SOURCE: “A Penchant for Narrative: ‘Mary Smith’ in Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford,” in Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 20, No. 3, Fall, 1990, pp. 318-30.

[In the following essay, Carse investigates the character and interpretive role of Cranford's self-effacing narrator, Mary Smith.]

Readers must wait until chapter twelve before the narrator of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford finally promises to “say a word or two here about myself” (117). What then follows, however, is not at all a revelation about herself, but only a brief comment, necessitated by the plot, explaining why she has extended her recent visit to Cranford. This reticence is perhaps the reason that critics of Gaskell's most popular fiction seldom give more than brief attention to her narrator; when she is mentioned at all, the tendency is to dismiss her importance or possible complexity. ‘Mary Smith’ (who does not even reveal her name until chapter fourteen) has been called an advance in Gaskell's “persona method of story-telling,” but nonetheless a “naive” narrator (Sharps 132, 133), a “self-effacing character of no particular significance” (Griffith 62), and an “almost anonymous chorus” (Spacks 183). Others give her a bit more credit—John Gross, for instance, claims that the book is about “Mary's changing vision of the little town” (225)—but even the most thorough of recent feminist criticism highlighting the vision of female community in the book omits any detailed analysis of Mary Smith's narrating character.¹ Is Mary only the generic narrator that her name suggests, or simply the voice of Cranford, humorous in tone yet adamant in admiration of Cranford life? Or does Mary work in more complex ways, both as a narrator and as a character? Who is Mary Smith?

Since Gaskell intended the first installment, “Our Society at Cranford,” to be only one paper,² Mary Smith's role in it, not surprisingly, is basically that most identified by Cranford's critics: an unobtrusive, convenient narrator, someone both familiar with and outside the life of Cranford, a stance that allows her to know first-hand and comment wryly on its residents' habits and eccentricities.³ The only facts about Mary Smith offered in these two chapters are that she pays extended visits to her former residence of Cranford and that she is younger than her friends. She is “my dear” when addressed, and, with the exception of such narrative tags as “I can testify” and “I have described,” she confines herself primarily to commenting through the first-person plural of the community “we.” Two such comments are noteworthy here since they are later contradicted.

Describing the women's rule of limiting social visits to a quarter of an hour, Mary says that during calls “no absorbing subject was ever spoken about. We kept ourselves to short sentences of small talk” (3). This regulation is often broken in the course of the book as characters find much to say in even the smallest of small talk during protracted, impromptu visits. More revealing about Gaskell's initial perception of Mary Smith is the comment that “we were, all of us, people of very moderate means” (4). In chapter nine, however, Mary describes herself as a “well-to-do and happy young woman” (88), a change demonstrating Gaskell's decision to distance her narrator further from the Cranford women than age and residence alone allow.

Some distance, nevertheless, is already established in this first installment, however much the narrator wishes to seem a part of an anonymous “we.” Even though “we” had “almost persuaded ourselves that to be a man was to be vulgar,” Mary watches and judges for herself Captain Brown's behavior at a party typical of the usually all-women affairs in Cranford:

“He immediately and quietly assumed the man's place in the room; attended to every one's wants, … and did it all in so easy and dignified a manner, and so much as if it were a matter of course for the strong to attend to the weak, that he was a true man throughout.”

(7)

This appreciation of Captain Brown's “manly frankness” and “excellent masculine common sense” (5) directly opposes Miss Jenkyns's belief that women are superior to men and demonstrates both Mary's powers of observation and her capacity for independent evaluation of people and events. The same qualities are apparent, too, in several other passages in the first installment that establish Mary's propensity for discovering and appreciating effective methods of narration as well as its raw material.

One such passage is that in which Mary describes the letters she receives from the women of Cranford during her absence. Miss Jenkyns's letters are “stately and grand, like herself” (12); in one describing a lord's visit to Cranford, Miss Jenkyns complains that she does not know all the details, and she berates “our friend the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson's deficiency in the spirit of ‘innocent curiosity’” (13). “Innocent curiosity,” of course, creates gossip, the stuff of homely narratives, something that, in Mary's opinion, the stately Miss Jenkyns cannot convey nearly as effectively as can her self-effacing sister, Miss Matty⁴:

“Miss Matty humbly apologized for writing at the same time as her sister, who was so much more capable than she to describe the honour done to Cranford; but, in spite of a little bad spelling, Miss Matty's account gave me the best idea of the commotion occasioned by his lordship's visit.”

