Gender and Agency in the works of Elizabeth Gaskell A Dissertation Submitted to the College of

219 Pages·2010·0.81 MB·English

“Some appointed work to do”:
Gender and Agency in the works of Elizabeth Gaskell

A Dissertation Submitted to the College of

Graduate Studies and Research

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of English

University of Saskatchewan

Saskatoon

By
Emily Jane Morris

© Copyright Emily Jane Morris, April 2010. All rights reserved.
PERMISSION TO USE

In presenting this dissertation in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Postgraduate degree
from the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this University may make it
freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying of this dissertation in
any manner, in whole or in part, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor or
professors who supervised my dissertation work or, in their absence, by the Head of the
Department or the Dean of the College in which my thesis work was done. It is understood that
any copying or publication or use of this dissertation or parts thereof for financial gain shall not
be allowed without my written permission. It is also understood that due recognition shall be
given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any scholarly use which may be made of
any material in my thesis/dissertation.

Requests for permission to copy or to make other uses of materials in this dissertation in whole
or part should be addressed to:

Head of the Department of English
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A5
Canada

OR

Dean
College of Graduate Studies and Research
University of Saskatchewan
107 Administration Place
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A2
Canada

i
Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine relationships between gender and agency in the works of Victorian
author Elizabeth Gaskell. Gaskell’s position within discussions of nineteenth-century feminisms
has long been a subject of debate, and her celebration of and focus on femininity, women’s lives,
and the domestic sphere of nineteenth-century womanhood is inevitably crucial in critical
analyses of her work. I argue that Gaskell’s take on gender is a more sophisticated one than has
been recognised. In her fictional depictions of the agency and power of women and men, as well
as in commentary from her correspondence and her biography of her friend and contemporary
woman author Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell conceives of the traditionally feminine sphere of
influence as more conducive to action than the masculine realm, where notions of authority and
responsibility paradoxically place limits on individual ability and agency. These ideas are further
complicated in Gaskell’s work by an awareness of the constructed or unfixed nature of gender, a
conscious recognition of gender roles as not essentially tied to sex difference but rather as fluid,
mutable, and primarily utilitarian.

My argument situates Gaskell’s position contextually, with reference to contemporary
nineteenth-century discussions of the roles and expectations of men and women. It is organised
in terms of the thematic focus of her novels, with chapters on industry and class relations, fallen
women, religion and marriage, and home and family. Within this framework I suggest a
progression in the complexity of Gaskell’s thinking both chronologically and in the shift of focus
from topics that are centered in masculine spheres of power, such as the economic, political, and
religious, to those that are firmly ensconced in the feminine domestic realm of the personal home
and local community. I end with a discussion of The Life of Charlotte Brontë and Gaskell’s
thoughts on female authorship, concluding that Gaskell’s locating of agency in the feminine is a
means by which she can promote alternative ways of being and recognize that diverse ways of
seeing the world and one’s own identity or position within it are essential in order to create and
maintain effective societies.

ii
Acknowledgments

I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to everyone who advised, helped, and supported
me over the course of the creation of this dissertation.

Thanks to the members of my Defense Committee – Dr. Susan Hamilton, Dr. Chris Kent, Dr.
Doug Thorpe, and Dr. Francis Zichy, for their thought-provoking and helpful questions and
suggestions. Special thanks to Dr. Thorpe for his kindness and generosity and engagement with
this project above and beyond the call of duty.

Thanks to Graduate Chairs Dr. Ray Stephanson, Dr. Ron Cooley, and Dr. Lisa Vargo for their
help in getting me through my PhD program virtually unscathed.

Thanks to my Supervisor, Dr. Lisa Vargo, for her infinite wisdom and advice and the grace and
kindness with which it has always been bestowed, and for everything she has taught me through
her own outstanding example about being a professional, effective, and dedicated scholar and
teacher, as well as a truly considerate, generous, and lovely person.

