Language Among the Amazons: Conjuring and Creativity in Cranford

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: “Language Among the Amazons: Conjuring and Creativity in Cranford,” in Dickens Studies Annual, Vol. 23, 1994, pp. 205-25.

[In the following essay, Gavin discusses how the Cranford women create oral fictions while their male counterparts are merely readers and quoters.]

My dear Mrs. Forrester, conjuring and witchcraft is a mere affair of the alphabet.

(Cranford 84)

In the town of Cranford conjuring and witchcraft are affairs of the alphabet. It is their arrangements of the alphabet, in speech and in writing, that enable the women of Cranford to sustain and protect themselves and to experience and create moments of magic in their lives. Miss Pole may not readily achieve the sleight of hand that she believes she might in following written “receipts” for conjuring tricks, but she is party to an understanding and use of language that might seem pure blindfold trickery to an outside observer. With skilled legerdemain she and her friends can turn “maccaroons sopped in brandy” into “little Cupids” (67), the black parlor where one ties up preserves into the “sanctuary of home” (113), and the straitened pecuniary circumstances in which they live into “elegant economy” (3). Their lives are steeped in a consciousness of the creative powers of language; it is with language that these Amazons conjure.

Considering the pervasive concern in Cranford with language (style, sentences, words, and even letters of the alphabet), surprisingly little has been written on the subject. Hilary M. Schor in her book on Gaskell (1992) does examine the subject,1 reading Cranford as “a woman writer's experiment with narrative, an extended commentary on the ways women are taught to read cultural signs, and a serious critique of the role of literature in shaping female readers” (87). Schor examines language issues and acknowledges the differences between female and male writing and the importance of “women's languages” (84) within the novel, but like many critics commenting on the division between male and female experience in the novel, she denies the older women of Cranford full credit for the integrity of their beliefs concerning language. Indeed criticism has often either ridiculed these women in their dealings with language, or taken it as virtually a given that they have had “male language” imposed upon them. In fact, as this paper will show through a close reading of the text, the women's beliefs about language and their use of it show a freedom from imposition, a self-reliance, and a creativity long ignored.

These older women perform magic with language. Out of the words they use in conversation and the tales they carry about the town they create intricate oral fictions; they conjure up a world for themselves, at times exciting, at times refined or rarefied. But if the women speak fiction, they write truth. It is in their unique styles of writing that they reveal truth and individuality (however ingenuously, circuitously, or fragmentarily). Written language, for the women, is almost sacred, and they will protect and defend the writings of those they hold important. Although the women's concerns with language are portrayed with generous irony in the novel, it is their belief in language and their facility in using it that are their creative achievement and victory over those who would change or “modernize” them. The ladies' lives are restricted in many ways, but they will not allow their language or their views on styles of language to be altered, attacked, or even criticized. They are creators with language and style, and not, as critics often assume, mere passive (or even societally restrained) receptacles for, or regurgitators of, anyone else's language. Their decisions about language and literature are very much their own, and language, unlike many other desirables for a comfortable life, is free for the using, something the women are not about to ignore.

The Cranfordians' use of language draws in Mary Smith, the narrator, who despite her youth and extra knowledge of the world includes herself as an apprentice Amazon through her use of “we” and “us”. It is not, however, issues of narration or of the female creativity of either Mary or Elizabeth Gaskell that I wish to focus upon (issues examined by Schor among others), but rather the ways in which characters, specifically the older women, use and regard language within the town of Cranford. I will examine the oral fictions of the Cranford women and suggest differences between their spoken language and that of the men and the young women of the town. I will also show that truth and individuality are revealed in what and how the women write, and posit the view that their beliefs about literature and written language are firmly, instinctively, and aptly held. I will end by showing that the women of Cranford are creators with language, while their male counterparts are mere readers and quoters of the language set down by others.

I

Orally, the Amazons of Cranford weave their own fiction: protective, adaptable, and imaginatively creative. The “phraseology of Cranford,” with its refined speech and elaborate rules and regulations, is distinctly of the women's creation. It is a language bred out of old-fashioned usage, idiosyncratic ideas of taste and elegance, a desire to spice their restricted existence, and a need to protect themselves from both the harshness of their economic situation and the speech of others. Vulnerable in many ways, words are something that they can control, and language is their most treasured possession, as Miss Pole indicates when, prevented from speaking by a coughing fit, she implores the others with her eyes, “[d]on't let Nature deprive me of the treasure which is mine, although for a time I can make no use of it” (116). She wants the right to divulge incredible news, to choose the words, to create the fiction.

Through speaking, the women create a world to suit themselves. It is not, moreover, a sort of continuous accident. Mary tells us of the Miss Barkers circulating cap patterns “among the élite of Cranford. I say the élite, for Miss Barkers [sic] had caught the trick of the place, and piqued themselves upon their ‘aristocratic connection’” (60; third emphasis added). There is, in other words, a kind of knack or gift that characters must acquire in order to join in the Cranfordian fiction, and it is these tricks that add magical touches of elegance to the women's lives. Theirs is a world in which “[u]nderstanding” is “such a coarse word” (114) and the use of the term “hoaxing” is to be apologized for (50), and in which they are “not so old as the ladies used to be when” they were girls (50). Rowena Fowler, pointing to the “shared fictions” of the women, correctly suggests that “[o]ne of the most pervasive mutually-understood conventions of women's language in Cranford is the avoidance of blunt, hurtful, or demeaning truths” (723). To tell the absolute truth in speech would be, for these women, an ungenteel abomination, revealing as it would the hardships of their existence and the vulgarities of the world. Their language, like their dress, must reflect “chaste elegance and propriety” (74).

