SOURCE: "Elizabeth Gaskell: The Telling of Feminine Tales," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 16, No. 3, Fall, 1984, pp. 274-87

[In the following essay, Weiss contends that, rather than disrupting or devaluing her works, Elizabeth Gaskell's use of stories inserted into her texts allowed the author to explore feminine thought and experience across a broad spectrum of ages and social status.]

In considering the works of Elizabeth Gaskell, the critic is immediately confronted with those twin damning adjectives, "charming" and "minor," which have clung to the reputation of Gaskell in the present century and prevented a balanced and serious consideration of her works.¹ Discussions of her talent usually suggest her marginal status, portraying her as a homemaker and an amateur, rather than as a serious professional writer.² And no quality has been held against the author more than her natural gift of storytelling. Her love of plotmaking, her appreciation of the good anecdote, story, or melodrama has been cited against her, as if her very charm and natural ability as a spinner of tales were evidence of an absence of art and purpose in her works.³ In particular, the interpolated tales which frequently crop up in all but her most mature works are likely to strike the modern critic as disruptive and unnecessary. In recent years, however, feminist criticism has shed a new light on the act of storytelling and its psychological implications for the female artist. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, for example, in The Madwoman in the Attic have explored the difficulties inherent in the position of the woman writer in an age in which ideal women were supposed to have no stories and in which the act of making stories of one's own life or the lives of other women could be considered a subversive activity.⁴ In a tradition of patriarchal literature, great anxiety and self-doubt seem to have been the portion of those women who attempted to give a feminine shape to reality by telling their own tales. Viewed in such a context, then, the interpolated tales in Gaskell's works may have been the means through which the author was able to work out the anxieties and ambiguities inherent in the role of female artist. Indeed, in the seemingly artless and random tales which her characters tell to one another, Gaskell may well have explored her own attitude toward fiction and the act of making fiction, and her perceptions about the difference between the fiction of men and the fiction of women.

Gaskell's life-long love of a good story is well documented; her letters attest to an early interest in local customs, legends, and superstitions.⁵ Her dramatic skill as a raconteuse was valued by the Howitts, who praised her ability to tell ghost stories around the fire, while her friend Charles Eliot Norton wrote, "She is a wonderful story-teller . . . always dramatic."⁶ Several of her published stories suggest her delight in a rattling good ghost story ("The Old Nurse's Tale" and "The Poor Clare") and many reflect her interest in local folklore, embroidering or reworking local tales with an introduction tracing something of their origins.⁷ But it is her fondness for interpolating a seemingly unrelated tale into the midst of an ongoing narrative that has marked Gaskell in the eyes of her critics as a naturally gifted but essentially artless amateur. Even Edgar Wright, who in Mrs. Gaskell: The Basis for Reassessment makes the most persuasive case for her "unity" and "development" as an important writer, is forced to take her to task for her interpolated tales: "Mrs. Gaskell was one of those who find it difficult to resist a digression; to this extent her fondness for reminiscence and local tales affects the mechanics of her art as well as the tautness of her style."⁸ And indeed it cannot be denied that Gaskell was sometimes guilty of interrupting the continuity of her work with an unrelated tale or anecdote. The gentle, pastoral tone of My Lady Ludlow, for example, is seriously disrupted by the gory tale of Clément, a melodrama which occupies about onethird of the book with only the lamest excuse of connection to the main plot. More often it was the comic anecdote which tempted Gaskell from the flow of her narrative. In Mary Barton, for example, Margaret tells an involved story of a seemingly dead scorpion her grandfather brought home, only to have it thaw out by the fire.⁹ Often such stories are put in the mouth of a local character to serve the function of local color as well as comedy. One of the delights of Ruth is to be found in the comic stories of the servant Sally, which cannot fail to entertain the reader, even if they do nothing to speed the progress of the narrative. In one memorable and longwinded tale, Sally tells of the clerk who got down on his knees while she kneeled at her cleaning tasks and proposed marriage instead of the "Methodee" prayer she had expected. The story meanders on for eleven pages; its avowed purpose, which it accomplishes, is to "talk" Ruth to sleep.

¹⁰ Other equally verbose tales include Sally's recovery of Christian cheerfulness after causing Mr. Benson's accident and the making of her will, in which she pays an extra sixpence for each fancy "law-word" included (R, pp. 191-94). Such comic tales serve as the very staple of Cranford, which consists largely of remembered anecdotes of such local and domestic events as the old woman dressing her cow in flannel, or the cat swallowing the old lace. The verve of such anecdotes cannot fail to amuse the reader, but it is their seemingly random quality which has earned their author the epithets "charming," "minor," and "artless."

