SOURCE: “Mothers without Children, Unity without Plot: Cranford's Radical Charm,” in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 52, No. 2, September, 1997, pp. 198-220.

Early in the modern critical reappraisal of Elizabeth Gaskell, John Gross perceptively warned that Gaskell's charm might lead critics to undervalue her work despite the fact that “her reputation has held steady for a hundred years.”¹ This is both an odd warning and an apt one, especially in the case of Cranford (1851-53), which is perhaps the most charming of all of Gaskell's works. I will argue that this novel's “charm” presents something of a critical challenge to our current understanding of narrative as something that mimics the compulsions of desire.² With its emphasis on compelling desire and entrapment, recent models of narrative often equate the structure of desire with the structure of narrative itself. However, as George Eliot notes about Tristram Shandy, certain types of desires cannot be represented in conventional novelistic structures:

What is the best way of telling a story? Since the standard must be the interest of the audience, there must be several or many good ways rather than one best. … Why should a story not be told in the most irregular fashion that an author's idiosyncrasy may prompt, provided that he gives us what we can enjoy? The objections to Sterne's wild way of telling ‘Tristram Shandy’ lie more solidly in the quality of the interrupting matter than in the fact of interruption.³

Wayne C. Booth makes a similar point when he notes that the representation of desires (or other emotive forces) can involve a “search for new ways of giving body to abstract forms.”⁴ I will argue that as something created, rather than mere ephemeral affect, Cranford's charm is best understood as the successful embodiment of just such an experiment in formal representation. It compels without plot and charms without seduction. In short, Cranford utilizes a subtly different narrative structure—one metonymous with sympathy rather than desire. As such, this novel represents a significant moment in nineteenth-century narrative, not only in the development of the novel of sympathy but also in the novel of reform.

Since its initial publication from 1851 to 1853 in Dickens's Household Words, Cranford has charmed readers through almost two hundred editions, has been translated into several languages (including Hungarian), and has often been dramatized. During its peak years (1899-1910) the novel was published seventy-five times, and new editions continue to appear. Dickens wrote to Gaskell that many of its episodes were “delightful, and touched in the tenderest and most delicate manner.”⁵ Dickens's good friend John Forster wrote to Gaskell of Cranford: “I cannot tell you what charm the whole quiet picture has for me”; later he complimented the book for “so nice, so exquisite a touch,” and he accurately predicted its great popular success.⁶ Even Gaskell's lukewarm contemporary reviewers were condescendingly gallant. A reviewer in Peterson's Magazine noted that Gaskell was incapable of writing badly and thus Cranford was “as interesting as an almost total want of plot can make it.”⁷

If in light of the novel's enduring popularity these nineteenth-century appraisals seem somewhat self-contradictory (such certain praise for such dearth of plot), this is possibly due to the fact that early readers believed that the novel's idiosyncratic structure and its charm were mutually inclusive. In 1952, in Elizabeth Gaskell: Her Life and Work, A. B. Hopkins neatly encapsulated this prevailing view of the novel, declaring that “Cranford is practically structureless; that is part of its charm” (p. 108). Of course, by dubbing Cranford “charming,” early critics dispensed with the necessity for explaining how it is that Cranford delights. Since charm dissolves under scrutiny, charming works and charming women neither deserve nor reward critical attention; in fact, they are best appreciated without it.

Nineteenth-century critics explained Cranford's appeal by noting that its plethora of charm compensated for its lack of plot. Twentieth-century criticism finds itself in a similarly compromised position—that of defending Cranford against the egregious charge of charm largely by ignoring the change completely. Seeking to emphasize the novel's narrative strength and to defend it from charges of “plotlessness” or, even worse, lack of unity, recent appraisals have focused on the intriguing means by which the force of this novel actually does lie in its plot.⁸ Other critics locate the novel's force in its presentation of character.⁹ Such approaches, however, inevitably entail the regretful acknowledgment that the novel's structure is weak since its idiosyncratic relationship to formal unity is, after all, “problematic.”¹⁰ Thus, critical appraisal of the novel continues to be ambivalent. Yet, juxtaposed, these two centuries of criticism raise suggestive questions. If Cranford is plotless, then how does it captivate the reader? Conversely, if Cranford's force lies in its plot, then how does this “force” operate within the novel's ostensible structural “weakness”?

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Perhaps the best place to begin examining Cranford's radically different narrative dynamic is at the moment of “interruption” often stressed by modern critics interested in discussing the novel's problematic lack of narrative unity—the death of Captain Brown. When on 13 December 1851 Gaskell published two episodes entitled “Our Society at Cranford” in Dickens's Household Words, she thought she had finished a short piece about a small fictional town named Cranford. Those episodes, though, comprise only the first few chapters of the novel as we now know it. Popular acclaim and Dickens's urging convinced Gaskell to continue the narrative, and she eventually added fourteen more chapters.¹¹ This continuation presented something of a challenge, since at the end of the first two episodes Gaskell had already killed off two important characters: the dynamic Captain Brown and the rather authoritarian Deborah Jenkyns. As Gaskell explained in her often-quoted letter to Ruskin: “The beginning of ‘Cranford’ was one paper in ‘Household Words’; and I never meant to write more, so killed Capt Brown very much against my will.”¹²

In his influential essay “Women Without Men at Cranford” Martin Dodsworth uses this important fact about the novel's publishing history to support his argument that there is a disruptive juncture after the death of Captain Brown, one that marks a structural flaw in the novel's narrative unity for which Gaskell only unconsciously manages to compensate in the later chapters by allowing Peter Jenkyns back to Cranford (see Dodsworth, pp. 133-34). I would argue, however, that not only is Cranford's publishing history an excellent metaphor for an unplanned (but nonetheless effective) escape from teleological narrative; it may also have provided the creative spur that prompted the novel's distinctive narrative pattern. A brief mention of two of Gaskell's “proto-Cranford” pieces should help illustrate important strands in this pattern and also help to explain the manner in which Cranford, more than any other of Gaskell's novels based on Knutsford, most fully instantiates a special pattern of existence into the structure of the narrative itself.

