To Trollope-l
April 4, 1999
Re: Cranford: A Gathering of Stories
To begin with, so we can all read the same stories at the same time, the wisest thing seems to be to share with others the original names of the stories keyed to all the chapters as I have them in the Oxford World Classics paperback series (in the hope that the divisions into chapters are traditional or conventional). I will also include the names of the stories, which are in my book printed as 2 separate appendices because these were printed in other magazines and at far intervals of time:
Chapters 1 & 2 = 'Our Society at Cranford', 13 Dec 1851, Household Words (a Dickens periodical)
Chapters 3 & 4 = 'A Love Affair at Cranford', 3 Jan 1852, ditto
Chapters 5 & 6 = 'Memory at Cranford', 13 Mar 1852, ditto
Chapters 7 & 8 = 'Visiting at Cranford', 3 Apr 1852, ditto
Chapters 9,10 & 11 = 'The Great Cranford Panic', Chapters the First
and Second', 8 and 15 Jan 1853, still Household Words
Chapters 12 & 13 = 'Stopped Payment at Cranford', 2 Apr 1853, ditto
Chapter 14 = 'Friends in Need, at Cranford', 7 May 1853, ditto
Chapters 15 & 16 = 'A Happy Return to Cranford', 21 May 1853, ditto
For the continuations:
Appendix 1: 'The Last Generation in England' by the Author of Mary Barton, an autobiographical piece, 5 July 1849, Sartain's Union Magazine, an American periodical (Gaskell knew Mary Howitt who wrote for Sartain's because Mary Howitt's husband was editor of another American periodical, Howitt's Journal and he had published several of Gaskell's earliest stories)Appendix 2: 'The Cage at Cranford', November 1863, All the Year Round (a Dickens periodical)
Ellen Moody
April 4, 1999 I've almost finished the first installment, and I like the stories
I've read so far. I wouldn't call them sentimental either, maybe
affectionately ironic. The characters exhibit an interesting mixture of
sweetness, snobbery, knowledge and knowledge. Gaskell does a good job of
showing what is good and bad about small towns. I thought it was
interesting that there are no gentlemen in Cranford, at least in the early
stories. The two that do show up in the early stories are quickly killed
off. In one of Gaskell's letters which I quoted from in an earlier post to
the list, she tells a male friend how much she likes being controlled by her
husband and assumes the same is true for Charlotte Bronte. Maybe that was
part of the truth for Gaskell, but not quite the whole truth.
Dear All,
Well I cannot tell a lie and must admit I am almost finished.
Further
on there are more men or at least a minimum number. Gaskell
cannot think of a plot which does not include love -- and that must mean
men. However, the emphasis is on women. My introduction tells me
she is telling of her childhood when she was brought up in a town something
like Cranford by women.
What I find fascinating is how realistic the
decor is. I really feel what it's like to live in the 19th century in tiny
ways. I also like the delicacy of the tones, so many and individualised.
The stories are beautifully artful.
Ellen
Reply-to: trollope-l@onelist.com April 4, 1999
From: John Mize I've really enjoyed Cranford so far. Gaskell clearly likes the
inhabitants of Cranford and sees their good points, but she is also aware of
their provincialism and snobbery. Even though I agree with Andy Warhol that
the only good thing about growing up in a small town is that you hate it and
you know that one day you will leave, I enjoy reading about Cranford.
Gaskell grew up in Knutsford, a town apparently much like Cranford, and she
always missed living in the country. Gaskell's narrator also misses
Cranford, but she isn't blind to the drawbacks of the little town.
I especially liked the war of the books between Miss Jenkyns and
Captain Brown. Both were convinced that there must be something seriously
wrong with a person who cannot appreciate Samuel Johnson or Charles Dickens,
respectively. For the rest of her life Miss Jenkyns seems to have been
convinced that Captain Brown's death was divine punishment for his having
liked Dickens too much.
I also really enjoyed Miss Mattie Jenkyns' attitude toward Johnson
and Tennyson. She fell asleep while Mr. Holbrook read Locksley Hall to her
and then told him that the poem reminded her of one of Samuel Johnson's
poems which her sister used to read to her. She couldn't tell him why the
Johnson poem was similar to Locksley Hall or even remember the name of the
poem, since the real reason was that both Tennyson and Johnson bored her and
put her to sleep, but since both poets were favorites of a person she loved
and respected, she thought both must be good, although she couldn't say why.
My copy of Cranford is a 1972 Oxford University Press edition, and
the editor notes that Dickens edited Gaskell's text when the stories first
appeared in Household Words. He had her change all the references to The
Pickwick Papers to Hood's poems. He told her it would be inappropriate to
have his name in her text since he was one of the editors of Household
Words. Gaskell is highly complimentary to Dickens, and she even seems to
suggest that Dickens is superior to Johnson. Deborah Jenkyns, the Johnson
devotee, is a little too stiff, a little too pompous and affected, a little
too snobbish, while the Dickens man, Captain Brown, is more down-to-earth
and genuinely kind.
Gaskell's apparent preference for Dickens seems to be based on her
seeing the new man, Dickens, as more in tune with real life and with women's
concerns than were the old-fashioned men of the previous generation. When
the narrator and Matty read her family's old letters, the narrator prefers
Mrs. Jenkyn's letters to those of the men. Her letters deal with real life,
while the men write to show off. They demonstrate their classical learning
or give useless, but impressive sounding advice. When Mrs. Jenkyn's writes
her husband for some advice about killing a pig, he sends her Latin poems
with her as the heroine, even though the poems are all Hebrew to her.
Deborah Jenkyns has obviously adopted her father, and not her mother, as a
model. The narrator can find little sense in her Johnsonion letters, except
when fear of a possible French invasion shocks her into writing in "pretty
intelligible English."
I'm not suggesting that Gaskell was a feminist; she certainly did
not think that women should do the same work as men, but there is a
suggestion that women are naturally superior to men. Men posture, preen,
strut and engage in ritual conflicts, while the really important work is
done at home by those best able to do that work.
Perhaps that is why Gaskell has no gentlemen in Cranford. The only
gentry in the town are shabby genteel older women. They try to keep the
young men away from their maids and pretend that they aren't poor. The only
two men who might have been gentlemen had they wished to be are Captain
Brown and Mr. Holbrook. They are quickly killed off. In an 1854 letter to
John Forster, Gaskell said "Mr. Shaen accuses me always of being 'too much a
woman' in always wanting to obey somebody..." Of course Gaskell doesn't
actually say she wants to obey men. She says that Mr. Shaen thinks that's
what she wants. Maybe Gaskell also wanted things she wouldn't dream of
telling Mr. Shaen, Mr. Forster or Mr. Gaskell. The dying men in Cranford
make me think of one of Norman Mailer's poems. In the poem the wife is
constantly trying to kill her husband by psychic energy, but nothing works.
The poem ends something like "Everyone said they were the perfect couple,
but their children kept dying." Gaskell seems to have had better psychic
aim than Mailer's poetic wife.