To defend Elizabeth Gaskell fully from such pejorative terms, it would perhaps be necessary to prove that she did indeed possess a conscious aesthetic in the creation of literary fiction, a task made difficult by the author's own self-effacement as a writer. Seldom in her letters did Gaskell discuss the artistic principles of her work; she was, of all Victorian authors, perhaps the least likey to make grand pronouncements upon her own art. For this reason it will be necessary to turn to the work itself to discover what Gaskell considered to be the function of fiction, and an interesting starting point is a seldom remarked episode in Sylvia's Lovers, in which the hero Phillip finds consolation for his troubles in the reading of old tales. Estranged from Sylvia by his own failure of truth and her lack of charity, Phillip goes off to war, returning home poverty-stricken and disfigured, to take refuge as a bedesman. Seeking diversion, he immerses himself in a "tattered old volume" of the Seven Champions of Christendom and reads of how Sir Guy, Earl of Warwick, came home from war disguised as a beggar and was unrecognized by his own wife until he sent for her to come to his deathbed. There "they had many sweet and holy words together, before he gave up the ghost, his head lying on her bosom."¹¹ Obsessed with this literary image, Phillip dwells upon it as comfort and inspiration: "All night long, Guy and Phillis, Sylvia and his child, passed in and out of his vision" (SL, p. 492). The story of Sir Guy and his wife, of course, neatly forecasts and encapsulates the destiny of Phillip and Sylvia, who will be reunited in compassion and forgiveness on Phillip's deathbed. Gaskell had this ending firmly in mind from the very beginning of the composition of Sylvia's Lovers: she seems to have felt that the emotional truth of her tale was embodied in this ending, for she wrote to her reader, W. S. Williams at Smith and Elder, asking him not to judge the book until he could see how it would be justified by the ending (L, 499, pp. 674-75). The function of the story from the Seven Champions of Christendom, then, is to foreshadow the reconciliation and Christian harmony in which Sylvia's Lovers is destined to conclude. This connection is significant, for it seems to suggest that literary fictions, such as the story of Sir Guy, can convey the hard-won emotional lessons which characters are often too blind to recognize clearly. The telling of a tale can often encapsulate emotional truths which function as either warning or inspiration, functions which Gaskell, like her Victorian contemporaries, would have considered to be the first obligations of literature. Seen in this light, then, the tales and anecdotes which interrupt the flow of a narrative are hardly likely to be random or artless, and an examination of the other interpolated tales of Sylvia's Lovers should bear out this theory.

Unlike the tale of Sir Guy, which comes from a "tattered old volume," the other tales of the novel come from an oral tradition of legends and local history; one of them is clearly an indulgence by the author in her weakness for ghost stories—a sailor's tale of how his uncle was saved from robbers by his brother's ghost. Other stories, however, are more closely related to the theme and unifying images of the novel. Kinraid, for example, first impresses Sylvia with his tales of the sights he has seen on his whaling voyages. As she listens in "fascinated wonder," he tells her what seems to be a typical sailor's tall tale about his glimpse of the "mouth o' hell"—a wall of ice seventy miles long with burning flames inside it, and black demons darting about it. The story is significant, for it marks the first impression which Kinraid makes upon Sylvia; but it also is significant for the way in which its fiery images seem to jar with the pastoral milieu of Sylvia's life. Kinraid's suggestion that it was the daring of the sailors which led them to "peep at terrors forbidden to any on us afore our time" (SL, p. 108) hints of a wild and reckless nature in the young sailor; while he is not developed as an evil or demonic character, the nature of his tale certainly suggests that he is neither destined nor suited to be the hero of the pastoral romance in which Sylvia is casting him. Similar in nature is the tale which Daniel Robson uses to cap the young sailor's story, also a sailor's yarn and one with which the young Robson first fascinated and courted Sylvia's mother years before. Like Kinraid's tale, Robson's nautical story about a wild ride upon the back of a whale suggests a nature unsuited for domestic harmony and responsibility, and perhaps forecasts Robson's reckless end, riding on and at the same time imprisoned by a wave of mob violence.¹²