(13)

Mary's interest in letters is like the delight she takes in a prominent characteristic of Cranford, its ability to make the most out of the smallest: “I have often occasion to notice the use that was made of fragments and small opportunities in Cranford” (15). Though she is speaking here of making pot-pourri and bundles of lavender-flowers, Mary associates these “small opportunities” with stories created from the small events of the village that nearly all the Cranford women take pleasure in shaping, since, “as we did not read much, and as all the ladies were pretty well suited with servants, there was a dearth of subjects for conversation” (10).⁵ Gossip is not the only material for the stories Mary finds in Cranford, however; the very lives of her friends take on the characteristics of enthralling narrative:

Miss Jessie began to tell me some more of the plans which had suggested themselves to her, and insensibly fell into talking of the days that were past and gone, and interested me so much, I neither knew nor heeded how time passed. We were both startled when Miss Jenkyns reappeared, and caught us crying.

(20)

Writing letters, making the most of “fragments,” and “talking of days that were past and gone”—these activities, already delineated in the first installment, are those for which Mary displays an unflagging fascination throughout Cranford. Their connection to the creation of narratives is of such interest to Mary that they supply not only a significant set of motifs for her own narrative but also a key to the overall importance of narrative for her.

Mary is, first of all, highly appreciative of the power of letters to create anew the images of a bygone life.⁶ Though chapter three opens with a complaint that written correspondence “bears much the same relation to personal intercourse that the books of dried plants … do to the living and fresh flowers” (23), chapter five is entitled, and dedicated to, “Old Letters.” Here Mary describes the effects of reading Miss Matty's family letters:

I never knew what sad work the reading of old letters was before that evening, though I could hardly tell why. The letters were as happy as letters could be—at least those early letters were. There was in them a vivid and intense sense of the present time; which seemed so strong and full, as if it could never pass away, and as if the warm, living hearts that so expressed themselves could never die. … I should have felt less melancholy, I believe, if the letters had been more so.

(42-3)

Most of the chapter is a running commentary on the varying styles and subject matter of the letters; for instance, Mrs. Jenkyns's “letters back to her husband … were more satisfactory to an absent husband and father, than his could have been to her” (45)—more satisfactory to Mary, too, since she obviously prefers the misspelled letters detailing the activities of children and requesting advice for pig-butchering to Rector Jenkyns's Latin-riddled, abstract prose.

Mary's primary interest in letters—their potential narrative value—as well as a major difference between her and Miss Matty is evident in her reaction to Miss Matty's enthusiasm for her sister's letters. Miss Matty “said all the others had been only interesting to those who loved the writers; … but Deborah's letters were so superior!” (46) Mary thinks otherwise:

“Oh dear! how I wanted facts instead of reflections, before those letters were concluded! They lasted us two nights; and I won't deny that I made use of my time to think of many other things, and yet I was always at my post at the end of each sentence.”

(47)

Mary's criticism here and her appreciation of other letters reflect the advice Elizabeth Gaskell gave (appropriately enough, in a letter) to a young writer in 1859:

I believe in spite of your objection to the term “novel” you do wish to “narrate” … but I think you must observe what is out of you, instead of what is in you. … [C]ertainly—whether introspection be morbid or not,—it is not a safe training for a novelist. … Just read a few pages of Defoe &c—and you will see the healthy way in which he sets objects not feelings before you. … [I]magine yourself a spectator and auditor of every scene & event … till it becomes 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 541-42)

What is most striking about this advice in relation to Cranford is the degree to which Mary adheres to it—in reaction to the narratives of others and in her own.

