background details in the narrative subvert this ideological work, a work that relies on repressing desire in order to achieve social ends. This very detail reveals a subtext driven by desire. I argue then how background detail becomes meaningful for what it suggests about the incomplete and unnarrated plots of
. For as we will see, Gaskell uses detail to indicate motivations that she leaves unexplained, thereby inviting the reader to formulate a critique of the very plot that she constructs.
I first explore Gaskell's concern about the appropriate relationship between objects and feelings. Reading Gaskell's advice to an aspiring novelist in one of her letters can help us to understand how she viewed the novel as an aesthetic construct. For Gaskell, a focus on objects requires describing reality objectively, and background details create a surface texture that “clothes” and “drapes” her plot. Gaskell leaves the detail for her reader to tease out as I will show in the second part of the essay where I examine Mr. Gibson's references to Jeanie in the early section of the novel before his marriage to Mrs. Kirkpatrick. Through repetition and then erasure of this detail, Gaskell's narrative inscribes an unnarrated plot that underlies and drives the larger plot of Wives and Daughters. A careful reading of the repetitions of Jeanie reveals a surprising and suggestive intertextuality with Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market” and its hortatory example of the fallen woman. Both the detail itself then and this intertextuality make an ironic commentary on how Gaskell's narrative indirection, or telling with “a mental squint,” can ruin a story. It is only by pulling the background detail into the foreground of the narrative that her critique of her own plot becomes clear.
Objects and Feelings
REALISM DEPENDS on certain things being said and certain things being left unsaid. It places the center of reality outside the individual and works to depict everyday things as they are actually and historically. Such depiction involves a cultivated objectivity for detail, often the work of much research and labor on the writer's part. This use of detail comes to signify a tribute to the minute organization of the natural and social worlds at the same time that it represents a means of ordering a world that increasingly resists control.2
For discussions of the use of detail in Victorian realist narratives and poetry, see Conrad, esp. 106–13, and Christ, esp. 13.
The pursuit of detail is the pursuit of certainty; Peter Conrad suggests that the Victorian's urgent, scrupulous attention to detail not only reduces the work of the imagination to the microscopic testing of the observation of detail (127–30), but becomes therapeutic in and of itself as a means of calming and steadying the self (112).
3 Schaffer makes a related argument for the therapeutic use of detail: Schaffer argues that British women aesthetes amassed “a surface wealth of detail to conceal an anxiety provoking sexual subtext” (31).
Carol Christ complicates this notion by showing how such therapeutic use of detail also suggests a tension between the extreme scientism of objectivity and the morbidity of subjectivity, the necessary uniqueness of all observation based as it is on the peculiarity of an individual's vision. Christ reads Victorian poetry to demonstrate how the Victorians feared extreme self-consciousness and saw an obsessive preoccupation with feelings and impressions as a form of self-imprisonment, which led to a loss of the sense of proportion and order in the external world.
4 See Christ 13, 32, and 34.
Christ argues that the Victorian aesthetic tries to fix an appropriate relationship between feelings and objects; it asks how we can derive an emotional response from the qualities of things.
5 See Christ's “Introduction” to The Finer Optic 1–15.
Elizabeth Gaskell was concerned about the appropriate relationship between feelings and objects. In an 1859 letter to an aspiring novelist, she gives “a model brief guide to novel-writing.”6
Gaskell did not write specifically about the art of writing fiction, yet her letters show us some ideas about her process of composition. See Chapple's “Introduction” (xx–xxi) to The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell. Chapple suggests that Gaskell's letter to “Herbert Gray” (Letter 420), giving advice about The Three Paths, is “a model brief guide to novel-writing” (xxi).
In this model, she discusses the novel as a form opposed to the essay, which Gaskell tells her correspondent requires “neatness pithiness, & conciseness of expression” (Letters 541). Instead, the novel, she suggests, requires narration and plot, and by implication allows for a looser structure. The plot, Gaskell warns, is not simply a “medium” for “dwelling on feelings.” Instead, 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 the artist; he must have an idea of his skeleton, before he can clothe it with muscle & flesh, much more before he can drape it. (542)
Gaskell's stress on the importance of character to plot illustrates her concern with the novel as an aesthetic construct where all parts contribute to the whole imaginative vision of the writer. To construct plot, Gaskell advises a “healthy” focus on “externals”:
I think you must observe what is out of you, instead of examining what is in you. It is always an unhealthy sign when we are too conscious of any of the physical processes that go on within {y} 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 weakness 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 am sure the right way is this. You are an electric telegraph something or other,– (541)7
I have given the letter retaining the notations of its manuscript form as transcribed in Chapple.