From: "Judy Warner" I also thought about how sad it was that Miss Matilda was living in a house
with Martha, but they were so cut off from each other because of class and
status, that Miss Matilda felt and was virtually alone. I'm not suggesting
that this was unusual-(the 'quality' didn't really think of the servants as
people, as recently as my late mother-in-law,) but how sad to think of it.
I agree too that the tone of these stories is very sweet, and although
there's some irony, it's very fond and gentle. More like the Lucia stories,
though not so sharp, than Austen to my mind.
Judy Warner
To Trollope-l
April 4, 1999
Re: Cranford, Chs 1-4: Astringent and Sweet
I'm reading the book in the later novel form and liked
the opening chapters.
I've surprised by it since I had been told it resembles Austen's
Emma. I have to admit both take place in a small town
or village, both have women at the center of the story, but
dwell on nuances of feeling; still, the overall effect of this
novel and Emma seem to me so different. Emma
is much harder. There is something intensely sweet and
kind in the depiction of the Browns; there is deep feeling
in the Captain for his daughter; words like warm, affectionate,
and phrases like the yearning heart come to mind when
I'm referring to his daughter Jessie, her marriage to Gordon
(engineered by the apparently dried-up "old maid" Miss
Jenkyns). The deep sense of nostalgic loss that Matty
feels when she grasps how much she has lost by
not having married the supposedly vulgar (really human)
Mr Holbrook whose love for Tennyson is supposed to
reinforce his sensitivity is not Austen-like; when she
says "'God forbid . . that I should grieve any young
hearts'" (Oxford Cranford, ed. EPWatson, p. 40)
we are in a different emotional universe. The concluding
passage of Chapter 4 has great beauty. Lines about
the Captain's older daughter's "trembling nervous
hands" (p. 6) are not to be found in Austen. It's too
frank, too openly filled with heart.
John quoted the line about how the place is in possession
of Amazons, but look how important the men
are in each story. In order for the opposition of tastes over
books to occur one must have the man's taste: Dickens
versus Johson is Captain Brown versus Miss Jenkyns. The
point of Chapters 3 & 4 is how much Matty lost by not
marrying. Miss Jessie Brown is saved from desperate
poverty by a man. Jem Hearn is necessary to Martha.
There's a lot of sex here. Also there's something pointed
about the women's discomfort with men one doesn't find
in Austen. The first page of the book quotes one woman
saying "'A man is so in the way in the house!'" (p. 1).
Paradoxically the Captain is respected or felt as a
presence because he is a man, because he speaks
in a voice too large for the room." The
line which described in as a "tame man, about the
house" (p. 4) is somehow unAusten.
At the same time the word for the opening
chapters is satiric-astringent. Gaskell is showing us
how small irritating tyrannies and hypocrises really
control people's existences. The snobbery is stultifying.
"Elegant economy" (p. 3); sour-grapes says the
narrator made "us very peaceful and satisfied" (p. 4)
It's funny in Chapter 1, but there is an undercurrent
about a disconnect between human emotion and
incessant phony ceremonies which cut people off from
one another and can make them very cruel to one
another. Matty is unmarried and Holbrook dies
without companionship because he was not considered
good enough, yet his taste is his own, books chosen
because he likes them, a comfortable house.
There are lots of little exquisite details building up the
community, a delicacy of apprehension that is associated
with women's books. Gaskell is an artist with words.
There's so much here as a result.
Here is when the stories were gathered together.
Almost immediately: they appeared as a book in 1853
(of course without the later story or early autobiographical
piece). In her introduction to the Oxford
paperback, Charlotte Mitchell says Cranford
is Gaskell's best known book. I wouldn't have guessed
it. I'd have thought Mary Barton or North and South
as social commentary would be much better known;
also The Life of Charlotte Bronte because of
the Bronte connection and its passion and beauty. Then before Mitchell launches
into what is an excellent essay on the stories, she
finds it necessary to excus Cranford because
it's about the female world, is not rebellious, and
according to her can be read as denigrating women,
especially spinsters as eccentric, muddled, and absurd
without men. Mitchell then stretched a point when she tried to counter
this criticism by calling the book 'a comic fantasy
of conformity' whose 'unexpectedness' made it
'more challenging to modern feminist reading than
the great Victorian novels of female rebellion than Jane
Eyre, The Mill on the Floss, and The Story of
an African Farm. How so? Because CranfordMitchell's essay is actually very good. She picks
good lines from the stories, such as the one
about Mr Holbrook's contempt for 'every refinement
which had not its root deep down in humanity.
She says one moral inference of this week's two
stories is that "realty and the sensual world
should defeat culture and formality."
I found these stories touching and appealing.
Ellen Moody
From: John Mize April 4, 1999
I expected to like Cranford, since I
like Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Bronte, but Cranford is funnier than I
expected. I think Gaskell was a little too earnest in her defense of
Charlotte to allow a lot of humor into the biography.
I wonder what Gaskell really thought about Dickens. When I first
started reading about the book war between Miss Jenkyns and Captain Brown, I
thought Gaskell was subtly mocking her editor, suggesting that Dickens was a
lightweight compared to Johnson. I later decided that that was my opinion,
not Gaskell's, and that she preferred Dickens to Johnson, or maybe she was
only trying to flatter Dickens after all.
April 5, 1999
Expectations: Gaskell really in her work
I had a high opinion of Gaskell's ability as an artist. She is
too conventional in her outlook in some ways, and this book suggests
why the vision of the novelist or her matter is finally more important than the
artistry. She is more in control of her work than the Brontes, but
theirs are the great great novels while hers are "merely" superlatively
good :). Not that I've read that many by Gaskell. I loved the reading of
Wives and Daughters in the cover-to-cover by Maureen O'Brien.
I am impressed by John's perceptive reading the self-reflective nature of this text and its
place in the marketplace imagination of Gaskell. This is not just cynical appreciation of her
praise for Dickens. Of course all this is there. Dickens is the editor of Household
Words. I too doubt that she admired Dickens that strongly
to oppose him to Johnson. Her art is realistic; she is not
radical for her age.
I hadn't thought of it. One must always think this way -- it makes
these books come alive.
Cheers Reply-to: trollope-l@onelist.com April 5, 1999
From: John Mize I find it interesting that Gaskell suggests that one reason Mr.
Holbrook is rejected is because he won't call himself a gentleman. He has
enough property that he could get away with calling himself a squire.
Holbrook refuses to let people address him as Esquire, and he refuses to act
the part of the gentleman. He possibly could have married Mattie if he had
agreed to act like a gentleman, but his pride is such that he cannot do so.
Of course, even if he had tried to act like a gentleman, that might not have
been enough, since his family were only yeomen. The Jenkyns family may have
less money than Holbrook, but they persist in clinging to gentility despite
their relative poverty. He might have degraded himself by pretending to be
something he was not and still have been rejected in the end.
