This document provides an overview and analysis of Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Wives and Daughters. It discusses how the novel was initially received by Henry James and others as lacking intellectual depth. However, the novel and Gaskell's "domestic" works have since been reevaluated. The document also analyzes how the novel depicts gender roles and separation of spheres in Victorian society, as well as tensions between traditionalism and progress. It discusses characters like Molly Gibson as representing a balance between Victorian feminine ideals and new ideas about women.

1. The Victorian Experience

2. The Victorian Experience

3. ...in 'Wives and Daughters' the late Mrs Gaskell has added to
the number of those works of fiction --- of which we can not
perhaps count more than a score as having been produced
in our time --- which will outlast the duration of their
novelty and continue for years to come to be read and
relished for a higher order of merits...So delicately, so
elaborately, so artistically, so truthfully, and heartily is the
story wrought out. [However…]
‘so little of an intellectual matter. we should say that in her
literary career as a whole she displayed, considering her
success, a minimum of head'.
(Henry James, in his review of Wives and Daughters (1866)
written in the wake of Elizabeth Gaskell’s death)
The Victorian Experience

4.  'she was all a woman was expected to be; gentle,
domestic, tactful, unintellectual, prone to tears, easily
shocked. So far from chafing at the limits imposed on
her activities, she accepted them with serene
satisfaction'. (David Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists,
1934)
 Renewed interest in Gaskell concentrated on the
‘social problems’ e.g. Mary Barton, Ruth, North and
South.
 The ‘domestic’ novels, previously the most popular,
have now also been re-evaluated.
The Victorian Experience

5.  One of the most tolerant of the nineteenth-century
nonconformist sects, notably progressive in their
attitudes to women
 Open to new scientific ideas incl. Darwin.
 Tensions within Victorian Unitarianism are reworked
by Gaskell to produce some of the conflicting elements
in her fiction: her shifts between the realist novel and
fairytale, between social protest and moral conformity
.
The Victorian Experience

6. The Victorian Experience
 Gaskell's last novel was serialized in
Cornhill Magazine from 1864 to 1866,
and completed by her editor
posthumously
 A Bildungsroman – Molly Gibson
 Set before the 1832 Reform Bill -
brings together England's aristocratic
past, represented by Squire Hamley
and the earl and countess of Cumnor
Towers, and the future, represented by
Molly Gibson and Squire Hamley's
sons, especially Roger

7. The Victorian Experience
 Informal style: 'To begin with the
old rigmarole of childhood.'
 Narrative blend – sympathetic
observation; awareness of Molly’s
consciousness. Anticipates e.g.
George Eliot’s style in
Middlemarch (1872).
 Fairytale structure
 Integrates the discourses of
realism and romance, progress
and nostalgia, the social
problem with the domestic tale

8.  The text seems to support the progression from
daughters into wives
 The Victorian separation of spheres appears to be held
firmly in place e.g. the story persistently associates
masculinity with professional work, science,
rationality
 However this separation is less stable than at first
appears e.g. Lord Cumnor - gossip-loving and tea-
drinking; Molly a tomboy as a child.
The Victorian Experience

9.  "Don't teach Molly too much: she must sew, and read,
and write, and do her sums; but I want to keep her a
child, and if I find more learning desirable for her, I'll
see about giving it to her myself." (Mr Gibson)
 'There is a reason, Molly, and one which I do not wish
to give. When I tell you this much, I expect you to be
an honourable girl, and to try and not even conjecture
what the reason may be'
 'I'd rather give my child, - my only child, remember! -
to you, than to any man in the world!' (to Robert)
The Victorian Experience

10.  The surrender of her [the Victorian ideal of the 'angel in
the house'] self — of her personal comfort, her personal
desires, or both — that is the beautiful angel-woman's
key act, while it is precisely this sacrifice which dooms
her both to death and to heaven. For to be selfless is not
only to be noble, it is to be dead (Gilbert & Gubar, The
Madwoman in the Attic; ch 25’The Queen’s Looking Glass’).
 How far is Molly’s character a balance between the quiet
domestic angel and the more aggressive new
woman?
The Victorian Experience

11. ‘He had rather a contempt for demonstrative people,
arising from his medical insight into the consequences
to health of uncontrolled feeling. He deceived himself
into believing that still his reason was lord of all,
because he had never fallen into the habit of expression
on any other than purely intellectual subjects. Molly,
however, had her own intuitions to guide her.’ (Mr
Gibson)
Cf Molly – reads ‘every book that came in her way,
almost with as much delight as if it had been forbidden’
The Victorian Experience

12. The Victorian Experience
 Sisterly love and
frienship
 sensation fiction and
realism
 Cynthia – never fully
internalised a daughterly
code?

13. The Victorian Experience
 Modeled on Darwin
 Clever – and strong
 Thrown off balance by
biological determinism
of sexual selection
(Cynthia)
 Compared with Mr
Gibson, indicative of
changes over time.

14. The Victorian Experience
‘The new race or species may not be absolutely superior in
the sum of its powers. and may even be more simple in
structure and of a lower grade of intelligence. Progression,
therefore, is not a necessary accompaniment of variation and
natural selection, though, when a higher organization
happens to be coincident with superior fitness to new
conditions, the new species will have greater powers
and a greater chance of permanently maintaining and
extending its ground.’
Sir Charles Lyell (Principles of Geology, vol 1 1932, Ch.21, p.
411-412)

15.  In the 1860s – constructed as ancient, progressive and
imperialist
 A sense of Saxon and Teutonic vigour was produced by
opposing it to Celtic weakness, vacillation and
instability of character:
 Englishness = fitness, masculinity, practical down-to-
earth reasoning, science and progress.
 French-ness = weakness, femininity, romanticism,
emotional indulgence and literature
The Victorian Experience

16.  A divided consciousness in its representation of
Englishness? E.g.an Englishman, from the mid-
nineteenth century, was not supposed to be emotional
(NB! Not the older generation e.g. Squire Hamley).
 'I never can manage to express what I feel. but I am
sorry for you. Yes, I am: it's beyond my power to help
you, as far as altering facts goes, but I can feel for you,
in a way which it's best not to talk about, for it can do
no good' (Roger)
The Victorian Experience

17.  Is Gaskell hinting in Osborne’s choice of Aimée -
French, Catholic, plebeian - that the future lies not in
any English pedigree but in a Darwinian hybridity of
classes and nations, beliefs and languages?
 More on Darwinian thinking in Wives and Daughters
next week.
The Victorian Experience