In writing about Cranford, Gaskell was fictionally representing the real town of Knutsford, a peaceful, antiquated spot where she had lived during much of her childhood. Gaskell later spent much time in the quickly growing industrialized town of Manchester (sometimes represented fictionally in her stories as “Drumble”). She describes herself as “vibrating” between these two towns, often longing to return to that peaceful childhood place to escape the pace of life in Manchester.¹³ In 1849 Gaskell attempted to capture some of the charm of Knutsford by writing a short nonfiction piece entitled “The Last Generation in England.” She describes this attempt as an effort of historical preservation. She wanted to

put upon record some of the details of country town life, either observed by myself, or handed down to me by older relations; for even in small towns, scarcely removed from villages, the phases of society are rapidly changing; and much will appear strange, which yet occurred only in the generation immediately preceding ours.¹⁴

These “details” are drawn directly from Gaskell's own memories, and they include some of the more memorable events she would later rework in Cranford. “The Last Generation” certainly contains the embryo of Cranford's charm, but it lacks compelling form. Her later short story “Mr. Harrison's Confessions” (1851) also depicts Knutsford (now “Duncombe”) but this time in fictional guise. In this story, Duncombe's mothers and widows comically impede the hero's romance with the angelic minister's daughter. Yet like “The Cage at Cranford,” which Gaskell wrote nearly ten years after Cranford was published, “Mr. Harrison's Confessions” derives its humor primarily from the ridiculous nature of the antiquated customs of its small-town denizens. However gentle, its comic force fails to capture the sympathetic resonances so deftly incorporated within the later novel.

“Our Society at Cranford,” Gaskell's third significant attempt to capture the pattern of existence in Knutsford, goes well beyond the simple desire to preserve the rapidly diminishing way of life that pervades “The Last Generation.” It also complicates the comic impulse that defines “Mr. Harrison's Confessions” by creating a more sophisticated comic tension. Perhaps by the time she wrote Cranford Gaskell had decided that “the Cranford people might [not] be joked about, and made fun of” (Cranford, p. 50); though, like the adult Peter Jenkyns, who also makes this decision, Gaskell was hardly immune to the humor in eccentricity.

In her introduction to the novel Elizabeth Porges Watson has suggested that Gaskell's relationship to the town of Knutsford consisted of “a deep affection for a particular pattern of existence” (p. vii). The early Cranford sketches in “Our Society” capture that pattern of existence, combining both the humor and the desire to preserve in a synthesis that transcends both. The first-person narrator, Mary (who is not identified by name until the later chapters were written), sometimes speaks directly to the reader in a familiar, almost epistolary voice: “Do you ever see cows dressed in grey flannel in London?” (p. 5). In such asides, and throughout the story, Gaskell assumes the reader's own nuanced amusement, and her irony vibrates with full, gentle timbre. The plot, such as it is, concerns a barely explained feud between Captain Brown (avid reader of Dickens) and Miss Deborah Jenkyns (respectful admirer of Dr. Johnson). Gaskell's light handling of the feud, and of the vibrations caused by Captain Brown's arrival in Cranford, becomes itself the texture and compelling charm of the story. Captain Brown dies before Deborah Jenkyns can formally reconcile the feud between them, and the tension thus generated resolves itself quickly as Jenkyns helps one of Captain Brown's destitute daughters to marry a worthy, long-lost suitor.

It should be clear at this point that Dickens's proposal that Gaskell weave these sketches into a longer novel was in reality a formidable challenge to create a formal representation capable of sustaining the distinctively “charming” Cranfordian pattern of existence already so well established in the original sketches. The earlier sketches had been short enough that they could rely on the charm of Cranford's particular pattern of existence rather than any sort of traditional plot. To continue the story, Gaskell had to find a way to instantiate that pattern of existence into a longer narrative.

Mary's comments at the beginning of chapter 3, “A Love Affair of Long Ago,” provide some clue to the manner in which Gaskell might have conceptualized this task. Here, Mary's connection to Cranford after the death of Deborah Jenkyns is strikingly analogous to Gaskell's relationship to the novel after realizing that she must continue a story she thought she had finished. In a narrative aside Mary comments, “I thought that probably my connection with Cranford would cease after Miss Jenkyns's death” (p. 23). Gaskell (via Mary) understands the difficulties surrounding the resumption of the Cranfordian narrative as the problem of how to maintain the relationship to Cranford itself begun in the first sketch, not as the problem of resuming narrative attempts at teleological plot (or, as Dodsworth would have it, of performing penance for the death of Captain Brown). Mary worries that her relationship to the town

would have to be kept up by correspondence, which bears much the same relation to personal intercourse that the books of dried plants … do to the living and fresh flowers in the lanes and meadows.

