Cranford read-along: chapters 9-16

Here we have Prada's take on the green turban, circa 2007. It's kind of pretty in a Grey Gardens sort of crazy. In Gaskell's Cranford, Miss Matty asks the narrator to find her a sea-green turban in town, and she is quite disappointed when the narrator fails to deliver one.

I have finished re-reading Cranford for the read-along at A Literary Odyssey, and I'm re-charmed by it, though rather hard-pressed to analyze it. One thing has occurred to me, and this won't be surprising to anyone who's read the rest of my blog: where is the marriage plot? Apart from other formal discrepancies, Cranford cannot be deemed a domestic novel in part due to the striking absence of a sustained representation of courtship brought to completion. The most likely candidate for such a plot would be Mary Smith, the narrator, an eligible young woman of agreeable background and surprising mobility (she "vibrates" between the nearby manufacturing town of Drumble and the backwater that is Cranford). Is Mary destined to be a spinster?

During my convalescence, apart from starting various sewing projects, I've been reading Kelly Hager's new book, Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition. Hager quite persuasively argues that the "rise of the novel" (cf. Ian Watt) was characterized as much by failed-marriage narratives as by courtship narratives. I love her argument because it's terribly true: so many many Victorian novels represent horrible marriages and seem to argue in favor of legal separation or divorce, the right of wives to own property, the right of mothers to have legal custody over their young children should they achieve a separation from the father, and so on. Hager provides a thorough, though succinct, summary of such novels in the first chapter of her book before diving into half a dozen Dickens novels as her particular case study. Reading this concurrently has re-focused my attention on marriage--or the lack thereof--in Cranford.

All we get in Gaskell's little novella is a sustained and amusing suspicion expressed about marriage by the old spinsters and bachelors of Cranford, punctuated by two of the happiest unions imaginable achieved by some unlikely figures. Behold the evidence:

1. Miss Matty and Mr Holbrook's sadly aborted courtship (the humble yeoman is deemed unsuitable for the supposedly higher-born Miss Matty by her father and elder sister).
2. Mrs. Jamieson is more distraught at the death of her dog Carlo than she was when her husband passed: "indeed, Miss Pole said, that as the Honourable Mr. Jamieson drank a good deal, and occasioned her much uneasiness, it was possible that Carlo's death might be the greater affliction" (144).
3. Mr. Hayter, the rector, fears matrimony. At a public event, he is seen "guarded by troops of his own sex from any approach of the many Cranford spinsters." Mary explains, "He was an old bachelor, but as afraid of matrimonial reports getting abroad about him as any girl of eighteen" (136).
4. Miss Pole congratulates Miss Matty "that so far they had escaped marriage" (156).
5. The genteel (i.e. penniless) widow Lady Glenmire marries beneath her station--marries Mr. Hoggins the surgeon. Miss Pole waxes acidic about the mésalliance: "She has married for an establishment, that's it. I suppose she takes the surgery with it" (167). We are not privy to the details of the courtship. The ladies of Cranford do not choose "to sanction the marriage by congratulating either of the parties" until they know if the union is to be approved by touchy Mrs. Jamieson (169).
6. Finally, the best example of marriage in the book, one engineered among/by the servants in order to "save" Miss Matty from destitution. When Miss Matty loses most of her annual income--and thus her ability to pay rent--in a failed joint-stock situation, her faithful servant Martha officially introduces her beau, Jem: "'please, ma'am, he wants to marry me off-hand. And please, ma'am, we want to take a lodger--just one quiet lodger to make our two ends meet'" (188). Jem makes the near-fatal mistake of audibly hestitating:

'It's that you've taken me all on a sudden, and I didn't think for to get married so soon--and such quick work does flabbergast a man. It's not that I'm against it, ma'am ... only Martha has such quick ways with her, when once she takes a thing into her head; and marriage, ma'am--marriage nails a man, as one may say. I daresay I shan't mind it after it's once over.' (188)

Miss Matty proceeds to remind the two lower-class lovebirds that "marriage is a very solemn thing" while Jem reiterates that "a man likes to have breathing-time" and that he's "a bit fluttered by being pushed straight a-head into matrimony" (189). It would be understatement to say that the arrangement of her own marriage by a female servant in order to save her boss from homelessness is a rather topsy-turvy event for a Victorian story. But Gaskell's overall tone of irony and levity throughout Cranford indicate that this is not any serious intervention into the sacred institution. We are left with the image of Mary and Miss Matty talking late into the night about "the chances and dangers of matrimony" (190). I wish we could hear exactly what they said, but Gaskell--whose other novels mostly do incorporate happy courtship plots--seems to lack imagination when it comes to this subject.

