[In the following essay, Schor analyzes Cranford as an experimental woman's narrative concerned with the cultural factors of women as writers and readers.]

Elizabeth Gaskell's third novel, Cranford, which is most frequently discussed by critics and nostalgic readers as a potpourri, a bouquet of impressions, an elegiac tribute to passing ways in a dying English village,¹ is in fact better read as a woman writer's experiment with narrative, an extended commentary on the ways women are taught to read cultural signs, and a serious critique of the role of literature in shaping female readers. The novel moves through a variety of texts, commenting on such domestic forms as instruction books, fashion guides and letter-writing, and high literature in the form of poetry, epic and encyclopedias. It begins by presuming a highly literary readership: much of its humor is directed against its subjects' lack of literary awareness or self-consciousness, attributes the work does not separate. Literature serves, not unconventionally, as an indicator of change, of morality, of loss—but increasingly in the novel, not only do we judge characters by their relationship to texts, we begin to see how their responses to the world have been shaped inversely by their reading of “literature” of all sorts. Books have created their readers; the languages characters have acquired limit their ability to express themselves or to move with changing times. Gaskell highlights this inversion not only to discuss the role of “literature” in shaping ideology, but to examine her own fictional authority.

The sense of external limitations to the authentic voice shapes Gaskell's narrative. The novel's experiments with textuality—its layering of family letters, literary allusions, poetry and failed bank notes—are paralleled by the evolution of the narrator: the increased definition of her voice and the active role she takes in the novel. She moves from anonymous reporter, to amused reader, and finally to manipulator and fairy-godmother, the perfect narrative “role” made concrete by her actions. As the novel concludes, we realize that by telling the story of the Amazons, “Mary Smith”—who had not looked at all like a character—has resolved her own choice of world and affiliations: to learn how to narrate their story, which means renouncing narrative absolutism and detached authority, is to understand, and be able to conclude, her own story. Her transformation, like the lives of the Amazons in Cranford, takes place in the marketed world of men, but suggests finally a world of female story-telling: Gaskell's attention to different kinds of reading suggests her growing awareness of the differences between female and male writing, and of the uses of marginality in the market of fiction.

Cranford rewrites marginality to form its own kind of experiment with narrative: like more famous Victorian examples of self-conscious narration, it comments on its own status as text, but it does so by indirection, a narrative viewpoint it names as peculiarly female. While following French feminist theories of “writing like a woman” (l'Écriture féminine) might lead us to look for a particularly, universally female language in Cranford, one in which, as Luce Irigaray claims, a “woman's desire would not be expected to speak the same language as a man's … [but] would undoubtedly have a different alphabet, a different language,”² we might ask instead how it was possible for one woman to reshape the forms of Victorian fiction, to write as a woman within a specific historical, economic, literary structure. Hélène Cixous argues that woman “must write her self … must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement”,³ here, my question is, what was the world (and the world of the text) into which Gaskell could “put herself,” and by what “movement.” As elsewhere in her fiction, Gaskell begins by placing herself in an inherited literary tradition, but here it is one of parody and subversion, a tradition she can use to rewrite the novel.⁴ By the end of Cranford, we know what an Amazonian work would look like. The idyll of Cranford, as place and text, is made possible by female writing, both of and in the novel.

I

Cranford begins with a fight about male authors, about Dr Johnson and Charles Dickens, which will reverberate through the whole novel. The novel's feud centers on literary tastes, focusing on deliberations about style and a writer's relationship to the market; Gaskell's publication of Cranford, in Dickens's magazine Household Words, began with an argument about his presence as author in the text. In both cases, at issue is a writer's presentation of self: Dickens thought it inappropriate that he appear by name in his own publication; Miss Jenkyns, in Cranford's opening, feels it is vulgar to publish in parts, and equally vulgar to appear in one's letters without being dressed in appropriate style. This question of presence in the text runs throughout the novel, but since Gaskell focuses on it initially as a debate between a man and a woman about two male writers, it takes on added resonance: how is the text to learn to register—or to re-write—female absence?

As the daughter of the rector and the owner of a number of manuscripts of sermons and a library of divinity, Miss Jenkyns, the maiden matriarch of the village of “Amazons,” considers herself more than adequate to decide “all questions of literature and politics” without troubling herself with “unnecessary reasons or arguments.”⁵ Isolated from the industrial town of Drumble to the north, the women of Cranford have imputed moral superiority to their isolation, as they have turned their practical liability (single, older women, no longer wealthy or important in a masculine, modern, money-minded world) into its own kind of advantage. Miss Jenkyns would have “despised the modern idea of women being equal to men,” when “indeed! she knew they were superior,” but this superiority is a fiction, as Cranford makes increasingly clear. The female world of action is limited, as is what the women can imagine doing.

Into the aggressively female world of Cranford, with its small rooms, “small slights,” and “trivial ceremonies,” comes Captain Brown, a brusque military man associated with the “obnoxious railroad.” At a Cranford soirée he offers to read out loud from the latest number of Pickwick, which he considers a “capital thing” and “famously good.” Miss Jenkyns says “I must say, I don't think they are by any means equal to Dr Johnson,” and the fight is on. She continues: “Still, perhaps, the author is young. Let him persevere, and who knows what he may become if he will take the great Doctor for his model” (47).