(p. 23)

Read as narrative allegory for Gaskell's own relationship to the text, this passage reveals an awareness of the structural difficulties posed by the deaths of her most important characters (Deborah as well as Captain Brown). Gaskell could not resolve these difficulties simply by attaching a traditional narrative to the original sketches, for to have done so would have risked duplicating either the stale description of “The Last Generation” or the reductive, plot-driven humor of “Mr. Harrison's Confessions.”

Gaskell seems to have solved this problem by continuing in the longer novel the nascent tendency in the earlier sketches to consistently, humorously, energetically, and creatively elude traditional linear plot. In “The Fragments and Small Opportunities of Cranford” Andrew Horton Miller astutely comments on Cranford's unique relationship to traditional plot, noting that this novel “has eluded the appreciation of critics accustomed to considering linear stories” (p. 91). One of the few critics to specifically investigate the distinctive quality of this novel's narrative, Miller argues that Cranford weaves together two types of plots: the teleological plot along with a more “fragmented” form of discursiveness directed by the novel's repeated interruptions. He cites as a convergence of these two types of plots the cacophonous moment in which Mary attempts to glean information about Miss Matty's “lost” brother, Peter Jenkyns. Having suspicions that Mrs. Brown's “Aga Jenkyns” might actually be the missing Peter Jenkyns (brother to Matty and Deborah), Mary attempts to discover more information about Peter. Her initial attempts to elicit this information provoke an unwonted cacophony incapable of producing the stories necessary to her goal. Instead of conveying the information Mary wanted, “every lady took the subject uppermost in her mind, and talked about it to her own great contentment, but not much to the advancement of the subject they had met to discuss” (Cranford, p. 111). Miller notes that this detective impulse constitutes a traditional teleological or propulsive drive in Cranford that exists simultaneously with the more discursive movement of the narrative.

Since Mary's decision to follow her own propulsive detective impulse cannot sustain itself past the moment it begins, however, Mary's attempt to create a propulsive plot in Cranford might best be read in terms of its failure rather than its existence. A convergence of two distinct narrative modes necessitates the existence of both. In Cranford, however, propulsive plots and characters consistently vanish before they can direct story. The cacophony that this impulse produces is indicative of the fact that teleological movement toward story cannot sustain itself in Cranford. The cacophony quickly resolves itself, however, once Mary abandons her momentary impulse toward traditional plot. When she begins to listen with her own contentment to the subject uppermost in each lady's mind, she (and the reader) learns that the normal, patient propensity to share in the resonance of the characters whose lives one touches actually yields far more story than self-directed attempts to create stories for emotional gratification.

Mary's early reports about the town set the parameters for this Cranfordian relationship to story. In Cranford “no absorbing subject was ever spoken about” (p. 3) and, in fact, “there was a dearth of subjects for conversation” (p. 10). When the opportunity does arise to share information, the Cranford ladies normally tell stories singly and clearly—waiting for each other to speak even when such patience requires a sacrifice. Mary and Miss Matty wait patiently for five minutes in order to allow Miss Pole to tell a piece of exciting news, despite their own “eagerness to see how [Miss Pole] would bear the information” (p. 116). When Miss Pole organizes the meeting in order to inform Mary that the ladies all wish to contribute something to Miss Matty's financial support, it proceeds smoothly, broken only by a few moments of silent sobbing. Although each person present had additional important information to convey to Mary regarding her contribution, all waited until after the meeting to obtain “a private conference with” her (p. 138). Like Miss Pole's “prophecies,” which she only reveals after events have proved her predictions, the Cranfordian narrative habitually waits for story. The inadvertent discoveries that Mary makes about the true character of the Captain and the Misses Brown, Miss Matty's secret “love affair” with Mr. Holbrook, and the true nature of the Cranfordian “robberies” all occur in quiet moments not at all directed by the teleological urge to direct story toward any particular outcome. As she adjusts to the rhythm of Cranford, Mary notices that neither her desires nor her suspicions can predict or interpret the actions of others. Instead, she notes, “it was only by a sort of watching … that I saw how faithful [Miss Matty's] poor heart had been in its sorrow and its silence” (p. 36). Mary learns most about character, and she tells Cranford's best stories, when her own perceptivity and understanding allow her to resonate sympathetically with the town's inhabitants.

It is this sympathetic resonance that defines Cranford's charm and that constitutes its radically different narrative. The novel's unique charm derives its essence from an innovation in the compelling dynamic of narrative that eschews traditional plotting in order to create a narrative mode that embodies a desire (more precisely, a sympathetic resonance) antithetical to seduction. Insofar as it is sometimes useful to gender narrative forms, I will dub this special sympathetic resonance a “maternal” one. It is a well-known fact of Gaskell's life that her husband urged her to take up writing in order to assuage her almost paralytic grief at the death of her infant son, William. Thus it is possible that for Gaskell the act of writing was powerfully figured in relation to maternal emotions of love and loss. The raw maternal instinct manifests itself just below the tangible outlines of plot and character, residing instead in Cranford's repeated emphasis on rescuing or retrieving children. Captain Brown sacrifices his life to save a child, and Mrs. Brown's grueling trek across India is similarly inspired. More subtly, Mrs. Brown's story is itself prelude to the discovery of another child—“poor Peter,” whom Miss Matty remembers only as a child, even though he returns as an aging gentleman. In fact, the day he starts “looking like a man” instead of a boy (p. 53), Peter disappears from Cranford, which suggests that his connection to childhood is inseparable from his connection to Cranford. Miss Matty dreams of a child, and when Peter returns she is confused because she remembers him still as a child—and indeed, after his return Peter continues the practical jokes that marked his childhood career.

