Given the feminine-centred titles of Mary Barton, Ruth, Cousin Phillis, and Wives and Daughters, it is not surprising that critics have devoted much attention to Elizabeth Gaskellâs depiction of women.1 Alan Shelston, for example, writes of Gaskellâs early works as focusing on social change and its implications for women and points to titles of later works, such as My Lady Ludlow, The Grey Woman, and Sylviaâs Lovers, which âidentify her as a novelist of womenâs experienceâ (Shelston 2010, viii, xiii). This categorisation is apt, for Gaskell gives sympathetic treatment to a range of women, from young women and fallen women to spinsters and widows, working-class and middle-class women alike. Further, although she signed most letters as âE.C. Gaskellâ, she was widely known to contemporariesâand many readers thereafterâas âMrs Gaskellâ. Though such a name conformed to Victorian conventionsâjoining her with Mrs Oliphant, Mrs Craik, and Mrs Henry Wood (Shelston 2010, 43)âit also has the effect of making her sound matronly, safe, âconventional and soothingâ (Schor 1992, 4). This matronly name, rather than a pseudonym, makes it seem a natural consequence that she became known as a woman writer depicting the female experience. To confine her to this simple categorisation is, however, limiting. Gaskell complicates and nuances not only notions of womanhood and figures such as the unmarried mother but also questions of manliness and figures ranging from industrialists and doctors to marginalised men, from the poor labourers and murderous working class to the deformed male.
Gaskell herself resists simple categorisation. In an 1850 letter, she writes that she has a âgreat numberâ of âMesâ and notes, âthatâs the plagueâ:
One of my mes is, I do believe, a true Christianâ(only people call her socialist and communist), another of my mes is a wife and mother, and highly delighted at the delight of everyone else in the house, Meta and William most especially who are in full extasy. Now thatâs my âsocialâ self I suppose. Then again Iâve another self with a full taste for beauty and convenience whh [sic] is pleased on its own account. How am I to reconcile all these warring members? I try to drown myself (my first self,) by saying itâs Wm [William] who is to decide on all these things, and his feeling it right ought to be my rule, And so it isâonly that does not quite doâŠYes that discovery of oneâs exact work in the world is the puzzle: I never meant to say it was not. I long (weakly) for the old times where right and wrong did not seem such complicated matters; and I am sometimes coward enough to wish that we were back in the darkness where obedience was the only seen duty of women. Only even then I donât believe William would ever have commanded me. (Letters, 108â109)
Her musings emanate from feelings of selfishness as she and William had just acquired their large, expensive house at Plymouth Grove at a time when âso many are wantingâ, but her emphasis on a multiplicity of âmesâ could just as easily apply to her role as a writer, for she cannot be confined to one label of industrial novelist, domestic realist, biographer, or historical fiction writer. Though she does not list âwriterâ as one of her âmesâ, this notion of a fractured self rings true throughout her written work as well as her life. Further, while contemplating issues of identity, Gaskell considers issues of gender and authority, particularly the relational role between men and women. Gaskell herself only saw her role as wife and mother as one of her âmesâ, so it would seem to âdrownâ some of her other selves in reducing her to âMrs Gaskellâ. Just as this naming practice is restrictive in confining Gaskell to the wifely element of her identity, it is equally limiting to view her only as a woman writing about women, for much of Gaskellâs writing revolves around nuanced issues of masculinity and manliness.
Gaskell turns to quoting Thomas Carlyle on the title page of her first novel, Mary Barton (1848), and a quotation from Carlyle seems fitting as an introduction to Gaskellâs approach to masculinity. His 1831 statement, âThe old ideal of manhood has grown obsolete and the new is still invisible to us, and we grope after it, one clutching this phantom, another thatâ (Carlyle 1899, 29), exemplifies the difficulty that Victorians faced in defining the masculine ideal. Mid-nineteenth-century England underwent great social change in the face of industrialisation, changing working and living conditions, and voting reforms, and with those changes came new conceptions of masculinity and what it meant to be a man and a gentleman. As Phillip Mallett points out, âold versions of manhood and manliness, bound up with aristocratic notions of rank and honour, began to lose their holdâ (Mallett 2015, vii) and this search for a new ideal was âembedded in a wider narrative of struggle and anxiety in an age self-conscious about changeâ (ix). Herbert Sussman, too, turns to Carlyleâs famous quotation to argue that Carlyle âsaw as the inadequacy of each of the several competing styles of masculinity available in the 1840s, the absence of any single formation of manliness to which a man might surrender himselfâ (Sussman 1995, 70). The question of manliness is particularly relevant to the works of Elizabeth Gaskell, which span class, region, time, and genre to grapple with ideas of masculinity in the working class, middle class, and landed aristocracy as she gropes after and clutches at a new ideal of manhood.
