Wives and Daughters

by Elizabeth Gaskell

  The novel is fascinated with the intelligent male’s capacity for errors in judgment, as well as the role of social mischance in deciding individuals’ fates. Gaskell shares these concerns with George Eliot, who in Middlemarch especially explores how social mischance and errors of judgment can get in the way of human aspiration. Gaskell is interested in these themes in Wives and Daughters but is much less likely to project the cause and effect through a tragic lens. For instance, in Wives and Daughters, when the often-absent Dr. Gibson happens to intercept the ridiculous Mr. Coxe’s missive of love to Molly, the web of effects that drives the story is set in motion, while in Middlemarch there is nothing ridiculous about the determining accidents (the meetings of Dorothea and Casaubon, and Lydgate and Rosamond) that drive their failures and compromises. In Gaskell’s novel certain significant errors of judgment—in particular, errors of judgment about whom one loves—are ameliorated by mischance before an irrevocable step is taken. Like Middlemarch, Wives and Daughters places the most serious errors in judgment squarely in the hands of the men of science. Roger Hamley wins repute by publishing a scientific paper responding to French theorists, while Lydgate’s ambitions to discover a primary tissue also derive from contemporary preoccupations in French medicine. Middlemarch, which was published six years after Wives and Daughters, charts the destruction of scientific ambition by bourgeois marriage. And the grand error in judgment resides with a woman, as it does in Wives and Daughters, with the key difference that Gaskell allows Roger to make a mistake and then rebound from it. As such, one might say that, like Middlemarch, Wives and Daughters meditates on the human capacity for self-deception and compromise, but unlike Eliot’s novel, Gaskell’s novel is less interested in tracing the irrevocable outcomes of a wrong choice. The woman Roger will eventually marry will not impede his scientific aspiration, but rather further it. In this and other ways the register of Wives and Daughters is “comic,” not in the sense that it is humorous but (as in Shakespeare’s comedies) in the sense that it promotes resolution and social harmony. The scientific men who are prone to making poor judgments in Wives and Daughters are not presented in a buffoonish light; on the contrary, the men of science in the novel (including Roger Hamley, Lord Hollingford, and Mr. Gibson) are clearly the most appealing and respected men in the book. The novel is imbued with references to natural history and contemporary (to the 1820s) scientific concerns, including the two-year journey of exploration and natural-history collection in “Abyssinia” that Roger Hamley pursues. As Deirdre D’Albertis suggests in Dissembling Fictions, Roger is patently modeled on Charles Darwin, who when young was a naturalist on the Beagle and who was Gaskell’s relative; Gaskell, in a letter to her editor George Smith, connects Roger’s travels with Darwin’s. Africa (specifically, the east coast of Africa that Roger follows) should be understood as a point in the novel’s triangulated geography: England, France, and Africa are implicated in the novel’s deepest concerns, even though the narrative’s focus does not leave Hollingford. To the denizens of the town, and especially Squire Hamley, France functions as the resented and feared “other” to England’s steady centrality; clearly, the specter of the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars (1800-1815) is still present, for there are repeated unfavorable references to the French, including references to “boney” (Napoléon Bonaparte) and “Johnny Crapaud” (an early version of the slur of the French as “frogs”). The great secret that Osborne keeps from his father has to do with France, for Squire Hamley’s aversion to the French is no secret. The resolution to which the novel ultimately comes suggests that social progress and the casting off of national prejudices are concomitant with each other. Africa, however, is not granted the same status, but rather functions symbolically in the novel as the opposite of Hollingford’s civilization.