Her characterization of the novelist as an “electric telegraph” suggests not only that the novelist is a medium for sending her imaginative vision to the reader, but also that the novelist's vision is necessarily encoded. Gaskell's advice implies that what the writer must encode is her feelings. The writer must look outside herself, outside the “physical processes” that go on within and “not to be too cognizant of [her] mental proceedings.” These proceed- ings or “feelings” are “unhealthy” signs– “morbid” and “weak.” The writer must translate what is in the feelings into “results,” into “objects.” In other words, she must externalize the internal. It is worth dwelling on the several meanings of the word “object”; Gaskell certainly conceives of objects as material things that can be seen and felt; as realistic details. But she also conceives of objects as a focal point for directing the reader's attention to a specific goal or aim. In both senses, “objects” are “healthy” signs, and, for the most part, Gaskell relies on nineteenth-century expectations that these signs are comprehensible.
8 See Gallagher 179. It is also important to note that several critics have stressed the way that Wives and Daughters signals how Gaskell was approaching a new form of realism. See, for example, Schor 208–10, and D'Albertis 155–56. Warhol analyzes how Gaskell's early narrative voice, a voice that attempts to engage the reader in connecting the real and the fictive worlds through “a bridge of sympathy” (49), uses numerous models for the pattern of behavior that she hopes to inspire in her readers (53), and repeatedly expresses doubt about her grasp of the facts and her inability to transmit those facts accurately to the narrative (60). According to Warhol, this “engaging narrator” disappears in Gaskell's later fiction; Gaskell refrains from overt conversation between the narrator and the narratee as she achieves a new objective distance, a distance that abjures absolute knowledge of her characters (25–71, esp. 69–71).
Setting objects before her reader requires describing reality objectively, with a cultivated disinterest: “Don't intrude yourself into your description,” Gaskell counsels (542). Her disavowal of “feelings” suggests, as Christ argues, the way that Victorians feared how subjectivity could distort and lead to doubt and uncertainty. Gaskell's narrator in Wives and Daughters expresses a similar anxiety concerning the direct expression of feelings. Repeatedly, the narrator assigns words the power to express and to define feelings, to give them a distinctness they otherwise might not have. Perhaps more importantly, the narrator warns that when a character acknowledges feelings by putting them into words, the character will be forced to face painful, unpleasant realities. The narrator marks these feelings with tags that exhort the character to restrain from giving form to feelings, from turning feelings into objects. A few examples of these comments make clear a pattern of active repression. While brief comments such as “the less said the better” (121; ch. 10), or “It was better for them both that they should not speak out more fully” (399; ch. 36) caution against expression of feeling in general, other comments directly suggest the dangers of putting words to feelings. For example, the narrator tells us that Mr. Gibson “did not want Molly to define her present feelings by putting them into words” (134; ch. 11) or that “he would not allow himself to become more aware of [Mrs. Gibson's] faults and foibles by defining them” (322; ch. 29). This narrative comment suggests what Freud was to systematize at the turn of the century in the practices of psychoanalysis: words translate feelings into objects that then become useful in explaining the source of feelings and “cure” the patient.9
See Freud's discussion of Anna O's case in Gay 60–78.
Indeed, Freud's famous “talking cure” makes use of just such a mechanism and ties the expression of feelings to detail: as Naomi Schor explains, it is Freud's emphasis on the significance of detail and the need to interpret every detail that pulls the detail out of the background and into the foreground.
10 See Schor's analysis of Freud and detail, esp. 66–73.
Hence, it is significant that the narrator in Wives and Daughters resists such cathartic exercises for her main characters. True to her advice to the aspiring novelist, Gaskell wants to keep feelings within her characters. Gaskell's narrator fears what an expression of feelings might do to the lives of her healthy characters in the novel–Mr. Gibson, Molly Gibson, and Roger Hamley. Their “healthy” redirection of “feelings” into “objects”–Mr. Gibson's focus on his patients above all else, Roger's focus on natural science, and Molly's focus on the secrets of other characters–helps them to structure their desire in terms that conform to “results,” in other words, to social objects or communal needs.11
Moglen argues that realist narratives created “coherence from a single overarching perspective, they affirmed the possibility of psychic wholeness and structured desire in conformity with communal need” (6).
