Disavowal, defence and voyeurism in the narration of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cousin Phillis.(Essays)(Critical essay)

 
  A person, scattered in space and time, is no longer a woman, but a 
  series of events on which we can throw no light, a series of insoluble 
  problems. (Proust 1983, 99-100) 
 
  The eye and the gaze--this is for us the split in which the drive is 
  manifested at the level of the scopic field. (J. Lacan 1978, 73) 

Elizabeth Gaskell's novella Cousin Phillis was completed after Sylvia's Lovers and appeared serially in the Cornhill magazine between November 1863 and February 1864. It is the story of young Paul Manning's frustrated efforts to woo Phillis Holman, a distant cousin of his that he meets upon taking up a position as clerk to Edward Holdsworth, to whom she is also introduced and for whose looks and learning she falls, only to be abandoned shortly afterwards, the whole affair culminating in Phillis's physical and mental collapse.

Regarded by several critics as one of Gaskell's most mature pieces of writing, (2) Cousin Phillis is among those instances of her fiction where the author officially employs a homodiegetic narrator, Paul Manning, who participates in the narrated story both as its narrator and as one of its main characters. (3) Paradoxically, however, Gaskell's choice of homodiegetic narration habitually shifts to an autodiegetic one, with Paul Manning, rather than Phillis Holman, becoming the central and privileged character of the story from the very beginning.

Although Cousin Phillis has lent itself to thematic readings and has often been interpreted, like Cranford, as a nostalgic idyll of country life, as an "essentially pastoral text" (Foster 2002, 161) reminiscent of the author's early days in rural Sandlebridge, some more recent interpretations have raised the question of what might be considered to be the novella's greatest strength, its narrative technique. (4) What strikes one, however--and this is an aspect of Gaskell's narrative that seems to have passed unnoticed by contemporary criticism of Cousin Phillis--is the fact that although it purports to be a text about a woman, it is in essence a text about men and male fantasies of the female, with the heroine's own body and discourse suppressed by those of the three male characters surrounding her. These are Reverend Holman (her own father), Edward Holdsworth and, most importantly, Paul Manning, the narrator all of whom seem to maintain different fantasies of Phillis. Her father views her as the eternal virginal female child with no desire of her own, as does Edward Holdsworth, who even wishes to capture her as such in his incomplete, rejected sketch of her. As for Paul, he only marginally imparts his story of her, his agency and mediation arousing deep doubts as to the motives behind his account. Last but not least, Gaskell's employment as well as her simultaneous subversion of a chameleonic narrator renders her text a locus of a narrative paradox and ambivalence, since she constantly keeps her reader in doubt as to the reliability of the events recounted, for it is constantly implied that the narrator's "wandering eye" (1995, 31) and hence the narrating "I" are untrustworthy and conspicuously lacking in vision as well as in self-awareness. In this way it becomes clear that it is male fantasy rather than male narrative authority and objectivity that shapes the narrated events. It is thus, perhaps, inappropriate to speak of the woman writer's internalization of the male perspective for reasons of narrative authority. Rather, Gaskell's employment of this particular type of narrative perspective falls within that category of fictional narration that Dorrit Cohn terms "discordant narration." According to Cohn, this mode of narration,

 
  suggests the reader's sense that the author intends his or her work to 
  be understood differently from the way the narrator understands it: in 
  a way that can only be discovered by reading the work against the 
  grain of the narrator's discourse, providing it with a meaning that, 
  though not explicitly spelled out, is silently signalled to the reader 
  behind the narrator's back. It intimates as well that the narrator, 
  far from being conceived as the author's mouthpiece, is an expressly 
  and artfully created vocal organ whose ideology clashes with his or 
  her text. (Cohn 2003, 307) 

Attempting to account further for Gaskell's androcentric narrative perspective and open the question of the author's intentions would be a risky task, indeed. Whether she has internalized the objectifying patriarchal gaze or whether it is a matter of her sensitivity to woman as object or victim of the gaze, Gaskell seems to be exposing the former for what it is (objectifying and disempowering) and the latter as common in Victorian male homosocial practice. What is more important, however, is that in attempting (self-consciously or otherwise) to represent the heterosexual male objectifying gaze from the very centre of male consciousness, Gaskell ends up shifting the focus of attention from the seemingly primary female object of desire onto the seemingly secondary male characters of the text. Through this process of substitution, Gaskell not only interrogates Victorian gender roles and encoding, but also exposes gender to be a subject position, a shaky and unstable category just like the Heathbridge "shaking, uncertain ground, which was puzzling [the] engineers--one end of the line going up as soon as the other was weighted down" (1995, 7).

In what follows I shall attempt to offer a reading of Cousin Phillis that will focus on this very function of the narrator and on the economy of narratorial discourse in relation to gender. To this end, I will argue that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the narrator's initial commitment to write about Cousin Phillis and the text's conspicuous undermining of this commitment. Phillis's own story and, to an even greater extent, her own discourse (much more corporeal than verbal as it is) are essentially suppressed in and subsequently erased from the text in favour of those of the narrator, who fails to account for her unique specificity, the very quality that he initially declared, incited the telling of his story. The heroine as "other" in Cousin Phillis, like Albertine of Remembrance of Things Past, is there only to "fall prey to a true lunacy of the snapshot" (1985, 117), as Mieke Bal notes in her analysis of Proust's text and Gaskell's narrator, like Proust's, simply succeeds in turning Phillis into an objectified, static, a-historical, idealized and marginal figure, whose imposing physical and intellectual prominence needs either to be erased from memory as a traumatic experience or to be rendered virtually invisible in order to pose no threat to his masculinity. From a narratological perspective, according to Mieke Bal, "traumatic events disrupt the capacity to comprehend and experience them at the time of their occurrence. As a result, the traumatized person cannot remember them. Instead, they recur in bits and pieces, in nightmares, and cannot be worked through" (1985, 147).