  When characters leave Hollingford, the narrative does not follow them on their journey; neither Roger, who traverses the east coast of Africa, nor Cynthia, who spends weeks in London, is present in the narrative when away, except through the occasional letter. Africa functions in the novel’s geographical triangulation as the imagined absence or emptiness, the place where one is “away” rather than a location in its own right. This geopolitical nearsightedness is underscored by Roger’s scientific pursuits while there: He is a natural historian collecting “unknown” specimens and “discovering” new places, which are then duly presented to the Geographical Society via letters and in person, when he returns. That Africa conjures up frightening associations for the women of Hollingford is probably a correct presentation of English cultural attitudes; lurid descriptions of Africa (especially of cannibalism) would have been familiar from newspapers and journal reports from the early decades of the nineteenth century through mid-century, when John Speke and David Livingstone made their storied journeys. One of the most jarring aspects of the BBC film version of Wives and Daughters (1999)—replayed in the United States on the PBS ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre series—is the choice that was made to show Roger Hamley occasionally in the landscape of eastern Africa. The visual interruption of the English country scene with the sublime scenery of Africa is one that the original novel does not make; the reader is never even privy to Roger’s letters, which are not reproduced within the narrative nor read aloud by the neglectful Cynthia, so Africa never gets represented in any meaningful or evocative way. Instead, Africa stands in for absolute absence, the place from which one returns.

  The scientific exploration that Roger is sent on is but part of the broader discourse of science in the novel. Moreover, Roger’s scientific interest in the natural world, which Molly then adopts, seems to provide an analogy for the work that Elizabeth Gaskell is performing in her narrative. One way of understanding Wives and Daughters is to think of it as an analysis of people in their particular environment—a kind of “social ecology” in which the observation of a single person or specimen in its environment teaches one about general patterns or truths. The methodology of natural history emphasizes close observation of the common or everyday, to better understand how the particular fits into the broader rubric of nature. Likewise, the novel studies or observes Molly and the inhabitants of Hollingford to better understand the broader category of human nature. This scientific-like observation of Hollingford is one way of understanding the rhetorical conceit behind the novel’s subtitle (“An Every-Day Story”); the author and the natural historian share a common perspective and commitment. As a biographer notes, “Gaskell claims simply to look, like Roger Hamley, into a pool which others might pass by: the everyday life of families in a country district. But she knew that her dull-looking specimens would turn out to be rich and rare” (Uglow, p. 585).

  Roger Hamley is the character most profoundly associated with the study of nature: “He had been out dredging in ponds and ditches, and had his wet sling-net, with its imprisoned treasures of nastiness, over his shoulder” (p. 115). The study of nature comes indoors as well, where the primary tool of the early-nineteenth-century scientist is employed:That evening he adjusted his microscope, and put the treasures he had collected in his morning’s ramble on a little table; and then he asked his mother to come and admire. Of course Molly came too, and this was what he had intended. He tried to interest her in his pursuit, cherished her first little morsel of curiosity, and nursed it into a very proper desire for further information. Then he brought out books on the subject, and translated the slightly pompous and technical language into homely everyday speech. Molly had come down to dinner wondering how the long hours till bedtime would ever pass away ... But prayers and bedtime came along before she expected; she had been refreshed by a new current of thought, and she was very thankful to Roger (pp. 121-122).

  Here the study of natural objects is represented as palliative, for Molly had been deeply upset by the news of her father’s remarriage; the scene also captures the first moment that Molly values Roger. He had found her outside crying earlier in the day, a scene in which his innate tenderness is demonstrated through
a plant and in which he sees Molly (as if for the first time) while looking out for a particularly rare specimen:He did not see Molly as he crossed the terrace-walk ... when, looking among the grass and wild plants under the trees, he spied out one which was rare, one which he had been long wishing to find in flower, and saw it at last, with those bright keen eyes of his. Down went his net, skilfully twisted so as to retain its contents while it lay amid the herbage, and he himself went with light and well-planted footsteps in search of the treasure. He was so great a lover of nature that, without any thought, but habitually, he always avoided treading unnecessarily on any plant; who knew what long-sought growth or insect might develop itself in that which now appeared insignificant? (p. 115).

  Of course it is Molly whom he cannot see as he searches out the rare specimen, which the attentive reader will recognize as a narrative forecasting of his future relation to her.