Their repression of feelings contrasts sharply with the “unhealthy,” “morbid” attention that Osborne Hamley, Cynthia Kirkpatrick, Mrs. Gibson, and Squire Hamley direct to their feelings. Their plots within the novel represent a range of engagements with the process of working through traumatic losses by talking out their feelings as they reach a proper social and emotional equilibrium at the novel's resolution. Osborne Hamley represents the extreme of this focus on feelings, and his marriage to Amiee, a French servant girl whose letters Roger and Molly suspect of faulty grammar, pushes him outside the main plot. His excessive sensibility, like his mother's, has no place in the vision of England's future that closes
Wives and Daughters. Clare/Mrs. Kirkpatrick/Hyacinth/Mrs. Gibson also expresses her feelings excessively, irritating other characters by turning her sentiments into events. Her daughter Cynthia dwells on her own “bad nature” and analyzes her inability to feel deeply as a result of her lack of maternal care. Perhaps the most excessive expression of feeling comes through the Squire, who suffers the loss of both his wife and first-born: he is capricious, exacting, passionate, and authoritative, a domestic tyrant who cherishes “morbid fantasies.” Indeed, Squire Hamley exemplifies what happens when people “say things that estrange one for life.”
Before examining how this repression of feelings works to undermine Gaskell's plot, it is important to make clear that her “model brief guide to novel writing” establishes a tension between the writer's objectivity and the reality she constructs in her fiction. After Gaskell has discussed the importance of plot–“a subject of labour & thought”–she advises the aspiring novelist to
imagine yourself a spectator & auditor of every scene & event! Work hard at this till it become a reality to you,–a thing you have to recollect & describe & report fully & accurately as it struck you, in order that your reader may have it equally before him. (Letters 542)
As a spectator or auditor, the novelist is firmly located outside the fiction that she creates. This passage reveals Gaskell's nineteenth-century literary context, her belief that there is an objective reality that can be described “fully” and “accurately.” At the same time, however, the passage also suggests Gaskell's awareness that this reality is necessarily a creation of the writer's imagination of the “scene or event” as it “struck” that writer. Thus, Gaskell's advice acknowledges that the writer's task is also subjective, based on her own perception of the events that she creates.
Nevertheless, Gaskell still conceives of putting that imagined reality before her reader as “describing” and “reporting” “fully” and “accurately” what is out of herself: setting “objects,” not “feelings,” before her reader. But this focus on objects may encode the feelings that the objects, the results of the feelings, repress. By reading “objects,” minute details that Gaskell's narrator reports fully and accurately in such a way that they arrest the narration briefly for the visceral aesthetic pleasure and pain that they create in the reader, I argue that Wives and Daughters as a text engages in the same mechanics of repression that the narrator advises the characters to follow. To be sure, it is significant that the narrator leaves these details largely unexamined. By only taking note of feelings as exteriorized results, Gaskell's narrative buries the source of these feelings in her characters' desires and leaves these in the background of her plot. Yet just as her narrator repeatedly cautions the characters against putting words to feelings, the very presence of these cautions marks what they conceal. In this way, strategic details in Wives and Daughters blur the comforting ideological work of the novel and point to a deep ambivalence about the marriage plot. These details do not make links between the feeling and the objects that encode them: instead, Gaskell's narrative leaves the detail open for interpretation and lets the reader do the work of introspection, whether it be morbid or not.
Jeanie
MR. GIBSON is the character who most embodies the resistance to expressing emotion and he teaches this resistance to Molly, who remembers how her tears would annoy her father.12
Stoneman makes a related point about Mr. Gibson's resistance to expressing emotions: Stoneman identifies Mr. Gibson's version of the “masculine lie”–“which prevents human emotion becoming part of the dominant ideology” (180).
