Dear Serial Readers,
Off we go on another Victorian serial adventure--this one with the auspicious beginnings of a fairytale "rigmarole." The fairytale motif is evident and sweet, with allusions to Goldilocks when Molly falls asleep under the cedar tree and later wakes inside the grand house in Clare's bed. But there are other tales suggested in these opening pages--perhaps Cinderella with the ordinary people taken by serial carriage rides to the Towers festival, but also an evident wink at Jane Eyre through Molly's governess's name. I couldn't help seeing echoes in a reverse chronological direction, with Mr. Gibson, the new doctor to Hollingford, who had studied in Paris, as a precursor to Eliot's Lydgate who arrives in Middlemarch near the opening of that novel, and in the days before the passage of the First Reform Bill. I wonder how else Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72) might be compared to this novel.
I also wonder about the role of sleep in building a new fictional world--Molly falls asleep in what appears to her as an Edenic dreamland, although she suffers from the hothouse atmosphere too. I began thinking about sleep and visionary realms in the early pages of novels--this too reminds me of the opening of Eliot's The Mill on the Floss where the narrator falls asleep while looking back in time. Is falling into a new narrative world like the opening of a dream? There is something gently parodic about Gaskell's use of the fairytale motif too in this first segment of the novel, which concludes with an assertion about Molly's "very happy childhood." Is some serpent, some apple, some Eve, to intrude upon this quaint English paradise? Mr Gibson is a fond father, but seems a bit emotionally dense--I recall Eliot's description of Lydgate as "an emotional elephant."
The brief glimpses of the greenery of the Towers as well as Lady Agnes's lecture on orchids and attention to the taxonomy of plants also reminded me of Gaskell's Job Legh, a working-class naturalist in her first novel Mary Barton. Charles Darwin was a distant cousin of Gaskell's, and there's a character, soon to appear, supposedly modeled after the young Charles Darwin who preferred botanising or geologising in the hills to his studies at Cambridge. Botany was also a popular activity for women to pursue as a hobby but also as a way to educate themselves about the natural world.
I look forward to your thoughts about this dreamy opening! For next week, the second installment includes chapters 4-6. There were 18 installments altogether printed in The Cornhill Magazine.
Serially yours,
Susan
4 comments:
This is the fourth Gaskell I've read -- Mary Barton, North and South, and Cranford being the other two -- and so far this one feels more "Cranfordian" than the other two. Mary Barton and North and South seemed to me much more interested in direct social commentary; they're novels tailor-made for the "Condition of England" label. (Not that that's a bad thing -- I think very highly of both.) The tone of Wives and Daughters, like Cranford, seems more characterized by gentle irony and interested in domestic life. This could change, of course; I've only read the first three chapters.
I think we can see the "gentleness" in the fairy-tale elements so far -- Molly oversleeping and waking could be played as a moment of tension and fear from her perspective. And we get a little bit of that, but not much -- we mostly get the sense that she's surrounded by people with good intentions and some compassion for her. Part of me thinks we underrate the artistic challenge of creating a narrative that downplays conflict.
Are there any other novels that treat literacy the way Gibson does? I mostly remember it as a class marker (Dickens comes to mind), not something that a literate doctor would consider withholding from his daughter.
I think this is my first Mrs. Gaskell, and so far I'm enjoying it! I like the nostalgic sense of the past and how much better things are in the author's now--now that we have railroads and the landed gentry aren't so dominant. I wonder what time frame she means to set this early part of the novel? I even did research on railroad development in England--though I probably could have looked up this novel. Do you think the 1820s?
I like Susan's connection to fairy tales, and I think that goes along with the narrator's sense that Molly's childhood was in the olden days and the sense that class differences are both amusing and irritating, but not at all a problem to those of lower classes.
I worry that Miss Clare/Mrs. Kirkpatrick will be our Eve / apple / snake. I think the doctor is so great in his conversation with Molly, but I agree that he seems emotionally dense, and Molly is so ready to blame herself for anything someone else blames her for.
This is my first encounter with Elizabeth Gaskell, though I did see part of the serialization of Cranford when PBS played it ages ago.
While reading the first three chapters I was very much reminded of The Mill on the Floss - the young Molly being an echo of Maggie Tulliver, especially in the intellectual hunger. And, of course, the pastoral 'pre-railroad' middle English setting brings Eliot's work to mind as well.
As Miss Eyre is an inescapable reference to Jane Eyre, I wonder how this bit of subtle intertextuality will play out. Maybe it's a hint as to Doctor Gibson's character, as the reader is inevitably reminded of Rochester? Or maybe it has more to do with Eyre's character and her feelings for Gibson. Or perhaps I'm making mountains of mole hills!
The fairytale opening of the novel, and the placement of the action in the fairly recent past, reminded me of another George Eliot novel--the "moral fable" Silas Marner, which famously opens "In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses..." And to second Joshua's comment, I do see a nostalgia and quiet irony that connects this opening of Wives and Daughters with the ladies of Cranford.
To push the Jane Eyre connection that everyone has noted, it occurred to me while reading that Lady Cumnor's school for girls might be seen as a benevolent version of Jane Eyre's charity school, Lowood. We learn that the girls at this school are "taught to sew beautifully, to be capital housemaids, and pretty fair cooks, and, above all, to dress neatly in a kind of charity uniform devised by the ladies of Cumnor Towers;--white caps, white tippets, check aprons, blue gowns, and ready curtseys" (p. 4). These details echo the school in Charlotte Bronte's novel, but recast them in a more positive light (beautiful sewing as opposed to sewing with bad needles and thread; blue gowns as opposed to brown smocks, etc.). The books of engravings seemed another direct echo of Jane Eyre, as did Molly's desire to "look around the room, unobserved" (p. 21) at the Cumnor's great house.
Finally, I'm with Kari in thinking that Miss Clare/Mrs. Kirkpatrick might be our "snake." The cliffhanger at the end of the installment, where we are told that she and Dr. Gibson do know each other through his "great professional attention," seems to set her up as a potential seductress!
This is a novel that I haven't read in its entirety before, so I'm looking forward to a "real" serial experience. We'll see how good I am at predicting the plot!
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