IN AN EARLY VERSION of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford sketches, “The Last Generation of England” (1849), the narrator expresses a “wish…to put upon record some of the details of country town life,…for even in small towns, scarcely removed from villages, the phases of society are rapidly changing” (319). Before she begins her ethnographic preservation project, however, the narrator provides a disclaimer, suggesting the difficulty of categorizing the various aspects of what she is about to write: “As for classing the details with which I am acquainted under any heads, that will be impossible from their heterogeneous nature; I must write them down as they arise in my memory” (319). She then goes on to provide precisely what she claims is impossible–a categorical litany of the local inhabitants, beginning with the daughters of “very old” families who, “if unmarried, retired to live in–on their annuities, and gave the ton to the society there” (319). The reader is quickly taken through the town's social register, from “widows of the cadets of these same families,” to “professional men and their wives,” to a “grade lower…a class of single or widow ladies,” and on “[b]elow again,” to “the shopkeepers,” “the usual respectable and disrespectable poor,” and “a set of young men, [hanging about] ready for mischief and brutality” (319–20). Through her description, the narrator performs a double disavowal; heterogeneity prevents classification, but that very heterogeneity is itself what produces the need to classify. The rural society that serves as a precursor to Cranford (1851–53) represents a diversity that must be categorized–its hierarchy organized according to its uniqueness of place.1
Cranford was originally serialized in Household Words from December 1851 to May 1853, with Gaskell making revisions to it prior to its publication in book form. For more on the publication history of Cranford, see Collin, Hughes and Lund, and Schor.
Rendered as particular, readily-identifiable positions within the eccentric space of provincial English society, Cranford's denizens are inscribed through the Victorian fascination with taxonomy–a fascination with the seemingly paradoxical possibilities of “classing the details.”
Cranford itself has presented problems to literary critics attempting to classify it within the thematic emphasis of Gaskell's career.2
While providing an interesting reading of Cranford's utopic view of aging, Lansbury does suggest that Cranford fully justifies Gaskell's status as a minor novelist (81). Work by critics such as Auerbach, Gillooly, and Schor has done much to reclaim Cranford's status.
Steeped in an education that included political economy, literature, history, and science, Gaskell is most known for such industrial reform novels as
Mary Barton (1848) and
North and South (1854–55).
Cranford's socio-critical position, however, is harder to situate with certainty than are the industrial novels. Noted for its stylistic delicacy and light comedy, it nonetheless advances social and economic arguments through that comic structure, transgressing generic expectations of the provincial sketch.
3 Schor, reading Gaskell's work through the pressures of the literary marketplace, takes Cranford's oft-cited delicacy and lightness of style as part of a broader social critique, suggesting that the novel “asks clearly what the voice of the woman writer can be” (84). Hughes and Lund write: “The unusual form of Cranford…created new spaces in Victorian literature where Elizabeth Gaskell could do her work” (70).
Yet this generic instability is crucial for
Cranford as a text that engages and shapes the discourses surrounding women's sexuality and aging–discourses that sought to classify and stigmatize women's bodies as they aged. Like the characters that comprise the heterogeneous homogeneity of the Cranfordian community, the novel embraces categorization in order to resist it. By identifying this doubleness, I want to consider how this novel's implicit commentary on taxonomy reframes our conception of the limitations and usefulness of classifications that, both figuratively and literally, impinged upon women. To do so, I will place
Cranford in dialogue with some of the cultural discourses that performed these categorizations: population studies, political economy, medicine, and conduct literature.
Cranford's social critique depends upon the categories these discourses create. By mediating
Cranford's narrative through these cultural texts, I want to emphasize Gaskell's role in taking up these social codes in order to give them new powers of signification for older women.
“In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons” (39; ch. 1). This oft-quoted opening phrase signals the uniqueness of Gaskell's fictive society–it is, in fact, a community of women. But not just any women, as Nina Auerbach notes by placing the emphasis not on the Amazons themselves but on their power to possess:4
Gillooly reads the associative power of the Amazons' possession as being complicated or undercut by the sentence's structure: “the sentence reads: ‘Cranford is in possession of the Amazons’–as though they were a captive population or a historical artifact” (884).
[t]hese women are beyond the years of waiting. The hunt has failed, their mothers are dead, and they are in possession themselves, reminding us of the stability and strength that accompany Cranford's genteel destitution: if the lives of single women in Victorian England were socially and economically marginal, they were legally endowed with the unique power of property-owning. (79)
These are single women, possessing an economic power unique to their status
as spinsters. The connection between “possession” and “power,” however, goes beyond Auerbach's claim for its economic significance to include the community's sexual self-possession as well. In a village where “to be a man was to be ‘vulgar”’ (45; ch. 1), the social status of marriage diminishes and the cultural pressures that marginalize unmarried women recede.
Cranford's Amazons have formed a self-contained social network theoretically free of the pressing necessities of courtship, marriage, and childbearing. Even with their successful resistance to the social privileging of marriage, however, the fact that these property-owning women are “beyond the years of waiting” moves them into a category beyond that of spinster and into one that further dispossesses them. As women who are both unmarried
and older, these Amazons represent two distinct yet overlapping figures of marginalization: redundant and post-menopausal women.
5 According to the OED, the earliest usage of the term menopause in English was 1872, although the French term, la ménopause, was in use as early as 1823. Climacteric has an earlier usage in English, with entries as early as 1813, as does the phrase change of life, which the OED cites as being applied to the cessation of menstruation in 1834. For convenience, I use consider these terms interchangeable.
Early in the novel, Miss Matty, one of Cranford's Amazons, is harshly brought back to the social reality of her age by her maidservant, Martha. Martha chastises her for wearing a “‘thin shawl”’ in cold weather and reminds her, “‘At your age, ma’am, you should be careful”' (77; ch. 4). Resentful, Miss Matty queries Martha as to “‘how old”’ she thinks her mistress is. Martha indelicately replies, “‘[n]ot far short of sixty”’ (77; ch. 4). With “grave emphasis,” Miss Matty curtly informs her that she is “‘not yet fifty-two!”’ (77; ch. 4). “‘Not far short of sixty”’ or “‘not yet fifty-two”’; this emphatic distinction seems hardly worth the trouble that Miss Matty takes. For fifty-one is still, though perhaps not old, past a nineteenth-century woman's expected transition into menopause, a transition that demarcated a woman's transition into old age. In The Change of Life (1857), Dr. Edward John Tilt lists forty-six as the average age of cessation of menstruation, based on observation of 500 patients, with only ten percent of his cases still in the “dodging time” at fifty-one (21).6
The “dodging time” refers to “the time included between the first indications of the failure of ovarian energy and cessation” (Tilt 9).
