British Women Writers and the Short Story, 1850-1930

Reclaiming Social Space

K. Krueger

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137359230
• eBook ISBN: 9781137359247
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book addresses a critically neglected genre used by women writers from Gaskell to Woolf to complicate Victorian and modernist notions of gender and social space. Their innovative short stories ask Britons to reconsider where women could live, how they could be identified, and whether they could be contained.

1

Spinsters Re-Drawing Rooms in Gaskell’s Cranford

I pique myself on knowing by sight, and by name, almost every man and boy in our parish, from eight years old to eighty – I cannot say quite so much for the women. They – the elder of them at least – are more within doors, more hidden. One does not meet them in the fields and highways; their duties are close housekeepers, and live under cover.

(Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village)¹

In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women . . . For keeping the trim gardens full of choice flowers without a weed to speck them; for frightening away little boys who look wistfully at the said flowers through the railings; for rushing out at the geese that occasionally venture in to the gardens if the gates are left open . . . for kindness (somewhat dictatorial) to the poor, and real tender good offices to each other whenever they are in distress, the ladies of Cranford are quite sufficient. ‘A man,’ as one of them observed to me once, ‘is so in the way in the house!’

(Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘Our Society at Cranford’)²

The labels of ‘spinster’ and ‘old maid’, in Victorian rhetoric, indicated much more than years and marital status. To fail to marry was to be relegated to an almost-invisible social position, to face the trials of often-straitened economic circumstances, and to be excluded from what was increasingly seen as woman’s sole purpose: providing domestic comfort to others.³ This chapter considers how Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford series, published in Household Words from December 1851 to May 1853, takes up the cause of the spinster, welcoming mid-Victorian readers into untraditional homes that had heretofore been barred from view. Gaskell used the venue of Charles Dickens’ Household Words, a magazine that capitalized on popular tropes of normative middle-class domesticity, to offer a more inclusive view of the inhabitants and the function of the drawing room and the parlor. The Cranford stories can be understood as reformist simply by virtue of Gaskell’s placement of unmarried old women at the center of the Victorian domestic interior and her attention to this location as a site of story. Because these women within their homes are the subject of her narrative, when Gaskell accesses these ‘under cover’ stories, she radically shifts the narrative terrain exemplified by her literary predecessor Mary Russell Mitford, whose sketches of village life focus on public arenas that marginalize elderly women. At a time when the Victorian household was being redefined through the celebration of separate spheres by the burgeoning middle class – despite a drastic increase of unmarried women – Gaskell’s sympathetic portrayal of an alternate vision of the home invites readers to reassess dominant definitions of that space. In Cranford, the home is neither marginal nor is it an exclusive sphere that admits only heterosexual familial relations and subjects. It is an inclusive environment that makes room for the familiar negotiations of the domestic world by the often-ignored and otherwise-unseen spinster.

Cranford builds this sense of inclusiveness over the course of the short story series, gradually accumulating revelations that offer insights into the complicated lives of the women of Cranford that, consequently, deepen the reader’s connection to such characters. Gaskell first dismantles common preconceptions regarding literary depictions of the village and the spinster by departing from the sketch tradition. Instead, Gaskell redeploys such tropes in a different genre: her short stories emphasize the way in which popular fixation on drawing-room forms and ceremonies that seem to display eccentricity may prevent observers from appreciating moments in which elderly women transgress such strictures when they respond to crises. Domestic spaces like the parlor successfully support economic practices while retaining their symbolic function as the central location of the family unit. In Cranford, this unit is simply more inclusive. The arc of the series operates on several levels: it introduces the spinster as a dynamic protagonist and opens up her domestic interior to narrative relevance; it uses a narrator to bridge presumed social differences in order to invite the Victorian reader to sympathize with these often-ignored characters; and it illustrates the way in which the spaces of the Victorian home can be adapted to serve a variety of emotional and practical needs. Gaskell harnesses the unique generic elements of the short story series, a genre in formation during the mid-Victorian period, to make such critiques possible.

