COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the
reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as
well as questions that challenge those
perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as
diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters
written by the author, literary criticism of later
generations, and appreciations written throughout the
work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of
questions seeks to filter Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and
Daughters through a variety of points of view and
bring about a richer understanding of this enduring
work.
Comments
CHARLES DICKENS
You may perhaps have seen an announcement in the
papers of my intention to start a new cheap weekly journal of
general literature.
I do not know what your literary vows of
temperance or abstinence may be, but as I do honestly know that
there is no living English writer whose aid I would desire to
enlist in preference to the authoress of “Mary Barton” (a book that
most profoundly affected and impressed me), I venture to ask you
whether you can give me any hope that you will write a short tale,
or any number of tales, for the projected pages.
—from a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell (January 31,
1850)
HENRY JAMES
We cannot help thinking that in “Wives and
Daughters” the late Mrs. Gaskell has added to the number of those
works of fiction-of which we can not perhaps count more than a
score as having been produced in our time—which will outlast the
duration of their novelty and continue for years to come to be read
and relished for a higher order of merits. Besides being the best
of the author’s own tales-putting aside “Cranford,” that is, which
as a work of quite other pretensions ought not to be weighed
against it, and which seems to us manifestly destined in its modest
way to become a classic—it is also one of the very best novels of
its kind. So delicately, so elaborately, so artistically, so
truthfully, and heartily is the story wrought out, that the hours
given to its perusal seem like hours actually spent, in the flesh
as well as the spirit, among the scenes and people described, in
the atmosphere of their motives, feelings, traditions,
associations. The gentle skill with which the reader is slowly
involved in the tissue of the story; the delicacy of the handwork
which has perfected every mesh of the net in which he finds himself
ultimately entangled; the lightness of touch which, while he stands
all unsuspicious of literary artifice, has stopped every issue into
the real world; the admirable, inaudible, invisible exercise of
creative power, in short, with which a new and arbitrary world is
reared over his heedless head—a world insidiously inclusive of him
(such is the assoupissement of his critical sense), complete in
every particular, from the divine blue of the summer sky to the
June-bugs in the roses, from Cynthia Kirkpatrick and her infinite
revelations of human nature to old Mrs. Goodenough and her
provincial bad grammar—these marvellous results, we say, are such
as to compel the reader’s very warmest admiration, and to make him
feel, in his gratitude for this seeming accession of social and
moral knowledge, as if he made but a poor return to the author, in
testifying, no matter how strongly, to the fact of her genius.
-from an unsigned review printed in The Nation (February 22,
1866)
THE SPECTATOR
Mrs. Gaskell’s last book is certainly,
Cranford excepted, her best; and absolutely her best if we
are to consider a larger and more complex design, somewhat less
perfectly worked out, higher than a little gem of exquisite
workmanship, but depending exclusively for its art on the humour of
a delicate memory, skilful at noting the little symptoms by which
warm hearts betray the yoke of narrow interests, and at recalling
all the quaint customs of country-town society. Wives and
Daughters is not an exciting story; it is a story the character
of which is nearer to that of Miss Austen’s tales than to Mary
Barton or Ruth. But there is more depth of character,
more value for intensity of feeling in it than in anything which
Miss Austen ever wrote, though the execution is much less equal
than that great novelist’s. The characters of both hero and
heroine, for instance, are vague and unimpressive. The sketch of
Mr. Gibson, the surgeon, is the nearest to Miss Austen’s style of
drawing, and his dry caustic humour and acute reserve remind one
sometimes so closely of Mr. Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice,
that it almost suggests some unconscious lingering of that happy
picture in Mrs. Gaskell’s memory ... However, Mr. Gibson is not
another Mr. Bennet, but a much less indolent and less selfish man,
but he is certainly the character in which Mrs. Gaskell’s art
touches most closely that of the most delicate artist of the last
generation. There is just the same extent of delineation, the same
limited degree of insight permitted into the character, in both
cases. Miss Austen never went further. She painted with absolute
perfection the upper stratum of feeling, and no more. Mrs. Gaskell
often goes deeper; but into the interior of Mr. Gibson’s character
she never pretends to see further than Miss Austen herself would
have seen. Indeed he is the kind of man who does not see further
himself, for he habitually pushes aside trains of thought or
feeling that are not immediately practical, and so scarcely knows
what he himself thinks or feels on any subject, if no purpose is to
be answered by distinctly realizing his own state of mind. Mr.
Gibson is seen, like most of Miss Austen’s stronger characters, in
but a half-light; for she seldom exhibits more of the natures of
any but weak chatterers and fools. Miss Austen herself would
scarcely have drawn Mr. Gibson better than Mrs. Gaskell has
done....