The narrator tells us that he rarely betrayed in words what was passing in his heart. He “scold[s] himself for his weakness in feeling so much pain” (60; ch. 5) at Molly's departure for Hamley Hall, and the narrator often uses verbs and images that testify to his active repression of this pain and his own guilt and remorse for marrying Mrs. Kirkpatrick. These descriptions do not analyze Mr. Gibson's feelings: instead, they translate these feelings into physical manifestations that underscore his repression. For example, after he proposes to Clare, the narrator reports that Mr. Gibson “swallowed down something that rose in his throat, and was nearly choking him” (106; ch. 10); or, later in the novel, that he “willfully shut his eyes and waxed up his ears” to Mrs. Gibson's behavior (321; ch. 29). Or when he suspects Molly's pain at their new domestic situation, he “stuns” his own heart into “numbness as soon as he could by throwing himself violently into the affairs and cares of others” (400; ch. 36).
While critics have referred to Mr. Gibson's first love Jeanie, or to his misogyny and racism,13
See, for example, Easson 191; Schor 190; and D'Albertis 151. D'Albertis observes that Mr. Gibson is the only character who alludes to the racial Other (146), joking with Roger about “the threat of infection by the blackness of Africa” (147).
only Margaret Homans and Hilary Schor discuss at any length the “secret” of his own sexual desire.
14 See Homans 252. Homans's argument anticipates many points of my own argument. However, while Homans centers on the divisions of Molly's linguistic practice, I focus on Mr. Gibson's repression of the partially narrated story of the fallen woman and how this story provides the motivation for his decision to send Molly to Hamley Hall.
Schor argues:
Desire, as we saw, was the hidden motivation for Molly's exile to Hamley, and for her father's remarriage–the latter being, we might argue, a double secret, for although he claims to himself and keeps secret from Molly Mr. Coxe's offer as a reason for marriage, his own sexual desire is the motive that the villagers assume, and which we would be wrong entirely to discount. (192)
Schor, nevertheless, does discount his desire in her own reading reinscribing the danger of women's sexual desire: “it is really Cynthia's presence, with her secrets, that introduces the sexual plot” argues Schor (191). Yet as my reading will show, Gaskell undermines the woman's sexual plot by introducing in only teasing narrative comment a significant detail of Mr. Gibson's sexual past, a detail that indicates his motivation for sending Molly off to Hamley Hall, but does not, as in many other instances of narrative comment in the text, link up that motivation to his own actions. Instead, as I will show, the Jeanie of Mr. Gibson's sexual past not only sets the whole plot of
Wives and Daughters into motion, but also prefigures its use of secrets and bribes. Jeanie is the secret of
Wives and Daughters, and the submerged story of Mr. Gibson's desire for her implicates male sexual desire in female pain, creating the missing link in the novel's title between “wives” and “daughters.” Indeed, the title elides not only the missing term “mothers” as critics have noted, but more significantly the missing terms “husbands” and “fathers,” the structuring terms that tie together “wives” and “daughters.” “Poor Jeanie” provides the detail that introduces Mr. Gibson's own sexual experience as the motivation for his response to Mr. Coxe's letter.
Before examining how this detail disrupts the narrative of Wives and Daughters, it is worth examining how Gaskell's use of “Poor Jeanie” in the narrative resonates surprisingly with Christina Rossetti's poem “Goblin Market.” Gaskell surely knew of the poem; not only was she interested in the issue of the fallen woman, the subject of her second novel Ruth (1853), but she socialized with Christina's brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, several times in 1859.15
Gaskell's daughter Meta was interested in painting, and her interests had initiated a friendship between the Gaskells and Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelite painters. As Gaskell writes in a letter, they “got to know Rossetti pretty well” (Uglow 455).
Christina Rossetti's poem, like Gaskell's novel, depicts two sisters: one subject to temptation and one prudent. In “Goblin Market,” Laura falls to the temptation of eating the goblin men's forbidden fruits, and Lizzie, the prudent sister, intervenes to save Laura from the fruits' diminishing effects. When Laura returns home to Lizze after sucking the goblin men's fruits “until her lips were sore,” her sister reminds her of the story of Jeanie: “Do you not remember Jeanie”? (line 147). Jeanie provides a hortatory example of the woman who has eaten the goblin men's fruits, suggestive of sexual experience, and then dwindles away and dies, unmarried.
Teasing references to Jeanie punctuate Christina Rossetti's poem and suggest its intertextuality with Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem “Jenny” about a golden-haired prostitute.16
All quotations of the poem are taken from R. W. Crump's The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition; “Goblin Market” appears on pages 11–26. I have indicated line numbers parenthetically in my text.