Although unlikely, Miss Matty might still be on the productive side of the climacteric; a space that a woman at sixty could not occupy with any hope of veracity.
7 In an 1882 edition, Tilt cites the author of an 1873 book, Taylor's “Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence,” who writes: “‘A woman who had past [sic] the age of fifty-three is presumed, in law, to be past the age of child bearing”’ (29).
As
Cranford's narrator, Mary Smith, reminds us, “the remembrance of her youth had come very vividly before her this day, and she was annoyed at finding that golden time so far away in the past” (77–78; ch. 4). And Miss Matty certainly appears to see a disjunction between her own age and
old age, for she later tells Mary, “‘we are principally ladies now, I know; but we are not so old as the ladies used to be when I was a girl”’ (94; ch. 6). Miss Matty's comic denial of her movement into senescence illustrates an experience that Dinah Mulock Craik suggests all women must undergo, the “trying crisis in a woman's life–a single woman particularly–when she begins to suspect she is ‘not so young as she used to be”’ (281). Old age, as Craik suggests, impacts single women in a unique way.
8 Medical literature certainly seemed to suggest that single women aged differently. Dr. Tilt suggests that while some doctors posit a correlation between spinsterhood and increased disease in menopause, the single woman might actually experience less difficulty at the change of life. He writes: “Some writers countenance the popular prejudice, that the unmarried are most liable to flooding, to cancer, to ovarian and uterine tumors at the change of life; but there is no truth in the assertion. The single pass through this period without more trouble than the married, and, so far as I can ascertain, suffer less than other women” (71).
As a novel riddled with old maids,
Cranford takes up this question of difference for single women, particularly as that difference registers on the level of sexual viability, economic productivity, and social visibility.
The conventional view of menopause in the 1850s was one of disempowerment. Elizabeth W. Markson notes that by the late mid-century, the belief that “aging women were adversely influenced by menopause” produced pejorative descriptors like “‘involutional melancholia’ and ‘climacteric insanity”’ for women going through menopause, “and special diagnostic categories, including ‘old maid's insanity”’ were created to pathologize this biological process (60). Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century the cessation of menstruation was “consistently seen as pathological,” and “many nineteenth-century medical accounts of menopause saw it as a crisis likely to bring on an increase of disease” (E. Martin 21).9
The assumption that menstruation was disabling is hardly surprising, considering works like Jules Michelet's L'amour (1858), which claims: “‘Woman is forever suffering…from the cicatrisation of an interior wound which is the cause of a whole drama. So that in reality for 15 to 20 days out of 28…one may almost say always–woman is not only invalided but wounded. She suffers incessantly the eternal wound of love”’ (qtd. in H. Ellis 247). What surprises is that menopause, with its cessation of “eternal” wounding, did not reverse this classification of women as invalids. Although women resisted the cultural pronouncement of their biological frailty, it continued into the latter part of the century. In 1877, Frances Power Cobbe claimed that women were being invalided not by their own physiology but by the medical profession: “There is no denying the power of the great Medical Order in these days. It occupies, with strangely close analogy, the position of the priesthood of former times.…If Michelet had written for England instead of for France, he should have made a book, not on ‘Priests, Women, and Families,’ but on ‘Doctors, Women, and Families”’ (292).
Described in terms of adversity, melancholia, insanity, disease, and hysteria, the woman who had passed into menopause had relinquished her possession of power: power over her desires, her body, even possibly her mind. In
A Hand-Book of Domestic Medicine (1860), Henry Davies concurs with this conventional wisdom, citing hysteria as a probable result of menopause; yet, he claims that symptoms of this sort are insignificant, suggesting that the climacteric “is erroneously considered by women as an eventful period in their lives” (526). In
Cranford, however, menopause is indeed an eventful period in women's lives, becoming a paradoxical source of strength.
This paradox derives in part from the positive role a post-menopausal woman, most especially a single woman, might play in a Malthusian context.10
Gaskell's father, William Stevenson, possessed an extensive knowledge of the economic theories of the 1820s. His series “The Political Economy,” which appeared in Blackwood's during 1824–25, discusses Malthus's principle of population. Cautioning that Malthus's premise is not without flaws, Stevenson gives it qualified approbation and declares that the problems Malthus raised are “still without a complete answer” (45). That Gaskell, inheriting this intellectual tradition, was as deeply engaged as her father in periodical culture is evident not only from her contributions to contemporary magazines but from her letters. Among others, Blackwood's and The Westminster Review appear, both of which published articles on Malthus and population well into mid-century. See Gaskell's Letters.
T. R. Malthus's
An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798–1826) posits sexual division of labor as being perpetually in conflict and calculates that reproduction will, in England's industrial economy, always outpace production. In this model, childbearing becomes a dangerous threat to economic stability, both on an individual and a communal level. Summarizing the various checks on population, Malthus declares that phenomenon a natural consequence: “if we multiply too fast, we die miserably of poverty and contagious diseases” (2: 88).
11 I draw on Poovey's A History of the Modern Fact (1998) as a way to understand the impact of Malthusian political economy on Victorian culture. Discussing the revisions that Malthus made to Essay on Population as “one site where the meanings of numerical representation were reworked at the end of the eighteenth century,” Poovey notes that Malthus's movement away from a “less obviously providential interpretation of contemporary society with a more copious use of numbers that claimed actually to refer to particulars that had been counted helped make numerical representation seem immune from the very theoretical strains with which the Christian Platonism of theological utilitarianism so thoroughly imbued it” (284). The increasing impartiality of numerical data–shielding it from interpretative scrutiny–is perhaps one of the governing factors in the population scares regarding redundant women in the 1850s and the aged poor in the 1890s. Gaskell, I suggest, interrogates the ways in which categories–empirically based or no–are effective social structures when they remain unchallenged.
As the old maids of Cranford are beyond the potential to multiply, beyond the threat of outpacing their economic resources and contributing to the widespread misery that overpopulation produces, they hold a unique set of virtues: the inability to reproduce coupled with economic self-dependence. In that context, the relationship between the aging body and its productive capacity that Gaskell depicts in
Cranford narrates a social question not only relevant to the pathologization of women's bodies as they age but to the role of older women in a productive economy. The model of non-reproductive sexuality in
Cranford is a repositioning of a Malthusian economics of population, one that addresses the social marginalization of older women through its challenge to the contemporary idea that female post-menopausal sexuality is anathema.
12 Although Carol A. Martin makes a claim for Gaskell's invocation of Malthusian principles in North and South, critics have not taken up the question of Cranford's role as an exemplary text of post-menopausal sexuality through a Malthusian lens. More recent critical approaches not only have pressed the feminist critical concerns raised by Auerbach, Gillooly, and Schor, but have focused on a variety of issues, including empire, finance, and ethnography. See Cass, Croskery, Knezevic, and Mulvihill.