They do not blind themselves to the truth, for at heart they know the “reality” of their situation. Mrs. Forrester sits in state pretending not to know what cakes will be served at her party, “though she knew, and we knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we knew, she had been busy all the morning making tea-bread and sponge-cakes” (3). Yet the ladies simultaneously come to believe in many of their fictions, which become a kind of concomitant reality, a magic for which all the performers suspend their disbelief. Their economy becomes “elegant” because their language makes it so. They enjoy a “refreshing” stroll in the night air because their spoken language will not reveal that they have to walk home because they cannot afford any other means of transportation; nor will it reveal other hardships, lost loves, or grief. Above all none of them speak of money “because that subject savour[s] of commerce and trade” (3), and “money-spending [is] always ‘vulgar and ostentatious’” (4).

The women have their own rules for elegant living: calls are to take place after twelve noon and are never to be “longer than a quarter of an hour,” and one must “not allow [one]self to forget [the time] in conversation” (2). The strictness of the rules is ironically undercut: “[a]s everybody had this rule in their minds, whether they received or paid a call, of course no absorbing subject was ever spoken about. We kept ourselves to short sentences of small talk, and were punctual to our time” (2-3). But we must take care as to how much significance we place on this irony. Are we to believe, as the schoolboy Peter did, that “the old ladies in the town wanted something to talk about” (51), or that there is now “a dearth of subjects for conversation” (10)? To do so would be to suggest that their rules for discourse actually eliminate discourse, when in fact these “rules” of speech are a part of their verbal fiction. Miss Matty certainly believes that Peter was mistaken about the earlier ladies: “[t]hey had the St. James's Chronicle three times a-week, just as we have now, and we have plenty to say” (51). As of course they do. The women talk over old anecdotes, but they also have more than sufficient new material to discuss, and not just from the Chronicle. As Nina Auerbach puts it, “Cranford threads its monotonous life with what Charlotte Brontë called ‘the strange, necromantic joys of fancy,’ peopling its world with self-created magic burglars, ghosts, spies, Frenchmen, and witches” (87). Through their oral language the Cranfordians create their own fictions, whether tightly structured into quarter-of-an-hour slots, extended over an evening's entertainment, or episodically updated over days, weeks, or months.

The best example of an “episodic update” is “the panic,” during which time reports “spread like wildfire” and are enlarged and elaborated upon with every telling. Miss Pole, who regularly “collect[s] all the stray pieces of intelligence in the town” (82) and relates these to the other women, becoming “the heroine of the evening” (83), is now “the principal person to collect and arrange” reports of the robberies “so as to make them assume their most fearful aspect” (89). She and Miss Matty brush up their most “horrid stories of robbery and murder” (92), and the women come to believe the ghastly fiction they have created: that Miss Pole's house has been attacked, and that there is a murderous gang roaming the town led by the “French spy” Signor Brunoni. When the fictional consistency of this plot becomes too difficult to sustain, it is relegated to the anecdotal archives of the Cranfordians. Besides, they are on to a new plot: the curing of the sick Mr. Brown, who is the very same, so suspected Signor Brunoni (a name which “sound[s] so much better” [102]).2

In Cranford stories are told and retold, elaborated on and altered, and fictions are rewritten or adapted to suit the circumstances. The ladies await Captain Brown's apologies for “carrying [a poor old woman's] baked mutton and potatoes safely home.” When the Captain does not, in due course, appear in order to apologize, his part is rewritten, and more than once: “it was decided that he was ashamed, and was keeping out of sight,” then, that he had in fact shown “great goodness of heart” and would be “comforted” on his next appearance. When the Captain does appear, “untouched by any sense of shame,” they are “obliged to conclude he had forgotten all about Sunday” (10-11). Captain Brown, who answers the women's “small sarcastic compliments in good faith’ (4-5), has his role in the town repeatedly rewritten by the women, and he is in time “called upon, in spite of all resolutions to the contrary,” and orally “his opinions [became] quoted as authority” (4). This acceptance is possible provided his faux pas are ony oral, which the Cranford spoken fiction can tolerably incorporate; when he challenges their literary authority, however, the fictional world of the women can no longer incorporate him, and he is, as will later be seen, left to his fate.

“Because Cranford is a predominantly female world, women's language and values are the accepted currency” (Fowler 720), but it is not just speech and behaviour that the women are concerned with; their standards extend to names. They discuss whether Mrs. Fitz-Adam (at whose name the line is so often drawn) should be admitted to Cranford society: “[n]o one, who had not some good blood in their veins, would dare to be called Fitz; there was a deal in a name” (64). Fitz-Adam is however certainly better than her maiden name, which her brother, the doctor, retains for life—Hoggins: “we disliked the name, and considered it coarse; but, as Miss Jenkyns said, if he changed it to Piggins it would not be much better” (63). The women's acceptance of his name would be expedited if he would own up to a connection with the Marchioness of Exeter, one Molly Hoggins, but however much the women will fictionalize in speech, Mr. Hoggins will not, and denies any such relationship. Thomas Holbrook too refuses to be called Esquire and sends back mail that is not directed to “Mr. Thomas Holbrook, yeoman” (28). Pure dismay is expressed by the ladies on learning that Lady Glenmire has dropped her title to become “Mrs. Hoggins,” and there is consternation whether this union should be sanctioned by the community. And then there is Mrs. Forrester's story of her cousin Mr. ffoulkes, who “looked down upon capital letters, and said they belonged to lately invented families,” and who went on to marry a Mrs. ffaringdon “all owing to her two little ffs” (64). Their language concerns go right down to words and letters, and like Miss Pole's “throwing A's and B's at [their] heads like hail-stones” (85), their speech is an “affair of the alphabet.”