Lizzie warns her sister Laura about “Jeanie's” fate:
She thought of Jeanie in her grave,
Who should have been a bride;
But who for joys brides hope to have
Fell sick and died
In her gay prime,
In earliest Winter time,
With the first glazing rime,
With the first snow-fall of crisp Winter time. (lines 312–19)
Catherine Maxwell's reading of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem as source material for his sister's poem rightly argues that Christina's poem, unlike her brother's, redeems the fallen woman, Laura, “by insisting that it is men, not women, who are the goblins” (96). Maxwell's conclusions about “Goblin Market” are useful for a reading of Mr. Gibson's “remembering Jeanie” in
Wives and Daughters. Maxwell explains that Lizzie's brave intervention stops the pattern whereby Laura will succumb to the goblin men's powers. Maxwell argues:
“Mindful of Jeanie,” [Laura] obtains what she wants from the goblins without succumbing to their powers. It is Lizzie, not Jeanie, who becomes Laura's precursor, and “remembering Jeanie” becomes a way of reminding oneself about the necessary dangers of negotiating with men's texts and men's images of women. (96)
In Gaskell's novel too, “remembering Jeanie” reminds the reader of the necessity of negotiating with men's texts and men's images of women. As I will show, Gaskell's deployment of “Poor Jeanie,” both in Mr. Gibson's remembering and in the narrator's comment, exposes Mr. Gibson's sexual past at the same time that it operates intertextually with “Goblin Market” to initiate a conversation regarding the necessary sisterhood of women in the face of male history.
The reader first hears of Jeanie when Mr. Gibson reads Mr. Coxe's intercepted love letter to Molly, “not the conduct of a gentleman” (52; ch. 5), as Mr. Coxe reminds him. Holding the letter in his hand, Mr. Gibson comforts himself with “his conviction of Molly's perfect innocence– ignorance” (49; ch. 5):
“Sixteen and three-quarters! Why, she's quite a baby. To be sure–poor Jeanie was not so old, and how I did love her!” (Mrs. Gibson's name was Mary, so he must have been referring to someone else.) Then his thoughts wandered back to other days, though he still held the open note in his hand. (49; ch. 5)
This brief passage gives one of the rare instances when Mr. Gibson does not censor his feelings but shares them through his own voice with the reader. The narrator's interruption only partially, teasingly narrates the story of Mr. Gibson and “Poor Jeanie.” This interruption is set off orthographically in parenthesis as it distances the narrator from the sexually charged nature of the information she imparts. Nevertheless, the parenthesis acts to emphasize the secret nature of the information that the narrator provides because it disrupts the narrative, introducing doubt and the possibility of alternative explanations to those that Mr. Gibson voices to himself. In this way, the parenthetical emphasizes the detail and thus subverts the hierarchical ordering of foreground and background. By tracing Mr. Gibson's three subsequent references to Jeanie, we shall see that Gaskell puts a detail into the background of her story whose foregrounding would provide a history that she cannot fully reveal because of conventions that do not allow women to speak openly about the sexual life, especially about the sexual life of men.
Mr. Gibson does not want to be “hard” on Mr. Coxe and decides to give him a hint that he must stay away from Molly. Significantly, he writes Mr. Coxe a prescription in Latin, the language of science and medicine: the prescription advises modesty, humility, deference.17
Although Dante Gabriel Rossetti's “Jenny” was published in 1870, he had been working on the poem for some time and his sister was familiar with the poem. Marsh points out that in Christina Rossetti's poem Jeanie may be pronounced “Jenny” in order to rhyme with “many” in line 149; this, Marsh argues, evokes the fallen woman in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem. See Maxwell 75–104, esp. 95.
Mr. Gibson's Latin prescription not only provides him with a method of avoiding the task of putting his feelings into his own language, it aligns his advice with the authority and accent of science. It is a prescription that Mr. Coxe rightly finds “insulting.” Its therapeutic value is directed not toward Mr. Coxe himself so much as it is directed toward his duty to admit Mr. Gibson's superior authority in the matter of his daughter's sexual life.