Several other scenes featuring letters further illustrate this combined emphasis on the narrator's use of “facts” and the reader's response. Early in chapter thirteen, Mary receives a letter from her father, “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). Such content may be called “facts,” but Mr. Smith's letter is no nearer to supplying the facts of interesting narratives than Rector Jenkyns's are. The only potentially useful fact of this letter is that the “disagreeable rumours” are about the bank in which Miss Matty has all her money invested. In the same post, Miss Matty receives a letter from the bank, inviting her to an “important meeting.” But vague announcements of “disagreeable rumours” and “important meetings,” though they make Mary suspicious, can only supply a “half-knowledge,” upon which no action can be taken. Quite different is Mary's own letter that she mails in the next chapter. Earlier in her “search after facts” about Miss Matty's brother, “poor Peter” (111), Mary gleans very few from the Cranford ladies beyond the “scanty intelligence” that he “had last been heard of in India” (112). With Miss Matty's financial crisis, however, Mary has a definite purpose in writing to Peter, and acting on her hunch that Peter is the “Aga Jenkyns” who helped Signora Brunoni, she writes a letter “which should affect him, if he were Peter, and yet seem a mere statement of dry facts if he were a stranger” (127). Mary's letter sends Peter to the side of his sister and ensures the happy ending of Cranford, and Mary seems to recognize this power of letters to provoke reaction when she drops hers in the post:

I stood looking at the wooden pane, with a gaping slit, which divided me from the letter, but a moment ago in my hand. It was gone from me like life—never to be recalled. … [T]he little piece of paper, but an hour ago so familiar and commonplace, had set out on its race to the strange wild countries beyond the Ganges!

(128)

Instilling her narrator with her own principles of narration allows Gaskell to distinguish Mary from her Cranford friends through more than just their taste in letters. Nearly all the women are story-tellers who can “recollect & describe & report”: Mrs. Forrester tells the tale of her cat eating her lace, Miss Matty relates the story of “poor Peter,” and Mary, of course, recounts these as well as all the incidents she herself witnesses in Cranford. These stories, however, remain at the level of anecdotes, “real life” events that can please in their telling but cannot alone satisfy the inveterate narrator or the avid appreciator of effective narratives. The two events that not only propel Miss Matty to the role of heroine but also supply the most explicit elements of a continuous plot are those in which Mary vividly imagines herself a “spectator and auditor” and actively participates in generating the material of narrative. An examination of these events demonstrates that Mary Smith's narration is more than mere journalistic recording or humorous tone: Mary is a creator as well as a reporter, a narrator so steeped in the powers of narrative that she consciously shapes the events of her own plots.

The first of these events occurs early, in the second installment, and, significantly, springs from the “dearth of subjects for conversation” that prompts tales of “days that were past and gone”:

There was all the more time for me to hear old-world stories from Miss Pole, while she sat knitting, and I making my father's shirts. I always took a quantity of plain sewing to Cranford; for, as we did not read much, or walk much, I found it a capital time to get through my work. One of Miss Pole's stories related to a shadow of a love affair that was dimly perceived or suspected long years before.

(24)

Miss Pole does not know many details of this tale of frustrated love between Miss Matty and Mr. Holbrook, just enough to set Mary to “castle-building,” though the mention of Mr. Holbrook's age (70) blows up her “castle, as if by gunpowder, into small fragments” (29). “Very soon after,” Mary witnesses the first meeting in many years between Miss Matty and Mr. Holbrook, and “he repeated so often, as if to himself, ‘I should not have known you!’ that any sentimental romance which I might be inclined to build, was quite done away by his manner” (30).

Mary's subsequent thoughts and actions, however, belie this protest that her “castle” is annihilated. When Mr. Holbrook invites the women to his farm and Miss Matty is hesitant, Mary, “at the first sentence of relenting, … seized the opportunity, and wrote and despatched an acceptance in her name” (31). She watches Miss Matty closely, and, “although Miss Matty little dreamt I knew anything of her early story, I could perceive she was in a tremor at the thought of seeing the place which might have been her home” (31). Later, when Mr. Holbrook has fallen ill after his trip to Paris and Mary realizes why Miss Matty is so miserable, she “felt amost guilty of having spied too curiously into that tender heart, and I was not going to speak of its secrets,—hidden, Miss Matty believed, from all the world” (38). Mary, however, continues to speculate: a long illness afflicting Miss Matty in her youth Mary “now dated back in [her] own mind as following the dismissal of the suit of Mr. Holbrook”; Mary notices that after Mr. Holbrook's death, Miss Matty keeps the book he gave her with her Bible by her bedside, and she overhears Miss Matty asking that her caps be styled like widows' caps. Miss Matty never mentions Mr. Holbrook again, and, Mary declares, her “effort at concealment was the beginning of the tremulous motion of head and hands which I have seen ever since in Miss Matty” (39).