It is, as Captain Brown remarks immediately, “quite a different sort of thing” that Dickens does: this becomes clear as soon as each reads an excerpt from the favored author. When Captain Brown reads the account of Sam Weller's “swarry” at Bath, the listeners “laugh heartily,” the textual soirée enhancing their own party. But Miss Jenkyns resists Dickens: after sitting in “patient gravity” while the Captain reads, she turns to the narrator to ask “with mild dignity” that she be brought Rasselas “out of the bookroom,” and begins to “read one of the conversations between Rasselas and Imlac, in a high-pitched majestic voice.” After concluding, she says, sounding Johnsonian herself, “I imagine I am now justified in my preference of Dr Johnson as a writer of fiction,” and gives the argument “a finishing blow or two” by adding “I consider it vulgar, and below the dignity of literature, to publish in numbers.” Captain Brown asks quietly, “How was the Rambler published, ma'am?” but Miss Jenkyns goes on: “Dr Johnson's style is a model for young beginners. My father recommended it to me when I began to write letters,—I have formed my own style upon it; I recommend it to your favourite” (48). And here Captain Brown goes too far, saying “I should be very sorry for him to exchange his style for any such pompous writing.”

But what she presents as mere “style,” what looks like pomposity, is for Miss Jenkyns a connection as personal and immediate as any literary affinity can be, and Captain Brown's criticism is a “personal affront”:

Epistolary writing, she and her friends considered as her forte. Many a copy of many a letter have I seen written and corrected on the slate, before she “seized the half-hour just previous to post-time to assure” her friends of this or of that; and Dr Johnson was, as she said, her model in these compositions. She drew herself up with dignity and only replied to Captain Brown's last remark by saying, with marked emphasis on every syllable, “I prefer Dr Johnson to Mr Boz.”

It is said—I won't vouch for the fact—that Captain Brown was heard to say sotto voce, “D———n Dr Johnson!”

(48)

Captain Brown's retreat to epithet suggests the failure of his “favourite,” but as the novel makes clear, the style of her favorite has betrayed Deborah Jenkyns. The language in which her father taught her to write her letters is one which the text never hesitates to mock gently: we are given a sample of Miss Jenkyns's letter describing a visit from a lord to the Browns, using prose so Johnsonian as to approach parody:

Mrs Johnson, our civil butcher's wife, informs me that Miss Jessie purchased a leg of lamb; but, besides this, I can hear of no preparation whatever to give a suitable reception to so distinguished a visitor. Perhaps they entertained him with “the feast of reason and the flow of soul”; and to us, who are acquainted with Captain Brown's sad want of relish for “the pure wells of English undefiled,” it may be matter for congratulation, that he has had the opportunity of improving his taste by holding converse with an elegant and refined member of the British aristocracy. But from some mundane failings who is altogether free?

(52)

The language, though rich, suggests no pleasure; nor does it allow for specific emotion. One might deduce Miss Jenkyns's personal pique in her rhetorical question, “from some mundane failings who is altogether free,” but the prose makes it impossible for her to describe her anger, and, further, evades its own responsibility—that of the “pure wells of English undefiled”—for her pain.

All of Miss Jenkyns's aspirations for her life, everything her father led her to expect the world to provide for her, grew out of that prose style. She had meant, she once told her sister Matty, “to marry an archdeacon, and write his charges” (158); after her mother's death, she vowed “that if she had a hundred offers, she never would marry and leave my father” (102). And she was, Miss Matty tells the narrator, “such a daughter to my father, as I think there never was before, or since. His eyes failed him, and she read book after book, and wrote, and copied, and was always at his service in any parish business. She could do many more things than my poor mother could; she even once wrote a letter to the bishop for my father. But he missed my mother sorely; the whole parish noticed it” (102). And, as Miss Matty notes, when their brother Peter returned, “Deborah used to smile … and say she was quite put in a corner. Not but what my father always wanted her when there was letter-writing, or reading, to be done, or anything to be settled” (103). A letter-writing daughter is not a wife, not a son, not even her own writer.

But Miss Jenkyns relies on the “higher style of literature” because it seems to remove her from her own life: from “elegant economy,” from solitude, from the deaths and tragedies of her family. The Johnsonian voice is an attempt at the timeless, in the same way that Boz seems to be entirely of the moment. The novel connects Dickens with haste and urgency: Captain Brown walks through the streets so engrossed in his newest number of Pickwick that he all but runs into Miss Jenkyns. And in the climactic scene of the chapter, Captain Brown himself is run over by that most Dickensian of modern machines, the railroad that had run down Mr Carker in Dombey and Son a few years before Gaskell wrote Cranford. While “a-reading some new book as he was deep in,” he looked up to see a little girl cross a track, and “he darted on the line and cotched it up, and his foot slipped, and the train came over him in no time” (55). The man who gives Miss Jenkyns the news seems to have something Dickensian in his prose, as well—the sentence has more connected phrases and more urgency than the usual Gaskell sentence. Not only is Brown destroyed by a symbol of the new world racing in on the Cranford that had “petitioned” against the railroads, but his presentation as a reader of Pickwick makes Dickens himself seem the murdering engine.

And so Miss Jenkyns assigns guilt, when the narrator returns to visit her on her deathbed, where she lies being read to by the dead Captain's granddaughter—from the Rambler:

‘If Flora were not here to read to me, I hardly know how I should get through, the day. Did you ever read the Rambler? It's a wonderful book—wonderful! and the most improving reading for Flora’—(which I dare say it would have been, if she could have read half the words without spelling, and could have understood the meaning of a third)—‘better than that strange old book, with the queer name, poor Captain Brown was killed for reading—that book by Mr Boz, you know—“Old Poz;” when I was a girl—but that's a long time ago—I acted Lucy in “Old Poz.”’—She babbled on long enough for Flora to get a good long spell at the Christmas Carol, which Miss Matty had left on the table.