Opposed to these stories of terror, wonder, and adventure told by male characters, there is the simple anecdote of local history told by Sylvia's mother. The story of poor "crazy Nancy" has an obvious reference to the romance of Sylvia and Kinraid. A young man, "as nobody knowed" but who had "summat to do wi' the sea" turns the head of a young serving girl "just to beguile the time, like," and then he abandons her. Poor Nancy can no longer perform her tasks and ends her days chained to the kitchen dresser of the workhouse, unable to utter anything but one phrase: "He once was here" (SL, pp. 198-99). Mrs. Robson's story is a warning which Sylvia chooses not to hear, but its message is clear to the reader. A woman who abandons herself to an unwise love risks abandoning her duty, her serenity, and even her sanity. Madness is another "doorway to hell," as fearsome as that glimpsed by Kinraid or Robson in their travels, and closer to the truth of Sylvia's own life than any image of masculine adventure, for with Kinraid's abandonment Sylvia will come precariously close to madness and to abandoning her Christian path. Her mother's story clearly embodies the same emotional truth which the novel embodies for the reader; the function of the telling of tales, then, can clearly be the same as that of writing novels—to reach the heart of the listener with a symbolic truth made powerful by imagination and art. In addition, there seems to be a special truth concerning the nature of women's lives which can only be conveyed by the fiction-making powers of a woman who tells tales for other women.

If such a large claim may be made for most of the interpolated tales of Sylvia Lovers, then it would seem worth the reader's while to consider the function of the tales which the characters tell to one another in other works of Gaskell, and it would seem valid also to consider what role the sex of the storyteller plays. For it is apparent from even a cursory look at the interpolated stories in Sylvia's Lovers that there is a great difference between the tales that men tell and the tales that women tell, a difference which is surely significant in an age when the function of the female writer was much in doubt.

The attitude of Gaskell concerning her role as a woman writer was at best problematical. Her letters reflect a recurring conflict between what she called "home duties" and "the development of the individual," (i.e., her work as a writer) and her anxieties, which she referred to as "my puzzle," apparently were never resolved (L, 68, p. 106). Modern attempts to portray her as a feminist seem equivocal or exaggerated. In spite of her acknowledgment of the special disadvantages under which a talented woman labored, Gaskell was far from a doctrinaire supporter of feminism; it was only with reservations that she signed a petition for the Married Women's Property Act, and her advice to an aspiring woman writer was to concentrate on household duties (L, 151, p. 693). Nevertheless, she was vocal on the need for meaningful work for women and was anxious that her writing be taken seriously. Like Mary Ann Evans and the Brontë sisters, who published under masculine or neutral names, she wished to avoid the connotation of frivolity and sentimentality which plagued works by "lady" novelists. Gaskell consulted her publisher about the possibility of using a masculine pseudonym (L, 28, p. 59) and eventually published her first novel anonymously. But in spite of her desire to have her writing judged apart from considerations of her sex, Gaskell was far from disclaiming sexual differences in literary perspective. No critical praise for Mary Barton pleased her more than that of Thomas Carlyle, who began his letter with an intuition of the novel's female authorship,¹³ and Gaskell was extremely chagrined to discover that she had guessed wrongly at the sex of the author of Adam Bede.¹⁴ Though assuredly not a feminist writer, no Victorian woman writer of major stature was more aggressively feminine than Gaskell. Active and even strenuous as her life as a writer and minister's wife was, it seems to have convinced her that the feminine sphere of interest was not only different from that of men—it required a different literary perspective, an act of feminine fiction-making, to give reality and shape to it. Such an attitude may be discerned in the voice of the feminine narrator of Cranford, who dismisses a letter from her father, noting disdainfully that it was "just a man's letter; I mean it was very dull and gave no information beyond that he was well, that they had had a good deal of rain, that trade was very stagnant, and there were many disagreeable rumors afloat."¹⁵ The letter from Mary Smith's father is not unimportant, for the "disagreeable rumours" pertain to the imminent failure of Miss Matty's bank, a key thread in the plot of Cranford. But the narrator's disdain for this "man's letter" is significant in an author who was herself a prolific and accomplished letter-writer. What a "woman's letter" might have contained is suggested by the collected letters of Gaskell herself and by the closely observed feminine perspective of the narrator of Cranford: domestic details, gossip, the trivia of human connectedness, and hints of the rich inner emotional life. Mary Smith's father warns of the failure of a bank, but only Mary herself can report on the effect of this event on Miss Matty's character, on her relationships with the community, and on her view of herself and of her world. To say that Cranford could have been written and observed only by a woman writer is not to trivialize the book, but to suggest that there existed in the nineteenth century a world of domestic concerns, human relationships, and inner needs which could scarcely have been attained from a masculine literary perspective.