***
IS CRANFORD A MALTHUSIAN LOVE PLOT? Silvana Colella coins the term “‘Malthusian’ plot” to connect the ubiquity of tragic love stories in early nineteenth-century popular magazines with a Malthusian political economy. She cites “A New-Married Couple” (The Mirror, 1826) which:
happily celebrates the matrimonial union of Jacob, aged 60, and Hester, aged 50, two lower-class lovers who wait and wait and wait (in a truly Malthusian fashion) till the time for procreation is well over, and marriage therefore becomes a possibility. When marriage is not synonymous with reproduction…it enjoys a non-problematic narrative status. (23)
As the censuses throughout the 1800s indicate a growing surplus population that would make manifest Malthus's prediction that “the human race will be constantly endeavouring to increase beyond the means of subsistence” (1: 11), marriage and reproduction's symbiotic synonymy reinforced anxieties about England's economic self-sufficiency.
13 Spengler notes that “The population of England and Wales grew nearly 1 3/8 percent per year between 1801 and 1881–at a rate higher than Malthus believed sustainable, but supported in part by imported foodstuffs, at falling prices after 1870” (1.n.p.).
By mid-century, the Malthusian plot reemerges, but with a difference.
14 Malthus remained a contentious figure of debate in periodicals throughout the 1800s. See for example “On Population” in the December 1840 issue of Blackwood's, which affirms Malthus's theories and cautions readers against taking their impression of Malthus's work “not from perusal of the work itself, but from opinions and loose expressions afloat upon the surface of society” (Alison 808). The Westminster Review still carried reviews of Malthus's theory into the 1850s, publishing articles like W. E. Hickson's “Malthus on Population.” During Cranford's serialization, Herbert Spencer's “A Theory of Population, Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility,” appeared in the Westminster Review, blending a biological theory of population controls with Malthusian principles.
Colella suggests that “Malthus' principles of population provided the most controversial terms in which to reframe the age-old issues of ‘love,’ ‘marriage,’ ‘procreation,’ and ‘death”’ in the early part of the century (18). With its evocation of the 1830s and its invocation of issues that resonate with an 1850s reader,
Cranford complicates the more simplistic, divisive categories found in the Malthusian-inspired popular fiction of the 1820s. The terms that reframed “age-old issues” have a particularized potency in the 1850s as the anxiety about population growth becomes publicly mapped out through the image of the single woman.
The 1851 census shows that in England and Wales, approximately sixty-eight percent of women aged twenty to twenty-four were unmarried; almost forty percent of women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine. The statistics for older women were not much better in terms of marital prospects. Close to twelve percent of all women over forty had never married.15
See Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, Table 5.
By 1859, not surprising considering this surplus of marriageable women, the question of redundancy took center stage. Fearful of the economic burden to society that the unmarried woman posed, an article in a November 1859 issue of the
Saturday Review, “Queen Bees or Working Bees?,” dismisses offering any social alternative to women who remain single; the woman who has failed to marry “has failed in business; and no social reform can prevent such failures” (576).
16 Bessie Parkes, the author of the paper being reviewed, was part of Gaskell's close network of Unitarian female friends who were connected to the social reform movement. Gaskell gave these women her “qualified support” in signing a petition for the amendment of married women's property laws, which Barbara Leigh Smith proposed in 1854 (Uglow 311). While being attracted to their ideals, Gaskell was somewhat shocked by their radical behavior, as when Parkes and Smith traveled unescorted (and uncorseted) on the Continent in 1850 (Uglow 311–12).
Anticipating feminist proposals like Frances Power Cobbe's “What Shall We Do With Our Old Maids?” (1862),
Cranford takes the category of “old maid” as a viable alternative to the economic problems of reproduction and population, bringing Malthusian ideas out of writings about the lower-classes and into a consideration of the middle-class world of provincial England; out of the twopenny
Freebooter and into
Household Words.
17 Cobbe's article, which appeared in 1862 in Fraser's Magazine, was a response to W. R. Greg's highly conservative and controversial essay, “Why are Women Redundant?” in the National Review (1862). As Poovey notes in Uneven Developments, not all views accorded with Greg's. Poovey cites Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon's Women and Work (1859) and the English Woman's Journal as examples of dissenting voices.
Through Deborah and Matty Jenkyns, Cranford follows what Colella suggests is the peripatetic requirement of the tragic type of Malthusian love plot: rather than finding a sweetheart to marry, these spinsters encounter men who exhibit an alarming tendency to disappear or die. In the opening lines, without apparent dismay Mary Smith declares: “If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears” (39; ch. 1). Yet, this desirable displacement of the masculine component in marriage is equally to be wished for with a single man as well. When the widower Captain Brown arrives in town, the “ladies of Cranford” are to be seen “moaning over the invasion of their territories” (42; ch. 1). Representing an invasion of their tightly-scripted social rituals–for the ladies “had often rejoiced…that there was no gentleman to be attended to, and to find conversation for, at the card-parties”–Brown also encroaches on the finite resources of the “elegant economy” of these Cranfordians' amusements (45, 42; ch. 1).18
Malthus's theory is predicated on a finite set of agricultural resources.
But the Captain, who initially displeases on several fronts–his masculinity, his connection with the railroad, his admission of poverty– quickly wins the admiration of Cranford's Amazons, becoming “a favourite with all the ladies” (46; ch. 1).
Although “upwards of sixty,” Captain Brown has “a wiry, well-trained, elastic figure; a stiff military throw-back of his head, and a springing step, which made him appear much younger than he was” (44; ch. 1). With an apparent age that belies his biological one, Captain Brown exudes a youthful physical vigor that contrasts starkly with Miss Jenkyns's dour stateliness. Pitting tradition against progress, the difference in their approaches to aging are metaphorically mapped through their ensuing literary disagreement. The debate between Miss Jenkyns and Captain Brown over literature, a debate placing Johnson in contention with Dickens, takes on a different dynamic when read as a contestation over views of aging and sexuality.19
Auerbach reads this scene as a battle between literary pomposity and “human and literary right” on its surface. Yet the death by train that Brown experiences “illustrates not only Cranford's unsettling power to obliterate men, but its corresponding gift of producing them at need” with the appearance of Jessie's suitor: “The advocate of the misogynist Pickwick Club, whose benign male fellowship thwarts its desperate caricatured spinsters, is not allowed to survive, but a patient and polite provider is a welcome intruder” (81–82). This production of men when needed, I want to suggest, is part of Gaskell's emphasis of the communal power to promote responsible unions.
