SOURCE: “‘Cousin Holman's Dresser’: Science, Social Change, and the Pathologized Female in Gaskell's ‘Cousin Phillis,’” in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 52, No. 4, March, 1998, pp. 471-89.

[In the following essay, Pettitt uses “Cousin Phillis” to probe Elizabeth Gaskell's views of science and contemporary scientific culture.]

Gaskell completed her novel Sylvia's Lovers, the “tiresome book” that had taken her three years to write, in January 1863.¹ It is a novel in which will and desire seem impotent over the development of narrative and history, and, despite the fact that no scientists appear in its pages, there is evidence within the very narrative structure of Sylvia's Lovers that Gaskell is engaging with scientific discourses and the much-discussed theories of unconscious development that were current in the 1860s.² It is impossible that Gaskell, living through the 1850s and 1860s in Unitarian, middle-class Manchester, related by marriage to Charles Darwin, and in contact with many of the leading scientists of her age, could have ignored a rapidly developing scientific culture.³ As Arnold Thackray has pointed out, for the Mancunian middle class in the nineteenth century, science “offered a coherent explanatory scheme for the unprecedented, change-orientated society in which [social reformers] found themselves unavoidably if willingly cast in leading roles.”⁴

Nevertheless, disentangling Gaskell's view—or rather views—of science is a confusing process that seems at first to yield only contradictions. “Not scientific nor mechanical” was Gaskell's own emphatic assessment of herself in a September 1851 letter to her friend Anne Robson in which she describes a trip to the Great Exhibition in that year (Letters, p. 159). Yet I argue that while Gaskell energetically rejected any simplistic notion of science as a “coherent explanatory scheme,” throughout her work she inscribes and reinscribes versions of “scientific progress,” repeatedly attempting to find a scientific paradigm for social change that is genuinely capable of expressing and ordering her desire for social transformation. I also argue that, when scientific paradigms break down in Gaskell's fiction, the failures are projected onto the feminine subject. The female occupies a double space in Gaskell's narrative that renders her both hero and victim: both “bound by another's rules” (in Gaskell's words)⁵ and simultaneously representative of the power to transform those rules. That the developing scientific culture and the gender-divided culture of “separate spheres” are ideologically linked in Gaskell's work becomes very clear in her last two works of fiction, the novella “Cousin Phillis” and the unfinished novel Wives and Daughters: An Everyday Story. In these last narratives, as she had done in her earlier work, Gaskell again takes up figurations of the scientist in an attempt to conflate human agency and change, while using the female as the site upon which change is ultimately projected.

Gaskell wrote “Cousin Phillis” directly after Sylvia's Lovers, throughout the autumn and winter of 1863, and the novella appeared in parts in the Cornhill between November 1863 and February 1864.⁶ At first reading, the work seems to mark a complete departure from Sylvia's Lovers. A. W. Ward describes it as a “simple tale” of “homely charm,”⁷ and indeed Gaskell seems to have restored the control of nature to man; there is nothing of the wild landscape or treacherous sea of Sylvia's Lovers in the cultivated garden and farm where most of the action of “Cousin Phillis” takes place. Even the surrounding countryside is described as “very wild and pretty.”⁸ Gaskell has changed the scale, and the very brevity and intimacy of the novella form supports the theme of her story; for “Cousin Phillis” is about looking closely, about attention to detail. The initial impression is that the wide, created universe has been circumscribed and shrunk into the garden of Hope Farm: “there was a low wall round it, with an iron railing on the top of the wall, and two great gates between pillars crowned with stone balls for a state entrance” (p. 265). This is a place where order and privacy prevail, at least superficially. Yet there are four scientists in “Cousin Phillis.” Every male character in the story, with the exception of the farm-laborer Timothy Cooper and the ministers, is to some degree a man of science. After her bleak examination of Darwinian theory in Sylvia's Lovers, with “Cousin Phillis” Gaskell returns to the scientific paradigm of mechanics and heavy industry that she had used before in both Mary Barton and North and South.

Gaskell's friend Catherine Winkworth gives an account in an 18 March 1856 letter to Emily Shaen of a visit to Mr. Nasmyth's Patricroft works made by a party comprising herself, Selina Winkworth, Gaskell, and her eldest daughter, Marianne. Leaping up to explain the workings of some piece of machinery, Nasmyth “illustrated with impromptu diagrams drawn on the wall alternately with a piece of white chalk and a sooty forefinger.”⁹ Jenny Uglow notices the transposition of this incident into “Cousin Phillis” (see Uglow, p. 544), when the irrepressibly scientific Mr. Manning, an inventor and the narrator's father, uses the same method of illustration:

I saw my father taking a straight burning stick out of the fire, and, after waiting for a minute, and examining the charred end to see if it was fitted for his purpose, he went to the hard-wood dresser, scoured to the last pitch of whiteness and cleanliness, and began drawing with the stick; the best substitute for chalk or charcoal within his reach, for his pocket-book pencil was not strong or bold enough for his purpose. When he had done, he began to explain his new model of a turnip-cutting machine to the minister, who had been watching him in silence all the time. Cousin Holman had, in the meantime, taken a duster out of a drawer, and, under pretence of being as much interested as her husband in the drawing, was secretly trying on an outside mark how easily it would come off, and whether it would leave her dresser as white as before.

