Disavowal, Defence and Voyeurism in the Narration of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cousin Phillis.

Abstract

Although Elizabeth Gaskell's novella Cousin Phillis purports to be a text about a woman, it is in essence a text about men and male fantasies of the female with the heroine's own body and discourse curiously remaining in the background in favour of those of the text's male characters, including the narrator's. What is more, Gaskell's heroine functions not only as an object of exchange within men's triangulated homosocial practices, but also as a pretext for the narrator's homoerotic attraction to the text's male figures, which he attempts to disavow via his seeming interest in the objectified, though daunting, figure of Phillis. Gaskell's employment of a chameleonic male narrator, who retrospectively oscillates between a homodiegetic and autodiegetic mode of narration triggers a duplicitous game of gazes, appearances and inter-subjective identifications, through which Gaskell not only interrogates Victorian gender roles and encoding, but also exposes gender to be a subject position, a shaky and unstable category.