Re: Cranford: Delicate Perceptions
In response to John's comment on the curious place pride plays in
the behavior, self-framing, and thus fate of Mr Holbrook: there are
lots of curious continual observations Gaskell makes about her
characters which don't fit into the conventional moral inferences we
are to make. We are to see how cruel is snobbery, formalism and
obtuse way people have of judging one another from categories, also
how silly is the mechanical way they go about life, almost not
life-like except that they do it. Yet those who writhe in the grasp
of these things let them control them. Later in the book we meet
an aristocratic Scots woman who seems singularly free of all sorts
fo things: however, we don't get a close look at her.
One thing that struck me about most of the women Gaskell sympathises
with is how often she uses the word "nervous" about them. They have
nervous hands; their hands tremble; they are nervous from anticipating
the calls of others. They are actually very vulnerable, fearful of life in
a way. The artificial schedules, the hierarchies are then carapaces,
ways of protecting and masking themselves. Miss Deborah Jenkyns
lives as much on the edge of some emotional breakdown as Mattie,
and numbers of the males are just as "bad." It's such intimations
continually noted by Gaskell that makes the characters so appealing,
lovable (so to speak).
I liked the lines of poetry chosen too. In numbers of the cases they
seemed to resonate right. Actually off-list John told me something I'd
like to share with everyone because it strikes me as so true. We ought
to remember that when Gaskell favors Dickens over Johnson, Dickens
was her editor. If you think about Dickens's fiction, his techniques are
quite different from those of Gaskell. There is probably a strong dollop
of flattery going on in her elevating Dickens over Johnson.
Ellen
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com And as Cranford would seem to suggest, France not only kills reputation, it
kills people as well! Miss Matty's long-lost love Mr. Holbrook's death is
directly attributed to his visit to Paris: "he might have lived this dozen
years if he had not gone to that wicked Paris, where they are always having
revolutions."
ZUBAIR AMIR Reply-to: trollope-l@onelist.com April 9, 1999
From: Marian Poller My copy is the Penguin ed. Chapter 5 has a reference to India
rubber rings. What are they? Also who is the narrator? She sounds
so masculine.
I especially love the crochet and knitting references throughout
the book. They are absolutely correct and show me our authoress
must have enjoyed the activity. Anyone know for sure?
Marian Poller R: The Narrator of Cranford
In response to Marian, the ambiguity with which
the narrator is at first presented can be seen as evidence that the book
evolved out of two stories that Gaskell did not suppose
would have a continuation. She did not in fact rely on
continuing her material until she got well into the
stories. For example, the opening of Story 2 (Chapter
3 of the novel) reads: "I thought that probably my connection
with Cranford would cease after Miss Jenkyns's death"
(Oxford Cranford, ed. PGWatson, p. 23). The
end of first story has a finality in Miss Jenkyns's death
and the marriage of the Captain's daughter. Other of
the openings have the feel of starting all over again with
a new theme or device or added characters.
We also don't get much about the narrator.
Until we are told the narrator is a young
woman related to Miss Matty, and that the narrator lives
with an aging father in Drumble, one feels the narrator
could be male. There is a dearth of detail about
the narrator until Story 5 (Chapter 10 of the novel).
Then we hear of a sick father; it is slightly after
that we get a feeling the narrator is a young woman
under Miss Matty's care who also comes to care for
Miss Matty In the first story (or Chapters 1 & 2) of the novel, the
narrator only tells us he or she is on a visit to Cranford
and lives in nearby Drumble (Oxford Cranford, p. 12).
We might suppose that someone with such an intricate
appreciation of tiny gestures who is expected to obey
the small tyrannies of genteel women must be a woman.
But we don't know this. In fact I too got the feeling the narrator
could be a man. There was something neutral or
neuter about the presence, something down to earth,
and when the narrator says Cranford is run by Amazons,
I felt this to be a man's way of laughing. Yet in Story
4 (Chapter 7), we are told that narrator and Miss
Matty "sat at our work" (p. 66). Men don't sit and
sew.
Gaskell did not make up her mind what sex
to make the narrator until Story 4, and did not think
to fill in details about the narrator's background and
life until the third installment. Then she invented details
which fit the needs of her story. (When Miss Matty's
bank fails, the narrator is given a father who can advise
Miss Matty what to do.)
This is interesting in trying to understand the changes
in tone between the early and later stories. It's also
interesting in thinking about why women writers would
write as impersonal male narrators. Towards the end
of Oliphant's Autobiography and Letters when we
are into the 1890s Oliphant suddenly says to her
publisher, how times have changed. Her publisher
had apparently been suggesting to her that she
present herself as a female in something she is writing
because that's what's wanted and appeals. Oliphant
says when she first began to write women often presented
themselves as males (and she did) because males
were taken more seriously. If you wanted your story
to have an impact and its point of view to be accepted,
you were a male and not a female narrator. So
maybe we see Gaskell not being able to make up
her mind: she is at first not sure, and then later
opts for a female because it makes more sense for
a female to be under Miss Matty's care and to go
visiting for tea, play cards, keep people company
than a male. Men were freer, could ignore the
routines of women's small habits, and they also would
have been expected to be at school or work.
Mrs Gaskell spent time crocheting and knitting.
Most women did not sit still when they sat; there were
no vast manufacturers to make or mend people's clothes.
Mrs Gaskell had children, a husband. I like all the small details of daily life we are given:
what candles people use, how they make their small
economies. One really gets a feeling of the physical
milieu of the Victorian world & the technological limits
or bases of every day life. It's been said repeatedly too that women's literature continually brings
up sewing, knitting and imagery for these occupations.
I too surmised rubber rings were rubber bands.
Ellen Moody
To Trollope-l
April 11, 1999
Re: Cranford, Chs 5 & 6: Story 3: Memory at Cranford
In this story the tone of the volume begins to change.
While the other stories have warmth, sweetness and
kindness towards the vulnerabilities of the characters,
they are by-and-large continually astringent with a
strong satiric thrust. These two chapters or this
story takes a turn into the a more emotional terrain
as Matty emerges as the heroine for the first time.
We are told some peculiar incidents in the story
of Peter Jenyns.
There is something rich in and of itself about old
letters. Thackeray has a half-satirical
but half-nostalgic meditation on this in Vanity
Fair. The story of Matty's parents'
courting and young marriage would have touched
Gaskell's readers as in her time it was just
that far away in time as to evoke longing for
the past. The incidents told in the letter are
such as people would tell one another. Having
Matty go over them now her sister is dead too,
and the brother gone invests them with a preciousness
they would not have to someone else. Then she
wants to burn them and does. Heart-breaking.
This is what was done to letters at the time.
Inner worlds were to be hidden lest they be held
against people. The trifling and trivial circumstances
are the lives of these people.
Everything is seen through Matty and that accounts
for a good deal of the sentimental and humble
mood of what's told in the letters too. Perhaps those
who like the book are those who are capable of
liking Matty without shame; perhaps those who get irritated
by the book are those Matty embarasses. In the
introduction to the novel, Elizabeth Porges Watson
says one reason Cranford makes modern
readers squirm and not want to go over it, is
'we assume a gendered hierarchy of value. The
public world of social reform is still more important
than the private female sphere'. Worse yet, Matty
is self-abnegating, sweet, repressed about sex,
kindly, gentle, all the traits which today are not
exactly those which are admired in the public
press.