(“Cousin Phillis,” p. 289)

The similarity of the accounts is undeniable, but Gaskell transposes the inscription from a factory wall to a hardwood dresser in the kitchen of the Holmans' farmhouse. The comfortable small comedy of Cousin Holman's surreptitious attempts to assess the damage to her dresser frames the scene with the recognizable referents of domestic comedy. But in fact Cousin Holman's dresser will never be as white as before. Gaskell chooses to represent the nineteenth-century “march of progress” in terms of intimate material changes that penetrate the most traditional of homes. Scientific innovation crosses classes and creeds and threatens traditional boundaries, just like the railway lines that Holdsworth is laying over “the shaking, uncertain ground” (p. 263). And while celebrating the potential of scientific change, Gaskell also struggles to incorporate, or at least to include, its effects on individual lives in her inventories of the small details of human existence.

“Through Mr Manning Gaskell shows that the older, simpler order can co-exist with industrial progress,” claims Uglow (p. 544). Mr. Manning does, indeed, seem to be presented as the “good scientist,” but he does not belong to an “older, simpler order”; rather he belongs to the discourse of self-help to which Gaskell returns after her bleak evocation in Sylvia's Lovers of a world devoid of will. The “older, simpler order” of science is as much of a myth as the “natural” sexual innocence of women. Yet in “Cousin Phillis” Gaskell seems able to engage aggressively only with the latter myth. She transfers all her potentially radical questions about change onto a central female character while leaving the more problematic questions of class and technological and social change unresolved.

Manning is an example of the hero-victim inventor of nineteenth-century self-help literature. He is introduced leaving Paul at his new lodgings in Eltham, when he is reported to have delivered “a few plain precepts” to his son (p. 259). Gaskell's emphasis, in all of the sporadic descriptive glimpses of Manning, is on his rejection of superfluity, verbal or financial:

He was a mechanic by trade, but he had some inventive genius, and a great deal of perseverance, and had devised several valuable improvements in railway machinery. He did not do this for profit, though, as was reasonable, what came in the natural course of things was acceptable; he worked out his ideas, because, as he said, “until he could put them into shape, they plagued him by night and by day.”

(p. 259)

The scattered clues that the reader is given about Manning—in a narrative from which he is largely absent—can be reconstructed into a variation on a familiar self-help invention narrative. Typically, perseverance is privileged over genius, of which Manning only possess “some.” Unlike Jem Wilson's “crank, or somewhat” in Mary Barton,¹⁰ though, Manning's inventions are not only in the form of “devised … improvements” to machinery already in existence. He is also the creator of Manning's Patent Winch: “It was in the Gazette,” boasts Paul; “It was patented. I thought every one had heard of Manning's patent winch” (p. 276). During the narrative, too, Manning is busy designing “Manning's driving wheel” (p. 287). Yet despite this, Manning is no radical genius likely to change the world at one stroke. Gaskell insists on the Holmans' ignorance of his great innovation in shunting, and later in the book, when Holdsworth is about to leave suddenly for Canada, she inserts a significant parenthesis as he receives the letter of commission: “‘It is from Greathed the engineer’ (Greathed was well known in those days; he is dead now, and his name half-forgotten)” (p. 313). These small details seem to indicate that Gaskell is anxious to dispel any suspicion that Manning may be in possession of power. She seems equally anxious to indicate the gradualism of his transformation into a rich man. It is stressed that Manning does not invent for money but rather because he is “called” to do it as a Romantic vocation. Even when his ideas are capitalized by the rich Mr. Ellison (“who lives in King Street? why, he drives his carriage!” [p. 290]), Gaskell stresses that profit is “a long way off, anyhow” (p. 290). And, indeed, when Paul subsequently makes a visit home to Birmingham he finds no evidence of sudden social transformation: “There was no display of increased wealth in our modest household” (p. 306). In fact, the social position of Mr. Manning is not shown to change at all in the course of the narrative, although the reader is told that it has changed substantially. At the start of the novel it is noted, carefully, that Paul's situation as a clerk to a railway engineer is “rather above his [father's] in life” (p. 259)—which is that of a mechanic—so Manning's partnership with Ellison represents a significant social leap.

