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.

What Good is Mirage?

England experienced what I’ve referred to as a “crisis of marriage” starting around the mid-eighteenth century with Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, which was supposed to eliminate marital indeterminacy. That is, the 1753 legislation was supposed to help folks determine whether a marriage was legal and above-board. Given the vast range of marriage customs (broomstick wedding, anyone?) and conflicting laws (between Church and State, between England and Scotland, etc.) people weren't always certain if they were married or not. As it happened, the so-called 1753 Law of Clandestine Marriage was not that difficult to get around, as anecdotes, court cases, and novels subsequently proved. And instead of making marriage intelligible to its practitioners, the law only placed another in a series of mystifying veils over the institution, which grew more and more confused and vexing to its practitioners in the British Isles and throughout the British Empire over the next 150 years. Marriage was particularly susceptible to reforms in the Victorian Era, the “age of progress,” and these reforms were frequently described, demanded, and denounced in Victorian novels, poems, and stories.

We’re hearing echoes of the Victorian crisis of marriage in America today. We’re no longer certain what the point of the institution is, according to Robin West, a legal scholar whose work has been important in the Law and Literature movement as well. West writes that the question haunting us (U.S.) today is something like “What good is marriage?”

We—meaning all of us—need to contemplate this question, not only because it is an interesting one, but also because lawmakers will likely take steps over the next half century to change the legal contours of marriage. We need to raise the question regarding the good of marriage not only to deepen understanding. If we can go some ways toward answering the question, it will help guide deliberation on whether, and if, and how, we change it (Marriage, Sexuality, and Gender, 2007, p. 21).

She’s writing from the perspective of Law, and I’m frankly not sure who her audience is here. The book is a thorough description of three different stances folks take on marriage today: defending it, arguing to abolish it, and arguing to fix or redefine it. West herself takes the modest, moderate position that civil union law should be expanded as a socially legitimate alternative to marriage. But I digress: my goal here is not to review her important book, so much as to wonder aloud whether anyone is now writing fiction that criticizes today’s marriage laws? Are there novels that represent same-sex marriages? Are there stories that promote or criticize alternatives to marriage? Are American authors even interested in marriage anymore? It seems to me that the big names in twentieth-century U.S. fiction, Updike et al., were all-too preoccupied with adultery. Have they moved on to engage other issues around marriage, especially as the institution comes under increased strain?