A Refreshing Read: Reflections on Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford

Elizabeth Gaskell

After the first three chapters of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, which was first published serially from 1851-1853, I was having difficulty establishing a sense of plot, even though recurring references to certain characters and conflicts made me believe one was coming; I couldn’t discern who the first-person narrator was or the nature of her relationship to the town; and the principal actors of the first two chapters had died by the time I reached page 30. 

I am hesitant to call the form of the book flawed, even though this rough and scattered start, followed by an increasingly coalescing sense of focus on one character, Miss Matty, and finished with a last-ditch effort at a traditional sense of climax and resolution—all of this suggests a novel that can’t make up its mind as to what it is about.  And yet, when I had finished reading, I found Cranford completely refreshing, and when one can say so about a book, the urge towards analysis seems sadly academic.

Cranford paints a portrait of a small English town whose residents are predominantly female. Gaskell’s rendering of everyday life in the town is pure pleasure to read and provides the chief interest of the book, for while we see the outmoded fashions, the arbitrary conventions the women have developed and wouldn’t dare break, and the quaint understanding these same women share of society’s structure and workings, we see equally their good intentions, their past troubles and heartbreak, and the sacrifices they make to support one another.  In short, Gaskell manages to achieve satire with a heart; her first-person narrator, who frequently visits Cranford, speaks in terms of “we,” implicating herself as both a participant and representative of the community.  At the same time, this narrator lives in the more modernized town of Drumble, which gives her an eye for seeing how quaintly endearing and even laughably backwards some of the Cranfordians’ behavior and ideas are.

While the fabric of everyday life in this outmoded and unconventional town is the chief interest of the book, our focal point in the community is Miss Matty, an elderly woman of Cranford whose good intentions and real kindness makes us forgive her shortcomings and her ineptness.  As I mentioned, the book becomes increasingly like a novel with its introduction of a major conflict: Miss Matty loses her entire income and livelihood when the bank that houses her assets fails.  Forgive me for not having qualms over giving you such a “plot spoiler,” but I truly believe that if you read the book you will see I have spoiled nothing; I repeat, it is the sense of life with all its follies and foibles that makes the book worth reading.

What compels me, above all, to name this book as refreshing to read is its unabashed sentimentality.  Today, unless you’re a screenwriter for Lifetime or the author of books like A Walk to Remember, writers avoid sentimentality at all costs.  And for good reason: I’m the first to gag at such saccharine simplification of intellect and emotion.  But what Gaskell pulls off is a sort of honest sentimentality, an upholding of what is good and simple and pure while simultaneously tempering it with ever-so-subtle realism of encroaching modernity, of the impracticality of living such a sheltered life as the Cranfordians live, and of the selfishness (far removed as it is from the novel itself) that makes a supportive community like Cranford an unreal anomaly.

Most relevant to me as a writer embarking on my second novel is a reminder that a novel doesn’t have to conform to expectations (okay, well, maybe to sell it does, but we can be as idealistic as Cranford for just a moment).  As I read, I found myself thinking of how quick we are to exalt Virginia Woolf for creating the feminine sentence and approaching an arguably feminine form of novel with Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, yet Cranford seems to me to have a prior claim.  True, Gaskell is not the stylist that Woolf is, nor is Cranford the masterpiece that Woolf’s novels are.  But what Gaskell does with her content, with her masterful yet gentle satire, and with a form that privileges small concerns and domestic anecdote over traditional plot structures seems every bit as deserving of our admiration and attention when it comes to naming authors who push convention.

Stay tuned for Thursday’s post when I’ll feature a passage from Cranford—you won’t want to miss it, and perhaps more than any of my previous featured passages, this one will capture in brief the spirit of the entire book whence it comes.

Featured Passage, The Season of Second Chances

The following passage comes late in Diane Meier's The Season of Second Chances and is spoken by a colleague of Joy, the narrator.  Given Meier's opinions in her Huffington Post article, I think this passage from her book is about as near a relative of the 19th century authorial aside as contemporary fiction will allow.  Enjoy!

"Men say that style is frivolous--clothes are frivolous, that homes are frivolous, hair styles and gossip and entertaining are frivolous--but most men tend to live one-dimensional lives unless they have wives who take care of the homes and the clothes and the entertaining for them.  Their wives bring a level of humanity to them.  They bring drama and detail and style into their lives.  Haven't you ever noticed that when a wife dies, a man either remarries--right away--or he dies himself; while women go on as widows for decades.  That's how frivolous these things are, Joy.  This thing we call style--this is the texture of the world."

