Wives and Daughters

by Elizabeth Gaskell

  The townspeople’s interest in the titled people is best captured in the scene of the charity ball in chapter 26; the townspeople dance and yet await the appearance of the Cumnors (the people from the “Towers”), who are rumored to have a duchess visiting them. They make a very late appearance, and many of the Hollingford ladies are disgusted with the duchess: “‘Such a shabby thing for a duchess I never saw; not a bit of a diamond near her! They’re none of ’em worth looking at except the countess, and she’s always a personable woman, and not so lusty as she was. But they’re not worth waiting up for till this time o’ night’ ” (pp. 291-292). Here Mrs. Goodenough’s criticism is based on the duchess’s decision to dress in a simple manner and not to wear what the townspeople had expected (“diamonds and a coronet”), which violated the distinction that her title afforded and that the townspeople wished to see maintained; a duchess was the only member of the peerage who might wear a coronet, or small crown. As Lady Harriet, one of the novel’s most astute commentators, remarks to her brother, rank and class are performances: “ ‘We’re a show and a spectacle—it’s like having a pantomime with harlequin and columbine in plain clothes’ ”(pp. 294-295).

  The role of rank and class in the novel cannot be underestimated, as it informs many of the social interactions and machinations. The family at the center of the story, the Gibsons, have what is perhaps the most socially ambiguous position in the novel—an ambiguousness due in no small part to the nebulousness of the medical profession in the early nineteenth century, which included physicians with university degrees, apothecaries (who sold drugs and dispensed medical advice), surgeons (who dealt with the structure of the body), and surgeon-apothecaries. The majority of doctors were educated through apprenticeships, which is the case with Dr. Gibson’s students. The apprenticeship to a surgeon, like all apprenticeships, was a legally binding agreement; it lasted from five to seven years, during which the apprentice exchanged his labor for education and room and board. Dr. Gibson, whose reputation in the neighborhood is held in high esteem primarily because he “attends” at the Towers, was most likely educated in this way, although his Scottish background (Edinburgh then being at the cutting edge of medicine) lends him a more enlightened and prestigious reputation. And yet it would be a mistake to think that medicine afforded someone a high social standing, as it does today, for even among the professions it was the least respected. The process by which the profession’s reputation began to change started with the Medical Registration Act of 1858, which abolished regional licensing and formally installed the hospital as the place for medical training. In Wives and Daughters, the fact that Mr. Gibson occasionally has lunch with Lord Hollingford (the earl’s son) depends entirely upon his personal merit—the two men share an interest in new scientific discovery—and not upon his rank.

  The web of rank and class in Wives and Daughters incorporates a varied cast of people and social positions, including the land agent, the second son, the governess, the barrister, the unmarried but genteel woman, the servant, and the laborer. Roger Hamley, as the second son of Squire Hamley, would not have inherited land or title from his father; the laws of primogeniture ensured that land would not be divided among sons but given in its entirety to the eldest, so it is understood that he will have to make his own way in the world. This gives him an entirely different status from Osborne, his older brother, as Mrs. Gibson is quick to intuit and exploit. Mrs. Gibson, who is known as “Clare” at the Towers because that was her name when she was governess there, changes her social position when she marries Mr. Gibson; her position rises in that, as a governess she would have been a dependent in the house of the Cumnors, but it falls in the sense that she loses that intimate relation and sheds the name of her first husband (a clergyman who was himself a younger son) . As Elizabeth Langland has pointed out, Mrs. Gibson in conventional moral terms seems insensitive and lacking in character, but as the household’s “status manager” she is inordinately successful: “Her masterful negotiations of signifying practices—etiquette (including introductions, visiting, calls, and cuts), dining rituals, household decor, and dress make her a key player in the socially prestigious marriages of Molly and Cynthia, marriages that install them permanently within the upper middle class and remove them from the ambiguous status of doctor’s daughters and potential governesses” (Langland, Nobody’s Angels, p. 134). Cynthia often threatens to become a governess, a position that was considered a last resort for genteel but poor girls. The status of a governess, who occupied a strained position between the family and the servants, replaced the status into which one was born. The genteel woman who was working to sustain herself in the homes of middle- and upper-class families would have had little opportunity to benefit from marriage, the primary conveyor of higher status for women in the nineteenth century.