Those who have not learnt the art of conjuring with the alphabet, men and younger women, often impinge upon the Cranfordian ladies' fiction because of their unwitting habit of speaking the truth. Captain Brown, Thomas Holbrook, Mr. Hoggins, and Peter Jenkyns all speak their minds openly; all call a spade a spade, and what is so much worse, call it so in loud voices. Captain Brown speaks “in a voice too large for the room” (4), sings in a “sonorous bass” (6), talks openly of his poverty, and is “blind to all the small slights and omissions of trivial ceremonies with which he had been received” (4). Mr. Holbrook, although he reads aloud beautifully, sees “no necessity for moderating his voice” if people are not ill, and constantly uses the dialect of the country in conversation (29). (Perhaps this is why Miss Pole fears earache as they walk up to his house.) As for Mr. Hoggins, however proud they are of him as a surgeon, the women observe that he says “Jack's up,” and “a fig for his heels,” and calls Preference “Pref”; they can “only shake [their] heads over his name and himself, and wish that he had read Lord Chesterfield's Letters in the days when his manners were susceptible of improvement” (103). Men customarily speak loudly and speak as they find. The women specifically speak the truth on one occasion, ironically because they are “desirous of proving [them]selves superior to men … in the article of candour” (98) following Mr. Hoggins' denial of one of their fictional verities (their belief that he has been robbed). What they are candid about on this occasion are their private fears and precautions, which naturally enough are not based on firm facts, but arise out of imagination and superstition.

Because the women are attuned to belief in their own oral fiction, the spoken jests of men are sometimes taken seriously (these are to be distinguished from the ladies' fiction in that the male speaker of a jest does not believe his jest, while on one level at least the women believe their fictions); we need only think of Miss Betty Barker following Captain Brown's advice to clothe her Alderney in a “flannel waistcoat and flannel drawers” (5), or Mrs. Jamieson's horror at Peter's “shooting a cherubim” (159). Yet on other occasions the women are astonished by the credulity of married women. They cannot believe that Lady Glenmire swallowed Mr. Hoggins's “poor vamped-up story about a neck of mutton and a pussy, with which he had tried to impose on Miss Pole” (106), and Miss Pole notices that marriage “always ma[kes] people credulous to the last degree” (105). Miss Matty, however, later tells Mary that “a little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly” (108), though she thinks Peter was wrong in thinking that “the old ladies in Cranford would believe anything” (50). Their fictions are not totally outrageous, but a little credulity on their part goes a long way.

Rowena Fowler suggests that “[u]nlike the Amazons of Herodotus, the women of Cranford are not bilingual, and their nervous attempts to acquiesce in male discourse are foiled by the contradiction between men's words and women's manner of speaking” (719). While the women might at times be befuddled by male discourse, they certainly never “nervously acquiesce” in any discourse that is not their own. Indeed, the ladies “had often rejoiced, in former days, that there was no gentleman … to find conversation for” (6; emphasis added), which clearly indicates a “bilingualism” rather than an acquiescence. The women can speak male language, but prefer not to. Men, insisting on oral accuracy, can be an irritant to the women, who do not expect the response to a “[d]ecidedly” on their part to be a questioning as to “[w]hat there was to decide” (141), or the rebuff to “[w]hat a pretty book!” to be “[p]retty! madam! it's beautiful! Pretty, indeed!” (35).

The women's methods of speech are similarly not shared by the younger women of the town; it is not just men who can speak distastefully. Jessie Brown not only states, but repeats, that her uncle is a shopkeeper. Hearing this, the women feel physically sullied: “[i]t was to take the taste of this out of our mouths, and the sound of this out of our ears, that Miss Jenkyns proposed music” (8). Martha is also “blunt and plain-spoken to a fault” (26). She speaks the truth, though we are told that she writes ‘hieroglyphics.” Lady Glenmire, although she is “not over young,” is “younger than Mrs. Jamieson” (71), and “a bright little woman of middle age” (76); she calls for tea when she wishes it, and does the unthinkable by requesting more bread and butter when she feels they all desire it. It is also she who asks Miss Matty if she is “fond of astronomy.” Miss Matty replies “[n]ot very,” and is “rather confused … to remember which was astronomy, and which was astrology” (80).

Yet if the Amazons confuse “astronomy” with “astrology,” “graminivorous” with “carnivorous,” or ‘horizontal’ with “perpendicular,” it is the words they confuse, not the concepts, and these words are hardly crucial to their daily lives. Miss Matty, in replying to Lady Glenmire, knows that her opinion and answer are the same “under either circumstance” (80). These are scientific concepts that are not based on the instinctive tastes and understandings of the women, and there is no reason why they should be “fond” of them. Mrs. Forrester tells us “that in her day the only use people made of four-syllabled words was to teach how they should be spelt” (112). Miss Matty knows that the “stars are so beautiful” (80), and does not need the concept defined; she knows instinctively that their beauty is “sufficient” for her. This is not to suggest ignorance in the women, but to respect their inherent ability to judge what knowledge they will retain. Miss Matty states that “she never could believe that the earth was moving constantly, and that she would not believe it if she could, it made her feel so tired and dizzy whenever she thought about it” (80). She obviously “knows” of the rotation of the earth, and her comment is not evidence of the lack of intellect that is often imputed to the women, but evidence of thought, and after such thought, an idea rejected. The fiction of her world is honest, if not factual—who would not become dizzy thinking of such a thing? Indeed, part of the delight the women take in their world is based on their very lack of insistence on “verbal accuracy.” For example, that marvelous stimulation to tangential thinking, the comment that Peter has been “elected great Lama of Thibet” (112), begins a passage of wonderful free association of language, including a dispute over whether llamas are carnivorous animals or not; the women are open to all hints and permutations of language, for enjoyment, argument, and entertainment, as well as for protection.