Miss Jenkyns dismisses Captain Brown's enthusiasm for Pickwick Papers, citing not only Dickens's style but the publishing format itself. She finds “‘it vulgar, and below the dignity of literature, to publish in numbers”’ (48; ch. 1). The Captain's response, “‘How was the Rambler published, ma'am?”’ (48; ch. 1) appears to pass unnoticed. To further defiant questions by the Captain, Miss Jenkyns finally states with grave dignity, “‘I prefer Dr Johnson to Mr Boz’” (48; ch. 1). Her preference for a text to combat Mr. Boz is strategically appropriate; she chooses Rasselas as the counter-text to Pickwick.20
Cass makes a claim for Johnson's presence as an intertextual one, with Rasselas as an “orientalist inter-text, framing the novel's opening resistance to social and cultural change” (423).
The dialogues between Rasselas and Imlac model a form of philosophical rectitude. Miss Jenkyns, pointing to
Rasselas, can invest Johnson's writing with the qualities of repression and moral restraint that she would suggest Dickens's
Pickwick, both in form and content, denies.
21 Miss Jenkyns shares her affinity for Johnson as an authority on all things with Isabella Beeton, whose Book of Household Management (1861) invokes Johnson as the expert on everything from morality to practicing household economy.
Miss Jenkyns then comes to look Malthusian in her moral ethos; for Malthus, moral restraint was the one tangible means of combating the devastating consequences of unchecked population growth. When discussing the obligation to defer marriage without decreasing the public desire for marriage, he writes that “regulation and direction…are required with regard to the principle of population, not diminution or alteration” (2: 94). Malthus suggests that if this regulation as exemplified through practicing celibacy “be the only virtuous mode of avoiding the incidental evils arising from this principle, our obligation to practise it will evidently rest exactly upon the same foundation as our obligation to practise any of the other virtues, the foundation of utility” (2: 94). The narrator of “The Last Generation” tells how Cranfordians of the past used to adhere to this philosophical ideal, where a man having “arrived at middle age” and “finding himself rich and desirous of being married…would frequently write to some college friend, or to the clergyman of his native place, asking him to recommend a wife” (325–26). The “dear old lady” who tells of these now-unfashionable unions, declares: “‘very happy marriages they turned out”’ (325, 326).
Part of the changing society Mary Smith chronicles, Captain Brown, although father to only two daughters, appears to have produced more than he can provide for; yet he appears not only happy but blissfully unaware of what should be shame for his participation in an economic cycle of misery. Miss Jenkyns, seeing in him the sign of proliferating fecundity that begs disaster, perhaps associates his lack of Malthusian virtue with other arenas; a preference for Dickens, particularly in serial form, can be extrapolated to a preference for irresponsible excess. His fondness for reading Pickwick is so consuming that he “would walk through the streets so absorbed in them, that he all but ran against Miss Jenkyns” (53; ch. 2). Although it would seem that this distracted disruption to her person would simply affirm Miss Jenkyns's association of the Captain with vulgarity, she owns to Mary that “she had rather he had knocked her down, if he had only been reading a higher style of literature” (53; ch. 2). Miss Jenkyns, outside of a reproductive economy, nonetheless models through her literary preferences a moral restraint in terms of sexuality that she would have Captain Brown adopt. Gaskell comically inverts the Malthusian principle of restraint. If he would only read “a higher style of literature,” Captain Brown need offer no apology for his inability to practice physical self-control in public. Virtuous thinking provides certain privileges of conduct.
All the same, Miss Jenkyns performs acts of kindness for Captain Brown and his daughters. In the act of rescuing an endangered toddler, Captain Brown is killed by a train. Upon hearing that the Captain “‘was deeply engaged in the perusal of a number of Pickwick, which he had just received”’ only moments before his death, Miss Jenkyns sighs and solemnly declares, “‘Poor, dear, infatuated man!”’ (57; ch. 2). His regrettable infatuation– a term infused with sexual connotation–underscores why Miss Jenkyns would adopt a mourning costume and why she would attend his funeral. Her black crepe bonnet humorously reminds Mary Smith “of a helmet; and in that hybrid bonnet, half-helmet, half-jockey cap, did Miss Jenkyns attend Captain Brown's funeral” (57; ch. 2). Having “sent out for a yard of black crape, and employed herself busily in trimming the little black silk bonnet” (57; ch. 2), Miss Jenkyns, in her attention to detail, could not be more scrupulous had she been Brown's widow rather than his neighbor. The ridiculousness of her “half-helmet, half-jockey cap” comically underscores what Susan R. Sherman claims was a predominant view of sexuality for older people, which “was considered inappropriate, immoral, disgusting, unhealthy, and perverse” (17).22
Sherman bases her claims on the work of Herbert C. Covey.
The bonnet–part-military, part-sporting, part-“elegant economy” in its excessive inappropriateness –begins to erode any negative associations of desire with age. This comic moment becomes in turn a strategic one. Simultaneously signifying restraint
and desire as a spinster, Miss Jenkyns moves out of a potentially marginal role in Cranford's reproductive economy to become a Malthusian matchmaker.
After the Captain's eldest daughter dies, Miss Jenkyns insists that the remaining daughter, Miss Jessie, stay with her. Soon after her arrival, Miss Jenkyns discloses the identity of a “caller” who once having loved Miss Jessie, wishes to renew their romance now that she is free to marry. Seemingly out of character for this prudish woman, Miss Jenkyns snaps at her sister when Matty declares with “outraged propriety” that a man is sitting with Jessie in the drawing room with his “‘arm round Miss Jessie's waist!”’ (61; ch. 2). Dorothy “snubbed her down in an instant,” declaring that it was “‘[t]he most proper place in the world for his arm to be in”’ (61; ch. 2). Abandoning her usual “feminine decorum,” Dorothy Jenkyns facilitates the marriage of Jessie Brown to Major Gordon (61; ch. 2).23
Like Miss Jenkyns, Pickwick also plays matchmaker; he facilitates the marriage of his servant, Sam Weller.
Her prudence is now aligned to a sense of community in terms of supportable population growth. Although it is open to question whether her passions were stirred by Captain Brown, Miss Jenkyns certainly rejects even the possibility of a non-reproductive marriage for herself, while promoting marriage and reproduction in a younger couple. Miss Jenkyns's distaste for marriage in her own (and others') economically straitened circumstances allows her to see the value of promoting the marriage of those who are more comfortably circumstanced. Miss Jessie's marriage, which produces “Little Flora Gordon” (61; ch. 2), enjoys the fruits of virtuous desire. They did “wait and wait and wait” (Colella 23) until marriage was possible. Miss Jenkyns's role in their union is one of promoting prudent desire–a desire she understands more fully as a woman both inside and outside of its discursive community. Cranford's “elegant economy” remains undisturbed by the threatening specter of fiscally irresponsible marriages.
