)
Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold […]. Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names. Because they destroy “syntax” in advance, not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things […] to “hold together”
(M. Foucault, The Order of Things 379)
76
2.1. Introduction
Cranford (1853) has been known as Elizabeth Gaskell’s humorous, gently ironic, episodic novel of gentility and custom, which depicts the fading way of life of the “Amazons” (C 1), a community of unmarried, elderly ladies and childless widows, whose days are passed in visits, cards and genteel gossip in the margins of a rapidly changing Britain from a rural to an industrial economy. However, the values of Cranford’s community are already outdated and under threat by the inevitable forces of change, when mid-Victorian Elizabeth Gaskell, via her hybrid narrator, Mary Smith, who is both an insider and an outsider of her narrated world, describes them with what has often been termed ironic affection and an eye for the ridiculous.
My reading of Cranford as a first-person community narrative will address the novel’s idiosyncratic narrative form and the ways it generates tensions between the individual and the community as well as between its narrating and narrated subject.
Cranford the text and Cranford the place (whose whimsicality equals that of its narrative form) mutually inform each other through the mediation of Mary Smith, the text’s homodiegetic, communal narrator, who is also one of its characters. As a narrator, Mary
Smith operates in her capacity as an individual, detached observer of her narrated world, as a distinct “I”. As a character, however, she often resorts to the convenient all-inclusiveness
(and submissiveness) of a “we”, through which, she becomes (and speaks as) part of the community in an attempt, as I shall be arguing, to recompense her narrated world for her aggressiveness and rebellion. In other words, Cranford the text seems to operate in a different way from Cranford the place, the former being mainly a site of aggressive tension, self-conflict and uncertainty (as well as a springboard for humorous irony), all of which can be detected in the narrator’s discourse, while the latter a locus of relative certainty, even stagnant conventions. Cranford as a spatial dimension can be read, on the one hand, in terms 77 of what Foucault calls a heterotopia, a regulated community whose entire history is enclosed in one space – “a sort of mixed joint experience” (Of Other Spaces” 24). On the other hand, however, it also gestures towards utopia, a promise of (unreal) wholeness, and thus at the same time towards inevitable alienation and loss.
My aim in this chapter is twofold. Initially, I shall attempt to offer a reading of
Cranford’s narrative technique and notoriously fragmented structure as paradigmatic of a process of splitting, doubling and repetition, a process which can be seen at work both on a thematic and narrative level and which is symptomatic of alienation, trauma and the trope of desire. Desire in Cranford manifests itself as lack emanating from a process of misrecognition and narrative ambivalence similar to that experienced by the human subject during Lacan’s mirror stage. For Lacan, as we have seen, it is during the mirror stage’s discordant operations that the human subject (the “I”) is immersed “in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extend from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality [leading it] to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s mental development” (“The Mirror
Stage” 4). Moreover, it constitutes that decisive moment in the subject’s development when this is thrust “into mediatization through the desire of the other” (5), as it also accounts for the “evident connection between the narcissistic libido and the alienating function of the I, the aggressivity it releases in any relation to the other” (6). This, in turn, is connected to the appearance of the double, because of the imagos it evokes, as Mary Smith’s fear of eyes
(indeed, her own) implies. Thus, desire for and of the other in Cranford – in the sense that
Cranford’s narrator/character desires it both as a text and as a locality as much as both text and locality desire her in both capacities (as narrator and character) in order to exist and acquire meaning – materializes in the narrator’s ambivalent/antithetical relation to it. 78
Notably, there seems to be an asymmetry in the way Cranford the text and Cranford the place are interdependently related to each other through the mediation of Mary Smith the narrator and Mary Smith the character in terms of discursive conventions, ideology and narration. As a narrator (and mediator), Mary Smith systematically adopts a humorous, and definitely, ironic stance, often tinged with aggression, towards her narrated world, something which materializes in her frequent asides (apostrophes) to her narratee. As one of the text’s characters, however, not only does she partake of the very same eccentricities,
“elegant econom[ies]” (C 4) and daily practices of the depicted rural community
(“Cranfordisms” is the term she uses to refer to them)1 that she habitually mocks, she is also
eager to impart their localized significance to an urban, middle-class readership, as if to
release the tension of their negative effect on her by way of narrating them to a third party.
Hence, Cranford’s narrative discordance, in the sense that the narrating “I” is at odds both
with its narrated counterpart (the narrating “I” is far removed from the narrated one, despite
its claims to the contrary by way of its transmutation into a communal “we”) and, even
more, with itself and its narrated world, as I shall be arguing in the second part of this
chapter.
Further on, I shall attempt to show that narrative discordance (and ambivalence) in
Cranford also become manifest in terms of what Foucault refers to in his analysis of the
1 Gaskell often quoted from her own text when it came to talking about her Knutsford relations and acquaintances. She used the term “Cranfordism” in one of her lengthy letters to John Forster in the following way: “Shall I tell you a Cranfordism. An old lady a Mrs Frances Wright said to one of my cousins “I have never been able to spell since I lost my teeth”’ (Letters 290). On another occasion she wrote to Tottie Fox: It’s Sunday and I’ve the comfort of sitting down to write to you in a new gown, and blue ribbons all spick and spun for Xmas – and cheap in the bargain, “Elegant economy” as we say in Cranford – There now I dare say you think I’ve gone crazy but I’m not; but I’ve written a couple of tales about Cranford in Household Words, so you must allow me to quote from myself<…>. (Letters 174) 79 seemingly opposing spatial categories of utopias and heterotopias, which I see as quite similar to Lacan’s mirror stage, in that Cranford’s seemingly utopian qualities of self- reliance, recycled sources and undisturbed mode of existence, all three emanating from its undifferentiated imaginary-symbolic state (just like that of the speaking/narrating subject), actually render it a heterotopic utopia, a locus of subversion and uncertainty just like Mary
Smith’s mirror experience, which is evocative of the Lacanian mirror-stage experience.
According to Foucault:
Between utopias and these quite other spaces, these heterotopias, there might be a
sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a
utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror I see myself there where I am not,
in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there
where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables
me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it’s
also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror exists in reality, where it exerts a sort of
counteraction on the position that I occupy […] it makes this place that I occupy at
the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected
with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be
perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. (“Of Other
Spaces” 24)
With its own “rules and regulations” (C 2), but also with its own version of power relations, as we shall see in the fourth section of this chapter, Cranford’s “otherness” displays the characteristics of a heterotopia, (έτερος/άλλος τόπος) a different space, a kind of neutral zone beyond the dominion of conventional social structures of power and power relations, but at the same time subjected to and dominated by its own intrinsic, conventional values.
Moreover, in Cranford’s “other space” subjectivity, and by extension, the act of narration 80 are seen and mediated as performativity and such categories as class and gender are there only to be subverted, parodied and exposed as culturally constructed signifying systems, which are at once rigid, fluid and arbitrary.
Furthermore, Cranford constitutes a type of heterotopic utopia, or utopian heterotopia, a sort of “joint experience”, as Foucault names it, in which the narrating “I” of
Mary Smith, as both self and other, or, as the “I” and its double, suffers severe psychic loss, fragmentation, ideological conflict and a simultaneous desire and struggle for wholeness and connection. All these eventually render it a locus of ambivalence and unresolved tensions between the “I” (as individualized ego) and the “we” (in the domain of which the
“I” becomes the narrated one), that is, between the individual and the community’s internalized otherness, or, in Lacanian terms, between the “I” and its imagoes. As Lacan notes in his essay “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis”, “[a]mong these imagoes are some that represent the elective vectors of aggressive intentions […]. These are the images of castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body, in short […] the imagoes of the fragmented body” (11), which in the case of
Cranford are coupled both with the image of the fragmented narrating and narrated “I” and that of its fragmented text. As for the “imagoes of the fragmented body”, Cranford’s thematic reservoir literally abounds in scenes/images of castration, mutilation, dismemberment and devouring as well as in surrealist, dream-like images2 of umbrellas as
“sticks in petticoats” (C 2), Alderny “cows dressed in grey flannel” (C 6) and puddings in
the shape of a “lion couchant […] that tickled [the narrator’s] hysterical fancy” (C 187).3
2 As Jenny Uglow aptly observes, “Cranford constantly undercuts solemnity, its humour resting on an upside-down sense of priorities which endow ‘realism’ with the unreality, crazy logic, leaping connections and total divorce between language and meaning later found in Lewis Carroll” (289). 3 In her recent biographical study on Gaskell, Shirley Foster traces (and emphasizes) the autobiographical origins of such surrealist or dream-like images, observing that “Cranford’s real-life 81
2.2. Cranford’s Community Narrative as a Fragmented First-Person Text
String is my foible. My pockets get full of little hanks of it, picked up and twisted together, ready for uses that never come. I am seriously annoyed if anyone cuts the string of a parcel instead of patiently and faithfully undoing it fold by fold. How people can bring themselves to use India-rubber ring, which are a sort of deification of string, as lightly as they do, I cannot imagine. To me an India-rubber ring is a precious treasure. I have one […] that I picked up off the floor nearly six years ago. I have really tried to use it, but my heart failed me, and I could not commit the extravagance. (Cranford 57-58)
Of simple plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call a plot episodic when there is neither probability nor necessity in the sequence of its episodes.
(Aristotle, Poetics 2323)
Over the years, Cranford has lent itself to a number of diverse readings and to some radically divergent interpretations, which have by now dispelled the early (somewhat
basis is verified by the attested actuality of events such as the cow wearing a flannel waistcoat and drawers […] the cat who swallowed the lace […] and the skilful reproduction of the vernacular itself also give strong proof of personal knowledge” (Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life 98).
82 simplistic) notion of the novel as a charmingly rural, nostalgic idyll.4 As Margaret Reeves observes, “not only is there no critical consensus on this text, but critics who are poles apart in ideological terms have no difficulty finding support in the text for their respective political positions” (390). Thus, it has often been read by gender-oriented criticism (and not only) as a female Utopia, “a fantasy of the social and political empowerment of women […] a utopia of the superfluous”, (Dolin 195) celebrating its triumph over male mentality.
Rowena Fowler, for instance, commends the novel for its celebration of “a society of female survivors” (717) in which men are banished into the margins (Fowler 719) and Nina
Auerbach reads it as the depiction of a durable, welcoming, co-operative female community, which “defeats the patriarchal warrior world that proclaims itself the real one”
(Communities of Women 87). Also, Rae Rosenthal sees Cranford as a feminine utopia that endorses communal practices, co-operation and the harmonious coexistence of individuals
(74-75), despite its vulnerability to the utilitarian/capitalist world that surrounds it. Earlier critics such as Martin Dodsworth and Patricia Wolfe, on the other hand, besides drawing attention to its feminist undertones, have also emphasized the novel’s fragmented form and
4 See, for instance, John Kucich’s work The Power Of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction, where he claims that “far from being a nostalgic glance at a provincial backwater, Cranford reaffirms a purely female, contemporary cultural authority, based on morally sophisticated feminine affiliations with misrepresentation, that it inserts into the public arena” (153). He also argues that “Cranford is hardly a pious, wistful idyll about the superiority of compassion to competition. Rather, it is a fable of middle-class women’s efforts to activate threatening energies latent in middle- class principles of cultural authority, without fully unleashing their disruptive potential” (156). Similarly, Margaret Case-Croskery notes that “by dubbing Cranford ‘charming’, early critics dispensed with the necessity for explaining how it is that Cranford delights. Since charm dissolves under scrutiny, charming works and charming women neither deserve nor reward critical attention; in fact they are better appreciated without it” (200). Both Kucich and Croskery attempt to dispel the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics’ appreciation of Cranford in terms of the novel’s appeal based more on its charm rather than on its serious artistic status, a charm seen by earlier critics as compensating the reader for its condemnable lack of proper plot. 83 problematic structure. The former refers to it as “a series of disconnected lavender-and-lace sketches” (Dodsworth 136), describing it as divided into two sections of unequal strength, the first one dealing with captain Brown’s invasion of Cranford’s feminine society, his
“accidental” death standing for a feminine rejection of the male’s role in the community and the second representing an act of expiation on the part of the Amazons for their guilt, through the reintroduction of men into their society. The latter sees the novel as divided between two parts, “each dominated by one of the Jenkyns sisters who directs the narrative by force of her unique personality”, concluding that “the movement of Cranford demonstrates the limitless strength of the female when she overcomes her fear of male domination by concentrating her whole being on giving tenderness and understanding to mankind” (Wolfe 162). Similarly, Edgar Wright in Mrs Gaskell: The Basis for Critical
Reassessment notes that “it is about Miss Matty that the episodes develop until they have finally limned her history and character in a narrative that accumulates as it proceeds”
(104). More recently, a number of critics have offered readings of Cranford, which focus not so much on its thematic, but rather on its cultural significance and narrative potential, with Borislav Knezevic viewing it as an “amateur reporter’s [ethnographic] exercise in cultural comparison” (407) and Hilary Schor’s reading of the text “as a woman writer’s experiment with narrative” (87), thus setting the mode for some really innovative readings of this most widely read of Gaskell’s works.
Over the last couple of years, Cranford’s specificity has been rediscovered by a number of critics also as part of its ecological propositions of recycling and reusing, instead of ostentatiously consuming resources. Jill Rappaport, for instance, reads Cranford as
“Gaskell’s conservation of sympathetic feeling in a closed community [as] analogous to the conservation of energy that was being hypothesized by her contemporaries” (97) claiming that by “using principles of sympathetic and economic conservation, Cranford’s system of 84 exchange reworks material limitations […] [and treats] sympathetic exchange in a sustained manner and on an expanded scale, writing women’s charity in terms of sympathy and sisterhood rather than coin” (95). Finally, Cranford’s colonial undertones and subtext have not passed unnoticed by critics like Jeffrey Cass, for whom Gaskell’s use of “Cranford’s quaintness mask[s] the nearly invisible disintegration of its ideological conservatism as well as the thorough dismantling of its correlative institutions and traditions by forces from the outside” (418). Its “Cranfordisms”, he further notes, “must be repeatedly turned into the signs of a national culture, while the very act of narrative performance interpellates a growing number of national subjects” (Cass 418).
The unusually loose, and, for this reason, potentially problematic (especially by nineteenth-century novelistic standards), structure of Cranford or, as many Gaskell scholars have liked to put it, its “lack of unity”,5 has, of course, been much discussed amidst an ever
growing interest in Gaskell scholarship. However, Cranford, as is well known, did not
initially appear as a full-length work and was never meant, as Gaskell herself admitted,6 to become one in the first place, had it not been for Dickens’s insistence upon her adding more numbers to the first one she submitted on the one hand, and Gaskell’s own developing professionalism, on the other. Thus, Cranford’s collection of texts, like the majority of
Victorian prose works was, as Hillis Miller notes, subject to those “physical, social and economic conditions of the printing and distribution of Victorian books, that is, the breaking
5 As early as 1952, A. B. Hopkins in her work Elizabeth Gaskell: Her Life and Work endorsed the currently prevalent idea of Cranford being simultaneously idiosyncratic, fragmented and charming, stating that “Cranford is practically structureless; that is part of its charm” (108). Also, almost a decade later Margaret Tarratt emphasized the fact that “Cranford presents something of a problem for the critic since it is not clear whether it has a ‘structure’ at all [since] it is not apparent whether it is to be read as a realistic novel or as a series of autobiographical anecdotes about Knutsford, thinly veiled in the garb of fiction” (152). 6 She wrote to John Ruskin: “The beginning of ‘Cranford’ was one paper in ‘Household Words’; and I never meant to write more, so killed Captain Brown very much against my will” (Letters 748). 85 of the text into numbered or titled parts, books or chapters, and publication in parts either separately or with other material in a periodical” (“Line” 287), which by definition interrupted linearity in the strict sense of the term.
Cranford first appeared in serial form between December 1851 and May 1853 in
Dickens’s Household Words, following the tradition and conventions of the periodical genre so popular at the time.7 One might assume that from a historical perspective,
Cranford’s initial mode of composition and publication8 alone would be enough to account
7 Cranford’s publishing history is well known. It began as a short piece entitled “The Last Generation in England” subsequently appearing in the American (Philadelphia) Sartain’s Union Magazine in July 1849 and continued with “Mr Harrison’s Confessions” published in The Ladies Companion between February and April 1851. Then it started being published irregularly as a series of sketches with the first one, “Our Society at Cranford”, appearing in Charles Dickens’s Household Words on 13th December 1951. Over the years, Cranford has attracted readers through almost two hundred editions and has also appeared in translation into a number of languages. During the years 1899-1910, that is, during its peak season, the novel was published seventy five times with new editions seeing the light of publication every year. For a detailed account of Cranford’s original conception and publication see Hilary Schor’s Scheherezade in the Market Place: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel, where, among others, she emphasizes the relation between the emergence of the railways, whose rapid expansion established fast transport, and the subsequent (hastier) modes of publication, which followed suit in order to match the changing pace/rhythms of life. For Schor, part of Cranford’s significance lies in the fact that “change in this novel is the world of the railways, and the railways mark not only a change in the ways of life but a change in ways of publication as well. In the 1850s, novels became more plentiful precisely because they were being read on the move […] as the trains revolutionalized movement” (85). 8 Writing for serial publication in the Victorian period, as is well known, did not really differ much from writing by commission in that a writer would not only have to work under pressure, but also cater for the desires and expectations of a very specific reading audience as these were moulded and shaped by the dominant cultural stereotypes of the time as well as by the dictates of the journal editors themselves, who would often hurry their contributors (as Dickens often did with Gaskell) to produce the next number/instalment of a particular work within strict time limits. “O what a lazy woman you are, and where IS that article!” (qtd. in Sanders 48), Dickens wrote to Gaskell in exasperation, when she was late submitting copy, because of her preoccupation with the writing of Ruth. Editorial interference was also instrumental in shaping the final (printed) version of a text and 86 for its loose structure and lack of traditional plot. This remains so, despite the strength of the text’s ever present, first-person narrator/character, Mary Smith, whose key role in the narrative constitutes the most important, if not the only, unifying principle of the work, a role which has received considerable attention by recent criticism. The role of Cranford’s narrator is of primary interest to the present study and shall be duly discussed in relation to the text’s fragmented form, but first I would like to look at Gaskell’s famous letter of advice to a young novelist. This was a lengthy letter written in 1859 and addressed to Herbert
Grey,9 an aspiring novelist and a contemporary of hers, where Elizabeth Gaskell exposed
her personal views on what she considered to be exemplary novel writing in response to the
novice novelist’s request for advice, as someone “who has gone before on the path [he is]
following”:
Cranford is clearly a case in point with Dickens intervening in the text not only by providing the title for the first (“Our Society at Cranford”) and second (“A Love Affair at Cranford”) instalments of Cranford, but also by replacing Gaskell’s own crucial reference to his own Pickwick Papers for another title, namely, “Hood’s” Poems. Trying to pre-empt an explosive response on Gaskell’s part, he wrote to her shortly after the substitution: Any recollection of me from your pen cannot (as I think you know) be otherwise than truly gratifying to me; but with my name on every page of Household Words, there would be – or at least I should feel – an impropriety in so mentioning myself. I was particular, in changing the author, to make it “Hood’s Poems” in the most important place – I mean where the captain is killed – and I hope and trust that the substitution will not be any serious drawback to the paper in any eyes but yours. I would do anything rather than cause you a minute’s vexation arising out of what has given me so much pleasure, and I sincerely beseech you to think better of it, and not to fancy that any shade has been thrown on your charming writing […]. As to future work, I do assure you that you cannot write too much for Household Words and have never written half enough. I receive you, ever (if Mr Gaskell will allow me to say so) with open arms. (Dickens qtd. in Schor 93) 9 As J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard note, “Herbert Grey’s novel The Three Paths was published in 2 volumes by Hurst in 1859”( The Letters of Mrs Gaskell 540n). 87
Your plot in The Three Paths is very poor; you have not thought enough about it, –
simply used it s a medium. The plot must grow, and culminate in a crisis; not a
character must be introduced who does not conduce to this growth & progress of
events. The plot is like the anatomical drawing of an artist; he must have an idea of
his skeleton, before he can clothe it with muscle & flesh, much more before he can
drape it. Study hard at your plot […] don’t intrude yourself into your description […]
But your style seemed to me good. It was the want of plot,--& the too great dwelling
on feelings […] that appeared to me the prevalent faults of your book. (Letters 541-
44)
By this time, Gaskell had already published Cranford (episodic in structure and form itself) as a whole in 1853, which, though hardly qualifying as a novel, because of its loosely connected episodes, was soon to become one of her best selling works. However, upon reading Gaskell’s advice to the aspiring novelist Herbert Grey, one cannot help wondering about her own fragmented technique in Cranford, a technique that has produced what might be called a string-tied text, one which lacks the smooth, uninterrupted linearity of the classic mid-nineteenth century novel. This is a text, in other words, whose narrative logic defies the conventions of the novelistic genre, those same ones that she champions in her critique of
Herbert Grey’s work. Moreover, if Herbert Grey’s “too great dwelling on feelings”, of which she is rather critical, appears to be a flaw that renders his text problematic, then
Gaskell seems to be blind to her narrator’s “too great dwelling on feelings” in Cranford, which should not pass unnoticed as part of the driving force behind her incentive to write
(somewhat compulsively) about this place.10 It is in Cranford, of all her works, that Gaskell
10 It has been invariably suggested by Gaskell biographers that Cranford apparently represents fictionally the small provincial town of Knutsford, near Manchester, where Gaskell spent part of her infanthood (she was taken there at the age of eighteenth months, after the death of her mother, Elizabeth Stevenson), her childhood, her adolescence and her early adulthood. There, she was 88 seems to violate her own self-prescribed, Aristotelian standards of what constitutes proper narrative, on the one hand, and to succumb to emotional involvement, on the other, through her narrator’s, Mary Smith’s, psychic investment in the narrating process. Thus, contrary to her officially expressed stance towards novel writing, as well as contrary to her own practice as regards her other works, instead of the widespread, much-acclaimed climactic plot, which entails movement and teleology, in Cranford Gaskell seems to be endorsing an anti-narrative model which is mainly one of stasis and inertia, since it partakes of the episodic and the anecdotal, but which, paradoxically, gives one the impression that it aspires to plot and teleology all the same.11
brought up by her widowed maternal aunt Hannah Lumb (“aunt Lumb”), of whom she remained extremely fond throughout her life. According to Shirley Foster, it was Aunt Lumb and the other unmarried aunts in Knutsford who gave her a sense of the possibilities of female solidarity and community – a sense which may have been partly responsible for her commitment as an adult to helping women, both socially and professionally (Elizabeth Gaskell 10). However, like all interpersonal relationships, especially those formed in the early stages of life, Gaskell’s relationship with and psychic investment in her Knutsford relatives suffered its own ambivalences, psychic losses and frustrations, which in Cranford materialize in Mary Smith’s ambivalent relationship with the ladies of Cranford. 11 This is evocative of the narrative model Peter Brooks introduces in Reading for the Plot. He states: An event gains meaning by its repetition, which is both the recall of an earlier moment and a variation of it: the concept of repetition hovers ambiguously between the idea of reproduction and that of change, forward and backward movement […]. Repetitions create a return in the text, a doubling back. We cannot say whether this return is a return to or a return of : for instance, a return to origins or a return of the repressed. Repetition through this ambiguity appears to suspend temporal process, or rather, to subject it to an indeterminate shuttling or oscillation that binds different moments together as a middle that might run forward or back. This inescapable middle is suggestive of the demonic: repetition and return are perverse and difficult, interrupting simple movement forward. (99-100) 89
Although it has been suggested that Cranford is a string-tied narrative rather than a full-circle one, due to its episodic form and lack of a central, unifying principle, each one of its episodes, one might argue, constitutes a full-circle, or, in the narrator’s own terms, an
“India-rubber ring” (C 58) narrative in its own right, retaining, at the same time, some form of central narrative unity with the rest of the episodes through its communal narrator and partial thematic affinity. Cranford’s collection of stories could be visualized, then, more in terms of a series of circular narratives (each one with a beginning, middle and end) string- tied together by means of repetitive departures from and returns to the scene of its writing, rather than as a knot-free text simply resembling the image of a fragmented line. “For my own part, I had vibrated all my life between Drumble and Cranford” (C 219) the narrator,
Mary Smith, emphatically claims, a statement into which the founding moment of her narrative crystallizes, clearly implying both her literal departures from and returns to the land of Cranford and to her text as well. With each departure a narrative cycle closes for a new one to be opened upon her subsequent return.
Exploring the concept of narrative line as it applies to narratives in general, Hillis
Miller emphasizes its repetitive fashion, calling into question the notion of uninterrupted narrative linearity and replacing it with that of the inherently knotted narrative. According to Miller, “[t]he image of the line […] cannot be detached from the problem of repetition.
Repetition might be defined as anything that happens to the line to trouble its straightforward linearity: returnings, knottings, recrossings, crinklings to and fro, suspensions, interruptions” (“Line” 288).12
12 Hillis Miller’s further elaboration on the concept of the narrative function of the line emphasizes the fact that by its very nature the praxis of writing resists any notion of perfect, unmediated linearity, by virtue of its repetitive character, which is in turn the result of the repetitive character of the alphabetical symbols themselves as well as the result of the interruptions “in the flow of ink on the blank page, so that the line is both a thread and a labyrinth, simultaneously moving forwards and 90
From a psychoanalytic perspective, especially that pertaining to trauma theory, the notions of repetition and return are crucial to how traumatic memories and traumatic material surface in the sublimated domain of art in general, and in that of narrative in particular, not least because trauma is first and foremost what the psychoanalytic practice seeks to unearth from the human unconscious. As Ellie Ragland, echoing Lacan, observes:
What is repressed in the real – the order of trauma, of the unsayable, unspeakable,
the impossible – will return in the symbolic order of language. A trauma, in other
words will not just disappear. It cannot simply be forgotten. Not only will it remain
recorded in the real as a limit to memory; it will reappear as a symptomatic enigma
which opens onto a certain anxiety […] [whose] effects have remained inscribed as
an unconscious system of knowledge which appears in conscious life as a concrete
insistence, whose characteristic modes are repetition, passion, strong affect, or a
suffering that one cannot simply and easily talk away or talk through. Trauma, in
Lacan’s estimation, is […] the cause of doubt. (“The Psychical Nature of Trauma”)
Cranford’s discordant narrative and fragmented form, like the fragmented – full of twists and turns – narrative of the analysand in the psychoanalytic dialogue, has much to do with traumatic material, which manifests itself in the process of narration steeped in doubt and ambivalence, as we shall see.
backwards and incessantly begging for new nuances of meaning” (“Line” 286). To this effect, he further notes: Linear terminology describing narrative tends to organize itself into links, chains, strands, figures, configurations, each covering one of the topographical regions […] basic to the problematic of realist fiction: time, character, the narrator, and so on. To identify line terminology used for stories, bit of string by bit of string, will be to cover the whole ground, according to the paradox of Ariadne’s thread. The thread maps the whole labyrinth, rather than providing a single track to its centre and back out. The thread is the labyrinth and at the same time it is a repetition of the labyrinth. (290). 91
Alternatively, Cranford’s knotted linearity and lack of formal cohesion could partly be attributed to the fact that it could be classified as a typical nineteenth-century “narrative of community”, since it displays distinctive characteristics of this genre. In her extensive study of the genre, Sandra Zagarell identifies it as follows:
In the nineteenth century, narrative of community’s formal elements reflected its
commitment to rendering the local life of community to readers who lived in a world
the authors thought fragmented, rationalized, and individualistic. Narratives of
community ignore linear development or chronological sequence and remain in one
geographical place. Rather than being constructed around conflict and progress, as
novels usually are, narratives of community are rooted in process. They tend to be
episodic, built primarily around the continuous small-scale negotiations and daily
procedures through which communities sustain themselves […]. Finally, narratives
of community represent the contrast between community life and the modern world
directly through participant observer narrators, and these narrators typically seek to
diminish this distance in the process of giving voice to it. (503)13
One could extend Zagarell’s observation further by noting that in being rooted in
place but ignorant of temporal sequence, often conflating past and present, community
narratives display a logic of their own, which resembles more the dream/unconscious world
rather than the conscious one, since in the unconscious, the past is in the present, as it is in
the community. It is partly along these lines that Cranford’s depiction of an almost all-
female community operates, in the sense that part of the community’s peculiarity lies in its
13 Zagarell also notes that writers working within the tradition of the narrative of community “take as their subject the life of a community […] and portray the minute and quite ordinary processes through which the community maintains itself as an entity. The self exists here as part of the interdependent network of the community rather than as an individualistic unit […]. Narrative of community thus represents a coherent response to the social, economic, cultural, and demographic changes caused by industrialism, urbanization, and the spread of capitalism. (499) 92 simultaneous defiance of and adherence to its era’s perceptional modes of temporality, though I would argue that its difference from other narratives of community14 and its main
(if not the only one) unifying principle, also lies in the fact that the text is primarily built
upon its narrator’s self-conflict and division, for in the process of narrating her dealings
with Cranford the narrator cannot but narrate her own self as well. In the opening scene of
the novel the narrator sets the tone of her narrative in exactly those terms that Zagarell
refers to in her study. However, it is her ironic tone that differentiates the case of Cranford
from other, purer examples of the genre.15
Cranford’s “want of plot” to use Gaskell’s own terms, its episodic structure and
formal lack of cohesion, but, also its simultaneous evocation of traditional plot and narrative
14 Although, as Zagarell argues, community narratives did not actually emerge as “a full-fledged genre” (500) until the first half of the nineteenth century, such works as Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (London 1800), “which introduced into fiction the use of the vernacular as a metonomy for a folk culture, and Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1824-32), which adapted […] Washington Irving’s peripatetic “alienated observer” narrator with an empathetic woman deeply involved in her own village” (500-501), qualify as precursors to the genre proper, as it was to be practised by later writers such as George Eliot, Gaskell and in the United States, by Harriet Beecher Stow and others. 15 Mary’s ironic stance actually informs the text from its very first pages: In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the neighbouring commercial town of Drumble [….]. For keeping the trim gardens full of choice flowers without a weed to speck them; for frightening away little boys who look wistfully at the said flowers through the railings; […] for deciding all questions of literature and politics without troubling themselves with unnecessary reasons or arguments; for obtaining clear and correct knowledge of everybody’s affairs in the parish [...] for kindness (somewhat dictatorial) to the poor, and real good offices to each other when they are in distress, the ladies of Cranford are quite sufficient. “A man”, as one of them observed to me once, “is so much in the way in the house!” (1) 93 unity, via its narrator, curiously enough, recall one of those crucial moments in Mary
Smith’s textual presence, where in a distinctly confessional tone she admits that string is her foible, her “own individual economy […] little hanks of it picked up and twisted together”
(C 58), with string obviously being a metaphor both for Cranford’s collection of embedded narratives and for Gaskell’s own fragmented technique.16 At the same time, the narrator
almost immediately contradicts herself by declaring that she is “seriously annoyed if anyone
16 In a recent article, Lorna Huett draws an interesting parallel between the collective and heterotopic nature of Cranford’s text and its subsequent serial publication in Dickens’s equally collective Household Words by making detailed reference to their common periodical frame and “intellectual proximity” and by viewing them both in the context of London’s Great Exhibition. She writes: “Cranford is on one level a novel about collections, whether of stories, life-histories, letters, or old clothes unfashionable elsewhere. Household Words, like all journals, is of course itself a collection, consisting of an aggregation of work by various authors in differing styles and genres” (34). As both Cranford and Household Words are preoccupied with collections, “small fragments and opportunities” as well as by anxiety about commodity culture, they have often been linked to the famous Great Exhibition which officially opened its Crystal Palace (“part factory, part museum, part theatre and part department store” [Huett 34]) gates in Hyde Park on May 1st 1851, almost a year after Household Words had begun publication, with an impressive collection (often criticized for its commercially ostentatious character) of heterogeneous exhibits, which was received with mixed feelings by contemporary spectators. Gaskell visited the Exhibition three times as she admitted in a letter to her sister in-law, Anne Robson, but declared herself no ardent admirer of its “icons of commodity culture” (Richards 7). She wrote: “Of course we did the Exhibition. I went 3 times, & should never care to go again; but then I’m not scientific nor mechanical” (Letters 159). See also, Tim Dolin’s article, “Cranford and the Victorian Collection”, where he reads Cranford “as a collection of anecdotes printed on cards and bundled together” (193) as part of the Victorian practice (and vogue) of keeping collections of every sort as part of a national obsession with “aggregation – organizing individual things into groups of things” (180). He extends this observation to the narrative technique of the novel, arguing that “Cranford’s narrative form, loosely episodic, is reminiscent less of a conventional Victorian novel than a woman’s collection [of stories]” (193). Finally, in her recent essay “Craft, Authorial Anxiety, and ‘The Cranford Papers’”, Talia Schaffer reads Gaskell’s text in the context of the “Victorian domestic handicraft movement begun at the end of the eighteenth century” (222), highlighting Cranford’s “problems of narratorial reliability and authorial anxiety” (222) as these result from its narrative affinity with domestic handicrafts. 94 cuts the string of a parcel instead of patiently and faithfully undoing it fold by fold” (57), a declaration steeped in ambivalence, since it refutes her very own narrative politics of fragmentation by endorsing, though only theoretically, once again, the Aristotelian model proper. Thus, Mary Smith’s obsession with string in Cranford becomes a trope of communication and psychic investment, but also an indication of what object-relations theorist Donald Winnicott calls a “denial of separation” from Cranford’s maternal space.
String can be looked upon as an extension of all other techniques of communication.
String joins, just as it also helps in the wrapping up of objects and in the holding of
un-integrated material. In this respect string has a symbolic meaning for everyone.
An exaggeration of the use of string can easily belong to the beginnings of a sense of
insecurity or the idea of a lack of communication […]. As a denial of separation
string becomes a thing in itself, something that has dangerous properties and must
needs be mastered. (19)
For object relations theorists like Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott human subjectivity is mediated by phantasy objects, like the breast, which the human subject identifies with and internalizes at a very early stage of life, in infanthood. “It is these two processes of identification and internalization”, as Ruth Parkin-Gounelas explains, “which form the basis of object choice in later life” (Literature and Psychoanalysis 30), and which seem to be at work here, for the Cranford “Amazons”, as the appellation connotes, like their mythical counterparts, are deprived of the all-giving breast that would satisfy the young narrator by giving back to her a whole and fulfilling image of herself. This might explain
Mary Smith’s stance of frustration and fragmentation, her narration of Cranford’s “small fragments and opportunities” (C 21), her desire for attachment and communication, but, at the same time, her aggression towards Cranford in her attempt to assert her own difference from its narrated world. 95
It is Gaskell’s employment of a very specific type of narrator, a “communal
narrator”, as Susan Lanser has termed it, but at the same time, a very self-absorbed and self-
conscious one,17 along with her narrative tactics of ambivalence, which further underscore
Cranford’s tactics of fragmentation. From a narratological point of view, the term
“communal narrator” refers, according to Susan Lanser, to that narrative practice in which
“narrative authority is invested in a definable community textually inscribed either through multiple, mutually authorizing voices or through the voice of a single individual who is authorized by the community” (Fictions of Authority 21).18 In Cranford, Mary Smith’s narrative agency becomes manifest as two separate, but mutually constitutive fragments, as both an “I” and a “we” (which are used interchangeably), thus claiming familiarity with two
17 Other critics have noted the discordance of narrative strategies in Cranford. For example, in her reading of Cranford Hilary Schor has observed that “the novel plays with ‘transient examples’ and ‘knotted’ stories” with its narrator being “equally hard to read” (86). She further comments that “[a]t times she [Mary Smith] is very much the removed ethnographer, trying to read (in the sense of construct a reading of); at other times, she seems the daughter of Cranford, not only telling stories she has heard others tell but describing the people she has known telling them” in an attempt “to tell the story of Cranford (the story of its stories)”, which is what “make[s] Cranford a divided and deeply self-conscious text, aware of itself as a document” (Schor 86-87). Also, Margaret Case- Croskery in her critical reappraisal of Cranford argues, following Peter Brooks’s model of narrative, that “this novel’s charm presents something of a critical challenge to our current understanding of narrative as something that mimics the compulsions of desire [...] [however], it compels without plot and charms without seduction [by utilizing] a subtly different narrative structure – one synonymous with sympathy rather than plot” (198-99). 18 In Fictions of Authority Lanser considers the mode of communal voice to be a “category of underdeveloped possibilities” (21) within the narratological paradigm, one that in her analysis counterbalances the individualist character of authorial and personal narrative voices, and is primarily a narrative strategy adopted by women authors. She also contends that “[u]nlike authorial and personal voices, the communal mode seems to be primarily a phenomenon of marginal or suppressed communities […] [one she] has not observed in fiction by white, ruling-class men perhaps because such an ‘I’ is already in some sense speaking with the authority of an [already] hegemonic ‘we’” (21). In my reading of Cranford, however, I contend that Mary Smith’s communal practices are there to foreground the significance of the individual ego rather than to counteract it. 96 different types of discourse, which could be associated with the urban and the rural element respectively, revealing at the same time a strong ambivalence towards both.
The resulting text seems to be one that, as Alyson J. Kiesel suggests, “disguises processes of incomprehensible (either for Mary or for the reader) development as repetition” (1012) and which accounts for the appearance of the double, as we shall see.