Writing of Cranford's ability to produce men at need and obliterate them at will, Auerbach argues that Cranford “veers … between being a sanctuary of unreality … and a repository of sudden, quasi-magical power that destroys or appropriates the reality it excludes” (82). Both sanctuary and magical power reside for the Amazons of Cranford in the fictions of the spoken word. They speak elegant creative fictions according to their own code, while the men of the town speak loudly, and, like younger women, bluntly and factually. The women's written world is also creative, but reveals more of their individuality. Male characters have a less evident and a more formal personal written world, and are sustained far more by reading language than by creating it.

II

Although the women choose to clothe or mask distasteful or unwieldy reality in their more public oral fictions, in the private world of their writing (letters and notes) they are able, through their personal styles, to reveal more of their individuality. They create their own styles of writing on the basis of their own beliefs, unconfined by any external (Cranfordian or non-Cranfordian) epistolary practices, or by any of the forms of their own oral fiction. Moreover, they consider the written word sacred and are secure in the knowledge that these writings will not enter the public domain. Just as they guard the truth revealed in their own letters, they defend what they judge to be the best in writing. Their regard for the written word comes, indeed, from knowledge and practice of their collective spoken fiction, which although magical and marvelous is limited in geographical range and needs constant adjusting, a continuous observance of strict rules, and a body of adepts to maintain it. Written language on the other hand, even if relatively formless, and requiring little or no “trick,” is more individual and can be sent beyond the bounds of Cranford.

Miss Deborah Jenkyns writes pretentious, grand, overly philosophical, and stately letters: “[e]pistolary writing, she and her friends considered as her forte” (9). In writing, however, she is an arbiter of taste, and not the model to be followed that she is in speech. She writes and corrects, and re-corrects, yet wishes her letters to be considered as if she has “‘seized the half-hour just previous to post time to assure’ her friends of this or of that” (9). “Everything in them [is] stately and grand, like herself” (12), even when, as in her letter to Mary, she is revealing something as basic as her nosiness about Captain Brown's visitor. Deborah does not use what we might consider appropriate language for her subject matter, but she does use language appropriate to her, priding herself, as she does, on her use of Dr. Johnson as “her model in these compositions” (9). Schor rightly points out that “the text never hesitates to mock gently” this language use of Deborah's (90), and suggests that her letter to Mary “uses a prose so Johnsonian as to approach … literary parody” (90). But while it may perhaps approach parody (although it would be more accurate to say that it is somewhat over-elegant), this does not demonstrate, as Schor contends, that “the style of her favorite has betrayed Deborah Jenkyns” (90). She is not very successful, naturally, in being Johnson, but her written style reflects clearly what she is; her view of Johnson is distinctly her own. I would similarly disagree with Schor's statement that “[t]he language, though rich, suggests no pleasure; nor does it allow for specific emotion” (91). The letter (12-13) suggests great pleasure in the roll of the words, the choice and placement of literary quotations, the sweep of the exact number of “many-syllabled words” across the page, and the evident satisfaction of putting things as “Johnsonianly” as possible. There is no evidence that she is less than pleased with her creation, for the letter is very much (overstated or not) her own, and Deborah in any case would never be a woman to splash her emotions wildly across either a page or a drawingroom. In her reserved and carefully composed (and quite cutting) remarks about Captain Brown's “sad want of relish for ‘the pure wells of English undefiled’” (13), we are well aware what emotion she is expressing. To strike a low note instead of a “high note” in commenting on Captain Brown would, for Deborah, be the betrayal (of her own rules and of her self); it is not her high tone that would somehow betray her.

Much is made by critics of the fact that Deborah's father, the Rector, recommends Johnson to her in her youth. Patsy Stoneman argues that “[t]hough apparently ‘strong-minded’ and ‘superior’ … [Deborah] has assimilated the conditions of her own subordination” (89). Fowler writes of the “patriarchal forces and conventions which once overtook and destroyed Deborah Jenkyns” (725), and Schor argues that “[l]iterary daughters are not given the language they need; rather they are given languages, often dead languages, that mediate their experience for them” (94). True, a man (Deborah's father) has recommended a male writer of a previous generation to a woman (Deborah), and true, Deborah did read and write for her father and spend much of her youth ministering to his needs, even giving up her hopes of “marry[ing] an archdeacon, and writ[ing] his charges” (107). At the time we see Cranford, however, the Rector has been dead for a number of years, but Deborah still reveres “her” Johnson. She accepts Johnson as a model out of respect and love for her father and the education he gave her, but keeps him as a model because she knows instinctively that he is “her sort” of writer (there are, after all, critics and readers today who still choose the “imposing” Johnson as their life's work). She is quite capable of writing a letter to the bishop for her father, but in her own letters she is creating for herself; she does not possess only “useless literary skills” (Schor 112). We see more of her style after her death, when Mary and Miss Matty burn her letters, and there is no indication that she wrote with anything but pleasure and confidence in her own stylistic abilities: “[h]er hand was admirably calculated, together with her use of many-syllabled words, to fill up a sheet”; “the words gathered size like snow-balls, and towards the end of her letter, Miss Jenkyns used to become quite sesquipedalian” (47). She has more than “the appearance of a strong-minded woman” (Cranford 12), she is a strong-minded woman, and one who would not blindly follow the style of a writer she did not herself admire and respect.

