Education is a Woman’s Asset in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis

Abstract

The Victorian period was characterised by its landmark on the swift change of moral and social codes leaving an impact on the status of women which prompted reflections by thinkers and authors. The novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), breaks new grounds by drawing attention to strategic education which helps women to construct gender identity. As such, education that enhances practical achievements for women stands for an empowering asset that serves to revisit the prevalent conventional norms of training women merely for the accomplishment of domestic tasks. This argument is backed up by supporting details provided through the applied text-based analysis method. Unlike readings of Cousin Phillis (1864) showing a woman’s educational outcome as limited to a failed romantic experience, a deep reading of Gaskell’s text provides a substantial understanding of the impact of a woman’s education which enlightens a woman’s mind to develop from ignorance to knowledge, and from ‘foolishness’ to wisdom in the symbolic setting of Hope Farm. Therefore, the experience of the unaccomplished love affair is rewritten in terms of making it a womanly cultural experience that broadens her knowledge of herself and her practical needs in a pastoral environment. Becoming acquainted with the Latin and Italian languages and literature helps the character’s mind to transcend the limited romantic dimension in the promotion of the female identity construction process that is organically connected with the national identity.