Thanks to my family and friends for helping me through various breakdowns, for listening to my
Victorian and Gaskellian rants and rambles, for putting up with countless hours of whining,
complaining, and cursing, and for taking care of me. Thanks especially to my parents, who have
always been there to listen and encourage and help and remind me of what is important. And to
Ryan, for everything, but especially for being the test subject for numerous presentations, and for
caring about Gaskell for me.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PERMISSION TO USE i

ABSTRACT ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS iv

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER ONE – “WHAT COULD WE NOT DO”: GENDER, INDUSTRY, AND AGENCY
IN MARY BARTON AND NORTH AND SOUTH 25

CHAPTER TWO – “SUCH A PRETTY, PROBABLE STORY”: GENDER, AGENCY,
FALLENNESS, AND FICTIONS IN “LIZZIE LEIGH” AND RUTH 60

CHAPTER THREE – “I WOULD LOVE MY GOD MORE AND THEE LESS”: RELIGION,
MARRIAGE, AND AGENCY IN “LIBBIE MARSH’S THREE ERAS,” SYLVIA’S LOVERS,
AND “LOIS THE WITCH” 110

CHAPTER FOUR – “BEWILDERING HELPLESSNESS”: THE AGENCY OF GENDER
CONSTRUCTION IN CRANFORD, “A FEAR FOR THE FUTURE,” AND WIVES AND
DAUGHTERS 150

CONCLUSION – “SHE MUST NOT HIDE HER GIFT IN A NAPKIN”: THE AGENCY OF
NOVELS AND THE LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË 188

WORKS CITED 201

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Introduction
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) has been labeled as a proto-feminist and, conversely, a
traditionalist and even apologist for patriarchal ideologies. This dissertation argues for the
complexities of Gaskell’s thinking about gender and demonstrates how she both participates in
and moves beyond the discussions of her time, ultimately conceiving of relationships between
individual women and men and gender ideals in a challenging and illuminating way. As this
dissertation will suggest, this is revealed most significantly in her discussions and fictional
depictions of agency as inversely related to official ideas of power. The ideas are encapsulated in
a letter Gaskell wrote to her friend Eliza Fox in 1856, at the mid-point of her authorial career,
expressing the particular conflict she felt over women’s issues and gender roles. The letter
accompanied a petition addressed to Parliament supporting a Married Women’s Property Bill,
which Gaskell signed and was returning to Fox. Gaskell comments about the petition, “I don’t
think it is very definite, and pointed; or that it will do much good” (Letters 379). She goes on:
a husband can coax, wheedle, beat, or tyrannize his wife out of something and no
law whatever will help this that I see. (Mr Gaskell begs Mr Fox to draw up a bill
for the protection of husbands against wives who will spend all their earnings)
However our sex is badly enough used and legislated against, there’s no doubt of
that – so though I don’t see the definite end proposed by these petitions I’ll sign.
(379)
Gaskell recognizes that there is a need for improvement in the individual lives of women, but
does not accept changes in the legal system as most effective means to obtain it. Officially
sanctioned power, in this case the law, is trumped by other ways of achieving a desire. From
physical beating to emotional coaxing and wheedling, to financial earning and spending, Gaskell
acknowledges there are alternate ways of controlling people and getting what one wants. The law
is a means to official kinds of power, but Gaskell sees unofficial or subversive power as just as
potent and outside of the control of legislation. She both applies and explodes gender
stereotypes, suggesting husbands can embody typical masculine physical power but also utilize
the feminine tools of influence, wheedling and coaxing. Wives are given the traditional women’s
foible of extravagant spending but presented as a weapon, a means of control. In this short
2

extract, Gaskell suggests that men and women are confined by gender stereotypes but also able
to transcend them, that official power does not equal or cancel out other mean of personal
agency, and that there are balances and alternatives that exist in relationships between power and
gender, so the only good that legislation can do is to combat or counteract itself.
Gaskell’s fiction presents a similarly complex portrait of women and men and the
relationships between them. Recognizing that men are in a position of much more official
authority and power than women could claim, Gaskell does not accept it as given that women are
thus less fulfilled, valuable, or useful. In fact, consistently within Gaskell’s writing, the power
that men are supposed to have actually creates limits to the good that they can do, while women
are able to act both within the traditionally feminine domestic sphere and, when necessary, in
traditionally masculine public realms. Her fiction is concerned with how individual men and
women can act and accomplish their goals and desires, sometimes because of and sometimes in
spite of, ideologies, authorities and institutions that lay claims to power. Through examining the
depictions of gender, power, and agency in Gaskell’s fiction, I will suggest that her interest lay in
the differences in the kinds of socially defined power that men and women possessed, and that
for her answers come from recognizing the importance of that diversity of perspective and the
opportunity for effective action and good work thus created. My approach is contextual, locating
Gaskell’s ideas about masculinity and femininity within contemporary debates and anxieties and
suggesting that her particular take on the matter complicates accepted notions of Victorian
feminist thinking. Thus, it tracks Gaskell’s conceptions of gender through her depictions and
negotiations of femininity specifically. However, since for Gaskell the feminine is defined by its
contrasting and symbiotic relationship to the masculine, explorations of the roles and
expectations of men are also an integral part of the discussion. Gaskell’s own lack of
differentiation in terms of limits – men and women both face trials and oppressions of equal but
different kinds – make this more broadly a gender analysis involving a balance between the
differences accorded by gender.
Gaskell’s femininity and her position as a female author have long been a consideration
for critics. In a recent (2007) overview of Gaskell criticism, Susan Hamilton notes that Gaskell’s
contemporaries were keen to label her novels as women’s reading and thus to “put her back in
her womanly place” (182) while Terence Wright, in his 1995 book on Gaskell, still insists on
identifying her as “Mrs. Gaskell,” thus keeping her wifely persona at the forefront of his analysis
3

