Sylvia's Lovers Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

by Elizabeth Gaskell

  For all its apparent impotence and painfulness, however, the female world of the novel has its own power and strength which is finally prioritized. If women are normally alienated or excluded from the dominant modes of male action and speech-making, they have their own mode of communication: they speak to each other through gesture, touch, voiceless sympathy, and they have an innate understanding of emotional complexity – Bell, for example, has a ‘deeper insight into her daughter's heart than her husband, in spite of his greater knowledge of the events that had happened to affect it' (p. 219), and Sylvia understands her mother better than Robson does. Bell also instinctively responds to the drenched and distressed Hester, who, when she has come to Haytersbank Farm to take mother and daughter to the imprisoned Robson, has been repulsed by Sylvia: ‘a hand was put out, like that which took the dove into the ark, and Hester was drawn into the warmth and the light' (p. 268). Shamed by her mother's humanity, Sylvia herself takes Hester's hands and the other young woman responds by touching ‘Sylvia's shoulder with a soft, caressing gesture' (p. 270). Later, in the moving scene in which Hester finally reveals her secret to Sylvia, the latter takes the grief-stricken woman in her arms, ‘holding her, and soothing her with caresses and broken words' (p. 402).

  The emphases here on hands and touch, replacing articulate verbal communication, foregrounds the maternal and healing aspects of femininity. Significantly, when Kinraid appears to enact a similarly female role, his actions hint at manipulation or possessiveness: in the scene where he engages himself to Sylvia, ‘he had fast hold of her hand' (p. 179); and even when he seems to reverse gender functions (‘He lulled and soothed her in his arms, as if she had been a weeping child and he her mother' (p. 182)), his love is shown as tempered by a self-considering awareness – ‘for various reasons he was not sorry that circumstances had given him the chance of seeing her alone, and obtaining her promise to marry him without being obliged to tell either her father or her mother’.

  Ultimately, the novel asserts the primacy of female values. Forgiveness and altruistic acknowledgement of the ‘other' – something which Sylvia herself has to learn – become the motivating force behind Philip's last hours, as, with his hand now held ‘tight in her warm, living grasp' (p. 452), he sees the falsity of his previous reliance on specious (male) reasoning in order to impose his pattern of desire on her. Moreover, at the end women have been able to insert themselves into the male world. Sylvia finds a voice as she speaks of her knowledge of male treachery: ‘I'm speaking like a woman; like a woman as finds out she's been cheated by men as she trusted, and has no help for it' (p. 402). Hester becomes a partner in the business after all, following Philip's disappearance. They are also enabled to insert themselves into the processes of history. Hester founds alms-houses in Monkshaven, and though they are inscribed as ‘erected in memory of P. H.’ it is she, rather than Philip, who is remembered through them. The narrative conclusion, too, is framed as recall, spoken by the bathing woman at the Public Baths to ‘a lady’, a fanciful reconstruction of Gaskell's own experiences at Whitby, listening to the local people; through the female narration and the final concentration on the subsequent lives of Sylvia, Hester and little Bella, women are empowered as subjects and tellers of stories, while men disappear from the text.

  III

  Sylvia's Lovers not only explores issues of gender and social change within the context of dramatic historical events, but also, on a more intimate level, is a powerful study of sexual tensions and conflictual or unfulfilled relationships. Almost all the liaisons in the novel – heterosexual or single sex – are determined by construction of the ‘other' (that is, the not-self), inspired and driven by the attempt to achieve self-definition. Such ‘othering' images are created by preconceptions which in their turn are responsible for establishing illusory or deceptive notions. The source of these preconceptions is twofold: the social, sexual and moral ideologies which frame each character's behaviour; and the desire which motivates that behaviour.

  Many of the relationships in the novel are initiated by misapprehension or untested assumption. So Charley Kinraid's first romantic glamour for Sylvia is due to her mistaken belief that he is Molly Corney's lover, while Kinraid himself, observing her ‘innocent blooming childlike face' as he sees her weeping at Darley's funeral, assumes that she is the dead sailor's ‘sweetheart' (p. 69). Each continues to see the other according to sexual or romantic ideality: Sylvia considers that Kinraid is ‘the nearest approach to a hero she had ever seen’, one who challenges injustice and performs wonderful deeds of bravery; Kinraid (like Arthur Donnithorne with Hetty Sorrel and Angel Clare with Tess) pursues his courtship in the appropriately female sphere of the dairy, domesticating her through a patriarchal image of femininity which endorses her ‘beauty, and pretty modest ways' (p. 134).