From fragments of conversations and glimpses of emotion, then, Mary constructs a love story for Miss Matty's life. Not only does this story supply the plot for the second installment of Cranford, making possible its closure when Miss Matty allows Martha to have a “follower,” but it also adds poignancy to Miss Matty's character throughout the serial⁷ and displays the sensitivity and perceptiveness of Mary's. Because of her story, Mary asks no questions when Miss Matty alludes to the dreams she once had of marriage, and Mary's silence precipitates the relating of quite a different method of story-telling.

“My father once made us,” Miss Matty began, “keep a diary in two columns; on one side we were to put down in the morning what we thought would be the course and events of the coming day, and at night we were to put down on the other side what really had happened. It would be to some people rather a sad way of telling their lives”—(a tear dropped upon my hand at these words)—“I don't mean that mine has been sad, only so different to what I expected.”

(107)

Mary's story for Miss Matty, though it too emphasizes the contrast between what is thought would happen and “what really happened,” recognizes the value of strong and true emotions for which no ledger-book telling of lives can account. Its “plot” does not conclude with the end of marriage hopes nor even the death of its “hero,” but rests in Miss Matty, who never tells it or, as far as we know, even perceives it as quite the story Mary has made of it.

The second event in which Mary takes an active part is the aforementioned return of Peter, prompted by Mary's letter to him. Unlike Mary's role in the story of Miss Matty's love affair, which primarily makes Miss Matty a kind of heroine by adding an “insider's” perspective of her character, Mary's role in this narrative is to take an action that will have lasting effects on other characters.⁸ Significant here, too, is Mary's approach to this action. Just as her story of Miss Matty is initiated by bits of references to bygone days, so too is the narrative of Peter's existence and eventual return. Signora Brunoni tells Mary her story of suffering and struggle in India and the kindness of an “Aga Jenkyns,” and an idea flashes through Mary's head—“could the Aga Jankyns be the lost Peter? … I would make further inquiry” (110-11). This inquiry is not so different from the careful observation that Mary uses to piece together the story of Miss Matty's love affair. What is different is Mary's description of it, which offers a rare explicit comment about herself:

In my own home, whenever people had nothing else to do, they blamed me for want of discretion. … I was tired of being called indiscreet and incautious; and I determined for once to prove myself a model of prudence and wisdom. I would not even hint my suspicions respecting the Aga. I would collect evidence and carry it home to lay before my father, as the family friend of the two Miss Jenkynses.

(111)

Mary, of course, does not lay the evidence before her father, but instead writes to Peter directly, perhaps displaying her want of discretion but certainly demonstrating a confidence in her own judgment. Her interest in Miss Matty's story of “poor Peter” and in the Signora's of “Aga Jenkyns” motivates her to act, and by doing so, Mary gives a plot to the other love of Miss Matty's life—that for her brother.

Mary's delight in creating narratives is equalled by that of only one other female character, Miss Pole. She does not wait for “fragments and small opportunities” to come to her; she actively seeks them.

Miss Pole was always the person … to have had adventures. She was in the habit of spending the morning in rambling from shop to shop; not to purchase anything … but to collect all the stray pieces of intelligence in the town. She had a way, too, of demurely popping hither and thither into all sorts of places to gratify her curiosity on any point; a way which, if she had not looked so very genteel and prim, might have been considered impertinent.

(82)

Miss Pole's narrative powers take center stage in the three-chapter installment Gaskell wrote after nearly a year's interruption in Cranford's serialization. She first shows her narrative bent and enthusiasm in her successful scouting of the Assembly Room for a chance to meet “Signor Brunoni”: “‘while I was busy picturing his past life to myself, he had bowed me out of the room. But wait a minute! You have not heard half of my story yet!’” (83) Shortly after the conjurer's visit, when “uncomfortable rumours” of robberies are circulating among the shopkeepers and cottagers, Miss Pole is “the principal person to collect and arrange these reports, so as to make them assume their most fearful aspect” (89).

