"A Silent Partner Long Enough": Phelps Rewrites Gaskell's North and South

Abstract

"A SILENT PARTNER LONG ENOUGH": PHELPS REWRITES GASKELL'S NORTH AND SOUTH Jill Bergman University of Montana Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's 1871 labor novel, The Silent Partner, met with mixed reviews from the beginning. A review in Literary World praised the novel in its day for its "superior realism," but the New York Times criticized it for its "slight story" and its "extremely unsatisfactory and discouraging conclusion."1 The mixed reviews have continued as modern scholars seek to assess literary works on ideological as well as aesthetic grounds. Specifically, recent reception of The Silent Partner has found it difficult to reconcile the novel's pro-labor, anti-capitalist rhetoric with the scene in which protagonist and reformer, Perley Kelso, uses her sway with the mill workers to persuade them to accept reduced wages rather than going on strike. In their afterword to the 1983 edition of the novel, Florence Howe and Mari Jo Buhle credit Phelps with trying to cross the "rigid boundaries of social class," yet they identify as "problematic " "Perley's ability to foreclose [rather than support] the strike near the novel's end." They see this moment as "a sign of the limited political vision of the young novelist."2 Judith Fetterley in 1986 noted inconsistencies in the novel. She convincingly argues that although Phelps's protagonist comes to identify with laborers due to their shared status as outsiders to language, this same protagonist shifts her position in the strike scene to side with the mill owners, "advocating her own silence" and effectively silencing the workers .3 Amy Schräger Lang in 1994 offered an explanation for the novel's incongruities, asserting that the "politics of representation, the imperatives of the novel form, and the reformist intent of the author require radically different interpretive frames."4 In short, scholars seem agreed that the novel is of at least two minds, and have tried to make sense of that. Nina Baym's introduction to Phelps's spiritualist novels may offer an explanation for this reception. Discussing Phelps's life and work, Baym places her among her late-nineteenth-century writing contemporaries and points to the "[nostalgia] for antebellum ideals of Christian domesticity and homogeneous community life" that 148¡ill Bergman caused these women writers to struggle "to situate women like themselves —white, Anglo, genteel, idealistic, socially conscious—in a world constantly outrunning their efforts to grasp it." This struggle, and the work arising from it, says Baym, "has been especially difficult for contemporary critics to appreciate on its own terms."5 We can better appreciate The Silent Partner "on its own terms" by placing its "struggle to situate women" within its transatlantic literary context. Scholars to date have overlooked the striking similarity between Phelps's novel and Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 novel, North and South; nevertheless, Phelps's novel borrows directly from Gaskell's in its basic plot, as well as in specific scenes—notably, the troubling strike scene.6 If we assume an intentional borrowing (and indeed I do not see how we cannot), an examination of the ways Phelps rewrites Gaskell illuminates her goals in the novel and explains her treatment (or neglect) of class tensions. In responding to and rewriting Gaskell's novel, specifically her treatment of a woman's acceptable role in business and marriage, Phelps responds to a previous generation of women writers, the generation of her own mother, author Elizabeth Wooster Stuart Phelps (1815-1852), writing at roughly the same time as Gaskell. In North and South, Gaskell ultimately proposes the model of a silent partnership for women in business via marriage, a model Phelps explicitly rejects. By rewriting this Victorian novel, Phelps challenges what she judges to be outdated expectations for women, expectations that she encountered in her youth and grappled with in much of her work. Let me begin by highlighting some of the striking similarities between these two novels: In North and South, protagonist Margaret Hale—a gentleman's daughter who has recently relocated to the industrial town of Milton—has taken a keen interest in the labor tensions in the town. She befriends one of the mill workers and his daughter, who is ill due to her work...