It is little wonder, then, that in the works of Gaskell, the stories that women tell differ greatly from those of men. As the stories in Sylvia's Lovers have already suggested, the tales of men are likely to be filled with adventures, journeys, and marvels—like the sailor's ghost story or the nautical tall tales of Kinraid and Daniel Robson. Edgar Wright has detected in the scene in North and South in which Mr. Thornton first impresses Margaret with the chronicle of his early struggles, a suggestion of Othello's seducing Desdemona with his marvelous tales.¹⁶ The Othello courting motif is observable in the interpolated tales of other Gaskell heroes; as has already been noted, Kinraid in Sylvia's Lovers first impresses Sylvia with his nautical tales, just as Daniel Robson had once courted Sylvia's mother. Similarly, in Mary Barton Will Wilson comes home from the sea to make an impression on the heart of Margaret Legh with his fireside tales of flying fish and mermaids with bright green hair. Again, in Cranford, the old bachelor Peter comes home from his travels to enchant the ladies of Cranford with "more wonderful stories than Sinbad the Sailor" (C, p. 185). Other tales that men tell are likely to revolve around some great journey or adventure. In Mary Barton, John Barton tells how the workmen took their petition to London, only to have Parliament refuse to hear it, and Job Legh tells a comic epic of two old men bringing back an infant granddaughter from London. The tales of these men are not at all random or unrelated to the progress of the narrative. Barton's adventure is a key motivation for the eventual murder of the mill owner's son, and the whole episode of the workmen's petition is crucial to the theme of the misunderstanding between the working men and the managerial class. Job Legh's comic tale embodies another of the novel's themes, the compassion and humanity of the poor for one another. The comic journey of the two grandfathers to rescue an infant echoes other acts of charity which the poor perform for one another in Mary Barton. The old men's ignorance and incompetence at child care are the stuff of high humor, but the readiness with which their own class, and particularly the women of their class come to their aid, is a recurring motif in the works of Gaskell. These masculine stories of adventure are thus hardly random or without purpose. Exciting yarns in their own right, they are also a part of the cumulative method by which Gaskell piles up her novels' impressions. The stories are chosen deliberately to display something of the teller's character; moreover, they generally reflect the broader themes and images of the novel.