Note: my edition of Cranford dates from 1905 (I think), published in New York by Grosset & Dunlap, and contains illustrations after H. Thomson.

Cranford read-along: chapters 1-8

I am a few days late with my contribution to the Cranford read-along (hosted by Allie at A Literary Odyssey, due to having a surgery last week and complications therefrom. Well, here I am. But before I give my impressions, I give a little warning: I first read Cranford in graduate school. While I remember thinking the book sort of charming at the time, I also remember thinking it insignificant. My re-reading of the book this month is cranky and frustrated and dismissive. Cranford is just a batch of delightful sketches of a time-gone-by. Maybe it's the medication I'm on, which leaves me with little patience for anything other than a marathon of Weeds re-runs, but right now I feel pretty fiercely that Gaskell's other books are superior and far more engrossing in content.


One thing that frustrates me about Cranford is its relentless tone of irony. All descriptions of the feminine inhabitants of the town are colored by it, and this has the effect of gentle mockery. (If the source of the irony is the narrator—a member of the younger generation who is not just an outsider, but also a townsperson—then the effect is that of youth/the urbane patronizingly if affectionately mocking old age/the provincial.) In spite of the fact that Cranford's old ladies are likened to Amazons in the opening paragraph, or that it is the women who appear to hold all the power in the town, or that feminine community is upheld as an ideal, a reader would have to do a lot of fancy work to interpret the rambling stories as illustrations of the empowerment of women in the absence of men. No, the stories seem to insist that men are more rational, less ridiculous. Examples include the loveable Captain Brown with his "excellent masculine common sense" or the sensible, unpretentious Mr. Thomas Holbrook, yeoman.

The chapter I like best, of 1-8, is chapter 5, "Old Letters," a poignant description of Miss Matty re-reading old letters before burning them. The narrator describes the letters' content and the writers' varying styles, but the most compelling part of the chapter for me is the physical description of the letters themselves:

The Rector's letters, and those of his wife and mother-in-law, had all been tolerably short and pithy, written in a straight hand, with the lines very close together. Sometimes the whole letter was contained on a mere scrap of paper. The paper was very yellow, and the ink very brown; some of the sheets were (as Miss Matty made me observe) the old original post, with the stamp [a watermark] in the corner, representing a post-boy riding for life and twanging his horn. The letters of Mrs. Jenkyns and her mother were fastened with a great round red wafer … The rector sealed his epistles with an immense coat of arms, and showed by the care with which he had performed this ceremony, that he expected they should be cut open, not broken by any thoughtless or impatient hand.

The passages continues, describing Miss Jenkyns’s letters as crossed, a common, economic epistolary practice with the effect of saving paper (and thus postage).

Fragile and ephemeral, letters have a short life-span, like mayflies and all the members of the Ephemeridae family. Ephemera has become a popular focus for Victorian scholars over the past couple decades, and I imagine that Gaskell’s works are a treasure-trove of descriptive data to Victorian Material Culture scholars, some of whom have recently focused their attention to salvaging, collecting, and theorizing about printed ephemera—transitory objects like letters, periodicals, posters, maps, pamphlets, and even cheap yellow-back novels. Letters are not meant to last forever, of course, but something in me cringes when Miss Matty throws her parents’ love letters into the fire.

'We must burn them, I think,' said Miss Matty, looking doubtfully at me. 'No one will care for them when I am gone.' And one by one she dropped them into the middle of the fire; watching each blaze up, die out, and rise away, in faint, white, ghostly semblance, up the chimney, before she gave another to the same fate.

This description shows nostalgia being conquered, however painfully. The act of burning the letters might be destructive, but it is also progressive. Old letters provide an intimate record of pasts that are both private (anachronistically) and public (when read by living successors of the original senders and recipients). Letters are cultural artifacts, evidence of "olden times," its politics, economics, religious and domestic ways. Gaskell captures the ghostly nature of ephemera, how it both symbolizes the past and heralds modernity.