(62)

Reading, even the Rambler, is the only consolation left for Miss Jenkyns, and a reader by now recognizes its private implications. The public value, all Miss Jenkyns can discuss, is still open to question, for how improving can it be for a younger world which cannot read “half the words without spelling” or “underst[and] the meaning of a third”? But for Miss Jenkyns, the book of her youth has become young again with her in her second-childhood, “better than that strange old book, with the queer name.” Here, her vision of literature exacts its own vengeance—only in Miss Jenkyns's mind was Captain Brown “killed for reading” Pickwick—but Dickens allows Miss Jenkyns to recapture her youth in another way; in her unexpectedly imaginative pun on “Boz” and “Poz” a happier, more frivolous Deborah is regained, acting “Lucy” in Maria Edgeworth's play “Old Poz.” Dickens, though, has the last word: as Miss Jenkyns babbles on, young Flora gets in “a good long spell” at the Christmas Carol, clearly what she would prefer to be reading at the moment—and no doubt as improving as the barely understood, unpronounceable Rambler.

If this discussion focuses our attention on the ways women, in particular, read male writers, we must go on to consider the relationship of these texts to the woman writer, and here the presence of Dickens in the text highlights these concerns for Gaskell herself. When Dickens published Cranford in Household Words he forced Gaskell to change the reference: to take his name out, and to substitute Thomas Hood's.⁶ Not only does one lose the connection between new literary style and new economic patterns in reducing the topicality of the reference, but the particularity of representative male writers battling it out disappears. If Gaskell is suggesting the difficulty of a woman's taking her place in that arena, Dickens has demonstrated her particular powerlessness in this instance: she was able to restore him to the chapters when Cranford was published in book form, but she resented fiercely his editorial imposition on the initial publication, and there is evidence to suggest she tried to withdraw Cranford from Household Words at the last minute, after learning of the proposed change. The editorial involvement Dickens prided himself on often felt like interference to Gaskell, and in most cases, as here, she has been proven right: his insertion of Thomas Hood where she had included his works does not carry nearly the authority or the humor she had intended.

Gaskell was not battling with just anyone at this moment: Dickens dominated both the publishing and the creative end of the business in 1853, when Gaskell began Cranford. He had solicited the novel for Household Words, writing to Gaskell, addressing her as “my dear Scheherazade,” saying there was no living writer whose work he would rather publish.⁷ In a sense, directly, Cranford was written “for” Dickens: in his attempts to shape the novel, we can see foreshadowings of the fierce battles between them over North and South which would prompt him to write to Wills, “If I were Mr G. O. heaven how I would beat her,” and “Couldn't a fight be got up between the female-major and Mrs Gaskell?” Neither could have known in the early stages of their working relationship that she would be the novelist who would most consistently defy his editorial changes, return her page proofs in exactly the form she had submitted them, ignoring his suggestions, and put the number breaks where she wanted them. But Dickens stands clearly as the male writer reading over Gaskell's shoulder as she writes Cranford, and the Dickensian references and patterns in Cranford, as well as the battle over its appearance in Household Words, suggest what is at stake for Gaskell. His every appearance in Cranford is charged with significance.

The story on the whole suggests the inability of women to realize their intentions in the market. In these early chapters, Gaskell seems to be reflecting on the writer as a literary daughter, still struggling with the language her father gave her for—specifically—domestic writing. Part of what is so absurd about Deborah Jenkyns's writing is simply that it is in the wrong place: if she were an archdeacon and writing up charges, if she were, as her sister imagines, writing advice books, the Johnsonian sentences she can toss off so easily would not seem inappropriate or pompous. Women have no room for the grand style in their writing, for they never write anything grand. Literary daughters are not given the language they need: rather, they are given languages, often dead languages, which mediate their experience for them. How could Miss Jenkyns write her story as Rasselas?

Gaskell's point of departure might be seen in the account of Miss Jenkyns's death scene: the re-reading of Johnson through a character's reading of Dickens; the layering of texts and awareness of readers; a deliberately multi-vocal writing and reading in which we briefly can imagine the scene as it would be written by several authors.⁸ This feeling of a layered text is implicit in the contrast between Dickens and Johnson, a contrast which, I have suggested, collapses in on itself in so many ways, as we learn that the writers are the same in that which they exclude. Gaskell's criticism of Johnson could itself have been inspired by the Johnson Dickens gives us in Pickwick: Garrett Stewart has quoted William Wimsatt on Johnson's “‘smile behind the ponderosity, a ripple beneath the grave style,’” but has remarked further, “when Dickens gets hold of Johnsonian words, the smile breaks into laughter, the ripple becomes a complete ironic upheaval.”⁹ If what Gaskell learned from Pickwick was that “ironic upheaval,” she could in turn both reveal and further displace Dickens himself. As we so often feel with Dickens, the process of reading and writing go on dialectically: through the parade of voices in the opening of Cranford, we can see a rare showiness in Gaskell's narrative, an awareness that she is at once taking her place among the male writers, and using that power to register her difference.

