Mothers of Empire in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford

Abstract

MOTHERS OF EMPIRE IN ELIZABETH GASKELL’S CRANFORD JULIE M. FENWICK University of Ottawa E l i z a b e t h GASKELL’S Cranford depicts the undramatic life of the “genteel” portion of society in a small English country town during the late 1830s and early 1840s. This society is composed mostly of widows and maiden ladies of modest means, whose greatest dissipation is a decorous round of tea and card parties, and among whose principal concerns is the economy of their domestic arrangements. I propose that, despite its narrow focus, the story is in part concerned with the impact of nineteenth-century British imperialism upon English society, particularly on English women, and that it suggests the pervasiveness of this impact by demonstrating that even the tiny world of insular Cranford cannot escape its repercussions. Cranford's examination of imperialism is approached from a perspective that focusses not on the exploits of men who participate in imperial adventures as soldiers, sailors, administrators, or merchants, but upon the women who love them: sisters, wives and potential wives, and, above all, mothers. These women pay a heavy price for the expansion of British trade through military imperialism: some women remain single because the men they would other­ wise have married are sent half a world away, while those who follow their husbands abroad to unhealthy climates often become invalids. But the most crushing loss to these women is the loss of their children. If they join their men abroad they risk losing their babies to strange diseases in alien lands; if they remain in England they may be doomed by a shortage of “suitable” mates to a life of spinsterhood that precludes motherhood; or mothers may be separated for half a lifetime from dearly loved sons who spend their ca­ reers advancing the British empire. Thus women’s investment in maternity and men’s pursuit of the wealth brought by military imperialism are treated in Cranford as opposed activities. And Cranford makes it very clear that the material rewards of imperial trade are of far less importance than the values associated with “mother-love.” The two Jenkyns sisters are representative of what the nineteenth cen­ tury perceived as a demographic group of “surplus” middle-class women, condemned to a life of spinsterhood because of a lack of possible mates. I suggest that, in Cranford, they are “surplus” because many of their potential English Stu d ie s in C a n a d a , 23, 4, Dec. 1997 husbands have left England to serve the empire. It is significant that the shortage of men in Cranford is class-specific: “If gentlemen were scarce, and almost unheard of in the ‘genteel society’ of Cranford ... handsome young men ... abounded in the lower classes” (24). When the youthful Miss Matty tried to circumvent this shortage of gentlemen by looking to the class imme­ diately below hers for a husband, her father and sister snobbishly discouraged the match. Miss Matty’s former suitor, Mr. Holbrook, is a proud member of the yeomanry who refuses to adopt the manners and pretensions of the middle class, although his wealth and respectability would certainly permit him to do so. Therefore, he is an “unsuitable” husband for a daughter of the vicar; the “ladies” of Cranford must marry “gentlemen” of their own class.1 And why are “gentlemen” rare in Cranford? It was not always so. Gaskell uses the image of the red umbrella to point out the comparatively recent vanishing of the middle-class male population. Once “held by a strong fa­ ther over a troop of little ones,” the “magnificent family red silk umbrella” can now barely be carried by “the poor little lady — the survivor of all” her once numerous family (2). The fathers of middle-class families have left Cranford, for “what could [gentlemen] do if they were there?” If a gen­ tleman does settle in Cranford, he soon “disappears. ... [H]e is accounted for by being with his regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble” (1). The source of middle-class wealth in the nineteenth century is, directly or indi­ rectly...