“THE WRONG SIDE OF THE TAPESTRY”: ELIZABETH GASKELL'S WIVES AND DAUGHTERS

Abstract

ELIZABETH GASKELL'S WIVES AND DAUGHTERS, often considered her finest and most psychologically complex novel, tells its story through narrative indirection–what Gaskell's heroine Molly Gibson identifies in a conversation late in the novel as telling a story with a “mental squint; the surest way to spoil a narration” (623; ch. 58). In this conversation, Molly is conscious of her audience–her admiring and encouraging aunts and her less admiring and less encouraging stepmother. Like Gaskell, Molly is conscious of the presence of a “critical listening.” Thus Molly selects which details of her visit to the Towers, the manor of the largest landowners in her town, she will relate. In examining the use of details, of particulars, in Victorian and Modernist poetry, Carol Christ makes clear that what is at stake is “not whether literature should contain detail but what the significance of the detail should be, and consequently what the criteria for its selection are” (4). Gaskell's realist domestic fiction delights in detail. Yet Gaskell has been taken to task by such critics as Virginia Woolf for an incidental and excessive use of detail, detail that for Woolf represents the mid-Victorian novelist's inability to select what is important in rendering reality. The aesthetic problem with detail, Naomi Schor explains, lies in the way that detail subverts internal hierarchic ordering by blurring the lines between the foreground and the background, the principle and the incidental (20–21). Schor's explanation of this internal subversion is useful for opening up Gaskell's use of detail in Wives and Daughters.