To argue this relationship of Gaskell's text to Dickens's, and to assert firmly that the implied author announces her presence within the text, might seem to approach dangerously close to a naive argument of intentionality: that Gaskell “meant” Cranford to be read as a manifesto of female authorship, and that the text obligingly meets (and offers up to us) her intended meanings. To raise only the problem of evidence, it is clear that Gaskell nowhere states her intentions so openly as to encourage such a reading, and it is not clear that such a language would have been available to her, had she wanted it. But one cannot discuss parody without being in the realm of authorial direction, and at the moment when a text names other texts, when an author names herself as in dialogue with a specific literary tradition, we can no longer avoid questions of intentionality. Gaskell wrote Cranford at a specific moment, in response to particular practical and literary considerations, growing largely out of her working relationship (one of dependency and powerlessness) with Dickens, a relationship which carried particular weight when she went to define herself as a writer. Her awareness of herself, and the text's awareness of its literary project—to laugh at tradition, and then re-write it—are not separable, nor can the connections be dismissed hastily under the rubric of intentional fallacies. Our attention to the writing of the text is largely directed by the text itself. That writing goes on inside as well as outside the story, that the story is about its own writing, is registered self-consciously by the text, primarily through its attention to the literary woman—a woman writing as well as reading, a figure Gaskell must have seen herself implicated in at a moment when she was increasingly aware of herself as a professional writer, working within a market of fiction.

If Gaskell perceived herself initially as a reader, then reading becomes the problematic of the novel(ist): when women read male writers, what will they write? The receptivity Gaskell seems often to be urging for women as readers conflicts, here as elsewhere, with the realities of women as writers, who are in danger of being too receptive, of acquiring the languages of others too easily—as her earlier fiction, especially Ruth, shows, women writers cannot criticize male plots from within that male frame. But what her use of Dickens and Johnson gives Gaskell is not so much a plot as a way of reading: parody, at its finest, turns receptivity to critique. The rest of the novel—moving between reading and writing—attempts to re-define the woman novelist's reading of male writing, and begins by asking the simplest questions about women and texts: what do women read, how are they taught to read, what are they empowered to write?¹⁰

Typically, it is one of the most humorous episodes of textual explanation in Cranford that provides the darkest view of narrative and of the dangers—especially to women—of mediated experience in general. When a magic show comes to Cranford, one of the Amazons shows a reluctance to accept it as magic: instead, she goes immediately to an encyclopedia to “nouns beginning with C,” in order that she “might prime herself with scientific explanation for the tricks of the following evening” (132). “Tricks” seems to be one area where encyclopedias would prove useless as explanatory tools: surely what baffles the eye would baffle encyclopedists and “science.” But what Miss Pole finds—before she has seen the conjuror, of course—explains everything to her:

‘Ah! I see; I comprehend perfectly. A represents the ball. Put A between B and D—no! between C and F, and turn the second joint of the third finger of your left hand over the wrist of your right H. Very clear indeed! My dear Mrs Forrester, conjuring and witchcraft is a mere affair of the alphabet. Do let me read you this one passage?’

Mrs Forrester implored Miss Pole to spare her, saying, from a child upwards, she never could understand being read aloud to.

(132)

The account of Miss Pole is amusing, and understandable—a fear of being trapped or taken in by experience leading one to read up on something, to master the “mere affair of the alphabet.” But it does not, in fact, help her at all: though she reads aloud throughout the magic show “the separate ‘receipts’ for the most common of his tricks,” she doesn't succeed in convincing anyone that “anybody could do them with a little practice—and that she would, herself, undertake to do all he did, with two hours given to study the Encyclopaedia and make her third finger flexible” (135). Further, of course, she misses a wonderful show, “more engrossed with her receipts and diagrams than with his tricks.” That is the fear of a literary model which I think we are meant to link with Johnson and the Dictionary, with a male-centered, alphabetized, totally explanatory, closed text: we will become engrossed with form (“receipts and diagrams”) and not only miss the fun, but lose the chance to see for ourselves.

The joke in Cranford is on the witchcraft of writing—what we might now call mystification. “Very clear indeed! … Conjuring and witchcraft is a mere affair of the alphabet.” Turning to encyclopedias—or fashion guides, or books of baronetcy—to explain the world is futile: one might laugh at Cranford itself for its rigid following of codes like fashion books or guides to manners, for all its guidebooks are out-of-date. But all these codes begin to seem arbitrary. They are codes only because they are agreed on; and if these systems of textual information are arbitrary, like Mr Holbrook's twenty-six cows named “A through Z” then agreement about literature, as well, begins to seem a question of communities. If the systems which the Amazons follow so religiously seem absurd to us, then so, too, must the systems of the outside world. Signs and sign systems work because they are acknowledged, but when they become rigid, like those of Cranford, they begin to filter experience in more threatening ways.

One could move briefly outside the literary systems to the social code most clearly examined in Cranford: that which designates the single woman “superfluous.” When one thinks of Deborah Jenkyns with her useless literary skills, reduced to writing Johnsonian epistles on what the butcher sold Miss Brown, one locates some of Gaskell's resentment at the codification of experience: she has indeed been cut off by society from leading a fuller life, for she should have been an archdeacon herself. But when one sees further the ways in which her own experience of that language has shaped Miss Jenkyns's expectations for her own life, one includes literary systems in the indictment. If Miss Jenkyns's aspirations for her life did grow out of that prose style, and what her father told her it would do, then isn't it responsible for her limitations? Miss Pole's account of “A represents the ball. Put A between B and D—no! between C and F” is very funny, but has nothing to do with the magic she sees; similarly, Miss Jenkyns's “sesquipedalian” and cross-written letters have little to do with the changing pattern of her life. At this point, we may protest like Mrs Forrest, that we “never could understand being read aloud to.”

