Wives and Daughters (110 page)

1
(p. 598)
like the Faithful John of the German
story...
to keep it from breaking
: Cynthia is confusing two fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm. Their
Kinderund
Hausmärchen
(Children’s and Household Stories
, generally known as
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
; 1812) includes one entitled “The Frog Prince,” which approximates the story Cynthia tells here, with the exception that the servant’s name is Trusty Henry. Another Grimm’s fairy tale is entitled “Faithful John.”

1
(p. 645)
Here the story is broken off, and it can never be finished
: The final chapter of
Wives and Daughters
is written by Frederick Greenwood, the editor of the
Cornhill Magazine,
which was the journal that was publishing Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel in serial form. The final chapter outlines what the reader already has good reason to believe: that Roger will return from Africa, will marry Molly, and will become an important scientific figure. The reason for the editor’s remarks is that Elizabeth Gaskell died suddenly, her final novel not quite finished, in November 1865. The novel was published in monthly installments from August 1864 to January 1866, with the final installment written by the editor.

Some stories are best told in installments, and some were specifically intended to be told in this way Though written for serial publication in the Cornhill
Magazine,
Gaskell’s
Wives and Daughters
is not necessarily such a tale. As Amy M. King describes in the Introduction, Gaskell often defied the commercial demands of serial publication. For example, at one point she rankled at the request of Charles Dickens, who edited her work for one of his magazines, that she end her installments with dramatic plot moments, and in the end she wrote and paced her novels as she, and not her editors, wanted.

In the modern television miniseries, or even serial television dramas, we might find serial publication’s equivalent: the impetus to narrate beyond the confines of individual installments, which results in a format uniquely suited to stringing audiences along with a good yarn. The four-episode
Wives and Daughters
(1999), produced by ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theater and directed by Nicholas Renton, is an exemplar of this updated form of serialization, dramatizing Gaskell’s story of stepmothers, betrothals, and gossip with competence and grace. That the format of choice for the adaptation was a television mini-series, rather than film, is canny, for the effect replicates in part the experience of serialization that the novel’s first readers would have experienced.

While Renton’s film, full as it is with realistic scenery and beautiful, ornate nineteenth-century dress, may not feel to us like an “every-day story” (as Gaskell had originally subtitled her novel), it nonetheless insists that the modern viewer be reminded of an “everyday” that is now past. Moreover, it impresses the modern viewer with its dramatic sweep, convincing performances, and evocative sets, which are well employed in this depiction of the lives of early-nineteenth-century “wives and daughters.” Renton (
Far from the
Madding
Crowd,
1998) enlists a cast that comprises a stable of period-drama regulars, among them Justine Waddell as an often silently expressive Molly Gibson, Bill Paterson as Mr. Gibson, Francesca Annis as Mrs. Gibson, Keeley Hawes as Cynthia Kirkpatrick, Anthony Howell as an earnest Roger Hamley, and Michael Gambon as Squire Hamley

But the secret to this
Wives’s
success is its screenwriter, Andrew Davies. Primarily known as the author of the
Bridget Jones
screenplays, Davies has produced an adaptation both faithful to Gaskell’s text (many of the film’s scenes are peppered with lines taken directly from the book) and refreshingly unadorned; the dialogue is crisp and naturalistic rather than overly affected and distracting. Readers looking for the satisfaction of a proper ending to Gaskell’s unfinished novel will delight in the film’s dénouement. Rather than a mournful good-bye at the windowsill reprising the famous engagement scene, Davies has Molly promptly run after Roger; the end is a reunion that gratifyingly relieves hours of carefully crafted tension, which may satisfy readers denied the pleasure of a final installment written by Gaskell.

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.

 

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)

 

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)

 

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

 

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)

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?