Furthermore, both its occasional autodiegetic mode of narration and the narrator’s frequent allusions to and meta-narrative comments upon its status as a text render Cranford a self- reflexive, in Linda Hutcheon’s terms, “narcissistic narrative”, whose mocking tone and humorous attitude both towards its depicted world and its own textuality and self- referentiality seem to question the very notion of fiction and its power of representation. It is characteristic, for instance, that Mary Smith draws our attention both to the present of narration and to the fact that her text is nothing but a shaky linguistic construct, whose signifying properties are in danger of collapsing if, for some reason, spelling and grammar are improperly employed. Thus, on recalling her own reaction to the news of Lady
Glenmire and Dr Hoggin’s imminent marriage, Mary notes:
Miss Pole herself was breathless with astonishment when she came to tell us of the
astounding piece of news. But I must recover myself; the contemplation of it, even at
this distance of time, has taken away my breath and my grammar, and unless I
subdue my emotion, my spelling will go too. (C 160)
At the same time, Cranford’s pervasive sense of humour on the level of narration, as well as the numerous scenes of practical joking, ridicule and gender drag it displays on a thematic level, along with its subversive tone and strong surrealist elements, combine to endow it with a dream-like quality (the result of the complicated operations of the unconscious) and give it a further twist. Consequently, Cranford’s predominantly female, 97 middle-class19 world is not only preoccupied (rather narcissistically) with the ritualistic observation of its own “rules and regulations” (C 2) and its “elegant economy” (C 4), which
is the result of an obsessional adherence to “fragments and small opportunities”, but is also
replete with an array of absurd images of devouring/engulfment and incorporation,
dismemberment and disfigurement, castration and attachment to fetish objects. Such are the
cases of one of Wombwell’s (the gaping well of the womb) lions that “ate [devoured] a little
child’s arm” (C114), the headless lady of Darkness Lane, the cat that devoured Mrs.
Forrester’s fine lace while the latter was left to soak in a bowl of cream and Captain
Brown’s being run over (and thus dismembered and mutilated) by a train while engrossed in
reading (metaphorically, devouring with relish) the newest number of Dickens’s Pickwick
Papers.20 There is also Mary’s persistent fear, though in essence her covert aggression
19 Although, as Mary Smith emphasizes, “gentlemen were scarce, and almost unheard of in the ‘genteel society’ of Cranford, they or their counterparts – handsome young men – abounded in the lower classes” (C 34), an observation that seems to validate the notion of the essentially bourgeois origin and orientation of the Victorian novel in general and of Cranford in particular. As Vineta Colby argues, “[i]ts values, its subjects and its principal characters are drawn from middle-class life […] deal[ing] almost exclusively with human relationships within small social communities […] and as it draws its subjects mainly from the daily life and work of ordinary people […] adjusting to reality, learning to conform to the conventions of established society” (4). In “The Last Generation in England”, Cranford’s precursor, Gaskell provided, indeed, not only the actual context of what was later to become Cranford’s character reservoir, but also a meticulous account of the synthesis of the local population of her native Knutsford on which the literary Cranford was modelled: The town in which I once resided is situated in a district inhabited by large landed proprietors of very old family. The daughters of these families, if unmarried, retired to live on their annuities, and gave the tone to the society there; […] Then there were the widows of the cadets of these same families; […] Then came the professional men and their wives […] former housekeepers […] [and finally] the respectable poor. (“The Last Generation in England”) 20 Gaskell’s literary allusions to Dickens, both direct and indirect, recur frequently in Cranford. As Hilary Schor notes, “Cranford (both the novel and its characters) connects Dickens with haste and urgency, [in that] in the climactic scene of the first chapter, Captain Brown himself is run over by 98 towards Miss Matty, which prevents the latter from disfiguring herself by wearing a much coveted sea-green turban (which she never gets to have, anyway, thanks to Mary’s intentional failure to get one for her), as well as the great array of hats (often comically worn one on top of the other) and ornamental, finely-wrought brooches that the ladies passionately display at the slightest opportunity:
The expenditure on dress in Cranford was principally in that one article referred to.
If the heads were buried in smart new caps, the ladies were like ostriches, and cared
not what became of their bodies. Old gowns, white and venerable collars, any
number of brooches, up and down and everywhere (some with dogs’ eyes painted on
them; some that were like small picture-frames with mausoleums and weeping-
willows neatly executed in hair inside) […] old brooches for a permanent ornament,
and new caps to suit the fashion of the day […]. I counted seven brooches on Miss
Pole’s dress. Two were fixed negligently in her cap […] one fastened her net
neckerchief; one her collar; one ornamented the front of her gown, midway between
her throat and waist; and another adorned the point of her stomacher. Where the
seventh was I have forgotten, but it was somewhere about her, I am sure. (C105)
that most Dickensian of modern machines, the railroad that had run down Mr Carker in Dombey and Son a few years before Gaskell wrote Cranford” (Scheherezade in the Marketplace 94). According to Alan Shelston, “Captain Brown’s railway accident in Cranford written some ten years earlier [than the first railway made its appearance in Knutsford] embodies an element of prophecy”, for as he observes, because “Gaskell […] wrote almost all her fiction when not only Britain but the continental countries as well were developing their railway systems – for her, perhaps more than for any other author of her period, the railway was a natural point of reference” (“Opportunity and Anxiety” 93). Moreover, Gaskell’s evocation of Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (also serialized in monthly numbers between April 1836 and November 1837) was in all probability far from being randomly chosen, since its structure, like that of Cranford, is episodic and without proper plot, with Mary Smith functioning as Samuel Pickwick’s northern counterpart. She is the communal narrator of a northern small town in the same way as Pickwick sets out to explore a number of small towns in southern England. 99
All such extravagances further “tickle [Mary Smith’s] hysterical fancy” (C 187), which manifests itself throughout the text in her attempts to articulate her ambivalent feelings of attachment to and alienation from Cranford’s community.
2.3. Mary Smith’s Duplicitous Strategies: The Narrator at Odds with her Text.
In addition to the problems arising from the novel’s fragmented narrative form, Gaskell’s
(seemingly) innocent, “nostalgic idyll of rural life”, as it has so often been called, presents more of a challenge to the critic than many other of her seemingly “more serious” writings also for its subversive character, multi-layered signification as well as for its thematic and narrative blind spots beneath its maidenly surface. To this effect, Jenny Uglow, Gaskell’s most influential biographer, observes:
The overall structure of the story-cycle has a similar backwards-forwards
movement, and this is particularly interesting since it was in no sense planned. The
first half of the book reveals a scouring of the past that modern psychoanalysts might
recognize as having a pattern resembling that of therapy, a process of reaching back
to unspoken trauma and then to childhood that enables the subject, in this case Matty
Jenkyns, to come to terms with hidden pain and look to the future (293).21
Indeed, we could extend Uglow’s observation about the character of Matty Jenkyns mainly
to the novel’s narrator, whose discourse is, in my view, what constitutes the text’s main
21 Gaskell considered Cranford a favourite among her own books, a text she would revisit (in the same way she would literally revisit provincial Knutsford itself during periods of Manchester- generated anxiety and stress) throughout her life. In a letter addressed to Anne Shaen in November 1851 Gaskell wrote: “I am so much better for Knutsford - partly air, partly quiet and partly being by myself a good piece of every day which is I am sure so essential to my health that I am going to persevere and enforce it here” (Letters 168). Also, shortly before her death, in 1865, she wrote to John Ruskin responding to his own expressed praise of Cranford: “I’m so glad you like it. It is the only one of my own books that I can read again; – but whenever I’m ailing or ill, I take ‘Cranford’ and – I was going to say, enjoy it! (but that would not be pretty!) laugh over it again!” (Letters 747) 100 source of fragmentation due to unspoken (but subtly present) trauma, materializing through her systematically ambivalent narrative strategies, which tell by showing and show by telling in the form of linguistic symptoms and by means of a fragmented narrative. As Roy
Schafer tells us in “Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue”, during the analytic session
“people do more than tell: like authors, they show. And there is no hard-and-fast line between telling and showing, either in literary narrative or in psychoanalysis” (34). This, I believe, is the way things signify in this text also because the narrator’s voice constitutes not only a site of psychic investment, but also of psychic conflict and ideological tension made visible in her textual practices, which are those of an “I” at odds both with the community it seeks to represent and with itself, as we shall see now.
Mary Smith’s introduction of her narratee to Cranford’s signifying practices and codes of communication and behaviour materializes in a characteristically ambiguous way.
Mary both sides with and differentiates herself from Cranford’s eccentric regime by presenting her female protagonists as a select group of charming “angels with a twist”
(Langland 113), on the one hand, and by apostrophizing her London narratee on the other:
Although the ladies of Cranford know all each other’s proceedings, they are
exceedingly indifferent to each other’s opinions. Indeed, as each has her own
individuality, not to say eccentricity, pretty strongly developed, nothing is so easy as
verbal retaliation; […] The Cranford ladies have only an occasional little quarrel,
spirited out in a few peppery words and angry jerks of the head; just enough to
prevent the even tenor of their lives from becoming too flat. Their dress is very
independent of fashion; as they observe, “What does it signify how we dress here at
Cranford when everybody knows us?” And if they go from home, their reason is
equally cogent, “What does it signify how we dress here, where nobody knows us?”
The materials of their clothes are, in general, good and plain, and most of them are 101
nearly as scrupulous as Miss Tyler of cleanly memory; but I will answer for it, the
last gigot, the last tight and scanty petticoat in wear in England, was seen in Cranford
- and seen without a smile. I can testify to a magnificent family red silk umbrella,
under which a gentle little spinster, left alone of many brothers and sisters, used to
patter to church on rainy days. Have you any red silk umbrellas in London? (C 2)
As Borislav Knezevic phrases it, “[i]n her asides to the readers, Mary is a vocal satirist of the town’s ways” (411), but without ever radically questioning her depicted world. “Her actions”, Knezevic further observes, “are restricted by her function as an observer and indeed they tend only to restore the conditions that existed before her arrival” (411).
However, it is not without significance that, contrary to what Knezevic argues, Mary Smith eventually does, indeed, transcend her role as an observer, with her actions obeying the instinct of Mary Smith, the character, rather than the tactful dictates of a disinterested observer, since she will neither withdraw from Cranford nor end her narration before she restores to it the conditions existing before her arrival. Interestingly, Mary’s duplicitous narrative strategies, as well as her final act of restoring “Peace to Cranford” (C 219) (the phrase constitutes the title of the novel’s last chapter) by staging Peter Jenkyns’ “Happy
Return” (the title of the chapter before the last one) to it (C 203), seem to run parallel to her own text’s urge for endings, an urge to be restored to a prior state of things, to a state of non-narration.22
22 I see a parallel here between Cranford’s narrating regime and Freud’s own parallel between the function of instincts (later to be interpreted as drives by Jacques Lacan) and the compulsion to repeat, as observed during the process of analysis and illustrated in his “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, following an “extreme line of thought” (245n) according to which “the aim of all life is death” (246). He wrote: But how is the predicate of being ‘instinctual’ related to the compulsion to repeat? At this point we cannot escape a suspicion that we may have come upon the track of a universal attribute of instincts and perhaps of organic life in general […]. It seems, then that an 102
Part of this duplicity results from the novel’s structural organization, which is based on Mary Smith’s duality of roles as well as on a mechanism of repetition or compulsion to repeat unpleasant experiences, originally noticed by Sigmund Freud in his patients’ repetition “of […] unwanted situations and painful emotions in the transference and tendency to revive them with the greatest ingenuity” (230) in his famous 1920 essay
“Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. Thus, although Mary Smith’s repetitive departures from and returns to Cranford impinge upon the normal flow of her life in industrial Drumble
(modelled on Manchester), she is unable to resist an immediate return to it, once she is summoned back, despite the anxiety each return entails. The beginning of chapter three titled “A Love Affair Long Ago” shows this clearly:
I thought that probably my connection with Cranford would cease after Miss
Jenkyns’s death; at least, that it would have to be kept up by correspondence, which
bears much the same relation to personal intercourse that the books of dried plants I
sometimes see […] do to the living and fresh flowers in the lanes and meadows. I
was pleasantly surprised, therefore, by receiving a letter from Miss Pole […]
proposing that I should go and stay with her; and then in a couple of days after my
acceptance, came a note from Miss Matty, in which […] she told me how much
pleasure I should confer if I spent a week or two with her […] of course I promised
instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore to an earlier state of things which the organism has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces; that is, it is a kind of organic elasticity, or to put it another way, the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life. (244)
103
to come to dear Miss Matty […] much wondering what the house would be like
without Miss Jenkyns, and rather dreading the changed aspect of things. (32)23
Mary’s returns to Cranford always entail her active participation in the town’s local
affairs. This is a fact which requires her full compliance with the community’s “rules and
regulations”, but which also causes her to react against what she perceives to be Cranford’s
whimsically oppressive eccentricities. At the same time, it triggers her communal narrative
strategies, which materialize in the use of the communal “we”, one which is steeped in “a
sort of sour-grapeism which made us very peaceful and satisfied” (C 4). It is in those
instances of Mary Smith’s narration that whatever is considered to be uncongenial to
Cranford’s “genteel” mode of perception of reality seems to have been ostracized from its
linguistic repertoire. It thus becomes repressed into its society’s collective unconscious,
causing what one might call a “Cranfordian Imaginary” (modelled on the sliced bread’s
“imaginary pattern of excellence that existed in Miss Matty’s mind” [C 187]) to emerge,
one which materializes in the community’s inability (or refusal) to see things for what they
are by resorting to the reassuring convenience of disavowal and euphemism:
23 Elsewhere in the text, Mary Smith assumes the role of Miss Matty’s principal carer and comforter having to cope with all the anxiety this role entails. It is also because of her own father’s occasional bouts of poor health (“I was summoned home by my father’s illness” [C 114], she confesses), that Mary has to leave Cranford in order to assume again a nursing position as befitting a young , unmarried woman of the time, “in anxiety about him” (114): Soon after […] I took my leave, giving many an injunction to Martha to look after her mistress, and to let me know if she thought that Miss Matilda was not so well; in which case I would volunteer a visit to my old friend, without noticing Martha’s intelligence to her. Accordingly, I received a line or two from Martha every now and then; and, about November, I had a note to say her mistress was “very low and sadly off her food;” and the account made me so uneasy that, although Martha did not decidedly summon me, I packed my things and went. (C 54)
104
Death was as true and as common as poverty; yet people never spoke about that,
loud out in the streets. It was not a word to be mentioned to ears polite. We had
tacitly agreed to ignore that any with whom we associated on terms of visiting
equality could ever be prevented by poverty from doing anything that they wished. If
we walked to or from a party, it was because the night was so fine, or the air so
refreshing, not because sedan chairs were expensive. If we wore prints, instead of
summer silks, it was because we preferred a washing material; and so on, till we
blinded ourselves to the fact that we were all of us, people of very moderate means.
(C 5)24
Caught between a structural duplicity, the young Mary Smith, who elsewhere in the text
refers to herself as “a well-to-do young lady” rather than an impoverished genteel woman,
seems to double herself defensively by splitting into a controlling, ironic, critical and in
some cases, even vindictive narrator on the one hand, and a contented, submissive and
obedient child-character on the other, a child who is often required, however, to assume the
24 The same strategies of denial and disavowal prevail when it comes to financial matters and all that is connected to them as well as when mimicry of the ways of the aristocracy is comically unfolded before us: None of us spoke of money, because that subject savoured of commerce and trade, and though some might be poor, we were all aristocratic. The Cranfordians had that kindly esprit de corps which made them overlook all deficiencies in success when some among them tried to conceal their poverty. When Mrs Forrester, for instance, gave a party in her baby-house of a dwelling, and the little maid disturbed the ladies on the sofa by a request that she might get the tea-tray out from underneath, everyone took this novel proceeding as the most natural thing in the world, and talked about household forms and ceremonies as if we all believed that our hostess had a regular servants’ hall, second table, with housekeeper and steward, instead of the one little charity school maiden, whose short ruddy arms could never be strong enough to carry the tray upstairs, if she had not been assisted in private by her mistress, who now sat in state, pretending not to know what cakes were sent up, though she knew, and we knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we knew, she had been busy all the morning making tea-bread and sponge-cakes. (C 3-4) 105 subject position of the mother, or, more precisely, that of the daughter as carer – a standard role in Victorian Society – towards the Amazonian ladies of Cranford. Notably, Mary is not only motherless (there is only mention of her father in the text), but also much younger that the ladies of Cranford, young enough, as a matter of fact, to be their daughter. She thus holds a borderline, ambivalent position in the text – this exact position of ambivalence, characterized by mixed feelings of joy and grief, (or, in Kleinian terms, of envy and gratitude). Her position in the text also recalls the psychic experience (one of jubilation and alienation) of the human subject during the mirror stage of Lacan’s topology – a position which, on a thematic level, is gradually reinforced by her repetitive returns25 to the rural
land of Cranford from that of urban Drumble. On the level of narration, it materializes
through Mary Smith’s repetitive use of Cranford’s linguistic conventions and phraseology.
Phrases like “elegant economy” and “strict code of gentility” are often reiterated by the
narrator, who, at one point, exclaims: “How naturally one falls back into the phraseology of
Cranford!” (C 4)
Although in her dual role she contributes significantly – materially as well as textually – to the development of Cranford the place and Cranford the text, Mary’s self- conflict is only inevitable because of this very division. In fact, the Freudian concept of the
25In her article “Household Forms and Ceremonies: Narrating Routines in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford”, Natalie Meir-Kapetanios also emphasizes the element of repetition in Mary Smith’s narration viewing it, however, as part of Cranford’s narrative affinity with contemporary etiquette books and household manuals in that they are both seen as “iterative narratives” conforming to a mode of description which creates the impression that a certain narrative event is customary (2) She notes: [Mary Smith’s] narrative style not only provides instruction in the town’s system of etiquette but also […] in how social practices are codified through repetition. For as Gaskell captures the town’s rhythms, routines, and rules in Mary’s descriptions of Cranford daily life, she employs a narrative mode that is similar to one that the numerous etiquette books, household manuals, and how-to handbooks that were published in the mid-to-late nineteenth century use in their codification of social experience. (2) 106 double becomes relevant at several points in Gaskell’s text, for hers is a text primarily based on repetition and ambivalence. The two textual personas of Mary Smith the character as well as her double, Mary Smith the narrator,26 function antithetically/antagonistically, one
might say, just like the concept of the narcissistic double both in its Freudian and in its post-
structuralist version, and it is through Mary’s declared fear of eyes, her own, looking back
at her from the mirror, that the appearance of the double becomes manifest. In his Lacanian
interpretation of the double Mladen Dolar observes:
The double is always the figure of jouissance: on the one hand, he is somebody who
enjoys at the subject’s expense. He commits acts that one wouldn’t dare to commit,
indulges in one’s repressed desire [...]. On the other hand, he is not simply someone
who enjoys, but essentially a figure that commands the jouissance (“At First Sight”
139).
26 This is a case of what Robert Rogers, in the context of his reading of Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, terms “doubling by division […] [a] kind of representation [which] typically expresses ambivalent feelings, the conjunction of which (particularly when hostility is repressed) is so intolerable that the ambivalence is dealt with defensively by decomposing the loved and hated father into two separate and seemingly unrelated persons” (5). In the case of Cranford, it is mainly the loved and hated deficiently maternal figures of the Amazons, but also the paternal figure of Mary’s own father, (whom she also both nurses, entertains and criticizes when she is away from Cranford), that constitute the source of ambivalence for the narrator, who projects her conflictual emotions onto her text. On a deeper level, one can also detect Gaskell’s own consideration for, but also her anxiety about and hostility towards the paternal, literary figure of Dickens, which materializes by way of her frequent allusions to his own literary output in subversive ways. According to Rogers, moreover, doubling “may be subjective or objective. Both represent conflict, but subject doubling represents conflicting drives, orientations, or attitudes without respect to other people, whereas object doubling displays inner conflict expressed in terms of antithetical or incompatible attitudes towards other people” (5). Clearly, Cranford displays the properties of both subject and object doubling because of Mary Smith’s structural positioning within the text, as both narrator and character. 107
It is Mary Smith’s double who undertakes this role in Cranford. Mary Smith the narrator functions as Mary Smith’s (the character’s) double, for it is primarily in her capacity as a narrator that Mary is allowed true agency in the text, since in the everyday proceedings of the community Mary’s role is restricted (at least until before she stages Peter
Jenkyns’s return to Cranford) to that of a mere onlooker. As such, she is expected to comply uncomplainingly with its “rules and regulations” (C 2) by being relegated to the position of a child, a child, however, who is at the same time expected to assume a mother’s role as regards her relationship with the childless ladies of Cranford. This is a subject position that, as a character, Mary both agrees to and refuses to endorse for herself in the text, by both acting in compliance with the circumstances, that is, in accordance with Cranford’s etiquette and the rules of feminine propriety, but, also against them by being critical of its practices and rebellious as regards her assigned position in the community. As a narrator, then, she is critical of her own depicted world through her frequent, ironic apostrophic comments
(asides) to her narratee. (“Have you any red silk umbrellas in London? We had a tradition of the first that had ever been seen in Cranford;” [C 2]) At the same time, her text is replete with instances where, as a character, Mary Smith displays a devotion to “the strict code of gentility” and to the numerous hysterical whims of the ladies, as it is equally eloquent about her own reaction to and rejection of them in an attempt to show her frustration at the way she is being treated by the ladies and to articulate her own individuality and separateness from them. She is often called on to assume the sacrificial position of the daughter-carer towards the Amazons, while at the same time she is being subtly maltreated as a child. For instance, although she generally succumbs to Miss Matty’s whimsical “cha[riness] of candles” (C 59) by preferring to “scorch [her]self with sewing by firelight”, she does not fail to express her annoyance at her “compulsory blind man’s holiday” (59), so when she has the chance to, she acts accordingly, that is by lighting a candle the moment Miss Matty 108 falls asleep. Similarly, the narrator mildly expresses her displeasure when Miss Betty
Barker, the former milliner, throws a party for the ladies, to which she is also invited. Here, once again, one cannot fail to notice how she is being treated by her hostess, that is, by being seated separately from the rest of the ladies (as if she were a child) together with
Carlo, the honourable Mrs Jamieson’s dog:
Miss Barker provided me with some literature in the shape of three or four
handsomely-bound fashion-books ten or twelve years old, observing, as she put a
little table and a candle for my especial benefit, that she knew young people liked to
look at pictures. (C 94)
On other occasions, however, especially on matters of taste, Mary acquires the upper hand by taking her revenge on the Amazons as, for example, when she appears to relish Miss
Matty’s disappointment when, instead of the sea-green turban she has asked Mary to bring her from Drumble, all she gets is an ordinary cap.
I was very glad to accept the invitation from my dear Miss Matty […]and most
particularly anxious to prevent her from disfiguring her small, gentle, mousey face
with a Saracean’s head turban; and accordingly, I bought her a pretty, neat, middle-
aged cap, which, however, was rather a disappointment to her […] It was in vain that
I twirled the cap round on my hand to exhibit back and side fronts: her heart had
been set upon a turban, and all she could do was to say, with resignation in her look
and voice – “I am sure you did your best, my dear. It’s just like the caps all the ladies
in Cranford are wearing, and they have had theirs for years, I dare say. I should have
liked something newer, I confess – something more like the turbans […] Queen
Adelaide wears” […]. But, for all that, I had rather that she blamed Drumble and me
than disfigure herself with a turban. (C 115-16) 109
Mary Smith is once again in the right place at the right time to impose her own standards of dressing, by acting as Miss Matty’s knowledgeable judge of good taste, when it comes to the latter’s choice of silk for a new gown:
Now Miss Matty had been waiting for this [the official arrival in Cranford of the
spring fashions] before buying herself a new silk gown. I had offered, it is true, to
send to Drumble for patterns, but she had rejected my proposal, gently implying that
she had not forgotten her disappointment about the sea-green turban. I was thankful
that I was on the spot now, to counteract the dazzling fascination of any yellow or
scarlet silk. (C 166)
Mary’s relation to Cranford could be said to display aspects of the relation to the mother as described by object relations theory. As is well known, at the core of object- relations stands the mother, who occupies the central role in the formation of the child’s psychic world and whose presence and participation in the child’s gradual unfolding of personality is instrumental. “With the advent of object-relations theory”, according to Janice
Doane and Devon Hodges, “the mother, long delegated to the wings of psychoanalytic thought, moved to center stage; her role in the child’s development was emphasized to the point where her authority and power far exceeded that of the all-powerful father” (7). For
Melanie Klein, in particular, the pre-Oedipal relationship between the baby and its mother is crucially important for the future development of the adult individual. This is “a relationship of projective identification within which the human subject both projects itself onto the mother and re-identifies with her” (Minsky 7), a relationship, in other words, within which the as yet underdeveloped infantile self is undifferentiated from the mother’s own.
Furthermore, “this first bond”, according to Klein, “[which] already contains the fundamental elements of an object relation […], for the breast, towards which all his [the 110 infant’s] desires are directed, is instinctively felt to be not only the source of nourishment but of life itself (211).
The shifting of Mary Smith’s position into the alternate roles of the punitive mother and neglected child on the one hand, and her occasional contentment with and self-denying devotion to the Cranfordian code on the other, are strongly evocative of Melanie Klein’s
“paranoid-schizoid position” (Klein 216), whose distinctive characteristic is the infant’s perception of the mother’s breast as divided into two opposing phantasies: the good breast, idealized as all-giving and the bad breast as its withholding counterpart. This first phase/position of Klein’s theory is characterized, like Cranford, by fragmentation and splitting, which are schizoid, as well as by the paranoid delusion that the persecuting object will invade the ego in order to annihilate both the ideal object and the self. This position is soon to be superseded by the “depressive” one,27 “when the infant progressively integrates
his feelings of love and hatred and synthesizes the good and bad aspects of the mother [as]
he goes through states of mourning bound up with feelings of guilt” (218).28
27In his essay “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis” (1948), Lacan acknowledges Melanie Klein’s contribution to what he terms “subjective experience of analysis” (19) as this relates to the subject’s display of aggressivity as a result “of the paranoiac structure of the ego” (20). “Through her [Klein]”, Lacan notes: We know the function of the imaginary primordial enclosure formed by the imago of the mother’s body; through her we have the cartography […] of the mother’s empire, the historical atlas of the intestinal divisions in which the imagos of the father and brothers (real or virtual), in which the voracious aggression of the subject himself, dispute their deleterious dominance over her sacred regions. We know too, the persistence in the subject of this shadow of bad internal objects. (20-21) 28 For Klein, it is this phase, rather than the Oedipal one, that constitutes the most decisive moment in the development of human identity, for if at this stage the infant manages to establish a “good object”, then good feelings will prevail and the transition from phantasy to a complex reality will most likely be a smooth one, just like the necessary separation from the mother. 111
Mary Smith seems to oscillate psychically between these two positions until the conflict is resolved by her staging the appearance/return or rather, the re-appearance
(another repetitive act) of Peter Jenkyns, her thematic and textual double, as we shall see.
As for the disastrous effects that the appearance of the double often entails for the subject, both in “The Uncanny”, Freud’s 1919 essay, and in most post-modern interpretations of the concept, the narrative tension evoked in Cranford by its appearance seems to be only slightly disconcerting for its narrator and a source of amusement for the reader, because of the intervention of a fair dose of humour, which in this text constitutes the differentiating factor that allows the tension to relax and helps the narrative “to avoid grimness” (Gillooly
884). However, this humourous attitude on the narrator’s part often functions as a cover for a deeper, repressed relationship to the depicted world of the Amazons which, on the whole, she is simultaneously satisfied with and frustrated in, attracted to and repulsed by. In his essay on humour written in 1927, Freud traces with precision the way in which “humour arises when a writer or a narrator describes the behaviour of real or imaginary people in a humorous manner” (“Humour” 427), just like Gaskell’s narrator does with Cranford. “[I]t is to be assumed”, Freud continues, “that it [humour] brings a yield of pleasure to the person who adopts it and a similar yield of pleasure falls to the share of the non-participating onlooker” (428). In our case, the person who adopts the humorous attitude is none other than the narrator herself and the non-participating onlooker, who, despite her/his peripheral position, does share the same “yield of pleasure”, is Cranford’s reader. Obviously, Mary
Smith’s recourse to humour becomes her main strategy of defence against her anxiety and ambivalence towards Cranford’s heterotopia. To this effect, Freud observes:
Like jokes and the comic, humour has something liberating about it [...]. The
grandeur in it clearly lies in the triumph of narcissism, the victorious assertion of the
ego’s invulnerability. The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, 112
to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas
of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions
for it to gain pleasure. (429)
Thus, although one might interpret Cranford as Gaskell’s own regressively heterotopic utopia to which she would repeatedly, and, as it appears, compulsively, return in times of frustration, fatigue and exhaustion (both physical and mental), one cannot help but sense this return also as part of an esoteric struggle to master the trauma of loss that separation from the motherland has caused. Amidst a host of often conflicting roles and responsibilities as wife, mother, social worker and professional writer, Gaskell viewed this text of hers as a therapeutic escape from a very demanding reality, especially in view of her own acceptance of this text’s healing qualities when she confessed to John Ruskin about
Cranford being the only one of her books that she would regularly revisit/return to. This is surely no accident, since Cranford’s recall of well-loved but at the same time, traumatic eccentricities obviously provided an outlet for repressed desires to be subtly articulated and for trauma to be mastered.
The central scene of the text, I would like to argue, one which serves as a prototype for a whole set of subsequent repetitions, is that in which the narrator admits that her “pet apprehension [is] eyes” by picturing herself “seeing eyes looking at [her] and watching her every time [she] go[es] up to [her] looking glass when [she] is panic-stricken” (C 158). The scene is repeated at the Cranford Assembly Rooms just before Signor Brunoni’s (the foreign, unfamiliar conjuror who, interestingly, turns out to be not so foreign after all, for he is none other but the domestic and thus familiar Samuel Brown) performance commences.
However, there is no mirror here, but only a stage curtain/screen, which seems to come to life rather uncannily, when “in weariness of the obstinate green curtain that would not draw up, but would stare at [her, Mary Smith is suddenly aware of] two odd eyes, seen through 113 holes, as in the old tapestry story” (C 122). This second scene is one rather enigmatically informed by the acts of gazing and vision, which are evocative of the post-modern subject’s position as a given-to-be-seen in the spectacle of the world, circumscribed by and subjected to the all-seeing gaze of its very own consciousness. (Lacan, The Four Fundamental
Concepts 74-75). This is also a moment of intense self-consciousness for Cranford’s “I” narrator, but also one of confusion and uncertainty about the eluding thing, that which neither Mary Smith nor the narratee ever get to see for what it is because it is but an absent presence, a gaping hole, the fantasy of desire which is never to be fulfilled:
I would fain have looked round the merry chattering people behind me [but] Miss
Pole clutched my arm and begged me not to turn, “for it was not the thing”. What the
thing was, I never could find out, but it must have been something eminently dull
and tiresome. However, we all sat eyes right, square front, gazing at the tantalizing
curtain, and hardly speaking intelligibly […]. At length the eyes disappeared – the
curtain quivered – one side went up before the other, which stuck fast; it was
dropped again, and, with a fresh effort, and a vigorous pull from some unseen hand,
it flew up, revealing to our sight a magnificent gentleman in the Turkish costume,
seated before a little table, gazing at us (I should have said with the same eyes that I
had last seen through the holes in the curtain) with calm, condescending dignity,
“like a being of another sphere”. (C 122, emphasis added)
It is during these two gazing moments that the uncanny surfaces steeped in its double meaning as something both familiar and unfamiliar, just like the motherland of
Cranford. If, as Freud has argued in his essay, “heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich” (“The Uncanny” 347), then its frightening effects certainly appear at a critical moment in Gaskell’s text (halfway through, in Chapter 10, which is aptly titled “The 114
Panic”) in the form of the double, which in this particular scene is surely evocative of the
Lacanian “mirror stage”.29 The gazing experience of Lacan’s mirror stage, which is both
pleasurable and threatening for the human subject, is also constitutive of the subject’s
formation of her/his sense of self (of the “I”), not least because the mirrored self gives rise
to the subject’s conflicting sense of its own totality and omnipotence, but also of its
irremediably fragmented otherness. For Lacan, the mirrored self is the first other both in
terms of time and importance. He argues that identification with one’s image in the mirror –
the “specular I” – takes place prior to identification with the other I, namely the “social I”
(“The Mirror Stage” 5). According to this logic, the “specular I”, which totalizes pre-ego
fragments, contradicts one’s emergent self (associated with the “social I”) and constitutes
evidence that identity is by definition self-alienating and that the agency of the ego is from
the start located in a “fictional direction”, thus immersing the subject in the “function of
méconnaisance that characterizes the ego in all its structures” (6). In Gaskell’s text, this
uncanny experience of Mary seeing eyes (indicative of the appearance of the double) both
behind her and before her, looking out of the darkness or through an “obstinate” green
screen, is founded on an unconscious recognition of herself in the form of the Other, a
recognition, moreover, which is reinforced by the implication that the eyes that she fears are
her very own reflected back to her either from within the looking glass or through the
curtain. Thus, Mary Smith both sees/narrates and becomes a vulnerable subject to be seen
from all directions, one who is being “looked at in the spectacle of the world” (Lacan, The
29 Lacan notes: The mirror-image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world, if we go by the mirror disposition that the imago of one’s own body presents in hallucinations or dreams, whether it concerns its individual features, or even its infirmities, or its object projections; or if we observe the role of the mirror apparatus in the appearances of the double, in which the psychical realities, however heterogeneous, are manifested. (“The Mirror Stage” 3) 115
Four Fundamental Concepts 75), existing in and determined by the intertwined webs of vision and desire.
Psychoanalytic theories of the double suggest that the double gives form to an early phase of narcissistic rage30 that, having become unbearable to the mature self, has long since been surmounted, mastered and, hence, repressed. Such being the case, the appearance of the double in the narrator’s mirror stands for a return of this primary aggression, which is jubilantly celebrated by the “specular I” (the ego-ideal ) but is split off and rejected by the
“social I” (the ego) as something alien to it, which thus becomes projected onto the other.
So, what Mary sees in the mirror is partly her own fear of herself, her own self-aggression, which she projects outwards onto the Amazons in her capacity as a character and transforms into irony and humour in her capacity as narrator. Thus, by occupying the liminal status of both the insider and the outsider in terms of her relation to (as a character) and narration of
(as a narrative agent) Cranford, she holds the position of what Lacan terms “the exitimate”, his own version of the uncanny, which signifies the blurring of boundaries between inside and outside, familiar and unfamiliar, self and other. According to Robin Lydenberg, “[t]he complex relation between inside and outside, domestic and foreign, familiar and unfamiliar reflects both the paradoxical nature of the uncanny and something about the origins of the speaking subject and of narration” (1082). This is exactly the relationship between Mary
Smith and Cranford the place, but, also, Cranford the text, which becomes to her a locus both familiar and unfamiliar, domestic and foreign, just like her own reflection in the
30 In his “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis” Lacan further explicates the notion of aggressivity as this characterizes the subject : There is a sort of structural crossroads […] to which we must accommodate our thinking if we are to understand the nature of aggressivity in man and its relation with the formalism of his ego and his objects. It is in this erotic relation, in which the human individual fixes upon himself an image that alienates him from himself, that are to be found the energy and the form on which this organization of the passions that he will call his ego is based. (19) 116 mirror. As a result, her narration becomes what Lydenberg terms “a supplementary extimate that both sustains and alienates subjects inside and outside their life stories” (1083). Thus, despite Mary Smith’s declared communal narrative position and practices and despite her indebtedness and commitment to the community, it is the individual (the “I”) rather that the community (the “we”) that finally becomes the most privileged, and, paradoxically, the least reliable party (because of its own self-conflict and liminal position) in the text upon which the community depends for its recording and textual survival. The community, in turn, is also constitutive of Mary Smith’s narrative authority for it has furnished her with the raw material necessary for the recording of her narrative by way of its traumatic inscription into her memory, thus rendering the relation between the “I” and the “we” a deeply controversial, but, at the same time, a mutually constitutive and transactional one.
2.4. Cranford’s Self-Conscious Heterotopic Performativity: Thematic Analogues
Like some other Victorian texts, such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or George
Eliot’s Middlemarch, Cranford draws attention to its spatial preoccupations by its very title.
Both Cranford the place and Cranford the text can be seen as what one could term heterotopic utopias. As a spatial category, as a locality, Cranford displays all those characteristics that might encode it as “another space”, one simultaneously combining the three-fold taxonomy of Foucault’s – the real, the utopian and the heterotopic (“Of Other
Spaces” 23-27). For Foucault, heterotopias are not to be understood as spatially pure entities simply because spatial categories always exist in relation both to each other and to the social structures of power that produce them.31 As a result, they tend to be located in the
31 Foucault notes: The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws […] us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we 117 interstices of real and ideal (utopian) social spaces and because they occupy such a borderline position between real social and utopian spaces they inevitably comprise elements of both. They are, in short, “every schism between real and ideal social spaces […] where transience and timelessness intersect with normal ideal constructs of chronology, identity, sexuality, and reality” (Ace, “Foucault’s Heterotopia”).