The end result for Miss Jenkyns is not the realization of motherhood for herself but the acceptance of maternity in another. On her deathbed, she has Flora Gordon reading The Rambler to her. When done by Dr. Johnson, publishing in numbers is “‘wonderful!”’ and “‘the most improving reading for Flora”’ (62; ch. 2). In a qualified acceptance of the vulgarity of serial publication, Miss Jenkyns tacitly accepts the fecundity that the Gordons represent. She still holds the opinion that Johnson's serialization is “‘better than that strange old book, with the queer name, poor Captain Brown was killed for reading”’ (62; ch. 2), so the fruitful multiplicity of “numbers” is acceptable only insofar as it publishes authors with “improving” qualities. Ever vigilant, Miss Jenkyns offers to a new generation the virtue she tried to promote in Captain Brown.
As Miss Jenkyns passes from the narrative, however, Dickens again looms in the background, threatening to undermine the Johnsonian paradigm she worked so hard to maintain.24
Some critics have seen the death of Miss Jenkyns as signaling the “healthy demise of the town's female militancy” (Auerbach 82). Auerbach challenges this claim, reading the scene as “the end of the severe patriarchal code which Deborah inherits from her remote, adored father” (82). Auerbach's reading would facilitate the re-envisioning of Dickens that Miss Matty seems to adopt.
Tellingly, her sister, Miss Matty, has left a copy of
A Christmas Carol on the table. The Cratchit family, an emblem of the all-too-reproductive working poor, is ultimately saved from financial burden by another Dickensian bachelor. Rather than the model of benevolence found in
Pickwick's eponymous hero,
A Christmas Carol places the security of the Cratchit family in the hands of curmudgeonly Ebenezer Scrooge. That Miss Matty would select a novel that speaks to the power of the childless to assist those with more children than they can support is suggestive. Miss Matty will go beyond Miss Jenkyns in embracing what it means to be menopausal in order to affect new answers to the problems of population.
While Deborah Jenkyns seems to have had no lovers in her youth, Miss Matty not only had romance but maintains her wistful acknowledgment of the possibility for love at any age: “‘I may say that there was a time when I did not think I should have been only Miss Matty Jenkyns all my life; for even if I did meet with any one who wished to marry me now (and as Miss Pole says, one is never too safe), I could not take him”’ (157; ch. 11). While Miss Pole may be correct that “one is never too safe,” a woman expressing desire to marry at this age would be considered morbid. Dr. Tilt writes that although “[s]ome physiologists say that, as a flickering flame gives a final blaze, so, in some women, sexual desire is strongest when the reproductive power is about to be extinguished,” his experience shows “that a marked increase of sexual impulse at the change of life is a morbid impulse” (94). Coral Lansbury affirms this idea of menopausal sexuality as socially stigmatized: “Sexual love between the middle-aged and old has always been regarded as disgusting or a source of broad comedy. The Victorians knew instinctively that an elderly woman was a figure of fun in her own right, but as a victim of passion she became ludicrous” (87). Conduct literature and fiction of the period concurred on the older woman's having settled the question of marriage and children; if one had not married by fifty, one surely could not expect to do so. Courtship would be out of the question and, if attempted, subject to biting satire. Gaskell takes up this assumption only to renegotiate it through Miss Matty's wistful musing on marriage.25
Lansbury notes: “If there is comedy, it is not at the expense of the characters, but of the reader's prejudices” (87).
Miss Matty's reason for not taking any man who wishes for her hand is not that it goes against cultural dictates; rather, the man she once thought of as a possible husband “‘is dead and gone”’ (157; ch. 11), making her a figure of empathy rather than scorn.
Before his demise, Mr. Holbrook, the rejected suitor of Matty's youth, resurfaces momentarily, “full with honest, loud-spoken joy at meeting his old love again” (71; ch. 3). That joy translates to an invitation to dine, which Miss Matty and Mary Smith graciously accept. After an outing that includes Mr. Holbrook's romantic reminiscences on poetry from Shakespeare to Herbert to Tennyson, to which Miss Matty inefficaciously offers her sister's Dr. Johnson as a rejoinder, Miss Matty sits in her best cap “in spite of her rheumatism” at her window each day, waiting for Mr. Holbrook to return the visit (78; ch. 4). When he finally arrives, he announces a planned trip to Paris. “[M]uch astonished” at this piece of news, Miss Matty's worst suspicions are confirmed when he returns from his trip ill (78; ch. 4). Miss Pole vehemently tells Mary Smith: “‘That journey to Paris was quite too much for him. His housekeeper says he has hardly ever been round his fields since; but just sits with his hands on his knees in the counting-house, not reading or anything, but only saying, what a wonderful city Paris was! Paris has much to answer for, if it's killed my cousin Thomas, for a better man never lived”’ (80; ch. 4). Unfortunately, Paris does have “‘much to answer for,”’ as Mr. Holbrook dies the next day. His death is viewed in Cranford as a preventable tragedy rather than a natural occurrence, suggesting that old age need not indicate impending mortality. Miss Pole declares he “‘might have lived this dozen years if he had not gone to that wicked Paris”’ (81; ch. 4). Whether from the wickedness of Paris or the decline of an aged body, Mr. Holbrook's death signifies for Matty a deepened commitment to the productive powers of spinsterhood.
Miss Matty's experience of desire and loss forces her to reconsider what had been a most guarded and fearful topic: whether to allow “followers” for the young servant women in Cranford. She tells Mary Smith that “she did not think that she should dare to be always warning young people against matrimony, as Miss Pole did continually;–to be sure, marriage was a risk, as she saw now she had had some experience; but she remembered the time when she had looked forward to being married as much as any one” (157; ch. 11). That time could as easily be the recent encounter with Mr. Holbrook as a moment thirty years in the past. That Miss Matty, as an older woman, acknowledges her own desire places her in the unique situation of being barred from the possibility of marriage for herself but able to seek out that fulfillment in others. But with caution; like Malthus, Matty sees both the risks and the rewards of marriage. While critics of Malthus's theories declared him to be against marriage, he in no way advocated dissolution of that institution:
After the desire of food, the most powerful and general of our desires is the passion between the sexes, taken in an enlarged sense. Of the happiness spread over human life by this passion, very few are unconscious. Virtuous love, exalted by friendship, seems to be that sort of mixture of sensual and intellectual enjoyment, particularly suited to the nature of man, and most powerfully calculated to awaken the sympathies of the soul, and produce the most exquisite gratifications. (2: 90–91)
Acknowledging the “virtuous love” that can produce “exquisite gratifications,” Miss Matty cautiously allows her maidservant Martha to receive a suitor: “‘God forbid!’ said she, in a low voice, ‘that I should grieve any young hearts”’ (82; ch. 4). When Martha and Jem break the news of their impending marriage, however, Miss Matty and Mary Smith ponder “a good deal about the chances and dangers of matrimony” (190; ch. 14). Unlike Major Gordon, Jem is not in a position of financial security. The couple's haste in wanting to marry stems primarily from another economic motive: Martha's insistence on aiding Matty in her own straitened circumstances. One of the dangers Matty envisions is likely that of unrestricted births, year after year, without economic resources to provide for them. For Malthus, marital felicity is inextricably connected with a larger, social concern regarding happiness: that humanity “should not increase too fast” (2: 94). How can this marriage, embarked upon in the first blush of Martha's childbearing potential, resolve the conflict between desire and consequence?
