Textual, Contextual, and Ideological Contradictions in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford

Abstract

TEXTUAL, CONTEXTUAL, AND IDEOLOGICAL CONTRADICTIONS IN ELIZABETH GASKELL’S CRANFORD MARGARET REEVES University of Toronto “InTHE FIRST PLACE,” the narrative of Cranford begins, “Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears. ... [W]hatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford.” 1 Thus Elizabeth Gaskell begins the collection of stories that we know as Cranford, stories of a group of older, single women whose independence and contentment is grounded in female solidarity and community. Gaskell’s portrayal of these women seems to participate in a valorization of spinsterhood and female friendship that many critics read as a kind of female Utopia. I question, however, whether such readings are supported by the text in its entirety, for these “disappearing gentlemen” also have a penchant for reappearing at ideologically crucial moments in the narrative. One of the more interesting curiosities about Cranford is the way in which this relatively short collection of stories (short, that is, by nineteenth-century novelistic standards), about a seemingly innocuous collection of women, lends itself to some widely disparate and politically charged readings. Those who read Cranford as a female Utopia tend to celebrate, in essentialist terms, its triumph of the female over the male. Rowena Fowler, for example, cele­ brates this work as “a society of female survivors” (717) in which men are banished to the margins (719). Similarly, Barbara Weiss ranks Cranford as a “stable, traditional, nurturing, and feminine community, as opposed to the masculine world of the neighboring city” (283), and Nina Auerbach sug­ gests that Cranford’s durable, welcoming, co-operative female community defeats the patriarchal “warrior world that proclaims itself the real one” (87). Directly opposed to these feminist celebrations of a superior, female self-sufficiency are the negative interpretations of Martin Dodsworth, who reads Cranford as “an elegy on the insufficiency of the female” trying to live in a world without men (139), and Peter Keating, who argues that “much of the pathos of Cranford derives from the numerous defeats the Amazons suf­ fer” (21). Both Dodsworth’s and Keating’s pejorative comments are aimed not so much at the gender of these characters as women, but at their status English St u d ie s in Ca n a d a , 23, 4, Dec. 1997 as spinsters, and especially the “sterility of life that spinsterhood in Cran­ ford would represent” (Keating 23). An abhorrence of aged spinsterhood also informs Françoise Basch’s analysis of this “stifling sisterhood of ... re­ spectable old maids” (179). In contrast, Coral Lansbury evaluates Gaskell’s portrayal of older single women not in negative but in positive terms and, like Fowler, considers Cranford a form of Utopian fiction; but she, too, con­ demns the work for its “clumsy narrative methods,” suggesting that it figures as a “cracked touchstone” for Gaskell’s literary abilities (7). Yet it is the narrative style of this text that rates praise from Hilary Schor, who reads Cranford “as a woman writer’s experiment with narrative ... and a serious critique of the role of literature in shaping female readers” (87). Not only is there no critical consensus on this text, but critics who are poles apart in ideological terms have no difficulty finding support in the text for their respective political positions. While Cranford certainly lends itself to radically divergent interpretations, these contradictory responses may be informed by textual, contextual, and ideological contradictions that reveal themselves as determinate contradic­ tions inscribed in the text itself. This analysis offers, in Pierre Macherey’s terms, a “symptomatic” reading of Cranford in order to identify those “con­ tradictions and absences [that] deform the text and reveal the repressed presence of those ideological materials which are transformed in the labour of literary production” (Wall viii). Specifically, I will trace the structural determinations of these contradictions by examining the material conditions of Cranford’s production, relying on the materialist critical categories de­ fined by Terry Eagleton in Criticism and Ideology (44-63). In the case of Cranford, its initial mode of production is crucial to a materialist analysis, because it...