II

How, then, does Gaskell counter the literary experience of always, only “being read aloud to”? On the simplest level, the text plays with a number of possible relations to reading and kinds of “reading experiences.” Through long passages where Miss Matty and Mary read and burn old letters, through extended debates on the relationship of poetry to natural fact, above all through the narrator's education as she learns to “read” Miss Matty's secret heartbreak, readers of Cranford are in turn instructed in varieties of readings, specifically in decoding what the novel terms the “effort at concealment.” The novel gives a voice to what cannot otherwise be expressed: to the silent sufferings of women like Miss Matty; to the enforced silence of the letters of dead loved ones, which live only in the continued affection of the living; to the deliberate silence of male texts like “Locksley Hall” about women's experience. Reading these absent voices calls for a different kind of attention from us, and giving room to the voices creates a layered, multi-vocal work, in which the very gaps in a novel begin to speak. In the process, the vision of a supervised text gives way to a text with multiple ways of entry, in which whispered phrases, sighs, even depictions of dozing readers, suggest to us that no dominating narrator can always have his way with us, can always impose on us any one vision of how we are to read.

This concern with the mediation of experience, the voice of instruction, and the relationship of reader to text, leads Gaskell to a new awareness of narration itself. And Cranford was written at a moment when narrative experimentation was the order of the day, and female story-telling central to nervousness about narrative: at the same time that Gaskell was publishing Cranford in Household Words, Dickens was publishing Bleak House, which engages many of the same questions of who is to tell the reader the story, and who thus tells her how to read. But Gaskell's concern with the voice of instruction, and with the voice of “authority,” has another, perhaps more immediate Dickensian analogy: with The Pickwick Papers, the work she invoked in her opening chapter.

Cranford can be read as a female version of Pickwick: in its spirit of “benevolence,” its focusing on social gatherings, and its preoccupations with “bachelorhood,” it seems a comment on the earlier work. Like Pickwick, it becomes increasingly dark as it draws to its close, and the bankruptcy of Miss Matty, though not induced by a breach of promise suit, draws on that same sense of the protagonist's integrity in the face of a world of bankers and lawyers. But while The Pickwick Papers, as Dickens scholars have noted, seems to “star” Dickens himself, making the image of his own language the hero of the text,¹¹ for Gaskell, the question of who focuses the text—and of on whom the text focuses—is answered very differently. Where Pickwick takes to the road, of course, the Amazons stay at home: where the narrative voice of Pickwick aims for the impersonal and the universal, the narrative voice of Cranford is increasingly more personal. Cranford is a kind of narrator's progress: the model it proposes is of narrative involvement, an involvement Gaskell saw as fundamental for women confronting essentially male traditions of reading and writing.

Virginia Woolf suggested some of the difficulties of that confrontation when she argued, in A Room of One's Own, that the woman novelist, “Mary Carmichael,” “will have her work cut out for her merely as an observer.”¹² We might here connect Gaskell's “Mary Smith” with Virginia Woolf's “Mary” (“call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael”): Woolf's use of “Mary” as a signifier for the common woman, the “‘I’ [which] is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being” (4)—the perfect, transparent narrator who gets more and more life as the text continues—is much like Gaskell's use of the plain name, “Mary Smith,” which suggests an almost balladic simplicity. It is tempting to argue for influence since Woolf's discussion of women bound in by texts sounds much like Gaskell's discussion of “affairs of the alphabet,” even as Woolf's treatment of the (future) woman novelist echoes much of Cranford's enterprise. In Woolf's description of what women might write, we can hear echoes of Cranford itself: the new novel's unexpected strength is its portrait of female friendship; it attempts a new sentence, breaking up “Jane Austen's sentence, and thus giv[ing] me no chance of pluming myself upon my impeccable taste, my fastidious ear.” Mary Carmichael has—and this might stand as an epigraph to my discussion of Cranford—“gone further”: she has “broken the sequence—the expected order. Perhaps she had done this unconsciously, merely giving things their natural order, as a woman would, if she wrote like a woman” (95). Woolf's description of the difference between male and female values and fiction further reminds one of Gaskell, and suggests the modernity within Cranford's nostalgia:

It is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are “important”; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes “trivial.” And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop—everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.

(77)¹³

What Cranford poses is the problem of the “feelings of women in a drawing-room” as “the” subject of fiction; like Woolf's essay, it puts into question the “difference of value” which has made women's stories “insignificant.”

Cranford is unquestionably a female story, which makes it the more remarkable that it does not, strictly speaking, have a heroine: Miss Matty represents some kind of moral center for the novel, which closes with her and with the idea that we are all somehow better for having known her. The “story” is largely hers, but the real story is in the narrator's changing perceptions of her—indeed, of her changing understanding of all the “Amazons.” And yet, we could not call Cranford Mary Smith's “story”: little happens to her—she does not die or get married, her situation does not change. In fact, her real “story”—her daily life with her father—takes place outside the novel and the village; we are reading her holiday self. But as Cranford concludes, we see the narrator increasingly involved in the plot of the novel, and in its happy conclusion. As she assumes narrative responsibility—telling readers more about herself, admitting her own doubts about that everyday life with her father in Drumble, becoming increasingly ironic and identified with the Cranfordian imagination—so she begins to act in the narrative: writing the letter to Miss Matty's brother, against all the male, practical discouragement she can imagine; coming up with the plan for Miss Matty's financial independence in running the tea shop; becoming more her own person, more her own heroine.