Miss Matty regards Deborah as a writer almost as highly as Deborah regards Dr. Johnson. But Matty, just as individually, creates her own style, writing “nice, kind, rambling letters; now and then venturing into an opinion of her own” (12), or notes that are “rather circuitous and very humble” (23). They are reflective of her reticent, easily confused, kindly nature. Matty's letters, “in spite of a little bad spelling” (like her mother's), do express her thoughts and opinions, even if she recants in postscripts after discussion with Deborah (13). When she is excited, her style reflects this: “[s]he began many sentences without ending them, running them one into another, in much the same confused sort of way in which written words run together on blotting-paper” (81), and “words that she would spell quite correctly in her letters to [Mary], bec[o]me perfect enigmas” when she writes to Mary's father” (131-32). Bad spelling, however, does not conceal truth: Mary writes the address of the Aga Jenkyns “spelt by sound; and very queer it looked,” yet the letter, “gone from [her] like life,” finds its mark (128). Similarly, disorganized written discourse does not conceal truth, for Mary tells us that Miss Matty's rambling style gives her the most information about goings on in Cranford.

Miss Pole is not one for divulging facts straightforwardly either. She sends a letter to Mary, in which, “at the end of every sentence of news, came a fresh direction as to some crochet commission” (12), and later on secretly delivers an “involved and oracular” missive (135) signed with her “initials, reversed, P. E.” (136). This is characteristic of Miss Pole's love of mysteries, and her style of expression increasingly reflects the complexly structured patterns of crochet.

The Jenkyns sisters learn early the truth-revealing capacities of written language when their father makes them keep a diary in which they are to write on one side the expectations of what will happen during the day and on the other side what has happened during the day. Both are truth; the truth of expectation and the truth of experience, and the difference between these truths reveals the perhaps more brutal truth of things lost or missed in their lives (as perhaps the ladies of Cranford insert their oral fiction between what they expect of the world and what their world provides). But the truth of life in Cranford is not easy to put down in words. Mary's secret letter to the Aga Jenkyns is written with care so that it “should affect him, if he were Peter, and yet seem a mere statement of dry facts if he were a stranger” (127). A hard letter to compose, which is perhaps why we have no extract from it in the text, though Peter, reading the truth within it, is moved to race home immediately.

Great importance and secrecy are attached to the written word. Mrs. Forrester is willing to give bread jelly to an invalid, but will give the “receipt” for it to no one during her lifetime: “it [is] bequeathed, as her executors would find, to Miss Matty” (104). During Miss Matty's time of crisis the ladies each write down the amount they can afford to give her annually in mysteriously sealed papers “under pledge of secresy” (138). Written language holds truth, and thus is valuable to the women, but public displays of written language are undesirable. For Miss Matty to begin her operation selling tea “[a] small genteel notification of her being licensed to sell tea, would … be necessary; but [Mary] hope[s] that it [can] be placed where no one [can] see it” (133). It is in fact placed under the lintel of the door, out of sight; the written truth of her current hardship must not be proclaimed publicly.

If truth and individuality are revealed by writing, they can also be hidden again by burning. Miss Matty is concerned with what will be revealed to others through written language, and regularly makes “candle-lighters of all the notes and letters of the week” (72). The truth contained in the old letters which she and Mary burn is not to become part of the selective fiction of Cranford society either, and is not to be revealed to those who did not care deeply for the writers (despite Miss Matty's opinion that “[a]ny one might profit by reading” Deborah's letters [46]).3 The letters contain some earlier truths of Cranford, an old Cranford which is burned with the letters, and from which only Peter, like a sole letter which is his, is preserved.

Many of the old letters reveal the personal histories of the Jenkyns parents. The young Rector's letters are “full of eager, passionate ardour; short homely sentences, right fresh from the heart; (very different from the grand-Latinised, Johnsonian style of [his] printed sermon …)” (43), while as an older, married man “he could hardly write a letter to his wife without cropping out into Latin” (45). His letters deal less and less with reality, but even early on, his fiancée could not understand “what he meant by repeating the same thing over in so many different ways” (43). Later in life she demonstrates continued bewilderment at his style through her own unintentionally comic docketing of her husband's letters: “Hebrew verses sent me by my honoured husband. I thowt to have had a letter about killing the pig, but must wait” (45). Her own writing has always been far more direct and unformed. From the outset each has a way of writing and exhorts the other to adopt it—she wants facts about finery, he expressions of love. Yet as time passes they both keep their differing styles; his letters become grandiloquent, sermonizing collections of quotations, while hers remain direct, ungrammatical, but factual descriptions of home life. She seeks the reality or truth that she writes in her letters, but does not receive it: “[s]he asked for his directions about the cows and pigs; and did not always obtain them” (46).

The distinction between men's and women's letters is not as clear-cut as are their differences in speech. Older men tend to keep self-revelation concealed under grandiose language, as the Rector does, or under the “small talk” of letters. Deborah, the most structured of all the female letter writers, makes use of quotations (fairly appropriately) to enhance her letters, while her father inappropriately stacks his letters with quotations and copied language. Mary comments on a letter from her father, by saying that it “was just a man's letter; I mean it was very dull, and gave no information beyond that he was well, that they had had a good deal of rain, that trade was very stagnant, and there were many disagreeable rumours afloat” (119). His letter reveals very little about himself, and this letter, together with Mr. Holbrook's “formal, old-fashioned” (30) note of invitation, are the only examples we are given of contemporary men writing in Cranford. What are clearly distinct between men and women in Cranford are beliefs about literature and practices of reading.