Yet while Gaskell so cautiously plays down Manning's growing fame and fortune, she allows other, contradictory evidence to accrue. For instance, Holdsworth, in paying homage to the older man, shows Paul his “ungrudging admiration of his great mechanical genius” (p. 293; emphasis added), and Holdsworth is reported to have spoken of Manning “often … as having the same kind of genius for mechanical invention as that of George Stephenson” (p. 287). While Holdsworth seems to see a greatness of genius in Manning that makes him a powerful figure, he also gives an account of Manning's life that fits it perfectly for the pages of Samuel Smiles's Self-Help (1859):

“Here's a Birmingham workman, self-educated, one may say—having never associated with stimulating minds, or had what advantages travel and contact with the world may be supposed to afford—working out his own thoughts into steel and iron, making a scientific name for himself—a fortune, if it pleases him to work for money—and keeping his singleness of heart, his perfect simplicity of manner.”

(p. 294)

Money here, and in such other “industrial success literature,”¹¹ is the unstable signifier. When Gaskell repeatedly and emphatically represents Manning as not interested in “money,” the word stands in place of “social power.” The “Birmingham workman” could have as much money as he liked, and as quickly as he liked, if this would not affect his social position. But, inevitably, it would. Gaskell finds herself in something of an ideological bind here: she needs to reward Manning as a good and virtuous working-class man, yet she also needs to control the social change that such a reward necessarily entails, because her fear of working-class power remains active. Her solution is to limit his access to the text, creating a sense of his presence by narrativizing his absence with contradictory evidence of his social mobility and of his simultaneously staying in precisely the same place as before.¹²

As an independent center of value in “Cousin Phillis,” Manning is not successful because, like Job Legh and Jem Wilson, he suffers from being the unstable creation of a discourse other than that of the narrative that contains him. All of these characters are, in a word, stereotypes. They are the hero-victim inventors of self-help literature, and although Gaskell attempts to deploy them within her narratives as agents of change, they are unable to perform the symbolic work that she intends for them, disabled as they are by the essential contradiction in their construction. To say, as Uglow does, that “through Mr Manning Gaskell shows that the older, simpler order can co-exist with industrial progress” makes the strange assumption that an “order” of scientists like Manning existed as somehow separate and that it antedated “industrial progress.” In fact, men like James Nasmyth and George Stephenson were the agents of “industrial progress.” Similarly, the implication that “older” and “simpler” are adjectives that sit logically together is another assumption founded on the very myth of progressive development that Gaskell attacks elsewhere in her work. Yet Uglow's is precisely the reading that the text of “Cousin Phillis” is very carefully constructed to produce. Through Manning, I would argue, Gaskell attempts to invent an “older, simpler order” and thus separates the “Birmingham workman” from the processes of “industrial progress” and, furthermore, separates “industrial progress” from its inevitable corollary, social change.¹³

The two principal scientists in “Cousin Phillis,” Manning and Holdsworth, dramatize Gaskell's own conflicting views of science and its social roles. Holdsworth is not a hero-victim; he is a new type in Gaskell's fiction, and he represents a move toward the representation of a “real” social and scientific “new type,” the professional scientist. In “Cousin Phillis” Holdsworth appears as the Romantic Scientist. Not only is he the flippant focus of the romantic plot, but Gaskell also heaps him with all the accoutrements of the “romantic hero.” He is undeniably “exotic”: “he had travelled on the Continent, and wore mustachios and whiskers of a somewhat foreign fashion” (p. 261); he is “young, handsome, keen, well-dressed” (p. 287); he speaks fluent Italian and has “a long soft drawl” (p. 287); and Phillis initially thinks him “very like a foreigner” (p. 300). He is also slightly dangerous: the two good dissenting ladies of the pastry shop that Paul lodges above disapproved of him (p. 262), and he gives Phillis a copy of I Promessi Sposi, a novel that would probably not be approved of by her father, who feels that Holdsworth's company “is like dram-drinking” (p. 305). All of these vital credentials for the stereotypical romantic hero are supplied by Gaskell over and above the adulation that Holdsworth is afforded by the adolescent Paul, who immediately grants him “the position of hero in my boyish mind” (p. 261). The narrator insists on this “hero-worship” (p. 283), reflecting on “his empire over me” (p. 293) and noticing that Holdsworth similarly exerts an “unconscious hold” (p. 305) over the Holman family.

