Abstract
The labels of’ spinster’ and ‘old maid’, in Victorian rhetoric, indicated much more than years and marital status. To fail to marry was to be relegated to an almost-invisible social position, to face the trials of often-straitened economic circumstances, and to be excluded from what was increasingly seen as woman’s sole purpose: providing domestic comfort to others.3 This chapter considers how Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford series, published in Household Words from December 1851 to May 1853, takes up the cause of the spinster, welcoming mid-Victorian readers into untraditional homes that had heretofore been barred from view. Gaskell used the venue of Charles Dickens’ Household Words, a magazine that capitalized on popular tropes of normative middle-class domesticity, to offer a more inclusive view of the inhabitants and the function of the drawing room and the parlor. The Cranford stories can be understood as reformist simply by virtue of Gaskell’s placement of unmarried old women at the center of the Victorian domestic interior and her attention to this location as a site of story. Because these women within their homes are the subject of her narrative, when Gaskell accesses these ‘under cover’ stories, she radically shifts the narrative terrain exemplified by her literary predecessor Mary Russell Mitford, whose sketches of village life focus on public arenas that marginalize elderly women.
I pique myself on knowing by sight, and by name, almost every man and boy in our parish, from eight years old to eighty — I cannot say quite so much for the women. They — the elder of them at least — are more within doors, more hidden. One does not meet them in the fields and highways; their duties are close housekeepers, and live under cover.
(Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village)1
In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women … For keeping the trim gardens full of choice flowers without a weed to speck them; for frightening away little boys who look wistfully at the said flowers through the railings; for rushing out at the geese that occasionally venture in to the gardens if the gates are left open … for kindness (somewhat dictatorial) to the poor, and real tender good offices to each other whenever they are in distress, the ladies of Cranford are quite sufficient. ‘A man,’ as one of them observed to me once, ‘is so in the way in the house!’
(Elizabeth Gas kell, ‘Our Society at Cranford’)2
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Notes
See Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky, ‘Washington Irving and the Genesis of the Fictional Sketch’, Early American Literature, 21, 1986/1987, p. 230.
Gregory Wegner, ‘Hawthorne’s “Ethan Brand” and the Structure of the Literary Sketch’, The Journal of Narrative Technique, 17.1, 1987, p. 58.
Michael Trussler, ‘Suspended Narratives: The Short Story and Temporality’, Studies in Short Fiction, 33, 1996, p. 562.
George Griffith, ‘What Kind of Book is Cranford?’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 14.2, 1983, p. 55.
Lisa Niles, ‘Malthusian Menopause: Aging and Sexuality in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 33, 2005, p. 294.
Lorna Huett, ‘Commodity and Collectivity: Cranford in the Context of Household Words’, Gaskell Society Journal, 17, 2003, p. 40.
Talia Schaffer, ‘Craft, Authorial Anxiety, and “The Cranford Papers”’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 38.2, Summer 2005, p. 227.
Wendy Carse, ‘A penchant for nanative: “Mary Smith” in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford’, journal of Narrative Technique, 20.3, 1990, p. 322.
Charles Dickens, ‘A Preliminary Word’, Household Words, 1.1, March 1850, pp. 1–2.
Margaret Reeves ‘Textual Contextual and Ideological Contradictions in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford’ English Studies in Canada 23.4, 1997, p. 3
Lorna Huett, ‘Among the Unknown Public: Household Words, All the Year Round and the Mass-Market Weekly Periodical in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 38.1, 2005, p. 67.
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© 2014 Kate Krueger
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Krueger, K. (2014). Spinsters Re-Drawing Rooms in Gaskell’s Cranford. In: British Women Writers and the Short Story, 1850–1930. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137359247_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137359247_2
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