Just as the feminist movement has argued that femininity is a social construct, Gaskellâs varied writing highlights the fact that masculinity is likewise socially constructed and thus varies historically and culturally. Ultimately, her work shows that there cannot be one new ideal of manhood but rather, just as there are a range of âmesâ in Gaskellâs identity, a range of masculinities that change over time and place. From her first novel, Mary Barton, Gaskell stakes her claim to depicting manliness:
âJohn Bartonâ was the original title of the book. Round the character of John Barton all the others formed themselves; he was my hero, the person with whom all my sympathies went, with whom I tried to identify myself at the time, because I believed from personal experience that such men were not uncommon⊠(Letters, 74)
Not only does she identify and sympathise with working-class men, but she also uses her novels as a means to explore issues of gentlemanliness; in North and South (1854), for example, John Thornton declares, âI am rather weary of this word âgentlemanly,â which seems to me to be often inappropriately used, and often, too, with such exaggerated distortion of meaning, while the full simplicity of the noun âman,â and the adjective âmanlyâ are unacknowledgedâthat I am induced to class it with the cant of the dayâ (NS, 164). Though Margaret believes the term âgentlemanâ includes the âtrue manâ, Thornton dismisses âgentlemanâ as solely a relational term; issues of status, interiority, character, and class are wrapped up in the debate of âman vs. gentlemanâ. For the Victorians, John Tosh writes, âThe difference between gentlemanliness and manliness was criticalâ (Tosh 2005, 97); Gaskell draws attention to the timeliness of this debate with âthe cant of the dayâ. Further, throughout her works, she pays marked attention to the ways in which masculinity is unstable and changes over time. One senses that Gaskell is pushing her readers to identify one of her âmesâ as a theorist of manliness when, in her conceptualisation of masculinity in her final novel, Wives and Daughters (1864â1866), she presents Preston musing:
He felt at onceâŠthat [his] conduct [and his] threatsâŠwere just what no gentleman, no honourable man, no manly man, could put up with in any one about him. He knew that much, and he wondered how she, the girl standing before him, had been clever enough to find it out. He forgot himself for an instant in admiration of her. (WD, 507)
This interrogation of Prestonâs conduct is an interrogation of his masculinity: categories of the gentleman, of honour, and of manliness are at stake. Further, Gaskell emphasises the significance of understanding what it means to be a gentleman, an honourable man, and a manly man, for Preston stops short in admiration of Mollyâs cleverness. By making it clear that understanding manliness is of the utmost importance, Gaskell bolsters her legacy not only as a novelist of the female experience but also as a novelist of masculinity.
Masculinity Studies
Phillip Mallett points out that, were Carlyle writing in the 1890s, he would have to âacknowledge that there was and could be no monolithic âideal of Manhoodâ neither as a goal to be embraced, nor as a standard no individual man can live up to or fulfil, but rather a diversity of masculinitiesâ (Mallett 2015, xii). The end of the nineteenth century witnessed, as Mallett notes, many legal, professional, and cultural changes that combined to create âthreats from every angleâ to masculinity and a prevalence of gender instability (x). This notion of a âthreatâ to the ideal of manhood is important because, though Carlyleâs claim about the obsolescence of the old ideal of manhood rings true for Victorian authors such as Gaskell, it continues to be relevant today. Judith Gardiner writes that the notion of âmasculinity in crisisâ in contemporary society stems partly from more women in the workplace, a reduced emphasis on physical strength, and feminismâs questioning of male dominance; she argues that the effects of the âmasculinity crisisâ include male distress, anxiety, suicide, and criminality (Gardiner 2002, 7). Gardiner argues, however, that â[m]asculinity is a nostalgic formation, always missing, lost, or about to be lost, its ideal form located in a past that advances with each generation in order to recede just beyond its graspâ (10). She contends, âthe language of a âmasculinity crisisâ falsifies history by implying there was once a golden time of unproblematic, stable gender, when men were men, women were women, and everyone was happy with their social rolesââthe way we never wereââ (14). Likewise, Stephen Whitehead writes, âwe should be wary of talking up a crisis of masculinityâŠmen are not a predictable, homogenous groupâŠFirst, we should recognize the multiple ways of being a man and the multiple masculinities now available to men in this, the post-modern, age. There can be no prevailing, singular masculinity in crisisâ (Whitehead 2002, 3). Masculinity, he notes, is âunder constant revision, negotiation and movementâ (4).
Victorian writers such as Gaskell reveal that there is no uniform guide for âmanlyâ or âmasculineâ behaviour. Just as feminism has helped to show that notions of femininity are subject to historical and cultural change, literary critics, social historians, and gender theorists have recently begun addressing the fact that masculinity is likewise neither monolithic, static, nor essentialist. Feminism has helped to establish the notion of a multiplicity of masculinities, historically specific and culturally diverse, fluid and changing. With regard to Victorian studies, Clinton Machann notes that in the 1990s, feminism was dominant and foundational, supported by writers such as Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Mary Poovey, and Margaret Homans; that said, he notes, âeven if one accepted the idea that feminine experience was systematically ignored or suppressed within the old paradigm of supposed universal human experience, it was by no means clear that gendered masculine experience had been adequately or authentically explored within that paradigmâ (Machann 2010, 14). Masculinity studies in the 1970s and 1980s proved dependent on feminist theories and was thus often taught in womenâs and gender studies programmes (Gardiner 2002, 2). It gradually evolved to become informed by both feminist and queer theory (Gardiner 2002, x), and it was only in the 1990s that considerable writing about heterosexual masculinity as a social construct began to emerge (Whitehead 2002, 6â7). Both genders are now examined as social constructions, differentiated from sex as a biological condition (Lee 2007, 17). As Phillip Mallett writes, there is âincreasing attention to what now becomes a self-evident truth: men too have a genderâ (Mallett 2015, vi). Both masculinity and femininity are unstable categories; neither can be neatly contained. Further, both are relational concepts: âNeither masculinity nor femininity is a meaningful construct without the other; each defines, and is in turn defined by, the otherâ (Tosh 2005, 104).
Though today the terms are often used synonymously, John Tosh, in Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2005), clarifies that manliness âwas the most clearly articulated indicator of menâs gender in the nineteenth centuryâ (Tosh 2005, 2) and signified attributes that men were happy to have, whereas masculinity was neutral and matter-of-fact (3). Tosh makes it clear that the word âmasculinityâ, with its physical, emotional, and social attributes as well as âthe interiority of being, or feeling, a manâ, is a recent concept. Previously, it was used for âthe legal prerogatives of the male sex (such as primogeniture)â; the abstract nouns about being a man were âmanhoodâ and âmanlinessâ and largely pertained to a manâs appearance and actions (24).
Key terms in this book are also borrow...