Mary's description of this “arranging” fragments of information clearly discloses her opinion of it as well as a significant difference between Miss Pole's narratives and her own. Mary has her “doubts as to whether [Miss Pole] really would enjoy the little adventure of having her house broken into, as she protested she should” (89), and when Miss Pole panics over the appearance of suspicious-looking characters near her house, Mary comments that “we might have triumphed over Miss Pole, who had professed such bravery until she was frightened; but we were too glad to perceive that she shared in the weaknesses of humanity to exalt over her” (92). The episode, however, is filled with too much narrative promise for Miss Pole to forget; she “was very much inclined to install herself as a heroine, … and I noticed that every time she went over the story some fresh trait of villainy was added” (95). Miss Pole has her teeth examined for the sole purpose of questioning Mr. Hoggins, the doctor, about a report that he had been robbed; such is her belief in her own exaggerations that she subsequently condemns his denial of the tale as a demonstration of his “want of candour” (97). Mary holds her tongue during the telling of these tales but not during the one Miss Pole creates at the expense of her friends. After a visit to Mrs. Forrester, during which the widow confesses a belief in ghosts, Miss Pole is so frightened on the way home through “Darkness Lane” that she suggests an alternate route. The next morning, the facts have been altered:

Miss Pole said to me, with a smile half kindly and half contemptuous upon her countenance, “I have been just telling Lady Glenmire of our poor friend Mrs. Forrester, and her terror of ghosts. …” She was so calm and so much above superstitious fears herself, that I was almost ashamed to say how glad I had been of her Headingley-causeway proposition the night before.

(101)

Mary's narratives may be constructed of the same kinds of gossip and fragments of lives as Miss Pole's are, but never do they exaggerate the facts in order to exalt the narrator or ridicule the other characters. Mary, of course, delights in poking fun, especially when the targets, like Miss Pole in this scene (and Mrs. Jamieson on various occasions), display a snobbish contempt for the simplicity of their friends. She is not, however, malicious and, in fact, exhibits a sympathetic perception of the importance of story-telling in Miss Pole's otherwise uneventful life. She and Miss Matty allow Miss Pole to give Mrs. Forrester the earthshaking news of Lady Glenmire's engagement,

although, if we had been inclined to take unfair advantage, we might have rushed in ourselves, for she had a most out-of-place fit of coughing for five minutes after Mrs. Forrester entered the room. I shall never forget the imploring expression of her eyes, as she looked at us over her pocket-handkerchief. They said, as plain as words could speak, “Don't let Nature deprive me of the treasure which is mine although for a time I can make no use of it.”

(116)

Mary's keen criticism of stories based on exaggerations is even more apparent and emphatic when Peter appears. Peter is a consummate teller of tall tales. In his youth this propensity had taken the form of practical jokes; according to Miss Matty, “‘he seemed to think that the Cranford people might be joked about, and made fun of, and they did not like it; nobody does. He was always hoaxing them; … he seemed to think the old ladies in Cranford would believe anything’” (50). And Miss Matty adds, unaware of the significance of her comment, “‘He used to say, the old ladies in the town wanted something to talk about; but I don't think they did. They had the St. James's Chronicle three times a week, just as we have now, and we have plenty to say’” (51). When Peter reappears in Cranford many years later (and in Cranford nine chapters later), he still possesses the tendency to ridicule women and disregard their own narrative material. Mary Smith quickly perceives this tendency. Since Miss Matty can only tell a jumbled story of her brother's adventures, Mary questions him: “he laughed at my curiosity and told me stories that sounded so much like Baron Munchausen's that I was sure he was making fun of me” (152). Even more indicative of Mary's suspicions about the intention behind Peter's narratives and the effects on his audience is the following passage:

For my own part, I had vibrated all my life between Drumble and Cranford, and I thought it was quite possible that all Mr. Peter's stories might be true although wonderful; but when I found, that if we swallowed an anecdote of tolerable magnitude one week, we had the dose considerably increased the next, I began to have no doubts; especially as I noticed that when his sister was present the accounts of Indian life were comparatively tame. … I noticed also that when the Rector came to call, Mr. Peter talked in a different way about the countries he had been in. But I don't think the ladies in Cranford would have considered him such a wonderful traveller if they had only heard him talk in the quiet way he did to him.