Women Against Chick Lit: Diane Meier and The Season of Second Chances

“Chick Lit,” writes Diane Meier in a Huffington Post article, “has been used to denigrate a large swath of novels about contemporary life that happen to be written by women.”  As you might guess from the article’s title, “Chick Lit?  Women’s Literature?  Why Not Just...Literature?”, Meier is frustrated—and more than frustrated, she raises the valid question of what it means for our society if books about contemporary domestic life must contain violence or other trauma in order to be taken seriously.

You know Chick Lit when you see it.  The cover is pastel or pink and more often than not contains a martini glass and/or cartoon sketch of a chic woman.  The problem arises when books not intended as “beach reading” end up being marketed in this way.  In other words, you think you’re seeing Chick Lit when you pick up the book, but those who honestly wanted the beach reading will be disappointed, and those who are after substance won’t want to be seen with it.  Such is the scenario Meier describes—and rightly so, as far as I know.

Featured Passage, Sven Birkerts on Contemplation

If you read Tuesday's post on aborted books, you might remember I mentioned Sven Birkerts's ideas on contemplation.  Here is a very smart, and very true, paragraph from his article "Reading in a Digital Age," which appeared in the American Scholar.  Enjoy, especially his concluding sentence!

  "Reading the Atlantic cover story by NicholasCarr on the effect of Google (and online behavior in general), I find myself especially fixated on the idea that contemplative thought is endangered. This starts me wondering about the difference between contemplative and analytic thought. The former is intransitive and experiential in its nature, is for itself; the latter is transitive, is goal directed. According to the logic of transitive thought, information is a means, its increments mainly building blocks toward some synthesis or explanation. In that thought-world it’s clearly desirable to have a powerful machine that can gather and sort material in order to isolate the needed facts. But in the other, the contemplative thought-world—where reflection is itself the end, a means of testing and refining the relation to the world, a way of pursuing connection toward more affectively satisfying kinds of illumination, or insight—information is nothing without its contexts. I come to think that contemplation and analysis are not merely two kinds of thinking: they are opposed kinds of thinking. Then I realize that the Internet and the novel are opposites as well."

Aborted Books

This past week, I stopped reading two books.  Since identity is often determined as much by dislikes as by likes, it seems worthwhile to consider these aborted books.

You’ll remember that a couple weeks back I read Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge.  I thought I would complete the set and read Mr. Bridge, published 10 years later.  Like Mrs. Bridge, Mr. Bridge is composed of short chapters with witty titles, and, like Mrs. Bridge, Mr. Bridge is plotless as far as I could tell.  I read 170 pages of an edition with 367 pages total, 46% of the book.  This was enough to tell me that in its overall aim, Mr. Bridge seems very much like Mrs. Bridge, except for the difference that Mr. Bridge’s life is a little more public and exterior than Mrs. Bridge’s—after all, he’s the one who makes money and makes decisions.  Perhaps this explains the increased amount of dialogue in Mr. Bridge, which is not as strong a suit for Connell as his ability to narrate slightly odd yet wholly lifelike scenarios, the technique that dominates Mrs. Bridge.  Still, because he is more in the public arena and yet like his wife in many ways, Mr. Bridge comes across as bigoted when he takes those limitations into the public sphere rather than burying them in the private sphere, as Mrs. Bridge does.

Featured Passage, Light in August

In this scene, Joe Christmas, an 18 year-old, has returned to a restaurant to see again a waitress he saw once before.  Enjoy!

He believed that he could not leave now; that if he tried to go out, the blonde woman would stop him.  He believed that the men at the back knew this and were laughing at him.  So he sat quite still on the stool, looking down, the dime clutched in his palm.  He did not see the waitress until the two overlarge hands appeared upon the counter opposite him and into sight.  He could see the figured pattern of her dress and the bib of an apron and the two bigknuckled hands lying on the edge of the counter as completely immobile as if they were something she had fetched in from the kitchen.  "Coffee and pie," he said.

Her voice sounded downcast, quite empty.  "Lemon cocoanut chocolate."

In proportion to the height from which her voice came, the hands could not be her hands at all.  "Yes," Joe said.

The hands did not move.  The voice did not move. "Lemon cocoanut chocolate.  Which kind."  To the others they must have looked quite strange.  Facing one another across the dark, stained, greasecrusted and frictionsmooth counter, they must have looked a little like they were praying: the youth countryfaced, in clean and spartan clothing, with an awkwardness which invested him with a quality unworldly and innocent; and the woman opposite him, downcast, still, waiting, who because of her smallness partook likewise of that quality of his, of something beyond flesh. 

Faulkner the Acrobat: Reflections on Light in August

One of the most useful graduate courses I took was called “Structure of the Novel.”  So often, studying writing has to do not with learning something new but with heightening a conscious awareness of something you have previously registered only naturally and vaguely.  “Structure of the Novel” was one such awareness-heightening course, and it comes to mind today because I have just finished reading a book with nearly unparalleled structural acrobatics: Faulkner’s Light in August.