  Philip even more exclusively constructs Sylvia according to his desire, mediated through romantic ideology. His attitude is a mixture of adoration, possessiveness masking as protectiveness (in the opening scenes of the novel he tries to squash her instinctive warmth towards the morally dubious ‘Newcastle Bess’), and patronizing superiority; he regards her as ‘sadly spoilt, and shamefully ignorant; a lovely little dunce' (p. 29). He, too, confines her image within suitably domestic proportions, admiring her picturesque stance as she spins, comparing her prettiness to blooming flowers, and attempting to make her wedding outfit replicate his associational idea of her as a ‘pretty, soft little dove… puffing out her feathered breast, with all the blue and rose-coloured lights gleaming in the morning rays' (p. 305).

  False constructions of character also empower the pursuit of self-fulfilment. Philip justifies his treachery towards Kinraid by converting the stories about the latter's faithlessness into incontrovertible truth, eagerly seizing on the accounts of his breaking women's hearts, which he hears from Coulson and others, as signs that he was right not to have transmitted the impressed sailor's message to Sylvia. Indeed, Kinraid's removal as competitor for Sylvia's love reinforces this sophistry: ‘Philip took upon himself to decide that, with such a man as the specksioneer, absence was equivalent to faithless forgetfulness' (p. 213). The narrative is notably evasive about Kinraid's probity, juxtaposing stories of his philandering and the fact of his rapid marriage once Sylvia is no longer available with his declarations of love to the young girl and his loyalty to her during his period of impressment. But it mercilessly uncovers the self-deception and self-gratification at the root of romantic desire.

  Such constructions, both emanating from and perpetuating a failure to ‘see' or ‘read' character properly, produce disharmony and mutual misunderstanding. Most notably in the sphere of matrimony, but also elsewhere, the narrative unfolds the tragic results of self-preoccupation and obsession. There are many unfulfilled relationships in the novel, the consequence of misplaced desire. Hester loves Philip, but he, engrossed in his adoration of Sylvia, has no conception of her emotional feelings; Coulson loves Hester, but she, cherishing her secret longings for Philip, has no interest in his attentions. Even where there is apparent compatibility of desire, communication may fail as a result of characters' entanglement with their own visions. At the New Year's party, for instance, Kinraid's high-spirited enjoyment blinds him to Sylvia's sorrowful apprehension that he has forgotten her. Again, on his dramatic return to Monkshaven, he is quick to read her refusal to allow him to strike Philip as a betrayal of her former love (‘“Oh! thou false heart!… If ever I trusted woman, I trusted you, Sylvia Robson”’ (p. 346)).

  Misrepresentation or misinterpretation also divides people of the same sex. Philip's wilful misreading of Kinraid, already referred to, separates the two men both actually and conceptually: he reconstructs the specksioneer's difference (‘his bright, courteous manner, the natural gallantry of the sailor' (p. 153) as moral inferiority, thus permitting his subsequent behaviour towards him. Kinraid, on the other hand, considers that Philip's lack of evident manliness precludes his being a serious rival for Sylvia's affecti
ons. Less dramatically, Sylvia and Hester are separated by mutual misunderstanding. At first Hester regards Sylvia as flighty and insubstantial, an unworthy partner for Philip; though she starts ‘to love the woman, whose position as Philip's wife she would have envied so keenly had she not been so truly good and pious' (p. 315), she is still unable to read accurately the younger woman's response to her attentions to the frail Bell Robson. Sylvia's similar inability to recognize the ‘real' Hester makes her largely indifferent to the latter's suffering, and even at Philip's death-bed she is unconsciously cruel in her refusal to accept the validity of Hester's grief.