Furthermore, the normal activities of the Cranford ladies are often markedly maternal. When Miss Brown is sick the ladies divide the womanly chores of caring for her, much as they care for Signor Brunoni after his accident: “Miss Pole looked out clean and comfortable, if homely, lodgings; Miss Matty sent the sedan-chair for [Mr. Brown]; and Martha and I aired it well before it left Cranford” (p. 103). These maternal drives even occasionally expand to fill traditionally patriarchal roles. Although she defers to her father's advice, it is Mary who invents a job for Miss Matty, and before Mary's father even arrives the Cranfordian ladies band together in order to plan for Miss Matty's financial future.

Although the importance of children, mothers, and community in many of Gaskell's works has recently received much deserved critical attention,¹⁵ in describing Gaskell's writerly instincts as “maternal” I must stretch the denotative and connotative possibilities of the word to match Gaskell's own maternal vision. As I have shown above, traditional maternal concerns are present in Cranford. However, the novel is still largely about women defined by their lack of husbands and children. I am arguing, therefore, that the radical maternal drive in this novel emerges in its narrative structure, which Gaskell uses to evade conventional readerly desires (for such things as a stimulating plot or traditional romantic satisfactions) in order to respond to the needs generated by the novel's fictional characters.

Gaskell's own prescriptive advice in an 1859 letter to an aspiring young novelist is helpful here because it encapsulates an important dynamic within what I am calling Gaskell's “maternal” practice of narrative. She writes:

I believe in spite of yr objection to the term ‘novel’ you do wish to ‘narrate,’—and I believe you can do it if you try,—but I think you must observe what is out of you, instead of examining what is in you. … Then set to & imagine yourself a spectator & auditor of every scene & event! Work hard at this till it become a reality to you,—a thing you have to recollect & describe & report fully & accurately as it struck you, in order that your reader may have it equally before him.

(Letters, pp. 541-42)

This advice resembles Trollope's advice that writers let character direct plot. Gaskell's emphasis on character, however, is not to be confused with the Trollopian stance that “the highest merit which a novel can have consists in perfect delineation of character, rather than in plot.”¹⁶ Nor is it to be confused with the writerly advice to “show rather than tell,” which it also resembles. It is important that here Gaskell stresses “scene & event,” without mentioning character, in order to emphasize a narrative that vibrates responsively with its subject.

Wendy K. Carse notes that “what is most striking about [Gaskell's] advice … is the degree to which Mary adheres to it—in reaction to the narratives of others and in her own.”¹⁷ Certainly this is true. As I have suggested, Mary's role as catalyst for story rather than director of it is not a simple rejection of teleological progression, just as Gaskell's own relationship to telling a story she thought she had finished requires a sophisticated ability to weave the small pattern into a larger representation of itself. Both achievements evolve from Gaskell's sophisticated sympathetic attention to the Cranfordian pattern of existence and to her deep maternal commitments and needs. It is this remarkable ability to explore “outside” of self that constitutes the refinement of sympathetic narrative so unique to Cranford. It is perhaps also responsible for Gaskell's inspired biography of Charlotte Brontë, itself an important landmark in biographical narrative. In some real sense Gaskell's biography of Brontë defined the receptive public space for the shockingly “unfeminine” author of Jane Eyre, who had challenged Victorian conceptions of both “woman” and “writer.”

In her biography of Gaskell, Patsy Stoneman reminds us that Gaskell's education of her daughters was remarkable for its time. She notes that Gaskell's daughters were quite different in character and that Gaskell's diary attests to her interest in these differences as well as to her ability to nurture and direct their different natures through individualized parenting techniques that “allowed their natures to develop rather than imposing patterns on them.”¹⁸ This sophisticated maternal sympathy was at work in the Brontë biography, and it also constitutes the essence of the abstract form of desire instantiated in Cranford's narrative structure. Thus it is possible to say that those maternal and nonmaternal characters discussed above who act out maternal impulses represent only one rather superficial aspect of Gaskell's distinctive maternal relationship to novelistic form. More startling is the catalytic effect this maternal sympathy has on the form of the novel's narrative structure where it resists the traditional “seductive” teleological narrative, functioning instead as a metaphor for Gaskell's own parenting techniques, which employ a sophisticated form of sympathy in order to allow characters and stories to develop rather than imposing patterns on them.

In Cranford this sophisticated “maternal” relationship to the teleological plot gently redefines the traditional concept of novelistic unity, molding the reader's desires rather than catering to them. An important mediator between reader and story, Mary Smith dramatizes the relationship to story that is so important to the particular pattern of Cranfordian existence. Having learned from her early abortive attempt to discover more about Peter Jenkyns's whereabouts (which had provoked only a confusing cacophony), Mary decides to curb her impulse to focus story on “self” and expresses a determination

to prove myself a model of prudence and wisdom. I would not even hint my suspicions respecting the Aga [Peter Jenkyns]. I would collect evidence and carry it home to lay before my father, as the family friend of the two Miss Jenkynses.

(p. 111)

Implicit in this statement is an important conflict bearing directly on the novel's unique relationship to plot. Mary would like it to be the case that Peter Jenkyns is the same person as the mysterious Aga Jenkyns, whom Mrs. Brown discovered on her painful trek across India. Subordinating her initial desires for the exciting discovery of origins and identity, Mary here resolves to prioritize character over story. The moment marks her burgeoning understanding that her desire for story might be subordinate to some other, equally powerful impulse—the “maternal” sympathy that allows characters to develop stories themselves. Guided by this opposing desire, Mary at first decides to yield her narrative authority to a paternal one. However, she never carries out her decision to “collect evidence and carry it home to lay before her father.” Just as Captain Brown's unplanned death forestalls the traditional desire-directed plot and forces Gaskell's attention to the particular pattern of Cranfordian existence, Mary's experiences in Cranford forestall the traditional ceding of feminine authority to masculine—instead, she reconceptualizes the notion of story itself.