After he finishes the prescription, Mr. Gibson repeats to himself the loss of this mysterious woman: “‘Poor Jeanie,’ he said aloud” (50; ch. 5). The narrator provides no comment. As Mr. Gibson leaves his house on his horse, his mind begins to work through the difficulties of having a “motherless girl growing up into womanhood in the same house with two young men, even if she only met them at meal times; and all the intercourse they had with each other was merely the utterance of words such as, ‘May I help you to potatoes?’” (50; ch. 5). Significantly, Mr. Gibson's analysis of his daughter's situation employs polite table talk to encode a sexual subtext. This detail demonstrates Gaskell's wry wit, for it alludes to etiquette structures as an indirect means of negotiating social, even sexual, encounters. Mr. Gibson's effort to suppress Mr. Coxe's passion for Molly, to teach him self-mastery and the repression of his feelings, then develops in Mr. Gibson's own behavior: he masters his fears of his daughter's imminent sexual maturity by engaging in physical exercise:
The contingencies of the affair were so excessively disagreeable to contemplate, that Mr. Gibson determined to dismiss the subject from his mind by a good strong effort. He put his horse to a gallop, and found that the violent shaking over the lanes–paved as they were with round stones, which had been dislocated by the wear and tear of a hundred years–was the very best thing for the spirits, if not for the bones. (51; ch. 5)
It is hard not to read the way that Gaskell keeps her focus on the results of Mr. Gibson's self-mastery–his “violent shaking” over the stones that were worn and torn by years of wear. Indeed, this piling up of background details fuses his “good strong effort” into a metaphor for his own repression of what the reader can only surmise was a similar flirtation, even a buried narrative of seduction, in his own youth as the intertextuality with “Goblin Market” suggests.
Jeanie comes up again, the narrator tells us, when Mr. Coxe confronts Mr. Gibson and accuses Mr. Gibson of ridiculing his feelings for Miss Gibson. Mr. Coxe reminds Mr. Gibson that he too was young once. The narrator comments: “‘Poor Jeanie’ rose before Mr. Gibson's eyes; and he felt a little rebuked” (54; ch. 5). The memory motivates Mr. Gibson to make a “bargain” with Mr. Coxe, yet the intensity of his feelings is revealed in his loss of control over his advice to Mr. Coxe. Mr. Gibson berates Mr. Coxe for his violation of his master in giving the servant who helped him to pass the love note to Molly “a corrupting bribe”; then Mr. Gibson berates Mr. Coxe when he discovers that Mr. Coxe did not bribe the servant to “do [his] dirty work” (52; ch. 5). This inconsistency clearly shows Mr. Gibson in the process of mastering not only Mr. Coxe but also his own feelings. His waffling over how bribes should or should not be used in such cases of flirtatious subterfuge models a pattern of behavior that anticipates Cynthia's “bargain” with Mr. Preston, heavily colored as it is by bribes on both sides. When his conference with Mr. Coxe is over, Mr. Gibson resolves to send Molly away from home to Hamley Hall. The narrator comments: “He was startled into discovering that his little one was growing fast into a woman, and already the passive object of some of the strong interests that affect a woman's life” (55; ch. 5). Mr. Gibson's rash reaction to Mr. Coxe's strong interest in his daughter underscores both the possibility that Mr. Coxe's interest in Molly was overly sexual and the intensity of Mr. Gibson's buried passion for “Jeanie.”
Molly realizes that her father has “odd reasons at the back of [his] head –some mystery, or something” (58; ch. 5) for sending her away. As she tries to pluck out his secret, Mr. Gibson diverts her with the story of the “three old ladies.” His version makes some significant revision in the story of the Fates who control human life. He substitutes himself for the third, Atropos, death, who cuts the thread of life that the other two create:
There are three old ladies sitting somewhere, and thinking about you just at this very minute; one has a distaff in her hands, and is spinning a thread; she has come to a knot in it, and is puzzled what to do with it. Her sister has a great pair of scissors in her hands, and wants–as she always does, when any difficulty arises in the smoothness of the thread–to cut it off short; but the third, who has the most head of the three, plans how to undo the knot; and she it is who has decided that you are to go to Hamley. (58; ch.5)
Gibson here rightly metaphorizes the incident of Mr. Coxe's letter into a “knot,” an intertwining of his efforts to master both Mr. Coxe's passion for Molly and his own repressed passion in the unnarrated history of “Jeanie.” He fails to see, however, how his solution of sending Molly to the Hall in fact cuts the knot, repressing Mr. Coxe's interest in Molly and her approaching sexual maturity, rather than undoing it. In contrast, he credits himself with the “most head”–both intelligence and authority– in decreeing that Molly go to Hamley Hall. Her entrance at the Hall sets the narrated plot of
Wives and Daughters in motion as it knots the “smoothness” of Mr. Gibson's life ever more tightly.