This corresponds, partly, to Gaskell's conflicting needs in creating a narrator for Cranford: Gaskell needed a narrator who could do several things at once. Because she is telling a story of people already outdated, she needs a narrator who can move from one world to another, without the implied superiority of an omniscient narrator. She needs a narrator detached enough not to take Cranford's “elegant economies” too seriously, but enough of an insider to interpret such customs to the uninitiate. Her narrator must also understand the masculine business world of Drumble, but have a sense of what Cranford holds that that bustling town lacks. But clearly, no narrator except an omniscient one can move between these worlds—past and present, masculine and feminine, town and village—without tension, and so Gaskell must create a narrator who feels the differences, but can mediate between them for a reader.

Mary Smith, Cranford's narrator, lives with her father in Drumble but spends part of every year in Cranford, where, we are told, her father once lived. Indeed, near the end of the novel, she says, with a reluctance that reminds us of Gaskell's coyness of authorship, “I must say a word or two here about myself. I have spoken of my father's old friendship for the Jenkyns family; indeed, I am not sure if there was not some distant relationship” (170). From the first, Mary seems slightly allied with the ladies against her father, but her ironic gaze, loving as it is, is too penetrating of the ladies' foolishness for us not to hear her father's genial contempt for them: it is a contempt she will mock later, when she quotes her father on the subject of one of Miss Jenkyns's investments: “the only unwise step that clever woman had ever taken, to his knowledge (the only time she ever acted against his advice, I knew)” (172). But for the most part, the narrator's loyalties work in the way that the novel seems to be dividing up the world: men control the financial, industrial world, and, in some unexplained but significant way, keep the world going for the women who live in an exclusively domestic world of marrying and gossiping, making calls, burying the dead. The realm of female action—and of female comment—seems closely contained.

That narrative division begins to break down at the moment that the economic system does, and Gaskell must create a bank failure—a failure of “notes”—to create the space for this narrative transformation. As abruptly as Miss Matty's world is shattered with the loss of her savings in the failure of the Bank, so suddenly do the divisions fall apart which allow women not to think about “finances” and keep men safely out of the quotidian Cranford life. But the bank's failure and Miss Matty's way of meeting it accentuate Gaskell's focus on the single woman: through Miss Matty's unexpected strengths and a new contradiction of Mary's father, the strongest male authority of the novel, comes a possible reversal of power. Here, more explicitly than elsewhere in the novel, Gaskell links authority—power and authorship—with the “market” and suggests story-telling which is not commodifed, which is a “Cranford” rather than a “Drumble” narration.

Miss Matty's fate is what middle-class Victorians must most have feared: she is left with no income, but with social obligations; she is embarrassed in front of her friends; she must give up her family home. She faces this disaster in unexpected ways, however. When she meets a man who holds a cheque from her bank, knowing herself a shareholder, she chooses to ignore the strong rumor of the bank's instability, and stands behind her obligation, redeeming the cheque herself. She chooses, in the smallest as in the largest instance, not to profit from the misfortunes of others, but more essentially, she chooses to hold herself responsible to others. When she opens a shop, she refuses to sell green tea without warning customers of its hazards; she is always giving out more than just measures to customers, unable entirely to reconcile herself to market thinking. Mary's father disapproves of most of Miss Matty's “scruples,” calling them “great nonsense” and wondering “how tradespeople were to get on if there was to be a continual consulting of each other's interests, which would put a stop to all competition directly” (200); but as Mary notes, by consulting Mr Johnson who already sells tea, Miss Matty manages to improve her business, for he sends her customers. While Mary's father says “such simplicity might be very well in Cranford, but would never do in the world,” Mary adds, “I fancy the world must be very bad, for with all my father's suspicion of every one with whom he has dealings, and in spite of all his many precautions, he lost upwards of a thousand pounds by roguery only last year” (201). By imagining or imputing roguery, Gaskell suggests, Mr. Smith (surely Adam Smith) has called it into being.¹⁴

Miss Matty's movement, the single woman flying in the face of male opposition, is also the narrator's movement to freedom: the moment when Mary sends a letter off to Peter, Miss Matty's absent brother, ignoring her father's imagined mockery, is her moment of seizing power in the narrative, and the terms she employs sound like those used by Gaskell herself. The letter straddles the world of male factuality and female intuition; the description Mary gives of her prose might almost be one Gaskell would offer for her novel: she writes the unknown Aga Jenkyns “a letter which should affect him if he were Peter, and yet seem a mere statement of dry facts if he were a stranger” (180).¹⁵ The letter, like Miss Matty's life, is an act of faith, based on the coincidence of the travelling magician's foreign wife having met a kind man in India named Jenkyns, and on Mary Smith's involvement in the letter reading and burning of the earlier chapters. Like the description of the prose itself, Gaskell's description of the mailing of the letter and its eventual journey conjures up much of the act of novel-writing as well:

At last I got the address, spelt by sound; and very queer it looked! I dropped it in the post on my way home; and then for a minute I stood looking at the wooden pane with the 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. It would get tossed about on the sea, and stained with sea-waves perhaps; and be carried among palm-trees, and scented with all tropical fragrance;—the 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! But I could not afford to lose much time on this speculation.

