That "old rigmarole of childhood": fairytales and socialization in Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters.(Critical essay)

Four and a half years before the serialization of Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (1864-66), the Cornhill Magazine published "Curious, if True" (1860), one of the novelist's last gothic stories. The narrator of that tale, Richard Whittingham, an archivist in Tours attempting to prove his genealogical descent from a sister of John Calvin, loses his way, like Wives and Daughters's little Molly Gibson, in a dense wood. When he happens upon a lonely chateau, Whittingham knocks at the door, only to be welcomed into a gathering of eccentric individuals as if his visit were expected. These guests, who mistake him for the legendary Dick Whittington, turn out to be notable fairytale protagonists grown fat and old, degenerated--if not completely ruined--by the very attributes that made them fantastic. The story abruptly ends when Madame la Feemarraine (the fairy godmother) appears, and the narrator awakens beneath a tree to "the slanting glory of the dawning day" (286).

"Curious, if True" challenged the conventions of mid-Victorian realism by defamiliarizing the domestic narrative, one of the most recognizable arenas for exploring the dynamics of adult sexual relations. In the story, Whittingham, a seemingly impartial narrator, presents an intricate web of marital and class tensions through the familiar idiom of the drawing-room anthropologist. Yet his detached scientific perspective jars against Gaskell's all-too-apparent use of fantasy motifs. When Whittingham identifies his hostess Madame de Retz, for example, as a parvenu wife given to henpecking her spouse, the reader recognizes the tragically curious consort of the infamous Bluebeard who has since acquired a second, less notorious husband. This layering of quotidian matrimonial experience over fairytale narrative conventions creates an uncanny effect and initiates an interpretive rupture. Simultaneously Whittingham, the archivist, and Whittington, legendary Mayor of London, the narrator balances uneasily between identifications. At first an enlightened interpreter whose distanced analysis seemed to secure his autonomy, Whittingham now becomes, like his new acquaintances, an object to be "read," another signifier in a system of fairytale signs. Although "Curious, if True" eventually ejects Whittingham from its community of fairytale protagonists, it never secures his character; readers remain unsure whether to replace the name "Whittingham" with "Whittington." Since no set of fantastic or realistic genetic conventions emerges as a reliable method of identification, Whittingham never fits securely into the social circle in which he finds himself. Simply put, "Curious, if True" makes it impossible to definitely identify anyone.

Gaskell habitually used fairytale in her longer fiction to signal such problems of socialization. However, critics of Wives and Daughters have generally subordinated a sustained discussion of the relationship between fairytale and socialization in Gaskell's work to unflinching admiration for her realistic characterization and resistance to fantasy. (1) Many argue that Gaskell's attention to psychological detail and the complexities of social interaction form part of a larger and distinctly Victorian effort to assert, in George Levine's words, the "power of the real over the imagined" (57), a novelistic project that appears diametrically opposed to what scholars often describe as the universalizing function of the fairytale. (2) Indeed, an 1866 review commended Wives and Daughters for its lack of typology, fantasy elements, sensational devices, and "impossible fortune[s], showered into a last chapter, in the midst ... of a transformation scene" (qtd. in Easson, Critical 471). This review articulated what has become the standard interpretation of Gaskellian realism and of the mid-nineteenth century novelist: obsessed with faithful and accurate reproductions of daily life, the best of nineteenth-century novelists sought nothing more than to tell meaningful stories through "the admirable, inaudible, invisible exercise of creative power" (463). Although aware of realism's limitations, critics tend to characterize Gaskell's project as an outright challenge to fairytale's most appealing aspects: the fanciful, the grotesque, and the bizarre. In concentrating on Wives and Daughters's materiality, its fascination with social science, natural history, and economics, and its declared intention to present an "every-day story," readers neglect the extent to which Gaskell's social project depended on her management of fantasy. (3) Gaskell's fiction repeatedly used the familiar significations of fairytale to characterize marriage, reproduction, and middle-class achievement. A discussion of Wives and Daughters should embrace the novel's allusions to fantasy as willingly as the author did.

Certainly fairytales provided Gaskell with a web of cultural myth on which to embroider the more local and realistic story of Molly Gibson and her kin. But the persistence with which Gaskell returned to fairytale throughout her work points toward a much more conscious exploration of the genre's efficacy as a vehicle of socialization. By "socialization," I mean the successful incorporation of the child into the complex world of adult sexual relations. More specifically, I use the term to denote the child's ability to recognize, reproduce, and see itself within fairytale conventions. In what follows, I argue that the adult community of Wives and Daughters uses fairytale rhetoric to bring Molly in line with adult desires. In effect, adults colonize Molly when they call on her to identify with some fairytale protagonist just as the salon hails Richard Whittingham in "Curious, if True." The effect of this solicitation is to limit what the novel posits as the child's polysemic indeterminacy of identity. What readers often call the heroine's "growth" or "development," then, is really the result of a Foucauldian disciplinary system generated by middle- and upper-class adults bent on ushering the child into identification with middle-class conjugality.

Yet Molly's is hardly an uncontested interpolation. Although the novel treats the fairytale as a narrative structure that drives toward conjugal conclusions, Wives and Daughters, like "Curious, if True," still leaves room for resistance. Molly's reluctance to embed herself in fairytale conventions resists the novel's seemingly predetermined matrimonial (that is, heterosexual) conclusion. Molly's opposition to fairytale--an opposition coterminous with her fluid identity and antagonism toward adult desire--suggests that the child character has a more flexible function in the realistic novel than the adult (See Barthes 39). Gaskell uses Molly as a figure for ambiguous subjectivity, and in doing so challenges the determinacy of adult heterosexuality.

The Great Fairytale Debate

Before turning to a close reading of the novel, it is important to understand what fairytale connoted to nineteenth century audiences so that we may more easily perceive the extent to which Gaskell manipulated those connotations. Readers widely believe that fairytales transcend time and space, offering the same positive meanings to all people everywhere. This willingness to believe in the universality of fairytale has provoked some interpretive fallacies, including the gendering of the genre. Many contemporary readers of Wives and Daughters polarize the novel's rhetorics, coupling fairytale with the sentimental discourses circulating among Gaskell's gossiping women and contrasting it with the rational, scientific discourse of "accurate thought" (WD 39) typical of Gaskell's learned men. (4) These readings mimic eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentaries, which often linked fairytale to traditionally feminine occupations and the woman's body. The frontispiece to Robert Samber's first English translation of Charles Perrault's tales (1729), for example, depicts a middle-aged woman, probably a nurse or servant, who appears to be sewing by the hearth while telling ...