  Most central to the narrative is the discordance between Philip and Sylvia. Whereas he mentally constructs her so as to answer to his emotional needs, she regards him merely ‘as her mother's friend… [and] hardly ever thought of him when he was absent' (p. 113); she does not think of him as a lover at all – ‘her ideal husband was different from Philip in every point, the two images never for an instant merged into one' (p. 121). The portrayal of their marriage, the result of Sylvia's final volitionless accession to Philip's overmastering will, highlights the narrative's concern with failure of communication and ideological entrapment. Mutual misunderstandings proliferate: Philip's reluctance to address Sylvia on deeply intimate matters means that he remains ignorant of her real emotions, while, conversely, when he leaves his wife and Kester alone to talk of old times, ‘Sylvia felt as if her husband's silence was unsympathizing, and shut up the feelings that were just beginning to expand towards him' (p. 315).

  The extradiegetic narrational voice in the text (that is, the commentary which operates on a level ‘above' the events of the story) calls attention to these apparently unbridgeable gaps between people by foregrounding the silences and misconceptions. Knowledge and understanding is articulated only by this voice, thus stressing the impotency of individuals to speak for themselves. In the scene in which Kinraid comes to court Sylvia, for instance, the series of conditional and qualifying statements emanating from a position of omniscience (‘could she but have perceived it’; ‘but… he could not see’; ‘she wondered if' (p. 179)) reinforces the idea that even between these two lovers miscomprehension does – and will – exist. The failure to negotiate the distance between self and the other can, it is suggested, create a state of tragic isolation, with terrible consequences.

  The themes of isolation and entrapment are shown to be of specific relevance to women, whose articulacy is especially hampered by the conflict between selfhood and outer circumstances or ideologies. Sylvia herself, the product of a conflictual dual inheritance (‘male' passion from her father, ‘female' submissiveness from her mother), suffers the dichotomy between the romantic and sexual emotions aroused in her by Kinraid and her sense of duty which tells her to respond positively to Philip's unwelcome attentions; her feelings of helplessness in the face of determining conditions compound her impotence. Hester experiences a similar irresolvable dichotomy. She, too, is denied outlet for her hopeless desire, though while Sylvia's despair threatens her mental stability, the former's ‘crav[ing] for the affection which had been withheld from her' (p. 316) is suppressed as ‘her own private rebellion' is converted ‘into submission' (p. 378). Because she has more successfully internalized the code of womanly obedience and acceptance of non-fulfilment, Hester ostensibly copes better than Sylvia with her disappointment, transforming the impulses of thwarted desire into angelic ministration. But her suffering is no less, and the final scene of the novel merely emphasizes her continuing experience of denial and negation.

  It would be wrong to imply, however, that this is a wholly deterministic or pessimistic novel. Although Gaskell called it ‘the saddest story I ever wrote’,22 her belief in the mediating as well as the disruptive powers of human consciousness drew her to a final harmonizing vision. As the narrative demonstrates, reconciliation between individuals can occur, though only when preconceptions are dismantled and the selfness of others is recognized and accommodated. Hester and Sylvia, brought to awareness of their mutual suffering, are united by the acknowledgement that for them as women loss and lack are inherent conditions. The support they give to each other in this awareness is made possible only by their respective revised visions. Interestingly, their relationship in this regard is reminiscent of that between Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorrel in Eliot's Adam Bede, which, as has already been pointed out, Gaskell read while in Whitby. Like Dinah, Hester rejects an undesired suitor, and watches the man she loves (though Dinah's love for Adam is of much more gradual growth) court the childish, wilful and petted darling of all around; finally conquering her antipathy towards her, she comforts and helps her. Similarly, Sylvia turns in her need to the woman whom she has always regarded as uncongenial and insignificant, though the ensuing relationship is deeper than that between Hetty and Dinah, confined to Hetty's prison confession and pitiful last-minute clinging to her previously despised cousin.