Holdsworth, in contrast to Manning, is an educated and well-read scientist, a southerner and a “gentleman.” He refers to “my heaps of scientific books” (p. 294), but he is far from bookish—“He had no notion of doing or saying things without a purpose” (p. 265)—and is not interested in anything that is “merely narrative, without leading to action” (p. 287). He tells Paul that “‘Activity and readiness go a long way in our profession’” (p. 314), a maxim that seems to mirror Minister Holman's injunction to Paul: “‘Whatsoever thine hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might’” (p. 330).¹⁴ But Holdsworth's is a restless and promiscuous purpose, looking for work in the global capitalist marketplace, whereas Minister Holman looks for his duties within the boundaries of his “circumscribed life” (p. 326). Although it is not clear whether Hope Farm is run for subsistence only, none of the characters is ever seen going to market. The Holmans seem to live within a closed and self-sufficient economy where “there was plenty all around in which the humblest labourer was made to share” (p. 333).¹⁵ Holdsworth, by contrast, inhabits the free market, and his restlessness and opportunism belong to the competitive world of industrial capitalism. He represents for Gaskell the dangerous and disruptive power of science and industry that potentially unsettles and disturbs such enclosed self-sufficiency. His sudden absences—first from his job, in the “dark overshadowed dale” (p. 294) where he contracts the low fever, and then his final departure to Canada—extend the world of the novella suddenly, so that Hope Farm no longer seems quite so entirely a microcosm. Holdsworth's letters bring “a whiff of foreign atmosphere into [Minister Holman's] circumscribed life” (p. 326)—a connection is formed between Hope Farm and the macrocosm. Holdsworth, unlike Manning, represents science and industrial progress as change. Old stories will necessarily be interrupted: the romantic hero will suddenly leave for Canada, never to return.

In comparison with Manning, Holdsworth is frenetically mobile, but his is not a social mobility. Gaskell is at pains to make clear in the passage in which Holdsworth and Manning meet that Holdsworth is a “gentleman”:

my father, … his hands, blackened beyond the power of soap and water by years of labour in the foundry; speaking a strong Northern dialect, while Mr Holdsworth had a long soft drawl in his voice, as many of the Southerners have, and was reckoned in Eltham to give himself airs.

(p. 287)

The fact that Manning was a mechanic in the works where Holdsworth served his engineering apprenticeship makes their “mutual regard” (p. 287) suspect. Manning is figured as the classless inventor who can joke with the gentleman, Holdsworth, about other gentlemen wearing gloves for dirty mechanical work. While this passage could be read uncritically as a celebration of the democratizing power of science, it can also be read as a transparent middle-class fantasy of class reconciliation and cooperation.

Manning is supposed to be consulting Holdsworth about his driving wheel and the offer he has been made of a partnership. This attempt to bring the two scientists together is convincing neither as social realism nor in terms of the representations that Gaskell is using. A vast gulf yawns between the social positions of a mechanic and a gentleman-apprentice. Such a relationship between a young and foppish professional and a middle-aged laborer is unlikely enough; that it could function with no class friction at all seems preposterous. The other problem is representational. Because Gaskell has drawn on the hero-victim inventor myth for her representation of Manning, he cannot authentically enter systems of exchange and the capitalist market. Holdsworth, although no less a stereotype, represents exchange value and is, perhaps excessively, “transferable.” The two men cannot communicate, as they are created in different genres, and it is perhaps significant that their conversation is not represented but rather is reported by Paul.

Holdsworth tries to explain Minister Holman's scientific ability as hereditary—“it's evidently good blood” (p. 294)—but Paul “knocks a pretty theory on the head” (p. 294) by pointing out that Minister Holman is not related to his father by blood but by marriage. Thus Gaskell calls into question the basis of scientific ability: it seems to be spread arbitrarily and widely among the male characters in “Cousin Phillis.” “I have fewer books than leisure to read them, and I have a prodigious big appetite,” remarks the Minister, when he asks Paul to help him with the technical words in “a volume of stiff mechanics” (p. 277). Later he asks Paul to recommend “any simple book on dynamics that I could put in my pocket, and study a little at leisure times in the day” (p. 278). The Minister appears to be engaged in a program of rigorous self-help, which in some ways allies him to the representation of Manning: Gaskell tells us that the two men “seemed to come together by instinct” (p. 288). If Manning seems more substantial in the company of Minister Holman than in the company of Holdsworth, it is because both Hope Farm and Manning himself are represented by Gaskell as outside of the social and capitalist world. The drawing on the dresser of the turnip-cutting machine represents the pure value of the turnip-cutting machine, not its potential exchange value. Minister Holman insists on pure representation, and like Manning he eschews superfluity, as is shown when Holdsworth remarks that he enjoys talking to the Minister: “really it is very wholesome exercise, this trying to make one's words represent one's thoughts” (p. 303). Holdsworth's usual mode of speech, with its “random assertions and exaggerated expressions … merely looking to [his words'] effect on others” (p. 303), reveals his attitude to meaning as detachable and manipulable and, with his propensity to “talk a subject up,” constitutes further evidence of his adaptation to a commercial environment.