(154)

Modifying his stories out of respect for his sister (with whom, in their youth, he had shared the secrets of his practical jokes) and the Rector (though as a boy Peter had shown no such respect for another rector, his father, often the butt of those jokes), Peter proves to Mary that his intention in stretching the truth of his adventures is at least partially motivated by a basic contempt for the others' supposed gullibility. Left at that, however, Mary's criticism would seem to be defused by his audience's obvious enjoyment of his stories. Mary is not, though, merely irritated that she and the others should be thought such simple-minded dupes. At a “select party in his honour,” from which the Hogginses and Mrs. Fitz-Adams are excluded because their modest origins offend Mrs. Jamieson, Peter sits crosslegged on the floor “with the utmost gravity”; observing the ladies' eager approval of what Mary sees is an obvious joke on them, she “could not help” but remember how they had all condemned

Mr. Hoggins for vulgarity because he simply crossed his legs as he sat still on his chair. Many of Mr. Peter's ways of eating were a little strange amongst such ladies as Miss Pole, and Miss Matty, and Mrs. Jamieson, especially when I recollected the untasted green peas and two-pronged forks at poor Mr. Holbrook's dinner.

(154)

This last recollection refers to Miss Pole and Miss Matty's refusal to do an “ungenteel thing”—eat peas with a knife as their host does (with Mary successfully imitating him). Mary often, throughout the book, calls attention to the class-consciousness of the ladies, but most often during circumstances that show their essential kindness overcoming it. This scene with Peter is particularly significant because it shows Mary aware of the mean insidiousness of class snobbery, which encourages condoning and even admiring behavior that would be censored in one of a lower class. She blames Peter, by implication, for prompting this display of an attitude unworthy of her friends. Generated by a contemptuous intention to make fun of his audience, Peter's stories have an equally undesirable effect on that audience.

Mary's criticism of Peter in this scene is reinforced immediately; “the mention of Mr. Holbrook's name recalls to my mind a conversation between Mr. Peter and Miss Matty” (154). It is a one-sided conversation in which Mr. Peter demonstrates an unintentional but no less stinging insensitivity:

“If anybody had told me you would have lived and died an old maid then, I should have laughed in their faces. … It was Holbrook … that I used to think would carry off my little Matty. … Well, that's long years ago; more than half a lifetime! … You must have played your cards badly, my little Matty, somehow or other—wanted your brother to be a good go-between, eh! little one?”

(155-56)

Peter, much as he loves his sister, cannot imagine anything that has happened to his “little Matty” to be still affecting her life. His very unconsciousness of the pain his coarse remarks are causing reveals his essential disregard for the life of emotions his sister has lived without him and thus his careless dismissal of possible narrative material in this village of women whom he has always ridiculed.⁹ Peter has thus proven himself an irresponsible narrator; he has violated Gaskell and Mary's “credo” of narrative that implicitly dictates a respect for the narrative's power and for its audience.

To ensure a happy ending to the story, Mary's disapproval of Peter must be softened, and Gaskell does not waste the opportunity provided by Mary's consistent interest in stories. From little pieces of news, Miss Pole imagines something “between Mr. Peter and Mrs. Jamieson in the matrimonial line,” which Mary, too, from her own observations, comes to suspect. Mary does not wonder how Peter could be attracted to dull Mrs. Jamieson; she is only angry that someone may be displacing her “dear Miss Matty in his heart” (158). At the party arranged by Peter “under the patronage of the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson,” Mary eavesdrops on the pair's conversation and is relieved to hear that, far from making love to the widow, Peter is “at his old tricks” (159). Though she offers no comment here, Mary's relief is obviously still mingled with distrust and disapproval, for Peter soon turns to Mary: “‘Don't be shocked, prim little Mary, at all my wonderful stories; I consider Mrs. Jamieson fair game, and besides, I am bent on propitiating her, … and I don't want to give her time enough to get up her rancour against the Hogginses’” (159-60). Mary likewise diplomatically omits any comment on his method of curing class snobbery, only saying that she is thankful, “because of my dear Miss Matty's love of peace and kindness,” for the return of “the old friendly sociability” (160). Her parting remark, however, the last sentence of Cranford, must be directed as much at Peter as at herself and the others: “We all love Miss Matty, and I somehow think we are all of us better when she is near us” (160).