I assume that by Chapter 6 or the second part of
this story Gaskell realised she was going to write
on. She sends Peter away and doesn't tell us
what happened to him. He is to come back or
be used later in some way.
This is a curious story and it's not easy to know
how Gaskell meant us to take it. Peter is his
mother's boy; he is always irritating his father.
He loves to hoax people, to play games.
One day he dresses up as his (now dead) Aunt
Deborah. He goes out in public and parodies
her. Well the father sees him and floggs
him. Peter runs away. The family is terrified
because they fear he has committed suicide.
The father is desolated, Matty wild and
white, comfort nowhere. They search for
him by dragging the ponds; the mother writes
to him. No sign at all. We are told this
leaving of Peter traumatised the family
and maimed its destiny for ever. It is eventually
discovered that Peter has gone to sea, but
it is too late The mother dies, Deborah the
older sister assumes the part in the family
Peter might have played. She will never
leave her father, be his housekeeper. As
for Matty, 'I knew I was good for little, and that
my best work in the world was to do odd jobs
quietly and set others at liberty.'
We are probably not to see this as a story
of transvestism -- I don't feel what is being
explored is sexuality, though there is a direct
battle between father and son over what is
manly and unmanly behavior. The father flogs
the son for being unmanly. Yet it feels
like a prank and one that is simply mocking
of the world's solemnity and Deborah. Peter
is jealous of Deborah and doesn't want to grow
up to be the kind of man his father is.
What we have here also is a knotted plot. Events
are set up which are to be explained later. Except
of course in the next three stories, Peter is
dropped, and only brought back to resolve
the novel into a part fairy tale, part qualified
happy ending.
So lots of knitting and lacery everywhere: in the structure, in the content.
Ellen
Re: Cranford, Chs 5 & 6, Story 3: Memory at Cranford
How real Gaskell makes the
world of the 19th century to me. In descending to tell
us of the daily small economies her characters variously
practices (the talk about the candles, the amounts
of sugar and butter people eat, how they shop,
how they make up their fires, what they
wear to warm themselves), she captures a level of life at which people
literally exist. In her Chronicles of Carlingford
Mrs Oliphant delineates the same real details and
obstacles and things of life's daily routine.
Might we say this is a mark of women's fiction (écriture féminine).
Ellen
Re: Cranford: Poor Peter
I agree with John that Peter is defying his father and refusing
to become the sort of man his father is, but it is an obscure
kind of revolt, one not well understood by Peter himself. He
also doesn't know what to revolt for or how else to live.
The story does capture the difficulty of finding some way
of life which in the end does not coopt you. Peter revolts
against a cult of manliness on shore, only to end up a
sailor on a ship. The great problem for rebels has ever
been to find what it is they really want to do.
Ellen
To Trollope-l
April 12, 1999
Re: Cranford, Chs 7-8: Story 4: Visiting at Cranford
We modern readers may be inclined to hurry over this
story; however, as all societies have ever been unequal,
and the people in them have ever wanted to behave in
ways that represent their superiority to those beneath
them, the intricate details of snobbery and caste-
arrogance are here set forth with delicate verve. After
Matty, my favorite character in the book is Lady
Glenmire. She is in fact a standing rebuke to fringe
people. Of course, it's not fair to blame them and
praise her, since her sense of self-worth is assured
by her rank. It frees her -- to, among other things,
not lie about her money or her things. She is always
a cynosure of present sexual fulfilment among the
genteel classes. Thus far the only women to have
a fulfilling sexual relationship in front of us are
servants. She marries one of the best men in
the place, Mr Hoggins, who is himself considered
a trifle coarse -- while he has the finest heart
and solid common sense and gentility of soul.
There is a motif throughout about sexual sublimation
-- or shall I say repression. On Victoria not long
ago we got to talking about the sudden decrease
in numbers of children born to middle class parents
in England at mid-century. At the opening of
the century Trollope's mother has 9 children;
his wife has 2. Tennyson's mother has something
like 12; Tennyson's wife has 2. It was suggested
that the change was one of behavior and abstinence
was the way it was done. Well late in this
book it is interesting how when we are told
Thomas's wife is pregnant (a servant), the
women in effect "upbraid him" for making another
"likely to make an appearance" (p. 119). The
sense is he should have abstained.
Tiny details throughout about lace, about
forms of address signifying levels of hierarchy
and respect (as we have talked on this list
before), on who speaks first, and so on --
all capture a real sense of solid milieu
and mores.
Ellen
From: John Mize I also really liked Lady Glenmire. As Ellen said, it was easy for her
to ignore her rank, since she had the security of her rank. I especially
enjoyed how the Cranford ladies were so concerned to use the proper terms
when addressing her. That part of the story reminded me of a story about
Dustin Hoffman and Lawrence Olivier. Hoffman was worried that he might
offend Olivier if he did not address him properly when they were working on
the movie, Marathon Man. Hoffman finally asked Olivier how he should be
addressed. Olivier said, "You can call me anything you want, but my name is
Larry." Even though Olivier mocked Hoffman's question, I suspect that if
Hoffman had not bothered with the question and had called Olivier Larry to
begin with, Olivier would have considered Hoffman to be an arrogant, rude,
American punk.
Reply-to: trollope-l@onelist.com From: Oldbuks@aol.com
There is a kindly quality to Gaskell's writing I find disarming. Imagining
Miss Matty, in a flutter at receiving a visitor at an unusual morning hour,
descending the stairs, one cap atop the other, and without her glasses, made
me smile, as well as the fact that the visitor, Miss Betty Barker, a retired
milliner, was so intent on her mission that she did not notice.
Her errand? To invite Mary Smith (our narrator) and Miss Matty to an
exclusive tea at her home. It could be considered exclusive because Mrs.
Fitz-Adam was to be excluded. She was the sister of the town surgeon Mr.
Hoggins, and since the man she married was not known to have any aristocratic
connections, Mrs. Fitz-Adam was considered to have remained in her lowly
station. Ellen has already mentioned how Gaskell shares with us the
contrivances of the genteel poor. Miss Betty Barker must give every
appearance of a grand aloofness with the servant with whom she was ordinarily
on such intimate terms, and had to resort to pretending to give Mrs.
Jamieson's dog tea, to provide the needed cover for some urgent conferences.
None of the ladies would admit to being hungry, but compelled themselves to
make "the heaps [of delicate eatables] disappear" (Penguin Cranford/Cousin
Philis, ed. Peter Keating, p. 111) to insure the hostess's feelings would
not be hurt by an apparent lack of appetite.