(182-83)

For a moment, the narrator stands firmly in the female world of Cranford, where it is entirely possible to imagine absent brothers returning, but she is also invoking a traditionally male topos: the sea voyage, the fragrance of the tropics, the “strange wild countries” which none of the Amazons will ever see. And, for a moment, she re-imagines both writing and voyaging in female terms: the letter is gone from her “like life—never to be recalled,” and writing is at once death, life “gone from me,” but also birth. A new “life” goes out of the writer, takes form, is given form.

She seems, as a writer, to have momentarily taken on the post of the Johnsonian narrator she invoked at the beginning, while subtly mocking his point of view by reminding herself—and us—that in the busy world of Cranford, “I could not afford to lose much time on this,” and so recalls herself from wandering “beyond the Ganges.” She tells of Miss Jenkyns, who, when Peter was heard to be in India, “learned some piece of poetry off by heart, and used to say, at all the Cranford parties, how Peter was ‘surveying mankind from China to Peru,’ which everybody had thought very grand, and rather appropriate, because India was between China and Peru, if you took care to turn the globe to the left instead of to the right” (164). When Mary Smith gathers the information about Peter, hunts out his address and transcribes it as best she can, and acts secretly and yet firmly to secure his return, she moves with an almost Johnsonian authority: it is the same authority that shapes the telling of the story, and her increasing insistence that she knows how best to tell it, and why.

But the final vision of the writer Gaskell suggests is hardly of the Johnsonian figure surveying in detachment a steady, fixed world from “China to Peru.” The writing woman, sending off a badly-spelt letter to a long-lost. brother, is detached from nothing: she writes out of feeling and involvement, to connect rather than to survey mankind, without having to specify to a reader which way to “turn the globe,” for here the “globe” is the constantly moving community of women. Cranford ends not with its narrator's description of herself or her fate, but with its vision of Miss Matty: that we are all better for having been near her. By ending with the social unit, the whole of Cranford society going in, arm in arm and at peace, to see Signor Brunoni's magic show, Mary Smith suggests that her narrative only has meaning in that community. Perhaps, in writing the history of Cranford in so deliberately non-epic terms, with little ironies, delicate perceptions and subtle appreciations, Gaskell has taken on the Johnsonian challenge in a new and unique way.

But she has not repeated the Dickensian experiment. While one does not want to re-create criticism of Cranford which stresses its “delicacy” and its “fragrance,” one must note that in its model of “concealed” narration it strikes a very different tone from the omniscience of the narrative sun that bursts through Pickwick. One cannot imagine Cranford ending:

It is the fate of most men who mingle with the world, and attain even the prime of life, to make many real friends, and lose them in the course of nature. It is the fate of all authors or chroniclers to create imaginary friends, and lose them in the course of art. Nor is this the full extent of their misfortunes; for they are required to furnish an account of them besides.¹⁶

There can be no such summary of the situation of narration in Cranford, for the story of Cranford is so much involved with the story of its telling. At no point would Mary Smith be able to locate herself enough outside either the novel or the town of Cranford to comment on it as “chronicler.” And yet she bears a more “authorial” relation to the novel than does, say, Esther Summerson, who cannot comment at all on her position vis-à-vis the “novel-as-a-whole.” Gaskell is trying for something between the disappearing author of “The Vanity of Human Wishes” and the self-promoting author of The Pickwick Papers; something between the voice-over narration of Bleak House and the entirely privatized voice of Esther's narrative.

That position of intentional mediation, between literary figures and literary voices, is what Mary Smith's narration re-creates, and it is as much an experiment in narrative as is Bleak House, though it has not been treated as such, perhaps because in its “concealment” and “femininity” it presents itself as so much less radical. To recognize it, we must be the kind of reader Mary Smith learns to be, reading through omissions and small, ironic comments. But through its pattern of oppositions and its insistence on its integrity as a guide to an alien way of life, Cranford stakes out its own territory in what it describes as a world of continual change, and Gaskell stakes out her own literary authority.

In her own oscillation between city and village, bustling present and dying past, Gaskell, like Mary Smith, is the perfect guide to Amazonian life. She has written a guide-book for what, to most of her contemporaries, was not worth visiting and not worth describing, and she has done it in Cranfordian terms, rather than the terms of Drumble or the terms of ‘Dictionary’ Johnson. Her narrative takes on the tone of Miss Matty's fading letters or unnarrated love story: by the end of Cranford, we too know how to read from such small signs, and how to complete the unfinished stories. The guide to Cranford could not be done in the language of “The Vanity of Human Wishes” or a Pickwickian report: it is the success of Cranford as a novel to teach us to read its own, specific language, and to master the village, and the novel, on its own terms. Cranford has some of the sense of Miss Matty's fading letters, “a vivid and intense sense of the present time, which seemed so strong and full, as if it could never pass away” (85), but it also has a sense of constant loss, as if the work of representation, too, was always slipping away. Miss Matty describes the diary her father once made her keep:

‘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 happened. It would be to some people rather a sad way of telling their lives’—(a tear dropped upon my hand at those words)—‘I don't mean that mine has been sad, only so very different to what I expected.’

(158)

That fluidity, the movement between expectation and reality, the present as it is lived and the past as it is “put down” in literature, with the addition of the softening tear, is what Cranford achieves. Its real achievement, as art, is to hold that flux steady for us, and to involve us so completely in its way of reading.