Gaskell's resolution posits a neo-Malthusian answer to this Malthusian problem, embracing the “chances and dangers of matrimony” as a means to enhance the very community such a marriage might threaten. When musing on her own lost opportunity in marriage, Miss Matty acknowledges the “‘strange yearning”’ of her heart “‘whenever [she sees] a mother with her baby in her arms”’ (158; ch. 11). Matty's maternal desire distinguishes her motives from her sister's; although clearly past her childbearing years by this point in the narrative (she is fifty-eight), Miss Matty's yearning need not go unfulfilled, but can be satiated through surrogacy.
Her promotion of Martha and Jem's marriage goes beyond Dorothy's Pickwickian facilitation of Jessie Brown's marriage to Major Gordon. When Martha gives birth to a daughter Matilda, the baby is “as much at home” in Miss Matty's “arms as in its mother's” (212; ch. 16). Matty's little namesake gives her the pleasures of motherhood with the reassurance in this economically interconnected narrative that a new life will not mean financial deprivation. She declares that “as for the probable children, if they would all turn out such little darlings as her god-daughter Matilda, she should not mind the number, if Martha didn't” (214; ch. 16). Fecundity becomes a matter of choice and temperament rather than a fiscal burden. Matty's experience offers a solution to Malthus's problem of population through communal intervention, and also shows how freedom from childbearing may empower women to aid other women. Confounding her culturally dispossessed position as an old maid who should have abandoned the desire for a husband or children, Miss Matty vicariously experiences motherhood through her servant's happy union. She represents what Dinah Mulock Craik suggests–that the single woman, even in old age, “is not to be pitied, for [hers] is a completed life” (308).
In a community where often there are “neither births, deaths, nor marriages” (52; ch. 2), the population remains in a state of perpetual self-correction. Maintaining the balance in Cranford, characters leave and are replaced with harmonious results. As Mr. Holbrook departs from the narrative, Matty's long-lost brother Peter returns as a surrogate-husband for her; as the potential for children has left Matty, little Matilda arrives to fill that void. Both in making a claim for one's celibacy as the means to promote another's marriage and in challenging the conduct axioms of the period in terms of aging women, Miss Matty quietly and subtly disrupts suppositions about older women's cultural roles. Teresa Mangum, citing an 1866 article in the Argosy, “The Art of Growing Old,” that bemoans the loss of “respect, veneration, and admiration” for the aged woman, notes the cultural positioning of her as “an other and an outcast” (83). No outcast, Miss Matty uses menopause as a transitional state of great import, one central to maintaining the resources of the community as a whole.
***
WHAT ABOUT THE OLDER WOMAN WHO DOES MARRY? Does she become “an other and an outcast”? Where do menopausal women who act on their sexual desire fit in this taxonomy? In a Malthusian-influenced plot, a non-procreative marriage should bring applause. Yet, responsibility in the realm of political economy might appear reckless in light of professional medical discourses. Dr. Tilt writes: “It is a very serious thing for a spinster to marry about fifty, particularly if she be anxious, nervous, and excitable!” (95). Even widows are not exempt from his cautions: “When menstruation is well over, there is no reason why widows should not marry, although marriage will render them more liable than they would otherwise have been to vaginitis and the milder forms of cervical inflammation” (95). Suggesting that it “is most imprudent for women to marry at this epoch, without having obtained the sanction of a medical man,” (94), Tilt's narrative points to the inextricability of the pathologization of women's bodies from axioms on age-appropriate behavior and economics.26
According to Markson, the medical profession's impulse to pathologize had an economic motive: “The medicalization of menopause [in the nineteenth century] was profitable to the emerging field of gynecology” (60).
Lady Glenmire's marriage to the town doctor, in its transgression of age and class categories, highlights this interconnectedness in order to revise cultural proscriptions on older women's sexuality.
Mrs. Jamieson's sister-in-law, Lady Glenmire is an aristocratic outsider to this solidly middle-class community. An impoverished widow of a Scottish peer, her visit disrupts Cranford's tightly-constructed social network. When Miss Pole interrogates Miss Matty about the appropriate mode of address to a woman “who might have sat down to tea with a coronet, instead of a cap, on her head,” Miss Matty muses: “‘My lady–your ladyship. It sounds very strange, and as if it was not natural”’ (125, 115; ch. 8). And indeed, Lady Glenmire's representation of aristocracy is an unnatural one. Martha describes her to Miss Matty as wearing “‘rather an old black silk, and a shepherd's plaid cloak,”’ and looking “‘not over young, ma’am, but yet, I should guess, younger than Mrs Jamieson herself”' (117; ch. 8). Lady Glenmire is inscribed through litotes; if she is “‘not over young,”’ is she old? If she is old, as the litotes would imply, where does that place her in the matrix of menopause that proscribes women? The litotes allow Gaskell to disrupt the cultural desires to classify Lady Glenmire's life course through the trope of understatement. As Lady Glenmire hovers in an ambiguous state somewhere between middle and old age, her character can reframe attitudes toward marriage as desirable at any stage of life.
Not only disruptive to a taxonomy of age, however, Lady Glenmire represents social change in the disjunction between her class and her finances. Far from being bejeweled or appareled in the latest fashions, she appears to practice a Cranfordian “elegant economy” in her approach to dress. When Miss Pole remarks that “‘every stitch [Lady Glenmire] had on–lace and all”’ could have been valued at the most at ten pounds, Mary Smith declares: “It was pleasant to suspect that a peeress could be poor, and partly reconciled us to the fact that her husband had never sat in the House of Lords; which, when we first heard of it, seemed a kind of swindling us out of our respect on false pretences; a sort of ‘A Lord and No Lord’ business” (122; ch. 8). It is this very representation of ambiguity and inscrutability–a type of Lady and No Lady–that works to draw an even closer connection between post-menopausal women and economic productivity.