Gradually Mary imbibes the Cranfordian attitude toward story. Like her companions, she slowly begins to see that stories can be dangerously seductive. After all, Miss Matty believes that poor Captain Brown's avid interest in the plot of the latest issue of Pickwick Papers was responsible for his death. (He neglects to look up while reading when crossing the town's new railroad tracks.) He “was killed for reading,” she muses sadly (p. 22). More subtly, “a most out-of-place fit of coughing” strikes Miss Pole at the moment she wishes to convey to Mrs. Forrester a piece of startling news (p. 116). Miss Pole's subsequent obsession with Signor Brunoni's exotic (fictional) origins distracts her completely from noticing that there are actually two Signor Brunonis as well as from enjoying the magical entertainment one of them offers. Likewise, “The Panic” (chapter 10) occurs directly in response to the town's willingness to suspend its normally distanced relationship to sensational stories. Defending itself from its own fictionally sensationalized stories of robberies in which “bricks [were] being silently carried away in the dead of the night” (p. 91), Miss Matty retires for the night earlier and earlier, afraid to remain awake. Another frightened Cranfordian actually places a sword under the pillow of her young servant boy in a dangerous (yet ridiculous) attempt at self-protection. This chapter veers dangerously toward the gently parodic humor of “Mr. Harrison's Confessions,” revealing that Cranfordians are most misguided and least sympathetic when reading themselves into traditionally compelling plots.

It is true that Mary wonders—and wonders with real impatience—whether or not Mrs. Brown's “Aga Jenkyns” might be Miss Matty's lost brother. But she gradually comes to recognize that directive desires are incompatible with a sympathy attuned more to the desires embedded in character than to the desires one might wish to impose from without. She ruefully comments on the disjunction between the desire to tell stories and the desire to understand the lives of those she loves: “I suppose all these inquiries of mine, and the consequent curiosity excited in the minds of my friends, made us blind and deaf to what was going on around us” (pp. 112-13).

It is quite natural that once Mary realizes this fact, story resumes. “The astounding piece of news” (p. 113) that Lady Glenmire is to marry Mr. Hoggins comes to light directly after Mary ceases her search for a story of her own making. Indeed, Mary's “real” discoveries (Miss Matty's long-concealed love for Holbrook, the existence of the Aga Jenkyns) are each derived not from any investigative desire but rather from her patient attention to the novel's engrossing characters—the stories “uppermost” in each lady's mind as well as the emotions they experience and invoke in others. Mary's sympathetic attention to the stories of others becomes itself the compelling texture of the Cranfordian narrative, which allows plot without compelling it. Indeed, her discovery that the Aga Jenkyns exists (and might be the lost Peter) is dependent upon the fact that she is catalyst, not director, of Mrs. Brown's story of her trek across India. Acting on this new understanding, Mary sends a letter to Peter designed to tell a story only after it establishes the fact of character. She hopes that this letter will “affect him, if he were Peter, and yet seem a mere statement of dry facts if he were a stranger” (p. 127). Later, as Mary's understanding of the relationship between plot and character evolves still further, even this act will seem too reductively purposive and (like her earlier desire to subordinate her investigative efforts to paternal approval) too dependent upon external sources of evaluation. After the meeting in which Miss Matty's friends demonstrate their unified and unselfish desire to protect Miss Matty from financial ruin, Mary senses the extent to which Cranfordians must tell their own stories:

I began to be very much ashamed of remembering my letter to the Aga Jenkyns, and very glad I had never named my writing to any one. I only hoped the letter was lost.

(p. 146)

Her shame signals the growth of a sympathy that has learned to allow characters stories outside of self and represents the important moment at which she ceases to value Peter's character in relation to her personal desire for plot. Shortly thereafter, Cranford's lost child finally reappears.

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That Peter's character emerges at the moment Mary's sympathetic engagement with Cranford is at its peak, rather than in response to her own desire for exciting discovery, may well account for the fact that Peter, not Captain Brown, is one of the few males allowed to reside in Cranford. As morally compatible as Captain Brown was with the ladies of Cranford, he was essentially out of place there. His attitude toward narrative, so humorously evident in his argument with Deborah Jenkyns over the relative merits of Dickensian and Johnsonian prose style, actually represents an insistence alien to the Cranfordian character. As his sensational death illustrates, he could not wait for story.

Indeed, despite Gaskell's celebrated lack of literary self-consciousness, the debate between Deborah Jenkyns and Captain Brown over the relative merits of Dickens and Johnson helps to elucidate certain features of Cranford's sophisticated narrative structure and demonstrates at least an unconscious action on Gaskell's part to have Cranford occupy a narrative niche different from the literary models she clearly admired. Hilary M. Schor suggests that Gaskell uses this debate to reject both Johnson and Dickens because neither is capable of inscribing the anger or pain of female absence in a male patriarchal society.¹⁹ No doubt Gaskell intended a distinction between Cranfordian narrative and the Johnsonian or Dickensian. However, rejection alone cannot account for the sincere regret with which Cranford (not to mention Gaskell) faces the loss of both characters—Deborah as much as the Captain.