of her work. As many critics have pointed out, the tradition which insists on a kind of innate
femininity in Gaskell’s writing dates back to Virginia Woolf, who in 1910 identifies Gaskell’s
“instinct in writing” which “was to sympathise with others” with her motherhood and her desire
to act “like a wise parent” (147). For Woolf, though Gaskell’s feminine sympathy is admirable,
she “seems a sympathetic amateur beside a professional in earnest” (146)1 and it is “why, when
one begins to read her, one is dismayed by the lack of cleverness” (147).2 Lord David Cecil’s
commonly cited 1934 appraisal, in which he finds Gaskell’s femininity both charming and a
basis upon which to dismiss her writing, suggests that in Cranford Gaskell “has found for once a
form proper to her inspiration, short, episodic, exclusively concerned with women” (241) but
condemns her male characters as “disastrous” (233). He finds Gaskell’s men to be “imperfectly
disguised Victorian women, prudish, timid, and demure, incapable of regarding any question
except in its personal aspect” (234). This assessment, which appears to be a reflection of Cecil’s
view of women in general as much as of Gaskell’s particular talents, firmly ensconces Gaskell in
the realm of the personal and exclusively feminine. Challenges to this perspective eventually
arose in the 1950s and 1960s from critics who recognized the political importance and value of
Gaskell’s industrial or social problem novels. Kathleen Tillotson, for example, in 1954 declares
Mary Barton “the outstanding example – outstanding in merit as in contemporary fame” (202)
because it was “more perhaps than any other novel of its time, a novel with a social effect” (222).
Following suit are critics Raymond Williams (1958) and John Lucas (1967), who also argue for
the value of Gaskell’s political novels, though they find her taking refuge from the political
ramifications of her own arguments in her tendency to present personal resolutions to political
problems, a tactic that has been perceived to be a feminine backing away from a significant
challenge. Even in the industrial novels the focus ends up on personal romance. Still, and my
own study is no exception, Gaskell’s own gender is a factor in practically every analysis of her
work. This is perhaps partially due to the precedent set by early criticism, partially due to the fact
that women’s writing in general tends to be subject to gender-based analysis, but mainly, I think,

1 Woolf’s comparison here is with her own contemporary John Galsworthy. She claims that the “novels of today are
so much terser, intenser, and more scientific. Compare the strike in North and South with the Strife of Mr.
Galsworthy” (146). Strife was published in 1909.
2 Though she does not make the equation specifically in her evaluation of Gaskell, Woolf appears to read her as an
“Angel in the House” figure like those she discusses in her essay “Professions for Women.” Woolf imagines this
figure cajoling her to write from a feminine, sympathetic, and flattering standpoint, and she finds these strictures to
be artistic anathema, imposing impossible limits on women’s writing. For Gaskell, as I will argue, they are the
means to escape limits.
4