The fourth scientist in “Cousin Phillis” is, of course, Paul Manning, the narrator. The reader hears little about Paul's own scientific ambitions, although the few details given indicate that he is conscientious: “I really had taken an interest in my work; nor would Mr Holdsworth, indeed, have kept me in his employment if I had not given my mind as well as my time to it” (p. 275). His father remarks: “Thou'rt not great shakes, I know, in th' inventing line” (p. 290); the impression is that Paul is steady and unexceptional, and by finally marrying Miss Ellison he guarantees both his own professional future and the patrimony of the Manning name. Paul's work is largely that of an interpreter: he explains technical words to Minister Holman, and Phillis's interest in his railway work makes him “take more pains in using clear expressions” (p. 276). The novella is ostensibly concerned with the process of Paul's coming of age, both intellectually and sexually, but his centrality to his bildungsroman is challenged by his function as narrator, as the interpreter of other, obscure signs.

The scene in which Manning draws the turnip-cutting machine on the dresser, along with the one in which Paul espies “the three. I counted their heads, joined together in an eager group over Holdsworth's theodolite” (p. 308), both use science as the focus of an unorthodox grouping. The heads “joined together” are temporarily united by scientific enthusiasm. Yet there is a jarring note in these scenes of scientific community. Gaskell may fantasize that classes are reconciled over the theodolite, the turnip-cutter, or in Manning's friendship with Holdsworth, but she projects elsewhere all of the potential for disruption and damage that science also threatens: as in her earlier work, the female once again becomes the problematic site of transformation.

Looking at Manning's drawing of the turnip-cutting machine, Phillis is “leaning over and listening greedily, … sucking in information” (p. 289), and although her head is one of the three “joined together” over the theodolite, Paul says that “she had hardly time to greet me, so desirous was she to hear some answer to her father's question” (p. 308; emphasis added). Science is male, and exclusively so, and Phillis can only gratify her appetite for scientific knowledge by eavesdropping on male conversations. Unlike Sylvia, she is hungry for “masculine news” (p. 294), but like Sylvia she has no control over her own “feminine” story. In her portrayal of Phillis, Gaskell is doing two things at once. On one hand she is engaging more explicitly than ever in the debate surrounding the social position and education of women, which was being exhaustively conducted in the periodical press in the late 1850s and 1860s. On the other hand she is using the representation of Phillis to resolve some of the ideological problems produced in the text by her portrayal of science and technological change.

An article in the English Woman's Journal in 1858, pleading for more educational opportunities and jobs for women, states: “Let woman put her shoulder to the slowly revolving wheel of progression, and she need not fear to be left behind, nor to be refused the countenance of her fellow-worker, man.”¹⁶ Certainly, Phillis is trying to put her shoulder to the wheel, but she is constantly repelled by a culture of male exclusivity. Although Gaskell kept herself assiduously separate from the “strong-minded women” campaigning for women's rights in the 1860s, there is evidence in her letters that indicates a private admiration for their work and, indeed, personal acquaintance with a few of them.¹⁷ However little she engaged with the organized radical opposition to “the established opinions of the world,” Gaskell must have been aware of what those opinions consisted. Here, for instance, is W. R. Greg discussing womankind in his well-known 1850 article “Prostitution” in the Westminster Review:

for … the desire scarcely exists in a definite and conscious form, till they have fallen. In this point there is a radical and essential difference between the sexes. … In men, in general, the sexual desire is inherent and spontaneous, and belongs to the condition of puberty. In the other sex, the desire is dormant, if not nonexistent, till excited; always till excited by undue familiarities. …¹⁸

This is precisely the view of feminine passivity, here sexual but in Gaskell both sexual and intellectual, that she attacks in “Cousin Phillis.” It seems, too, to be Minister Holman's view: when he accuses Paul of “put[ting] such thoughts into the child's head … spoil[ing] her peaceful maidenhood” (p. 345), he assumes that Phillis is “dormant” (in Greg's phrase), just as Holdsworth likens her to the sleeping beauty: “I shall come back like a prince from Canada, and waken her to my love” (p. 315). It is only Paul and Phillis who “knew that the truth was different” (p. 345).

Realist writing depends on leaving clues or fragments from which the reader can reconstruct an entirety of meaning. “Cousin Phillis” is a detective novel, but it is a pathologized detective novel in which the detective is also the criminal. Paul certainly transgresses when he tells Phillis that Holdsworth loves her, but he is also the anxious detector of signs by which he—along with the reader—attempts to piece together the possible state of Phillis's invisible inner life. The signs are almost entirely somatic rather than psychological or verbal. Phillis's body becomes a theater where all of the activity and emotion that is denied free expression displays itself.