As he drifts into marriage with Mrs. Kirkpatrick while Molly is away at Hamley Hall, Mr. Gibson, the narrator tells us, “was partly aware of whither he was going; and partly it was like the soft floating movement of a dream” (89; ch. 8). Interestingly, the narrator picks up on Mr. Gibson's metaphor of the knot. Here, the narrator recasts the knot of Mr. Coxe's letter into the “Gordian knot of [Mr. Gibson's] domestic difficulties.” Gaskell's characterization of these difficulties as a “Gordian knot” suggests their intractability; moreover, in this second instance, Mr. Gibson does not pretend to “undo” the knot. The narrator's commentary on how he plans to “cut the knot” casts doubt on his choice to marry Mrs. Kirkpatrick in a very “knotty” sentence based on a complex conditional structure that implicates Mr. Gibson's reason in the pain his choice will subsequently create for himself and for Molly:
He was more passive than active in the affair; though, if his reason had not fully approved of the step he was tending to–if he had not believed that a second marriage was the very best way of cutting the Gordian knot of domestic difficulties, he could have made an effort without any great trouble to himself, and extricated himself without pain from the mesh of circumstances. (89; ch. 8)
This “knot” that Mr. Gibson ties ever more tightly rather than undoes or cuts by his choice to send Molly to Hamley Hall and his choice to marry Mrs. Kirkpatrick are respectively the unplumbed secrets of the plot that introduce Molly to the sexual secrets of Osborne Hamley and of her step-sister Cynthia. Mr. Gibson's decision to marry Mrs. Kirkpatrick tests the limits of his characterization as the competent man of science, the doctor whose clear-seeing observation and reason correctly interpret the illnesses of both Osborne Hamley and Lady Cumnor. Mr. Gibson's inability to understand the objects closest to him, to “anatomize a woman's heart,” ironizes scientific reason and resists its purported objectivity and authority by tying repressed, secret motivation here to the physical processes and the mental proceedings that Mr. Gibson works actively to repress. The narrator tells the reader that Mrs. Kirkpatrick's sensual qualities–her soft, purring voice and her beauty–attract Mr. Gibson as qualities that make her a suitable future mother to Molly. Yet not only the villagers, but Molly, too, recognizes that her father “had come to like Mrs. Kirkpatrick enough to wish to marry her” (127; ch. 11). Nevertheless, Molly, like her father, refuses to explain to herself the attraction that her father feels for Mrs. Kirkpatrick. Molly too actively represses any thought of the sexual desire that she apprehends her father must feel for Mrs. Kirkpatrick: it was “an unsolved problem that she unconsciously put aside as inexplicable” (127; ch. 11).
Teasingly, the narrator continues to assert Mr. Gibson's invisible sexual history by returning to Jeanie until just the time that his second marriage to Mrs. Kirkpatrick becomes public. When Mr. Gibson goes to announce and, more importantly, to explain his upcoming marriage to the Miss Brownings, his oldest friends, and the friends of Molly's mother, Miss Phoebe compliments him on his constancy to the memory of his wife: “All men are not– like you, Mr. Gibson–faithful to the memory of their first love.” The narrator's comment again alludes to the mysterious Jeanie in enumerating a sexual history that Mr. Gibson keeps secret:
Mr. Gibson winced. Jeanie was his first love; but her name had never been breathed in Hollingford. His wife–good, pretty, sensible, and beloved as she had been–was not his second; no, nor his third love. And now he was come to make a confidence about his second marriage. (143; ch. 12)
By persistently revealing only enough information to tantalize the reader's knowledge of Mr. Gibson's unnarrated sexual history, the narrator keeps a strong focus on “objects,” not “feelings,” on Gibson's upcoming marriage. The knowledge of his sexual past then recedes into the background of the plot, erased by its absence.