Unlike the adventure stories of the masculine characters, on the other hand, the tales that women tell, like Mrs. Robson's story of Crazy Nancy, usually convey an emotional truth about the lives of women. Their messages in themselves are not likely to be overtly subversive; often in fact they reinforce prevailing stereotypes of the ideal Victorian "angel in the house." The mere act of female storytelling, however, becomes a means, not unlike the writing of novels, by which the female characters may name and give shape to the reality of their lives in a patriarchal society. Often the stories are told by one woman to another, to inspire her, to warn her, or to serve as some sort of clue by which she may find her path in the midst of the perplexities and trials with which feminine lives are fraught. In Gaskell's earliest novel, for example, almost every story told by a woman is told to Mary Barton herself, or is intended for her benefit, and each of them contains some feminine guidance about the duties and needs of a womanly life which the heroine desperately needs to hear. Left motherless at an early age, Mary is in danger of abandoning domestic duties and family ties for the empty flattery and false temptations offered to her by Harry Carson. (The luxury and idleness of the life of a "lady," which Mary hopes to attain through Carson, are embodied in the ironic portrait of Carson's sisters; in North and South, Mr. Thornton's sister and Margaret's cousin are similar portraits which suggest that the vain and idle life of a lady is not the ideal of the true woman.) With her mother dead and her father increasingly absorbed by his obsession with the workers' struggle, Mary has only the guidance of the other women in her life, and in their tales and conversation, these characters often act as surrogate mothers by suggesting to Mary the advice which her own mother might have provided had she lived. Old Alice Wilson, for example, relates the story of her youth to Mary and Margaret Legh, both young and motherless girls. Alice tells of leaving her home in the country to go into "service" in Manchester and of how it hurt her own mother that she was so willing to go. In subsequent years she often plans to go home again, but is unable to do so before her mother's death. The motif of Alice's futile desire to see her old home once more is repeated again and again throughout the novel; it serves as a warning to Mary about the value of the "home ties" she is tempted to abandon. Even the ballad which Alice sings about "the golden hills o' heaven" which remind her of the hills of her country home serves as a veiled warning to Mary and Margaret. The old folk ballad is about "a lover that should hae been na lover"(MB, p. 35) and about the girl who succumbed to him and was therefore barred forever from the golden hills, a tale which forecasts presciently the danger that Mary herself will skirt. Another tale is offered to Mary by Mrs. Wilson, who is destined to become Mary's mother-in-law. She tells Mary of the time early in her marriage when, in her domestic ignorance, she boiled potatoes all day until she had produced "a nasty brown mess, as smelt through all the house"(MB, p. 137). Mrs. Wilson is a weak and foolish character, and her recital of small domestic tribulations is comic, but the implications of her tale are serious and are intended for Mary's instruction. Mary has already neglected her social duties and domestic ties by failing to visit this old family friend more often, and her failure is symptomatic of the fact that she is neglecting the honest love of Jem Wilson for the false blandishments of Harry Carson. Mrs. Wilson's story, then, is a reminder of the importance of women's true duties. The subsequent discussion about the tendency of factory women toward "putting their little ones out at nurse, and letting their house go all dirty, and their fires all out"(MB, p. 137) serves as another reminder of where Mary's true duty and true fulfillment lie. But the novel's most important tale is clearly the one told by Mary's Aunt Esther. The story of Esther's life cannot, of course, be told directly to Mary, for Esther is a prostitute, and Mary must be protected from such contact and from the direct knowledge of such a sordid tale. But Esther tells her chronicle of seduction and betrayal with the express intention of preventing Mary from following such a course, and thus she seeks out first Mary's father and then Mary's suitor, Jem Wilson, to force them to listen to her story in the hopes that they can prevent a similar fate from befalling Mary. Like the Ancient Mariner accosting wedding guests, Esther forces her listener to hear the truth about her ruin in the hopes that it will serve as guidance for Mary's path in life. (Indeed, it is not unlikely that Esther's tale forecasts Gaskell's purpose in her own tale of a seduced woman, her novel Ruth.) As in other stories that women tell in Mary Barton, Esther's tale is intended to convey the same symbolic truth about women's lives as the novel itself, indeed the same truth that Victorian society heartily endorsed—that true fulfillment comes from the emotional and spiritual ties that bind a woman to hearth and family. The very telling of such tales, however, seems to suggest the existence of a feminine community of interests which differ radically from those of men, a community which supports and gives validity to the act of feminine fictionmaking.

The stories that women tell each other in Ruth seem to perform a similar function. Once again a motherless young heroine is embarked upon a life fraught with moral peril, and once again she finds solace and guidance in the tales of the women she meets. Ruth's first storyteller is a fat old lady who comforts the weeping girl on a coach journey by telling of her own lost sons, "soldiers and sailors, all of them," all very far from home, "and yet, you see, I can laugh and eat and enjoy myself (R, p. 131). The sympathy of this traveller suggests a community of women sharing the values of nurturing, love, and compassion and linked by the common bond of motherhood which Ruth is about to share. The existence of such a bond is demonstrated again toward the end of the novel when Ruth's son hovers on the verge of death and an old crippled woman comes to inquire and pray for him, "stirred with a sharp pang of sympathy, and a very present remembrance of the time when she too was young, and saw the life-breath quiver out of her child" (R, p. 309). Later, after Leonard's recovery, Ruth listens, weeping at the old woman's story of how her own child had sickened and died, "and the two were henceforward a pair of friends"(R, p. 310). Significantly, the old woman herself no longer sheds tears, but sits "patient and quiet, waiting for death" (R, p. 310). The jolly woman traveller and the crippled old woman are both linked to Ruth through their common motherhood, and the stories they tell of the loss of their sons imply a Christian resignation in the face of life's adversity, which is surely the novel's most prevalent theme. Their resignation, however, is at least partially belied by the relish with which they make stories and dramas out of their lives and use those stones to create a bond with other women. But the supreme storyteller of the novel is, of course, the servant Sally, and it remains for Sally to tell the tale which drives the moral of the novel home to Ruth. Watching Ruth perform household tasks with a languid and depressed spirit, Sally tells of her own experience as a young servant girl. Despondent over the accident which had crippled Master Thurstan, Sally "took to praying and sighing, and was careless about dinner and the rooms" (R, p. 173). She is reprimanded by her mistress, who points out that Sally's beloved Master Thurstan cannot eat the sodden pudding, and asks her if she thinks we are put into the world to "do nothing but see after our own souls? or to help one another with heart and hand, as Christ did to all who wanted help?" (R, p. 174). Sally's tale, and her accompanying admonition that "making a bed may be done after a Christian fashion,"(R, p. 173) remind Ruth that she must find her proper work in the world through Christian love and resignation, the tale thus encapsulating in comic form the central theme of the novel. Indeed, the character of Sally is pivotal to this theme, and all of her tales suggest the same motif, even when they are intensely comic. The story of Sally's refusal of a proposal of marriage from the kneeling clerk is really the proof of her devotion to her master, whom she will not leave even for a life and home of her own, and the story of the drawing up of her will, with its fancy "law-words," is the tale of another act of Christian love and charity, for she is leaving her savings to her master. Thus Sally endorses the typically Victorian role of the selfless heroine; her triumph lies in her ability to give purpose and dimension to her life by her own considerable verbal powers.

