Up to the later parts of the book, reading Wives and Daughters, the last novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, was a pleasant and, after a way, edifying experience for me. Later, however, it made me sad and thinking about questions I didn’t necessarily want to ponder on.
And then Gaskell sent Roger Hamley to Africa. And you know well what is the colonial context of that.
The novel is set in the late 1820s, years before the height of British colonialism in Africa, but it perpetuates some terrible and racist myths nevertheless. Here Africans, whenever mentioned, aren’t even poor, compassion-worth people needing a White Saviour. They are worse, they are half-human, they are presumed stupid, unintelligible, and utterly different from Us, the Default White People. And why these brief racist fragments are so sad to me? Because Mrs Gaskell was by no means an evil or malicious person, and yet she was so much into the propaganda of her times. Even a person like she, and that’s more terrible than you think. She wrote about foreign Catholics and about poor white workers just as about human beings, which was quite against many biased and classist notions of the time. But her compassion didn’t include Indian or African people. Colonies, after all, are peripheral. The life, the art, the important things aren’t about them. And it’s telling even more when you put her writing into context of Dickens and Eliot who complained in some of their works that people did more charity for Africans and Black slaves than for the white working class. To see that this kind of whataboutism is so old, to see that poor white and Black people were antagonised as back as then despite of their common plight, is depressing. So please don’t say that nobody has never cared about poor white people. Writers did care. And politicians antagonised them against other poor people. The ones who were of colour.
And as I’ve mentioned, it’s very sad when there is compassion towards an Other, but up to a point when the Other looks like us. It isn’t the criticism of Gaskell, but of the society which raised her.
Still, her novel leaves us with many acute points, and in most parts, it’s convincing about religious prejudices, social changes, and women’s life in the late 1820s and early 1830s.
The funny thing I noticed was that Wives and Daughters could work for me as literally a Cinderella’s retelling. And damn, it’s a modern retelling, where the step-sibling isn’t off-putting and the step-mother isn’t that villain-ish. Instead, we are given a nuanced story about three women who had to find their place in the world somehow.
Molly, the main character, in some other story would be shown only as a victim of her stepmother, Mrs Kirpatrick, who’s married Doctor Gibson, Molly’s father, to secure her position and to quit her job of a teacher. Here, one can observe how working was seen: To not work was a privilege of upper- and middle-class women. And because it was a privilege, women from these classes didn’t see work as something emancipating. Also, middle-class housewives weren’t like the housewives we imagine from the 1950s. They had other people who cooked and cleaned for them, and ran errands. And Wives and Daughters show well that complicated situation.
Speaking of Mrs Kirkpatrick – she’s obnoxious, she can be mean, but she isn’t villainous. She tends to be unpleasant and bossy, but one can read it as seeking her influence in the world where, at least officially, she was supposed to submit to her husband. Unlike many stereotypical stepmothers in our culture, she isn’t sexualized. She’s more like an obnoxious chaperone, but nor she is as vile as Cinderella’s stepmother. Over time, we learn that she had reasons for her every action, including those ones which might seem insensitive, like sending her daughter away to be raised by their kinspeople. She tries to be a good foster parent to Molly, but she seems to be more concerned with what it does mean in the eyes of the society than in the eyes of the girl.
While she’s often interpreted as a covert manipulator, I think that her own daughter Cynthia is even more complicated. Is she cynicial? Is she compliant in relations with her mother? Or does she simply try to survive in the world hostile to unwealthy young women? All this is up to our interpretation, but what is interesting is that Gaskell makes Cynthia snd Molly friends cooperating together, not foes or rivals. Cynthia isn’t your Mean Girl and Molly isn’t your Special Girl, and it’s simply beautiful.
When it’s revealed that Cynthia is blackmailed by a man who declared himself her suitor against her will, we are to feel sorry for her, not to condemn her, or to think that she lacked “honour” or “courage” to resist. Cynthia isn’t indecent because of being a victim. The man stalking her is shown as such, and this is also quite significant in my opinion. And since we know many other things about her, we are aware that the troubles she’s experienced don’t define her.
Men in Gaskell’s novel are as much complicated as her female characters. Some literary critics point out that in the story of Squire Hamley and his sons, Osborne and Roger, the important theme is the repression of feelings which harms the family a lot. Is that already toxic masculinity? It depends on how we interpret it. Squire Hamley isn’t bad or abusive, but he’s bossy, and he’s never understood well his sons and his sick wife. And it impacts their life, sometimes on a tragic scale. In the end, we know that only love and reconciliation are important, but for what price?
All dynamics in the novel are convincing and for some reason, the characters and their thoughts resonate with me more than characters of Dickens. Can it be because Gaskell is more focused on the inner, and on the smaller social circles? Probably. The people she’s created have their biases, and there are things in their mindset which simply do not align with ours, but many of their problems and dreams are just like our problems and dreams, told in a warm and yet not too sentimental way. If Gaskell was like Balzac, then Dickens was like Hugo; not in themes but in writing.
Left Hand of Fiction 