Cards were evidently played with a rather unladylike passion in Cranford, and
it was with great relief that the ladies saw the "Baron's daughter-in-law"
Mrs. Jamieson (p. 112) begin to snore, taking care of the problem of an
awkward number of players. Mary was given some old fashion-books to read; "I
know young people like to look at pictures", and Miss Betty began to juggle
the arduous task of speaking loud enough to overcome Mrs. Forrester's
deafness, while not waking the slumbering Mrs. Jamieson.
After the card playing, the lucky ladies were again feasted, this time with
"scalloped oysters, potted lobsters, jelly, a dish called little Cupids ...
In short, we were to be feasted with what was sweetest and best. " (p. 113)
Finishing with the alcoholic beverage known as "cherry brandy" which we see
Arabella imbibing in TAS!
The loosened up Mrs. Jamieson shared some spectacular news; she was soon to
be visited by a grand relation, her sister-in-law, Lady Glenmire. All the
partiers did a mental survey of possible attire suitable for such an event.
New caps would be the rule of the day!
Jill Spriggs
Reply-to: trollope-l@onelist.com From: "Robert J Wright" This sort of thing is still important to some people today. Little has
changed.
The chairman of our company was knighted this year, and during a recent
visit we had to decide what people were to call him. I have always known
him as Stuart, but everyone was told he was to be called Sir Stuart, or
"Chairman" in addressing him. As usual, in these matters, the wife is the
more touchy and where the person with the honour might overlook an error,
his wife (who inherits the title without having done anything for it) is the
more likely to point out a gaffe.
In our church, we have many lords, sirs and whatnots, living in Kensington
which has many expensive residences. When I first met Sir Richard O'Brien,
I foolishly called him "Sir Richard" which was of course correct. He
replied and said his name was Richard, and if I ever called him Sir, he
would never speak to me again. That is class.
I once called his wife Lady Ailsa and also got admonished for my pains. In
fact, the reason was rather different. As the honour was Richard's, I
should have called her "Ailsa, Lady O'Brien". The reason is that she is
"Lady O'Brien" because Richard was knighted, and would only be Lady Ailsa if
she received the title in her own right. Lady Thatcher (being a Baroness)
is a case in point.
So, you see, we Brits have not changed so much.
These things may be more evident in the UK, but every country has its
methods of honouring people. Last week I visited the marvellous Ingres
exhibition of paintings, and many of the subjects of the portraits sported a
pink ribbon in the left lapel depicting the French medal of honour. Even
the painter's self portrait in later life.
As for Americans, money may be the key, but the US is as class ridden as any
society, maybe more than most. My friend Warren Elliot who is a bigwig
attorney in Washington politics once took Vicky and me to the open air opera
near Washington. I think it is called the Wolftrap or some such. Anyway,
we had a blue card which I was instructed to wave at any jobsworth who
controlled traffic in the car park. We parked right by the entrance. It
seems the more you subscribe, the closer you get to park.
Robert J Wright To Trollope-l
April 12, 1999
Re: Cranford, Chs 9-10, Story 5: The Great Cranford Panic
I liked this story for a different reason than John -- or at
least I saw it differently. First, I should make a confession
right here: when I was young, very like Matty, when I
would go to bed I was often frightened there was something
or someone underneath my bed. I would not have admitted
this fear to anyone at the time, but I knew it was my
business to get into bed without letting either of my
arms or feet hang over the bedside. You see the thing
under the bed was not a creature out of nature, but was
some hideous monster, mysterious, who needed to
be ignored and given no opportunity to swallow me up.
When Matty dove under her bedclothes, she was
enacting a time honoured ritual
There was also a time I needed a nightlight before I
went to sleep, and then once the light went out it
was important there be no shadows.
What I'm getting at is in this chapter about how the
citizens of Cranford have their deep irrational and
uncanny fears aroused Mrs Gaskell has them tell
of dreams, fears, panics, and desires that are
universal and still with us. What is piquant about
her treatment is that usually Victorians who
play with this material, work it up, use it in the
context of a serious ghost story which ultimately
meditates some loss of religious faith (through
popular seances). Gaskell is sharp enough to
present it through an outright absurd charlatan
who we learn is not at all omipotent but inclined
to get sick, and leans on his wife. Signor
Brunoni is a wonderful portrait in its quiet
skepticism.
The panic aroused can be related to crazy mob
fears and xenophobia which lead to pogroms, but
I think the feel here is much closer to that which
we find in Emma. It was in this chapter that
I did begin to find at least one tone in the book
that reminded me of Emma. The fear the
chicken coop will be broken into is pure Mr
Woodhouse; later in the book Matty's anxiety
lest everyone overeat is again Mr Woodhouse.
It's more the sort of delicious shiver children
work up when they go to frightening movies,
except it goes on too long. Gaskell got a
lot of humour out of the characters who were
scared stiff and refused to show it too.
Darkness Lane where Jenny sees a lady
in white made me think of Collins and I
wondered how much we had in Cranford
a quiet parody of the kinds of superstitions
Collins played upon.
Again there seemed to me to be something
curiously original in Gaskell's approach to superstition,
magic, charlatans, fear and the dream world
of the characters mind. Mountebanks really
did come to small towns; doubtless the
people in them were haunted by their
own little understood anxieties and fears too.
Ellen
Reply-to: trollope-l@onelist.com From: John Mize Although I didn't think Gaskell was implying that Peter Jenkyns was a
homosexual, he was using cross dressing to defy his father and to insist that he
would never be the sort of man his father was. He identified with his mother,
while Deborah identified with their father. It seems that he was using the
strongest weapons he could use against his father to show his absolute hatred and
contempt for the man. Maybe he told himself he was simply joking, but I am
convinced that in most cases when someone tells you, "Lighten up. It was just a
joke," he is lying either to himself or to you. Peter all but provoked the
flogging so he would have enough justification to say, "Daddy, you bastard, I'm
through." Fortunately for him, he didn't have to wait until after his father was
dead to tell him off. When he left, Deborah stepped in and became the
replacement son, which was probably what she and her father both wanted, although
neither probably admitted the fact, even to themselves.
Peter reminds me a little of the late Kurt Cobain. Cobain's father tried very
hard to force Kurt to become a real man, although Cobain's definition of a real
man wasn't quite like the Reverend Jenkyns' definition. Cobain's definition
apparently had a lot to do with hunting and sports. Kurt refused to get out of
the truck when his father forced him to go hunting. His father made him play
little league baseball, but Kurt deliberately played poorly. When Kurt became
famous as the lead singer for Nirvana, he occasionally posed for pictures in
drag. I had the impression that his cross dressing. like Peter's, was motivated
by defiance of his father and his father's values.
I enjoyed Gaskell's panic story, and I especially liked the way she is
sympathetic to the women's fears, while, at the same time, laughing at them. The
story is almost a case study of how provincial ignorance and the fear of
outsiders can combine to create imaginary conspiracies. The real fears that we
have are easily seen to be caused by those nasty other people. You just can't
trust them. They are evil, they are not like us, they hate us, and the only thing
they understand is force. Believing that the French are behind a few possible
attempts at burglary in a small English town is little different from believing
that witches killed your cow, that the United States government invented AIDS to
reduce the numbers of homosexuals and minorities in America or that the
confrontations at Ruby Ridge and Waco, Texas were engineered by the International
Jewish Conspiracy.