The tales that women tell to the heroines of Ruth, Mary Barton, and Sylvia's Lovers are all aimed at conveying the central truths about the lives of women that the novels themselves embody; in each case the interpolated tale reflects upon the shared experience of women in a way that mirrors the novels' larger themes and, by implication, the very function of the female novelist. In other Gaskell works, the tales of women are not central to the development of a heroine, but nonetheless are in keeping with the concern of the novels with the emotional drama of women's lives and their attempts to gain some control over this drama by makng it the stuff of their tales. Cranford, as has previously been observed, is a collage of stories told by the ladies of the town and by the female narrator, comic and slight in their effect, but slowly creating a portrait of a stable, traditional, nurturing, and feminine community, as opposed to the masculine world of the neighboring city. Nina Auerbach has pointed out the role of "fancy" (i.e., tale-telling) in uniting the feminine community of Cranford in such a way that a private, feminine, fictional vision is created out of magic burglars, ghosts, spies, Frenchmen, witches, and the "white lies" told to Miss Matty to preserve her dignity, all acts of feminine fiction-making which in the end subvert "public, masculine truth."¹⁷ The only story which jars in this stable, communal experience is the wild adventure related by the conjuror's wife, but the "Signora," as she is called, is another woman bonded by the common experience of motherhood, for she has lost six children and possesses, as the narrator observes, "those strange eyes that I've never noticed but in mothers of dead children" (C, p. 130). The feminine community of Cranford rallies itself to her aid, with even the formidable Miss Pole drawn into this sisterhood of compassion and humanity. The tale of the conjuror's wife concerns her journey through India to save the life of her last surviving child, and the kindness that she receives along the way, particularly from an officer's wife whose own children have died. The story is remarkably similar to the story in Mary Barton in which Job Legh takes his infant granddaughter home from London, helped along the way by women who have lost their own children. (Job, of course, is a masculine taleteller, but he is more of a nurturing figure than the other male storytellers, being older and having raised his granddaughter alone.) In any case, the story of the conjuror's wife is decidedly a contrast to that of the other traveller returned from India to Cranford, Miss Matty's brother. Peter returns home to tell such traditionally masculine tall tales as the one about shooting a cherub off a mountain top, whereas the story of the "signora" revolves around the feminine themes of sacrifices made for a child and the bond between women who have suffered loss. Like the other ladies of Cranford, the conjuror's wife uses storytelling to impose verbal control on a life in which she otherwise has little power.