The somatic figuring of Phillis is pervasive in the narrative. Her “large, quiet eyes” and “white skin” (p. 266) are disturbed by Holdsworth's arrival; and at their introduction she is “blushing a little,” “flushed,” and “in a blushing hurry” (pp. 298-99). Later her eyes are “glad and bright,” and a word from Holdsworth “called out her blushes” (p. 309); when Holdsworth draws her portrait “her colour came and went, her breath quickened” (p. 311). After Holdsworth's departure, Paul notices Phillis's “face white and set, her dry eyes”; she is “as pale as could be” and “looking so pale and weary” (pp. 317-18); and when she hears Paul read out a letter from Holdsworth, Paul notices “two spots of brilliant colour on the cheeks that had been so pale before” (p. 319). At chapel on Christmas day the gossips talk about the possibility of Phillis dying of “a decline” (p. 320); Paul sees that “her grey eyes looked hollow and sad; her complexion was of a dead white” (p. 320); in the kitchen he hears “a noise which made me pause and listen—a sob, an unmistakable, irrepressible sob” (p. 321). The pause, indicated here by a dash on the page, dramatizes Paul's detective activity and implicates the reader as witness. This is the climax of the mystery for Paul, the detective, although not of course for the reader, who has been patiently assembling not only the clues about Phillis's state of mind but also those that indicate that Paul's own inexperience makes him an unreliable narrator. The vital clue for Paul is the book containing Holdsworth's margin notes: “Could that be it? Could that be the cause of her white looks, her weary eyes, her wasted figure, her struggling sobs?” (p. 322). This is a clue that reveals Phillis's inner life to Paul “like a flash of lightning on a dark night” (p. 322), yet Phillis continues to express nothing verbally, and it is only through somatic symptoms that Paul reads her happiness when he tells her that Holdsworth loves her: “Her eyes, glittering with tears as they were, expressed an almost heavenly happiness” (p. 324). Part Four opens with “the chapel-gossips complimenting cousin Holman on her daughter's blooming looks” (p. 325), and Paul notes that Phillis's “state of vivid happiness this summer was markedly different to the peaceful serenity of former days” (p. 329). After Paul tells Phillis of Holdsworth's marriage to Lucille Ventadour, her parents continue to read Phillis's symptoms as purely physical, and her mother interprets her show of temper as a reaction to the stormy weather. It is the servant, Betty, who reads the truth of the symptoms: “you've likely never heared of a fever-flush. … What makes her come in panting and ready to drop into that chair” (p. 336). When Holdsworth's letter arrives with the public announcement of his marriage, “her face was brilliantly flushed; her eyes were dry and glittering” (p. 339). Paul reports the pathological signs of Phillis's reaction in minute detail:

But once my eyes fell upon her hands, concealed under the table, and I could see the passionate, convulsive manner in which she laced and interlaced her fingers perpetually, wringing them together from time to time, wringing till the compressed flesh became perfectly white. … I wondered that others did not read these signs as clearly as I did.

(p. 342)

After Phillis confesses her love for Holdsworth to her father, Paul notes Minister Holman's failure to notice Phillis's symptoms: “her beautiful eyes dilated with a painful, tortured expression. He went on, without noticing the look on her face; he did not see it, I am sure” (p. 346). Then comes the collapse, which throws both Minister Holman and Paul into silence—“I pointed to the quivering of the muscles round her mouth” (p. 347)—and the subsequent brain fever.

I have quoted at such length because I think Gaskell's portrayal of Phillis almost exclusively through somatic symptoms is quite extraordinary. She achieves two things by this sustained treatment of Phillis's repressed subjectivity. First, by pathologizing her heroine within her narrative Gaskell demonstrates radically and effectively the pressure under which women are placed by the lack of permitted expressions of subjectivity. Phillis says very little in the novella, and less and less as it proceeds. “I loved him, father!” (p. 346) is the first expression of her selfhood that she is permitted, and it is figured as transgressive nevertheless. Thus Gaskell uses her representation of Phillis to illustrate the pathologization of women by a midnineteenth-century society that, literally, makes them ill.

The second achievement of this sustained pathologization of Phillis relates to the male community of scientists. All of them, despite their remarkable scientific gifts, fail Phillis in various ways. Holdsworth fails her by underestimating her and by allowing himself to ignore the pain that he knows he has caused her by lazily relying on the “established opinions” that characterize women as passive sleeping beauties. Minister Holman fails repeatedly and obstinately to read his daughter's symptoms as signs of an independent subjectivity. Manning “reads” Phillis only in terms of another woman—“poor Molly,” who pined away for love of him many years before—or as a potential wife for Paul. He reinforces the “established opinions” that militate against female subjectivity when he assures Paul that marriage and children would cure Phillis of Latin and Greek (p. 292). Paul himself, although he reads Phillis almost obsessively closely, does not always read her correctly. And he fails her most disastrously when, albeit in an effort to comfort her, he misjudges the effect and miscalculates the risk of telling her about Holdsworth's “love” for her.