due to the fact that gender is a significant subject of her work, so that whether a story is about
industry and class inequity or about witchcraft in Salem, it is also always about what it means to
be a man or woman. Because of her own role as a woman attempting to negotiate in realms of
masculine authority, Gaskell’s awareness of the advantages and frustrations of gender
expectations is heightened, and the ways in which gender and power are interdependent becomes
a major focus of her work.
Whether or not Gaskell’s apparent allegiance to the traditionally feminine, domestic, and
personal world of the home is reason to qualify or disqualify her as a proto-feminist writer has
been the subject of plenty of debate among critics in the area. One of the earliest and strangest,
but among the most important responses to a perceived feminist point of view in Cranford comes
from Martin Dodsworth in 1963. He sees the book as an outpouring of Gaskell’s “unconscious
hostility to the male [which] struggles with her awareness of the pointlessness of such hostility in
the predominantly masculine society of her day” (138). Dodsworth’s representation of the
“horror of the Cranford situation,” (139) brought about by the idea that its women “pretend to be
as good as, or even better than, men,” (133) while as clearly biased along gendered lines as
Cecil’s argument three decades earlier,3 begins to recognize that the gender roles that people are
expected to play is a theme in Gaskell’s work, and a conflicted theme at that. The real problem
that Dodsworth identifies here is one that continues to worry readers concerned with women in
Gaskell – whether she espouses radical proto-feminist doctrine or accepts and condones the
patriarchal status-quo, or does one thing consciously or overtly, and the other sub-consciously or
subversively.4 As feminist thought moved from the first-wave interest in securing legal,
economic, and political equality for women to second-wave considerations of the importance of
recognizing the value of femininity as an alternative to masculinity, feminist criticism began to
notice this kind of validation of women’s values in Gaskell’s work. Nina Auerbach’s influential
Communities of Women (1978) includes a chapter on Cranford that suggests that in excluding
“both patriarchal marriage and the industrial rogueries” (88) of the outside world, it is a
progressive and subversive re-conception of women’s lives and roles. In 1984 Coral Lansbury

3 For Cecil and Dodsworth, that Victorian femininity is conceived of as lesser than masculinity is a given.
4 One of the most important achievements of Dodsworth’s article is the critical response that it elicited. Patricia
Wolfe’s “Structure and Movement in Cranford” (1968) and Rowena Fowler’s “Cranford: Cow in Grey Flannel or
Lion Couchant?” (1984) are two particularly perceptive article-length reactions to Dodsworth which argue for its
feminist message.
5

draws on Edgar Wright’s earlier work (1965) to revive interest in Gaskell as a skilled writer with
an “innovative approach to narration”(Lansbury 117) and argues that Gaskell’s focus on the
family is the theme that unites her work, suggesting coherence as well as placing value on the
traditionally feminine sphere. In her 1987 self-declared “feminist revision” (2) of perceptions of
Gaskell, Patsy Stoneman takes the acknowledged fact that Gaskell’s work is mainly about
women further and claims that the focus, specifically on the maternal and on mothering, is in fact
an “effort at social reconstruction” (13) that challenges traditional patriarchal structures by
valuing the maternal instead. Deanna L. Davis, in her 1992 analysis of both Gaskell’s work and
the motives behind critical responses to it, backs away from these claims for Gaskell’s strong
feminist stance. She strikes a compromise between Gaskell as a covert proto-feminist subverting
patriarchal tradition by implementing a matriarchal worldview and as a staunch conventionalist
upholding the status quo. Davis recognises that “the feminine nurturance on which [Gaskell]
grounded her life and work has appeared to many feminist critics as unappealing at best and
traitorous at worst” (507), but also that the other side of the critical question can be “skewed by
the pressure to rescue Gaskell’s work from feminist oblivion, which they assume can only be
done by demonstrating that Gaskell is indeed a feminist prototype” (518). Davis instead argues
that Gaskell’s focus on the maternal is not the outright resistance that some feminist critics desire,
but rather a balance between the idealization of maternal nurturance and the recognition of
mothers as fallible, human figures as well, which she suggests is in itself a feminist viewpoint.
Davis’s reading of Gaskell’s feminism as something of a compromise marks another new
direction in Gaskell criticism that suggests the nuance of her thinking on issues of gender. For
the most part these analyses of feminism in Gaskell have focused on the maternal aspects of her
work. Mine departs from these to suggest that it is not only how women care, nurture, and
sympathise that is given value in Gaskell’s fiction, but also how they consistently and
persistently spring into action in order to achieve important goals for themselves and for others.
In Gaskell, the theme of women’s agency, inside and outside of the domestic sphere, is also an
essential aspect of the discussion of feminism and gender.
The critical understanding of Gaskell’s position within feminism is, as Davis’s work
suggests, defined in part by the particular perspectives that each critic brings to Gaskell, and their
differing feminist allegiances. My own perspective has the benefit of the influence of all of these
varied readings, which allows me to argue that in certain ways Gaskell fits in with each of them.