But in imagining the flux, in re-imaging it for us, the novel serves also to remind us of the limitations of the languages we choose. Miss Matty says that she loves the stars, but she cannot talk about them with an eager questioner, for, she says, she confuses “astronomy” and “astrology.” She asserts further, in the face of all authority, that “she never could believe that the earth was moving constantly, and that she would not believe it if she could, it made her feel so tired and dizzy whenever she thought about it” (127). What Cranford must do throughout is move between experience and explanation, as women must re-read what they have been told of the world. But here, as before, the novel must remain “dizzy,” an unfixable sphere in front of us, which we cannot maneuver as we please, but which offers up nonetheless the possibility of fictions of change rather than a literature of definition. The novel as a genre is always already in motion, rather than fixed, but in re-inventing the novel for women, Gaskell moved the prime movers; she imagined—and made real—the woman writer no longer being read aloud to, but writing out (and out of) her own way of reading.

Notes

1. Critics have argued against this view, while being taken in by it in subtler ways: Edgar Wright says that it is “over simple to accept Cranford as a nostalgic idealization,” yet in the next sentence he refers to its “lightness of treatment.” (Mrs. Gaskell: The Basis for Reassessment [London: Oxford University Press, 1965], p. 108). My reading of the novel begins with the assumption that Gaskell was using this “light treatment” as part of a larger critique.

   One might also read Gaskell's description of lost village life in terms of what Clifford Geertz calls a “thick description,” one in which she read behavior as “trying to rescue the ‘said’ of [social] discourse from its perishing occasions and fix it in perusable terms” (The Interpretation of Cultures [New York: Basic Books, 1973], p. 20). In its ethnography, as in other ways, Cranford anticipates the work of Gaskell's successor in realism, George Eliot, whose Middlemarch is of course subtitled, “A Study of Provincial Life.”

2. “This Sex Which Is Not One,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 25.

3. “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), p. 245.

4. Mary Poovey argues in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) that parody “can be seen as the expression of a desire to retain both the inherited and the revised genre” (44), expanding George Levine's comment in The Realistic Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) that “parody is a necessarily self-contradictory form” (69) into an argument that it thus by its nature fits a woman writer's self-contradictory position. For a further discussion of women and “mimetic” language, see Mary Jacobus's Irigarayan reading of The Mill on the Floss, “The Question of Language: Men of Maxims and The Mill on the Floss” in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

5. Cranford, ed. Peter Keating (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 39. All subsequent references included in the text.

6. See Winifred Gérin, Elizabeth Gaskell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 125-26, and, for a very interesting treatment of the history of Gaskell's relationship with Dickens, see A. B. Hopkins, Elizabeth Gaskell: Her Life and Work (London: John Lehmann, 1952), pp. 135-57.

7. Gérin, p. 123.

8. One can also see Bakhtinian dialogics in my discussion of the layering of voices and texts which, as with Bakhtin, is essential to the novel and functions as a reservoir of cultural voices and literary echoes; but I mean something at once not limited to and much more limited than that. The literary echoes here are part of a specific literary battle, Gaskell's movement towards her own voice, and must be read in the realm of male/female relations, the marketing of women's fiction, and the power dynamic between Gaskell and Dickens. See “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

9. Dickens and the Trials of Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 13.

10. I am arguing a different relationship to literary tradition than would Elaine Showalter (A Literature of Their Own, [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977]), who is generally dismissive of Gaskell and whose invaluable re-creation of a female tradition moves in a direction opposite to my attempt to argue for a female re-writing of a male tradition.

11. Stewart, pages 3-29 especially; Steven Marcus, Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey (New York: Norton, 1965), pp. 13-53 and further, “Language into Structure: Pickwick Revisited,” Daedalus (Winter 1972): 183-202.

12. A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1929), p. 92.

13. I am reminded of the quiet irony with which Woolf first commented that “too great a refinement gives ‘Cranford’ that prettiness which is the weakest thing about it, making it, superficially at least, the favourite copy for gentle writers who have hired rooms over the village post-office”; she then went on to remind us that “When she was a girl, Mrs Gaskell was famous for her ghost stories” (“Mrs Gaskell,” Times Literary Supplement, 29 September 1910, reprinted in Virginia Woolf, Women and Writing, ed. Michèle Barrett [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980], pp. 148-49). Woolf, no “gentle writer” herself, saw through Gaskell's cover immediately.

14. See The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967) for interesting references to Adam Smith, whom she clearly respected and feared. See especially, Letter 93, 7 April 1851, where Gaskell recommends that her daughter read The Wealth of Nations before she forms opinions on protectionism and trade, but that she not “confine” herself “to the limited meaning which he affixes to the word ‘wealth’” (p. 148). Gaskell, like Ruskin in “The Nature of Gothic” and Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts, created radical economic solutions in some depth through a creative mis-reading of Adam Smith.

15. It is interesting that we never get the text of the letter itself: presumably, the story Peter hears is the story we have just read, and at this moment of narrative fixity the story-telling could extend infinitely. This suggests what Tzvetan Todorov has called the “embedded” text, which “reaches its apogee with the process of self-embedding, that is, when the embedding story happens to be, at some fifth or sixth degree, embedded by itself,” as when Scheherazade tells the story of her own story-telling. (“Narrative-Men,” in The Poetics of Prose [Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977], p. 72). The embedding narrative, as Todorov claims, is the “narrative of a narrative”: in Cranford, this brief suggestion of the repetition of the story we are reading is the narrative of a narrative of narrativizing.

16. The Pickwick Papers, ed. Robert L. Patten (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 896.