Subject: [trollope-l] Cranford: Poor Peter
From: "Angela Richardson" Wasn't this story moving? It had all those elements of
pathos the Victorians knew how to manage
but it is not mawkish and Gaskell doesn't wallow.
Thinking about the story - doesn't it seem absurb
that any suspicion could be cast at Deborah who
suddently appears cuddling a baby, I mean, wouldn't
you just think a baby was visiting? It reveals
just how much sex and birth could be hidden, more than
seems credible now.
Angela
Reply-to: trollope-l@onelist.com April 14, 1999
From: John Mize I agree with Ellen that the Cranford stories are very moving. Gaskell
has a very appealing mixture of cynicism and sentimentality. She almost
seems to be a quieter, gentler Thackeray. Both she and Thackeray know that
we are a silly, pretentious species, but they feel sorry for us and for
themselves, even though we probably only deserve scorn. Everyone in the
small world of Cranford is a fool. Gaskell knows that the great world
outside of Cranford is also composed of fools. The bigger, grander fools
might have more money and more power than the Cranford fools. Their follies
might lead to direr consequences, but they aren't different in kind, only
degree.
Re: Cranford: A Kinder, Gentler Thackeray
Just to register that I think John Mize's comment that Gaskell is
a kinder, gentler Thackeray is inspired. It works for a number
of novels for both writers. Perhaps some of the harlequin
illustrations for Vanity Fair could fit into the capitals
of the opening chapters of each of the stories.
Ellen
Reply-to: trollope-l@onelist.com April 18, 1999
From: John Mize When Miss Matty tells Mary Smith not to be completely scared away from
marriage by Miss Pole's warnings, she says that "a little credulity helps
one through life very smoothly." That seems to be Miss Matty's credo in
life. She expects the best from people and is usually not disappointed.
Mary Smith's father, a practical hard-headed realist, expects people to try
to cheat him, but despite his wariness, he is cheated much more often than
is the credulous Miss Matty. When the Town and County Bank fails and Matty
is ruined, her friends band together to save her. Mr. Smith is impressed
despite himself. He reflects that Matty is being rewarded for her good,
innocent life, although later on he adds that a life such as Matty's might
be practicable in Cranford, but it would never do in the great world outside
Cranford.
Gaskell is extremely hard on aristocratic pretensions throughout
Cranford. She prefers the "degraded Lady Glenmire" to the "Honourable Mrs.
Jamieson," even though Lady Glenmire gives up her title to marry the
unashamedly vulgar Mr. Hoggins. At one point Gaskell says that the main
problem with Mr. Hoggins is that he failed to read Lord Chesterfield's
advice to his son while Mr. Hoggins was still young enough to change his
manners accordingly. With all of the references to Samuel Johnson in
Cranford, Gaskell obviously wants us to remember that Johnson considered
Chesterfield's ideal man to have "the morals of a whore and the manners of a
dancing master."
Gaskell also mentions that Mrs. Forrester is descended from the Tyrells,
Walter Tyrell who supposedly murdered William Rufus and James Tyrell who
supposedly murdered Richard III's princely nephews. Both killings are in
dispute, and it is also not completely accepted that the two Tyrells were
actually related. Mrs. Forrester, however, seems to be perfectly happy to
accept the two alleged murderers as ancestors, since the killings were done
long ago by well-born men.
In bringing up the Tyrells, Gaskell also seems to cast doubt on the
legitimacy of hereditary kingship in Great Britain. One famous Tyrell
apparently killed a king, and the other, the two heirs to the throne. Those
weren't the only instances in British history when the succession was
determined by a killing. Edward II, Richard II and Charles I were all
killed by their successors. Queen Victoria herself owed her own reign to
the successful military coup in 1688 which ousted James II.
Trollope once criticized Thackeray as being too hard on the rich and
wellborn, suggesting that, at bottom, Thackeray was a republican. Maybe.
Perhaps Gaskell was also a republican, closet or otherwise. I suspect both
Thackeray and Gaskell would mock any social and political leaders, no matter
how they were chosen. I think that hereditary kingship is a ludicrous
system, but I'm not sure it is more ludicruous than our current system in
the US where we choose people to govern us based on how well those persons
tell us what we want to hear. Of course only those people who have made
their peace with the true owners of the country are able to gather together
enough money to get their message across, a no doubt salutary check on our
apparent democracy.
To Trollope-l
April 18, 1999
Re: Cranford: 'Stopped Payment', 'Friends in Need,' 'Happy Return'
Some scattered thoughts in response to the stories and John
and Jill and Robert:
I wonder if the reason Gaskell seems more republican and
less supportive of hierarchy than Trollope is that she takes
us into a lower echelon of people. She also takes her
heroine someone who is just managing to live on the
gentry level (£250) and who can lose it all by one failure
at a bank. Margaret Oliphant takes her chief characters from
a similar echelon of society below that of the squirearchy
or secure gentry. In The Rector and The Doctor's Family
we meet one Nettie Underwood who is lives on the edge
of bankruptcy, supported by a sum not quite £250 which
she has to stretch to cover her ne-er-do-well sister,
brother-in-law (until he commits a form of suicide --
while drunk he jumps over a bridge) and three children.
If someone really lives on the edge, it gives them real
sympathy for those at the mercy of the capitalist flow
and periodical breakdowns of cash.
What seemed to me most noticeable about Matty
in this story is how she was indeed a heroine. She suddenly
seems to grow in strength, purpose, and stalwart rectitude
when she is told she is bankrupt. She pays for Mr Dobson's
presents to his family; she immediately begins to retrench.
This is part of Gaskell's dislike of pretensions and
phoniness throughout the stories. Matty does not identify
her worth with what she owns or can pretend to. When
Matty is told she can make it if she turns the bottom floor
of her house into a shop, our narrator writes:
Gaskell's use of Mr Dobson's finding out he has nothing
right in front of us is effective. We can feel with him the shock
of a lifetime. Not long ago in nearby Maryland a bank stopped
payment; it got about and we heard of it in Alexandria. The
name of the bank was listed in stores so clerks would not
take the check until the Federal Government stepped in.
Gaskell has a gift for the exquisite turn of phrase to capture
an outward delicate physical manifestation of intense inward
life. Very beautiful her portrait of Lady Glenmire upon
marrying Mr Hoggins:
And what can one say of the happy return of Peter and his
deep goodness and common sense and lack of pretension
and kindness? Yes it's a fairy tale, but done with such
taste one doesn't mind at all. I think the language of
Friends in Need and Happy Return, just that sleight of
hand which signifies something not quite real lets us
know this is the old world people dream of, the one
where people help each other out. Throughout I have
seen a strong vein of nostalgia and peace -- the
characters respond with affectionate trust to one
another. It's true all the main characters are old, but
that helps us believe it. They are tired and weary
and when they are rewarded, we can better accept
it than the unself-conscious fatuous fairy tale which
gives us a young hero and heroine happy for life.