  The character of the land agent—one who manages the day-today affairs of a large estate—in Wives and Daughters has a large role, as does the land agent in Middlemarch, Caleb Garth. The difference between the two characters could not be wider, for Mr. Preston in Wives and Daughters is a romantic adventurer and disrespectful of women and rank, while Garth is the model for the moral and intelligent man. Another character type within the social web of the novel is the London lawyer (specifically, barrister), of which there are two representatives: Cynthia’s uncle, and one of Cynthia’s suitors, Mr. Henderson. These professionals have a fixed status within their London orbits, which someone like Lady Cumnor deprecates, but which affords them a high standard of living. The vast majority of Hollingford’s denizens belong to the classes of servants, laborers, and townspeople. For the most part, the townspeople consist of “ladies,” and indeed it can sometimes feel as one reads the novel that it is a town made up almost entirely of unmarried older women; the Miss Brownings, who are genteel but relatively without means, are at the forefront of this category. Servants and laborers appear in Wives and Daughters, as if to fill out the fabric of the social web being described, but they are not at the center of any of the narrative strains. When servants and laborers do appear, their speech is recorded in dialect, to underscore their difference, as Old Silas’s is here: “ ‘Them navvies—I call ’em navvies because some on ‘em is strangers, though some on ’em is th’ men as was turned off your own works, squire, when there came orders to stop ’em last fall—they’re a-pulling up gorse and bush.... I thought I should like to tell ye afore I died’ ” (p. 334). Those who are outside the social web are those who are not English, their foreignness defined by difference of religion and nationality. The scrupulousness with which membership in the social web is defined is what drives the novel’s primary tragic narrative. And yet that which is most foreign—Africa, where Roger travels on a scientific excursion—is represented as so different as not even to earn the distinction of difference; the Africans whom Roger encounters are so outside the social fabric of Hollingford and England that they do not figure in its conception of itself, but rather are spoken of slightingly in a crude racial comedy.

  Perhaps the position that affords the most fluid rank is that of the marriageable girl, which the novel’s most central characters, Molly and Cynthia, personify. Although the rank of the marriageable girl depends in part on her father’s status, the novel presents female beauty as a kind of independent currency on the marriage market. The fluidity of the marriageable girl’s rank is one of the novel’s most sustained topics, and drives much of the narrative interest. Cynthia’s particular talent for pleasing and her beauty result in multiple admirers and suitors; this furthers the plot and supports the premise of the fluid status of the marriageable girl. The novel forecasts a number of possibilities for Cynthia’s future rank by showing how possible it is for her to attract attention from men of a number of different classes—including the landed gentry, the professional class, and the commercial moneyed class. The novel reserves its highest distinction for Molly, however, who through her intelligence and manners succeeds in earning the admiration of the younger generat
ion of the Towers, including Lady Harriet and Lord Hollingford, and who eventually has her worth discovered by Squire Hamley’s family. One way of understanding Cynthia’s ubiquitous popularity (and subsequent class mobility) in light of the more understated admiration felt for Molly is to see that Gaskell’s novel is a limited critique of the commercialization of marriage. Cynthia knowingly parlays her capacity to attract a number of marriage proposals, while Molly’s guileless-ness ultimately is rewarded with the more prestigious marriage.

  Cynthia is neither wholly bad nor wholly good, but rather of a mixed condition—a condition that suits her particularly to Gaskell’s everyday novel. Molly, although her character is unimpeachable and her mind lively, is not an angel playing to Cynthia’s fallenness, but rather—as she introduces herself to Lady Cumnor when but twelve—“ ‘only Molly Gibson’” (p. 22). At most, the stability of Molly’s character is contrasted with Cynthia’s chameleon-like quality, of which Gaskell seems particularly critical, at the same time as the novel suggests that this quality in Cynthia is not a character flaw so much as a necessary strategy for survival. That is, the critique is of the society that produces Cynthia, rather than Cynthia herself Gaskell’s novel operates within a realist rather than a melodramatic idiom; whatever subtle distinction is being drawn between the two girls (primarily one of character) does not get enacted through stark differences in their respective fates.

  In fact, Wives and Daughters seems to be rewriting some of the more traditional literary scripts for women. Mrs. Gibson is not the wicked stepmother of fairy tales, a genre that is evoked in the novel’s very first paragraph: “To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl.” Two things are important to understand about this opening: First, the “country” and the “shire” are introduced only by way of reducing the topic to what it intends to focus on, which is the story of this little girl. In this way, the novel aligns itself with the tradition of the bildungsroman, which is a type of novel that traces the development of an individual (often beginning with a significant event in a young life) in a social and moral context; as such, Wives and Daughters is akin to such Dickens novels as David Copperfield and Great Expectations. The second thing to understand about the opening is that the tone deliberately evokes the flat declarative style of the fairy tale—a style that is further emphasized by the events that quickly follow. Visiting the great people of the neighborhood, the young girl falls asleep underneath a tree, is woken by a woman who will turn out to be her stepmother, and is likened in fun to Goldilocks: “ ‘Oh, ho!’ said he. ‘Are you the little girl who has been sleeping in my bed?’ He imitated the deep voice of the fabulous bear ... but Molly had never read the ‘Three Bears,’ and fancied that his anger was real; she trembled a little, and drew nearer to the kind lady who had beckoned her as to a refuge” (p. 22). Wives and Daughters evokes the genre of the fairy tale, with its fantastic and cautionary tales of stepmothers and girls who overstep their bounds, in order to contrast its own purpose, which is strongly realist. Molly falls asleep under a tree so that the reader might wonder what kind of world this heroine will wake up to. The world she wakes up to is not a fairy-tale world of good and evil, but one of mixed effects and characters. As such, Wives and Daughters is much more interested in venality—specifically, Mrs. Gibson’s liberality with the truth, and Cynthia’s tendency to fickleness, both to others and her own self—than in actual sin. So the fairy tale is rewritten; there is a dreaded stepmother, but Molly is no Cinderella, Cynthia is no evil stepsister, and Mrs. Gibson, though selfish and silly, does not advance her daughter at the expense of her stepchild.