In order to understand how Gaskell creates such a revisionary narrative, one must first grasp the social, symbolic, and literary constructions Gaskell so effectively revises. One of the most pervasive social and architectural representations of home was the hearth. The sheer volume of fiction and nonfiction featuring the family gathered around the hearth became part of what Mary Poovey calls the ‘symbolic economy’ of the mid-Victorian period: these images, which depicted middle-class family life, also played a part in defining and consolidating it.⁴ Charles Dickens was one of the period’s most popular purveyors of these images of domestic bliss. His works of fiction became synonymous with the ‘religion’ of home, and he repeatedly contrasted scenes of warmth, snugness, and intimacy of the family gathered at the fireside with the impersonality, filth, and confusion of the world outside.⁵ In the 1850 inaugural edition of Household Words, Dickens defined his periodical as a figurative member of the family. His re-organization of the family fireside to include periodical reading helped Household Words reach a burgeoning middle-class audience. From the relative safety and contentment of the domestic interior, families could peruse entertaining and informative literature that shared their core family values.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford stories, published as a series in Household Words, use the generic flexibility permitted by periodical literature to draw readers into a different kind of narrative. The Cranford series, rather than distancing the unmarried or the poor, provided them pride of place at the center of the narrative through her use of the short story series’ attention to alternate structures and subjects of story, shifting the ways that Victorians may have begun to define the limits of the Victorian household and encouraging such readers to identify with rather than simply mock or pity them. Because Dickens marketed Household Words as a part of the normative symbolic economy of middle-class domesticity, it became an ideal avenue for authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell to influence that audience.

Gaskell took advantage of the flexibility of periodical publishing conventions to revise and update different generic conventions such as the humorous observation of the literary sketch, the direct address of letter-writing, and the episodic nature of serial publication to create a unique short fiction series. Gaskell’s short story series consequently demonstrates the coalescence of ‘several networks of partial resemblances’, a phrase which Jean-Marie Schaeffer has used to describe the formation of a genre from a variety of literary influences.⁶ Cranford’s formal characteristics exemplify how the short story as an emergent nineteenth-century genre was begotten from diverse written traditions in the periodical press. Gaskell employs the discursive space created by editor Charles Dickens to transform Household Words’ implicit construction – and Victorian readers’ subsequent understanding – of the domestic interior, the short story, and the social marginality of the spinster.

Gaskell’s Cranford series was seen as the successor of the literary tradition of the village sketch, but her narrative shifts dramatically away from the picturesque landscape of the village to focus, instead, on the picturesque women who live in it. Rather than becoming a waxen image of Mary Russell Mitford’s rustic village, Gaskell instead breathes new life into representations of the diversity of that village life and the Victorian home within it. Gaskell updates the literary sketch to create a series of stories that revolve around the plotted dramas of single women in their previously unglimpsed interiors. Gaskell pilfers these characters, the old maids who are subjects of either derision or erasure in Mitford’s sketches, and rewrites them as dynamic, changing women. Although her predecessors stopped at the doorstep of the provincial home, affirming dichotomies of belonging and unbelonging by doing so, Gaskell not only crosses the threshold, but takes up residence with these women, reversing these observational bounds and developing these characters through moments of change.

Moreover, Gaskell’s mid-century Cranford stories undercut prevalent generic expectations regarding representations of village life because the content and form of her stories departed from the sketch tradition. While Gaskell emphasizes interiors through short stories which are structurally dependent upon critical moments of change, earlier writers like Mitford relied upon the sketch to depict village life as largely public, picturesque, and unchanging. These earlier short literary pieces, which reflected regional manners, customs, and habits, began to appear in newspapers and magazines in the early 1800s.⁷ The literary sketch attempts to enact the physical, artistic process of sketching by representing a coherent and cohesive scene through language rather than paint. Consequently, it displaces plot by foregrounding other fictional elements such as character or spectacle as the definitive focus of the work.⁸ Such sketches are primarily concerned with capturing the quality of these scenes through detailed and sometimes humorous description, rather than advancing a plot that hinges upon development and change in character and circumstance. The sketch is a static form because the narrator simply observes what or who is already there. Suzanne Ferguson argues that British local color sketch writers such as Mitford combine a didactic function with an anthropological approach: the fiction foregrounds a cultural group in order to document it before it disappears.⁹ Mary Russell Mitford’s sketch series Our Village (1824–1832) takes the reader with her on innumerable walks and rambles in the countryside, minutely observing and describing the life around her. Mitford’s primary narrative mode is one of empowered observation – she is a privileged, knowledgeable translator of who and what she sees. Elizabeth Helsinger rightly observes that that this world is one which ‘forecloses questions’; where ‘everyone has a place – and to know one’s place (and everyone else’s) is both desirable and attainable’.¹⁰ This is the result of its reliance on the generic focus of the sketch – all else serves the narrator’s desire to pin down, to observe and collect in a taxonomic narrative system. The purpose of such works is to fixate, not to follow subjects of observation.