Cranford’s community, with its “rules and regulations” (C 3), its recycled sources, its defiance of ostentatious, capitalist pursuits and espousal of “elegant economies” (C 4), thrives in the margins of the industrialized, capitalist Victorian society relying on its own idiosyncratically altruistic (Utopian) methods of subsistence (methods reserved for the select few members of the community) and Imaginary mode of existence. It thus seems to be deaf and blind to the changing world that surrounds it, but also aware of this world’s alienating influence and fragmentation. As a result, we have Cranford’s selective admission into its territory of only a few outsiders who can also function as insiders and as mediators between the real (social) and ideal (Utopian) realms with Mary Smith being the only invited member (for preservation reasons) within the community. As a result, Cranford’s heterotopic locality is characterized by “a system of opening and closing that both isolates
[it] and makes it penetrable”32 (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” 26).
could place individuals and things […] we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another. (“Of Other Spaces” 23) 32 According to Foucault, “the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as is the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures” (“Of Other Spaces” 26). Cranford’s site clearly belongs to the latter category, since it demands that its newcomers conform to and participate in its own regime of rituals: Then there were rules and regulations for visiting and calls; and they were announced to any young people who might be staying in the town, with all the solemnity with which the old Manx laws were read once a year on the Tinwald Mount. 118
Concerning the act of narration, Cranford constitutes a heterotopic experience for its communal but at the same time highly self-conscious narrator, for whom narration is both enticing and frustrating, something which is reflected in Mary Smith’s disconcerting mirror experience. Mary’s mirror image as “a sort of mixed, joint experience” (Foucault, “Of Other
Spaces” 24), that is, as both utopian and heterotopic (and to some extent, even dystopic), is evocative of the Lacanian mirror-stage experience, sharing with it the elements of ambivalence, self-conflict and liminal positioning for the human subject. As Foucault puts it:
From the stand point of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am
since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed
towards me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the
glass, I come back towards myself; I begin again to direct my eyes towards myself
“Our friends have sent to inquire how you are after your journey to-night, my dear” […] “they will give you some rest to-morrow, but the next day, I have no doubt, they will call; so be at liberty after twelve – from twelve to three are our calling hours.” Then, after they have called— “it is the third day; I dare say your mamma has told you, my dear, never to let more than three days elapse between receiving a call and returning it; and also, that you are never to stay longer than a quarter of an hour.” “But am I to look at my watch? How am I to find out when a quarter of an hour has passed?” “You must keep thinking about the time, my dear, and not allow yourself to forget it in conversation.” (C 3) Also, as Nina Auerbach claims, “the men who enter Cranford mysteriously die, fall ill or disappear. Only to preserve itself does Cranford open its doors to a man who survives [Peter Jenkyns] […] and [he] has disgraced himself as a boy by assuming women’s dress that seems to insure his safe entrance into Cranford” (Romantic Imprisonment 186-87). Additionally, Cranford has, first and foremost, opened its doors to the narrator Mary Smith, whose main role is to preserve it textually, by way of narrating it, and thematically, by restoring Peter (the feminized male) back to its territory in her capacity as one of Cranford’s characters.
119
and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in
this respect. (“Of Other Spaces” 24)
For Foucault, then, the mirror aptly illustrates his notion of heterotopia. His way of describing the subject’s heterotopic experience of her/his mirror image is replete with undertones of primary narcissism, with the “I” and its preoccupation with its own reflection
(both as fulfilling presence and as frustrating absence) being emphasized in the same way, we could say, that they are emphasized by Jacque Lacan throughout his essay on the Mirror
Stage. Like Foucault, Lacan also underscores the narcissististic subtext underlying the mirror experience for the subject as well as the subject’s own ambivalence towards his/her own image as both whole (ideal/utopian) and fragmented (heterotopic). “[T]his jubilant assumption of his [the subject’s] specular image […] [as] the Ideal-I […] which will also be the source of secondary identifications […] situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual […] by which he must resolve as I his discordance with his own reality” (“The
Mirror Stage” 2), Lacan claims, thus postulating the irreducibly split condition of the “I”, in short, its permanently heterotopic (and, because of its undecidable status, also dystopic) condition.
From what has been said so far, we may safely conclude that the processes of splitting, doubling and repetition, as attributes of Gaskell’s heterotopic utopia, are to be seen as part of the text’s general interrogation and exposure of identity and all that is connected to it as both psychic, ideological and cultural constructs rather than as natural givens.
Cranford the place and Cranford the text are thus informed by a certain degree of performativity, of acting out identity and gender matters in repetitive fashion both on a thematic (as regards the text’s characters) and on a narrative level (as regards the act of
Mary Smith’s “I”/”we” narration), something that further adds to the intricacies of the “I” in 120 this text. This is another aspect of Gaskell’s text that has not received adequate critical attention, despite the fact that its multi-level prominence is what, among others, confers upon the text its unique specificity. In Cranford, individual identity, along with all the other signifying systems of social code and etiquette (of gender, class and behavioural patterns) are informed by what Judith Butler refers to as “a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization” (“Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions” 94), “a stylized repetition of acts” (“Bodily Inscriptions” 114) in other words, which points to their non-ontological status. Butler argues that “performativity […] is not a singular ‘act’, for it is always reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it is, acquires an act-like status […] it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition” (Bodies that Matter 12). It is on these premises that both the narrative and thematic infrastructure of
Cranford is anchored.
The parodic potential of performativity is also emphasized in Cranford, manipulated by Gaskell in order to challenge and subvert social structures and their normalizing practices. The ladies of Cranford are adept in the art of concealment, as we have seen, as well as equally efficient at mimicking and manipulating social codes by making them conform to their own Procrustean standards. Their world, no matter how idiosyncratic, like those wider ones of Drumble (Manchester) and London and like all communities, is largely governed by euphemism and self-deception and their so-called “delicacy” in cultural, social and financial matters savours of a self-imposed self-assurance and a refusal or inability to see.
On the level of narrative discourse, Mary Smith’s role is also informed by a certain degree of performativity and it is a twofold one. On the one hand, through humour and irony, she exposes both Cranford’s discursively constructed, performative heterotopia along with her own narrative venture as always, already in the grip of profound psychic 121 investment (and loss) and ideological processes by participating, moreover, in the proceedings of her depicted world also as a character. On the other hand, she takes a critical stance towards her own act of recording textually Cranford’s idiosyncratic mode of existence by appropriating the conventions of the novelistic genre, exposing it in the process for what it is, that is, a linguistic performance (the ritualistic repetition of the linguistic sign), a set of arbitrary conventions, which should be read for what they are, namely a text consisting of grammar and spelling, which, in Miss Pole’s words, like “conjuring and witchcraft is a mere affair of the alphabet”33 (C 119), or, in Linda Hutcheon’s terms, a text which “demonstrate[s] an awareness of [its] linguistic constitution” (7). Hence, Mary
Smith’s asides to her reader when, in retrospect, she is recollecting the scene of receiving the astounding news of Lady Glenmire’s imminent marriage to Mr. Hoggins that she must recover herself while in the act of writing, for the contemplation of the event, even at this distance of time, threatens to deprive her physically not only of her breath, but also of the
33 In similar fashion, social institutions like marriage are often exclusively determined in terms of their linguistic compatibility and ideological affinity with societal norms and conventions, as for instance, in the case of a first cousin of Mrs Forester’s, whose choice of a wife is said to have been made on account of how her surname was spelt: She [Mrs Forester] had a cousin who spelt his name with two little ffs – ffoulkes – and he always looked down upon capital letters and said they belonged to lately-invented families. She had been afraid he would die a bachelor, he was so very choice. When he met with a Mrs. ffarringdon, at a watering-place, he took to her immediately; and a very pretty genteel woman she was – a widow, with a very good fortune; and “my cousin”, Mr ffoulkes, married her; and it was all owing to her two little ffs. (91). Textual incidents like this seem to verify the fundamental notion of Lacanian psychoanalysis that what we perceive as reality, meaningful being and, above all, conscious and unconscious mind are linguistically constructed entities, utterly determined by the signifier, as is also desire, which emerges with signification too. Lacan’s famous dictum that “the unconscious is structured like a language” (Four Fundamental Concepts 20), expands to include Nature as well: “Nature provides – I must use the word – signifiers, and these signifiers organize human relations in a creative way, providing them with structures and shaping them” (20). 122 tools that constitute her means of cultural production (her text) namely, her grammar and spelling: “Miss Pole herself was breathless with astonishment when she came to tell us of the astounding piece of news. But I must recover myself; the contemplation of it, even at this distance of time, has taken away my breath and my grammar, and unless I subdue my emotion, my spelling will go too” (C 160). Thus, what has been termed “meta-fictional narrative” finds its direct application, since it is made explicit to the narratee that the text she/he is reading, along with its depicted world, just like the world she/he lives in, is both discursively constructed and performatively lived, governed by repetition, imitation and arbitrary conventions.
This aspect of Mary Smith’s first-person narration as performative repetition is also emphasized by analogies between story and narration, since it is not just Cranford’s main narrative that we encounter, but also its inset tales, the embedded stories narrated by the novel’s characters Miss Matty and Miss Pole. Again, these humorously uncanny stories marked by castration anxiety and the processes of splitting and doubling (as encounters with the subject’s profoundly familiar alterity)34, are, among others, also indicative of Cranford’s
34 Prominent among these stories, which unfold half-way through the novel within a chapter aptly titled “The Panic”, is the one connected with the Cranford ladies’ display of mass hysteria and confusion as regards a couple of petty thefts and burglaries that occur in the village and which are invariably ascribed to strangers, since, as Mary Smith tells us: We comforted ourselves with the assurance […] that the robberies could never have been committed by any Cranford person; it must have been a stranger or strangers who brought this disgrace upon the town […] therefore, we must believe that the robbers were strangers - if strangers, why not foreigners? – if foreigners, who so likely as the French? Signor Brunoni spoke English like a Frenchman; […] though he wore a turban like a Turk […] showing clearly that the French, as well as the Turks, wore turbans. There could be no doubt that Signor Brunoni was a Frenchman […]. French people had ways and means which […] the English knew nothing about. (C 127-128) In these cases, what initially appears as strange, foreign and disconcertingly unfamiliar is eventually disclosed as known of old, homely and familiar. Signor Brunoni is revealed as the English Samuel 123 narrative duplicity of attitude and tone towards social, cultural and linguistic codes. In this respect, Peter Jenkyn’s story of cross-dressing pranks and drag performance are crucially important for two reasons: firstly, it is through Peter’s deviant, marginalized body, as the ultimate “other”, that notions of a coherent self grounded on a stable, naturally-sexed identity crumble. Secondly, because it is thanks to Peter’s return (via Mary Smith’s intervention) that narrative closure, the text’s return to a prior state of non-narration, and hence the end of all anxiety, is finally effected. Moreover, like Signor Brunoni’s (Samuel
Brown’s) feared foreignness (otherness), which is eventually revealed to be homely and familiar and like Mary Smith’s fear of eyes, which are her very own in reflection, Peter’s predilection for assuming or performing foreign identities (such as that of Aga Jenkyns of
Chunderabaddad and the possible Great Lama of Tibet) confers upon him the same type of
Brown and the thefts ascribed to foreigners are only committed by locals. Another one is the tale of Darkness Lane’s phantom “lady all in white, and without her head […] who sat by the roadside wringing her hands as in deep grief” (C 141), as to whom, in Mary Smith’s words, “we preserved a discreet silence […] for there was no knowing how near the ghostly head and ears might be, or what spiritual connection they might be keeping up with the unhappy body in Darkness Lane” (141). Also Miss Pole’s haunting story of a gamekeeper’s daughter who, “on some particular fair-day, when the other servants all went off to the gaieties [and ] [t]he family were away in London […] roaming about in search of amusement, chanced to hit upon a gun […] took it down […] and it went off through the open kitchen door, hit the pack [a peddler had left earlier in the kitchen], and a slow dark thread of blood came oozing out” (C 130-131). Finally there is the amusingly uncanny tale of Miss Matty’s primordial fear of one of her legs being grabbed by someone lying in wait under her bed the moment she is getting into it: She owned that ever since she had been a girl, she had dreaded being caught by her last leg, just as she was getting to bed, by someone concealed under it. She said, when she was younger and more active, she used to take a flying leap from a distance and so bring both her legs up safely into bed at once […] now the old terror would often come over her […] and yet it was very unpleasant to think of looking under a bed, and seeing a man concealed, with a great, fierce face staring out at you; (C 139) 124 alterity that once again turns out to be native familiarity the moment he is identified as Peter
Marmaduke Arley Jenkyns, Miss Matty’s banished, long-lost brother.35
What is also of importance is that Peter’s ambivalent figure36 is strategically placed in Cranford to serve the purposes of the narrator, Mary Smith, and his re-establishment in the community further underscores the process of splitting and division, but also the parodic dimension of assuming an identity (an unequivocal “I”) and all that is connected to it. In fact, he could be considered as Mary’s thematic double in many respects, not least because
35 Critic William Hyde and Gaskell biographers Jennifer Uglow and Winifred Gérin have pointed to John Stevenson, Elizabeth Gaskell’s elder brother, as the obvious prototypical image of the lost or wandering mariner/ brother in her fiction, represented by the figures of “poor Peter Jenkyns” (Hide 21) in Cranford and “poor Frederic Hale” in North and South (Hide 21). Her use of the adjective “poor” before their names clearly marks them as personalities rejected by their families for failing to live up to their expectations (Hide 22). John Stevenson is described as “a congenial young man with a sense of humour and a distinct capacity for joking” (Hide 21). Also, as Gérin notes, John Stevenson neither followed the family tradition of entering the navy nor gained direct employment in the East India Company, but was licensed by the Company to trade with India as “a free mariner”, for which his father put up a bond of £500 for his good behaviour” (qtd. in Hyde 21). Finally, as Uglow observes, “restless and uncertain of his future, unable to rely on his father for financial support, [John] […] decided to quit England […] and settle in India” (Uglow 53). It was in the winter of 1828 that “John vanished from life. He was lost, either at sea or after his arrival in India: no definite news came of his fate” (53). However, the figure of the lost sailor became a recurrent motif in Gaskell’s fiction. 36 It is mainly through Peter that the free-floating character of signification is thematically represented in Cranford, for Peter is portrayed as consecutively occupying a number of conflicting subject positions in the text. He starts out as the patriarchally oppressed, feminized male to subsequently acquire the subject position of the sturdy and adventurous, all-male naval officer, whose rank as a lieutenant in the British Army (paradoxically) authorizes him to inflict colonial oppression on those colonized and oppressed by a British bourgeois, against whose restrictive rule he appears to be fighting while in Cranford. He re-enters Cranford as a culturally hybrid presence, one might say, “so very oriental” (C 219), or, as “the arrival from India”, [who tells] more wonderful stories than Sinbad the sailor” (C 219), and he manages to become a favourite with the ladies by force of his liminal position among them, a position allowing him to become the regulator of Cranford affairs after Mary Smith’s departure. 125 their line of action runs parallel to their ambivalent positioning in the text as both insiders and outsiders. Moreover, Peter as Mary’s double clearly “commits acts that one [in our case
Mary] wouldn’t dare to commit, indulges in one’s [Mary Smith’s] repressed desire [and] commands the jouissance” (Dolar, “At First Sight” 139). Thus, they both challenge parental authority. Peter through extreme pranks and cross-dressing and Mary through the expression of gentle resentment towards her depicted world in the guise of humorous irony, for feminine propriety forbids her to adopt a more extreme line of action.
It is Peter’s story, in the form of an embedded narrative, and, most importantly, the narrated, cross-dressing scenes featuring his drag performance (the consequences of which turn back upon himself, as it is) as well as the ensuing paternal punishment that precedes his actual return to Cranford. These occur half way through the text, in two consecutive chapters titled “Old Letters” and “Poor Peter” respectively. Peter Jenkyns is retrospectively described by Miss Matty as the one person in Cranford who “seemed to think [just like
Mary Smith] that the Cranford people might be joked about, and made fun of […] he was always hoaxing them”, Miss Matty tells, Mary adopting (by way of a momentary linguistic identification with Peter) what to her mind used to be her brother’s obscene phraseology,
“‘hoaxing’ is not a pretty word my dear, […] and I hope you won’t tell your father I used it
[…] I don’t know how it slipped out of my mouth, except it was that I was thinking of poor
Peter and it was always his expression” (C 71). Soon after Miss Matty’s discursive slip (of the tongue), Peter’s provoking drag performances come to the fore, generating further ontological destabilization of gender categories and hence, further linguistic confusion for
Miss Matty, whose own “I” narrative takes over at this point:
I could laugh to think of some of Peter’s jokes […] and they were very shocking. He
even took my father in once, by dressing himself up as a lady that was passing
through the town and wished to see the Rector of Cranford, “who had published that 126
admirable Assize Sermon.” Peter said he was awfully frightened himself when he
saw how my father took it all in, and even offered to copy out all his Napoleon
Buonaparte sermons for her – him, I mean – no, her, for Peter was a lady then […]
my father kept him [Peter] hard at work copying out all those twelve Buonaparte
sermons for the lady – that was for Peter himself you know. He was the lady. And
once when he wanted to go fishing, Peter said “Confound the Woman”! – Very bad
language, my dear […] my father was so angry with him, it nearly frightened me out
of my wits: and yet I could hardly keep from laughing at the little curtseys Peter kept
making, quite slyly, when-ever my father spoke of the lady’s excellent taste and
sound discrimination.
“Did Miss Jenkyns know of these tricks?” said I.
“Oh, no! Deborah would have been too much shocked.” (C 71-72, emphasis added)
The second scene of Peter’s cross-dressing is equally (if not more so than the first) telling in terms of exposing the performatively provisional status of identity (and hence gender) formation, its fictional direction and transgressively subversive potential. Again, his practical joking aims at deriding male authority, but, paradoxically, this time it is directed not so much against the ultimate, biological patriarch, the Rector Jenkyns, as against his sister Deborah, a female patriarch in attitude and tone, thus exposing gender identity as a mere repetition of attitude, “a reiteration of a norm” (Bodies That Matter 12), as Butler would have it:
What possessed our poor Peter I don’t know; he had the sweetest temper, and yet he
always seemed to like to plague Deborah […]. Well he went to her room […] and
dressed himself in her old gown, and shawl and bonnet; just the things she used to
wear in Cranford, and was known by every-where; and made a pillow into a little
[…] into – into a little baby, with white long clothes. It was only, as he told me 127 afterwards, to make something to talk about in town; he never thought of it as affecting Deborah. And he went and walked up and down in the Filbert walk – just half-hidden by the rails, and half seen; and he cuddled his pillow, just like a baby, and talked to it all the nonsense people do. Oh dear! And my father came stepping stately up the street, as he always did; and what should he see but a little black crowd of people […] all peeping through his garden rails. So he thought, at first, they were only looking at a new rhododendron that was in full bloom, and that he was very proud of; and he walked slower, that they might have more time to admire […]. My poor father! When he came nearer, he begun to wonder that they did not see him; but their heads were all so close together, peeping and peeping! […] when oh, my dear, I tremble to think of - he looked through the rails himself, and saw – I don’t know what he thought he saw, but old Clare told me his face went quite grey-white with anger, and his eyes blazed out under his frowning black brows; and he spoke out – oh, so terribly! – and bade them all stop where they were – not one of them to go
[…] and, swift as light, […] and seized hold of poor Peter, and tore his clothes off his back – bonnet, shawl, gown, and all – and threw the pillow among the people over the railings: and then he was very, very angry indeed, and before all the people he lifted up his cane and flogged Peter! My dear, the boy’s trick, on that sunny day, when all seemed going straight and well, broke my mother’s heart, and changed my father for life. Old Clare said, Peter looked as white as my father; and stood as still as a statue to be flogged; and my father struck hard! When my father stopped to take a breath, Peter said, “have you done enough, sir?” […] I don’t know what my father said – or if he said anything. But old Clare said, Peter turned to where the people outside the railing were, and made them a low bow, as grand and as grave as any gentlemen; and then walked slowly into the house. (C 73-74) 128
It is through Peter Jenkyns’ performance in drag that Victorian (and not only) assumptions about the continuity/correspondence between sex, gender and desire, as well as notions of a continuous, uncontested identity, are interrogated. Thus, in Butler’s terms, “gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one and woman and feminine a masculine body as easily as a female one” (Gender Trouble ix).
The scene of Peter’s gender drag is also marked by the presence of the Freudian
“pair of opposites – the instincts whose respective aim is to look at and to display oneself
(scopophilia [voyeurism] and exhibitionism” [“Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” 207-8]),
whose autoerotic aim was stressed by Freud. Moreover, Peter’s subsequent flogging by his
father is strongly evocative of the female version of Freud’s beating fantasy as illustrated in
his essay “A Child is Being Beaten”, especially in view of the fact that the scene is only
narrated/recreated by Miss Matty (and by extension, by Mary Smith) rather than actually
witnessed, for it is imparted to her by word of mouth, via old Clare’s, the family servant’s
own narrative. Freud refers to the three stages of the fantasy as follows: “My father is
beating the child whom I hate; I am being beaten by my father; some boys are being beaten
and I am probably looking on” (170-171). The fantasy exhibits both a sadistic
(active/aggressive) and masochistic (passive) attitude, the former stemming from sibling
rivalry and the latter from the fantasizing guilt-ridden subject’s desire to be punished for her
transgressive fantasy. Freud’s fantasy is characterized by intense inter-subjective
ambivalence and blurring of gender positions, which point to the instability, division and
unreliability of the narrating subject (the patient as analyzand) in general, and to the scene’s
narrating subjects (both Miss Matty and Mary) in particular. It also further underscores the
incessant play of the signifiers in Gaskell’s text. 129
Peter’s predilection for practical joking, moreover, echoes Mary Smith’s penchant for narrative humour and irony; his cross-dressing pranks confuse and destabilize conventional meaning-making procedures and neat gender categorizations by foregrounding the fluid nature of signification in the same way that Mary’s ambivalence towards her communal “we” and self-conscious “I” reveals their ontological emptiness, their discursive constitution and split character, but also their mutual indebtedness and interdependence. His narrative positioning, thus, is the reverse equivalent, one might observe, of that of Mary
Smith, with elements of the latter’s life story briefly occurring only long after her actual presence in Cranford and shortly before she decides to follow her compulsive urge for interference in her narrated world. It is at this exact moment that Mary Smith reveals to her narratee something of her own background, somehow preparing him/her for her final intervention, which is to be the most decisive one:
In my own home, whenever people had nothing else to do, they blamed me for want
of discretion. Indiscretion was my bug-bear fault. Everybody has a bug-bear fault, a
sort of standing characteristic – a pièce de résistance for their friends to cut at; and in
general they cut and come again. I was tired of being called indiscreet and
incautious; and I determined for once to prove myself a model of prudence and
wisdom. I would not even hint my suspicions respecting the Aga. I would collect
evidence and carry it home to lay before my father, as the family friend of the two
Miss Jenkynses. (C 157)
Like Peter’s scopophilic/exhibitionist drag performance that is meant to outrage his father, Mary’s equally scopophilic/exhibitionist urge to drop one of an “elaborately-knit pair of garters” (C 185), a gift from Miss Matty, “in the street, in order to have it admired” (C
185) causes her Peter-like “animal nature” (C 68) to break out in order to provoke Miss
Matty’s sense of propriety. However, unlike Peter who gets to act out his fantasy, Mary 130 never actually gets round to acting out hers, that is dropping her garter in the street. Instead, she opts for a more covert act of gaining satisfaction: on the one hand, she “appropriates
Peter’s jokes and profits by them in the retelling” (Gillooly 897); on the other, she succumbs to her desire to restore insider/outsider Peter to Cranford, a textual move that constitutes her final act of intervention in Cranford affairs and which materializes in her act of secretly sending the letter which brings Peter back to Cranford’s motherland.
Finally, Peter (his mother’s favourite)37 and by extension Mary Smith (Cranford’s
favourite) can also be seen as guardians of Cranford’s maternal authority and hence of what
in psychoanalytic terms we might term “maternal phallus”.38 Peter restores it to his mother
in the form of a shawl (or “Paduasoy”)39 very similar to the one that her own mother had
37 Textual evidence as to Peter’s alignment with the maternal side, as well as the maternal preference for the male child as bearing the symbolic phallus which will confer power upon her, is in the form of short, passionate pleas for support and protection against paternal oppression “in such a little sentence as this, evidently written in a trembling hurry, after the letter had been inspected: ‘Mother dear, do send me a cake, and put plenty of citron in’. The ‘mother dear’ probably answered her boy in the form of cakes and ‘goody’”(C 68). Also, “there were letters of stilted penitence to his father, for some wrongdoing; and among them all was a badly-written, badly-sealed, badly-directed, blotted note; – ‘My dear, dear, dear, dearest mother, I will be a better boy; I will indeed; but don’t, please, be ill for me; I am not worth it; but I will be good, darling mother’” (C 69). 38 As is well known, it is the symbolic rather than the anatomical significance of the male organ that is emphasized by psychoanalysis. “[T]the Phallus in this theory is both something which symbolizes power and something which is empty of content, precisely paralleling the paradoxes of authority and mastery” (Frosh 167). The Lacanian phallus, in particular, is a signifier, which in Lacan’s own terms, “speaks in the Other […] designating by the Other the very locus evoked by the recourse to speech in any relation to which the Other intervenes” (“The Signification of the Phallus” 285). 39 Her desire for the highly symbolic white “Paduasoy” (as object petit a), that would fulfill desire and that she always covets, figures prominently in Mrs. Jenkyns’s letters to her prospective husband during their courtship period: What she was quite clear about was a longing for a white ‘Paduasoy’ – whatever that might be; and six or seven letters were principally occupied in asking her lover to use his influence with her parents […] to obtain this or that article of dress, more especially the white 131 always refused to let her have when she was young. However, the shawl becomes a burial gift for Peter’s mother, since it arrives a day after she dies, so she is buried in it. Thus, the maternal phallus, empty of content in the symbolic, is only restored to her in the unrepresentable realm of the Real and desire is uncannily fulfilled only in death.40
And only think, love! The very day after her death […] came a parcel for her from
India – from her poor boy. It was a large, soft, white Indian shawl, with just a little
narrow border all round; just what my mother would have liked. We thought it might
rouse my father, for he had sat with her hand in his all night long […]. Then
suddenly he got up, and spoke: “She shall be buried in it,” he said, Peter shall have
this comfort; and she would have liked it.” […] He got up and felt it: “it is just like a
shawl as she wished for when she was married and her mother did not give it to her.
I did not know of it till after, or she should have had it – she should; but she shall
have it now.” (C 82)
In similar manner, Mary restores Peter (and hence narrative closure) to Cranford in general,
and to Miss Matty (the most obviously castrated figure among the Amazons) in particular,
in an attempt to recompense her for her narrative aggression and rebellion. At the same time, nonetheless, and by means of her thematic (material) and narrative intervention, she
‘Paduasoy’ […]. The white ‘Puduasoy’ figured again in the letters, with almost as much vigour as before. In one, it was being made into a christening cloak for the baby. It decked it when it went with its parents to spend a day or two at Arley Hall. It added to its charms, when it was ‘the prettiest little baby that was ever seen. (C 62-63, emphasis added). 40 As Lacan puts it: If the desire of the mother is the phallus, the child wishes to be the phallus in order to satisfy her desire. Thus the division immanent in desire is already felt to be experienced in the desire of the Other [the symbolic], in that it is already opposed to the fact that the subject is content to present to the Other what in reality he may have, as far as his demand for love is concerned because that demand requires that he be the phallus. (“The Signification of the Phallus” 288) 132 leaves behind her a worthy substitute (now a biological male) to continue her own ambivalent practices of gentle mockery of and compliance to the community’s “rules and regulations” (C 2). It is no simple coincidence, then, as Mary Smith’s subject double, Peter
Jenkyns is “more apt to play the friendly role of [the] secret sharer than that of [the] bitter antagonist at the narrative level” (Rogers, The Double in Literature 61). Hence, Peter’s funny eye-twinkle of approval to Mary the moment he is telling Mrs. Jamieson about his accidental shooting of a cherubim up in the Himalaya mountains: “Mr Peter caught my eye at this moment, and gave me such a funny twinkle”, (C 226) Mary tells her narratee one page before the last of Cranford.
In the final analysis, narrative closure in Cranford41 is effected only after the “I” has
been brought to face the whole trajectory of its own vicissitudes – that is, as simultaneously
homely and familiar, alienating and lacking, divided between its embodied and discursive
function and utterly perfomative, nothing more than a set of repetitions without original.
Moreover, the “I’ as both a narrating and a narrated one, like Cranford the place,
comes to present itself as simultaneously utopian (striving towards wholeness and
connection) and heterotopic (as alien to, but at the same time dependent upon the dominant
signifying systems that encode it as such), as that which is caught in the middle of all those
battling discourses which produce and contest it as the ultimate product of human
méconnaissance.
41 Ironically, it was Knutsford, Cranford’s model and her life-long favourite retreat place, which became Elizabeth Gaskell’s last abode when, after her sudden death on 12th November, 1865, she was buried in the sloping graveyard of Cross-Street Chapel. As Jenny Uglow notes, “[i]n death she returned to the people who gave her, as she grew up among them, […] her habit of stories” (Uglow 615). 133
CHAPTER THREE
The Voyeuristic “I”/Eye: Disavowal, Defence and Voyeurism in the Narration of “Six
Weeks at Heppenheim” and Cousin Phillis
3.1. “Six Weeks at Heppenheim” as a Precursor to Cousin Phillis
It is the subject who
determines himself as object with
the division of subjectivity.
(Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis 185)
I became like a spoilt child in my recovery;
every one whom I saw […] was thinking only
of me, so it was no wonder that I became my sole
object of thought.
(“Six Weeks at Heppenheim” 195)
Becoming his “sole object of thought” is what incites, by way of a reversal of interest (and object), the nameless, male, English narrator/traveller in Gaskell’s “Six Weeks at
Heppenheim” both to narrate and to interfere in a series of events in the life of his German sick-nurse, Thekla, using illness both as a means and as a pretext for his unorthodox methods.
Confined for six weeks in the sick-chamber of a family-run inn in the German village of
Heppenheim, oscillating between positions of activity and passivity and experiencing 134 alternating states of consciousness and semi-consciousness while convalescing from “serious illness” (“SWH” 190), the narrator of Gaskell’s story tries to cope with ennui through voyeuristic absorption, by turning the inn-servant Thekla into an objectified figure of scrutiny upon whom games of male fantasy and power are played out. In the meantime, through a reversal of positions, the narrator experiences a period of total physical and mental exhaustion – “weak as a new-born babe […] a helpless log” (“SWH” 191), rather prone in
“[his] weakness to cry” (“SWH” 192), – during which he depends on Thekla for his physical and emotional sustenance, his recovery and survival.
The second of her German stories and one of her least noticed pieces, Gaskell’s short piece1 “Six Weeks at Heppenheim”, her “most German story” (Skrine, “Mrs Gaskell and
Germany” 45), was first published in the Cornhill Magazine in May 18622 and, as Peter
1 As with Cousin Phillis and “The Grey Woman”, “Six Weeks at Heppenheim” is “an attempt”, according to Peter Skrine, “to write in the German manner” (“Mrs. Gaskell and Germany” 45) – that is, in the tradition of the German Novelle, the form that German writers of the first half of the nineteenth century used and perfected by emulating and/or “anticipat[ing] their scientific contemporaries by developing and perfecting a photographic, almost cinematic approach” (“Elizabeth Gaskell and her German Stories” 5). 2 As John Geoffrey Sharps notes, the story “was, according to Miss Meta Gaskell, planned and probably written more than three years before, during her mother’s autumnal stay at Heidelberg” (Sharps 343). Also in his article “Gaskell and her German Stories” Peter Skrine places its setting in “a small town some twenty miles north of Heidelberg […] situated on the Bergstrasse […] along the foot of the Odenwald, a chain of hills which forms the outer eastern fringe of the Rhine valley […] famous for its wine” (7). It was also in Heidelberg that Gaskell first met the Howitts (William and Mary), residents of Germany for a period of three years, with whom she retained a lifelong friendship and whose expertise and connections in publishing contributed decisively towards the publication of her first novel Mary Barton (1848). Gaskell had been corresponding with William and Mary Howitt since 1838 and it was they who introduced the Unitarian Gaskells to German life and culture. Although Gaskell herself never mastered German sufficiently (as opposed to French), a considerable degree of familiarity with the country and its ways should be taken for granted, since Gaskell’s minister husband, William, was not only a fluent speaker and writer of German, but also taught it to a number of interested Manchester intellectuals, mostly Unitarians, such as the Winkworth sisters, as a result of 135
Skrine further notes, “it is unique in being set entirely in Germany” (45), as opposed to her other German (Gothic) tale, “The Grey Woman”, which only partially unfolds there, as we shall see in chapter four of this thesis. “Six Weeks at Heppenheim” consists in the gradual unfolding of Thekla’s personal story of loyalty to and betrayal by an inconstant lover, narrated in the first person through the eyes of a nameless Englishman. In the process of narration, along with his own story, he elicits Thekla’s story piece by piece, passes judgement on the events and eventually ventures to “rescue” her from the hands of the ill-meaning suitor, Frantz Weber, to hand her over to another man by insinuating himself into a love triangle, having first insinuated himself into Thekla’s trust and favour. He thus acts as a marital go-between for the inn-servant and her widowed employer (Fritz Müller, the
Halbmond inn landlord), contributing in this way to the story’s rather conventional ending with Thekla changing suitors, passing from Franz to Fritz (the difference between the two, even linguistically, is negligible) through the mediation of the narrator. The latter misinterprets his inquisitiveness and intervention as an act of gratitude towards her. He states:
As long as my fidgety inquisitiveness remained ungratified, I felt as if I could not get
well. But, to do myself justice, it was more than inquisitiveness. Thekla had tended me
with the gentle, thoughtful care of a sister, in the midst of her busy life […]. Thekla
was the one of all to whom I owed my comfort, if not my life. If I could do anything to
smooth her path (and a little money goes a great way in these primitive parts of
Germany), how willingly would I give it? (“SWH” 195-96)
the attraction and influence that German culture exerted upon the English society of that time. As Anna Unsworth informs us, “Unitarians had, in fact, been visiting Germany and learning German for the past half century [and] German had been taught in the dissenting Academies when this was unheard of at Oxford and Cambridge, the original attraction to the language being the new Biblical criticism initiated by Eichorn at Göttingen” (6). 136
Being almost penniless and feeling rather bored “in these primitive parts of Germany”,
however, he decides to offer his unsolicited help by following a different course of action,
one towards Thekla’s emotional disentanglement from what he judges to be a disastrous love
affair. In essence, however, like another Phillis Holman, Thekla,3 Phillis’s German
counterpart, simply becomes an object of exchange between men fulfilling the expectations and serving the interests of a patriarchal community; Thekla’s own speech, just like that of
Phillis, is barred from expression, her somatic symptoms constituting the only outlet for her repressed emotions.4 As for the narrator, he seems to misrecognize and disavow his own
coercive strategies towards the heroine’s predicament, having convinced himself that “[he]
himself ha[s] but little to do with [his] story” (“SWH” 194). Once again, we encounter the
narrating subject at odds both with itself and its narrated counterpart, except for one or two crucial moments, when with hindsight he sounds critical of his past self, realizing his
patronising behaviour and indiscrete interference: “Somehow, I persisted with the wilfulness
3 “Thekla” is the only name by which the heroine is referred to throughout the narrative as opposed to the other characters of the story, whose surnames are always mentioned. Although we are given some information about her rural family background, there is no mention whatsoever of Thekla’s family name, something which further underscores her marginality and outcast status as a mere peasant girl. According to Jenny Uglow, Gaskell’s use of this particular German name dates back to the Gaskells’ stay in Germany for eight weeks in 1858, “Thekla” being the name “of the elegant, stylish daughter of the Gaskells’ landlady, Frau Pickford” (143) 4 A representative scene, among a number of similar ones, is that in which the heroine is always focalized through the semi-conscious, bed-ridden narrator as her emotional turmoil manifests itself through bodily expression: Turning a little I saw Thekla sitting near a table, sewing diligently […]. Every now and then she stopped to snuff at a candle; sometimes she began to ply her needle again immediately; but once or twice she let her busy hands lie idly in her lap, and looked into the darkness, and thought deeply for a moment or two; these pauses always ended in a kind of sobbing sigh, the sound of which seemed to restore her to sewing even more diligently than before. (“SWH” 192)
137
of an invalid. I am ashamed of it now” (“SWH” 196), he recalls; “she [Thekla] kept aloof
from me; for I knew, or suspected, or had probed too much” (“SWH” 211), he further
intimates to his narratee in the now of narration. Similarly, upon hearing about the German
law concerning the enforcement of a strictly fixed date for the commencement of grape
gathering in the area of the Rhine valley he exclaims: “What a strange and paternal law!”
(“SWH” 201) to repeat himself seven pages later with a second, equally telling indictment:
“What a paternal government!” (“SWH” 208), thus indirectly also commenting on his own
paternalistic methods via misplaced (and displaced) indignation and guilt.
The setting, like that of Cousin Phillis of a year and a half later, is pastoral,5 framed
by the idyllic vineyard landscapes of rural Germany. As we can learn from Gaskell’s
correspondence,6 “Six Weeks at Heppenheim”, which, as its title denotes, is partly a travelogue, was rather hastily composed with an eye to publication mainly for financial profit. In writing it, however, Gaskell was rehearsing an interesting narrative technique, that of the unreliable external narrator/traveller/recorder, who is not simply an observer of events,
as he/she almost invariably declares, but also an instrumental agent in shaping the course and
outcome of the events, a key participant in his/her narrated world. She would use the same
technique, a year and a half later, in more sophisticated ways and with more subtle effects, in
her subsequent piece, Cousin Phillis, of which “Six Weeks at Heppenheim” could be
regarded as a forerunner, or, in John Chapple’s terms, “a trial run” (“Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Six
Weeks at Heppenheim’” 13).