III

The women are sufficient “for deciding all questions of literature … without troubling themselves with unnecessary reasons or arguments” (1). They hold views on literature which they will not allow to be imposed upon, and they do not like the written word to be taken lightly. Miss Jenkyns “on the strength of a number of manuscript sermons, and a pretty good library of divinity, considered herself literary, and looked upon any conversation about books as a challenge to her” (8). Although “[i]n many respects … an idiosyncratic personality rather than an archetypal figure (Tarratt 154), Deborah is the arbiter of literary taste for the women even after her death, and her views become representative of those of the women because of her emphatic enunciation of them. We should not be surprised that although old-fashioned in dress and manner, the literature of the previous century (nevertheless the century in which they were born) is held up by the women as a model of excellence.

Literary differences are nowhere more dramatically revealed than in the great debate between Captain Brown and Miss Jenkyns over the literary merits of Mr. Boz and Dr. Johnson.4 In his biography of Charles Dickens, John Forster asks, “where will the blame lie if a [wo]man takes up Pickwick and is disappointed to find that [s]he is not reading Rasselas?” (2:376). In Cranford the blame lies with the loud interloper who strides in and forces his affection for Pickwick upon the assembled Amazons. Deborah Jenkyns takes an attack on her literary taste as a “personal affront,” and her “disappointment” cannot therefore be considered unprovoked. She has read numbers of The Pickwick Papers and feels qualified to judge their claims as literature, and even though some of the ladies present laugh heartily at the portion of Pickwick read aloud by Captain Brown, she reads from Rasselas to prove Johnson's superiority over Mr. Boz as a writer of fiction. One of her arguments is that she considers it “vulgar, and below the dignity of literature, to publish in numbers” (9), a comment doubly ironic since both the Rambler (as Captain Brown points out, though tellingly for once in a “low voice”) and Cranford itself were published in parts. When the Captain tries to tell Deborah that they are different types of literature, she cuts him down with “I am quite aware of that … [a]nd I make allowances, Captain Brown” (9). When he informs her that he “should be very sorry for [Boz] to exchange his style for any such pompous writing” as that of Johnson's (9), she clinches her argument by drawing herself up with dignity and “saying with marked emphasis on every syllable, “I prefer Dr. Johnson to Mr. Boz” (9).5 It is an irrefutable argument, and she has, in the world of Cranford, successfully defended what she considers to be the best in literature and style. The Captain after an alleged “D———n Dr. Johnson!” is forever silenced on this issue, and has learned better than to have “sport[ed] a bit of literature” (8) again among women who are in deadly earnest about the written word.

Given prevalent assumptions among critics that Deborah Jenkyns has had, to her detriment, views about language and literature imposed upon her, that she is trapped into ludicrous and blind notions about the literary worth of Dr. Johnson, and that she lacks access to a language with which to express herself, it might be useful to examine her actual arguments about Johnson versus Dickens, in contradistinction to her methods of arguing. The text's gentle mocking of Deborah during her exchange with Captain Brown implies general support for his attitude to the two writers. But are Deborah's ideas, and the arguments she gives to support them, being mocked, or merely the way in which she argues? Deborah's arguments are certainly pompous, her attitude towards Captain Brown's views over-dismissive, and her decision to wage such a war of words at an evening party seemingly ill timed—but that is Deborah. She is pompous, she can be dismissive, and according to her rules of behaviour, it is the Captain (publicly challenging her beliefs at a function) whose comments are ill timed. Once we get past the unapologetically presented character of Deborah (and in effect stop finding reasons to apologize for her character), we find that her arguments are considered, and are supported by her own examination. She has taken Pickwick into account, and her comments about Dickens are generally apt, in that the Mr. Boz described here has yet to complete his first novel; at this stage he does, as most modern critics would agree, have much to learn. Although Miss Jenkyns overstates the case by advancing Johnson as a model of “light and agreeable fiction” (11), and also errs in her comments on serial publication, that is more a product of her pompousness than her argument. In fact, Dickens did have aesthetic problems with “vulgar” serial publication and did take serious thought about the structures of his later, more finely crafted novels; Dr. Johnson the critic would not have been the worst influence in this regard. Miss Jenkyns is in effect reserving judgment on a talented but basically unproven literary upstart, and stating a preference for the proven oeuvre of an admitted literary giant, as many critics no doubt would, had Dickens died before completing The Pickwick Papers. Hers is a considered, intelligent judgment, however intolerantly expressed, and while we would agree with Captain Brown in admiring Dickens' lively style and in seeing him as “different” from Johnson, the Captain is really just quoting the (very) popular opinion of Mr. Boz. Far from being the product of “imposed thought,” Deborah's argument (and our reception of her argument) is the product of her being resolutely herself, and speaking that way. It must be remembered that for her Johnson the great lexicographer would be quite a liberating figure, suggesting the infinite possibilities of her language, but it is distinctly Deborah-like to insist from this that all things, including “light and agreeable fiction” (11), are to be found in “Dr. Johnson.”

Despite her victory, however, Miss Jenkyns can never forgive Captain Brown for his “disparaging remarks upon Dr. Johnson” (11). Their disagreement over language is described in the most physical of terms: “[t]he literary dispute … was a ‘raw,’ the slightest touch on which made them wince. It was the only difference of opinion they had ever had; but that difference was enough” (14). Captain Brown's walking around the streets reading Mr. Boz, and all but bumping into Miss Jenkyns, merely adds injury to insult: “she had rather he had knocked her down, if he had only been reading a higher style of literature” (14). Deborah maintains her belief in Johnson till her death, and similarly sticks to her view that Captain Brown's championing of his “[c]apital thing” (8) has proven a “capital” offense. Although to the end her methods of promoting her literary tastes are ironically presented (near her death we see Flora Gordon reading the Rambler to her with much difficulty, little “improvement,” and a glad escape to A Christmas Carol), we should not dismiss her “reasons and arguments” just because she avoids “troubling [herself] with unnecessary” ones (1).

