Dear Serial Readers,
Finally a bit of progress with Cynthia's "secret" relationship to Preston! Perhaps though this progress is only a playful tug at the chain of suspense. What do we learn? Do you get the impression that she may be secretly engaged to Preston, especially since she mentions to Molly that she might marry him "after all"? And how does money enter into this history, do you suppose? Cynthia mentions the "horrid poverty" and "money matters" that complicated her and her mother's life at Ashcombe, where Preston was the estate agent. This installment ends with the gossip wheels churning by Miss Browning who has put "two and two together" (more dangerous readers, like Mrs G) to decide that Molly was in the lane with Preston. We readers know, as clear as day, that it was Cynthia with Preston. I continue to see Cynthia as a domesticated sensation heroine--her repeated confession of an inability to love as a sentimental heroine might (and as Molly can), her concern with material and monetary matters, her bewitching appearance that seems to draw every young man--fickle Mr. Coxe included, her association with France (with its scandalous status in Victorian culture) and the repeated hints at her "secrets" and her claim that she's not "good"--that she's a "good hater" even!
Just two other comments: on depression and death. While I do understand that illnesses, especially mental ones, are historically and culturally variable, Gaskell's description of Molly's "low" spirits of hopelessness does seem very much like depictions on TV ads (and elsewhere) today about depression. About death--just Gaskell's allusion to the euphemisms parleyed instead of direct words when Cynthia considers risks to Roger's life in Africa. Gaskell is perhaps the most candid of Victorian writers I know on this subject of death, something she handles very differently than, say, Dickens.
If you scroll down all the way to the bottom of this blog, you'll see the new poll I've installed to figure out our next serial reading, to begin in February. I'd like to try short stories rather than another long novel. So I've proposed three possibilities: (1) George Eliot's "Scenes from Clerical Life" stories which were published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1857 (3 thematically linked stories); (2) Elizabeth Gaskell's "Cranford" stories, published over several years in Dickens's Household Words and now usually read together as if a novel by the same name; (3) 3 stories by Wilkie Collins which are not linked thematically or otherwise: "Miss or Mrs?", "The Haunted Hotel," "The Guilty River." Please do go to this poll (bottom of this blog) and vote soon--and forward this link if you think you know anyone who might be more interested in a relatively short serial reading experience (3 to 5 weeks, depending on which one we select).
Daun suggested sensation fiction. There is at this moment a serial reading blog around Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. Paul Lewis manages this endeavor and they're currently at installment #7 (1 per week). Email if you'd like to get the installments: womaninwhite@paullewis.co.uk
I also put up the first page of this installment from the Cornhill in the sidebar because it shows Roger in Africa, a scene we never see directly and barely indirectly. I hope you can manage to see this image although it's so small!
For next week: #14, chapters 41-45 (yes, 5 chapters).
Serially searching,
Susan
6 comments:
I do get the impression that Cynthia is, if not secretly engaged, promised to Preston, owing him herself to pay off some debt, perhaps for help out of familial financial crises, a sacrifice some might term “good.” I’m at least as interested in finding out where her mini obsession with the topic of her own goodness, or lack of it, stems from.
Chapter 37 could have been titled “Molly and Cynthia Get Real.” For several chapters now, they’ve been tiptoeing around each other, as people do when a secret, stated or not, hangs in the air. I’ve been feeling the tension between them so much that even this honest exchange was a relief (paraphrased):
Cynthia: Molly, you’re so serious.
Molly: You don’t value Roger as you ought.
Later, Cynthia veers more to what seems the secret’s source, when her conversation “seemed thoroughly in earnest” and she comes out with: “Molly, what should you think of me if I married him after all?”
In the later bit about Cynthia having “never lived with people with such a high standard of conduct,” and Molly’s comeback, “You must learn,” (Go, Molly!), Cynthia seems the apple not having fallen far from the tree.
At the end of Chapter 40, are the gossips Miss Goodenough and Miss Browning simply trying to thicken the plot? If I’m going to trust the hearsay of someone named “Hornblower,” I have all the confusion they stir up coming to me.
I believe that Cynthia has allowed herself to become engaged to Preston in order to hide some offense, probably monetary, although it is not clear where her mother's former flirtation with Preston fits in. I worry we won't have this solved before the book ends. I dislike Preston, but he really did seem very fond of Cynthia when Molly first met him. I find both his and Cynthia's behavior a bit puzzling--and also Mrs. G's, I guess. Can folks really be so blind to what they are doing? Or so unaware of a different perspective on their behavior? I know that people act selfishly and hurtfully to others, but not even knowing that it has an effect? Perhaps Mrs. Gaskell is also puzzled--or showing a level of selfishness that doesn't notice at all the effect of one's own actions.