5 As a dynamic presence, Nature informs Romantic literature extensively and a number of Gaskell’s texts, in particular her first-person narratives, are no exception as products of a post-Romantic mind’s literary endeavours. 6 On March 18th 1862, she wrote to her publisher George Smith: “I have not a scrap of anything written by me but the beginning\first chapter/of a sort of Memoir of Mme de Sévigné and her Times, – but I will write you as good a short story as I can if it will be of any help to you, & you will let me know soon against what time you want it. For the April number I suppose?” (Letters 679) 138
The story is also rich in undertones of the cult of the individual and is informed by
Romantic attitudes, thus displaying an affinity with the spirit and aesthetics of German
Romanticism,7 within whose philosophical frame the subjective articulation and/or recording of personal/subjective experience becomes the most privileged position of representation. As part of Romanticism’s concern for the common man and its renewed interest in folk culture – the result of the democratic ideas of a very recent revolutionary age – Gaskell’s choice of narrator seems to be modelled on the quintessential Romantic figure of the traveller/wanderer
– almost invariably male – searching for new localities, both real and imaginary, and new vistas for the mind among common people. Like Paul Manning, the male narrator/visitor of
Cousin Phillis, and the nameless, male narrator/lawyer/wanderer of Gaskell’s Gothic tale
“The Poor Clare”, as well as the nameless English narrator/traveller (of unspecified gender) of “The Grey Woman”, the narrator/traveller of “Six Weeks at Heppenheim”, is male,
English, nameless as well as on the threshold of the legal profession.8 The beginning of the story, like that of Cousin Phillis, is devoted to his own autobiographical details:
7 The term, according to Anna Unsworth, was “first used by Mme de Stäel in her book On Germany which, published in France between 1810 and 1813 and in England in 1813, opened the doors of Europe to the German literary and philosophical movement” (10). Also, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle, both well versed in the German language and culture, were instrumental in assisting the dissemination of German culture among the English intelligentsia, with Unitarians being among those who proved particularly receptive (because of their disadvantageous position in English society) to the new ideas of such philosophers as Schelling, the Schlegels, Hegel, Eichorn and of literary figures such as Goethe. Goethe’s epistolary novella The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and his novel Wilhem Meister (1807-1821) were particularly well-known to Gaskell, who makes explicit reference to him and his works in a number of her works, as for instance in Cranford and in her historical novel Sylvia’s Lovers (1863). 8 There is evidence in Gaskell’s letters that the prototypical figure for her narrators/travellers was Charles B. Bosanquet, a Balliol man, whose acquaintance she made at Heidelberg in 1858, and who was just about to begin his training in the legal profession. “He was there”, she wrote to Charles Eliot Norton, “after being at Eton, & having taken his degree at Oxford where he was at Balliol, a pupil of Jowett’s” (Letters 647). 139
After I left Oxford, I determined to spend some months in travel before settling down
in life. My father had left me a few thousands, the income arising from which would
be enough to provide for all the necessary requirements of a lawyer’s education; such
as lodgings in a quiet part of London, fees and payment to the distinguished barrister
with whom I was to read […]. The thought of living in such a monotonous grey
district for years made me all the more anxious to prolong my holiday by all the
economy which could eke out my fifty pounds […]. I had as fair a knowledge of
German and French as any untravelled Englishman can have; […] I had been through
France into Switzerland, where I had gone beyond my strength in the way of walking,
and I was on my way home, when one evening I came to the village of Heppenheim,
on the Berg-Strasse. (“SWH” 189)
Though unnamed, the retrospective narrator sounds particularly eager to establish his identity
and his socio-economic and educational background at the outset. An Oxonian touring the
continent as part of the already-established tradition of the Grand Tour “before settling down
in life”, he is equally eager to affirm what he perceives to be only his peripheral implication
in the events to be imparted. “I have stated”, he maintains at the beginning of the second
paragraph of the story, “this much about myself to explain how I fell in with the little story
that I am going to record, but with which I had not much to do – my part in it being little
more than that of a sympathetic spectator” (“SWH” 189). Five pages later, he repeats the
point: “But I myself have but little to do with my story: I only name […] things, and repeat
[…] conversations” (194). As the story unfolds, however, his part in it becomes rather more
that that of a mere observer and recorder of events. Like Paul Manning of Cousin Phillis, and
the nameless, male narrator of “The Poor Clare”, he becomes crucially implicated in the
narrated events via his intrusive tactics and, eventually, his interference. 140
His curiosity is sparked off the moment when his gaze is first attracted by the sight of
Thekla as her figure is bathed in the afternoon light, while his subsequent interference is foreshadowed by his detailed – almost photographic – account of their first encounter:
She came near; the light fell on her while I was in shadow. She was a tall young
woman, with a fine strong figure, a pleasant face, expressive of goodness and sense,
and with a good deal of comeliness about it too, although the fair complexion was
bronzed and reddened by weather, so as to have lost much of its delicacy, and the
features, as I had afterwards opportunity enough of observing, were anything but
regular. She had white teeth, however, and well-opened blue eyes – grave-looking
eyes which had shed tears for past sorrow – plenty of light-brown hair, rather
elaborately plaited, and fastened up by two great silver pins. That was all – perhaps
more than all – I noticed that first night […]. A shiver passed over me; she looked at
me, and then said: “the gentleman is cold; shall I light the stove?” Something vexed
me – I am not usually so impatient: it was the coming of serious illness – I did not like
to be noticed so closely; […] I answered sharply and abruptly: “No; bring supper
quickly; that is all I want.” Her quiet, sad eyes met mine for a moment; but I saw no
change in their expression, as if I had vexed her with my rudeness […] and that is
pretty nearly all I can remember of Thekla that first evening at Heppenheim. (“SWH”
190-91)
Although the narrator’s knowledge of German is, as he claims, as limited as that of “any untravelled Englishman”, his mediation of German customs and character resembles that of a native to the extent that, though both a stranger as well as a foreigner, he not only jumps to conclusions about Thekla’s sorrowful eyes, but also manages to become her confidant and thus learn her love-secrets, which he associates with a tantalizing letter she is seen reading: 141
When I wakened dawn was stealing into the room […]. Thekla was standing by the
stove, where she had been preparing the bouillon I should require on wakening. But
she did not notice my half-open eyes, although her face was turned towards the bed.
She was reading a letter slowly […]. She folded it up softly and slowly, and replaced
it in her pocket […]. Then she looked before her […] her eyes filled with tears […].
The thought of this letter haunted me, especially as more than once, I, wakeful or
watchful during the ensuing nights, either saw it in her hands, or suspected that she
had been recurring to it from noticing the same sorrowful, dreamy look upon her face
when she thought herself unobserved. Most likely, everyone has noticed how
inconsistently out of proportion some ideas become when one is shut up in any place
without change of scene or thought. I really grew quite irritated about this letter. If I
did not see it, I suspected it lay perdu in her pocket. What was in it? Of course it was a
love-letter; but if so, what was going wrong in the course of her love? […] at last the
gratification of my curiosity about this letter seemed to me a duty that I owed to
myself. (“SWH” 195)
Through narcissistic identification with his own image (“I became my sole object of thought”
[“SWH” 195], he tells us), he becomes both the subject and the object of his narration. He subsequently turns Thekla’s letter into his second best “sole object of thought” by assigning to it the position of a much-coveted object of desire, one that he strives to become possessed of, so as to delve into its contents, which he hopes will satisfy his “out of proportion” curiosity in an effort to keep himself sane and occupied while convalescing. When he eventually persuades Thekla to grant him access9 to this as well as other similar love-letters, a
9 He actually cajoles Thekla into making him her confidant: “if you had a brother here, Thekla, you would let him give you his sympathy if he could not give you his help, and you would not blame yourself if you had shown him your sorrow, should you? I tell you again, let me be as a brother to you” (“SWH” 197). 142
new obsession takes over, one related to his unsolicited intimation of her private story to her
employer, Fritz Müller, with both of them taking action to know all they can about her unworthy suitor “for Thekla’s sake” (“SWH” 203), as they both say. In the meantime, the narrator conventionally revels in phantasizing and plotting a number of possible, happy- ending scenarios for Thekla and her suitors, though as Fritz Müller once observes, “[o]ne has perhaps no right to rule for another person’s happiness” (“SWH” 204).
Commenting on the story, John Chapple has rightly noted that “it would be unjust to
ignore it as a mere catchpenny”10 (“Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’” 5),
despite what he sees as the story’s narrow field of vision (7). However, it is because of the
contrived narrowness of its optics, its limited scope of narrative vision, which is restricted to
that of a single, male consciousness – also becoming manifest as semi-consciousness – that
“Six Weeks at Heppenheim”, I want to argue, is worthy of attention as part of Gaskell’s
experimentation with more self-conscious and sophisticated narrative strategies than that of
the omniscient narration, which she had used in her industrial and historical novels. By
having the story narrated through the eyes of a male, partly homodiegetic, partly autodiegetic
persona,11 Gaskell succeeds in accentuating female repression and exclusion as these are
illustrated through the flat, objectified character of the low-ranking, uneducated inn-servant,
Thekla, whose marginal status seems to be no different from that of Gaskell’s subsequent middle-class, English heroine, Phillis Holman, the educated daughter of a minister.
Moreover, by placing her narrator’s past self in the position of the physically incapacitated, mentally frail voyeur, who by dint of his passive state and self-absorption, operates as sheer consciousness, developing into what John Chapple terms “a super-sensitive recorder of
10 Angus Easson, for instance has commented on the unsatisfactory, conventional plot and melodramatic tone of the story with “the woes of Thekla and her loyalty to a feckless lover, produc[ing] irritation rather than sympathy” (221). 11 See note 19 of this chapter for a detailed explanation of Genette’s terms. 143 character and incident” (“Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Six Weeks in Heppenheim’” 9), Gaskell obtains for him a privileged position of an uncommon type, a position from which he can revel in the close observation of his object of scrutiny (and phantasy) on the one hand, while remaining intradiegetically immune to criticism, on the other, his indiscretion and intrusiveness becoming known only to his narratee in the now of narration. “Watching her”, he recalls, “had a sort of dreamy interest for me; this diligence of hers was a pleasant contrast to my repose; it seemed to enhance the flavour of my rest. I was too much of an animal just then to have my sympathy, or even my curiosity, excited by her look of sad remembrance, or by her sighs” (“SWH” 192), thus deriving sadistic pleasure out of the scene.
Like Paul Manning of Cousin Phillis, as we shall see in the second part of this chapter, the narrator of “Six Weeks at Heppenheim” oscillates between what Freud terms
“the two pairs of opposites: sadism - masochism and scopophilia - exhibitionism” (“Instincts and their Vicissitudes” 205), as he does between the two types of object choice, namely
“narcissistic” and “attachment”, as exemplified in Freud’s 1916-17 paper “The Libido Theory and Narcissism”. The latter type of object choice (“attachment”) is what mainly informs both the narrator’s action (as a character) and his discursive practices here as part of his obsession with “people who have become precious through satisfying vital needs [and who] are chosen as objects of the libido” (476-77). Thus, it is not only Thekla, the narrator’s principal carer, who falls prey to his scrutinizing tactics and manipulation, as we have seen, but also the two other parts of the love triangle: Frantz Weber and Fritz Müller, the latter winning Thekla’s hand rather conventionally. All three of them have become vital to the narrator’s physical and mental sustenance and self-preservation as objects of his phantasy and desire. If, as Lacan claims, “[t]he phantasy is the support of desire” (The Four Fundamental Concepts 185) for the human subject, then “Six Weeks at Heppenheim”, as the chronicle of a survival, has 144
provided the narrating subject of Gaskell’s story both with the objects and their support (the
phantasies) necessary for the preservation of the “I” and its own misrecognitions.
3.2. The Lost Object of Narration: Identification and Substitution in Cousin Phillis
A person, scattered in space and time,
is no longer a woman, but a series of
events on which we can throw no light,
a series of insoluble problems
(M. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past 99-100)
The eye and the gaze – this is for us the
split in which the drive is manifested at
the level of the scopic field.
(Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis 73)
Elizabeth Gaskell’s novella Cousin Phillis was completed after Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) and
appeared serially in the Cornhill Magazine between November 1863 and February 1864,12 about a year and a half after “Six Weeks at Heppenheim”. It is the story of young Paul
12 As a book, it was first published in America in 1864 by Harper and Brothers under the title Cousin Phillis. A Tale, to appear, a year later (1865) also in England by the London based publishers Elder and Smith titled Cousin Phillis and Other Tales. 145
Manning’s frustrated efforts to woo Phillis Holman, a distant cousin of his that he meets upon
taking up a position as clerk to Edward Holdsworth, to whom she is also introduced and for
whose looks and learning she falls, only to be abandoned shortly afterwards, the whole affair
culminating in Phillis’s physical and mental collapse.
Regarded by several critics as one of Gaskell’s most mature pieces of writing,13
Cousin Phillis, like “Six Weeks in Heppenheim” (1862) and her Gothic piece “The Poor
Clare”, is among those instances of her fiction where the author officially employs a homodiegetic narrator, Paul Manning, who participates in the narrated story both as its narrator and as one of its main characters.14 Paradoxically, however, Gaskell’s choice of
homodiegetic narration habitually shifts to an autodiegetic one, with Paul Manning, rather
than Phillis Holman, becoming the central and privileged character of the story from the very
beginning.
Although Cousin Phillis has mainly lent itself to thematic readings and has often been
interpreted, like Cranford, as a nostalgic idyll of country life, as an “essentially pastoral text”
(Foster, Elizabeth Gaskell 161) reminiscent of the author’s early days in rural Sandlebridge, some more recent interpretations have raised the question of what might be considered the
13 According to Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund in Victorian Publishing and Mrs Gaskell’s Work, “among most London commentators”, Cousin Phillis was “a text that emerged as embodying the greatest strength in Gaskell’s maturity” (157). Similarly, Winifred Gerin notes that “Cousin Phillis and Wives and Daughters are the crowning works of her career” (230). 14 With the exception of Cranford, Cousin Phillis and My Lady Ludlow (in which, however, is it partially used more as a framing device than as a consistent narrative strategy throughout), it is only in her shorter fiction that Gaskell employs the narrative modes of autodiegesis and homodiegesis. Specifically, it is in nine other pieces of her short works, namely in “The Poor Clare” and “The Grey Woman”, two Gothic pieces published in 1859 and 1861 respectively analyzed in detail in chapter four of this project, “Mr Harrison’s Confessions” (1851), “Six Weeks at Heppenheim” (1862), “The Heart of John Middleton” (1850), “Curious, If True” (1860), “My French Master” (1853), “The Sexton’s Hero” (1847) and in “The Half Brothers” (1858) that she uses a similar mode of narration, but within a different fictional context each time. 146
novella’s greatest strength, its narrative technique.15 What strikes one, however – and this is
an aspect of Gaskell’s narrative that seems to have passed unnoticed by contemporary
criticism of Cousin Phillis – is the fact that although it purports to be a text about a woman, it is in essence a text about men and male fantasies of the female, with the heroine’s own body
and discourse suppressed by those of the three male characters surrounding her. These are
Reverent Holman (her own father), Edward Holdsworth and, most importantly, Paul
Manning, the narrator, all of whom seem to maintain different fantasies of Phillis. Her father
views her as the eternal virginal female child with no desire of her own, as does Edward
Holdsworth, who even wishes to capture her as such in his abortive painting of her. As for
Paul, he only marginally imparts his story of her, his agency and mediation arousing deep
doubts as to the motives behind his account. Last but not least, Gaskell’s employment as well
as her simultaneous subversion of a chameleonic narrator renders her text a locus of narrative
paradox and ambivalence, since she constantly keeps her reader in doubt as to the reliability
of the events recounted. For it is constantly implied that the narrator’s “wandering eye” (CP
31) and hence the narrating “I” are untrustworthy and conspicuously lacking in vision. In this
way it becomes clear that it is male fantasy rather than male narrative authority and
objectivity that shape the narrated events. It is thus perhaps inappropriate to speak of the
woman writer’s internalization of the male perspective for reasons of narrative authority.
Rather, Gaskell’s employment of this particular type of narrative perspective falls within that
category of fictional narration that Dorrit Cohn terms “discordant narration”. According to
Cohn, this mode of narration:
15 See, for instance, Jenny Curtis’s article “Manning the World”: The Role of the Male Narrator in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis” (Victorian Review 21.2 [1995]: 128-44) and Barbara Hardy’s recent essay “Cousin Phillis: The Art of the Novella” (The Gaskell Society Journal 19 [2005]: 24-33). Whereas both critics clearly underline the objectifying practices of Gaskell’s narrator, they take Cousin Phillis to be a text about a woman, rather than a text about male homosocial as well as homoerotic desire, as I argue here. 147
Suggests the reader’s sense that the author intends his or her work to be understood
differently from the way the narrator understands it: in a way that can only be
discovered by reading the work against the grain of the narrator’s discourse, providing
it with a meaning that, though not explicitly spelled out, is silently signalled to the
reader behind the narrator’s back. It intimates as well that the narrator, far from being
conceived as the author’s mouthpiece, is an expressly and artfully created vocal organ
whose ideology clashes with his or her text. (“Discordant Narration” 307)
Attempting to account further for Gaskell’s androcentric narrative perspective and open the question of the author’s intentions would be a risky task, indeed. Whether she has internalized the objectifying patriarchal gaze or whether it is a matter of her sensitivity to woman as object or victim of the gaze, Gaskell seems to be exposing the former for what it is
(objectifying and disempowering) and the latter as common in Victorian male homosocial practice. What is more important, however, is that in attempting (self-consciously or otherwise) to represent the heterosexual male objectifying gaze from the very centre of male consciousness, Gaskell ends up shifting the focus of attention from the seemingly primary female object of desire onto the seemingly secondary male characters of the text. Through this process of substitution, Gaskell not only interrogates Victorian gender roles and encoding, but also exposes gender to be a subject position, a shaky and unstable category – just like Heathbridge, described in the novella as “shaking, uncertain ground, which was puzzling [the] engineers – one end of the line going up as soon as the other was weighted down” (CP 7).
In what follows I shall attempt to offer a reading of Cousin Phillis that will focus on this very function of the narrator and on the economy of narratorial discourse in relation to gender. To this end, I will argue that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the narrator’s initial commitment to write about Cousin Phillis and the text’s conspicuous 148
undermining of this commitment. Phillis’s own story and, to an even greater extent, her own
discourse (more corporeal than verbal) are essentially suppressed in and subsequently erased
from the text in favour of that of the narrator, who fails to account for her unique specificity,
the very quality, that he initially declared, incited the telling of his story. The heroine as
“other” in Cousin Phillis, as is also the case with Thekla in “Six Weeks at Heppenheim”, like
Albertine of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is there only to “fall prey to a true lunacy
of the snapshot” (Narratology 117), as Mieke Bal notes in her analysis of Proust’s text.
Gaskell’s narrator, like Proust’s, simply succeeds in turning Phillis into an objectified, static,
a-historical, idealized and marginal figure, whose imposing physical and intellectual
prominence needs either to be erased from memory as a traumatic experience or to be
rendered virtually invisible in order to pose no threat to his masculinity. From a
narratological perspective, according to Mieke Bal, “traumatic events disrupt the capacity to
comprehend and experience them at the time of their occurrence. As a result, the traumatized
person cannot remember them. Instead, they recur in bits and pieces, in nightmares, and
cannot be worked through” (Narratology 147).
Phillis’s representation seems to be filtered through a narrative consciousness that in
Lacanian terms could be described as irremediably limited, since it is a product not only of
idealization, but of méconnaissance (misrecognition) as well (The Four Fundamental
Concepts, 82-83). Even more importantly, I will further attempt to argue, the figure of cousin
Phillis serves only as a pretext for a deeper and more essential relation underlying the subtext
of the story, the traumatic, and thus repressed homoerotic relation between the narrator, Paul
Manning, and his employer Edward Holdsworth (“one who is worth holding”). In this
exchange, Phillis simply becomes an object of exchange between them,16 a mere facilitator of
149
homosocial bonding, ensuring what Luce Irigaray, echoing Claude Lévi-Strauss, calls the
“smooth workings of man’s relation with himself, or relations among men” (This Sex Which
is not One 172). In short, what we encounter in Cousin Phillis is what Eve Kosofsky-
Sedgwick refers to as male homosocial desire “within the structural context of triangular,
heterosexual desire” (Between Men 50), which Gaskell’s narrator attempts to ward off and
disavow via his seeming interest in Phillis.17 To illustrate my argument I shall draw on that
16 In “The Education of Cousin Phillis” Philip Rogers offers an intertextual reading of Gaskell’s novella by tracing the ways in which the story’s literary allusions to Virgil, Dante and Manzoni inscribe themselves in the textual/sexual economy of the heroine’s education. To this effect, he argues that Phillis’s education in languages and texts as well as her desire for learning are totally in the hands of the novella’s male characters and, as a result, can only serve as destructive rather than empowering and/or liberating agents. He argues that Gaskell’s representation of teaching and learning among the male characters […] defines the social context in which the nature and ends of Phillis’ education are explored [in that] relationships among men in Cousin Phillis all possess a tutelary component, [since] the mutual esteem of men depends on their possessing exclusive knowledge and being able to tell others something that they don’t know. (28) 17 In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick defines “homosocial desire”, as a continuum along which one may describe the social bonds among either men or women. Although this concept of homosocial desire linguistically suggests homosexual practices, according to Sedgwick, it should not be considered synonymous with them, since homosexual behaviour is simply one position along the continuum of social practices that a theory of homosocial desire seeks to situate. As Sedgwick notes, the maintenance of patriarchal authority depends upon heterosexual relations; it does not, however, depend upon heterosexism (also known as homophobia), as her example of ancient Greek society shows. Both patriarchy and heterosexuality are based on the Lévi-Straussian model of the so-called trafficking in women, according to which women are seen as objects of exchange towards the consolidation of bonds between the men who actually “possess” them, all this leading to what constitutes Sedgwick's central idea in Between Men, namely that heterosexual relations are virtually strategies of homosocial desire. Thus, heterosexual relations exist to create, ultimately, bonds between men, which, she claims, are not detrimental to a concept of masculinity but definitive of it (50). Sedgwick identifies the strategies of homosocial desire as "erotic triangles," relationships in which there is rivalry between two active members (often, but not exclusively, two males) for the attentions and/or affections of a "beloved" third. Such triangles, 150
branch of narrative poetics known as feminist narratology18 as well as on psychoanalytic
theory, particularly that connected with the notion of the “gaze” as it has developed in
Freudian and Lacanian theory as well as in film studies. As Jenny Uglow observes, “the
glance and the gaze, even more than the word are the means of expression in this story”
(539).
The story is told in retrospect through the perspective of a focalizor who, in imparting
to the reader his account of things related to his involvement with Phillis and her family, has
to rely exclusively on his memory and past vision of events “as far as [his] observation reached at the time, or memory can recall now” (CP 88). However, his account of things is more often than not to be taken with a grain of salt not least because the “I” who narrates is no longer that which is being narrated, which means that Paul’s account of the past is inevitably shaped and conditioned by his present state of being and thus cannot be taken at face value. In this connection, Mieke Bal observes:
Memory is an act of “vision” of the past but, as an act, situated in the present of the
memory. It is often a narrative act: loose elements come to cohere into a story, so that
involving a whole variety of looks and glances in an interplay of inter-subjective possibilities, are evident in Cousin Phillis and are central, I think, to an understanding of the structuring of masculine subjectivity, particularly as embodied in Gaskell’s narrator, Paul Manning. 18 In The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice, as well as in her essay, “Towards a Feminist Narratology”, Susan Lanser introduced the term “feminist narratology” within the paradigm of narrative poetics/narratology. According to Lanser, feminist narratology differs from the already-existing body of narrative theory in that it is both textual and contextual in its practices, in that it combines a technical (formalist) as well as a cultural (that is, historical and political) approach to what has come to be known as “the narrative act”, while at the same time taking gender to be one of the principal coordinates of the act of narration, which, in turn, is an ideologically conditioned practice, as all discursive practices are. Also, Robyn Warhol in her essay: “The Look, the Body and the Heroine of Persuasion” defines feminist narratology as “the study of narrative structures and strategies in the context of cultural constructions of gender” (21). 151
they can be remembered and eventually told. But as is well known, memories are
unreliable […] and when put into words, they are rhetorically overworked so that they
can connect to an audience, for example a therapist. Hence, the “story” the person
remembers is not identical to the one she experienced. (147)
Although Paul sets out to write about his cousin (that is, as a homodiegetic narrator),
he constantly oscillates between an autodiegetic and a homodiegetic mode of narration
throughout the text.19 He begins his narration by devoting a number of pages to
autobiographical details about himself,20 as well as about his relationship with a much-
19 The terms constitute part of Gérard Genette’s typology in his seminal work Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Here, in the context of a detailed analysis of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Genette discusses the various categories of narrative analysis, the function of the narrator and that of the “narratee”. He also provides an analysis of “point of view” by introducing his three basic types of narrator: the “heterodiegetic” (an omniscient narrator who is absent from his/her own narrative), the “homodiegetic” (a narrator who is inside his/her narrative, as in a first-person narrative like Cousin Phillis) and the “autodiegetic” (a narrator who is inside the narrative and also the main character, as in autobiographical narratives). 20 The opening pages of Cousin Phillis are entirely devoted to Paul Manning’s autobiographical details with Paul himself revelling at his own self-absorption, while at the same time sounding curiously prophetic about his subsequent acts of indiscretion by perceiving himself as occupying an unauthorized position “in the middle” of things: 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 country town of Eltham […]. I was to be clerk under an engineer who had undertaken to make the little branch line from Eltham to Hornby […]. I now began to taste with relish the pleasure of being my own master. I unpacked the hamper that my mother had provided me with, and smelt the pots of preserve with all the delight of a possessor who might break into their contents at any time he pleased […] above all there was the fine savour of knowing that I might eat of these dainties when I liked, at my sole will, not dependent on the pleasure of any one else […]. I stowed my eatables away in the little corner cupboard – that room was all corners, and everything was placed in a corner[…]. I myself seemed to be the only thing in the middle and there was hardly room for me. (CP 1-3, emphasis added) 152 admired, awe-inspiring father, sounding peculiarly anxious to impart all this to the reader, before finally introducing his heroine, something he defers doing until well into his narration.
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. […] But this is enough
about my dear father. (2)
Paul, however, never seems to have had enough of not only his dear father, but his own life story. In attempting to move forward to Phillis’s tale, he keeps looping back to himself. Thus, a few pages later, he becomes aware of his digression and he apologetically reminds himself, as if by way of an intervention by a censoring superego, of his initial promise to write about his cousin Phillis through a reminder addressed to the reader: “But I have nothing to do with that now. It is about cousin Phillis that I am going to write, and as yet
I am far enough from even saying who cousin Phillis was” (CP 4). Obviously, such a reminder only serves as a pre-emptive gesture, a reassurance both to himself and to the reader that it is her and not his story that one is going to read. In ways that are not at first easily detectable, his narrative persistently revolves around his own involvement – and identification – with a set of textual paternal figures of authority via the figure of Phillis.
These can easily be identified as Mr Manning (his own father), Reverend Holman, and, above all, his ultimate object of desire, Edward Holdsworth, all three apparently constituting a narcissistic object choice made according to the Freudian schema based on idealization and ego-ideal formation/identification.21 What is also worth noting in the initial stages of the
21 In her discussion of Freud’s concept of narcissism, Juliet Mitchell notes: 153
narrative is the way the narrator defines his own subject position both historically and
ideologically by perceiving his father’s and, by extension, his own working-class family
background as only a transitional phase in their aspirations towards an emerging hegemonic,
masculine and capitalist world order. This is ideally represented by the figure of the
established, middle-class Holdsworth, who is clearly operating for the narrator as a powerful
ego ideal, an improved and more sophisticated version of his own father. Thus, it is not
without significance that, in what I consider to be a crucial moment in the narrative, Paul confesses:
I was an only child; and though my father’s spoken maxim had been, “Spare the rod,
and spoil the child,” yet, unconsciously, his heart had yearned after me, and his ways
towards me were more tender than he knew, or would have approved of himself could
he have known. My mother, who never professed sternness, was far more severe than
my father: perhaps my boyish faults annoyed her more. (4)
The repressive mechanism which is at work here bears a resemblance, I would argue, to the masochistic male beating fantasy, which Freud elaborates on in his 1919 essay “A
Child is Being Beaten”. According to Freud, the masculine version of this fantasy – there is a feminine version of it as well, as we have seen in chapter two – comprises the following three phases, the second of which is unconscious and repressed because of its homosexual connotations: I am being loved by my father; I am being beaten by my father; I am being beaten by my mother. “The remarkable thing about [this third] conscious fantasy”, Freud
Large amounts of necessarily homosexual libido are drawn to the ego-ideal which will be formed by various identifications, first with the image of the self, then with parents, and later with teachers, fellow-men and public opinion in general, and which is to be incorporated in the super-ego, the agency split off from the original ego for this purpose. In his ego ideal the person fits in with the social system. He cannot conform to this ex nihilo, but only in obedience to the ideas of a family, a class or a nation. (35-36)
154
observes, “is that it has for its content a feminine attitude without a homosexual object-
choice” (187), reminiscent of Paul Manning’s attitude towards the text’s male figures under
the guise of his interest in Phillis. It is from this point onwards, then, that Paul Manning,
himself in the process of maturation towards male adulthood, as his surname suggests, never ceases to identify with what he perceives to be influential models of masculine authority.
Thus, he talks about how much he was “in the habit of yielding to Mr Holdsworth’s authority
or influence [which he] never thought of resisting” (CP 11), and how his young employer
“held the position of hero in [his] boyish mind” and that “[he] was proud of being seen with
him” (5), for, as he says, “[he] might have fallen into much worse hands” (5). Similarly, upon
meeting Reverend Holman (“whole man”), the narrator admits that “[he] never saw a more
powerful man – deep chest, lean flanks, well-planted head” (21). Even Phillis’s body, like
Thekla’s “fine strong figure” (SWH 190) is depicted in terms of its resemblance to her
father’s large figure (“Phillis – so like him […] both in body and mind” [CP 28]), in that she
“was built […] after his type” (21) rather than as a female body in itself.
Talking about the split nature of the speaking subject, Julia Kristeva refers to
“borderline experience” as one’s capacity to be both a detached spectator (impresario) of
things in life and a participant (actor), the barrier between these two positions being unstable
and blurred. Narration, for Paul, like the act of writing itself, gradually becomes such a
“borderline” experience, as it is simultaneously a gesture which objectifies and the act of an
actor. In Kristeva’s words, “he is actor and impresario: he acts and observes himself acting, he delegates to a system but also intervenes in it” (“Name of Death or of Life” 103). In other words, the narrator sees himself seeing himself since it is he, rather than the character of
Phillis Holman, who becomes both the subject and object of his gaze (Lacan, The Four
Fundamental Concepts 80), thus doubly exhibiting signs of what Freud would term the passive scopophilic instinct. At the same time he is also exposed to the gaze of his narratee, 155 by placing himself in the position of the subject who looks, but who is at the same time the one who precisely is seen.
As the narrative progresses, both as a narrating and a narrated “I”, Paul Manning the narrator and Paul Manning the character systematically attempt to obscure each other’s role in the narrative in a duplicitous game of gazes, appearances and intersubjective identifications emanating from the narrating subject’s entrapment within what might be called a narratorial imaginary. For there is almost a complete failure on the part of Paul to recognize the split nature of his subjectivity as well as that of his text, apart from one crucial moment: “As far as I can remember, I kept praising each to the other in a manner which, if I had been an older man, living more amongst people of the world, I should have thought unwise as well as a little ridiculous. It was unwise, certainly, as it was almost sure to cause disappointment if ever they did become acquainted; and perhaps it was ridiculous, though I do not think that any of us thought it so at the time” (46).
This is a moment of simultaneous hindsight and misrecognition when the narrator’s guilt-ridden conscience surfaces most clearly, in that he momentarily sounds critical of his actions when he realizes, not without satisfaction, though, that “[he] had lost his place, and that Holdsworth had taken it” (CP 75), as well as “the unconscious hold that [his] friend had got over all the family” (76-77). However, he proceeds to the gesture of displacing his own guilt onto Holdsworth when he suddenly breaks the flow of his narrative with an apostrophe, in order to address himself directly to him, a textual move that points to the present of narration, articulated as it is in formal rhetorical fashion, more reminiscent of Reverend
Holman’s habitual manner of speaking than of Paul’s own: “It is many years since I have seen thee, Edward Holdsworth, but thou wast a delightful fellow! Ay, and a good one too, though much sorrow was caused by thee!” (CP 77). 156
What is occurring here is clearly an inter-subjective shift of positions, with Paul
placing himself in the position of Rev. Holman, identifying with him fully as he addresses
himself to Holdsworth. It is difficult, indeed, at this point for the reader to decide whether the
sorrow so ambiguously spoken of has as its recipient the heroine Phillis or the narrator
himself. Additionally, the question arises as to whether the sorrow was, after all, caused by
Holdsworth at all, since the reader has seen in advance that Holdsworth’s introduction to
Hope Farm was mainly due to Paul Manning’s insistent pulling of strings. The case here is again typical of the Lacanian subject who looks and who is precisely the one who is seen – that is, is implicated – by the desire of unconscious discourse, since, according to Robert Con
Davis, “visual experience – in fact, any text – theatricalizes an ‘Other’ desire in the shifting from one position to the other” (“Lacan, Poe and Narrative Repression” 987).
Throughout the narrative we are constantly faced with the narrator’s uncertainty as to who is to blame for Phillis’s plight, as well as with his repeated efforts to displace his guilt at
having interfered in her life onto some other person, be it Reverend Holman or Edward
Holdsworth. In his capacity as both narrator and character of his own text, the manner in
which he relates to his narratee and to the text’s characters oscillates between those “two
pairs of opposites” that Freud, addressing repression, talks about in his 1915 essay “Instincts
and Their Vicissitudes” namely, “sadism-masochism and scopophilia-exhibitionism” (124).
The main characteristic that Freud assigns to these seemingly polarized visual positions is
what he calls, “reversal of instinct into its opposite” (124). Hence, masochism is virtually
“sadism turned upon the subject’s ego” (124), and exhibitionism includes looking at one’s
own body. As for the scopophilic instinct (voyeurism) per se, the beginning of its activity is
auto-erotic: “it has indeed an object, but that object is part of the subject’s own body” (127).
Paul’s narration is obviously informed by an oscillation between such duplicitous positions,
with the voyeuristic-exhibitionist model being the most prominent. This, on the level of 157
narrative discourse, might also account for his choice of both the homodiegetic and
autodiegetic modes of narration. However, it is also what Freud terms primary and secondary narcissism that seem to be at work here and which could further explain the narrator’s repeated oscillation between these two modes of narration. As Freud observes in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes”:
The preliminary stage of the scopophilic instinct, in which the subject’s own body is
the object of the scopophilia, must be classed under narcissism, and […] we must
describe it as a narcissistic formation. The active scopophilic develops from this, by
leaving narcissism behind. The passive scopophilic instinct, on the contrary, holds fast
to the narcissistic object. Similarly, the transformation of sadism into masochism
implies a return to the narcissistic object. And in both these cases […] the narcissistic
subject is, through identification, replaced by another extraneous ego. (129)
A year earlier, in his 1914 paper “On Narcissism”, Freud makes extensive reference to these two types of object choice known as “anaclitic” or “attachment” and “narcissistic”, both occurring after the stage of infantile narcissism, during which there is “an original libidinal cathexis of the ego, from which some is later given off to objects, but which fundamentally persists and is related to the object-cathexes” (68).22 It is Paul Manning’s
vacillation between these two types of object choice (anaclitic and narcissistic), as well as
between active and passive scopophilia, that seems to inform his dual mode of narration,
22 In his essay “The Libido Theory and Narcissism” (1916-1917), Freud makes the same point about narcissism. He writes: Object-choice, the step forward in the development of the libido which is made after the narcissistic stage, can take place according to two different types: either according to the narcissistic type, where the subject’s own ego is replaced by another one that is as similar as possible, or according to the attachment type, where people who have become precious through satisfying the other vital needs are chosen as objects by the libido as well. A strong libidinal fixation to the narcissistic type of object-choice is to be included in the predisposition to manifest homosexuality. (476-77) 158
either homodiegetic, when he includes the other characters in his narration, or autodiegetic,
when his discourse focuses entirely on his personal life story. Caught between primary and
secondary narcissistic identifications, between active and passive scopophilia, the narrating
subject of Gaskell’s text falls victim to the trap of the gaze described by Lacan as self-seeing
and as “that which always escapes from the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with
itself in imagining itself as consciousness” (The Four Fundamental Concepts 74).
Paul’s encounters with Phillis mark even more conspicuously the onset of the
voyeuristic gaze, since this becomes Paul’s exclusive means of deciphering her. It also
becomes a means of defence against his cousin’s unusual personality, learning and superior
physical build, which I have suggested are reminiscent of the text’s major masculine
figures.23 “I can see her now”, Paul Manning tells us in the present of narration, “standing
under the budding branches of the grey trees […] her sun-bonnet fallen back on her neck, her
hands full of delicate wood-flowers, quite unconscious of my gaze, but intent on sweet
mockery of some bird in neighbouring bush or tree” (CP 113).
It seems that the function of the voyeuristic gaze, as a means of objectification, is activated every time Phillis is perceived as belonging to what are considered to be woman’s most appropriate realms of existence, those of nature and the domestic space. The voyeuristic gaze, like the fetish, devalues, idealizes and reassures, acting, as Gilles Deleuze describes it, as “a protective and idealizing neutralization” (32). This becomes evident also in those instances when Phillis’s scholarly qualities and relation to culture come to the fore. For it is
23 In her 1932 essay, “The Dread of Woman: Observations on a Specific Difference in the Dread Felt by Men and Women Respectively for the Opposite Sex”, Karen Horney refers to the woman as a potential source of male castration anxiety and remarks upon “the violent force by which the man feels himself drawn to the woman, and, side by side with his longing, the dread lest through her he might die and be undone” (242). Gaskell’s narrator obviously experiences feelings of anxiety and fear of engulfment by the woman who is perceived as phallic and castrating.
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then that the threat of castration arises most intensely: “You see she’s so clever – she’s more
like a man than a woman – she knows Latin and Greek […] and is wise and learned; she has
been so much with her father and […] I should like to have a wife taller than I am” (CP 54),
Paul intimates to his father, when the latter considers the possibility of Phillis becoming
Paul’s bride. Thus, Paul’s repeated efforts to interpret his cousin exclusively in terms of the
domestic ideal (as the angel in the house, as her mother’s obedient maid and as a dutiful
homemaker) fail, for his struggle for meaning-making is either blocked or brought to a halt
by Phillis’s resistance to such partial categorizations. In these instances, then, the narrator is
seen to adopt that attitude described by Freud as the propensity to debase the love-object, by
persuading himself not to desire any woman who is his equal or even his superior in order to
protect his threatened self-regard in accordance with the defensive principle of “sour grapes”
(“On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love”, qtd. in Horney 251):
“Woman! Beautiful woman! I had thought of Phillis as a comely but awkward girl; and I
could not banish the pinafore from my mind’s eye when I tried to picture her to myself” (CP
69).
