Read Online Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell - Free Book Online Page B

Wives and Daughters as a proving ground for Roger Hamley (the epitome of the vital Englishman) suggests the way in which the novel participates in, rather than simply reflects, cultural values about race and nation. And yet the fact that the novel points in its concluding moments toward a kind of hybridity for the future generations is fascinating: The recognized heir of the Hamley estate is part English and part French, the son of landed gentry and a common servant. In this provisional way Wives and Daughters perhaps suggests that (an albeit limited concept of) hybridity, as a social as well as a scientific concept, is England’s future and perhaps best hope.
     
    In a novel as long and as minute in the detailing of everyday life as Wives and Daughters is, it is perhaps niggling to turn our attention to what is not in the novel. And yet what is absent in a novel that calls itself an “every-day story” is itself fascinating, so by way of closing let us consider what Gaskell excludes from the everyday First, there is a decided absence of the depiction of labor in the novel, made all the more glaring because of the number of references to work. So, for instance, Dr. Gibson is often said to be away from home to attend to a patient, but the narrative never follows him to a bedside. Likewise, although we hear a great deal about the “draining works” that Squire Hamley has had to postpone for lack of funds, the reader is never privy to the details of the project even when the work begins again. Indeed, the one laborer (Old Silas) who speaks in the novel is on his deathbed. In a novel about the “everyday,” the lack not only of details but of scenes of labor seems a significant omission and makes the reader question its purport. Although Gaskell is not alone among nineteenth-century novelists in not representing the everyday details of work, another way of understanding the omission is through the lens of the novel’s title, which avows that its subject is the feminine sphere: Perhaps Gaskell wishes to shine light on the work of wives and daughters, and so highlights the private sphere by deliberately avoiding the details of the masculine public sphere of work. Indeed, the very best moments in the novel in which men play a part are scenes of leisure, especially (as the Cornhill editor draws our attention to) the scene of tobacco smoking at the end of chapter 2 3 . Here the conversational rhythms of speech and the import of this masculine ritual are memorably drawn.
    The second notable absence in Wives and Daughters is the absence of institutional religion. None of the characters are ever shown attending church on a Sunday, and there is no clergyman among the otherwise large stock of Hollingford characters. When Dr. and Mrs. Gibson are married, the clergyman is implied but not mentioned in the scene; only Old Silas on his deathbed mentions a clergyman who has been to see him—“ ‘Parson’s been here; but I did na tell him. He’s all for the earl’s folk, and he’d not ha’ heeded. It’s the earl as put him into his church, I reckon’ ” (p. 334)—but otherwise clergymen do not enter into the narrative. The absence of the establishment church (the Church of England) in the portrayal seems pointed, for the ritual of churchgoing would have been a mainstay of country life. Uglow suggests that Gaskell’s faith was “so integral to her life that she rarely writes about it”—but this does not quite account for the choice, which would have been contrary to her narrative purpose, to eliminate this everyday feature from the scene (Uglow, p. 451). Gaskell, who was raised as a Unitarian and chose to marry a Unitarian minister, belonged to what was considered a dissenting sect—that is, a sect that had separated from the national church (the Church of England) over doctrinal differences. Unitarianism was an open religion that only asked of its members that they believe in the one God and the divine mission of Jesus.