  Natural history in Wives and Daughters is more than a provider of analogies for love plots. The value natural history places on “observation” is mirrored by the novel. One of the best examples of this mirroring occurs in chapter 33, when Gaskell’s own observational powers and commitment to the description of natural detail appear side by side with the letter awarding Roger the scientific travel fellowship. The letter says that he had “great natural powers of comparison and classification of facts; he had shown himself to be an observer of a fine and accurate kind” (p. 364). The scene Gaskell describes invites the same kind of praise, and bears citing:It was one of those still and lovely autumn days when the red and yellow leaves are hanging-pegs to dewy, brilliant gossamer-webs; when the hedges are full of trailing brambles, loaded with ripe blackberries; when the air is full of the farewell whistles and pipes of birds, clear and short—not the long full-throated warbles of spring; when the whirr of the partridge’s wing is heard in the stubble-fields, as the sharp hoof-blows fall on the paved lanes; when here and there a leaf floats and flutters down to the ground, although there is not a single breath of wind. The country surgeon felt the beauty of the seasons more than most men (p. 362).

  The observer (here, Dr. Gibson) is present in the scene, and the details that are enumerated reveal a sensitivity to the process of observation familiar to a naturalist. In Wives and Daughters, those people who are strong observers are distinguished from those who cannot see the truth. It is no accident that Roger Hamley’s great error of judgment manifests itself as a failure of observation, one in which he cannot see the truth about a woman, but rather only a series of trite poetic images: She was a “a polar star, high up in the heavens, and so on, and so on; for, with all a lover’s quickness of imagination and triteness of fancy, he called her a star, a flower, a nymph, a witch, an angel, or a mermaid, a nightingale, a siren ...” (p. 368). The capacity to observe is equated in the novel with the capacity for truth—qualities most consistently present, not surprisingly, in Molly, the novel’s heroine.

  Natural history also functions in Wives and Daughters as a kind of analogy for its narrative procedure. That is, the novel makes a clear connection between interest in “out-of-door things” and the pursuit of a detailed exposition of everydayness, which can be said to be Gaskell’s ambition. In the following economical description of Roger, “everydayness” and “detail” are terms of value that are in line with knowledge of the natural world: “Roger was practical; interested in all out-of-door things, and he enjoyed the details, homely enough, which his father sometimes gave him of the everyday occurrences which the latter had noticed in the woods and the fields” (p. 248). In the same way that looking at objects under a microscope for Molly was palliative in her moment of deepest despair, here the practice of noticing nature knits together a father and son. The kind of knowledge that his father has—gathered from “everyday occurrences” that even this uneducated man had “noticed in the woods and fields”—is like the knowledge that Roger Hamley is pursuing as a naturalist and budding scientist, which in the coming years (but not yet) would become a proper subject at university. Roger’s interest in the “details” is matched by Gaskell’s narrative, which interests itself especially in the economic details of everyday life: how many bank notes are needed for a gown, the price that the Miss Brownings pay for tea, the specific rate of interest Cynthia repays on her loan, the process of insuring one’s life, the cost of drainage works, the worth of legacies, the entailment of land, and so on. The value natural history places on the observation of “everydayness” is like the knowledge that Gaskell herself is pursuing in trying to capture the details of the country around Hollingford, both social and natural. In this way, you might think of Wives and Daughters as a natural history of a society—not only which species inhabit it, but how the ecosystem works.

  It is from this perspective that one should understand the specific references to the scientific debates Roger enters into when he publishes a paper in response to debates circulating in French scientific circles. As a result of the paper, he is invited by Lord Hollingford to attend a dinner for scientists at which the guests wish to “meet the author of the paper which had already attracted the attention of the French comparative anatomists” (p. 300). The French comparative anatomists that the novel refers to by name—Georges Cuvier, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck—are the central scientific figures of the early nineteenth century whose debates and early discoveries contributed to the emergence of evolutionary theory ; Darwin himself cited Saint-Hilaire’s realizations about the homologies among species as important to his understanding of evolutionary relationships. The novel thus means us to understand that Roger is working at the cutting edge of the emerging field of evolutionary theory, especially because he is interested in “comparative osteology,” which as a forerunner of evolutionary theory was concerned with the likenesses and dissimilarities among various species (especially apes and humans). Roger, clearly the novel’s ideal of a man, is thus engaged in pursuits that require observation of homely everyday natural objects as well as theoretical pursuits that are attempting to answer the most profound questions about the relationships among species and the origin of humans. It is hard to dismiss these references to natural history as inconsequential—mere attempts to add verisimilitude to the narrative—not least because the references are so many and so detailed.