Paul’s lingering eye on Phillis’s bodily features, as Jenny Uglow observes, “bathes her from the start in an ambiguous double aura of sensuality and purity” (539). In Phillis he discovers such qualities as he has hitherto been able to identify in men like Holdsworth and
Reverend Holman, with the result that he feels simultaneously attracted, repulsed and intimidated by this “great, tall girl in a pinafore, half a head taller than [he] was, reading books that [he] had never heard of, and talking about them too, as of far more interest than any mere personal subjects” (CP 42). If the image of Phillis carries for Paul the threat of castration, then, according to Laura Mulvey, there are two avenues of escape from it; either by investigating and demystifying her through objectification, or through disavowal (denial) of castration by turning her or parts of her body and attire (her, hair, throat, mouth and her 160 repeatedly mentioned pinafore) into reassuring fetishes (438) – not, however, without an answer on Phillis’s part, as it will be seen. If the fetish, according to Freud, “saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual, by endowing women with the characteristic (the penis) which makes them tolerable as sexual objects” (“Fetishism” 353-54),24 then it is certainly so with the narrator, who is trying to evade his homoerotic attraction to the text’s male figures “by repressing and remodelling his unconscious fantasy” (“A Child Is Being
Beaten” 187), to use Freud’s own phrasing, in replacing his homosexual object-choice for a heterosexual one. Thus, Paul’s fantasies of wish fulfilment are marked by the presence of desire as lack, difference and otherness. Even the contents of his dream are structured accordingly, following the method of displacement: “I went to bed and dreamed that I was as tall as cousin Phillis, and had a sudden and miraculous growth of whisker and a still more
24 In the “Three Essays on Sexuality” (The Essentials of Psychoanalysis 297), Freud initially described fetishism as occurring when “the normal sexual object is replaced by another which bears some relation to it, but is entirely unsuited to serve the normal sexual aim [….] what is substituted for the sexual object is some part of the body (such as the foot or hair) [….] or some inanimate object which bears an assignable relation to the person whom it replaces and preferably to that person’s sexuality (e.g. a piece of clothing or underlinen)”. It was not until 1927, however, in his paper on “Fetishism”, that he related disavowal with fetishism, which he then came to see as a defence against the castration anxiety arising from the male child’s Oedipal complex, which the child tries to resolve by disavowing the mother’s lack of a penis, thus denying the danger to himself by constructing a fetish substitute for what he conceives of as the missing male genital. In the case of Phillis, both Paul and the other male characters of the narrative (notably Paul’s father and Mr. Holdsworth) habitually make a fetish of certain of her body parts, namely of her hair, throat and mouth with Paul even making a fetish of her pinafore.
161 miraculous acquaintance with Latin and Greek. Alas! I wakened up still a short, beardless lad, with ‘tempus fugit’ for my sole remembrance of the little Latin I had once learnt” (35).
According to Slavoj Žižek, “in Lacanian theory, fantasy designates the subject’s
‘impossible’ relation to a, to the object-cause of its desire. Fantasy is usually conceived as a scenario that realizes the subject’s desire” (Looking Awry 6); as is well known, the object petit a is but an endless series of displacements, a surplus. “In reality it is nothing at all, just an empty surface” (Looking Awry 8), whose purely formal nature renders it “an empty form filled out by everyone’s fantasy” (Looking Awry 132).
Paul’s wholly mediated, textual rendition of Phillis relies entirely on his own voyeuristic/exhibitionist orchestration of the gaze by his persistent refusal to admit (to be shown) that the object of his gaze, Phillis, becomes the bearer of the look by staring back occasionally. This is made fairly obvious by his own words: “I felt that the steady gaze of those deep grey eyes was upon me, though once, when I stealthily raised mine to hers, she was examining something on the wall above my head” (CP 14). Although the gaze seems to be functioning reciprocally here (as well as inter-subjectively between all the story’s characters irrespective of their gender), it is Paul’s lingering gaze that prevails, rather than
Phillis’s steady one, a gaze that he fantasizes as being more like the natural effect of the physical process of looking than a purposeful gaze, only to dismiss it as an imagined one. In this connection, Lacan observes:
In our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constituted by the way of vision,
and ordered in the figures of representation, something slips, passes, is transmitted,
from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it – that is what we call the
gaze (The Four Fundamental Concepts 73).
The gaze, as fundamentally different from the eye (the former is a network of relations, the latter simply one point in this network), means that individuals are blind to themselves, since 162 they can never see their own eyes as such, but only their gaze in the mirror. It is in this way that Paul ends up turning a blind eye both to Phillis’s discourse and bodily symptoms as well as to his own agency. Thus, he seems fully to verify his own father’s judgment of him:
“Thou’rt not great shakes, I know […] but many a one gets on better without having fancies for something he does not see and never has seen” (52). Betty the servant has made a similar point: “You great gaupous, for all you’re called cousin o’ th’ minister – many a one is cursed wi’ fools for cousins – d’ye think I can’t see sense except through your spectacles?” (CP130).
Relevant here is Lacan’s observation that “the subject [of phantasizing] […] is somewhere, split, divided, generally double, in his relation to the object, which usually does not show its true face either” (The Four Fundamental Concepts 185).
It is noteworthy that throughout the story Phillis Holman has no moment of looking at herself directly, or glancing into a mirror or contemplating any part of her body she might see. She becomes visible in the text only through the comments others make about her body, brains and looks as well as through her somatic discourse and bodily symptoms. As Clare
Pettitte observes, “Phillis’s body becomes a theatre where all the activity and emotion that is denied free expression displays itself” (Pettitte 485). Occasionally, however, Phillis is both intradiegetically and extradiegetically perceived, by the narrator and by the narratee respectively, not only as the bearer of the look herself, but as denying the male objectifying gaze, an act which confers a certain amount of power on her predominantly weak position in the narrative. This is the case, when, for instance, she eventually refuses to pose for
Holdsworth’s sketch of her:
He suddenly said to Phillis, – Keep your head still; I see a sketch! I have often tried to
draw your head from memory, and failed; but I think I can do it now […]. He began to
draw, looking intently at Phillis; I could see this stare of his discomposed her – her
colour came and went, her breath quickened with the consciousness of his regard; at 163
last, when he said, “Please look at me for a minute or two, I want to get in the eyes,”
she looked at him, quivered, and suddenly got up and left the room. He did not say a
word […] his silence was unnatural, and his cheek blanched a little. […] I felt obliged
to say something; it was stupid enough, but stupidity was better than silence just then.
(CP 86-7)
The fact remains, however, that although the text’s central visual metaphor seems to circulate around Phillis’s story via her somatic discourse, her story and her body are brought to the fore, only to become curiously invisible. Instead, they are systematically displaced and/or replaced by the stories and bodies of the text’s male figures, including the narrator’s,
for it is these bodies and stories that constitute the true, and for this reason repressed, object
of the narrator’s desire. Once again, the narrating “I” has not fulfilled its promise, for it has
been too much preoccupied with its own narcissistic self-fashioning and imagoes. Even more
than this, it is the gaze circulating in inter-subjective fashion that constitutes the ultimate
sought-for object in Cousin Phillis. The gaze, as object petit a, in Gaskell’s tale eventually “is
presented to us only in the form of a strange contingency, symbolic of what we find on the
horizon, as the thrust of our experience, namely, [as] the lack that constitutes castration
anxiety” (The Four Fundamental Concepts 72-73), the sort of anxiety that Paul’s text displays throughout. Despite having reached the end of his narrative, Paul remains “far
enough from even saying who cousin Phillis was” (CP 4), her figure, like that of Thekla in
“Six Weeks at Heppenheim”, becoming the lost object of his narration, a figure reminding
him of one of Wordsworth’s Lucy poems “[he] read in some book of poetry – “a maid whom
there were none to praise and very few to love”25 (114) – or as Marcel Proust would have it,
25 Elizabeth Gaskell’s affinity to William Wordsworth’s poetry is well-documented. As John Beer notes, “Wordsworth and Coleridge […] were for her two of the ‘Great spirits’ who were giving the world ‘another heart and other pulses’” (Beer 43). Also on 12th May 1836 she wrote from rural Sandlebridge: 164
“a sea, which like Xerxes, [h]e scourge[s] with rods in an absurd attempt to punish it for what it has engulfed” (100).
I have brought Coleridge with me, & am doing him & Wordsworth [–] fit place for the latter! I sat in a shady corner of a field gay with bright spring flowers – daisies, primroses. Wild anemones, & the ‘lesser celandine,’ & with lambs all around me – the air so full of sweet sounds & wrote my first chapter of W. [Wordsworth] yesterday in pencil – & today I’m going to finish him – and my heart feels so full of him I only don’t know how to express my fullness without being so diffuse. (Letters 7) Her narrator’s reference to the Lucy poems here, serves to further underscore Phillis’s invisibility and textual marginalization. The poem, from which Gaskell is quoting, is titled “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” and reads as follows: She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A Maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love:
A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! --Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and oh, The difference to me! (Abrams et al. 1986, 171)
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CHAPTER FOUR
The Gothic “I”/Eye: The Ghostliness of Identity in “The Poor Clare” and “The Grey Woman”
The fantastic problematizes vision (is it possible to trust the seeing eye?) and language (is it possible to trust the recording, speaking “I”?)
(Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion 30)
The Gothic is a discursive site, a carnivalesque mode for representation of the fragmented subject. Both the generic multiplicity of the Gothic […] and its discursive primacy, effectively detach the Gothic from the tidy implicity of thinking of it as so many predictable, fictional conventions. This may end up making the Gothic a more ambiguous, shifting term, but then the textual phenomena to which it points are shifting and ambiguous.
(Robert Miles, Gothic Writing 4)
4.1. The Victorian (Female) Gothic: A Transgressive Genre with a Pathological Twist
As a cultural phenomenon, as well as a “highly ideological signifying system” (Hoeveler,
Gothic Feminism 8), the Gothic gradually became a term broad enough to encompass a number of fields, denoting (especially during its Victorian revival) in a derogatory and sneering1 tone, everything “barbarous, medieval, supernatural” (Longueil 454) to end up “a
1 For instance, in Gaskell’s final, unfinished (because of Gaskell’s sudden death of heart failure) novel Wives and Daughters (1866) set in the early 1830s, one of the protagonists, Clare Kirkpatrick, a teacher at a girls’ school and a former governess to the local aristocracy, is depicted as trying to evade her prospective stepdaughter’s (Molly Gibson’s) stay at her own (Clare’s) house shortly before Clare’s marriage to Molly’s father, for fear of being seen reading what her “former life had caused her to look upon as [a sin] to be concealed” (Wives and Daughters 134) that is, her (shameful) liking for 166
cliché in criticism” (Longueil 460).2 Since the publication of the second edition of Horace
Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1765) which, by some general consensus,
inaugurated the Gothic as a genre, this literary form has resisted rigid categorization,
although, as James Watt comments, “the elevation of Walpole’s work to the status of an
origin has served to give an illusory stability to a body of fiction which is distinctly
heterogeneous” (1), because the Gothic can be said to include a wide range of texts which are
habitually placed under the rubric of the “fantastic”.3 The latter is also a category too broad in itself to account for the specificity of the Gothic paradigm, since it may include such diverse generic categories as folk and fairy tales, detective stories and ghost tales, as Tzvetan
Todorov has argued in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.4 However, to the extent that there is a consensus as to the Gothic constituting a distinct literary category, there are a number of characteristics ascribed to its thematic repertoire. The most basic of these pertain to the genre’s general preoccupation with fear – also materializing as female
the “dirty dog’s-eared delightful novel from the Ashcombe circulating library” (134). “Such ‘dirty’ yet ‘delightful’ novels”, according to Laura Kranzler, “would most certainly include the kind of racy, chilling, transgressive books commonly associated with Gothic fiction [with the] “‘dog’s-eared’ condition of Clare’s book suggest[ing] the multitude of eager women readers who borrowed these novels and passed them around among themselves” (“Gothic Themes in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction” 47). 2 As Paul Frankl also tells us in The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries, “‘Gothic’ (gotiche) meant ‘rustic’, ‘boorish’, ‘coarse’”(259-60), thus connoting notions of inferiority and escapism. 3 As Rosemary Jackson notes in the introduction to her influential Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, “FANTASY, both in literature and out of it, is an enormous and seductive subject. Its association with imagination and with desire has made it an area difficult to articulate or to define and indeed the ‘value’ of fantasy has seemed to reside in precisely this resistance to definition, in its ‘free- floating and escapist qualities” (1). 4 The fantastic as such constitutes for Todorov “the dividing line between the uncanny and the marvellous” (27), the former being that which can be rationally explained, while the latter that which can be only irrationally explained by supernatural, rather than by natural laws/causes. 167
terror when Ann Radcliff’s heroines began to conform to the recently decreed principles of
the sublime and the beautiful – as well as with all things gloomy and dark. As paradigmatic
of literary fantasy, the Gothic text, often “tortuous and fragmented” (Botting 2) both in content and form, seems to be “free from many of the conventions and restrains of more realistic texts […] refus[ing] to observe unities of time, space and character, doing away with chronology, three-dimensionality and with rigid distinctions between animate and inanimate objects, self and other, life and death” (Jackson 1-2). The Gothic, thus, appeared as a challenge to the eighteenth-century assumption that the conscious mind is what defines human subjectivity. Through its analysis of subliminal ecstasy and terror, it was able to move inwards into the human mind, thus providing Gaskell and her contemporaries with fertile ground for channeling illicit desires on the one hand, as well as for interrogating oppressive mechanisms, on the other.
In turning my attention to Gaskell’s use of the Gothic mode, I want to focus on the concept of the sublime as it foregrounded new forms of perception and consciousness, since a concern with terror and its relation to the notion and experience of the aesthetic category of the sublime5 (also referred to as Gothic sublimity), are among the most common traits of the
Gothic, especially in view of Edmund Burke’s account of it in his influential 1757
Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. In it,
Burke claimed that “[t]error is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the
ruling principle of the sublime” (58), defining terror as that which evokes “an apprehension
5 The term owes its origin to a treatise entitled On the Sublime (originally written in Greek with the title “Περί Ύψους”), which is believed to have been authored by the Greek rhetorician Dionysius Longinus, and in which the idea of the sublime is used to refer to various styles of speech such as high, middle and low. As an intellectual concept it was taken up by eighteenth-century writers and theorists of taste becoming particularly attractive to the artists of the Romantic period to connote an attainable quality in art and literature, one characterized by great thoughts, noble feeling, lofty figures, diction and arrangement, the five sources of sublimity established by Longinus (Cuddon 928-29). 168
of pain or death” (131). The Gothic text’s preoccupation with the sublime as a result of the
subject’s experiencing extreme situations of what is considered to be frightening is,
moreover, important to the present study, in as much as it addresses issues of subjectivity as
narrative coherence and reliability, particularly in those cases when a confrontation with
Gothic versions of the sublime – and the subsequent disruption of consciousness such an
encounter entails – arises as part of the narrating subject’s misrecognition of its own subjectivity, a subjectivity materializing in the texts under discussion as a narrating and hence mediating consciousness and/or agency.
Interestingly, it was also the cult of sensibility6 – one that exerted considerable
influence on the Gothic genre – which was also put forward in such influential works as that
of Burke’s treaty on the Sublime and the Beautiful in the form of a new attitude towards
existence and consciousness as these had already been theorized earlier by John Locke in his
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). As we have seen in chapter one of this
project, Locke challenged the Cartesian cogito philosophy by foregrounding the idea that the
mind can form ideas only after receiving (through the senses) sensations from sources
external to it and by emphasizing also the concepts of self and identity as predicated upon the
individual’s ability to construct his/her own history by being in a position to conceive of
his/her identity along a continuum at different points in time: “For it is by the consciousness it [the self] has of its present thoughts and actions”, Locke claimed, “that it is self to itself now, and so will be the same self, as far as the same consciousness can extend to actions past
6 As Elizabeth McAndrew argues, because Gothic fiction had its roots in the eighteenth-century literary tradition, it shared with it a fascination with sentimentalism closely associated with the sentimental novel to “help educate a reader’s feelings through his identification with the feelings of the characters; to arouse sympathy as the aesthetics of Sensibility demanded” (3-4). Since the Gothic genre partook of the conventions of the cult of sensibility, the effects of the latter appeared considerably magnified in this new genre, rendering it twice as conventional as the literary modes it sought to imitate. 169
or to come” (Locke 247-48). It is exactly this (already dubious) sense of continuity in one’s
sense of consciousness that Gothic sublimity (brought about by extreme forms of terror
emanating either from within of from without) comes to disrupt further, either in the form of
momentary speechlessness and blindness or in the form of loss of consciousness (swooning)
and loss of memory.
Burke’s essay on the sublime is, according to David Morris, “clearly relevant to the
almost simultaneous Gothic explorations of terror”7 (300). Yet, in its Gothic revision the
concept departed considerably from Burke’s more mechanical account of terror as the result
of purely physical/bodily processes caused by external stimuli, by hinting upon, or even
embracing the idea of terror being more likely to be caused by the mind’s own self-division8 and self-conflict, a mind tormented/haunted by its own unstable condition and subjected to its own, unknown (because long-forgotten and thus allegedly surmounted), repressed, often irrational powers (Morris 300-306).9 This is an idea clearly anticipating Freud’s later
exposition of his own version of subliminal terror in his 1919 essay on “The Uncanny”10 (“a
7 In the preface to the first edition of The Castle of Otranto, Walpole explicitly names terror as his own motivating force, as “the author’s principle engine [which] prevents the story from ever languishing” (40) by keeping the mind “in a constant vicissitude of interesting passions” (40). 8 The notion of subliminal terror as an effect of the perceiving subject’s own judgment, rather than as an objective reality is clearly one close to Immanuel Kant’s definition of it in his Critique of Judgment (1790), where he advances the idea that “true sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the judging person, not in the natural object the judgment of which prompts this mental attunement” (525) and where he defines the sublime as “what is absolutely [schlechthin] large […] what is large beyond all comparison” (521). 9 As regards the relationship between fear in its extreme form(s), terror and/or horror and its manifestation as Gothic sublimity, Morris further notes that “unlike more subtle shades of feeling or perception, fear is an ancient biological endowment, rooted in human physiology and psychology” (304). 10 Freud’s exact definition of the subject of the uncanny as “a particular province […] of the literature of aesthetics” (“The Uncanny” 339) is that “it is undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror; […] what excites fear in general” (339). In the course of his exposition 170
commentary on uncertainty”, as Hélèn Cixous has termed it in her essay “Fiction and its
Phantoms” [525]), as that which is both familiar and alien, irretrievably lost yet momentarily
recaptured/recovered in moments of intense intellectual uncertainty and doubt, which
generate feelings of terror, such as those that Gothic texts generously provide us with.11
Moreover, it is terror invested with contradictory emotions of repressed passions and desires and an intense sense of repulsion and loathing that inform what lies at the core of the sublime in its Gothic version, that is “a terror of the unspeakable, of the inconceivable, of the unnamable” (Morris 312). Also, as Elizabeth McAndrew has argued, it was through the
Gothic mode that the notion of evil, like that of terror, was seen as emanating from within the individual rather than from without, “as a distortion, warping [the] mind” (1) and not as something caused by some external, malevolent/vicious power.
The Victorian Gothic,12 in particular, especially in the form of the Victorian ghost
story, was hugely indebted to the concerns and anxieties of the preceding Romantic period,
not least because the latter period’s preoccupation with authority, subjective experience, self-
Freud, echoing Schelling, famously states that “everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light” (345) 11 Critic William Patrick Day draws a parallel between the Gothic paradigm and Freud’s system of thought viewing them both as “responses to the problems of selfhood and identity, sexuality and pleasure, fear and anxiety as they manifest themselves in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (181). 12 Peter K. Kitson’s comprehensive definition of the Victorian Gothic is particularly relevant. He defines it as: A many-splintered thing, fashioned from all kinds of cultural fears and anxieties […] a synthetic form, combining the established traditions of earlier Gothic with the recent innovations of sensation fiction, marketing these attributes for a Victorian reading public both awed and exhilarated by the process of change and improvement but terrified by fears of degeneration and decay. Victorian Gothic deals with the darker sides of the Victorian mind, those anxieties and desires that could not find open expression in the contemporary climate. (175) 171
consciousness and the status of the individual and its vicissitudes was also part of the
nineteenth-century socio-economic and philosophical backdrop, since this was the time, as
we have seen in chapter one of this project, when the dogma of individualism in combination
with industrialization, capitalism, imperialism and colonialism made themselves more acutely
felt than ever before.13 Thus, although the Victorians were largely steeped in the inherited
rationalist-empiricist, Enlightenment-based ethos of both their own and the previous century,
they also witnessed the emergence of new spectral threats, anxieties and fears mainly in the
face of a potentially rebellious working class,14 a product of the Industrial Revolution (an
13 In his article “The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story”, Srdjan Smajic observes: Compared to other genres of nineteenth-century literature, and especially the realist novel, the [Victorian] ghost story’s ethos appears not only anachronistic for its time but even fundamentally ahistorical; ghost stories are probably the last place one would think to look for evidence of how industrialization, Darwinism, or colonial expansion affected Victorian society and culture. (1108) However, I would like to argue, the Victorian Gothic was subjected to the same ideological pressures as other contemporary literary genres. The Victorian Gothic’s apprehension with phantoms and spectral returns showcases its very struggle to come to terms with its historical and cultural embededness in these cultural, political and socio-economic structures by displacing them onto its textual unconscious as both familiar and alien, threatening and dangerous, but ultimately inevitable (because newly-emerging and already there) societal phenomena. As for Gaskell’s texts under analysis, contrary to the prevalent norm characterized by a-historicism as theorized by Smajic, they are placed within a precise historical context and are replete with specific historical references throughout. 14 As David Punter claims in The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day: Gothic writing emerges at a particular and definable stage in the development of class relations: we may define this as the stage when the bourgeoisie, having to all intents and purposes gained social power, began to try to understand the conditions and history of their own ascent. This, surely is the reason for the emphasis in the literature on recapturing history, on forming history into patterns which are capable of explaining present situations […]. 172
issue thoroughly addressed by Gaskell in her industrial novels Mary Barton [1848] and North and South [1855]), on the one hand, and, on the other, the resurgence/return from a not-so- distant past of earlier (though of old familiar) fears represented by England’s ultimate foreign enemy, the Catholic French. As Sean Purchase claims, “[b]y the time of the Victorians, the notion of the Gothic ‘darkness’ had become mixed up with British anxieties about religious obscurantism, Catholicism and above all a sense of terror” (78). In both “The Poor Clare” and
“The Grey Woman”, two of Gaskell’s most explicitly Gothic tales, Roman Catholicism and the French are emphasized as feared and disruptive forces represented by the characters of the
Irish Catholic, witch-like figure of Bridget Fitzgerald of “The Poor Clare” and the sadistic highwayman Monsieur de la Tourelle of the “Grey Woman” respectively. It is in this sense, then, that I will interpret Gothic in its Victorian revision15 as both a reflection on and a
reaction to all such British anxieties connected to the nation’s relation to history by viewing
it, in Freudian terms, as an essentially repressed past which has returned to haunt the present.
This, Freud would refer to as the return of the repressed, whose effect on the subject (as both
narrating and narrated) results in what I have already referred to as subliminal terror and
hence in narrative indeterminacy, instability and/or unreliability.
But through what discursive channels have notions such as that of Gothic sublimity
been appropriated by the Victorian Gothic, especially by women writers, among whom
Gothic is thus a form of response to the emergence of a middle-class-dominated capitalist economy. (127-28) 15 Fred Botting notes: In the mid-nineteenth century there is a significant diffusion of Gothic traces throughout literary and popular fiction, within the forms of realism, sensation novels and ghost stories especially. Eighteenth-century Gothic machinery and the wild landscapes of Romantic individualism give way to terrors and horrors that are much closer to home, uncanny disruptions of the boundaries between inside and outside, reality and delusion, propriety and corruption, materialism and spirituality. These are signified by the play of ghosts, doubles and mirrors. (113) 173
Elizabeth Gaskell occupies a prominent position? And what are their narrative implications,
in terms of questions relating to gendered subjectivity and narrative reliability, particularly
when it comes to texts narrated in the first person? The present chapter will attempt to
address these issues, taking into consideration the fact that in both “The Poor Clare” and “The
Grey Woman”, Gaskell’s first-person narration is rendered even more problematic in terms of narrative authority and reliability, as we shall see, by the use of three other common Gothic conventions, that of multiple narration (as is the case with “The Poor Clare”) and those of the discovered manuscript and the embedded narrative (as employed in “The Grey Woman”), all three constituting Gothic devices used “as a means of authenticating [one’s] accounts, achieving a sense of distance or ‘pastness’ and preparing the reader to follow the story in its own terms” (Howard 21). An important effect of this type of mediated narration is to evoke, among others, an enclosed world reflecting mainly the female character’s inner world, especially when, as a letter writer, she narrates her misfortunes from a place of total (often self-imposed) isolation – as a result of what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar term “the distinctively female disease of […] agoraphobia” (The Madwoman in the Attic 85) – and imparts to the narratee her sufferings at the hands of a villain, as is the case with “The Grey
Woman”, a Gothic version of the Bluebeard myth.
The narrative devices of multiple and mediated narration clearly owe their origin to earlier forms of writing, particularly to the epistolary tradition of the eighteenth century, and were also to be used, with horrifying effects, in such celebrated works as Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein (1818), Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wonderer (1820), Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights (1847) and (rather later) Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898).16
16 Elizabeth McAndrew sees the narrative strategies of mediated and multiple narration as “enabling devices” in Gothic fiction, “laying the groundwork for symbolic interpretation” (35) thus emphasizing the text’s world position as “a symbolic construct with the reader carefully positioned in relation to it […] lead[ing] [her/him] into the landscape of the mind” (110). 174
Establishing a concurrence between content and form, the two techniques are often employed
in combination with “[d]ramatizations of imprisonment and escape” (Gilbert and Gubar, The
Madwoman in the Attic 85), as in Gaskell’s “The Grey Woman”, thus displaying a
“claustrophobic rage by enacting rebellious escapes” (85) from a life of confinement and
strictly defined frames of existence.17 Alternatively, as a way of escaping enclosure and
containment, or as an outlet for discharging guilt, “defining themselves as prisoners of their
own gender”, as Gilbert and Gubar argue, “women frequently create characters who attempt
to escape, if only into nothingness, through the suicidal self-starvation of anorexia” (85-86).
This attitude in “The Poor Clare” materializes through Bridget Fitzgerald’s vow of silence
and suicidal self-starvation as a means of effecting reparation and doing penance for her illicit
use of the power of the spoken word, in an attempt to lift her own curse of Lucy’s haunting,
sexually mischievous double.
As literary forms, then, both the Gothic novel and the Gothic tale, particularly in its ghost story18 version, endowed female writers19 with a power and freedom not to be
17 As Gilbert and Gubar further argue on the subject: “Literally confined to the house, figuratively confined to a single ‘place,’ enclosed in parlors and encased in texts, imprisoned in kitchens and enshrined in stanzas, women artists naturally found themselves describing dark interiors and confusing their sense that they were house-bound with their rebellion against being duty bound” (The Madwoman in the Attic 84). Also, in her book Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural, Vanessa Dickerson sees the woman writer of ghost tales as the one primarily affected by a pervasive Victorian condition of haunted “inbetweenness” (9), because of her ambivalent social positioning/standing, and consequently, as the one primarily situated in spectral indeterminacy. Thus, she posits that “far removed from the power-wielding occupations of the world- law, science, medicine, even the formal administration of religion yet relegated to the higher realm of moral influence, the position of the nineteenth-century female, as influential as it was, was yet equivocal, ambiguous, marginal, ghostly”(5). Hence, the widespread allure ghostliness held for the Victorian woman writer. 18 Ruth Parkin-Gounelas emphasizes the significance of the Gothic convention of ghosts: “the vast numbers of them which haunted the pages of English fiction in the first three decades of the 19th 175
encountered in other more realistic genres. “Emerg[ing] in an increasingly secularized society”, Emily Cohen observes, “the Gothic is a genre which glorifies transgression” (Cohen
883) and excess, of course, because of its subversive (via its employment of the occult and the supernatural), but, at the same time, deeply conventional generic characteristics. “Since
the mid-1970s”, Jaqueline Howard also notes, “critics and theorists, both male and female, have attempted to link the supposed subversiveness of the Gothic to its perceived existence as the gendered use of a particular literary form” (53). Through Gothic, women authors felt
century […] [whose] invasion of the everyday by literalized forms of horror [such as] ghosts, phantoms, specters and supernatural monsters” (“Learning What We Have Forgotten” 213), established the ghost tale as one more literary characteristic of the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was during this time that, in Parkin-Gounelas’s terms, “[t]he domestic ethos, which seems to have become unwritable in the period, gave way to the manifestation or embodiment of the fears and desires that lay behind it” (213). Also, according to Lucie J. Armitt, “the Victorian period is almost synonymous with the literature of ghosts […] a period in which occultism is competing with science and technology for the large answers to cultural questions” (151). The “Poor Clare”, in particular, displays such characteristics, in that both occultism and a belief in reason and science find expression in certain of the story’s characters, especially in that of the narrator, who hovers between trusting science and reason and falling prey to the effects of the supernatural. Finally, as an umbrella term, the ghost-story (as is also exemplified by Gaskell in “The Poor Clare”), includes, as Julia Briggs argues, “not only stories about ghosts, but about possession and demonic bargains, spirits other than those of the dead, including ghouls, vampires, werewolves, the ‘swaths’ of living men and the ‘ghost- soul’ or Doppelgänger” (12). 19 It is certainly not coincidental that following Horace Walpole’s text (The Castle of Otranto) the Gothic paradigm further acquired fame and/or notoriety by way of a number of female writers, who embraced its conventions and appropriated it as a literary form, such as Ann Radcliffe with The Mysteries of Udolfo (1794), Clara Reeve with The Old English Baron, Mary Shelley with Frankenstein (1818), Charlotte and Emily Brontë with Jane Eyre (1847) and Wuthering Heights (1847) respectively, to name but a few. “It is no accident” David Punter observes, “that many of the most important Gothic writers of the last two centuries – Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Dinesen, Carter – have been women” (411). Similarly, Rosemary Jackson tells us “it is no accident that so many writers of a Gothic tradition are women: Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Christina Rossetti, Isak Dinesen, Carson McCullers, Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, all of whom have employed the fantastic to subvert patriarchal society” (103-4). 176
relatively freer to offer a critique of male dominance and sexuality in more radical ways than
through other more realistically-oriented literary outlets. Also, it was through the impossible
plots of the Gothic text – “a great liberator of feeling” as Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick has termed
it (The Coherence of Gothic Conventions 3) – that readers (in their majority female) could
indulge in otherwise forbidden paths of fantasy and subversion20or attempt to come to terms
with a much-feared past inscribed into their present, a past loaded with patriarchal
prohibitions in the form of revengeful phantoms and ghostly returns. It was especially so “for
the genteel, middle-class, house-bound woman reader, [for whom] the illicit appeal of a
literary genre which is predicated upon transgressive desire” (Kranzler, “Gothic Themes”
47), that publishing houses like the Minerva Press, as Kranzler further notes, produced books
with such “ludicrously exaggerated plots” (47), making them extremely popular among a
continuously-growing female readership. “[F]or the vast numbers of early-19th-century
readers (mostly women)”, Ruth Parkin-Gounelas also informs us, “who returned, themselves,
repeatedly, to the consumption of these novels, […] these narratives, driven by the reciprocity
between remembering and repetition, are in themselves repeated enactments of libidinal
drives and in that sense are unfinishable, endlessly repeatable” (“Learning What We Have
Forgotten” 215). However, most critical accounts of the so-called Female Gothic21 have
20 As Leonard Wolf observed (rather provocatively) in The New York Times Book Review in 1973, “[d]espite the triumphs of Lewis and Maturin, the Gothic novel was something of a cottage industry of middle class women – as if women, oppressed by needlepoint, whalebone stays, psychic frustrations, shame and babies found in the making and consuming of these fictions a way to signal to each other (and perhaps the world of men) the shadowy out-lines of their own pains” (qtd. in Howard 58). 21 Since its inception by Ellen Moers in her seminal text Literary Women (1976), where she defined it as the “work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic” (90), the term has undergone several revisions and continues to be the subject of rigorous debates because of controversial attitudes regarding its usage and its debatable differences from the so-called “Male Gothic”. As a detailed discussion on the continuing evolution of the term’s 177
mainly dealt with its longer versions (the Gothic novel) and have been less inclined to
examine its shorter version,22 the Gothic tale, although this has been changing steadily since the mid-nineteen seventies, when theorists began to establish it as a distinct generic category.
connotations, Andrew Smith and Wallace Diana Wallace’s article “Female Gothic: Then and Now” is particularly illuminating. Both critics conclude that “despite or, indeed, because of, the rigorous debates which are ongoing around its usage, the term ‘Female Gothic’ is still a flexible and recognizable term for an area which is if anything gaining in vigour and complexity” (7). Elsewhere, Diana Wallace argues: “[t]he Female Gothic is perhaps par excellence the mode within which women writers have been able to explore deep-rooted female fears about women’s powerlessness and imprisonment within patriarchy […] which is the result of their exclusion or abandonment outside the symbolic order” (“Uncanny Stories” 57). To this effect, Luce Irigaray uses the term “dereliction” to refer to that state of ghost-like existence within which women “are nowhere […] never in touch with each other, lost in the air like ghosts” (The Irigaray Reader 91), a phrase which aptly describes, as we shall later on see, the situation of Anna Scherer, the heroine of “The Grey Woman”. Also viewing the Female Gothic as “a cohesive body of works with its own images and interrelations” (Fleenor 7), Juliann Fleenor’s definition of the Female Gothic is that: It is essentially formless, except as a quest; it uses traditional spatial symbolism of the ruined castle or an enclosed room to symbolize both the culture and the heroine; as a psychological form it provokes various feelings of terror, anger, awe, and sometimes self-fear and self- disgust directed towards the female role, female sexuality, female physiology and procreation; and it frequently uses a narrative form which questions the validity of narration itself. It reflects a patriarchal paradigm that women are motherless yet fathered and that women are defective because they are not males. (15) 22 In his article “The End of the Line: The Family Curse in Shorter Gothic Fiction”, Chris Baldick identifies two early forms of the Gothic tale, both of which were deficient in narrative momentum and resolution, namely the Gothic fragment, “a short lived form that made its appearance in some of the magazines of the late eighteenth century […] presenting itself as an inconclusive episode from some larger, lost work” (148) and the shilling shocker, also known as the penny dreadful, “which flourished in the popular market in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, [and] was parasitic upon the Gothic novel, in the most obvious mode of plagiarism” (148). Furthermore, For Baldick: The shorter Gothic tale is a form little studied outside the works of Poe. There are some good reasons for this neglect, principally the fact that it is largely parasitic upon the more substantial and complex tradition of the Gothic novel or romance proper […]. Whereas the line of novels from Walpole to Maturin at least forms a recognizably coherent phase of generic development (even if the story becomes more complicated later on), no such distinct 178
Elizabeth Gaskell has certainly been a case in point in this respect. An avid reader of
the Gothic herself,23 she was obviously well familiar with at least the most well-known
Gothic texts of the time, not least because she often makes explicit reference (by title) to
some of them in her fiction.24 Mainly known for her realistic style in her longer works, she
has not received as much attention as a short story writer25 or as a writer of Gothic fiction.
tradition of short story stands out either as an episode or as a clearly recognized line of development in nineteenth-century British tradition. (147-49) 23 According to Shirley Foster, “Gaskell herself enjoyed some of the sensation fiction of the 1860s, such as Caroline Clive’s Why Paul Ferroll Killed his Wife (1860), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1863), and novels by Mrs. Henry Wood (“Elizabeth Gaskell’s Shorter Pieces” 119). Evidence as to Gaskell’s reading tastes during that period derives, according to Foster, from “[b]orrowing records of the Portico Library Manchester, indicat[ing] that William Gaskell borrowed these texts; since books were not issued to women, it is very likely that these were for his wife’s, as much as for his, consumption” (129n). Also, as Foster further notes, a late Victorian article on Gaskell, observes how she was also known as an excellent narrator of ghost tales – “of which she possessed a good store” (Hompes qtd. in Foster 79) – at social gatherings, with people cramming around her to listen to her stories. For instance, a gentleman in Manchester, who was a frequent visitor at her house, is reported to have been “kept up through many a night while she told ghost-stories” (Hompes qtd. in Foster 79). Moreover, as Gaskell herself claims, Charlotte Brontë, who was once visiting Plymouth Grove (Gaskell’s Manchester home) in April 1853, one night shrank from hearing one of her hostess’s “dismal ghost stor[ies]” (The Life of Charlotte Brontë 406) fearing that it would cause her to remain sleepless all night. 24 The most notable case, to my mind, is Gaskell’s portrayal and deterministic explanation (in the face of her working-class character, John Barton) of the impoverished, revolted workers’ plight, in her 1848 first full-length novel Mary Barton, as potentially dangerous in the same way that Victor Frankenstein’s monstrous creation was, in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel: No education had given him [John Barton] wisdom; and without wisdom, even love with its effects, too often works but harm. He acted to the best of his judgement but it was a widely erring judgement. The actions of the uneducated seem to me typified in those of Frankenstein, that monster of many human qualities, ungifted with a soul, a knowledge of the difference between good and evil […] John Barton became a Chartist, a Communist, all that is called wild and visionary. (Mary Barton 160) 25 In her article “Elizabeth Gaskell’s Shorter Pieces”, in the recently published Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (2007), Shirley Foster maintains that although Gaskell’s novels (several of which 179
“Like many nineteenth-century novelists”, as Felicia Bonaparte observes, “Gaskell felt freer
to express herself in her stories than in her novels. Novels had for her the character more of
official public statements, [while] stories were more like private confidences” (48). Thus, it is
often in her shorter works, particularly in her Gothic tales, that one encounters Gaskell at her
radical best.26 Wide-ranging in content and technique as they are, her Gothic pieces show
Gaskell experimenting with genre and narrative methodology and dealing with topics which, though also explored in her longer works, often exert a sharper impact in the more restricted
have been adapted both for radio and television) have been the subject of “recent critical studies [which] have helped to establish her as one of the important novelists of the Victorian period, […] curiously, her shorter pieces have been largely disregarded by publishers and critics alike, perhaps because until now many have been difficult for modern readers to assess” (108) mainly because of their relative inaccessibility. Moreover, using evidence from Gaskell’s own letters to various publishers, Gaskell scholars such as Angus Easson and Linda Hughes, contend that “most of Gaskell’s stories were frankly written for pay, often on short notice” (Hughes 29), an observation that adds the dimension of commodity to Gaskell’s short fiction by placing it within its rightful context of the Victorian publishing industry “which tended to commodify short fiction, which had lower prestige than novels, because short stories”, Linda Hughes further notes, “could not carry a magazine, even if they frequently helped fill out an individual issue” (29). 26 In “Gaskell’s Ghosts: Truths in Disguise” Carol Martin makes extensive, well-documented reference to Gaskell’s propensity for the supernatural and the occult and her fascination with ghost stories. She notes, among others, that as “a cousin of Charles Darwin and a devout Unitarian, in the mild crisis of faith she repudiated neither science nor belief and combined […] a practical concern for the present with a strong belief in an afterlife” (27). Also, A. W. Ward, in his introduction to the Knutsford edition of Gaskell’s works, observes that “[t]he supernatural always had a strong attraction for Mrs. Gaskell, and her imagination could not fail to concern itself with those human delusions which are closely connected with the terrors largely fed by an instinctive tendency to which her own mind was no stranger” (qtd. in Martin 29). The same tendency can also be gleaned from a number of her own letters, where she openly admits her own superstitious fears, though whether seriously or in jest, it is not easy to say. In a letter to her close friend Eliza Fox (Tottie), for instance, she describes a visit to Shottery, near Stratford-on-Avon: “when we went long drives; in one of which (to a place where I believe the Sleeping Beauty lived, it was so overgrown and hidden up by woods) I SAW a ghost! Yes, I did; though in such a matter of fact place as Charlotte St. I should not wonder if you were skeptical; and had my fortune told by a gypsy; curiously true as to the past” (Letters 81). 180
space of the short story. Through what Laura Kranzler refers to as a “juxtaposition of the
ghastly and the everyday [which] suggests one of the defining characteristics of the Gothic
genre, that of the uncanny double” (Elizabeth Gaskell: Gothic Tales xi), Gaskell engages in that kind of aesthetic stimulation which allows her partly to interrogate, on the one hand, the taboos which repressed the society of the Victorian age, and to foreground, on the other, via her narrators, what Felicia Bonaparte terms “layers of self-deception” (48), exposing the self and its gender(s) as unstable, fluid and problematic categories.27 As a result, Gaskell’s use of
the theme of the double in “The Poor Clare”, as well as that of female victimization – which
implicitly embraces female homoeroticism in an attempt to experience nurturance, safety and
solidarity within patriarchy – in “The Grey Woman”, through the narrating agency of an “I”
narrator (a male and a female respectively), is of importance not only for what it possibly
reveals about her own internal conflicts and anxieties as a Victorian female subject, but also
for its revision of women’s response to the mythology of femininity and its ideals in
Victorian culture.28 Moreover, in both tales, that which has been internalized by the narrating
27 “Part of what constitutes the Gothic experience in these stories”, as Laura Kranzler also puts it in her introduction to Gaskell’s Gothic tales, “is the split between different forms of identity and between different forms of authority – in terms of gender, history and textuality – and how these boundaries are themselves transgressed” (Elizabeth Gaskell: Gothic Tales xii). 28 Louise Henson’s article “Half Believing, Half Incredulous: Elizabeth Gaskell, Superstition and the Victorian Mind” traces another dimension (one of ambivalence) to Gaskell’s relation to the ghostly and the supernatural, an attitude combining acute scepticism with eager belief within the wider context of Victorian empiricism and an enthusiastic scientific climate. To this effect she notes: The apparent ambiguity in Gaskell’s attitude – her delight in circulating stories and her concern about the sinister hold that superstition could have over the mind – reflects the ambiguity of her age. Despite the enormous appeal of the supernatural and the occult, the Victorian period was notable for its rationalist and scientific orientation towards human nature, behaviour and belief. (251) In “The Poor Clare” Gaskell’s ambivalent attitude is reflected in her narrator’s own combined scepticism with belief as regards Lucy’s case of haunting by a ghostly presence. 181
(and the narrated) subject through repression or transmitted to him/her via the encrypted, traumatic material of his/her psychically afflicted ancestors, insists on returning not only through doublings and repetitions, but also through the merging of the seemingly opposing temporalities of past, present and future as well as of the categories of history and literature, fact and fiction in much the same way as truth and fantasy merge during the analytic situation. Finally, narrative closure in the form of restoring order and normality is in both texts emphatically (and enigmatically) denied in defiance of one of Gothic’s most basic conventions. Thus, both “The Poor Clare” and “The Grey Woman” are only partially, if at all, resolved with most of their narrative strands left hanging open by their indecisive, psychically afflicted (traumatized), first-person narrators.