The mere knowledge of Lady Glenmire's arrival produces a flurry of expenditure among the Amazons. Miss Pole, Miss Matty, and Miss Forrester all buy new caps in honor of their anticipated introduction to Lady Glenmire, purchases that signify their participation in the economic cycle of production and consumption. As Mary Smith notes, “The expenditure on dress in Cranford was principally in” caps, and “with three new caps, and a greater array of brooches than had ever been seen together at one time, since Cranford was a town, did Mrs Forrester, and Miss Matty, and Miss Pole appear” (120; ch. 8). That her presence could stimulate the buying patterns of three of Cranford's Amazons immediately situates Lady Glenmire as a catalyst to economic growth. She serves to promote consumption, not to partake of it; rather than succumbing to the cap-buying frenzy, she continues to go about “more shabby than ever” (169; ch. 12). Yet the infusion of funds into the Cranford economic cycle that occurs through her, as if she were a conduit, emphasizes the monetary influence that older women can wield.
Of course, Lady Glenmire's own monetary situation is as straitened as the other women of Cranford. Her genteel poverty notwithstanding, her age, if not her class status, should have prevented her from considering marriage to any available man in Cranford. Yet only pages after Miss Pole, sounding like a sardonic conduct manual, tells Lady Glenmire that “indeed, she thought it argued great natural credulity in a woman if she could not keep herself from being married” (157; ch. 11), Lady Glenmire has become Mrs. Hoggins. Unlike the deferred marriages in the Malthusian love plots of earlier popular fiction, Lady Glenmire did not “wait and wait and wait (in a truly Malthusian fashion)” (Colella 23) till the time for procreation was well over to marry; she has been married once before. Unlike Jessie Brown's fruitful marriage, however, there is no mention of children from Lady Glenmire's previous union. Childless and widowed, she could (and, in the minds of the Amazons, should) have remained safely ensconced in a role similar to that of Cranford's spinsters.
Speculation abounds as to how Mrs. Jamieson will react. Having trusted to Lady Glenmire's virtue, Mrs. Jamieson had left her in charge of the household while she was away, assuming that Lady Glenmire would ensure that the maidservants had no followers. Yet, she appears to have violated that trust, as Mary Smith imagines a possible response: “The person whom she had left in charge of her house to keep off followers from her maids, to set up a follower of her own!” (167; ch. 12). The Glenmire-Hoggins marriage is discussed in terms of inappropriateness, as Miss Pole exclaims: “‘Where feminine delicacy is gone to, I don't know!”’ (166; ch. 12). But it is also thought of in terms of contagion–as a failure of the relative safety that Cranford should have offered to Lady Glenmire's widowed celibacy. When Miss Pole sputters out the news of the engagement, “‘What do you think, Miss Matty? What do you think? Lady Glenmire is to marry–is to be married, I mean–Lady Glenmire–Mr Hoggins–Mr Hoggins is going to marry Lady Glenmire!,”’ Miss Matty and Mary Smith cry out with dismay: “‘Marry!’ said we. ‘Marry! Madness!”’ (166; ch. 12). Even with Miss Matty's approbation of Jem and Martha's marriage, she sees an older woman's nuptials as something to fear by dint of its extraordinary rarity, as she reckons that “it was more than fifteen years since she had heard of any of her acquaintance going to be married, with the one exception of Miss Jessie Brown” (168; ch. 12). Too close for comfort, “‘Two people that we know going to be married. It's coming very near!”’ (166; ch. 12), the threat that this marriage represents gives Miss Matty “quite a shock” and makes “her feel as if she could not think what would happen next” (168; ch. 12). But what does happen next brings to light Gaskell's negotiation of the conflict between a Malthusian approbation of non-procreative marriages and a social distaste for older women's sexuality in any form.
Despite outward condemnation, the narrative itself subtly approves of Lady Glenmire's marriage in its promotion of productivity, not procreativity. As the wedding draws near, both Lady Glenmire and the Amazons look more vibrant and youthful. Lady Glenmire's face seems “to have almost something of the flush of youth in it” (169; ch. 12). And although Miss Pole says that she “‘would have been ashamed to have known that [her] marriage was spoken of in a grocer's shop, in the hearing of shopmen!”’ (166; ch. 12), the new Mrs. Hoggins represents the productive connection between the local economy and this non-procreative marriage. In anticipation of the ceremony, “the unmarried ladies” of the town “flutter out in an unusual gaiety and newness of dress,” declaring their reinvigorated status (169; ch. 12). As Mary Smith notes, the flurry of purchases is “as much as to say, in a tacit and unconscious manner, ‘We also are spinsters”’ (169; ch. 12). Engaged upon the eve of Miss Matty's impending financial ruin, Lady Glenmire's infectious marriage to Mr. Hoggins serves to extend the life and vigor of these menopausal Amazons, and a Malthusian marriage comes to look very much like a promotion of the economic desires of spinsterhood. That an infusion of youthful energy comes without the intrusion of children may justify this otherwise singularly odd union. Malthusian principles that would serve as a means of controlling the population remain intact–for we hear of no little Hogginses–while Miss Matty receives a much-needed boost to prepare for her economic crisis.
***
CAN A MALTHUSIAN LOVE PLOT BE an economic plot as well? When faced with the loss of her savings after the collapse of the Town and Country Bank, Miss Matty finally settles on opening a tea shop in her home.27
Miller discusses the cultural implications of Miss Matty's financial loss and her response to it in light of Joint Stock Company Liability Act of 1856.
Unaware of the economic support Mary Smith has gathered from the other ladies in Cranford, Matty is determined to be financially independent. The “shock” of Mary Smith's suggestion to sell tea comes not “on account of any personal loss of gentility,” but rather from a fear of unfitness for the work at hand (197; ch. 14). Her indifference to the question of gentility is surprising, particularly when considering many of the vitriolic contemporary opinions about women's work. As Mary Poovey notes, the anxieties generated by the 1851 census and its identification of a surplus female population included a large-scale fear of women “competing for work with men” (
Uneven 4). Yet, while the notion of a woman of Miss Matty's station and time in life having to work might seem to challenge conservative mores, Gaskell echoes some unexpected sources in promoting a genteel mode of self-sufficiency. Sarah Stickney Ellis, the bastion of conservative conduct literature whose famous enjoinder to “suffer and be still” (qtd. in Vicinus x) in her
Daughters of England (1842) set a tone for female submissiveness, showed a less proscriptive attitude towards women and work. In her earlier work
Women of England (1839), Ellis opposes the prevailing opinion that “if a lady does but touch any article, no matter how delicate, in the way of trade, she loses caste and ceases to be a lady” and insists that there are numerous occupations “connected with business in its varied forms, which are by no means polluting to the touch, or degrading to the mind” (345–46). Under the guidelines of such a philosophy, Matty's decision to engage in trade allows her to be both economically productive and socially visible, for “Even Mrs Jamieson's approval of her selling tea had been gained” (199; ch. 14).