Their science has failed all of them in diagnosing Phillis as a subject. Science, for Gaskell, still does not fit life sufficiently enough to be useful. The men examine and understand the mechanisms of turnip-cutters, drive wheels, winches, and railway tracks in minute detail, but the hidden mechanisms of the woman who sits beside them receive no attention, even when she seriously begins to show dysfunction. Paul is the exception, of course, but his attempted reading of Phillis leads him to an act that ultimately causes more pain. He knows the facts and he sees the symptoms, but he fails to infer adequately Phillis's inner life from them. His naive assumption is that Phillis can be “mended” by the information he gives her.

The whole plot of “Cousin Phillis” can be reconstructed from its appearance on Phillis's body. The novella, with its physical and somatic dramatization for the reader of the business of diagnosis, of paying close attention to signs, is a supremely realist narrative. Phillis's body becomes the site of radical transformations, projected by Gaskell away from the scientific-industrial plot. Catherine Belsey remarks that illness in nineteenth-century realist fiction is used as a strategy to express “the problem of change it symbolises.”¹⁹ Certainly the problem of social change seems to be symbolized through Phillis. That science and the scientific man have disrupted her story and caused her pain and suffering is manifestly present in the novella in a way that the pain of class friction and social change are not. And Phillis's resolution to adjust to that change is offered as the resolution of the narrative as a whole: “She blushed a little as she faltered out her wish for change of thought and scene” (p. 354). At last Phillis speaks, and makes a demand. It is true that she also blushes, but only “a little.” “Her wish for change” carries the ideological burden of the story, and that she chooses to go to Manning for her change is perhaps less significant than that she chooses to go to urban, industrial Birmingham.²⁰ Her final, paradoxical remark—“Then—we will go back to the peace of the old days. I know we shall; I can, and I will!” (p. 354)—demonstrates the irreversible change that has taken place in Phillis; “the peace of the old days” depended on her willlessness. Now that she has spoken herself into subjectivity, the peace of the old days will never return.

In “Cousin Phillis” Gaskell substitutes Phillis's pain for the pain of class division, social change, and the new science. By presenting a fantasized class reconciliation, particularly through the representation of the relationship between Holdsworth and Manning, the text disguises and evades confrontation of actual class tensions. But, by closely reading Phillis's extraordinarily detailed somatic symptoms, the reader is able to reconstruct the repressed narrative of pain underlying the story—a powerful pain that breaks beyond the conventions of the romantic plot in order to reflect Gaskell's own troubled response to rapid social change and the iniquitous divisions between both classes and sexes that, she seems to suggest, can be numbered among its results.

Notes

1. Gaskell's daughter Meta, in a 19 December 1862 letter to Effie Wedgwood, described her mother “writing 10 pages a day of the tiresome book that is really ‘a story without an end’” (quoted in Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories [London: Faber and Faber, 1993], p. 503).

2. Both Uglow in Elizabeth Gaskell, chapter 24, and Kate Flint, in Elizabeth Gaskell (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1995), chapter 6, discuss the Darwinian structure of Sylvia's Lovers. Although no actual evidence exists of Gaskell's ever having read Darwin's On the Origin of Species, she could not have failed to have been aware of the furor over its publication in 1859, moving as she did in intellectual and unorthodox circles, and she was certainly aware of the sister-scandal over the publication of Essays and Reviews, which appeared only three months afterward. She writes to Charles Eliot Norton in April 1861: “Everybody was talking about America, & ‘Essays and Reviews’” (letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 16 April 1861, in The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, ed. J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967], p. 646). As Benjamin Jowett and Mark Pattison, two of the seven theologians who contributed to Essays and Reviews, were friends of the Gaskells, “everybody” presumably includes herself.

3. Scientists of the Gaskells' acquaintance included James Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam hammer; Joseph Paxton, the designer of the Crystal Palace; William Fairbairn, inventor of the riveting machine; George Allman, Professor of Zoology at Edinburgh University; Lord Francis Egerton, patron of Manchester science; Benjamin Brodie, Professor of Chemistry at Oxford; the physicist James Joule; and the chemists James Allan, Edward Schunk, and Henry Roscoe (see Uglow, pp. 559-60).

4. “Natural Knowledge in Cultural Context: The Manchester Model,” American Historical Review, 79 (1974), 682.

5. Letter to Catherine Winkworth, 29 November 1848, in Letters, p. 64. “Mrs J. J. Tayler is shocked at such a subject of conversation [Scott's Kenilworth] on a Sunday,—so there I am in a scrape,—well! it can't be helped, I am myself and nobody else, and can't be bound by another's rules” (pp. 63-64).

6. Jenny Uglow has suggested that Gaskell's portrayal of Minister Holman's shock at his daughter's confession of her love for Holdsworth owes something to Gaskell's own state of mind at the time of writing “Cousin Phillis,” as news reached her in March 1863 of the sudden engagement of her daughter Florence to a young barrister and “scientific” young man, Charles Crompton (see Uglow, p. 538).

7. “Introduction” to Cousin Phillis, ed. Ward, vol. 7 of The Works of Mrs. Gaskell, Knutsford Edition (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1906; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1972), pp. xiii and xvii.