4.2. The Backward Glance of Narration: Narrative Discordance and the Encounter with the Sublime in “The Poor Clare”
The most ancient myths tell of the transgressive nature of the backward glance. Lot’s wife heedlessly looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt. No sooner has Orpheus glanced at Eurydice, than she is lost to him for ever. (Emily Cohen, “Museums of the Mind: The Gothic and the Art of Memory” 883)29
Why do I tell you all this? I have little to do with the Squire and Madam Starky;
29 The terror of the backward glance, as Maud Ellmann also observes, “lies in the interpretive activity itself, the sheer audacity of looking back into the past and rediscovering the violence of childhood. Thus it is curious that many myths revolve around the prohibition of the backward glance […]. It seems that Orpheus yearning for the past exceeds his desire to lead it back into the light; […] Similarly, Oedipus’s backward glance costs him his eyes” (9). In Gaskell’s tale, the narrating subject’s obsession with the backward glance reveals its loss of authority over itself and its narrative. 182
and yet I dwell upon them, as if I were unwilling to come to the real people with whom my life was so strangely mixed. (“The Poor Clare” 52)
It is with the above apostrophe/direct address, an engaging narrative practice often employed
by Gaskell in her fiction,30 that her narrator interrupts the flow of his four-page, introductory narration in “The Poor Clare”,31 as if to remind both the narratee and himself of a seemingly
pointless digression from what should constitute his retrospective, backward-looking
narrative proper, that is, the events that led to his own actual involvement with the cursed
Lucy Gisborne through a series of strange coincidences and supernatural phenomena. As if in
30 The narratological terms “engaging narration” and “engaging narrator” constitute part of Robyn Warhol’s terminology to denote the employment of a narrator who intervenes in the text and directly addresses a public readership as if they were historical individuals in an attempt to guide their sympathies. An engaging narrator, as Warhol explains, attempts to bridge the gap between strictly literary utterances and serious statements (“Towards a Theory of the Engaging Narrator” 811-17) by thus overlooking the distance between what Gerald Prince terms the “narratee” and the actual reader of the text identifying the two as one and the same entity or, as Warhol has put it in her work Gendered Interventions, when “identification between narrator and author is reinforced” (57). This narrative device, which is repeatedly used by Gaskell in her fiction (particularly in her industrial novel Mary Barton), but also by other contemporary novelists (Charlotte Brontë had used it in Jane Eyre, for instance, with her famous “READER, I MARRIED HIM” phrase being the most notable case), seems to be linked with sentimentalism or sensationalism in novel writing, with the Gothic text offering itself as particularly fertile ground for sensationalism and/or sentimentalism and melodrama. As meta-narrative signs, however, such direct addresses to the narratee/ reader pair (“almost always spoken in earnest” [Warhol, “Towards a Theory” 811]) also constitute, one might arguer, narrative interventions which actually point to the made up nature of the text, since they inevitably expose their very own textuality. 31 According to Laura Kranzler, “[t]he Convent of the Poor Clares was established by Clare Offreduccio de Favarone (1193-1253) in San Damiano, Italy, in 1212. This contemplative order is based upon the teachings and beliefs of Saint Francis of Assisi, and members of the enclosed community live according to the principles of poverty, sisterly communion and solitude” (Gothic Tales: Elizabeth Gaskell 350 n.) 183
the grip of some inner, irresistible force, Gaskell’s limp, frail narrator sounds unwillingly
willing, but, also, compulsively impatient, to explain to both parties (himself and the
narratee) his prolonged dwelling upon the story of the Catholic Starky family. The digression,
however, is far from pointless, since, as I wish to argue, it points exactly towards where it
should, that is, towards the blind spot of a foreign/alien traumatic past, a past which has
returned to haunt the present and future of narration in the form of a foreign body called “IT”
(“PC” 78-79). The latter, having become an infection for all those directly involved with the
story (including the narrator), has been brought home by the Irish Catholic Madam Starky in
the face of her Irish Catholic nurse, Bridget Fitzgerald, who subsequently becomes one of the
Poor Clares. Although, as we are told from a theoretically safe point of closure, “IT” departed
long ago together with Bridget’s terrible curse and Bridget herself, “IT” is still here, alive and
well, haunting the discourse of the narrating subject, who narrates the traumatic moment in an
attempt to come to terms with its paralyzing force.
“The Poor Clare”, one of Gaskell’s lesser-known32 Gothic pieces, was first published
(anonymously) in three installments (on December 13th, 20th and 27th 1856) in Dickens’s
extra Christmas number of Household Words,33 after the completion of Gaskell’s industrial
novel North and South and while she was at work on her famous biography of The Life of
32 It is mostly Gaskell’s better-known Gothic piece, her ghost tale entitled “The Old Nurse’s Story” (1852), which has attracted critical attention so far, mainly for stylistic reasons (it is considered to be one of Gaskell’s most artistically complete works and also one which fully reflects the tropes and conventions of the Gothic genre). However, this attitude towards Gaskell’s other Gothic tales has been changing lately, with a number of them featuring prominently not only in anthologies of the genre, but in critical studies as well. 33 The tale had actually been intended for the previous (1855) Christmas number of Household Words, but because Gaskell had not been able to complete it in time for publication, it was reserved for next year’s Christmas number. It was later incorporated into the second volume of Round the Sofa and Other Tales (1859) together with such tales as “An Accursed Race”, “The Doom of the Griffiths”, “Half a Life-Time Ago” and “The Half-Brothers”. 184
Charlotte Brontë. The story is “an example of Gaskell’s skilful interweaving of historical fact
and local legend with her own fiction” (Kranzler, Gothic Tales 347n), and in John Chapple’s terms, “an exploration of madness, revenge and the uncanny” (“Unitarian Dissent” 176). It is retrospectively narrated by a homodiegetic, introspective, nameless narrator that is, by a first- person, personally-involved, elderly, male narrator, whose impulsive (and compulsive) urge for a type of narration interspersed with meta-narrative comments is emphasized right from the start. One could say that the text is a Gothic structure in itself (as is so often the case with
Gothic texts), with numerous twists and turns in its plot as well as repetitions and simultaneous backwards and forward narrative moves. It typically uses what Andrew Smith and Diana Wallace describe as “a male love-struck narrator, who appears to be caught in a
Female Gothic plot which casts him as its hero, [with] love becom[ing] increasingly sinister as it turns into a destabilizing and dangerously irrational emotion that ultimately aligns love with feelings of justified terror” (6). Thus, it abundantly displays the stylistic conventions of the Gothic also because of Gaskell’s use of a number of common stock devices of the genre, such as the old Manor House of the Starky family in the middle of a thick forest, the appearance of a ghostly double and an intense fear and loathing of Catholicism (“the old faith”, as it is called) and all that is connected to it, as the text’s source of evil. It tells, moreover, the story of the narrator’s own professional and emotional involvement with Lucy
Gisborne, the illegitimate daughter of Mary Fitzgerald (Bridget Fitzgerald’s daughter) and
Squire Gisborne, the latter having been the recipient of a terrible curse by the Irish Catholic
Bridget Fitzgerald, a curse, which ultimately comes to haunt Bridget’s granddaughter, Lucy, and, eventually, Bridget herself in the form of a demonic double.
As a number of critics have noted – Felicia Bonaparte, Jenny Uglow, Shirley Foster and Maureen Reddy among them – the story displays a thematic affinity not only with several of Gaskell’s other (mainly Gothic) works, but also with Charlotte Brontë’s fiction, 185
particularly with Jane Eyre, in that both in “The Poor Clare” and in Brontë’s novel the motif of the double is explicitly used, according to Maureen Reddy, “as an emblem of [the heroine’s] potential for passion” (264).34 To this, one could also add the fact that both works
are first-person narratives told by retrospective narrators, whose personal involvement in and
temporal distance from their narratives cast doubts as to their reliability, objectivity and their
ideological positioning in the “then” and “now” of their narration.
Although narrative unreliability often becomes an issue in first-person narratives as
products of one particular, and thus, limited subjectivity, in the case of “The Poor Clare” the spatial and temporal split between the past and present of narration becomes centrally problematic, because of the narrator’s own obsession with and insistent dwelling upon a traumatic past at the expense of a disconcertingly ever-present “now” coupled with an unspecified, uncertain future. For, as I wish to argue, this is a text that is curiously anchored in the present of narration – despite its claims to the contrary – which is haunted by the past and in this respect, I contend, it is reminiscent from the very beginning of the analytic situation. As for the future, this is to be left out of perspective, quite intentionally, we are told by the anonymous, elderly, male narrator of the text – a lawyer by profession – in his assertion that he is habitually intent upon probing into things past (rather than future), just like the books in his uncle’s library: “His house was in a stately new street called Ormond
Street”, he tells us, “and in it he had a handsome library; but all the books treated of things
34 There is a characteristic scene in “The Poor Clare”, which is strongly reminiscent of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, namely Jane’s first encounter with Bertha Mason’s “curious […] distinct, formal, mirthless” (Brontë 92-3) laugh coming from the Thornfield attic. In Gaskell’s text it is the moment just before the narrator experiences his own first encounter with Lucy’s double: “Just at this moment came a peal of ringing laughter from the garden. It was Lucy’s voice; it sounded as if she were standing just on one side of the open casement – and as though she were suddenly stirred to merriment – merriment verging on boisterousness, by the doings or sayings of another person […]. Again that laugh – so musical in sound, yet so discordant to my heart” (“PC” 74-75).
186
that were past; none of them planned or looked forward into the future” (“PC” 61). Likewise,
the lawyer’s profession that is passed on (along with material property) to the narrator by his
unmarried, childless London uncle is also backward looking, since “[m]any cases of disputed
property, dependent on a love of genealogy, were brought to him, as to a great authority on
such point” (“PC” 61), thus displaying the narrator’s own (either inherited or chosen)
preoccupation with tracing origins, legitimacy and/or illegitimacy as well as with securing
inheritance rights. All of these concerns traverse the text throughout, for they constitute, we
are told, not only a professional, but, as it turns out, also a personal goal of the narrating
persona, because of his parallel profound emotional involvement with the accursed Lucy
Gisborne. Once liberated from the curse, Lucy and the narrator can aspire towards union, but
until then, we are informed, and despite the fact that “[t]the great Fitzgerald property was
Lucy’s […] that was all – [and] nothing” (“PC” 90), they are doomed to remain apart from
each other, since Lucy’s double stands between them acting, like all doubles, as “a disturber of love” (Freud, “The Uncanny” 353).35 Only when Lucy’s double becomes, in Otto Rank’s
terms, “a harbinger of death” (Freud, “The Uncanny” 357) for the one who has cast the curse
(that is for Bridget) are the two lovers free to embrace normality. We are never explicitly
told, though, if normality ever arrives, since there is no mention whatsoever in the text of
matrimonial (or other) union between the two lovers.
However, the future in “The Poor Clare” I wish to argue, is crucially present, despite
the narrator’s (alleged) predilection for things past. It conspicuously intrudes in the narration
at one of the most crucial points in the narrative, the moment when the horrifying curse is
35 The double is a “disturber of love”, Mladen Dolar, echoing both Freud and Otto Rank, also explains. “[H]e typically springs up the moment when one is about to touch or to kiss, the girl of one’s dreams; he springs up when the subject comes close to the realization of his wishes, when he is on the brink of attaining full enjoyment, the completion of the sexual relation” (“I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding Night” 14). 187 cast by the witch-like Bridget Fitzgerald upon Squire Gisborne for having wantonly shot her dog after a drinking bout, the dog being the only thing left to Bridget by her daughter, Mary, the latter having departed from her mother’s home in order to take up “a situation with a grand lady abroad” (“PC” 54). The curse characteristically extends towards a specific and predetermined end and, as a formal “illocutionary act” (Prince, Dictionary of Narratology
41), is both solemnly articulated and ceremoniously cast by Bridget:
She walked right into Mr Gisborne’s path, and fixed his unwilling, sullen look, with
her dark and terrible eye. “Those never throve that did me harm,” said she. “I’m alone
in the world, and helpless; the more do the saints in heaven hear my prayers. Hear me,
ye blessed ones! hear me while I ask for sorrow on this bad, cruel man. He has killed
the only creature that loved me – the dumb beast that I loved. Bring down heavy
sorrow on his head for it, O ye saints! He thought I was helpless, because he saw me
lonely and poor; but are not the armies of heaven for the like of me? […] You shall
live to see the creature you love best, and who alone loves you – ay, a human creature,
but as innocent and fond as my poor, dead darling [Mignon, the dog] – you shall see
this creature for whom death would be too happy become a terror and loathing to all,
for this blood’s sake. Hear me, O holy saints, who never fail them that have no other
help!”
She threw up her right hand, filled with poor Mignon’s life-drops; they
spurted, one or two of them, on his shooting-dress, – an ominous sight to the follower.
(“PC” 59)36
36 The scene recalls a very similar one in method and tone in another Gaskell Gothic piece “The Doom of the Griffiths”, where the Welsh national hero Owen Glendower casts a similar curse on his best friend as punishment for his betrayal: I doom thee to live because I know thou will pray for death […]. Thou shalt live to see all of thy house, except the weakling in arms, perish by the sword. Thy race shall be accursed. Each 188
Ironically, in Oedipal fashion, “the roots of the curse lie deeper than she knows”
(“PC” 82), as the nameless, future-evading narrator observes. Interestingly, the two phrases
“my poor, dead darling” and “for this blood’s sake”, also recall Bridget’s other darling, her
lost daughter Mary, whose death37 has been caused by the same Squire Gisborne and in this
way the deadly curse comes to implicate five different parties (Bridget, Mary, Squire
Gisborne, Lucy and the nameless narrator) in its web, all of them interconnected by ties of
blood, marriage and inheritance. Bridget’s curse, like all curses, is habitually articulated in
the declarative mode, replete with illocutionary force in the future tense, promising to fulfil
itself (as it does) at some indefinite chronological point in the near or distant future. The
cursed creature turns out to be none other than Bridget’s own granddaughter, Lucy Gisborne
(her “own flesh and blood”) – the latter being the offspring of the union between the seduced
Mary Fitzgerald and Squire Gisborne – upon whom the curse comes to rest in the form of a ghostly double, whose haunting presence affects not only Lucy’s own, but also the narrator’s mental stability, and by extension, his narration and his reliability as well. As he notes,
“[n]othing was real but the unreal presence, which had come like an evil blast across my bodily eyes, and burnt itself down upon my brain” (“PC” 80).
The crucial mirror scene, during which the double makes its appearance – just when
Lucy reaches adolescence – is twice narrated, first by Lucy, as her own initial encounter with her double, and shortly afterwards, through the narrator’s perspective, as his own experience
generation shall see their lands melt away like snow […]. And when nine generations have passed from the face of the earth, thy blood shall no longer flow in the veins of any human being. In those days the last male of thy race shall avenge me. The son shall slay the father. (“The Doom of the Griffiths” 104) 37 A brief account of Mary Fitzgerald’s fate at the hands of Squire Gisborne appears half-way through the text recounted by Mistress Clarke, Lucy’s supportive guardian: “She was some beautiful young woman whom he lured away from her protectors while he was abroad. I have heard said he practised some terrible deceit upon her, and when she came to know it, she was neither to have or to hold, but rushed off from his very arms, and threw herself into a rapid stream and was drowned” (“PC” 81). 189
of seeing “IT” (“PC” 79). In both cases, it should be noted, the double as other, as the object
of both the male and female gaze is perceived to be potentially destructive – what Freud,
echoing Otto Rank, calls “a harbinger of death” (“The Uncanny” 357) as well as alluring and
sexually seductive, a figure bearing the promise of deathly jouissance for the desiring subject:
“The curse – the curse!” I looked up in terror. In the great mirror opposite I saw
myself, and right behind, another wicked, fearful self, so like me that my soul seemed
to quiver within me, as though not knowing to which similitude of body it belonged.
My father saw my double at the same moment, either in its dreadful reality, or in the
scarcely less terrible reflection in the mirror; but what came of it at that moment I
cannot say, for I suddenly swooned away; I was in my bed for days; and even while I
lay there my double was seen by all, flitting about the house and gardens, always
about some mischievous or detestable work. What wonder that everyone shrank from
me in dread – that my father drove me forth at length, when the disgrace of which I
was the cause was past his patience to bear. (“PC” 77)
“Not knowing to which similitude of body [her] soul belonged”, Lucy seems to be at odds with her own body and her sense of self, since she both recognizes but also misrecognizes the reflected dual image of herself as both angel and demon.38 The scene once
38 The demon-angel duality is, of course, a staple one among Victorian conceptions of femininity complemented in art and literature, according to Nina Auerbach, by the old-maid/fallen woman duality (Woman and the Demon 63). From a Lacanian perspective, this is a moment of deep ambivalence for the human subject, as we have seen, a moment of both recognition and misrecognition, in the sense that one recognizes one’s own reflected image, but also the “miss”, the lack, loss or gap intervening between one’s own self and one’s own reflection, which results in one’s becoming alienated from oneself. Thus, the subject acquires a sense of self which is marked by feelings of stability, unity and wholeness, but, at the same time, by a sense of lack, a sense of a whole pointing out a gaping hole. This is also a moment during which the subject experiences feelings of aggression towards its own mirror reflection, which in the case of Lucy’s double possibly point towards her inherited unspeakable secrets. 190
again recalls the Mirror Stage process defined by Lacan in his 1949 lecture as “the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject” (“The Mirror Stage” 2). The mirror itself also functions as a source of jouissance
for the subject, who is enticed by and absorbed in the imaginary misrecognition of her image.
This “I”, according to Lacan, is one “that leads us to oppose any philosophy directly issuing
from the Cogito” (1). In other words, it is an “I” which is foreign to rather than at one with itself, “situat[ing] the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional
direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual” (2). However, in the case
of Lucy’s haunting by a phantom visited upon her via an ancestor’s curse, another psychic
mechanism which seems to be at work here is what Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok refer
to as the “Transgenerational Phantom”, to which we shall return later on in this chapter.
The narrator initially reacts to the appearance of Lucy’s double in a sceptical manner:
“I had hitherto put cases of witchcraft on one side as mere superstitions”, he tells us, “and my
uncle and I had had many an argument, he supporting himself by the opinion of his good
friend Matthew Hale. Yet this sounded like the tale of one bewitched; or was it merely the
effect of a life of extreme seclusion telling on the nerves of a sensitive girl? My scepticism
inclined me to the latter belief” (“PC” 77-78). He thus officially displays his distrust towards
such phenomena which cannot be rationally explained and proved by the empirical methods
of applied science. He also appears to be reiterating his era’s wider concerns with what
Srdjan Smajic terms “complex negotiations between faith and doubt in the epistemological
value of sight [as] the result of an emerging crisis in early nineteenth-century discourse on
vision” (1109). This so-called crisis Smajic sees as part of the Victorians’ concern with a
wider network of ontologically contested issues related to human perception and subjectivity,
including the controversial issue of vision and the very definition of seeing itself. The 191 controversy, according to Smajic, was “shaped by two related and concurrent developments: the rapidly declining influence of theology and metaphysical philosophy in forming popular thinking about visual perception, and the dissemination of ideas through physiological science about the fundamentally subjective character of human vision” (1109).39
The narrator’s oscillation between faith and doubt as to the actuality of Lucy’s double’s sightings is characteristically articulated in terms of contemporary beliefs related to empirical data and philosophy, when just before his own spectral encounter with the apparition he tells Lucy: “I fancy that some physician could have disabused your father in his beliefs in visions” (“PC” 78). “While nineteenth-century physiological science could effectively rationalize the appearance of a spectre as nothing more than a subjective optical effect – an ephemeral image that exists nowhere except in the deceived eye of the beholder”,
Smajic notes, “the unsettling question that inevitably arose from such arguments, and which
Victorian ghost-story writers often posed quite explicitly, was where precisely (if anywhere at all) to draw the line between objective and subjective perception in general, between optical fact and optical illusion”. (1109) They thus prefigured later, anti-Cartesian theories of perception and scopic regimes (such as that of Lacan) related to the position of the observer/spectator in the world, which insert the gazing subject/seer within an intricate network of socio-economic, cultural and psychological practices and discourses.
39 Smajic further notes: While the only acceptable model of vision for nineteenth century materialist philosophy and science was of course the physiological one, vocal defenders of Christian doctrine such as Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin zealously argued for the primacy of spiritual vision and poignantly contrasted the limited capabilities of the bodily eye with the more valuable and permanent insights of spiritual and devotional spectatorship. (1110) Thus, even from within contemporary religious discourses, the notion of a coherent, perfectly knowable self through empirical data was strongly questioned and indirectly paved the way for subsequent theoretical paradigms on the formation of subjectivity and the trajectories and function of its vision(s). 192
Seeing, however, in “The Poor Clare” subsequently translates into believing for the incredulous narrator, since the image of Lucy’s double soon becomes as disconcerting and unbearable for him as it is for Lucy, leading him to abandon his initial scepticism40 about such supernatural phenomena upon seeing the phantom himself:
Just at that moment, standing as I was opposite to her in the full and perfect morning
light, I saw behind her another figure – a ghastly resemblance, complete in likeness, so
far as form and feature and minutest touch of dress could go, but with a loathsome
demon soul looking out of the grey eyes, that were in turns mocking and voluptuous.
My heart stood still within me; every hair rose up erect; my flesh crept with horror. I
could not see the tender Lucy – my eyes were fascinated by the creature beyond. I
know not why, but I put out my hands to clutch it; I grasped nothing but empty air,
and my whole blood curdled to ice. For a moment I could not see; then my sight came
back and I saw Lucy standing before me, alone, deathly pale, and, I could have
fancied, almost, shrunk in size.
“IT has been near me?” she said, as if asking a question.
The sound seemed taken out of her voice; it was husky as the notes of an old
harpsichord when the strings have ceased to vibrate. (“PC” 78, emphasis added)
40 Louise Henson uses the phrase “volitional control” to refer to Victorian epistemological attitudes towards the dominant idea that the mind should be under the sole control of reason rather than in the grip of the fantastic, the marvellous and/or the supernatural. The narrator in “The Poor Clare” seems to lack such “volitional control” when he has to come to terms with the case of Lucy’s haunting. Henson notes: “The narrator’s own role in the story also serves to demonstrate how the intelligent and the educated might be impressed by powerful ideas and thus come to be seduced by the superstitions of tradition” (“Half Believing, Half Incredulous” 258).
193
As instances of Gothic sublimity, both Lucy’s and the narrator’s encounters with the double generate feelings of (literally) unspeakable terror and intellectual uncertainty. These materialize in the narrator’s momentary loss of sight and Lucy’s loss of voice and seem to exert on both of them a fascination with those vertiginous aspects of the psyche which point towards the subject’s imaginary construction in the symbolic, allowing it, at the same time, a furtive glimpse of what lies on the other side of the dividing border, namely, the Real, an encounter with which can only mean loss, division, death and absence of representation. “I took her [Lucy] by the hand”, the narrator continues, “and led her silently through the budding heather – we dared not speak; for we could not tell but that the dread creature was listening, although unseen, – but that IT might appear and push us asunder. I never loved her more fondly than now when – and that was the unspeakable misery – the idea of her was becoming inextricably blended with the shuddering thought of IT” (“PC” 78).41 “IT”, then, becomes a point of reference in the text, the alien/foreign, but, at the same time, familiar body/blind spot that threatens to disrupt the subject’s consistency by traversing the text as that which functions both as a threat of annihilation and a promise of jouissance – as, in other words, the primordial lost object a.42
41 Elsewhere in the text, the narrator characteristically refers to “IT” also as “the fearful Third” in connection with how it intervenes between Lucy and himself, on the one hand, and, on the other, in relation with how it affects his own mental state: “I was out of health, and felt as if I were in an inextricable coil of misery. Lucy and I wrote to each other, but that was little; and dared not see each other for dread of the fearful Third, who had more than once taken place in our meetings” (“PC” 90). 42 “Where do we meet this real?”, Lacan poses the question in his essay “Tuché and Automaton”, explaining that “what we have in the discovery of psycho-analysis is an encounter, an essential encounter – an appointment to which we are always called with a real that eludes us” (The Four Fundamental Concepts 53). The term “tuché”, which as Lacan writes, he “ha[s] borrowed from Aristotle [and has] translated as the encounter with the real” (53) places “the real beyond the automaton [the symbolic order], the return, the coming back, the insistence of the signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle” (53). 194
According to Mladen Dolar’s post-Lacanian reading, “the double is that mirror image
in which the object a is included. It gains its own being, the Imaginary starts to coincide with
the Real, provoking a shattering anxiety […] the anxiety that the double produces is the surest
sign of the appearance of the object” (“At First Sight” 139). Furthermore, “the consistency of
our experience of reality”, according to Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Lacan, “depends on the
exclusion of what he [Lacan] calls the object petit a from it: In order for us to have ‘normal
access to reality’, something must be excluded, ‘primordially repressed’” (“I Hear You with
my Eyes” 91). In moments of subliminal terror like those experienced in “The Poor Clare”
“this exclusion is undone: the object […] is included in reality, the outcome of which, of
course, is the ‘disintegration of our sense of reality’, the loss of reality” (“I Hear You” 91).
Moreover, momentary loss of sight (blindness) and voice (voiceless sound, which equals
silence) strip the subject of those protective defences against engulfment by the deathly Real in the realm of which the Lacanian love objects of gaze and voice – “the two objectal remainders of an excessive presymbolic jouissance” (Salecl and Žižek 4) – show their true face. The former (the gaze) by returning itself through the demonic mirror image and the latter (the voice) by rendering the gazing subject’s voice without sound, a “silent sound, [a] soundless voice” (Dolar, “The Object Voice” 7), leading to a destabilization of the subject’s faculties and hence of its narrative reliability.
Inevitably, then, the narrator’s initial incredulity towards the actuality and efficacy of the curse is eroded in order to be replaced by his own susceptibility to the same state of mind as Lucy’s. He thus becomes as much afflicted – as if by means of a hypnotic effect – by the curse as his object of affection, Lucy, and, in similar fashion to Frankestein’s monster,
Maturin’s Melmoth (in Melmoth the Wanderer) and Coleridge’s ancient mariner (in his poem
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner), he, also, becomes a wanderer: “I was restless and miserable”, he intimates to his narratee, “I devoted myself to good works; but I performed 195
them from no spirit of love, but solely from the hope of reward and payment, and so the
reward was never granted. At length, I asked my uncle’s leave to travel; and I went forth a
wanderer, with no distincter end than that of many another wanderer – to get away from
myself” (“PC” 96). Obviously, then, by feeling a stranger to himself, the narrator, as both a narrating and a narrated “I”, testifies to his very own instability/ unreliability and ultimate susceptibility to the effects of the curse.
As Linda Hughes and Michael Lund note, “[t]o the superstitious eighteenth-century minds of the story's characters, this effective curse arranges events along a predetermined path into the future as much as a genealogist’s research codifies the past” (Victorian
Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell's Work 101), in much the same way, I would add, that the narrator's obsession with tracing (and retrieving) things past informs his very own methods of retrieval. Thus, while in the process of investigating the “existence of any descendants of the younger branch of a family to whom some valuable estates had descended in the female [Bridget’s] line” (“PC” 62), the narrator observes:
Accordingly, I went to Kildoon. I suspect I had something of my Uncle’s delight in
following up a genealogical scent […] for I very soon found out […]. [T]here were
three poor Irish fellows, each nearer of kin to the last possessor; but, a generation
before, there was a still nearer relation, who had never been accounted for, nor his
existence ever discovered by the lawyers, I venture to think, till I routed him out
from the memory of some of the old dependents of the family. What had become of
him? I travelled backwards and forwards; I crossed over to France, and came
back again (“PC” 63, emphasis added).
It is in similar manner that temporality in the form of past, present and future
traverses the text of “The Poor Clare”, with Bridget’s self-fulfilling curse functioning as a
fixed, but also mobile point of reference throughout the text, returning over and over to 196 haunt the process of narration and the narrator, who also (anxiously) traverses his memory paths in an attempt to “rout out” of it the traumatic raw material that has liberally endowed him with confusion and uncertainty, so that he can provide the narratee with as solid an account of events as possible.43 It is the curse, again, that provides the most compelling unifying element in a text which, in most other aspects lacks unity and strength of plot.
The story is set at a time anterior to that of Gaskell’s own “in a day and place of a more literal religious belief” (Homans 248). Though it purports to be exclusively concerned with the past, it begins by being firmly anchored in the present of narration. It starts in medias res, literally, in the middle of things:
December 12th 1747. – My life has been strangely bound up with extraordinary
incidents, some of which occurred before I had any connection with the principal actors
in them, or indeed, before I even knew of their existence. I suppose, most old men are,
like me more given to looking back upon their own career with a kind of fond interest
and affectionate remembrance, than to watching the events – though these may have far
more interest for the multitude – immediately passing before their eyes. If this should
be the case with the generality of old people, how much more with me! [...] If I am to
43 Critics have detected a number of inaccuracies concerning facts and localities in the plot of the story and have also commented upon the story’s lack of unity and uncertainty of focus, using stylistic evidence. In “A Missing Gaskell Tale Found”, for instance, Ellen M. Laun argues that the second chapter of the three comprising “The Poor Clare” was written about ten years before the first and last chapters and she also provides convincing evidence of “many small discrepancies and factual errors [which] demonstrate the imperfect matching of parts” (179). Also, in her essay “Female Sexuality in “The Poor Clare”: The Demon in the House”, Maureen Reddy observes that “[u]nlike Gaskell’s best gothic tales, such as “The Old Nurses Story”, this story is too difficult to have great impact; there are far too many characters and incidents for one tone to be sustained throughout […]. The reader would be thankful for a chart of the plot, which has so many turns and twists that one is likely to get lost entirely along the way” (261). Obviously, the tale displays a lack of unity as part of its indebtedness to the nineteenth-century Gothic conventions, which legitimized a lack of narrative momentum and clear-cut plots. 197
enter upon that strange story connected with poor Lucy, I must begin a long way back.
I myself only came to the knowledge of her family history after I knew her; but, to
make the tale clear to any one else, I must arrange events in the order in which they
occurred – not that in which I became acquainted with them. (“PC” 49)
In this passage, the narrator’s confessional tone, ominous as it is, and his declared obsession with a traumatic past (which he must strive to put in order in accordance with the present), coupled with his intention, but, also, with his momentary hesitation/indecision (“If I am to enter upon that strange story”) to impart this to an attentive reader/listener/narratee, contrast sharply with his use of the present perfect tense. (“My life has been strangely bound up with extraordinary incidents”). This clearly suggests not only the on-going haunting effects of the events to be recounted, but also an affinity with what Freud was later to identify as the talking cure, the analytic situation. In his essay “Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue”,
Roy Schafer poses the following question to which he shortly provides the answer:
Is there a narrative form that is methodologically more adequate to the psychoanalytic
occasion? I believe there is. It is the story that begins in the middle, which is the
present […]. Once the analysis is under way, the autobiographical present is found to
be no clear point in time at all. One does not even know how properly to conceive this
present; more and more it seems to be both a repetitive, crisis perpetuating
misremembering of the past and a way of living defensively with respect to the future
which is, in the most disruptive way, imagined fearfully and irrationally on the model
of the past. It soon becomes evident that one is working in a temporal circle. (48)
This is the exact way, it seems to me, that both the narrator and the narratee conceive of the temporal circle of the events to be narrated, arranged, as we are told, “in the order in which they occurred – not that in which [he] became acquainted with them” (“PC” 49) as dictated, 198
moreover, by “some strange power which had taken possession of [his] will […] and which
forced it in the direction it chose” (“PC” 67).