They have suffered, and in this book suffering is
connected directly to repression of one's passions
and the tyranny of hierarchies, distinctions and
their routines. The sympathy for the mountebank
comes from Gaskell's siding against the rigid
life-denying establishment.
When Gaskell gave her narrator the name of Mary Smith, it
seemed to me she lays bare the reality that the name and
character and circumstances of her narrator are all an
afterthought. 'Smith' also seemed to signal to most 19th
century no body. Why this name seemed more common
than Brown or Jones, I don't know, but it seems it was
so regarded.
Ellen Moody
Reply-to: trollope-l@onelist.com April 19, 1999
From: John Mize My edition of Cranford has a copy of an essay, The Last Generation in England,
which Gaskell wrote for an American magazine, Sartain's Union Magazine, in 1849.
She later used almost all the incidents in the essay in Cranford, with one
significant exception. A group of young punks used to amuse themselves by
stopping and whipping ladies who were returning from card parties. Gaskell says
that they whipped the women as one would whip a small child. Does that mean a
spanking rather than an actual whipping with a whip? When the punks went too far
and whipped a woman belonging to a prominent family. the magistrate intervened and
put a stop to the their activities. That episode was obviously a little too rough
for the tone of Cranford, which is probably one of the reasons men, especially
young men, have little place in the novel.
By the way doesn't the bank failure remind you a little of It's a Wonderful
Life? Was Frank Capra a Gaskell fan? The editor of my edition of Cranford
suggests that the bank failure episode, which does not appear in the essay, had
its origin in Emily Bronte's putting her and her sisters' money in railroad stocks
which subsequently went bad. Of course by the time the stocks failed, Charlotte
was receiving royalties from Jane Eyre. She, like Matty, was helped out by her
friends, even though, unlike Matty, she didn't know most of them.
Re: Cranford: 'The Last Generation' & 'The Cage'
I too found the description of the young punks of small
town England 40 years earlier the most memorable element
in this essay. Its hardness is one of the things that
distinguishes it from the stories. Here is one paragraph:
Statistics suggest that the most violent part of our population
are still young men from the ages of 19-29. I remember in some Islamic countries
women who walk in the street without a complete black veil
over them are beaten by streetgangs. When I travelled through Spain and Portugal with a
girlfriend, we found we were harassed by young men (remarks made, gestures,
attempts to pinch) because we were unaccompanied by men.
The paragraph previous to the above includes talk of professional
men and their wives, of doctors, of housekeepers, widows
of stewards. Both together demonstrate the Gaskell
deliberately limited the kind of people she would
present in her Cranford to the gentry. She wanted something
gentle, playful and ultimately idyllic: like Austen, Gaskell tells us
only about the gentry and their doings. When she says there
are no men, she means no men of family. She has left out
the disrespectable poor. I couldn't find my editor's comments
on the above paragraph, but it seemed Watson wanted
to dismiss it because she wants us not to read Cranford as
too idealising or limited.
A little disturbed by the broad comedy of 'The Cage at
Cranford'. I don't know how many people have this story
written 10 years later. It makes fun of the characters in
Cranford and makes one wonder if there is not more
unrecognised mockery in the original Cranford stories
than is usually seen. I hope not. I like the delicacy of
the emotional approach which both keeps its distance
and yet allows us to identify with Matty, her brother,
Peter, and all the characters we meet whose vulnerability
and real sorrows in life allows us to sympathise with
their caste-arrogance as a shield and compensation.
John says Gaskell's based the behavior of Matty's
friends towards her on Charlotte Bronte's experience.
It would not happen now, and the gracious charity
of Matty's people also makes us warm to them.
There is a Latin saying which means he who gives
graciously -- without emphasising, reminding
the recipient, asking for some pay-back or even
telling of it -- gives twice.
Ellen Moody
From: pmaroney@email.unc.edu (Patricia Maroney)
I am enjoying Cranford and the postings on it. The only Gaskell I had read was
Ruth, and this is worlds better. About a world of women: one of the footnotes
in the edition I am reading mentions that it is to some extent a female
Pickwick Papers, and I can see the truth in that. It also reminds me of the
world in Barbara Pym's novels of women in immediate post _WWII England. The
nostalgia, the shortage of men, the importance of place, rank, routine, and all
the minutiae (am I spelling that correctly?) of daily life, the general sense
of trying to cope as best one can but an occasional sense of sadness that not
all of life's possibilities are being lived here.
April 26, 1999
Reply-to: trollope-l@onelist.com From: "Robert J Wright" Cranford is about women. Women in a closed society of other women. It is
about how women act without the influence of men, knowing each other so well
that the works of normal intercourse are so well oiled that only an outside
influence can disturb their everyday lives which in every degree revolve
around each other.
I have never read a book which is so exclusively about women and by a woman.
No other book seems so devoid of male characters. The doctor is admired as
a good doctor (for a man) but his masculine and coarse words and ways
disturb the even flow of social contact. Most of the male characters are
quite incidental to the plot, and in any event are often threatening or
undesirable.
Even for one (like me) who works in an almost exclusively feminine
environment, and has more reason that most me to be regarded as an honorary
woman and to understand what so many men find baffling, Cranford tells me a
lot about women, not only in the time it was written but even today.
Are these women happy in each other's company as spinsters? Ostensibly yes.
Take for example this passage (p96):
So men get a pretty bad press. You can't trust 'em. If they're not
robbers, they shorten Preference to Pref (cards are like a religion - that
would be like calling Christ Chris, to you and me!), or they pretend to be
Italian conjurers and can't even manage a horse.
But underneath, all these women say one thing and think quite another. Only
in Miss Matty's most unguarded moments with her young friend would she
admite to having wished she had been married. A poignant moment, as her
eyes fill with tears for what might have been. What might have been, that
is, if she had been strong and had followed her own desires and had ignored
the pressure of men who dominated the world as it then was and instructed
women what to think, how to act, and how to decide. Once our Signor became
vulnerable, all the invisible fears were forgotten and he became a target
for mothering, for charity, or to fill time. The Archdeacon was more a
target for matrimony than a prelate.
One feels Cranford could have been more of a book had some cad like Crosbie
turned up on the scene, and disturbed what is a soporific, but hugely
enjoyable read. Trollope would not have treated these characters with such
understanding and love. I suspect also the narrator would have been fleshed
out and played much more of a part had the book been by Wilkie Collins.
As a man, I did not feel badly for my sex. Oh no, this is not a
misogynistic read. We can see below the veneer and read the minds of the
women. How sad they have so much time to kill, so little excitement, so
many economies to make. But how much I admired the fact they felt so
comfortable with each other, they rarely argued, they agreed in public (even
if in private they felt quite a different way). Times past, but although we
might not mourn what women endured in those days, there were many things
which were desirable and right about society in England in those days, and
we have no reason now to be sniffy about what was deficient back then.