Yet perhaps the most delicate artistic
achievement in the book is the sketch of Mr. Gibson’s second wife,
and her daughter Cynthia Kirkpatrick,-especially the fine touches
of resemblance which, in spite of the widest difference and even a
little unfilial repulsion on the daughter’s part, betray their
kinship.... This pretty, selfish, shallow, feeble-minded, vain,
worldly, and amiable woman is exquisitely painted from the first
scene in which she appears to the last. Her radical and yet
unconscious insincerity of character, her incapacity for real
affection, and strong wish to please others so far as is consistent
with first pleasing herself, her soft purring talk when she is
gratified, the delicate flavour of Mrs. Nicklebyish vanity and
logic which is infused into her conversation without any
caricature, the ambition to be reputed a good step-mother which
makes her thwart her stepdaughter in all her favourite tastes in
order that Molly may seem to be treated exactly like her own
daughter Cynthia, her inability to understand any feeling that is
not purely worldly,-and generally the graceful vulgarity of her
mind, make a most original picture, as well as one of high
pictorial effect. There is a moderation in the sketch of Mrs.
Gibson’s selfishness, an entire abstinence from the temptation to
pillory her, a consistency in infusing a certain feeble amiability
of feeling through all her selfishness, a steadiness in delineating
her as, on the whole, not without agreeableness, which, when
connected with so utterly contemptible a character, convey a sense
of very great self-control as well as skill in the authoress. There
is not a conversation in which Mrs. Gibson takes part that is not
full of real wealth of humour and insight. All of them illustrate
the fine shades of silliness, the finer shades of selfishness,
which in delicate combination make up Mrs. Gibson’s
character....
On the whole the book has wonderful variety, and,
though not exciting reading, satisfies and rests the mind, besides
containing some passages of profound pathos. The story ends like a
vessel going down in full sail and in sight of port; nor do the
endeavours of her editor to weigh up the ship and bring it in,
succeed in doing more than demonstrating how completely the life of
the passengers was the birth of Mrs. Gaskell’s own vivid
imagination. In spite of the deficiency of its closing chapters in
consequence of the sudden death of its authoress, Wives and
Daughters will take a permanent and a high place in the ranks
of English fiction.
-March 17, 1886
CONNOP THIRLWALL
I mourn deeply over the loss of Mrs. Gaskell. To
‘Wives and Daughters’ it is irreparable. I am not in the least
comforted by anything that the editor of the Cornhill has
said. The few things which he has disclosed as to the sequel of the
story, if indeed it is anything more than a guess, instead of
allaying, excite one’s curiosity There was matter left for another
volume.
-from Letters to a Friend (1881)
Questions
1. How are we meant to understand Mrs. Gibson? Is
she a satire of a class-conscious and insensitive wife and mother?
Or does the novel admire her in any way? If her values are
contemptible, why is she so successful?
2. How does Wives and Daughters treat the
process of daughters turning into wives? Is Dr. Gibson’s philosophy
about educating his daughter vindicated, or does the novel question
the wisdom of limiting the education of women? Consider the
examples of Mrs. Gibson, Cynthia, and Molly.
3. What is the role of class in the “every-day
story” that is Wives and Daughters? Do you think that
Gaskell believes rank is natural, or that class is an artificial
measure of worth? Consider this as you think about the array of
characters in the novel in relation to the classes they belong to.
Finally, how does the novel understand and rank the merits of Roger
Hamley?
4. Gaskell never gives us an explicit account of
Cynthia’s character, but rather wisely leaves it up to examples.
What is the nature of Cynthia’s character? Describe it in all its
ambiguities and contradictions.
5. Do you agree that Molly is less interesting
than Cynthia? How is Cynthia’s happy ending a “generous revenge,”
as Henry James puts it, on the idea that Cynthia’s character is
hopeless? Does Cynthia act badly toward her various suitors (as Dr.
Gibson believes)?
6. Gaskell’s methodology is one of a “simple
record of the innumerable small facts of the young girl’s daily
life.” Can Cynthia be excused of her fickleness and malleable
character because of her upbringing? How is Molly’s conduct and
morality superior? Is her superiority a result of something other
than her upbringing?
7. Cynthia seems almost universally fascinating
in the novel; most of the men, and even Molly, fall in love with
her. Try to pinpoint the nature of Cynthia’s fascination. Is she
sexually alluring? What else constitutes her appeal? Do you think
the novel critiques Cynthia for the sexual aspect of her character;
if so, why?