Narratologically speaking, Gaskell’s narrator engages in making an implicit meta- narrative reference to two distinct versions of chronological sequence reflected by the terms
“story” and “plot”, or fabula and sjuzhet within the Russian Formalist paradigm.44 Although
the two terms correspond to different modes of temporal organization of a given narrative (the
former is incumbent upon linear chronology, while the latter does not respect sequential
chronological order), when it comes to such convoluted narratives as that of “The Poor Clare”,
the distinction between the two is far from clear, in much the same way as narrative sequence
becomes problematic in the analytic situation itself. By the same logic, the narrator’s longing
for completion and explication is destined to frustration and fragmentation, since there is not
only an absence of linear chronological sequence, but also an absence of a single, coherent
perspective on these “extraordinary incidents” (“PC” 49). In the course of narration, these
same incidents are to be shaped in space and time not only by the text’s narrating agent, but
also by some of its characters, such as Sir Philip Tempest, Father Bernard and Mistress Clarke,
who at certain points in the text undertake the role of the narrator. The ensuing narrative is
circular in terms of structure and tone – its end casts one back into its middle – and the
narrator ends up narrating the past locked into the present, which seems to be completely
determined by the future, in other words, by the curse to be fulfilled. Narration becomes
fragmented, repetitive, unsettling, deeply obsessional and as discordant as Lucy’s double’s
laughter in accordance with the fragmented and unstable psychic condition of the narrating
44 In Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1972) Gérard Genette uses the terms histoire and récit to distinguish between these two modes of narrative temporality. It is often that “Récit and histoire”, as Susan Lanser has noted, “rather than being separate elements, converge, so that telling becomes integral to the working out of story” (“Toward a Feminist Narratology” 624), as is the case with the narration of “The Poor Clare”. 199
“I”, who repeatedly comments on his very propensity for mental weakness, instability and
utter passivity at the mere account of the haunting, even before his own exposure to the effects
of Lucy’s double. As a result, the narrator’s mental deterioration, desperation, alienation and
loss of authority over his consciousness and his narrative – just like Lucy’s own loss of authority over her own consciousness – are reflected in the instability of the text’s narrative
voice, and by extension, in that of the split narrating subject speaking from the very core of the
text:
I have seen a child on a common blown along by a high wind, without power of
standing still and resisting the tempestuous force. I was somewhat in the same
predicament as regarded my mental state. Something resistless seemed to urge my
thoughts on, through every possible course by which there was a chance of attaining to
my object. I did not see the sweeping moors when I walked out: when I held a book in
my hand, and read the words, their sense did not penetrate to my brain. If I slept, I went
on with the same ideas, always flowing in the same direction. This could not last long
without having a bad effect on the body. I had an illness, which, although I was racked
with pain, was a positive relief to me, as it compelled me to live in the present
suffering, and not in the visionary researches I had been continually making before […]
and after the immediate danger was over my life seemed to slip away in delicious
languor for two or three months. (“PC” 68)
Could we, perhaps, also talk of a hysterical text mediated by a narrating agent who
suffers from reminiscences45 and whose bodily/somatic symptoms undertake to speak out
45 The phrase “Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences” (qtd. in Parkin-Gounelas 138) belongs, of course, to Freud and Breuer appearing “at the beginning of the Studies”, as Ruth Parkin-Gounelas notes, reminiscences being “unconscious traces, what he [Freud] called ‘mnemic symbols’ (symbols of the repressed memory). Hysterics differ from others in that the affect attached to traumatic experiences they have had has not been discharged […] but remains “strangulated, and the memory of 200 what language cannot symbolize? If, as Ruth Parkin-Gounelas notes, “[h]ysteria is about gaps in texts: repressions, amnesias, paramnesias, even conscious silences” (Literature and
Psychoanalysis 143), then Gaskell’s text with its thematic and narrative gaps, lapses of memory and silences clearly subscribes to this description by displaying the characteristics of an incoherent and traumatic narrative. It practically remains unresolved until its very end, failing to fulfill both the narrator’s and the narratee’s/reader’s desire and expectations, especially those pertaining to the much-anticipated union between Lucy and the narrator.
Instead, the only form of narrative closure brought about by the overwhelmed narrator is the one mediated by the death of the one person responsible for the casting of the curse, Bridget, but without any promise of marriage for the young and now curse-free survivors. Curiously, moreover, in the third (and last) chapter of the narrative, Lucy is left in the margins of narration, with whatever versions of narrative truth (or untruth) and narrative coherence (or incoherence) having arisen, in the words of Peter Brooks, “from a dialogue among a number of fabula and a number of sjuzet, stories and their possible organizations, as also between two narrators, analyzand and analyst” (Reading for the Plot 284). The latter pair clearly occupies the positions of narrator and narratee, sharing between them an open-ended, unresolved session of personal story-telling, without the therapeutic effects of transference and/or satisfying narrative closure.
The story, thus, ends rather abruptly, with many of its narrative strands remaining loose, incomplete and problematic. The curse is tragically lifted, we are told by the narrator, only after Bridget the witch has died a painful death as a penitent (and destitute) nun known
the experience to which it is attached is cut off from consciousness” (Literature and Psychoanalysis 138). In “The Poor Clare” the narrator’s traumatic experiences could also be attributed to his Oedipal anxiety related to the paternal figure of his much-respected, but, in essence, feared uncle, who is obviously a most dominant figure in the narrator’s life. 201
by the highly suggestive name of “Sister Magdalene”46 of The Poor Clares of Antwerp, a
monastic sect bound by the oaths of silence, poverty and solitude. Having suffered the effects
of her own curse on her own flesh and blood, and, ironically, after having nursed and fed the same Squire Gisborne (ill and starving himself) she had once cursed, she dies of starvation herself and in complete silence until the last line of the text, which coincides with her own physical death,47 and only after Lucy’s psychic split has been re-enacted at the level of the
narrative itself through the mediation of a psychically split narrator/character. The fact
remains, however, that although, as we are told, Lucy “is freed from the curse” (“PC” 102),
the spectral phantom generated by it has not been effectively exorcized. There is something of
“IT” still remaining in the narrative, something that the narrator has not been able to rout out
of his own memory and which shows itself in the pathological discourse of his narration. This
“fearful Third” (“PC” 90), as the narrator terms “IT”, apparently constitutes a residual foreign
46 Bridget’s reputation as one of the Poor Clares of Antwerp, we are informed, is also surrounded by controversy. Like her biblical namesake (Mary Magdalene), “the most famous reformed prostitute in Western culture” (Kranzler, Gothic Stories xxvi), “Sister Magdalen is either a great sinner or a great saint. She does more […] than all the other nuns put together;” (“PC” 97). Even as Sister Magdalen, then, Bridget seems to partially re-enact the psychic split her own curse caused her granddaughter to suffer, a curse which ultimately comes to rest upon her self as its origin. 47 The concluding paragraph of the text focuses on the scene of Bridget’s suicide-like death by starvation brought about intentionally as a means of repentance and retribution for her sins in the midst of a riot in Antwerp and it is rather melodramatic in tone: On a bier before the high altar, lay a woman – lay Sister Magdalen – lay Bridget Fitzgerald. By her side stood Father Bernard, in his robes of office, and holding the crucifix on high while he pronounced the solemn absolution of the Church, as to one who had newly confessed herself of deadly sin. I pushed on with passionate force, till I stood close to the dying woman, as she received extreme unction amid the breathless and awed hush of the multitude around. Her eyes were glazing, her limbs were stiffening; but when the rite was over and finished, she raised her gaunt figure slowly up, her eyes brightened to a strange intensity of joy, as, with the gesture of her finger and the trance-like gleam of her eye, she seemed like one who watched the disappearance of some loathed and fearful creature. “She is freed from the curse!” said she, as she fell back dead. (“PC” 102) 202 body, a trace which continues to subsist in the text haunting the narrating “I” as something more intimate, deep-seated and buried (encrypted) in the subject’s psyche, something which might have its source not within the subject’s own unconscious. Rather, it could be something which has been bequeathed to it by an afflicted ancestor’s unconscious in the form of an alien body within. It is in this respect, we might argue, that on both a thematic and a narrative level strong-willed ancestors like Bridget Fitzgerald and the narrator’s awe-inspiring London uncle have something to do with their descendants’ disturbed psychic condition and it is from such psychically disturbed ancestors that both Lucy’s and the narrator’s “transgenerational phantom” (Rand 165) has, possibly, been transmitted to haunt their present and future.
4.3. “The Sins of the Fathers shall be Visited upon the Children”: Transgenerational
Hauntings and Traumas
Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and
sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the
children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation
(The Bible, “Exodus” 34: 7)48
“The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children,” She said.
48 The phrase is once again repeated in “Numbers” as: “The Lord is longsuffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation” (14:18). This is a common Gothic theme according to which children are to suffer for their ancestor’s crimes and sins also occurring in such Gothic texts as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) as well as in Gaskell’s own “The Poor Clare” and “The Grey Woman” (1861). Moreover, as Michael Wheeler notes, “biblical allusion was for Elizabeth Gaskell, as for her contemporaries, a highly developed literary convention, of major thematic and structural significance rather than serving merely as decoration [since] for Gaskell, biblical allusion followed a uniquely Unitarian contour” (25). 203
“Who is the father?” asked I. “Knowing as much as I do, I may surely know more – know all.
Tell me, I entreat you, madam, all that you can conjecture respecting this demoniac
persecution of one so good.”
(“PC” 79)
At the narrative centre of “The Poor Clare” lies the famous biblical phrase “the sins of the
fathers shall be visited upon the children” (“PC” 79), twice repeated in the text,49 in the same
way as it is twice repeated in the Bible itself, along with a number of parallel familial bonds
and relationships, the most crucial of which are those occurring between Bridget and Mary
Fitzgerald on the one hand, and between the narrator and his London uncle, on the other.
The former pair dramatizes a typically primordial, pre-oedipal mother-daughter relationship, one extending, as it does, towards the future to include the youngest descendant of the family line, Lucy Gisborne. The relationship between mother and daughter is described in Gaskell’s story as a symbiotic one, “almost lover-like in its intensity” (Kranzler, Gothic
Tales xxv), informed by the “experience of oneness characterized by a blurring of boundaries between mother and infant – a dual unity preceding the sense of separate self” (Kahane 336).
It is also an intensely controversial one, clearly implying what Leslie Fiedler sees as “the maternal blackness imagined by the gothic writer as a prison, a torture chamber” (qtd. in
49 It is first spoken in the future tense by Mistress Clarke, Lucy’s guardian, as “the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children” (“PC” 79), while she is recounting Lucy’s story to the narrator, and three pages later, by the narrator himself this time in the present tense as “the sins of the fathers are indeed visited upon the children” (“PC” 82) the moment when, after a series of investigations as to the origin of the curse, he is in a position to testify to its inevitable fulfillment and efficacy. Interestingly, the biblical phrase runs parallel to and follows the same route as that of Bridget’s curse, with the future determining the present, while both of them are totally determined by the past. We thus, have the three temporalities of past, present and future merge into one. 204
Kahane 336), which is reflected in the narrative by Bridget’s50 “strong character and
passionate anger” (“PC” 57), as well as by her Medusa-like eye and figure that “looked as if
she had been scorched in the flames of hell, so brown, and scared and fierce a creature did she
seem […] and those who met her eye once cared not to be caught looking at her again” (57).
The mother-daughter relationship is somewhat histrionically depicted as one of ambivalence,
self-conflict and almost uncontrollable passion. In the words of Laura Kranzler, “mother and
daughter mirror each other’s rage as well as devotion” (Elizabeth Gaskell: Gothic Tales xxv):
But if everyone else yielded to her [Bridget’s] ‘magic’ of a ‘superior mind’, her
daughter not unfrequently rebelled. She and her mother were too much alike to agree.
There were wild quarrels between them, and wilder reconciliations. There were times
when, in the heat of passion, they could have stabbed each other. At all other times they
both – Bridget especially – would have willingly laid down their lives for one another”.
(“PC” 53)
Thus, the spectral presence and shadowing of the omnipotent mother figure in the very center of the narrative, “archaic and all-encompassing”,51 to use Claire Kahane’s phrase, is already
there as the source of the evil presence of the double, which inevitably comes to haunt its
prime bearer, the grandmother Bridget, then the daughter Mary and eventually (and most
intensely) the granddaughter Lucy as well as those in close proximity with them, signifying at
50 As Tracy Nectoux claims, Gaskell used the name Bridget (slightly changed) quite intentionally, it seems, choosing to endow her female character with the pagan aspects of the Irish Goddess Brigit, the Goddess of fire, poetry, and the hearth, a “Triple Goddess of poetry, smithcraft and healing” (35). 51 Clare Kahane emphasizes the centrality and forcefulness of the bond between mother and child in Gothic texts, claiming that: Because the mother-woman is experienced as part of Nature itself before we learn her boundaries, she traditionally embodies the mysterious not-me world, with its unknown forces. Hers is the body, awesome and powerful, which is both our habitat and our prison, and while an infant gradually becomes conscious of a limited Other, the mother remains imaginatively linked to the realm of Nature, figuring the forces of life and death. (Kahane 336-7) 205
the same time, the vicissitudes of femininity’s lot that all three generations of women must
confront. Bridget and Lucy, in particular, also “manifest that most fundamental split between
the two sides of feminine identity so central to Victorian Ideology: the split between the pure
asexual ideal and monstrous, sexual voraciousness” (Kranzler, Gothic Tales xxv).
The latter pair (the narrator and his uncle) clearly depicts the Oedipal relationship
between father and son, for as we are informed, the narrator has from a very young age been
officially adopted by his much-admired London uncle (whose imago traverses the narrator’s
discourse throughout) because of the latter’s single, childless state. The narrator devotes
almost two pages (no “little account”, indeed, despite his claims to the contrary) to his own
autobiographical details and pathology (attributed to hard work) in the beginning of chapter
two, after his long digression regarding the details of the Starky family and how Bridget’s
connection to it came to be. It is by solemnly apostrophizing the narratee twice that he
attempts to secure the narratee’s trust and sympathy as well as his emotional involvement in the narrative:
I now come to the time in which I myself was mixed up with the people that I have
been writing about. And to make you understand how I became connected with them, I
must give you some little account of myself. My father was the younger son of a
Devonshire gentleman of moderate property; my eldest uncle succeeded to the estate
of his forefathers, my second became an eminent attorney in London, and my father
took orders. Like most poor clergymen, he had a large family; and I have no doubt
was glad enough when my London uncle, who was a bachelor, offered to take charge
of me, and bring me up to be his successor in business.
In this way I came to live in London, in my uncle’s house […] and to be treated and
esteemed as his son, and to labour with him in his office. I was very fond of the old
gentleman. He was the confidential agent of many country squires and had attained to 206
his present position as much by knowledge of human nature as by knowledge of the
law; […] he used to say his business was law, his pleasure heraldry […]. Many cases
of disputed property, dependent on a love of genealogy, were brought to him, as to a
great authority on such points. […] I worked away – partly for the sake of my family
at home, partly because my uncle had really taught me to enjoy the kind of practice in
which he himself took such delight. I suspect I worked too hard; at any rate, in
seventeen hundred and eighteen I was far from well, and my good uncle was disturbed
by my ill looks. (“PC” 61-62, emphasis added)
Interestingly, both familial lines are characterized by the younger descendants’
repetition of their ancestors’ life choices and, eventually, their ancestors’ fate. We thus see, on the one hand, Mary Fitzgerald repeating her mother’s (Bridget’s) life pattern52 reflected in
Mary’s life choices, whose consequences are eventually visited upon Lucy in the form of the
haunting double, and, on the other, the narrator’s modeling of his own personal preferences,
profession and lifestyle on those of his uncle. Even more intriguing, however, is the fact that,
although Lucy and the narrator have apparently been afflicted by the encrypted secrets and
traumas of their respective ancestors, the narrator appears to be carrying within him not just
the secrets and traumas of his parental uncle figure, but also those of Bridget – via his
involvement with both Bridget and Lucy – something which complicates his narrative agency
even more. What is, then, the psychic mechanism facilitating this kind of spectral transmission from one person’s unconscious to that of the other in the form of the return of a phantom presence?
In his lifelong investigation of the origins and function of phobias and traumas, which repeatedly return to afflict the subject, Freud came up with a number of observations, which
52 Like Mary’s union with Squire Gisborne, Bridget’s “marriage to one above her rank – had been unhappy”, the narrator informs us, “[h]er husband had died, and left her in even greater poverty than that in which she was when he had first met with her” (“PC” 56). 207
he was able to glean from his own analytic experiences with such famous cases as those of
Little Hans and the Wolf Man. Thus, in his 1915 essay on “The Unconscious” he wrote: “It is
a very remarkable thing that the Ucs. [Unconscious] of one human being can react upon that of another, without passing through the Cs. [Conscious]. This deserves closer investigation,
especially with a view to finding out whether preconscious activity can be excluded as playing
a part in it; but, descriptively speaking, the fact is incontestable” (165-166).
Sixty years later, in her 1975 analysis of phobia in her essay “Story of Fear: The
Symptoms of Phobia – the Return of the Repressed or the Return of the Phantom?”, Maria
Torok makes reference to Freud’s observation in connection with her own findings on trauma
and phobia, emphasizing its link with the subject’s ego defence “against the indistinct threat of
the return of the repressed” (177). For Torok, this is a threat “which itself appears to emerge
along the oedipal path and which analysis seeks to cure by means of affective transference,
bringing to light the words of desire as well as the prohibition, thereby freeing them both from
anxiety” (177). At the same time she refers to the notion of the phantom elaborated by Nicolas
Abraham53 to describe those patients’ discourse, who during analysis, are displaying “signs of
the most intense emotion […] yet being entirely absent as far as their own person is
concerned”. “This means”, Torok states, “that when people say “I”, they might in fact be referring to something quite different from their own identity. […]54 Further they might not
even be referring to another person with whom they identify. It means that some people are
53 In his editor’s note to Nicolas Abraham’s essay “Notes on The Phantom: A Compliment to Freud’s Metapsychology”, Nicolas Rand explains: “Abraham’s theory of the phantom enlarges upon Freud’s metapsychology by suggesting that the unsettling disruptions in the psychic life of one person can adversely and unconsciously affect someone else. Abraham likens the foreign presence to ventriloquism and calls it a phantom, a haunting, or a phantomatic haunting” (166). 54 She refers to this as “the prejudice of the “I” [which] consists in hearing the first-person singular whenever somebody says “I” yet, when faced in particular with phobia, [one is] hard put to find the identity of this “I” who is claiming to be fearful” (Torok 180). Hence, she indirectly confirms the alien nature/otherness of the phantom that speaks through the subject. 208
completely detached from their own libidinal roots and only produce puppet emotions” (Torok
178-179). This foreign presence within the subject seems to be what is at work in Gaskell’s
tale.
Nicholas Abraham’s concept of the phantom, according to Nicholas Rand, “moves the
focus of psychoanalytic inquiry beyond the individual being analyzed because it postulates
that some people unwittingly inherit the secret psychic substance of their ancestors’ lives”
(Rand 166). As a “metapsychological fact”, according to Abraham, the phantom owes its
emergence to “the gap produced in us by the concealment of some part of a love object’s life”
(Abraham 171) and consequently, one is haunted by “the gaps left within us by the secrets of
others” (171). “The “phantom” as Maria Torok also emphasizes, “is a formation in the
dynamic unconscious that is found there not because of the subject’s own repression but on
account of a direct empathy with the unconscious or the rejected psychic matter of a parental
object” (Torok 181).
Such influential progenitors as Bridget Fitzgerald and the narrator’s uncle have
unwittingly bequeathed to their descendants and those closely involved with the latter not only
their material property, but also their own rejected psychic matter, which apparently continues
to infest the narrator’s retrospective narrative discourse with its phantom effects, even after the double has been successfully exorcized on a thematic level. Moreover, it is in Bridget’s iconized examples of the antithetical, stereotypical images of the woman as virgin and whore that the mystery of narration’s unresolved status and on-going haunting lies in the form of the foreign body “IT”, which has been bequeathed to the narrator, even before his actual meeting and infatuation with Lucy, along with the “beautiful foreign picture of the Virgin” (“PC” 55), presented to Bridget as a consolation gift by her master, Squire Starky, to alleviate her sorrow for her departed daughter. In a crucially important comment early in the text, Gaskell’s
narrator informs us: “Next day, the Squire himself came down, carrying a beautiful foreign 209
picture – Our Lady of the Holy Heart, the Papists call it. It is a picture of the Virgin, her heart
pierced with arrows, each arrow representing one of her great woes. That picture hung in
Bridget’s cottage when I first met her; I have that picture now” (“PC” 55, emphasis added).
Apparently, it is not just Bridget’s sado-masochistically iconized, traumatized foreign picture
of the Virgin that the narrator becomes possessed of in terms of material property, but also her own (as well as his uncle’s) encrypted secrets, traumas and phobias, which ultimately come to interact with those of Lucy, thus rendering their union problematic, if not impossible. Towards the end of his essay on the phantom Nicholas Abraham notes:
It is reasonable to maintain that “the phantom effect” progressively fades during its
transmission from one generation to the next and that, finally, it disappears. Yet, this is
not at all the case when shared or complimentary phantoms find a way of being
established as social practices along the lines of staged words […]. We must not lose
sight of the fact that to stage a word – whether metaphorically, as an alloseme, or as a
cryptonym – constitutes an attempt at exorcism, an attempt, that is, to relieve the
unconscious by placing the effects of the phantom in the social realm. (176)
The shared and/or complimentary phantoms/foreign bodies in Gaskell’s Gothic tale as these implicate the characters and the narrating persona in a complex web of unconscious identifications and psychic splits eventually come to congeal around the staged words (and their uncontrollable power) of the biblical prophecy “the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children”, proving, on the one hand, as Alan Shelston notes, that “[t]he greatest threat to the ideal of family is the violence inherent in its own structures” (“The Supernatural in the
Stories of Elizabeth Gaskell” 145), and, on the other, Jacques Derrida’s observation of our post-modern times that, “[a]t bottom the specter is the future, it is always to come” (Specters of Marx 39). In being reiterated throughout the narrative, the cryptic and (encrypted) words come to reaffirm both the efficacy of the curse – which always already doubles back on the 210 one that has hurled it – and its incapacitating force for the involved narrating agent of
Gaskell’s text, who, having promised to narrate the past, he can only give us the future mediated by the present. In the final analysis, it is the Gothic text, above all, as the locus par excellence of desiring heroes and heroines, wronged ancestors, encrypted secrets, prohibitions, transgressions and spectral visitations/returns that constitutes fertile ground for Gaskell’s narrating subject’s playing out of desire, trauma and phobia, which render the celebrated subject of the Enlightment both an ailing subject and an alien to itself.
4.3. The Ghostliness of Identity and the Lesbian Gothic as Embedded Narratives:
Gender Configurations in Meta-fictional First-Person Narrative Contexts: “The Grey
Woman”
A mirror is a thing of mystery. It functions as a humble purveyor of replicas. But because it is only in such replicas that we can have any idea of ourselves, it also functions as a model on which we construe and to which we orientate our being. And in this sense we imitate our imitations. (Manuel Aguirre, The Closed Space 24)
[I]n the gloom of an autumnal evening, I caught my own face and figure reflected in all the mirrors, which showed only a mysterious background in the dim light of the many candles which failed to illuminate the great proportions of the half-furnished saloon […]. I trembled in silence at the fantastic figures and shapes which my imagination called up as peopling the background of those gloomy mirrors. (“The Grey Woman” 300) Like Lucy Gisborne of “The Poor Clare”, the newly-wed Anna Scherer, the heroine and principal autodiegetic narrator of “The Grey Woman”, on first entering her suite of rooms in her husband’s château, catches a furtive glimpse of herself in the surrounding mirrors only to 211
shudder at her multitudinously refracted reflection, all those “fantastic figures and shapes
which [her] imagination called up as peopling the background of those gloomy mirrors”
(“GW” 300). As in “The Poor Clare”, the mirror scene in “The Grey Woman” is suggestive
of the uncontrollable multiplicity and fragmentation of the narrating subject’s consciousness
at the narrative center of the text, a consciousness which is not at one with itself and its
discourse(s) and which precludes a single and stable subject position and source of origin and
hence narrative reliability. Only this time we are confronted with a different type of narrator
from that of the “The Poor Clare”, for Gaskell has chosen to employ a female persona as the
main narrator of her story, the victimized wife, Anna Scherer, whose marital abuse has turned
her into the lurid shadow of an emotionally and mentally confused agent, narrating her
misfortunes through a letter.
If Lucy’s encounter with and subsequent haunting by a sexually suggestive double
has mainly to do with her inheritance of encrypted, ancestral traumas (as is also the case with
the nameless narrator of Lucy’s story), Anna’s vertiginous, multiple psychic split and
dramatic physical transformation are more likely to be viewed as the result of her surrender
(enforced by strategies of patriarchal coercion) to an incapacitating regime, whose oppressive
practices deprive women of their autonomy by implicitly encouraging strategies of
masochistic passivity, self-victimization, even self-immolation.55 In “The Grey Woman”,
55 Self-inflicted pain as a means of “deadening [herself] to danger” (“GW” 310) is rather masochistically inflicted by Anna on herself – she bites out a piece of flesh from her own hand – while lying beside a corpse hidden under the table of her husband’s dressing-room, which she has secretly entered to retrieve a letter believed to have been sent by her father, when her husband and his gang unexpectedly arrive: I dreaded the betrayal of fainting, and struggled hard for such courage as I might attain by deadening myself to the danger I was in by inflicting intense pain on myself. You [the address is to her daughter, Ursula] have often asked me the reason of that mark on my hand; it was where in my agony, I bit out a piece of flesh with my relentless teeth, thankful for the pain, which helped me numb my terror. (“GW” 310) 212
Gaskell’s proposal of cross-dressing strategies as well as images of same-sex attachments and
lesbian desire are emphasized as possible outlets for escape from patriarchally-imposed
situations of entrapment, immobilization and incarceration at the cost of living in exile from
one’s own body, losing one’s own sense of identity, and, ultimately, one’s mental stability. It is through the marked body of Anna Scherer, her unnaturally-coloured, prematurely grey complexion and hair as well as through her shattered personality reflected in her fragmented, inconclusive narrative, that Gaskell once again interrogates Victorian practices of physical and psychological female victimization, whereby “the representation of the bourgeois women fades into blankness, liminality, ghostliness, or instability as the safety of their domestic space is threatened” (Lawson and Shakinvovsky 17).
The “Grey Woman”,56 the first of Gaskell’s German stories, appeared serially in
three parts between the 5th and the 19th of January, 1861, in Dickens’s All the Year Round;57 four years later (1865) it was published in book form under the title The Grey Woman. And
Other Tales by the London-based publishers Elder and Smith. It is the story of Anna Scherer, a middle-class German girl, whose marriage to an abusive French aristocrat and subsequent
56 Like “Six Weeks at Heppenheim”, “The Grey Woman”, according to John Geoffrey Sharps, “resulted from Mrs. Gaskell’s Heidelberg sojourns in Autumn 1858 and Summer 1860” (Mrs Gaskell’s Observation and Invention 335-36) during which it was customary for her to exchange stories with the Howitts, their Heidelberg-based friends, “the most frightening & wild stories […] – some such fearful ones – all true” (Letters 44), as she herself wrote to her sister-in-law, Eliza Holland. It is possible, Sharps further notes, that Gaskell obtained the outlines of the tale in the same way as the first (external) narrator of “The Grey Woman” (336), that is, via a discovered manuscript, since the circumstantial evidence that Gaskell supplies in her letter implies that she is speaking from personal experience, referring, for instance, to the date as “184–” (“GW” 287) as well as mentioning the “summer storm” (“GW” 288) and the miller’s “crimson umbrella” (“GW” 288). 57 The previous year (1860), Wilkie Collins’s immensely successful The Woman in White, a representative example of sensation fiction, also appeared serially in the same periodical as Gaskell’s tale of a year later. Both tales use suspense and sensationalism and are melodramatic in tone, much like the earlier Gothic works of Ann Radcliffe, such as The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian. 213
escape from his prison-like castle, along with his ruthless chase of her, result in her
impressive physical transformation and mental collapse from a pretty girl to a prematurely
grey, agoraphobic, ghostly (and ghastly) woman.
The story, which is a close reworking of Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard myth,58 is written in the tradition of the German Novelle59 and draws on both the realistic and the Gothic
tradition.60 It displays, for instance, many of the characteristics and stock-in-trade machinery
of the Gothic genre (along with a good dose of sensationalism), such as the intimidating presence of the ferocious (and foreign) Monsieur de la Tourelle, the deceptively effeminate,
aristocratic French husband who turns out to be the cruel chief of the Chauffeurs, “a band of
robbers who infested all the roads leading to the Rhine” (“GW” 328), the wild, rocky
58 For Diana Wallace, “[t]he basic structural elements of the Bluebeard story are also those of a typical Female Gothic plot. The Bluebeardesque figure who murders or imprisons his wife appears repeatedly: Radcliff’s Mazzini and Montoni, Brontë’s Rochester, Austen’s spoof villain General Tilney, and du Maurier’s Maxim” (59). 59 According to J. A. Cuddon, “the Novelle is a fictional narrative of indeterminate length […] restricted to a single event, situation or conflict, which produces an element of suspense and leads to an unexpected turning point […] so that the conclusion surprises even while it is a logical outcome” (642). The German Novelle, as Peter Skrine also notes, is “the narrative genre which German authors were making very much their own in the mid-nineteenth century” (“Gaskell and her German Stories” 5), with Goethe both being among its major commentators and its principal practitioners. The two characteristics of the Novelle as Goethe defined them is first “the decisive central presence of an “extraordinary incident” (qtd. in Skrine 5) […] “which only the most capable story-telling can convince us is true” (5) and the second is “a fondness for often sophisticated narrative frameworks” (5) just like the one Gaskell makes use of in “The Grey Woman”. 60 Ruth Parkin-Gounelas maintains that “as the nineteenth century went on […] the genre was faced with the challenge of demands for realistic settings, and had to invent alternative sites for haunting” (Literature and Psychoanalysis 121). It should also be noted that a combination of Gothic and realistic elements is not, of course, a feature unique to Gaskell’s fiction, but, rather, common practice among her major Victorian contemporaries such as Dickens (in Bleak House), Charlotte and Emily Brontë (in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights respectively), as well as George Eliot (in Adam Bede), who also introduced Gothic elements into their otherwise realistic texts. 214
landscape surrounding his castle and the heroine as prisoner in her husband’s rock-solid
château (Les Rochers). There are also (implied) violent death scenes among the servants, a former wife murdered, a hidden corpse stripped for plunder, a mistaken identity which
results in murder, revengeful killings, and, eventually, the arrest and decapitation of the
brigands. Finally, what Francesco Marroni terms “[m]oral passivity of the community”
(Marroni 18), which is indifferent to the heroine’s tribulations, is also present in Gaskell’s story. “Anna”, as Marroni notes, “only finds the protection she hopes to find in society at the
very end of the story” (18), which, curiously, one might observe, coincides with the murder
of her maidservant Amante by the Chauffeurs – Amante (as her name suggests) being the
heroine’s only protector,61 partner and implied lover – as well as with Anna’s ghost-like return to her hometown. It is her unexpected, sudden return, in the form of a living ghost, which somehow also invests the narrative with a spectral dimension, recasting, at the same time, the recurrent Gothic motif of spectral visitation/return. As Dianna Wallace notes, “[i]t is
Anna who is the ‘ghost’ of the story” (Wallace 60), as it can be gleaned from Anna’s own narrative in which her return is likened to that of a ghost: “At length, Fritz [Anna’s brother] gave way, and believed me to be his sister Anna, even as though I were risen from the dead
[…] he fetched his wife, and told her that I was not dead, but was come back to the old home once more, changed as I was” (“GW” 291).
61 Like Rosamond’s nurse, Hester, in “The Old Nurse’s Story” and Mistress Clarke in “The Poor Clare”, the maidservant Amante, in addition to being implied as Anna’s potential lover, is also the embodiment of the benevolent, nurturing, surrogate mother-figure, who is there to guide and protect her vulnerable (and passive) surrogate daughter from the threatening patriarchal horrors of the past and present. However, although Hester and Mistress Clarke live to see their surrogate daughters return, somehow, to normality, Amante is murdered by the very male that she has been struggling to save Anna from. Thus, sexual transgression is punished and the heroine is subsequently given over this time to the benevolent protection (and sexual possession) of another male, Doctor Voss, who is conveniently placed in Amante’s position as both surrogate father and lover. Ironically, Anna Scherer never returns to normality. 215
“The Grey Woman” is thus informed by all “the important features of [the Gothic’s]
mise en scène” (Sedgewick-Kosofsky, The Coherence 3), displaying, moreover, “excessive
emotional experiences of desire, terror and pleasure” (Becker 1-2), all three amply reflected
by Anna’s experiencing self and by her autodiegetic narration. Furthermore, it could be characterized as a specimen of what has been termed Gothic thriller as well as a an instance of what Michelle A. Massé has termed “marital Gothic”, “a later form of the genre, where the husband is present at the beginning rather than the end of the story and repeats the role of the father62 […] who strips voice, movement, property and identity itself from the heroine” (682).
It is in this respect that Gaskell’s text is also informed by what Diane Long-Hoeveler views
as “the middle-class woman’s intense ambivalence toward the paternal home” (Gothic
Feminisms 10), in the sense that the latter is viewed “as a site of patriarchally based, rather than emotionally based relationships” (10), which result in the heroine’s eventual (and unavoidable) displacement (neither openly imposed on her nor completely of her own accord) from the paternal domicile as her only means of rebellion. In particular, Anna Scherer’s
already ambiguous position within her father’s home deteriorates further once her status from
a man’s daughter (typically, there is no mention of a mother) changes into that of another
man’s wife, for in addition to acquiring the status of the decorative “parvenue” (“GW” 304),
62 On the one hand, the figure of the father in “The Grey Woman” is presented as “gentle and indulgent towards us women, though he was stern enough with the apprentices in the mill” (“GW” 292), as Anna informs us. On the other hand, however, he is depicted as treating Anna as an expendable object of barter between males by wishing her to marry Karl, his favourite among his apprentices, something which strongly vexed Anna: “I can see now that my father wished him to marry me, and that Karl was desirous to do so […] the more Karl advanced, the more I disliked him” (292). Also, when Anna announces to her father that she does not wish to be married to M. de la Tourelle, he almost forces her to proceed with marriage, literally giving her over to another male’s appetites in true Gothic fashion: “I said to my father that I did not want to be married, that I would rather go back to the dear old mill; but he seemed to feel this speech of mine as a dereliction of duty as great as if I had committed perjury; as if, after the ceremony of betrothal, no one had any right over me but my future husband” (“GW” 298). 216 as she calls herself, she becomes, at the same time, a powerless prisoner. Cut off from the rest of the world, cast in total isolation without any family ties and pregnant with M. de la
Tourelle’s child, Anna confesses: “It was a more complete and total separation than I ever anticipated when I married” (“GW” 305). Moreover, amidst total emotional and intellectual confusion, partly unable and partly unwilling to see, among other things, her husband’s, her father’s, but, also her own complicity in her predicament; she comments:
[T]he new sensation that he [M. de la Tourelle] was the father of my unborn babe
came over me, and I tried to invest him with this new character. I tried to believe that
it was his passionate love for me that made him so jealous and tyrannical, imposing, as
he did, restrictions on my intercourse with my dear father, from whom I was so
entirely separated, as far as personal intercourse was concerned […]. I knew that no
one cared for me except my husband and Amante […] my husband loved me, I said to
myself, but I said it almost in the form of a question. His love was shown fitfully, and
more in ways calculated to please himself than to please me. (“GW” 304)
Anna’s contradictory feelings and statements emanating from her reluctance (or inability) to accept parental rejection, but at the same time, her realization of the fact that she has been actually dispensed with by her own people (“I knew that no one cared for me”), her frustrated hopes that her husband will not abuse, but love and protect her instead are all exposed as an illusion (as so many other things are in this tale, as we shall see). All this is reflected in a statement which also implies her own misguided complicity: “I was bewitched, – in a dream,
– a kind of despair, I had got into a net through my own timidity and weakness, and I did not see how to get out of it” (“GW” 298). Still bewitched, as it seems, in the now of narration, when it comes to explaining what she perceives to be her orchestrated entanglement with the events that led to her victimization, Anna is unable to provide a coherent narrative. She thus addresses her daughter (her private narratee) and by extension also her external narratee 217
through a letter in an equally uncertain tone: “I do not quite know – so many things have
come to pass since then, and blurred the clearness of my recollections – if I loved him or not
(“GW” 296).
“The Grey Woman” is also informed by elements of social realism and displays
considerable political awareness, both of which are more often than not conspicuously absent
from Gothic fiction, but which have always constituted recurrent issues in Gaskell’s novels.
The tale is historically and geographically set on the French-German border in 1789, the year
when the French Revolution broke out, marking an era of intense political upheaval known as
the age of terror, whose far reaching implications extended beyond France to influence its
neighbouring countries, including Germany, and, of course, England. As the miller Herr
Scherer characteristically says of his ancestress, “the aunt Anna had a sad history [and] it was
all owing to one of those hellish Frenchmen” (“GW” 290). Anna Scherer herself also makes explicit reference to the historical and political context of the events narrated, when she characteristically mentions the year ’89 as the time of her memorable (partly-enforced by her sister-in-law, but in essence self-chosen) visit to Madame Rupprecht’s fashionable home in
Carlsruhe, where her brief courtship with Monsieur de la Tourelle leads to her disastrous
marriage: “This visit to Carlsruhe”, Gaskell has her heroine say meaningfully, “took place in
’89, just when every one was full of the events taking place in Paris; and yet at Carlsruhe
French fashions were more talked of than French politics” (“GW” 295, emphasis added),
thus indirectly, yet self-consciously, commenting upon the Gothic genre’s stereotypically
decontextualized introspective superficiality and its indifference to the dramatic political
events of the period. 218
Despite the vivid Gothic setting, there is an absence of supernatural elements,63 but the story’s realistic frame of reference is simultaneously reinforced and undercut by the framing narrative devices of the ancestral portrait and the discovered manuscript, both of which literally attract the external, first-degree narrator’s gaze, thus triggering the narrating process within a meta-narrative context. “Narrating is never innocent”, Peter Brooks maintains, “and the narrative that frames another allows the writer to dramatize the results of the telling. And this no doubt gives a signal to the reader that the tale told can and should react on his own life” (Psychoanalysis and Storytelling 77-78). This seems to be the case with the palimpsestic narrative of the “Grey Woman” with its deceptively gentle, orderly opening framework and setting, within which a repressed, violent French kernel looms uncannily; the latter is evocative of the mood of post-Revolutionary anxiety, which afflicted so many
English novelists (such as Mary Shelley in revising Frankenstein) including Gaskell herself,64 and requires careful mediation.