  Instead, the novel refigures that tale as a tale of second families—what we today call blended families—with all their complications, both happy and painful. One of the ways the novel seems most modern, and most astute to the contemporary reader, is in its dissection of the small but persistent tensions within a blended family. Molly resents the changes in her routine and environment that Mrs. Gibson makes, and Mr. Gibson (whose unromantic vision was for a manager of his house and daughter) resents his wife’s banishing of his favorite vulgarity, the eating of bread and cheese for supper. One could point to any number of scenes in the novel that carefully trace the nuances of petty resentments, annoyance, and discomfort that can sometimes emerge in these living situations. In the following example, taken from the scene in which the stepmother-to-be and her future stepdaughter first meet, the narrative captures the sense of suppressed feelings within a scene of forced felicity: Molly did not speak, but it was by a strong effort that she kept silence. Mrs. Kirkpatrick fondled her hand more perseveringly than ever, hoping thus to express a sufficient amount of sympathy to prevent her from saying anything injudicious. But the caress had become wearisome to Molly, and only irritated her nerves. She took her hand out of Mrs. Kirkpatrick’s, with a slight manifestation of impatience (p. 138).

  And in this second example, taken from the first time Molly and Cynthia meet as sisters, the narrative is explicit about the pleasures, as well as the inevitable awkwardness, of new relations:Molly fell in love with her, so to speak, on the instant. She sat there warming her feet and hands, as much at ease as if she had been there all her life; not particularly attending to her mother—who, all the time, was studying either her or her dress—measuring Molly and Mr. Gibson with grave observant looks as if guessing how she should like them.“There’s a hot breakfast ready for you in the dining-room, when you are ready for it,” said Mr. Gibson. “I’m sure you must want it after your night journey.” He looked round at his wife, at Cynthia’s mother, but she did not seem inclined to leave the warm room again.... Cynthia rose and followed Molly upstairs.“I’m so sorry there isn’t a fire for you,” said Molly, “but—I suppose it wasn’t ordered; and, of course, I don’t give any orders. Here is some hot water, though.”“Stop a minute,” said Cynthia, getting hold of both Molly’s hands, and looking steadily into her face, but in such a manner that she did not dislike the inspection.“I think I shall like you. I am so glad! I was afraid I should not. We’re all in a very awkward position together, aren’t we? I like your father’s looks, though” (p. 215).

  The particular oddness of Cynthia and her mother’s relationship is here drawn for the first time, made more stark by the warmth of the newly met stepfather and sister; Mrs. Gibson not only does not meet her daughter where she is dropped by the coach, but she forgets to order a fire for her bedroom. Cynthia here alludes quite directly to what the narrative elsewhere works hard to suggest through the details of domestic life: the “very awkward position” they are in as strangers and yet also the nearest of relations. Wives and Daughters, although ostensibly structured around a slowly emerging marriage plot, is in fact an extraordinary depiction of the contours of blended families and, more generally, the rhythms of everyday family and married life.

  The description of the other family that is dissected in Wives and Daughters is a more tragic depiction of family life than the (generally) comic presentation of the Gibson family. The family of Hamley Hall, equally divided between its ill and dying members and its hardy and stubborn ones, is subject to what feels like an inevitable series of misfortunes resulting from the clash of cultures and personality types within the family. Mrs. Hamley is an invalid in a literal sense, but one senses too that her sickness is a response to her husband: Her London upbringing and refined tastes are at odds with a loving but nevertheless uneducated and provincial husband. The Hamley’s two sons embody the opposition of their parents: Osborne, the elder, golden son, is poetic and destined for a brilliant career at university, while Roger is considered plodding and more like the father in his physical strength and proclivity for the outdoors. Roger, in fact, personifies the doctrine of “muscular Christianity,” a belief system equating moral and physical fitness that became
widely accepted in the 1850s: “ ‘This Mr. Mason told me the tutor said that only half of Roger’s success was owing to his mental powers; the other half was owing to his perfect health, which enabled him to work harder and more continuously than most men without suffering’ ” (p. 365). Gaskell portrays the dangers of determining the life paths of one’s children and of patriarchal dominance; the novel’s most tragic plot traces the ill consequences of a son’s fear of his father’s disapproval. Although overbearing and authoritative, Squire Hamley is undemonstratively loving—a combination the novel suggests is particularly dangerous. His fundamental lack of insight into his own emotions is part of a larger preoccupation of the novel about the mismanagement of one’s inner life. When the Squire is faced with an inconceivable loss, the depiction of the collision between the earlier self—dogmatic and unforgiving—with the new self, which fiercely combines love, regret, and pain, is one of the more harrowing presentations in nineteenth-century literature. If not quite a depiction of redemption, Squire Hamley’s transformation is nevertheless a realistic presentation of the capacity for change.