Nevertheless, we cannot dismiss its role as the plot's mainspring. Gaskell's “model brief guide to novel writing” shows us how thoroughly she thought through her plots–how “not a character,” and here we must include “Poor Jeanie,” “must be introduced who does not conduce to this growth & progress of events” (Letters 542). Indeed, Gaskell's attempts to frustrate both her characters' and the reader's interpretation of Mr. Gibson's “own act” in first sending Molly to Hamley Hall and then in marrying Clare/Mrs. Kirkpatrick/Hyacinth initiate a set of textual repressions that push her critique of patriarchal authority into the background of the text. It is Mr. Gibson's secret, the secret of his past and present sexual desire, that knots the plot of Wives and Daughters around details that fade into the background as the secrets of Osborne Hamley and Cynthia Kirkpatrick move into the foreground and repress this first secret. This repression too pushes Molly out of “innocence– ignorance” into knowledge as she becomes embroiled in the socially transgressive sexual secrets of Cynthia and Osborne and enters into her own desire.
“The Wrong Side of the Tapestry”
GASKELL'S TECHNIQUE of apparent remembering, coming as it does through both the character and the narrator, excavates Mr. Gibson's repressed past, fleshes out his identity through throwaway detail, and creates a psychological depth that the surface of the narrative dares not approach, indeed that the surface of the narrative actively represses.18
Pam Morris translates Mr. Gibson's prescription: see note 2 on page 657 in the Penguin edition of Wives and Daughters (1996). Gaskell's use of Latin could be related to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem “Jenny,” which has as its epigraph Mistress Quigley's misunderstanding of the Latin “genitive case” as “Jenny's case.” Mistress Quigley thinks the schoolteacher, as the owner of Latin, is being smutty.
In
The Pargiters, describing how the nineteenth-century novelist dealt with the sexual life, Virginia Woolf explains that the
instinct to turn away and hide the true nature of the experience, either because it is too complex to explain or because of the sense of guilt that seems to adhere to it and make concealment necessary, has, of course, prevented both the novelist from dealing with it in fiction–it would be impossible to find any mention of such feelings in the novels that were being written by Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Oliphant, George Meredith, during the eighties. (51)19
I am indebted to Easson's interesting observation of Gaskell's early novels in his essay “The Sentiment of Feeling: Emotions and Objects in Elizabeth Gaskell.” Easson argues that in her early novels Gaskell interfuses objects and emotions: the dimensions of time and memory interfuse. Gaskell, Easson argues, seems to see through the many layers of a person's experience and by a technique of apparent remembering offers the reader an experience analogous to opening a passage or tunnel that stretches back in time and reorders our understanding of character and situation (75). In such moments, Easson explains, Gaskell suspends the forward movement of the narrative and delves down into the strata of character, the details suggesting the multi-layered complexity of existence and experience (76).
As Woolf continues her explanation of how the nineteenth-century novelist dealt with the expression of sexual desire, her description evokes Gaskell's use of Jeanie in
Wives and Daughters. “All the novelist can do, therefore, in order to illustrate this aspect of sexual life, is to state some facts; but not all; and then to imagine the impression on the nerves, on the brain; on the whole being,” argues Woolf (51). Gaskell's narrator's disruptive comments on Mr. Gibson's first love, however, go farther as they stimulate the careful reader to speculate on the partial narrative of “Poor Jeanie.” Is she, like Rossetti's Jeanie in “Goblin Market,” a fallen woman who hoped for joys brides have but paid too dearly and dwindled away in her prime? Does Mr. Gibson's feeling of “rebuke” at Mr. Coxe's insinuation that he too might once have been engaged in youthful, flirtatious subterfuge reveal his seduction of “Poor Jeanie”? Does his “wincing” at the pain of her memory mark his own feelings of shame at her ruin? The narrator's subsequent silence about Jeanie literally buries this sexual history in the text.
Yet as the plot of Wives and Daughters unfolds, its painful result will color Molly's transition from sexual innocence to knowledge of her own desire, from daughter to wife. Later in the novel, Molly laments how changed the situation in her father's house is after his marriage. Dwelling with Mrs. Gibson, a “plotter,” leads her to “seeing the wrong side of the tapestry” (346; ch. 31). The narrative collusion with Mr. Gibson's burial of his sexual past, suggestively Gaskell's awareness of a critical listener who “makes concealment necessary,” keeps the right side of the tapestry– the focus on “objects, not feelings” upper-most in Wives and Daughters. Nevertheless, when we turn its comforting surface wrong side out, as Molly begins to do, we too begin to sense how the interplay between sides encloses what would spoil the narration.20
Woolf clearly makes an error here as Gaskell died in 1865 while she was completing Wives and Daughters.
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