There are fewer interpolated tales in North and South. Mr. Thornton's recital of his early struggles, which fits into the Othello-Desdemona pattern of courting noted in Gaskell's works, is an integral part of the developing of the hero's personality and the theme of the harsh, sturdy Northern character. But there is one clearly anecdotal story of great interest in the novel, and it is told by Margaret Hale herself. A sturdier heroine than those of Gaskell's previous novels, Margaret Hale does not seek much guidance from other women and specifically rejects the advice of such surrogate mothers as Mrs. Thornton and her own Aunt Shaw. Margaret relies, sometimes to her regret, largely upon her own judgment, and the story she tells is interesting in that it contains her own vision of the inner reality of women's lives. The story emerges in the midst of a heated discussion between Margaret and Mr. Thornton about the conduct of the masters toward their workers. Mr. Thornton compares the workers to children and declares himself in favor of governing such children by autocratic laws. Margaret responds with a strange story of a wealthy man in Nuremberg, who lived for many years with a child he kept shut up in his immense mansion. Upon the death of the father, the son is discovered to be "an over-grown man, with the unexercised intellect of a child," who is unable to take care of himself in the world and falls prey to every bad counsellor and evil influence. Eventually this "great old child" must be cared for by the city authorities, for "he could not even use words effectively enough to be a successful beggar."¹⁸ Margaret's story is clearly related to the political and economic discussion at hand, for it suggests that the workers, deprived of education and independence, will grow to be both ignorant and dangerous. Margaret implies that in order to be capable of governing themselves rationally, the workingmen must be educated to understand the economic conditions which govern their lives and must be given some control over their own destiny. Such an argument is clearly central to the major economic theme of the novel, but it is related as well to an equally central theme: the dilemma of women's lives. As John Pikoulis has noted, in North and South "the theme of women searching for an expansion of the possibilities for living that are open to them is combined with the theme of the dispute between masters and men."¹⁹ In the discussions between Margaret and Mr. Thornton, Gaskell depicts an intricate blending of economic and sexual tensions; as a woman suffering the limitations forced upon her by male society, Margaret identifies strongly with the equally powerless industrial workers. Her anecdote serves a double function, then; it establishes her political position in opposition to Mr. Thornton and it also suggests Margaret's clear-sighted vision of the central problem in the lives of nineteenthcentury women—the lack of experience and education which might teach them to function independently. With Margaret Hale, Gaskell seems finally to have created a heroine strong enough to articulate her own visions in fictions of her own making.

In view of Gaskell's increasingly subtle use of the feminine anecdote or tale to convey the central concerns of her novels, it is interesting to note that there are fewer and fewer interpolated tales in her later works. Cousin Phillis contains almost no tales, although, of course, it is, like Cranford, a narrated reminiscence. Peter Keating has pointed to a significant difference between the female narrator of Cranford and the masculine narrator of Cousin Phillis which is consistent with the way that Gaskell used male and female storytellers in other works: "whereas Mary Smith had embodied Mrs. Gaskell's own perceptions of Cranford, [the narrator of Cousin Phillis] lacks any truly sympathetic understanding of the lives and events he describes."²⁰(The measure of the gulf between Mary Smith and Paul Manning as narrators may be gauged by the effect of their respective interventions in the events of their stories. Mary Smith arranges for the return of Peter from India, and intuitively suggests the perfect genteel employment for Miss Matty in her reduced circumstances; Paul's well-intentioned itervention in his cousin's love affair, on the other hand, brings about the bleak ending of Cousin Phillis.) But aside from the blundering ignorance of the masculine persona of her narrator, Gaskell shows little interest in the act of tale-telling in Cousin Phillis and none at all in her last novel, Wives and Daughters.

It is apparent that the dwindling role of the interpolated tale in Gaskell's later work is related to some development in her ideas about her role as a woman writer; just what this development might have been is difficult to document. Aina Rubenius has postulated a change in Gaskell's writing from the publication of The Life of Charlotte Bronte, which "marks the transition in Mrs. Gaskell's authorship from the writing of novels with a purpose, such as Mary Barton, Ruth, and North and South, to the writing for art's sake."²¹ According to Rubenius, Gaskell later came into contact with ideas about women's rights and Goethean ideas of self-development, and thus came to regard the demands of her art as paramount.²² Although evidence for such an intellectual change is hard to pinpoint, it is at least certain that her literary success in later years brought her economic confidence and independence. Her letters show that by the end of her life she had taken control of her own income generated from writing and had no qualms about using it at her own discretion.²³ It is possible that in later years her admiration for Charlotte Brontë may have inspired her with greater self-assurance about the role of the woman writer, or that the very act of writing the biography (the story of a woman who outwardly had no story) may finally have laid to rest her doubts about the validity of women creating stories out of the reality of feminine lives.