Matty's solution to her dire economic circumstance is dependent not only upon the Amazons' approval but on her post-menopausal state. Emily Martin notes that there were positive views of menopause that countered the prevailing opinion of post-menopausal women as weak or incapable: “some regarded the period after menopause far more positively,” calling it the “‘Indian summer’ of a woman's life–a period of increased vigor, optimism, and even of physical beauty” (21).28
Barbre concurs with Martin that there were positive views of menopause, citing both Edward John Tilt and his contemporary, Charles Meigs, as asserting that “with the debilitating effects of menstruation and childbearing behind them, postmenopausal women not only regained the beauty and health of their younger days, but in fact those qualities were enhanced by the plumpness that resulted from menopause” (28). Barbre notes, however, that Tilt also warns patients of the conditions that menopause could induce, including “consumption, rheumatism…constipation, deafness, and cancer,” as well as mental conditions like hysteria and moral insanity (29). For an analysis of Tilt's representation of menopausal pathology in relation to Queen Victoria, see Munich's Queen Victoria's Secrets, 105–08 and 116.
This perception of rejuvenated vigor that Gaskell's work helps to inform, however, was a minority view. To more fully understand how that view was presented, I want to turn again to Dr. Tilt's
The Change of Life, particularly as his work is paradoxical in its representation of menopause. Tilt's narrative, in its dualistic strategy, becomes, like Gaskell's, subject to scrutiny in terms of its socio-critical message. Beginning with a description of menopause as a period that “concludes with the permanent restoration of health” (9), Tilt offers some positive outcomes for menopausal women: “it must not be thought that the change of life implies the loss of all personal attractions…in many women there is, for long after the change of life, an autumnal majesty so blended with amiability, that it charms all who approach within its magic circle” (103). Not only increased in beauty, the post-menopausal woman has the potential for increased immunity to disease; if a woman be “in tolerable health” prior to menopause, she has “only blessings to expect from the change of life” (93).
The “blessings,” however, come with qualifications. Only by conforming “to judicious rules” can women “pass through the change with little or no suffering” (93, 92). Even though, as Tilt notes, “it is only the minority of women who suffer in the many ways” he describes (92), the minority gets socially reconfigured to code all women rather than some. “Pathological blushing” (56), nervousness, irritability, hysteria, loss of morals, fat deposits, flatulence. The conditions that become synonymous with menopause itself emerge from the impulse to narrativize pathology–to create a professional discourse that not only identifies but creates disease and outlines a “systematic treatment” for it (15). Enveloped within the text of this taxonomy of disease, however, remains the prospect of resisting pathologization and experiencing a different kind of menopause. Gaskell's representations of powerful older women–narrated through a text that acknowledges the social equation of age with frailty–then resonates strongly with a work like Tilt's. Both authors write from within existing categorical assumptions and draw on those assumptions to reframe them for particular purposes. For Tilt, the process of reframing taxonomies professionalizes the discourse surrounding women's bodies. For Gaskell, this process promotes the discourse of older women's productivity.
If Tilt's work is primarily about categorizing women's bodies as diseased, how does his (and others') positive portrayal of menopause fit within the socially proscriptive views of older women? To resolve this “seeming anomaly of at least some positive medical views of menopause and the climacteric,” Emily Martin turns to an economic metaphor (21). She accounts for the dilemma through “the nineteenth century's concern with conserving energy and limiting expenditure” (21). That menopause should be read through the lens of conservation and economic resource is a fit analogy for Cranford. Tilt's recommendation for all women at the change of life–healthy or not–is to conserve energy. Gaskell sees this period, however, as a time that provides, rather than requires, additional reserves; Miss Matty's post-menopausal state allows for an increased expenditure of physical energy to further the ends of economic productivity. Although she gives away many comfits to the children who come to her shop, Mary Smith states: “Her sales of tea during the first two days had surpassed my most sanguine expectations” (202; ch. 15).
Content in her home-cum-shop, Matty inhabits both the economic and the domestic realms. Andrew Miller writes: “Matty's home is split into public and private spheres, and her domestic routines and material environment appear to have been fully divided” (151). The division of Miss Matty's spatial environment, however, could be read as a conflation of the public and private spheres. Her home is still her home; the reappropriation of space to new use need not create a complete division. The flow of neighbors and friends into Miss Matty's tea shop creates a picture of domestic warmth, and the economic transactions that take place there are done with the least disruption to maidenly gentility. This conflation presents a challenge to the Malthusian premise of the sexual division of labor. Rather than being constrained by the division of labor that Malthus identifies–that of the feminine domestic and the masculine economic–Matty transcends that constraint by being economically productive in her domestic space. Miss Matty's non-procreative productivity represents a new spin on the Malthusian problem of population by presenting usefulness in communal terms. Her increased engagement with the community brings a value to her work that transcends the economic and shows how the biological and social positions of the non-reproductive member are mutually dependent. Harking back to Gaskell's father's declaration that the problems Malthus raised are “still without a complete answer” (Stevenson 45), the answer to those who have too many to support might be found in those who have none.
Census scares about redundant women; medical literature that turns biology into pathology; economic anxieties about self-dependence. All of these concerns coalesce in Cranford to define what it is to be old as a woman. Age itself and the social questions that aging raise continually surface in the novel, only to resist the proscriptions that the society outside the novel would seem to dictate. From the Miss Jenkynses to Miss Pole to Mrs. Jamieson to (one would assume) eventually Mary Smith herself, the Amazons of Cranford demonstrate an amazing resilience to the pressing problems of economic subsistence and the social stigma of being spinsters. Presenting the post-menopausal woman as a categorical challenge to the nineteenth-century attempt to ignore the older woman, Gaskell deploys taxonomies in Cranford as a means to move outside of those very classifications. The interconnectedness of economics, sexuality, and community blur the boundaries between middle age and old age, between spinster and widow, between servant and mistress, between reproduction and production. Writing about ageism in contemporary culture, Kathleen Woodward claims: “Along with race, gender and age are the most salient markers of social difference” (x). In Gaskell's novel, gender and age mark a difference that transcends the text and challenges readers to rethink what it means to be an Amazon.
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