Both Johnson and Dickens haunt this novel, and each is as important through his spiritual presence as his tangible absence. Deeply suspicious of the seductive nature of fiction, Johnson's Rasselas (1759) shares with Cranford a reliance on an essentially moral impulse to compel reader involvement in a novel with deliberately thin pretensions toward plot. In many ways Deborah Jenkyns's beloved Rasselas is a treatise against desire itself, revealing Johnson's deep distrust in the guiding capacity of human passions. However, even as Gaskell adopts the Johnsonian ideal that plot can be driven by something other than seductive desire, she rejects Johnson's distrust of deep human feelings. In “Cranford and ‘the Strict Code of Gentility’” Margaret Tarratt perceptively argues that as the representative of Johnsonian morality, Deborah's “strict code of gentility” is actually at odds with the novel's moral center (p. 155). And in fact Gaskell's rich moral imagination was probably much more closely related to Dickens than to Johnson. Like Dickens, Gaskell is deeply interested in the power of sympathy and fiction to effect moral reform and to create communities.

It is thus no surprise that, after Captain Brown, the next attractive male protagonist is himself almost a Dickensian character—and clearly identified with the Dickensian romantic impulse. Although isolated on his farm, John Holbrook “despised every refinement which had not its root deep down in humanity” (p. 29), thus presenting the appropriate contrast to Deborah Jenkyns's more artificial code of gentility. He possesses an inspired and humorous eccentric intensity—with no sense of incongruity he names “his six-and-twenty cows … after the different letters of the alphabet” (p. 32). He eats peas with his knife, quotes Lord Byron and Goethe, and bolts off to Paris with nary a nod toward Cranfordian normalcy.

Yet Gaskell “killed” John Holbrook as abruptly as she killed Captain Brown. This second startling death reveals that it is probably a mistake to read the later chapters of Cranford as an apology for the early death of Captain Brown. As representatives of Johnson and Dickens, both Captain Brown and John Holbrook embody motives antithetical to the novel's sympathetic core. Like the Captain, Holbrook is incapable of making the leap outside self in order to adapt to the pattern of conversation in Cranford, even by means of the literature he enjoys. In fact, his flaws strikingly resemble Captain Brown's. By championing his favorite literature (Dickens), Captain Brown only succeeded in alienating Deborah. Similarly, Holbrook does not notice that his “old lover,” Miss Matty, falls asleep while he is reading. As insistent as Captain Brown about his tastes, Holbrook lectures on the proper presentation of meals (“no broth, no ball; no ball, no beef” [p. 33]) without realizing that his guests cannot eat without proper utensils. Likewise he reads to an audience who “being forgotten” were “consequently silent” (p. 34). The ever-patient Mary Smith finds conversation with Holbrook as perplexing as conversation might be with Don Quixote himself, and Miss Pole permits his literary enthusiasm only because it allows her to better concentrate on her crochet.

Just as her affinity with Johnson is tempered by an understanding of the importance of emotion and sympathy, Gaskell's understanding of Dickensian romantic sentiment is tempered with the knowledge that sympathy, at least in part, is incompatible with romance and true attention to character. Dickens's genius created characters and plots so deeply compelling that he occasionally left himself open to Trollope's complaint in The Warden that the Dickensian brand of romantic sympathy actually obscures the importance of individual character.²⁰ The Dickensian plot not only allows characters to change due to primarily romantic influences, it often demands it.²¹ In contrast, Cranford regretfully but doggedly blows up romantic desire “as if by gunpowder, into small fragments” (p. 29). Those romances that do flourish in Cranford are over quickly, and their stories lack the narrative buildup so essential to typical romance teleology. As soon as Miss Jessie's suitor appears, she is married. Similarly, the Glenmire/Hoggins courtship only gently taps the shoulders of Cranford's narrative. Before the reader can turn around, the pair are already wed. And again, “A Love Affair of Long Ago,” like the abrupt demise of Captain Brown, seems almost designed as an exercise in letting go of the romantic impulse. In an unconscious imitation of Deborah's assumption that all poetry in some way evokes Dr. Johnson's eminent ideals, Miss Matty feebly compares Tennyson's poetry to Dr. Johnson's. The scene is very funny, but the humor works to explode romantic possibility. Emphasizing Holbook's incompatibility with Deborah's ideals and Miss Matty's confused attempt to conflate the value systems of those she loves, this scene underscores Miss Matty's incapacity to resonate sympathetically with the object of her own love affair. Mary's desire to read Miss Matty's relationship with Holbrook as sentimental romance explodes the seductive impulse of narrative yet again. As in the rest of Cranford, Gaskell here forces the reader to laughingly forgo the pleasures of a romance narrative that cannot adequately be told through the characters involved. These moments reveal the consistency with which Gaskell allows the teleological plot to emerge in Cranford so she can resist it. Thus in Cranford Gaskell hoists the impelling forces of desire from their more conventional, stable, and traditionally compelling position in plot in order to allow a narrative in which the reader resonates sympathetically with characters outside of self. Gaskell weaves her creatively “maternal” narrative influence in order to allow characters stories outside of Mary Smith's desires and outside the desires of the eager-to-be-seduced readerly self. Like Mary, the reader becomes more and more Cranfordian, participating in the rhythms of a town that understands reformative sympathy as that resonance with subject that prompts change by first admitting desire and then transforming it.