I'm intrigued by the London trip! Perhaps that will separate Cynthia from Roger, but it doesn't seem likely to let us know what is up with Cynthia and Preston.
I am also interested that we only saw the visit to Hamley through Molly's eyes, and we now see her open with her father again, but he's pretty stuck with his limited relationship with her and with his marriage.
I am intrigued that there is a picture of Roger in the African wilds--he seems to be writing a letter? The letter that Molly herself will touch?
I wonder if anyone in this book will end up satisfied and content.
I am finally posting again after a long hiatus, but I've been reading along with you all of the time.
Like everyone else, I am reading Cynthia as a kind of sensation heroine. I am especially interested in the way that a strong parallel is being drawn in the novel between Cynthia and the secretly-married Osbourne. Both have rocky relationships with their parents, for example, and both have spent money that simply cannot be accounted for, and both are also connected to France (as Susan pointed out, a place that usually spells trouble). Is Gaskell urging us to wonder if Cynthia is in fact mixed up with a "stolen marriage" (as Osbourne is)? Perhaps Preston knows about it, if he isn't more directly involved?
Thinking about Gaskell's novel and its relationship to the sensation tradition also made me think back to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. I noticed a strong similarity between Molly's painful situation of watching Roger and Cynthia and Jane Eyre's painful experience of being forced into the drawing room during Blanche Ingraham's visit to Thornfield. In Bronte's novel, Blanche is exposed as an opportunist. Will this be the trajectory of Gaskell's novel, as well, so that we might expect Molly and Roger to find each other in the end? Or is this just my own wishful thinking?
For the next serial read, I'd be happy to turn to Wilkie Collins. My second choice would be Eliot's short stories.
I'm just looking forward to the mischief caused by the gossips. It seems like it'll have a chance to bring Molly into a more prominent role, since she's been patiently waiting in the wings (and slowly declining, apparently!). Her defensiveness in chapter 40 is very endearing. And I've enjoyed seeing how Gaskell is able to spin small plot developments into a lot of story, so I have high hopes for this one.
It's interesting to me that the squire and Cynthia, whatever flaws they have, both sincerely admire Molly and appreciate her (at a time when most of the characters in this novel seem content to let her remain in the shadows). And that makes me like both of them quite a bit more.
And like Julia, I voted for Collins, but I like both Cranford and Scenes of Clerical Life, so I'll be happy to read whatever we pick.
I must add more this week, because I didn't read far enough and now that I've read the section on the gossip, I must write about it!
And I also did love that Squire Hamley felt guilty for liking Cynthia so much and noticed that she ignored Molly while she was walking with the Squire--Cynthia may like Molly very much, but she also always puts men first.
Although it's clear that these women in Chapter 40 gossip for the excitement of it, which Mrs. Gaskell has criticized, I find it fascinating how their gossip supports normative behavior, and often (but not always) the very behavior that Mrs. G and her readers also support. I can't blame Molly all that much for breaking a teacup, or feel all that fond of Miss B. for holding on to that resentment; on the other hand, her determination to make sure that Molly not marry someone as potentially harmful as Mr. P is comforting.
I do love, also, the "bad reading"--so similar to my own when I suspected Cynthia and Osborne were married!
I do like the parallels between C and O, especially their connection to that scandalous France (even if Bonaparte wasn't really born there).
I'm excited that I now get to read more chapters than I thought, including "The Storm Bursts."
As Julia associated this novel with Bronte's Jane Eyre, I was struck by some similarity between this one and Bronte's last novel Villette. Molly, a silent observer and sufferer, repeatedly reminds me of Lucy Snowe, sandwiched between her sister-like, adorable Polly and Graham she secretly longs for. And Cynthia's role as sensation heroine, coquettish and selfish (though unconsciously) to people around her, is just like the character of Ginevra Fanshawe in Villette, too, while they are both strongly linked to the French locale. I try to find out some connection between these two novels as I see more and more of similarity in narrative techniques through the perspective of a maturing girl--Molly and Lucy. Th e only difference is that Molly seems like a more reliable narrator to readers although she does not yet confess her love for Roger openly to readers.
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