The story opens amidst an idyllic setting in the German countryside to gradually draw the narratee into its unfamiliar, foreign, inset tale written in the epistolary mode.65 It begins
63 Treating the Gothic as a “mode” rather than as a genre in his historical approach to the Gothic in A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares, Robert Mighall explains that “the ‘supernatural’ is not ‘essentially’ a defining component of the Gothic” (iii), since as a term, “mode” identifies more accurately the “principal defining structure [which determines the Gothic’s] attitude to the past and its unwelcome legacies” (iii). 64 Post-revolutionary anxiety about the terrors of the French Revolution also constitutes a basic theme in her historical novella My Lady Ludlow (1859) as well as in her short story “My French Master” (1853); however, as Peter Skrine notes, in these works, all such terrors are “effectively held at arm’s length, and seen only from the side of the Channel” (“Elizabeth Gaskell and her German Stories” 6- 7), in contrast with the Gothic narrative of “The Grey Woman” where these terrors are released in all their brutality in the second, violent part of the tale. 65 For Josephine Donovan, the epistolary mode, the letter, has been historically linked to what has been termed “female style” in writing, a mode, whose main characteristic, as we have already seen in chapter one of this project, is its private, introspective character, sentimentality and confessional tone 219
rather prosaically at a picturesque “mill by the Neckar-side” (“GW” 287) somewhere in rural
Germany. Initially, its narration is undertaken by an external, first-person, English
narrator/traveller to be brought to its end at the very same locality, but this time with the
transformed Anna Scherer as its closing narrator, intimating to her daughter the terrors of the
French part of her life. A sharp contrast is thus established right from the start between
congenial, homely, Protestant Germany and sinister, Catholic France, with England’s affinity
to the former and its aversion to the latter crystallizing in the external narrator’s comment
about Herr Scherer, the inn-proprietor with the “friendly and familiar” (“GW” 287) voice: “If
you want to see Scherer in a passion, just talk to him about the possibility of a French
invasion” (288), since “two successive mills of theirs have been burnt down by the French”
(288).
The external narrator/traveller focuses extensively on the idyllic qualities of the
surrounding, homely landscape, replete as it is with the relaxing scenes and sounds of the
countryside, as well as with the domestic values of prosperous country life and hospitality,
before he/she gradually recedes in order to let Anna take up her own narrative. Everything in
this peaceful German village is precise and amiable and so very remote from the forbidding
atmosphere and the sadistic violence that will later unfold in the French part of the tale:
associated with the woman’s domestic, and thus limited sphere of existence and action. (“The Silence is Broken” 212-14). However, for feminist narratologists such as Susan Lanser the letter form has been the empowering mode par excellence for women to display what she terms “female ingenuity”, not only in the obvious sense of a clever composition that finds a “woman’s way” around censorship, but in the service of a broader and literary design: to make a mockery of the assumptions about women’s ‘artless’ epistolary style” (“Toward a Feminist Narratology” 662). My contention is that Gaskell’s tale interestingly subscribes to both theoretical viewpoints because of its very use, on the one hand, of meta-narrative embededdness, a strategy that self-consciously draws the narratee’s attention to its inset epistolary narrative, which displays many of the characteristics of the epistolary form, and through the mediation, on the other hand, of an extradiegetic, grammatically genderless narrator. 220
The river turns the mill-wheel with a plenteous gushing sound; the out-buildings and
the dwelling-house of the miller form a well-kept dusty quadrangle. Again, further
from the river, there is a garden full of willows, and arbours, and flower-beds not well-
kept, but very profuse with flowers and luxuriant creepers, knotting and looping the
arbours together. I went to drink coffee there with some friends in 18-. The stately old
miller came out to greet us […]. He was of a grand build of man, […] friendly and
familiar […]. Poultry of all kinds abounded in the mill-yard, where there were ample
means of livelihood for them […]. He followed us to an arbour, and saw us served to
his satisfaction with the best of everything we could ask for. (“GW” 287)
While having coffee with a German-speaking friend in the garden of this neat, amiable mill “to which many people resort for coffee, according to the fashion which is almost national in Germany” (“GW” 287), the external, nameless, English narrator/traveller
(there are no markers of this narrator’s gender, which remains totally unspecified throughout) of the story is forced to seek shelter from the sudden “summer storm” (“GW” 288) inside the mill owner’s house. There his/her eye is “caught” (“GW” 289) by the portrait of a woman and subsequently by “a bundle of yellow [German] MSS.” (290), which contain the story of her dramatic metamorphosis from “a pretty girl, with her complexion of lilies and roses”
(“GW” 289) into a ghost-like figure of a woman “known by the name of the Grey Woman
[…] [who] lived in some state of life-long terror” (289). The girl “lost her colour so entirely”, we are told, “through fright” (289).
Anna Scherer’s extraordinary physical transformation, her marked body as the result of extreme terror due to marital abuse and relentless pursuit, “is an exteriority that indicates an inexpressible interiority”, to use Kate Lawson and Lynn Shakinvovsky’s phrase, (The
Marked Body 21). “The female body”, they note, “already the site of alterity, is inscribed here with something that cannot quite be expressed: it thus becomes that which is culturally and 221
physically denied the place that is not” (21). Such lack and sense of placelessness is
something that the external narrator of the story is no doubt affected by as he/she is
implicated in the reciprocal act of looking and being looked at:
My eye was caught by a picture in a dark corner of the room, and I got up to examine
it more nearly. It was that of a girl of extreme beauty; evidently of middle rank. There
was a sensitive refinement in her face, as if she almost shrank from the gaze, which of
necessity, the painter must have fixed upon her. It was not over-well painted, but I felt
that it must have been a good likeness, from this strong impress of peculiar character I
have tried to describe. (“GW” 289)
It is not only the painter’s gaze that the figure in the picture is depicted as trying to evade. It
is also the external narrator’s own gaze that is enigmatically evaded because of the feeling of
strangeness that this particular act of gazing at the portrait generates. Indeed, it is the
crossing, the literal exchange of these two gazes which stages a crucial encounter between
subject and object at these initial stages of the story, a dialectic which seems to function as
the desiring, driving force that is to set in motion and then propel the ensuing narrative.
Although the gaze emanating from the portrait is not directly returned (“she almost shrank from the gaze”), it is not denied either, thus creating a sense of indeterminate screen, which provokes the narrator’s/spectator’s look further with the promise of some kind of reward, which appears in the substitute form of the yellow manuscript presented to the narrator and his/her friend by the mill-owner promising to fulfill his/her desire for the Grey woman’s life narrative:
All this time he was rummaging in the drawer of an old fashioned bureau, and now he
turned round, with a bundle of yellow MSS. in his hand, which he gave to my friend,
saying, “Take it home, take it home, and if you care to make out our crabbed German
writing, you may keep it as long as you like, and read it at your leisure. Only I must 222
have it back again when you have done with it, that’s all.” And so we became
possessed of the manuscript, of the following letter, which was our employment,
during many a long evening that winter, to translate, and in some parts to abbreviate.
(“GW” 290)
A process of mutual appropriation and triple mediation is to follow, since the German
element has to be approached via the English and the sinister, uncanny French via the homely
German. Not only do the narrator and his/her German-speaking companion become
“possessed of the manuscript”, they moreover become possessed by it in their toilsome effort,
“during many a long winter nights”, to “make out [the] crabbed German writing”, translate it
from German and edit it in proper manner, before they can make it accessible to their
English-speaking readers. As for the narratee he/she is right from the start inserted in the
realm of what Gerald Prince terms “metadiegetic narrative” (A Dictionary of Narratology
50), since it is through the triple agency/mediation of the narrator/editor/translator sequence that the story of how Anna Scherer became the ghost-like, agoraphobic, psychically unstable, figure unfolds with the narrator/traveller/retriever of the manuscript withdrawing from the narrative entirely once he/she has introduced us to its contents.66 And this is where the alien,
uncanny part of the story begins to infiltrate the narrative. In this respect, the narrative
framework of “The Grey Woman” is characterized by a conspicuous lack of narrative closure
in the sense that once Anna Scherer takes over the narration of her own story, we never again
get to hear from the external narrator. Interestingly, the same lack of narrative closure is to be
re-enacted within the inset tale itself as well.
The embedded narrative of Anna’s life-story is revealed gradually in the form of a
letter Anna Scherer addresses to her daughter Ursula as part of the former’s desperate efforts
66 As Laura Kranzler observes, “the story of ‘The Grey Woman’ is distanced [from the reader] three times: [it] is read by a nameless traveller, is written in a foreign language and dates from the previous century” (Gothic Tales xviii). 223
to persuade the latter not to marry the young Frenchman she is in love with for fear of
repeating Anna’s own horrendous life-line, since Ursula’s lover turns out to be the son of the
murdered man whom Anna accidentally discovered in M. de la Tourelle’s chamber.67
However, we never get to know Ursula’s reply, though we do know, through some clues that the miller provides his guests with, that she never actually embraces marriage having complied, after all, with her mother’s advice.68 Thus, it is not only the narrative framing of
the story that is left hanging open, but also that of its embedded tale. What the narratee is
eventually presented with is a text which is not only too heavily mediated to be a reliable one,
but also one whose principal narrator/character (Anna Scherer) has suffered a severe blow to
her mental faculties by M. de la Tourelle’s physical and psychological abuse of her. Indeed,
67 Diana Wallace argues that “the uncanny in this story is located in the figure of the wife who fears that her fate will repeat that of her predecessor” (59) as in the Bluebeard story. However, there is a more extensive fear of repetition, I believe, permeating Gaskell’s text, for we also have the mother (Anna Scherer) praying for her unborn child to be a girl “lest a boy might have something of the tiger nature of its father” (“GW” 335) as well as her apprehension about her own fate being repeated by that of her daughter, if the latter also marries a Frenchman. Hence, Anna’s warning to her daughter against matrimony. Reciprocally, it is also the daughter’s fear of repeating the mother’s fate that obviously keeps Ursula from marrying at all. Such a fear of repetition as well as fear of castration produce the effect of the “uncanny” – Freud viewed these two fears as inseparable from each other – and constitute, according to Tania Modleski, “two aspects of the more primal fear of being lost in the mother” (71), a fear that in “The Grey Woman” is also reflected by the text’s predilection for narrative embeddedness. Thus, each narrative becomes engulfed by the one which contains it. 68 As the mill-owner intimates to his guests, “Anna had a sad history […] and her daughter suffered for it – the cousin Ursula, as we all called her when I was a child. To be sure, the good cousin Ursula was his child [M. de la Tourelle’s] as well. The sins of the fathers are visited on their children” (“GW” 290).The biblical phrase is once again used by Gaskell, but now it becomes a cliché as well as an exaggeration in the mouth of the miller, uttered as it is in a solemn and melodramatic way, and it seems to be rather out of place in this tale, since we are never actually told how Ursula has been brought to suffer for her father’s sins in any other way apart from her having to refrain from marriage by putting an end to her engagement to the man she loved after her mother’s exhortations. 224
the last time we hear from the external narrator/translator/editor is shortly after he/she has
given us a brief justification as to the letter’s existence:
The letter began with some references to the pain which she had already inflicted upon
her daughter by some unexplained opposition to a project of marriage; but I doubt if,
without the clue with which the good miller had furnished us, we could have made out
even this much from the passionate, broken sentences that made us fancy that some
scene between the mother and daughter – and possibly a third person – had occurred
just before the mother had begun to write. (“GW” 290)
From this point onwards it is Anna herself who becomes both the narrating and the narrated subject of her story. She begins with the account of her hasty, almost enforced marriage to M. de la Tourelle. She then goes on to narrate her subsequent spatial displacement from the familiar homeliness of Germany to the unfamiliar, uncanny spaces of
Les Rochers in France, continuing with her long account of both her own and her maidservant’s (Amante’s) escape in cross-dressing disguise from her husband’s castle and his relentless chase of them, after their discovery of a corpse hidden in his private chambers following the revelation of his double life and criminal past and present affairs, among which the murder of his previous wife, Victorine, figures prominently.
Like the original Bluebeard tale, “The Grey Woman” is a story in which the narrating heroine’s curiosity and desire to know amply reflect the social and cultural realities surrounding the precarious position of women within patriarchy, which forbids females any knowledge of their sexuality. Anna’s own attempt to satisfy her desire to explore what lies beyond her own limited sphere of existence on the forbidden side of M. de la Tourelle’s castle, under the guise of an irresistible urge to retrieve what seemed to be her father’s letter, proves rather frustrating (her desire is never fulfilled) and only precipitates unspeakable terror
(already anticipated), which materializes in her psychosomatic transformation, not only the 225
product of fear, but also that of a constant veiling-unveiling process which results in
deception and confusion, all of which inform Anna’s retrospective narrative discourse.
Deception is a key term here, because in “The Grey Woman” deception in general and
the main narrator’s self-deception in particular constitute its narrative center, with the categories of space and gender (including the unspecified gender of the external narrator), above all, remaining fluid and ambiguous, the result of deceptive appearances, a grey area
like Anna’s grey complexion and hair. Spatial representation, for instance, becomes spatial
disorientation for Anna, who seems to be unable to locate herself both in the paternal home and in M. de la Tourelle’s “old castle in the Vosges” (“GW” 299) with its “incongruous two parts […] joined into a whole by means of intricate passages and unexpected doors, the exact position of which I never fully understood” (“GW” 300), as she confesses. Moreover, in addition to the external narrator’s unspecified gender, the characters’ gender positioning also remains unspecified. Gender in “The Grey Woman” is misperceived as an optical illusion, in the sense that it always proves to be other than that which is being projected outwards, because it is used as the principal means of deception by all the main characters, including, of course, Anna and her maidservant, Amante. Monsieur de la Tourelle’s “effeminate appearance and manner”69 (“GW” 299), in particular, turn out to be his very strategies of
dissemblance underneath which lurks the most aggressive, sadistic,70 though at the same
time, also ambiguous masculinity:
69 M. de la Tourelle’s private chambers are also more reminiscent of a woman’s boudoir rather than those of a male occupant. “I remember”, Anna recollects, the sweet perfume that hung in the air, the scent bottles of silver that decked his toilet-table and the whole apparatus for bathing and dressing, more luxurious even than those which he had provided for me” (“GW” 309). 70 As the chief of his gang, M. de la Tourelle commands and participates in “the cruel practice of the chauffeurs, by roasting the feet of their victims in order to compel them to reveal any hidden circumstances connected with their wealth, of which the chauffeurs afterwards made use” (“GW” 314). 226
His features were as delicate as a girl’s […] his dress was blue and silver. I was so lost
in admiration of this beautiful young man, that I was as much surprised as if the angel
Gabriel had spoken to me, when the Lady of the house brought him forward to present
him to me […]. But, before the end of the evening, I became a little tired of the
affected softness and effeminacy of his manners, and the exaggerated compliments he
paid me, which had the effect of making all the company turn round and look at me
[…] he was very much devoted to me; he almost frightened me with the excess of his
demonstrations of love. (“GW” 295-96)
The scene, in which Anna figures prominently as “the most fortunate of girls” (“GW” 296) and which is ironically evocative of the biblical Annunciation scene where the archangel
Gabriel appears before Mary to announce that she is the chosen one, by analogy anticipates
Anna’s own pregnancy, pursuit and suffering. It also emphasizes the familiar Gothic concept of excess as it is reflected by the larger-than-life, caricature-like figure of M. de la Tourelle and his excessively unreal “demonstrations of love”. Even more importantly, it exposes the instability of gender categories as constitutive of individual subjectivity by viewing them as shifting and shaky positionalities, whose function is to deceive the spectator and veil the emptiness of the gaping hole underneath the assumption of male/female subject positions.
Thus, Anna’s initial impression of her husband-to-be, which is that of an extremely polite, effeminate, “beautiful young man” is gradually eroded to reveal a self-centered, intimidating aggressive male, who next assumes the façade of the passionately enamored, deserted husband to reassume, once again, his initial image of ferocious masculinity with his “keen and dreadful eyes like those of a lynx” (“GW” 339). “I soon found out”, Anna notes, “how little I, or, apparently, any one else, could bend the terrible will of a man who had on first acquaintance appeared to me so effeminate and languid to exert his will in the slightest particular” (“GW” 301). M. de la Tourelle’s bisexuality is also hinted at when his homoerotic 227 relationship with his principal male servant and gang member Lefebvre, is clearly implied by the latter’s treatment of Anna “as an intruder rather than [his] master’s chosen wife” (“GW”
301). As Anna remembers:
I was very much afraid of him [Lefebvre]. He had such an air of suspicious surliness
about him […] and yet M. de la Tourelle spoke of him as most valuable and faithful.
Indeed it sometimes struck me that Lefebvre ruled his master in some things; and this
I could not make out […] one thing I remember noticing, that the more M. de la
Tourelle was displeased with me, the more Lefebvre seemed to chuckle; and when I
was restored to favour […] Lefebvre would look askance at me with his cold
malicious eyes, and once or twice at such times he spoke most disrespectfully to M. de
la Tourelle. (“GW” 301-2)
What is important here is Anna’s self-deception, which calls for closer attention. This is reflected by her retrospective life-narrative, which is one of masochistic passivity, indecision and repressed homoerotic desire. All this repression is reflected in the self- destructive choices she makes in her capacity as the narrated “I”, a series of choices which, rather ambiguously, seem to be neither entirely her own nor directly inflicted upon her by those in her immediate environment, and which she herself, as the narrating “I” in the now of narration, attributes to her naivety, timidity, inexperience, immaturity and susceptibility to being manipulated and ultimately deceived.71 However, in the course of her narration, as I
71 For instance, she draws our attention to her relationship with her sister-in-law, Babette Müller, a relationship, which as Anna implies, is one of jealousy and rivalry on the latter’s part: “That Babette Müller was, as I may say, the cause of all my life’s suffering […]. Babette Müller looked upon me as a rival. She liked to be admired” (“GW” 292), she notes, emphasizing at the same time her own modesty and tendency to shrink from the others’ gaze: “I feared admiration and notice, and being stared at as the Schöne Müllerin, whenever I went to make my purchases in Heidelberg” (292). It is partly due to Babette’s manipulation that Anna attributes her decision to pay the disastrous visit to Carlsruhe, thus disavowing her own complicitous part in this decision. 228
have already pointed out, we are given certain clues as to Anna’s own complicitous part in the events leading to her predicament, a complicity deriving from her very self-deception as to her sexual orientation.
Anna recounts the events prior to her disastrous marriage in great detail implying all the while that she was only peripherally involved in the decision-making process which led to it and to her subsequent entrapment, emphasizing her feelings of ambivalence as well as her passive (and pathetic) role throughout, disavowing at the same time – like Paul Manning, the male narrator of Cousin Phillis – her homoerotic attraction to Sophie Rupprecht via her interest (no matter how ambivalent) in M. de la Tourelle.72 However, the narrative of “The
Grey Woman” is interspersed with subtle images of lesbian desire and excess, which have
been hinted at only tangentially by critics and biographers and only as regards Anna’s
relationship with her maid Amante. In fact, Anna’s repressed desire becomes manifest rather
early in the narrative, for it is partly because of her attraction to her old school friend, Sophie
Rupprecht, rather than because of her sister-in-law’s insistence, that she departs for
72 Anna characteristically notes: I never felt quite at ease with him [M. de la Tourelle]. I was always relieved when his visit was over, although I missed his presence when he did not come […] he loaded me with presents, which I was unwilling to take, only Madame Rupprecht seemed to consider me an affected prude if I refused them […] by accepting these I doubled the ties which were formed around me by circumstances even more than by my own consent […]. At length, however, I learned from Madame Rupprecht that she had written to my father to announce the splendid conquest I had made, and to request his presence at my betrothal. I started with astonishment. I had not realized that affairs had gone so far as this. But when she asked me, in a stern offended manner, what I had meant by my conduct if I did not intend to marry Monsieur de la Tourelle – I had received his visits, his presents, all his various advancements without showing any unwillingness or repugnance – and it was all true; I had shown no repugnance, thought I did not wish to be married to him, – at least not so soon) – what could I do but hang my head, and silently consent to the rapid enunciation of the only course which now remained for me if I would not be esteemed a heartless coquette all the rest of my days? (“GW” 296-97) 229
Carlsruhe, eager as she is to be reunited with her. “I don’t think I wanted to leave home”,
Anna recollects, “and yet I had been very fond of Sophie Rupprecht” (“GW” 293). Once in
Sophie’s home she further notes that “Sophie was all that I had recollected her at school:
kind, affectionate, and only rather too ready with her expressions of admiration and regard.
The little sister kept out of our way; and that was all we needed, in the first enthusiastic
renewal of our friendship” (“GW” 294). It is also during the long evening engagements and
social gatherings that Anna is “longing for the time when [she and Sophie] might have
supper and go home, so as to be able to speak together, a thing forbidden by Madame
Rupprecht’s rules of etiquette” (“GW” 295).
As Paulina Palmer notes, “[l]inked to the idea of lesbianism as unspeakable is the
concept of it as unrepresentable” (120); consequently, it is only through strategies of
indirection and subterfuge73 that images of alternative sexualities can be evoked in the
Victorian Gothic text, despite the genre’s predilection for inscribing transgression and
excess. Thus, although it does inform Anna’s narrative, homoerotic attraction can only be
traced in the interstices of “The Grey Woman” by masquerading as female friendship,
companionship and solidarity. The most apt illustration of this, of course, is the bond formed
between Anna and her maid Amante before, during and after their struggle “to leave the house of blood” (“GW” 317). In a number of scenes subtly suggestive of homoerotic desire, intermingled with unspeakable terror, the representation of lesbian desire is thus covertly effected in Gaskell’s text artfully interwoven with scenes of extreme horror, which loom uncannily in the background, as revealed by Anna’s retrospective account:
73 As Judith Roof notes, “[c]onscious of a kind of phallic preeminence, women writers are faced with the difficulty of representing perceptions unaccounted for in a phallic economy in terms of that economy” (109), thus emphasizing the necessity for the covert, rather than overt symbolization of sexualities, especially transgressive ones. 230
For me, I saw nothing but her, and I dared not let my eyes wander from her a minute;
and I heard nothing in the deep midnight silence but her soft movements, and the
heavy beating of my own heart. At last she took my hand, and led me in the dark […]
once more into the terrible gallery, where across the black darkness the windows
admitted pale sheeted ghosts of light upon the floor. Clinging to her I went;
unquestioning – for she was human sympathy to me after the isolation of my
unspeakable terror […]. We stole round the end of the building, and on turning the
corner – she first – I felt her hold on me tighten for an instant […]. We had not spoken
a word; we did not speak now. Touch was safer and as expressive […]. Amante sat a
little above me, and made me lay my head on her lap. Then she fed me, and took some
food herself; and opening her great dark cloak, she covered every light-coloured speck
about us. (“GW” 317-18)
Struggling to deceive and thus evade Anna’s “terrible husband” (“GW” 323) in an attempt to pass unnoticed and erase all traces after them, Amante and Anna blur and disrupt gender categories by disguising themselves – as well as by living together and behaving – as husband and wife.74 By altering “the shape of her face and her voice” (“GW” 323) and by
assuming male attire, Amante passes herself off as a traveling tailor and as Anna’s husband,
while by blackening her teeth and dying “[her] fair hair and complexion with the decaying
shells of stored-up walnuts” (323), Anna gives up her good looks in order to assume the subject position of a poor tailor’s (Amante’s) wife. Once again, gender, as discursively
74 In the course of her narration, Anna constantly comes up with a number of suggestive erotic scenes between Amante and herself, which are almost always framed by the presence of deadly terror, when, in the vicinity of their persecutor, they struggle to cover up their traces and save themselves from certain death. In doing so, she draws a parallel between erotic pleasure and fear of death: “We crept into our bed, holding each other tight, listening to every sound, as if we thought we were tracked, and might meet our death at any moment” (“GW” 330), Anna tells us, implicitly naming two extreme states which generate what in Lacanian (and Irigarayian) terminology would be termed jouissance. 231
constructed, as a series of unstable signifiers and contested performative subject positions
assigned to and assumed by the subject, is exposed for what it is, an arbitrarily assigned
subject position, an imitation rather than a stable and transparent biological given, a distabilizer of identities rather than a point of fixity. As a deception strategy, moreover, this shifting of gender positions disorientates and deceives the heroine’s persecutors, but at the cost of her never recovering from the state of terror in which she has lived for the last eighteenth months. Although Amante, the faithful companion, protector and lover, is eventually tracked down and murdered by the Chauffeurs, Anna is never identified by her persecutors; she has so transformed herself, beyond recognition, that she never again recovers her former good looks as well as her somatic and psychic health:
I grew stronger in time – stronger, at least. I was able to work a little at home and to
sun myself and my baby at the garret-window in the roof. It was all the air I dared to
take. I constantly wore the disguise I had first set out with; as constantly I renewed the
disfiguring dye which changed my hair and complexion. But the perpetual state of
terror in which I had been during the whole months succeeding my escape from Les
Rochers made me loathe the idea of ever again walking in the open daylight, exposed
to the sight and recognition of every passer by […]. I lived in the same deep
retirement, never seeing the full light of day, although when the dye had once passed
away from my face […] my yellow hair was grey, my complexion was ashen-
coloured, no creature could have recognized the fresh-coloured, bright-haired young
woman of eighteenth months before […] they called me the Grey Woman. (“GW”
336-339)
A ghostly shadow, shunning daylight and shrinking from the gaze, just like her image in the portrait which also hangs in a dark corner of Herr Müller’s sitting-room and which 232
frames both her figure and her narrative, the spectral Anna Scherer manages to escape from
M. de la Tourelle’s slaughterhouse and rage – though not from his haunting influence – only to end up a lifelong prisoner of her own frustrated hopes, shattered intellect and self- deception. Socially dead and totally exiled from her desire, body and intellect, she remains a series of fragmented, shaky, unstable images throughout the story, exactly like her multitudinously refracted reflection in the mirrors surrounding her in Les Rochers, a veritable
figure of Irigarayian “dereliction”, “dissolved, absent, empty abandoned” (Irigaray, The
Irigaray Reader 91), unable either to forget the past or embrace the present just like Phillis
Holman and that other female German outcast, Thekla of “Six Weeks at Heppenheim”.
Her autodiegetic narrative also remains fragmented and inconclusive the result of divided, unfulfilled desire as well as of her mental and physical abuse set “to haunt those
[human] boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticuation” (Butler,
Bodies that Matter 8), but at the cost of her bodily and mental seclusion and exclusion.
Having reached the end of her narration, it is only in the final lines of her letter that Anna identifies M. de la Tourelle as Ursula’s biological father, while extending a final warning against matrimony to her. In the meantime, she herself has, one page earlier, once more coveted the gaze of deathly jouissance, the gaze of Eros and Thanatos, when for one last time, amidst terror and emotional confusion, Anna recollects her final encounter with M. de la Tourelle before his arrest and decapitation:
Once only, only once more, did the old terror come upon me. For some reason which I
forget, I broke through my usual custom, and went to the window of my room for
some purpose, either to shut or to open it. Looking out into the street for an instant, I
was fascinated by the sight of M. de la Tourelle, gay, young, elegant as ever, walking
along on the opposite side of the street. The noise I had made with the window caused 233
him to look up; he saw me, an old grey woman, and he did not recognize me! Yet it
was not three years since we had parted, and his eyes were keen and dreadful like
those of the lynx […]. I was ill for long months afterwards. (“GW” 339, emphasis
added)
Framed by her window, Anna’s derelict, ghostly figure both attracts and is attracted by her former lover’s/persecutor’s gaze in the same way that her framed, painted figure attracts and is attracted by the narrative gaze of the external narrator/traveller. Both fail to recognize
Anna Scherer, simply because she is not there. In painting her figure and in publicizing her story, both artists – like Anna herself – only come face to face with the ghostliness (and terror) of identity, the simulacrum of subjectivity.
234
AFTERWORD
In 1862, two years before her death, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote to an unknown correspondent:
“I do not think I ever cared for literary fame; nor do I think it is a thing that ought to be cared
for. It comes and it goes” (Letters 694). In saying so, she was being uncannily prophetic as to the way her own literary fame was to come and go. Despite the fact that, as Susan Hamilton notes, “in the months following her death in 1865, Gaskell’s contemporaries cared a great deal about her literary fame […] Gaskell’s reputation was later chased into the shadows by modernism’s onslaught on the Victorians and remained remarkably unchanged until revisited in the 60’s and 70’s” (178).
Unlike other mid-nineteenth-century women writers, such as the more acclaimed
Brontës and George Eliot, Gaskell continued to occupy the shadowy position of the minor, and for this reason, ignored novelist during the 1960s and 70’s and up to the mid 80’s.
However, unlike her more celebrated contemporaries, she formed her own literary reputation during her lifetime not only by challenging expectations of gendered behaviour and by looking deep into the motives behind certain human behavioural patterns, but also by taking her readers beyond purely subjective experience and interpersonal relationships into a society divided by striking inequalities similar to those we encounter in the world we inhabit today.
This was a world of extravagant wealth, on the one hand, and utter poverty, on the other as
Gaskell had personally witnessed it by being a resident of and a social worker in England’s urban north, in industrial Manchester. Through what has been termed “documentary realism” she portrayed working-class life, child-labour and industrial strife in Manchester’s Cotton
Mills in her industrial novels Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855) interwoven with her heroines’ problematic involvement in the staple romantic plot. She thus both responded directly to gender-related questions that novels such as Jane Eyre raised and drew them further by placing them into their rightful social context of a complicated world torn by 235 social turmoil and class conflict, and it was only this aspect of her work that started to be rediscovered and emphasized mainly from the 1950s onwards by Marxist critics. It was thus her industrial novels (Mary Barton and North and South) and to a much lesser extend, her three other long works (Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), Ruth (1853) and Wives and Daughters (1866) with their omnisciently narrated plots as well as her “charmingly innocent”, Cranford with its humorous depiction of old-fashioned provincial life that attracted critical attention, rather than her non-industrial and short fiction (including her novellas and Gothic pieces).
There was a failure, then, on the part of most critical circles (save the Marxists) to perceive what many contemporary readers, including myself, today see as the nuanced irony, narrative complexity of and subtlety of tone in her fiction, as well as its subversive subtext.
Even during the 80’s and early 90’s, which was the time when feminist criticism started to discover her works, the general tenor was to classify Gaskell with the minor novelists of her time. Such attitudes have been totally reversed today with Gaskell’s reputation having regained lost ground as a result of shifting critical investments in literary studies, as well as of the fact that literary reputation itself has never ceased to be the subject of critical inquiry.
“Elizabeth Gaskell’s fiction is beginning to receive the attention it deserves” (“Elizabeth
Gaskell’s Shorter Pieces”108), Shirley Foster asserts in her article on Gaskell’s short fiction in the recently published Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell with most of her works now being widely available in paperback editions as well as in digital form on the Internet.
Of course, the fact that Gaskell’s name and work appeared for the first time only in the seventh edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature in 2000 is particularly telling of the state of affairs as regards her literary status after her spectacular rise in the mid 1840’s and her subsequent fall following the years after her death and up to the mid-eighties. The fact that the first Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell was published just two years ago, in 2007, is equally telling about her resurgence (and resurrection) in the critical circles of 236
our times, as is also the fact that she has been steadily re-entering the canon, since her name
nowadays figures perennially and prominently in most Anglophone University syllabuses
where courses on the Victorian novel are offered. As Jill Matus, editor of The Cambridge
Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell, claims, “Gaskell’s canonical status today is a restoration
rather than a continuity of her reputation in her own day” (1), since in the past decade,
“Elizabeth Gaskell has become a figure of growing importance in the field of Victorian
literary studies [as] a talented story-teller, with a zest for anecdote, legend and social
observation [and comedy] […] innovative and experimental in her use of genre and narrative technique, particularly in the realm of shorter fiction” (Matus 1) and these aspects of her
work are starting to receive due attention often followed by a realization that the most
subversive and radical Gaskell is to be found in those of her texts that she has least been
expected to be found.
One of the most recent developments in the field of Victorian studies has not only
been an attempt to broaden the canon by bringing up or back into print, and make available for critical interpretation ignored, neglected or underread texts, especially by women writers, but also to identify and bring into focus aspects of their texts that have not received critical
attention before. This is what I have attempted to do through my close reading of 5 of
Gaskell’s first-person texts, which appear under the rubric of three “I’s, as paradigmatic of
the Communal, the Voyeuristic and the Gothic I/eye all three of which both perceive and
narrate, falling prey, at the same time, to their own divided, misrecognized state as well as to
the destabilizing effects and politics of the gaze.
Dispelling further the notion of Gaskell’s image and work as charming, virtuous,
conventional, even motherly, is what my thesis, then, has attempted to do as regards her first-
person fiction. This I see as the locus par excellence where some of her most compelling
questions concerning the problematics and otherness of subjectivity are most provocatively 237
articulated and where she addresses issues relating to the ways in which the self, the “I”,
comes to construct (and be constructed by) its own phantoms and fictions, caught as it is in
the midst of all those battling discourses of the symbolic system which have constituted it as
a speaking/narrating subject in the first place, the very same ones which often bring it face to
face with its own imitation and its performative dimension. Consequently, in the texts under
analysis the narrating (and narrated) self cannot be in harmony either with its external reality
or with itself despite their struggle for integrity, wholeness and connection.
As we can also glean both from her texts and her letters, Gaskell herself was no
stranger to the problematics of subjectivity. Although as a post-Romantic, Victorian subject
steeped in the empiricist dogma of her age she officially espoused received Cartesian-
rationalistic notions of the self’s wholeness and centrality, in her fiction she repeatedly turned
the truism of Cartesianism on its head by means of her plots and characters as well as through
the self-deluded, pathologized narrators she constructed. Although the principle of the
Cartesian cogito was the dominant model of thinking about the nature of thinking during the
time Gaskell was writing and publishing her texts, as it still is today, her texts foreground, as
I believe I have shown through my analyses, alternative mechanisms and modes of thinking
about perception which are close to our own post-modern assumptions about the origins,
thinking and bearing (or being) in the world of the human speaking subject. Early in the 20th century, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger declared: “Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought.” (“The World of Nietzsche: God Is Dead” 112). It was in the same vain that up until before his death in our century Derrida was concerned to demonstrate that “reason is only one species of thought” (“The Principle of Reason” 16). I consider both philosophers’ claims about the thinking, speaking subject to be close to Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1853 observation as she articulates it through the mouth of one of her characters, Martha, Miss Matty’s maid- 238
servant in Cranford when she has her declare: “I won’t listen to reason […] Reason always means what someone else has got to say” (182).
One of the most convincing arguments, perhaps, illustrating our distrust towards
Certesianism’s arrogant anthropocentrism has been provided by the psychoanalytic paradigm,
especially through its post-structuralist revisions, in view of the fact that it has systematically
challenged stereotypical notions about the human subject’s centrality and rationality.
Consequently, this thesis is largely informed by it as is also by post-structuralist assumptions
about the linguistic and hence cultural embeddedness and function of the speaking and hence
the narrating subject as posited also by that branch of narrative poetics known as feminist
narratology. In the light of psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious, the proposition “I
think therefore I am” becomes manifestly problematic in terms of received models of the
subject’s self-presence within consciousness or feeling, promoting instead an awareness of
the extend to which any “I” or human subject is decentred. What makes this idea of the
decentred “I” particularly disturbing and at the same time valuable (and as far as I am concerned also liberating) is that it involves a dislocation of, a doing away with notions of human mastery and autonomy of self, introducing instead the humility of recognizing that the human subject is not centered in itself, let alone centered in relation to the surrounding world or solar system. In his 1925 essay on “The Resistance to Psychoanalysis”, Freud talked about the emotional difficulties humans have in accepting the psychoanalytic ideas of the unconscious. He drew a parallel between them and the earlier theories of Darwin and
Copernicus, claiming that the psychoanalytic view of the relation of the conscious ego to an overpowering unconscious constituted a severe psychological blow to human narcissism similar to the biological blow delivered by Darwin’s evolutionary theory of descent as well as similar to the cosmological blow brought about by Copernican theory, demonstrating how 239
“the arrogance of anthropocentrism is both unwarranted and unsustainable” (Bennet and
Royle 126).
Lacan’s theory of the splitting and fragmentation of the self gave a further twist to
Freud’s theories simply by pointing to the linguistic construction of the speaking subject,
insisting “that the subject is uncertain because [it] is divided by the effects of language”
(Four Fundamental Concepts 188), the big Other as he calls the realm of language, within
which the “I” “is pursuing […] more than half of [it]self” and where “[it] will simply find its
desire ever more divided […] in the circumscribable metonymy of speech.” (188).
Lacan's model of consciousness is based on the principle that the self is never self-
aware, that what it experiences as “itself” is simply a misrecognition, a méconnaissance. For
Lacan, we are who we are only in relation to others. Our aims and desires are shaped by the desires of others in interpersonal terms as well as in terms of social expectations and prohibitions. Our knowledge of the world comes to us by way of others; the language we come to speak pre-exists us, and, to a great extent, our thoughts conform to pre-established patterns of thinking. The otherness of the image the subject assumes in the mirror stage confers both a positive (jubilant) and a negative (aggressive) dimension upon the subject's existence. I am never, in Lacan's model, fully myself because the relationship within which my ego, my “I”, comes into being is a relationship with an image that both is and is not myself, an image that simultaneously points towards the promise of self-identity and its unattainable status and which perpetually triggers the subject’s psychic investments in a variety of persons and objects (material and cultural) that hold out the promise of desire’s fulfilment. Hence, the subject’s sense of alienation, aggression and self-division, but also its illusions of mastery and its seduction by fantasies of wholeness. First-person narratives as cultural objects are more susceptible to such fantasies for in being more self-conscious than 240
omniscient ones they promise a greater, but ultimately a more illusory fantasy of self-identity
and wholeness.
While conducting research for and during the writing process of this dissertation, I did
my best to place Gaskell’s texts within their rightful socio-economic, historical and cultural
context and to emphasize their embeddedness into earlier forms of texts, providing my reader
with the relevant information. However, because of my own embeddedness in the discourses
of post-modernity, my close readings of Gaskell’s texts are inevitably predicated on the
assumption that this illusory/imaginary relation of the subject to its seductive mirror image
informs the structures of her first-person narration, whereupon the narrative act is further complicated by the mutual implication of the “I” and the “eye”, that is the subject that narrates and the “eye” that looks and perceives. Both emerge flawed and unreliable, divided and split, urging us to believe less in our identifications and psychic investments and more in the reality of the place of the self and its objects as being fundamentally performative and
empty.
241
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