Deborah, then, can reasonably be considered “literary” and an authoritative judge of what she has read. But how wide is her range of reading, and what are the other women's reading habits? The Jenkyns sisters have a book room comprising the deceased Rector's books, and Deborah has read with and for her father when younger and makes use of literary allusions. She has also on occasion “learnt some piece of poetry off by heart” (112), perused the dreaded Pickwick, read Johnson, and spread her view of him among her friends. But beyond her, reading activity seems to fall off sharply. Miss Pole has heard or read of the fictional heroes “Thaddeus of Warsaw and the Hungarian Brothers, and Santo Sebastiani” (83) and refers to encyclopaedias and to “Dr. Ferrier and Dr. Hibbert besides” (99). Mrs. Jamieson has “a japanned table devoted to literature, on which lay a Bible, a Peerage, and a Prayer-Book” (75). Certainly many of the women know ghost stories and have heard of The Arabian Nights (154) and “Lalla Rookh” (112). Mary (far more literary as a narrator) is at a card party “provided … with some literature, in the shape of three or four handsomely bound fashion-books ten or twelve years old” (67). There is, finally, the St. James's Chronicle to look forward to, but we hear little else of the women's reading of “literature,” and surprisingly in a novel that Schor argues is “a novel about reading” (110), they are rarely shown reading in the text. Matty herself treasures the language held in a book far more for whom it belonged to than for its contents. She is always loyal to the merits of Johnson out of love for her sister and keeps beside her bed his dictionary (which, to judge from her spelling, she rarely investigates), along with the book of poems from Thomas Holbrook. She similarly presents Mary with “the handsomest bound and best edition of Dr. Johnson's works that could be procured” as a mark of deep favor (153).

The literary tastes of the women are “old-fashioned,” while the literary tastes of the men are more contemporary; Captain Brown and Mary's father show familiarity with Dickens, Thomas Holbrook with Tennyson. There is more to this than a question of taste; it is the fundamental difference between the older women of Cranford and the men, between reading and creating. “[W]e did not read much” (10), says Mary near the beginning of the novel, and she later comments that she gets plenty of plain sewing done while staying at Miss Pole's, “as [they] did not read much” (24). This indicates that as far as the older women of Cranford are concerned, Schor is incorrect to argue that “[i]n this world, books have created their ability to express themselves or to move with changing times” (287). The truth is that these women cannot be greatly influenced by what they read because, quite simply, they do not read very much at all. The only sustained reading we see is Mary's and Miss Matty's reading of old letters, which is in a sense also part of the women's creative sphere (of inclusion and exclusion), in that these letters are written by Deborah or others of Matty's family, and are read for reasons of love and duty, not literary desire. In fact, far from being shapers of the Cranfordian women, on private grounds these letters are actively excluded by the women from their world. The language and creation of Cranford are firmly in the women's hands, and there is little limit but self-imposed propriety on what can be expressed. Through language, the women are controllers of their world and are under no obligation to move with what others define as “the changing times”; they can almost do what is so much harder: halt time.

Male characters who attempt to write their own roles in the women's fiction can survive only if they do not attempt to take authority for the written word out of the Amazons' control.6 and as long as they read enough to sustain themselves. The Rector has published a sermon and an ode, but is a man of the past, not the present. It is Captain Brown and Thomas Holbrook who best illustrate the importance to male characters in Cranford of reading. Captain Brown is absorbed in reading Dickens, while Miss Jenkyns uses Johnson as an arbiter of written composition, a stimulant to her own creativity. However delightful we might find the Captain's reading, he only reads, while Miss Jenkyns, however self-consciously, creates. Although private reading is his prerogative, in speaking publicly of his preference for Dickens over Johnson, Captain Brown forces his opinion about written language into the midst of the women's oral fiction. This the women (particularly Deborah) cannot ignore, and the Captain, however unwittingly, has rung his own death knell.

Views on written language at odds with their own cannot be incorporated into the woman's world. The implication of their oral fiction is that Captain Brown dies for what he chooses to read, and, ironically, dies when he stops reading. His Dickensian (even Pickwickian) character cannot be sustained by the women because it is not made from their language. It might almost seem that Miss Jenkyns's compulsive, spell-like, Johnsonian clove-sticking (at a time when the Browns “were seldom absent from her thoughts” [15]) has fated the Captain, who has questioned her self by questioning her preferences in language and style. Her many “rolling three-piled sentence[s]” (15) (the “conjuring and witchcraft” of her alphabet) have perhaps used language in a way powerful beyond her imagination or intention (although Deborah herself seems to believe in the fatefulness of words; she insists that the little rolls of tallow forming around candles be spoken of not as “winding-sheets” but as “roly-poleys” [84]). Miss Jenkyns stands her ground and Captain Brown dies, proving (in the Amazon fiction) her belief stronger. Her comment on hearing that his grotesque death was (in her view) caused by perusing a number of Pickwick is “[p]oor, dear, infatuated man!” (17). To her he was blindly infatuated with Dickens, while she judged Johnson with a clear eye. He glances up from his book, stops reading, and like a noble Dickensian hero runs to his death to save a child.

Thomas Holbrook, perhaps the most “literary” character in the novel, has a house full of books chosen according to his own taste, which he reads: “somehow one can't help it” (32). He is described as “a great reader” (34), and will impulsively set off and walk the “seven miles to Missleton” to order Tennyson's poems after reading a review of them (34). He is a Don Quixote, absorbing much of his character from what he reads, and wandering about his farm “repeating apt and beautiful quotations from the poets,” even though he pronounces Byron as Burron and Goethe “strictly in accordance with the English sound of the letters” (32). He reads “Locksley Hall,” a poem reminiscent of his and Matty's lost love, to his unlistening guests. He honestly admits that he does not know Dr. Johnson's poems as well as Matty appears to (for whom “[i]t is so like that beautiful poem of Dr. Johnson's” [35] is a term of general approbation), and admits that he has learned from a poem that ash-buds in March are black.