  The reconciliation between Sylvia and Philip is also dependent on a process of readjustment and self-evaluation, as well as on the erosion of gender difference. Ironically, this process is begun in Sylvia by her instinctive resistance to external confirmation of her husband's treachery: Jeremiah Foster's acquiescence in her accusations against ‘men and their cruel, deceitful ways' (p. 374), when she reveals her secret to him – like Kester's in a later scene – impels her to reconsider her judgement of Philip, the start of a change which leads her to unsay her vengeful vow (‘“I'll never forgive yon man”’ (p. 348)) and to recognize her own need for forgiveness. The final union between husband and wife is based on their avowals of mutual guilt and on their awareness of responsibility for the tragedy of their lives. The text refuses to prioritize a facile optimism here. Even though this earthly harmony is redemptive, it is temporary, and though it is ultimately incorporated into a vision of divine love, a place in which ‘there is no more sorrow, and no more pain' (p. 453), such a vision does not go unquestioned. Sylvia's last words to Hester are ‘“do yo' think… as God will let me to him where he is?”’ (p. 454), and the assurances of death-bed pieties are not wholly definitive. Nevertheless, unification, albeit last-minute, has been achieved, and the widened temporal and topographical dimensions with which the novel concludes dissipate the earlier suffering and conflict. Sylvia's daughter, Bella, marries and emigrates to the New World; the events of the tale become history, gaining meaning by their inscription as ‘story' and distanced by the shaping forces of the articulating imagination.

  NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

  1 Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London, 1903, vol. 1, p. 357.

  2 J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (eds.), The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, Manchester University Press, 1966, p. 586.

  3 Chapple and Pollard (eds.), Letters, p. 717.

  4 Reprinted in A. W. Ward (ed.), The Works of Mrs Gaskell, 8 vols., Smith, Elder & Co., London, 1906, vol. 1, p. lxxiii.

  5 F. K. Robinson's Whitby: Its Abbey and the Principal Parts of the Neighbourhood, S. Reed, Whitby, 1860, is a valuable source of information about the town and its environs. Its date of publication makes it very likely that Gaskell consulted it during her researches for the novel.

  6 Robinson, Whitby, p. 131.

  7 Sylvia's Lovers, Chapter VI, p. 64.

  8 Mrs Ellis H. Chadwick, Mrs Gaskell: Haunts, Homes, and Stories, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, London, new and revised edition, 1913, p. 263.

  9 Ward (ed.), The Works of Mrs Gaskell, vol. VI, p. xiv.

  10 Chapple and Pollard (eds.), Letters, p. 718.

  11 For details of the likely sources of these researches, see Appendix 1.

  12 Chapple and Pollard (eds.), Letters, p. 595.

  13 Chapple and Pollard (eds.), Letters, p. 596.

  14 Chapple and Pollard (eds.), Letters, p. 606. The statement is quoted from [S. Winkworth (ed.)], Letters and Memorials of Catherine Winkworth, Clifton, 1883, vol. 11, p. 297.

  15 Chapple and Pollar
d (eds.), Letters, p. 611.

  16 Chapple and Pollard (eds.), Letters, p. 691.

  17 Chapple and Pollard (eds.), Letters, p. 692.

  18 J. G. Sharps, Mrs Gaskell's Observation and Invention, Linden Press, Fontwell, Sussex, 1970, pp. 383–4.

  19 See n. 4 to Chapter III (p. 459).

  20 See Appendix 1, ‘Whaling’ (p. 479).

  21 ‘Dover Beach' was probably written in 1851, but it was not published until 1867, so there could be no direct echo of the poem here. But as Jenny Uglow points out (Elizabeth Gaskell: a Habit of Stories, Faber & Faber, London, 1993), letters from Arnold in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, show that he sent her early drafts of some of his poems (p. 667).

  22 Quoted in Ward (ed.), The Works of Mrs Gaskell, vol. VI, p. xii.

  FURTHER READING

  EDITIONS

  The earliest collected edition of Gaskell's works was published by Smith, Elder as Novels and Tales of Mrs Gaskell in 1872–3, reissued several times up to 1897. The first complete edition, however, was The Works of Mrs Gaskell (8 vols., Smith, Elder & Co., London, 1906), edited and with an introduction to each volume by A. W. Ward (the Knutsford Edition). This was followed by The Novels and Tales of Mrs Gaskell (11 vols., Oxford University Press, London, New York and Toronto, 1906–19) edited by Clement Shorter (World's Classics series).

  Notable individual editions of Sylvia's Lovers include that prefaced by Thomas Seccombe (G. Bell & Sons, London, 1910); the first Everyman edition, introduced by Mrs Ellis Chadwick (J. M. Dent & Sons, London, 1911); and the later Everyman edition of 1965, introduced by Arthur Pollard. The most recent editions are those issued by World's Classics, edited by Andrew Sanders (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1982, reissued 1999), and by Everyman, edited by Nancy Henry.