In this examination of Mary's disapproval of Peter's narratives, I quoted a line—“For my part, I had vibrated all my life between Drumble and Cranford”—often cited by critics of Cranford discussing Mary's autobiographical significance, since Elizabeth Gaskell “vibrated” all her life between the city of Manchester and the village of her youth, Knutsford.¹⁰ Though certainly valid, this emphasis, however, overlooks Mary's own point: that this “vibrating” has helped her discover that “wonderful” stories might still be true ones. She is not ordinarily an incredulous audience, but her willingness to see the “wonder” in the true is tempered by an ability to detect patently false narratives. This balance between credulity and incredulity is most evident in a scene initiated by Miss Pole's belief in her own exaggerated stories. Miss Pole is disgusted that the affianced Lady Glenmire should believe Mr. Hoggins's denial of his supposed robbery and even thinks “it argued great natural credulity in a woman if she could not keep herself from being married” (106). After Miss Pole leaves, Miss Matty hopes that Mary will not “‘be frightened by Miss Pole from being married. I can fancy it may be a very happy state, and a little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly,—better than always doubting and doubting, and seeing difficulties and disagreeables in everything’” (108). Such a naive remark is, of course, characteristic of Miss Matty, who never suspects selfish motivation in others. Characteristic of Mary is her reaction, which accords with her narrator's belief in relying on “facts” and observing for herself.

If I had been inclined to be daunted from matrimony, it would not have been Miss Pole to do it; it would have been the lot of poor Signor Brunoni and his wife. And yet again, it was an encouragement to see how, through all their cares and sorrows, they thought of each other and not of themselves; and how keen were their joys.

(108)

Not coincidentally, this leads into the Signora's story of her life in India, a type of the “wonderful” but true story that Mary so enjoys.

In chapter four, before the conjurer's show begins, Mary wants to turn around in her seat to look at the “merry chattering people” behind her, but Miss Pole prevents her, saying “‘it was not the thing.’ What ‘the thing’ was, I never could find out, but it must have been something eminently dull and tiresome” (86). Such for Mary would be a world without the stuff of narrative. Cranford belongs to a narrator revelling in her craft—observing all objects around her through an eye sharpened to detect narrative value, shaping stories from the lives of simple people, and always remaining faithful to a credo of narrative that demands imagination tempered by truthfulness, accurate reporting combined with active creating, awareness of one's audience balanced by independent evaluation.

In Mary, Elizabeth Gaskell created not simply a convenient narrator but a character who could feel, judge, and articulate the value of Cranford; in making her a “well-to-do and happy young woman,” Gaskell gave Mary qualities that circumstances of their background deny the older women. Mary's role in life is far richer in possibility than those of any of the other characters. Her identity is dependent on neither her father's world nor Cranford; her independence is that of the narrating artist. Following her author's dictate that she be concerned primarily with objects outside of herself, Mary includes her own actions and reactions only to enhance her story, but she is far from remaining anonymous as a result. “I was tired of being forgotten, and of being consequently silent,” Mary complains during her walk with Mr. Holbrook (34). To speak, to give the shape of stories to fragments of lives and by doing so invest those otherwise forgotten lives with meaning is Mary's responsibility, and delight, in Cranford. It is also her power. When her father learns of the Cranford ladies' plan to help Miss Matty, he exclaims, “‘See, Mary, how a good innocent life makes friends all around. Confound it! I could make a good lesson of it if I were a parson; but as it is, I can't get a tail to my sentences—only I'm sure you feel what I want to say’” (141). Mary cannot only feel it; she can express it, and in a much more effective form than any parson's lesson. And, in the story she gives Cranford, this penchant for narrative characterizes Mary Smith, and ultimately, Cranford, too.