It is worth noting that Mary's moral sympathy, more complicated than Miss Matty's and more responsible for the novel's structural charm, is remarkably similar to that of George Eliot, who explores the nature of a sympathy that “feels its reverence grow in proportion to the intimacy of its knowledge.”²² It may be this very quality to which George Eliot refers when she writes to Gaskell that, even as she was attempting to formulate her own relationship to fiction, her “feeling towards Life and Art had some affinity with the feeling which had inspired Cranford and the earlier chapters of Mary Barton.”²³ In many respects, then, Cranford is no more a tale of provincial life than is George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72). In Cranford Gaskell writes with, of, and through the sympathy that George Eliot writes about.

That is a strong claim. I am arguing, however, that Gaskell's rejection of teleological narrative in Cranford actually represents a radical moment in the development of the novel, one perhaps more akin to a novel such as Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760-67) than to any of Gaskell's nineteenth-century contemporaries. Obviously Cranford is not Tristram Shandy, but both novels do share a creative relationship to digression and sympathy that displaces the conventional, seductive teleological plot. Unlike Sterne, however, Gaskell does not simply frustrate teleological progression. She replaces it with a sophisticated, sympathetic resonance.

Cranford reminds us that desire is not the only structural paradigm for a narrative dynamic—novels rely on the sympathetic impulse as well. I am here “contrasting” sympathy with desire in order to render a categorical distinction that perhaps does not exist (given that the drive toward sympathy may be parallel to the drive for romance and mystery, for example). My point is not to insist that this categorical distinction is a valid one—rather I aim to distinguish sympathy from the types of desires that traditionally drive plots and, in so doing, to suggest that the desires that drive plots also play a significant role in shaping them. Readers could not identify with the characters who embody their desires without the imaginative transference that sympathy provides. I want to claim for this novel the full import of the creative energy with which Gaskell crafted a narrative form directed by this sympathetic impulse. Normally, character and sympathy are subordinate to action and desire. Cranford, however, reverses that hierarchy. By creating a narrative that compels the reader forward—not through desire but through sympathy—Gaskell was able to continue weaving a story whose natural trajectory had ended two chapters into itself. She was able to write the impossible: a “charming,” plotless novel.

As such, Cranford represents not only an important achievement in narrative but also a unique hybrid between the novel of sentiment and the novel of reform. In the eighteenth century an emerging interest in the human capacity for sympathy had produced a new kind of hero capable of transcending self-interest through sympathy alone.²⁴ Richardson's Clarissa (1747-48), Fielding's Amelia (1751), Sterne's Sentimental Journey (1768), and Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771) are but a few of the numerous eighteenth-century fictional explorations of this sympathetic sensibility. All of these novels rely more or less on their power to evoke strong emotions via the reader's capacity for experiencing the feelings felt by fictional characters. Nineteenth-century novelists, including Trollope, Dickens, Gaskell, and George Eliot, continued to explore the effects and limitations of sympathetic interactions between individual characters and the reading public, developing and refining the relationship between the novel and social reform. In a continuum of socially responsive sympathy, the deaths of Clarissa and Little Nell and the poignant defeat of Trollope's gentle warden all evoked shock waves of public reaction in order to promote increasingly specific reform agendas.

In its “charming” formal representation of the constructive interplay between plot, sympathy, and social reform, Gaskell's Cranford presents a twist in this reform-oriented teleology of emotional effect. Like her eighteenth-century predecessors, Gaskell locates moral worth in human sympathy, but her revision of this dynamic demanded a new relationship to affect and plot. Gaskell recognized in the concept of reform the powerful need for the kind of sympathy that she revealed for Charlotte Brontë in her biography and for the working classes in her novels of social reform. In Cranford she models sympathetic interaction in its very structure rather than in its subject matter. Gaskell had been accused of exacerbating class antipathies in Mary Barton (1848) by extending her sympathy beyond established class boundaries. With a deep sense of horror, Gaskell responded in a letter to Mary Ewart: “No one can feel more deeply than I how wicked it is to do anything to excite class against class; and the sin has been most unconscious if I have done so … no praise could compensate me for the self-reproach I shall feel, if I have written unjustly” (Letters, p. 67). Writing Cranford, Gaskell was no doubt painfully refining her “indiscreet” use of sympathy just as Mary Smith refines hers as she participates in the Cranfordian story. Divorced from more obvious contexts of turbulent social reform, Cranford relies on the kind of sympathetic understanding that Gaskell brought to all of her novels of social reform.

Thus far, this account of Cranford's special relationship to novelistic form might seem to suffer from an emphasis on formal considerations akin to those that led earlier critics of this novel astray. The argument that the problematics of Cranford (such as its lack of plot, its self-effacing charm, and the abrupt demise of Captain Brown) actually represent a radical and successful experiment in narrative technique has said little about Cranford's relationship to the Victorian emphasis on social reform or to Gaskell's feminist agenda. The scope of this paper limits a further exploration of these important connections, but before closing I would like briefly to suggest that if it is true, as Michael McKeon states, that formal changes are necessarily and profoundly ideological,²⁵ then a better understanding of Gaskell's formal innovations should lead to a better understanding of this novel's full commitment to social reform of both class and gender boundaries.