Robert J Wright
RE: Men & Women in Cranford
In response to Robert,
While I agree that women dominate this series of stories, and the
atmosphere has a delicacy of intuition and concern with nuances
that we identify as feminine, in each story
a man was brought in to make a story. The women don't have stories without men.
That is, Gaskell cannot write a story about women in and of themselves as apart from men.
Perhaps the action of life as she saw it revolved around men?
Does it still today?
The first story depends upon Captain Brown. We are told he is
'a tame man, about the house' (Oxford Cranford, ed PGWatson),
but he has all the signs of the species male: 'he spoke in a voice
too large for the room' (p. 5). His death precipitates a crisis from which
his daughter is saved by the appearance of Major Gordon. In the
second story we given the poignant story of how Miss Matty didn't
marry Mr Holbrook and his death counterpointed with her allowing
her servant to have a sexual life. Old letters tells of a courting
couple and their first years of marriage (children are born to
Matty's mother). The next story brings us Peter. I agree
'Visiting' lacks males, but the next brings the mountebank. When
Miss Matty goes bankrupt, her kindness to a bankrupt old man is
important because he is a man; Mary Smith's uncle helps her;
Peter saves her.
In other words, Gaskell tried to but, except when delineating
women visiting one another (daily life), couldn't imagine a story
for women without men. Even that visiting introduces Lady
Glenmire and the point about her is she marries a coarse
but good man, Mr Hoggins, showing the importance
of earthy male presences.
Still, men are in this book most frequently seen as a
necessary evil. They are often characterised as nuisances.
They are described as speaking in loud voices; they slam doors.
There was a line somewhere in the book where one lady tells another she is
going to be married, and the first replies something to the effect, Why?
now you will have such noise in the house. And untidiness. Men
also make women pregnant (remember Miss Jenkyns upbraiding
Thomas). I don't know that Gaskell's women in _Cranford_ are
that happy in one another's company since there is a great distance
between what they really feel and what they profess to feel, and
they are in endless competition with one another over their status and
manners; however, men are still seen as useful because they provide
money, home, security, prestige. For all but young housemaids and sexy
Scots ladies, they are a disruptive necessary evil.
How far is this the result of the de-sexing of these women.
The way people used to see these stories was as a reflection
of the way single spinster ladies living on small incomes in
Victorian England really felt. It would be assumed they were virgins
and not sexually awakened. But were they? Think of Anne Lister.
At least not all spinsters were de-sexed. Trollope manages
to suggest his spinster aunts have an appreciation of what the
female heroines want out of marriage sexually.
Yet it could be true that a certain group of women were kept
innocent -- or ignorant and repressed during the day (what
they dreamed of at night no one can know). I had aunts who
would swear women didn't like sex until married and then
unless the husband worked at it not much after marriage
either. (The aunts in question were born in the early
1920s). These women assumed women didn't have sexual
feeling until it was aroused by men; no marriage, no arousal,
for after all, what 'good' middle class women would have
sex without marriage.
At any rate some of the sweetness of the atmosphere is due
to the lack of sexual aggression or passion we feel in these
women. Matty looks back with sweet nostalgia at what she
missed and longs for tender affection. She has no urge to
copulate. At the story's close, she is safe with her brother,
who is also unmarried.
There is nothing misogynistic
here. The men are all good, kind, sweet, and mean well.
Not a brute among them. Even the father who flogs Peter
does it for his own good, feels remorse, and was no
tyrant before that or afterwards.
I see the novel as a celebration of an older world of bonds,
of village life and family networks, which is undercut or
darkened by an attention to the repression and snobbery
such a static hierarchy entails. I liked it as a retreat
which was not fatuous but astringent. I am glad we read it. New
Grub Street and Cranford are the best
non-Trollope books we have chosen thus far.
Now this may be my taste for real sensitivity as part of one's psychological makeup.
NB: I didn't notice any references to teeth
in Cranford. In New Grub Street we
hear about the difficulties of maintaining
clean underwear for a lady living on her
husband's tiny income in an apartment
in London. But nothing on teeth. I must
keep a look-out in Lady Audley's Secret.
Cheers,
From: John Mize
Subject: The Coming Cranford Read
Subject: [trollope-l] Trol: Cranford: The Amazons
Ellen
Subject: [trollope-l] Trol: Cranford: Mr. Holbrook
Subject: [trollope-l] Cousin Phillis -- the very wicked French influence
From time to time on the VictorianFiction list we have
noted the attitudes of characters regarding the
reading of French novels. It tends to denote loose
morals, and even if the person reading those dreadful
French novels is totally innocent, their reputation
can be virtually ruined should their reading tastes be
discovered. Now, apparently one cannot travel to
France either and hope to return to this small village
with reputation intact. :-)
zsa1@cornell.edu
Subject: [trollope-l] Some questions on Cranford
Herzlyia, Israel
mpoller@netvision.net.il
Subject: [trollope-l] Gaskell's Cranford: Visiting
Subject: [trollope-l] Cranford: Lady Glenmire and Sir Larry
from work in Reading, Berks UK
Subject: [trollope-l] Trol: Cranford: Peter and the Panic
- missing the farewell at Liverpool
- the shawl arriving too late
Subject: Cranford: The Fools of Cranford
Subject: [trollope-l] Trol: Cranford: A Little Credulity Goes a Long Way
'I could see it was rather a shock to her; not on
account of any loss of personal gentility involved,
but only becuase she distrusted her own powers
of action in a new line of life, and would timidly
have preferred a little more privation to any
exertion for which she feared she was unfitted'
(Oxford Crandford, ed EPWatson, p 142).
her face seeme to ahve alsmot something of the
flush of youth in it; her lips looked redder, and more
trembling full than in their old compressed state, and
her eyes dwelt on all things with a lingering light,
as if she was learning to love Cranford and its
belongings . . . (p. 117)
Subject: [trollope-l] Trol: Cranford: The Last Generation in England
'There were the usual respectable and disrespectable
poor; and hanging on the outskirts of society were a
set of young men, ready for mischief and brutality,
and every now and then dropping off the pit's brink
into crime. The habits of this class (about forty
years ago) were much such as those of the Mohawks
a century before. They would stop ladies retrning
from the card-parties, which were the staple gaiety
of the place, and who were only attended by a maid-
servant bearing a lantern, and whip them; literally
whip them as you whip a little child; until administering
such chastisement to a good, precise old lady of
high family, 'my brother, the magistrate', came forward
and put down such proceedings with a high hand'
(Oxford Cranford, ed PGWatson, pp. 162-63).
Subject: [trollope-l] Women
"Well Miss Matty! men will be men. Every mother's son of them wishes to be
Samson and Solomon rolled into one - too strong ever to be beaten or
discomfited - too wise ever to be outwitted. If you will notice, they have
always foreseen events, though they never tell one for one's warning before
the events happen; my father was a man, and I know the sex pretty well."
Ellen
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