Notes

1. The foremost proponent of this vision is Nina Auerbach in her Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction. Patsy Stoneman offers an excellent analysis of recent feminist criticism of Cranford as well as her own thesis that “although the ‘cooperative female community’ is admirable, it is not triumphant.” Mary Smith receives only the most cursory attention, however, from both Stoneman and the critics, including Auerbach and Patricia Wolfe, whose theses she examines.

2. Gaskell's often quoted letter to Ruskin makes this clear: “The beginning of Cranford was one paper in ‘Household Words’; and I never meant to write more” (Letters 748).

3. Of all the criticism of Cranford, Patricia Spacks's provides the most extensive examination of Mary Smith. Apropos of Mary's narrative stance, Spacks comments: “As narrator, Mary Smith retains sufficient emotional distance to feel amused or pitying or both as she contemplates the local scene, but she offers no serious criticism of the sort implied by the Austen narrator's tone [in Emma]” (186). I believe that Mary does offer a sort of criticism (as this examination will later reveal), and, though I agree with Spacks's perception of gossip as a narrative-creating activity, I view Mary's role as more distinct from the other women than she does. Her thesis is that “the response of affectionate amusement which Mary Smith exemplifies and which the reader readily shares does not fully answer to the situation. … [T]he women of Cranford still fictionize those who don't belong; and they fictionize themselves” (189).

4. Mary's love for and preference in letters echo her author's: “Don't you like reading letters? I do, so much. Not grand formal letters; but such as Mme Mohl I mean” (Letters 289-90).

5. Patricia Spacks calls this interest in small opportunities the “novel's most serious preoccupation: what can be made of a diminished thing?” (188)

6. Mary's interest in letters may be consciously related to her “voice.” As Winifred Gerin comments, “the style of Cranford resembles far more the style of [Gaskell's] letters than any of her other fictions” (124).

7. I am using “serial” here as George Griffith does in “What Kind of Book is ‘Cranford’?” Griffith's argument is that the first four installments (chapters one through eight) have the characteristics of a series (i.e., closure at the end of each and few links between installments) and the last four have those of a serial (where internal links look ahead toward the outcome of the story [63]). His analysis convinces me that Gaskell probably did envision the book to be a serialized novel, rather than a set of “papers,” once she resumed writing it after a year's hiatus (the “series” portion was published between December 1851 and April 1852, the “serial” between January 1853 and May 1853).

8. Spacks makes a similar point: “The story-teller emphasizes the urgency of narrative by her own involvement in creating the story she tells” (187). She, however, attributes another motivation as well to Mary's intervention here: “it also underlines her need to make excitement for herself by functioning as more than an observer” (188).

9. Though her evaluation is not concerned with the role narration plays here, Stoneman's criticism of Peter is similar to mine: “The only activity he conceives as possible for Matty is the purely economic one of husband-hunting. … As a failed economic manoeuvre, Matty's “play” for Holbrook seems fair game for a joke; … Peter takes silence as proof of absence” (97-98).

10. Sharps, for example, equates Drumble and Cranford with Manchester and Knutsford, though he adds that “whatever autobiographical remarks Mrs. Gaskell makes appear wholly in keeping with this character [Mary]” (132-33).

Works Cited

Auerbach, Nina. Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Gaskell, Elizabeth. Cranford. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

———. The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell. Ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966.

Gerin, Winifred. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.

Griffith, George V. “What Kind of Book is ‘Cranford’?” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 14 (1983): 53-65.

Gross, John. “Mrs. Gaskell.” The Victorian Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. Ian Watt. London: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Sharps, John Geoffrey. Mrs. Gaskell's Observation and Invention: A Study of Her Non-Biographic Works. London: Linden Press, 1970.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Gossip. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Stoneman, Patsy. Elizabeth Gaskell. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Wolfe, Patricia A. “Structure and Movement in Cranford.” Nineteenth Century Fiction 23 (1968): 161-76.