Like Cranford's complicated relationship to plot, which compels without compelling, Gaskell's relationship to social reform and to communities of women begins with a sympathetic understanding essentially and confidently maternal, assuming equity with the paternal and the patriarchal rather than attempting to compel it. The problem remains, of course, that insofar as Cranford represents an innovative approach to social reform, its very charm seems to stamp it with stultifying inconsequence. Inherent in this novel's unique narrative, however, is an attitude toward both power and convention that implies consequence to inconsequence itself. A loaded word in feminist discourse, “charm” can signify seductive power as well as an authoritative approval of those who confine their behavior within proscribed patriarchal boundaries. Critical appraisals of Cranford's charm have suffered from both of these perspectives, but the novel actually participates in neither of them. By developing an alternative narrative attitude toward desire—a novel based on sympathy rather than seduction—Cranford transcends both perspectives creatively and sympathetically.

If in Cranford Gaskell offers a matriarchal community in contrast to the world of “Drumble,” then perhaps she does so because she understands that the transformative power of sympathy is crucial to reform on both the personal and social level. Indeed, the creative sympathy instantiated in this novel's content and form assumes a fundamental requisite of reform: the ability to understand one world from the vantage of another. In this sense, Martin Dodsworth is absolutely right to claim that Gaskell strives to allow men back into the community at Cranford. Just as this novel without mothers or children struggles to reincorporate its “lost” child, Gaskell admits men into Cranford not to justify her vision but because her narrative imagination is an inclusive one. Her “charming” distance from the seduction narrative, like Cranford's distance from Drumble, does not locate her deep within the oppressed female domestic sphere, nor does it locate her in direct opposition to an authoritative patriarchy. Rather, in order to suggest an alternative pattern of narrative and of existence, in Cranford Gaskell creates a literary space that is creative and flexible enough to vibrate sympathetically between opposing poles.

Notes

1. “Mrs. Gaskell,” in The Victorian Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Ian Watt (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 217.

2. See Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984).

3. “Story-Telling,” in “Leaves from a Notebook,” in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 444, 446.

4. The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 128.

5. Dickens, letter to Gaskell, 21 December 1851, in The Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume Six, 1850-52, ed. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Nina Burgis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 558.

6. John Forster, letter to Gaskell, 13 March 1852, quoted in A. B. Hopkins, Elizabeth Gaskell: Her Life and Work (London: John Lehman, 1952), p. 352, n. 104; and 1863 letter to Gaskell, quoted in Hopkins, p. 104.

7. Rev. of Cranford, “Editor's Table,” Peterson's Magazine, 24 (1853), 215.

8. See Martin Dodsworth, “Women Without Men at Cranford,” Essays in Criticism, 13 (1963), 133.

9. Patricia Wolfe argues that Cranford's structure “is based on characterization, not incident or plot” (“Structure and Movement in Cranford,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 23 [1968], 162).

10. A surprising number of insightful critics either explicitly or implicitly accept Dodsworth's reading that there is a critical juncture in the novel after chapter 2. Margaret Tarratt remarks that the death of Captain Brown “marks a point of rupture with the rest [of the novel], as far as the thread of story is concerned and this is an undoubted structural weakness” (“Cranford and ‘the Strict Code of Gentility,’” Essays in Criticism, 18 [1968], 152). Wolfe writes that the “problem of Cranford's structure is central to an understanding of the book” (p. 161), and she too divides the novel into two parts, which she argues should be considered holistically. Implicit in this claim, as in the claims of other critics, is the notion of a “break” in the early part of the text for which Gaskell must compensate with extra thick “unity glue.” Only Andrew Horton Miller notices that such an approach cannot “explain the fragmentation within particular episodes of the text” (“The Fragments and Small Opportunities of Cranford,” Genre, 25 [1992], 97n).

11. See Hopkins, pp. 102-6.

12. Gaskell, letter to John Ruskin, February 1865, in The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), p. 748.

13. For a more complete analysis of the importance of Knutsford in Gaskell's literary imagination, see Hopkins, pp. 102-18; and Elizabeth Porges Watson, introduction to Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford, ed. Watson (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), pp. vii-xii (further references to Cranford are to this edition and are included in the text).

14. Gaskell, “The Last Generation in England,” in Cranford, Appendix 1, p. 161.

15. See Eileen Gillooly, “Humor as Daughterly Defense in Cranford,” ELH, 59 (1992), 883-910; Pauline Nestor, Female Friendships and Communities: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); and Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978). Also extremely useful as an overview on feminist perspectives on Gaskell is Deanna L. Davis, “Feminist Critics and Literary Mothers: Daughters Reading Elizabeth Gaskell,” Signs, 17 (1992), 507-32.

16. Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1947), p. 140.

17. “A Penchant for Narrative: ‘Mary Smith’ in Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford,” The Journal of Narrative Technique, 20 (1990), 321.

18. Stoneman, Elizabeth Gaskell (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987), p. 33.

19. See “Affairs of the Alphabet: Reading, Writing and Narrating in Cranford,” Novel, 22 (1989), 290.

20. See Anthony Trollope, The Warden, ed. David Skilton (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), chapter 15, “Tom Towers, Dr. Anticant, and Mr. Sentiment.”

21. Bella Wilfer and Eugene Wrayburn of Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) are two examples, since the romantic demands of this novel's plot require that both of these characters undergo transformations in their original characters in order to satisfy the demands of their successful romantic union. Bella suddenly transforms from a fairly selfish and self-centered young woman into an angel in the house, and Eugene (like many a romantic hero before and after) actually changes his entire identity.

22. George Eliot, “Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young” (January 1857), in Essays of George Eliot, p. 385.

23. George Eliot, letter to Elizabeth Gaskell, 11 November 1859, in The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954-78), III, 198.

24. See R. S. Crane, “Suggestions toward a Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling,’” ELH, 1 (1934), 205-30.

25. See The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), p. 266.