8. Elizabeth Gaskell, “Cousin Phillis,” in Cousin Phillis and Other Tales, ed. Angus Easson (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), p. 261. Further references to this work are to this edition and appear in the text.

9. Quoted in Uglow, pp. 667-68, n. 18.

10. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, ed. Edgar Wright (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 165-66.

11. The phrase is Patrick Brantlinger's, in The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832–1867 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977), p. 120.

12. Uglow argues convincingly that Manning is based on Gaskell's acquaintance James Nasmyth, giving as evidence the Patricroft works visit and an anecdote apparently told by Nasmyth about gentleman-apprentices wearing gloves, which appears as a shared joke between Holdsworth and Manning in “Cousin Phillis” (see p. 287; see Uglow, chapter 25). If this is the case, I think it is only important insofar as it exacerbates Gaskell's problems with the representation of Manning. In The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy, 1815–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980) Maxine Berg writes: “By the 1820s and 1830s James Nasmyth, James Fox, Matthew Murray, Sharp, Roberts & Co., Hicks, Hargreaves & Co., Fairbairn and Lillie, and Joseph Whitworth were directing large-scale machine shops, foundries and engine factories in the Midlands and the North” (pp. 153-54). Nasmyth was clearly a rich industrialist, while Manning is represented as simultaneously successful and poor.

13. The intentionality of this process of representation is perhaps not entirely clear from my reading. I am not suggesting that Gaskell intended to write the working classes out of any share in industrial progress and, therefore, social change. I am rather attempting to argue that Gaskell, once she decides to deploy the good and worthy stereotype of Mr. Manning, is locked into a discourse that inevitably produces this outcome.

14. This was a popular maxim in the nineteenth century. William Bell Scott had used it shortly before “Cousin Phillis” as the motto for his picture Iron and Coal, painted 1856–61, one of his “Scenes from Border History,” a series of public paintings that celebrate industrial progress on Tyneside. Information from the Witt Library, London University.

15. We hear a great deal about the farm's produce in “Cousin Phillis”: Phillis reads Virgil while paring apples, she and Holdsworth first meet in the kitchen garden where she is picking peas, she tells Paul that her basket of eggs contains potatoes, and she entertains Holdsworth with “home-made bread, and newly-churned butter” (p. 299). This, I think, reinforces the sense of self-sufficiency that Holdsworth disrupts.

16. Anon., “Female Education in the Middle Classes,” English Woman's Journal, 1 (1858), 227.

17. The most prominent was the “Langham Place” group of campaigners for women's rights. In 1857 Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and Bessie Rayner Parkes, who were both Unitarians, established what became the English Woman's Review. The Review shared its Langham Place offices with The Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, founded in 1859 and run by Jessie Boucherett. Barbara Bodichon went on to become one of the founders of Girton College, Cambridge in the 1870s. Gaskell grudgingly admits, in a 5 April 1860 letter to Charles Eliot Norton, some admiration for Barbara Bodichon, although she seems to find it necessary to explain Bodichon's radicalism by her illegitimacy: “She is—I think in consequence of her birth, a strong fighter against the established opinions of the world,—which always goes against my—what shall I call it?—taste—(that is not the word,) but I can't help admiring her noble bravery, and respecting—while I don't personally like her” (Letters, p. 607). Gaskell also seems to have been acquainted with Bessie Parkes, who, in a 25 October 1859 letter to Marianne Gaskell, she reports is coming to tea and “to ‘want my judgment’ on something or other”—if her tone is somewhat irritable she explains later in the same letter that “callers swallow up all my days” (Letters, pp. 902, 903). Gaskell's friend Harriet Martineau contributed an article to the debate: “Female Industry” appeared in the Edinburgh Review, 109 (1859), 293-336.

18. [W. R. Greg], “Prostitution,” Westminster Review, 53 (1850), 456-57. Greg adds: “We do not mean to say that uneasiness may not be felt—that health may not sometimes suffer; but there is no consciousness of the cause” (p. 457).

19. Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 74.

20. The published ending was not the one that Gaskell originally intended, as is revealed by two unpublished letters from Gaskell to George Smith, 10 December 1863, MS. Acc. 6713, 2/4, National Library of Scotland, reprinted in J. A. V. Chapple, “Elizabeth Gaskell: Two Unpublished Letters to George Smith,” Etudes Anglaises, 33 (1980), 183-87. In the originally intended ending, Paul, married, returns years later to find Heathbridge struck by typhus, “and comes across Phillis using Holdsworth's old sketches to help her drain the marshy land.” She is running her father's farm and has adopted two orphaned children, but she has never married. This putative ending could be read conventionally as a fable of loyalty to the memory of true love, or it could be read more radically as a male-less fantasy of female reproductive and productive self-sufficiency.