  How might we understand, then, these references to contemporary science? Perhaps one way of understanding their place in Gaskell’s “every-day story” is to think about the status of natural history in the novel. A quick catalog of the various characters shows that the characters who are depicted as either most educated or most admirable are also interested in one way or another in the natural world: Lord Hollingford sponsors scientific endeavors; Roger Hamley is a naturalist, while Molly reads Le Règne Animal, happily receives wasps’ nests as gifts, and scours Roger’s letters from Africa for details about his discoveries (as well as his well-being); Squire Hamley is an untutored observer of nature, while Dr. Gibson appreciates nature’s details from his horse; and Lady Harriet peppers her speech with analogies drawn from nature, while her sister Lady Agnes is an amateur botanist. In contrast, Cynthia is bored by Roger’s naturalist discussions and fails to appreciate the floral language implicit in a bouquet gathered for her, while Mrs. Gibson—otherwise a sharp reader of social hierarchies and distinctions—is unimpressed by Roger’s fame on the London scientific stage. The novel seems to employ natural history as a short-hand for distinction of person, whether that be class, education, or morality. For instance, Cynthia’s lack of feeling is shown when she fails to attend a meeting, while in London, of the Geographical Society, at which a letter from Roger is to be read aloud to the public (women included). In contrast, Molly somehow naturally embodies a kind of distinction that Cynthia lacks.

  Lady Harriet, the novel’s shrewdest observer, distinguishes Molly early on as a kind of exception to her class; she employs language that reminds Molly of zoology. When Molly protests that Lady Harriet speaks of “ ‘the sort of—
the class of people to which I belong as if it was a kind of strange animal you were talking about,’ ” Lady Harriet responds by saying “ ‘I talk after my kind, just as you talk after your kind. It’s only on the surface with both of us. Why, I dare say some of your good Hollingford ladies talk of the poor people in a manner which they would consider as impertinent in their turn’ ” (p. 162). By likening the way people distinguish themselves from those of a different class as an exercise in observing animals—as a zoologist might—Molly initiates a discussion about class with Lady Harriet. Notice the way Molly does not back away from saying what she means; she clarifies what she means by substituting “the sort of” people with “the class of people.” Lady Harriet’s candid response about equality—a term she employs with reservation—is fascinating in the way it both accepts as natural the distinctions between social classes and yet allows for the possibility that class is not inherent:“But somehow I separate you from all these Hollingford people.”“But why?” persevered Molly. “I’m one of them.”“Yes you are. But—now don’t reprove me again for impertinence—most of them are so unnatural in their exaggerated respect and admiration when they come up to the Towers, and put on so much pretence by way of fine manners, that they only make themselves objects of ridicule. You at least are simple and truthful, and that’s why I separate you in my own mind from them, and have talked unconsciously to you as I would—well! now here’s another piece of impertinence—as I would my equal—in rank, I mean; for I don’t set myself up in solid things as any better than my neighbours” (p. 162).

  This conversation is very telling, for in many ways it holds the key to the novel’s attitude about social class. Molly’s criticism of Lady Harriet essentially makes the point that if social distinctions are “natural”—if members of other classes seem like “stranger animals”—then it is wrong of Lady Harriet to speak with her as an equal. Lady Harriet’s response is an amalgamation of traditional class snobbery and modern notions about class: To her, people of different classes are different because they inhabit (often to their detriment) their rank, while she acknowledges that rank itself is not a “solid thing.” Moreover, Lady Harriet believes in distinction—both of character and talent—and expresses it in calling Molly “simple and truthful” and in appreciating how Molly has joined her brother in his admiration of Roger Hamley.