Whatever the cause, at the end of her career, Gaskell seems to have had less need to work out a justification for feminine fiction-making through the interpolated tale. Wives and Daughters, in particular, is imbued with such a forceful vision of the painful inner drama of seemingly prosaic feminine lives, that the author seems not to have needed the help of her characters to tell stories which hammer home her themes. And yet, to say that there are no tales and stories in Gaskell's most mature work is not to suggest that the tales are necessarily random or intrusive in the earlier works. Rather, they seem to be the mark of a growing artist, striving to control her material and her artistic vision within the bounds of an exuberant and bountiful talent, and striving also to justify the very act of feminine creation. Taken as a whole, the stories and tales of these novels show an astonishing range of fiction-making, from the comic and the marvelous to the pathetic. Each is appropriate in some way to the character of its narrator, and each in some way reflects upon the major concerns of the novels. The act of storytelling in Gaskell's works, particularly when the teller is a woman, is an artistic and literary act of faith—the passing on of tradition, the sharing of experience or vision, the strengthening of communal bonds—in the same way that writing a novel is, for a woman, an act of faith. Each of the storytellers of these novels is a literary artist in his or her own right; and in particular, the female tellers of tales seem to convey the inner truths of feminine experience which Gaskell would have considered to be the particular province of the woman novelist. Far from being artless or intrusive, then, the interpolated tales of Gaskell's novels are a measure of the author's early power to absorb the broadest possible range of life's experience, to make it serve the purposes of her art, and to work out the implications of a uniquely feminine making of fiction.

¹ F. R. Leavis, for example, cites her as one of those "minor novelists" like Charlotte Yonge and Wilkie Collins whose work has blurred the recognition due to the truly "classical" novelists (The Great Tradition [New York: New York Univ. Press, 1973], pp. 1-2). John Gross begins his evaluation of her work by conceding that her "charm" has "led to her being treated as a lightweight, automatically consigned to the ranks of the miniaturists and minor talents" ("Mrs. Gaskell," in Ian Watt, The Victorian Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971], p. 217). And Laurence Lerner, in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Wives and Daughters tempers his praise of Cranford with the same disparaging phrases: "charming" and "minor" (Harmondsworth: 1969, p. 20).

² See Edgar Wright in his excellent study, Mrs. Gaskell: The Basis for Reassessment (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 4-5.

³ Wright discusses the stereotype of the "moderately cultured amateur with .. . a talent for story-telling" (p. 4).

⁴ Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), p. 39 et passim.

⁵The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chappie and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1966), 12, pp. 28-33; 15, p. 42; and 29, p. 61. Hereafter cited in the text as L, followed by letter and page references.

⁶ Winifred Gérin, Elizabeth Gaskell (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 123, 184.

⁷ Wright, pp. 79-82. According to Wright, "there is an obvious link between her love of tradition and legend, and her delight in ghost stories and morbidly tinged tales, which are a staple of any mythology" (p. 165).

⁸ Wright, p. 82.

⁹Mary Barton, Knutsford Edition (London: Smith and Elder, 1906; rpt. New York: A. M. S. Press, 1972), pp. 43-44. All references to the works of Gaskell will be to the Knutsford Edition.

¹⁰Ruth, pp. 164-69.

¹¹Sylvia's Lovers, p. 492.

¹² Angus Easson in Elizabeth Gaskell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979) has noted how "the sense of exaggeration in Robson's tale" demonstrates the way in which "Gaskell modifies or finds a story appropriate to her characters" (p. 167).

¹³ Carlyle began his letter, "Dear Madam, (For I catch the treble of that fine melodious voice very well)" and went on to praise the "beautiful, cheerfully pious, social, clear and observant character [which] is everywhere recognisable in the writer. . . . "In Gérin, p. 89. For Gaskell's reaction, see Letters, 33, p. 64; 37, p. 68; 38, pp. 68-69; and 39, pp. 69-71.

¹⁴ Gaskell's discomfort with the feminine authorship of Adam Bede had mainly to do with the irregularities of "Mrs. Lewes'" life. See Letters, 431, p. 559; 438, pp. 566-67; 449, p. 592; and 451, p. 594.

¹⁵Cranford, p. 143.

¹⁶ Wright, p. 140.

¹⁷Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 87, 117.

¹⁸North and South, pp. 141-42.

¹⁹"North and South: Varieties of Love and Power," Yearbook of English Studies, 6 (1976), 176.

²⁰ Introduction to Cranford/Cousin Phillis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).

²¹The Woman Question in Mrs. Gaskell's Life and Works (Essays and Studies on English Language and Literature, The English Institute in the University of Upsala, ed. S. B. Liljegren, Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950), pp. 60-61.

²² Rubenius, pp. 61-62.

²³ Early letters report her husband coolly pocketing her check for "Lizzie Leigh" (Letters, 70, p. 113). In her later years she used her income without her husband's knowledge to purchase a house for his retirement and the future of her unmarried daughters.