Mitford’s static narrative system ratifies the social and spatial blindnesses of her narrator. Raymond Williams explains that a community becomes knowable not simply by identifying ‘what there is to be known’, but the knowable is also a function of what subjects ‘desire or need to know’, so what is seen is not only the reality of the rural community, but is shaped by the ‘observer’s position in and towards it’.¹¹ Though Mitford asserts her authority by offering a sense of the village as a relatively unchanging community, she also acknowledges certain boundaries that, as an anthropological observer, she does not cross. Although Mitford claims that she knows ‘by sight, and by name, almost every man and boy in the parish’, elder women ‘within doors’ are ‘more hidden;’ they live ‘under cover’.¹² Despite her claim to comprehensive knowledge, Mitford’s perception of village life is explicitly limited to the public (which she defines as masculine) sphere. Women who live and work predominately inside their homes and who are uninvolved in public displays of courtship fall completely out of view and just beyond the reach of narrative relevance.¹³ Franco Moretti, in his own mapping of the social geography of Our Village, notes that such a survey hinges upon choice: one chooses a unit worth mapping. When he charts Mitford’s walks, he reveals a kind of circular pattern of movement, always returning to the center – but always within a public outdoor space. No one advances anywhere either in terms of plot, character development, or social space – the narrator simply canvasses outlying areas and then returns to report her findings. He similarly observes the spatial division of labor in Mitford’s village (the shops and services which are primarily performed by men, which once again are performed in a public arena).

Such a limited purview has ramifications for the interpretation of the inheritor of this sketch tradition: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford series, published twenty years after the conclusion of Mitford’s series.¹⁴ Moretti compares the two, claiming that while Mitford’s narrative charts a variety of spaces, Gaskell’s Cranford is presented as ‘a place under siege, where no one dares to go anywhere;’ because there is little attention given to movement through public space or from the village to larger neighboring towns, he claims that Gaskell ‘literally hibernate[s] her village’. For Moretti, while Mitford’s work ‘explodes’, Cranford is ‘Madame Tussaud’s idea of a village story’.¹⁵ However, Moretti’s ‘anywhere’ indicates the presumption that only certain locations have narrative and spatial relevance. If Moretti’s maps hinge upon his charting of perceptions of space, how then can we dismiss the spaces that remain unacknowledged by both Mitford and Moretti?

Domestic architecture is just as clearly inscribed by movement and occupation as village streets and farmers’ pastures, but such locations are simply blocked by walls from sight and therefore (in the eyes of Mitford and Moretti) from significance. Cranford uses the rooms of the Victorian house to dramatize the internal and external changes that characters experience: as the meanings of the spaces they occupy shift in tandem with their behaviors, so too do their perceptions of themselves and the world around them. Such crises occur in domestic spaces that presumably dictate feminine behaviors, and yet the spinsters of Cranford consistently redefine the social and symbolic functions of those rooms based upon their actions. In doing so, these characters rewrite assumptions about domestic femininity, simultaneously altering readers’ views of spinsters and their definition of the familial home.

When narrator Mary Smith, a young woman acquainted with the Jenkyns sisters, visits the elderly women of Cranford, she at first reiterates the biases of the outsider as the women seem to fulfill all humorous expectations of their eccentricity and isolation. However, the stories also account her observation of numerous moments of crisis that play out in Cranfordian homes. These crises are the turning point in short stories wherein characters’ presumably familiar world shifts due to some internal or external catalyst. This is what distinguishes Gaskell’s stories from Mitford’s sketches. ‘Fixing’ character and place, pinning Cranfordians down, is exactly what is not possible in Gaskell’s Cranford short story series. While they may at first be seemingly fixed, the characters actually shift perceptions (both their own and others’ notions of them) when they actively reframe the social meanings of the spaces they occupy during moments of crisis.

The revision of the drawing room and parlor in moments of flux produces narrative momentum – the drive toward a conclusion that Edgar Allan Poe so famously defined as the single effect that constitutes the short story’s generic idiosyncrasy. This single effect is not just synonymous with the climax of the plot; more importantly, it is the ‘undercurrent of significance’, the ‘dominant impression made on the reader’. This is also one of the essential developments of the short story as a genre separate from the sketch in the nineteenth century: once characters are endowed with minds, they are ‘subject to the inner complexities that experience imposes. They undergo internal changes as they are affected by the choices they make and by what happens to them.’¹⁶

The short story series combines the single effect of individual short stories with those of narrative expansion and elaboration that one would expect of sustained narratives such as the novel. The result is a hybrid form that relies upon a succession of minute revelations that gradually develop an overarching pattern of experience that opens up over the course of numerous stories. Michael Trussler explains that the short story is based upon the intermittent; it does not deal with cumulatives, and is instead a genre fascinated with moments that refuse the explanatory function of viewing events in a series.¹⁷ The short story series, unlike the stand-alone story, does offer that larger contextual pattern, but it is a pattern of a particular sort. B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Feminine Occupations
• 1 Spinsters Re-Drawing Rooms in Gaskell’s Cranford
• 2 Braddon, Broughton, and Specters of Social Critique
• 3 Possessing London: The Yellow Book’s Women Writers
• 4 Baynton and Mansfield’s Unsettling Women
• Conclusion: Woolf, Rhys, and Narratives of Obscurity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index