Holbrook has “six-and-twenty cows, named after the different letters of the alphabet” (32). He tends the constituent parts of language, has language under his control, but is unable to do what the women can with their A's and B's; he can expertly read and quote, but he cannot conjure, he cannot create. Soon after his return from Paris he becomes ill, “not reading or anything” (38), and dies (it suits Miss Pole to believe that Paris has killed him). If he does not read he cannot survive, and when he reads he is bound to follow language as it has been set down by others, just as he abides by his father's law of the dinner table: “[n]o broth, no ball; no ball, no beef” (33). Minor male characters show similar reading or speaking patterns: Mr. Mulliner is rude and does “not speak except in gruff monosyllables” (75), but is seen engrossed in reading the St. James's Chronicle, while even the “civil butcher” of Cranford, one Mr. Johnson, who almost seems to repay loyalty to his namesake by sending Miss Matty customers when she begins to sell tea, has “a little want of tact” (125).

Peter Jenkyns, from childhood on, is more of a “jester” than a genuine story-maker. He comes closest to the oral fictions of the women when, ironically, his father believes his jest that he is a woman who wants a copy of the Rector's Assize Sermon. Peter is then briefly bound up in his own fiction, as he is made to his dismay to copy out twelve sermons for “the lady,” and curses his fictional counterpart: “[c]onfound the woman!” (51). But this early incident is the exception to the rule that men do not create fiction in Cranford, and indeed Peter's second ‘hoax” in women's clothing precipitates his exile from the town. He returns at the end of the tale, drawn by Mary's truth-containing letter, with a past unconventional enough to give him much leeway in the women's world. He can still tell outrageous tales which are essentially jests, but is sensible enough to be selective in whom he tells them to, and does not do so in front of Matty. His comments to her about Thomas Holbrook show, however, that he still possesses the brutal bluntness of male speech. His incorporation into the world of Cranford is in the women's hands, and they will need to adapt their fiction to cover his verbal and behavioral blunders. He has nevertheless gained a lifetime's sustenance from his time in India, and thus does not require the constant reading that the other men do; he is himself a virtual living tale, an “Arabian night.”

With so much criticism declaring that the women of Cranford are restricted, repressed, and imposed upon, it is important to notice that in the vital area of language the Amazons have minds and wills of their own, and use them. They conjure up grand and adaptable oral fictions, they reveal truth, and respect those truths revealed, through their individualities of written style; they “decid[e] all questions of literature” aptly and firmly for themselves. These women must be granted credit for their imagination and integrity, for their conjuring and creativity, where language is concerned.

An anonymous critic wrote in 1866 that Cranford will remain immortal “while the language lives” (“Editor's Table” 186). Cranford, the town of the Amazons, will surely endure as long as the women's language does, or as long, perhaps, as it is allowed that the women, with verbal dexterity, can magically transform the A's and B's of their alphabet into their world.

Notes

  1. Schor's chapter on Cranford is based on her earlier article “Affairs of the Alphabet: Reading, Writing and Narrating in Cranford.Novel 22 (1989): 288-304.

  2. And indeed, as Barbara Weiss points out, a man whose wife “[l]ike the other ladies of Cranford … uses storytelling to impose verbal control on a life in which she otherwise has little power” (283).

  3. Gaskell saw to it that after her death many of her own letters would be burned by her daughter.

  4. I am indebted to Mark Eade for tireless help and discussion during the writing of this paper, and am particularly grateful for the valuable insights and suggestions he has contributed to my discussion of Deborah's preference for Dr. Johnson over Mr. Boz.

  5. In light of Deborah's views on Rasselas and Matty's later saying that Deborah “could have said the same things quite as well [as Mrs. Chapone]” (46), it is interesting to note Gaskell's letter in 1857 to a friend, in which she discusses having little time in which to write: “[i]f I had a library like yours, all undisturbed for hours, how I would write! Mrs. Chapone's letters should be nothing to mine! I would out-do Rasselas in fiction” (Chapple and Pollard 489).

  6. Auerbach writes: “[i]n the verbal and commercial battle of nineteenth-century England, the cooperative female community defeats the warrior world that proclaims itself the real one” (87).

Works Cited

Auerbach, Nina. Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1978.

Chapple, J. A. V., and Arthur Pollard, eds. The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1966.

“Editor's Table. One Book of the Late Mrs. Gaskell.” Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine (Philadelphia) Feb. 1866:186. Cited in Elizabeth Gaskell: A Reference Guide. By Robert L. Selig. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. 34.

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. 2 vols. 1872-74. Ed A. J. Hoppé. London: Dent, 1966.

Fowler, Rowena. “Cranford: Cow in Grey Flannel or Lion Couchant?” Studies in English Literature 24 (1984): 717-29.

Gaskell, Elizabeth. Cranford. Ed. Elizabeth Porges Watson. The World's Classics Series. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1972.

Schor, Hilary M. Scheherazade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.

Stoneman, Patsy. Elizabeth Gaskell. Brighton: Harvester, 1987.

Tarratt, Margaret. “Cranford and ‘the Strict Code of Gentility.’” Essays in Criticism 18 (1968): 152-63.

Weiss, Barbara. “Elizabeth Gaskell: The Telling of Feminine Tales.” Studies in the Novel 16 (1984): 274-87.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

‘Peter Was a Lady Then’: Sexuality and Gender in Cranford

Next

Mothers without Children, Unity without Plot: Cranford's Radical Charm

Loading...