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7. “Growing Pains”: Representing the Romantic in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters
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163 7 “Growing Pains”: Representing the Romantic in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters Julia M. Wright On the whole the influence of these [nervous] diseases is often great on national character, and domestic happiness. When wealth and luxury arrive at a certain pitch in any country, mankind cannot remain long stationary in mental qualifications or corporeal strength. Domestic peace is first invaded by asperity of temper and turbulent passions. Vices and diseases are close attendants on riches and high living. All these gradually extend among the community; and the circle widens, till it engulphs a whole people; when polished society may be said to bring on its own dotage, and to dig its own grave! —Thomas Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperament Elizabeth Gaskell’s last, and never-completed, novel, Wives and Daughters: An Every-Day Story (1866), belongs to a group of important novels in which the Victorians looked back to the previous age and considered cultural change not in the “sixty years since” of Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels, but in terms of the short space of a single generation.1 W. A. Craik suggests that, in Wives and Daughters, Gaskell “chart[s] the changing shape of society, the gradual breaking-down of the class system as the old order changes, and the gradual infiltration of the squirearchical structure by the new men of science, learning, and the professions, as the younger generation reshapes itself amid the older one.”2 But this cultural progress is not smooth; there is a detour, in the form of the Romantic,3 which threatens to divert the nation from its auspicious path. The novel’s hero, Roger Hamley, binds the future to the past by distinguishing himself from the present of the novel. Roger is a “Hamley of Hamley,” with a Saxon frame, the mind of a scientist, and no interest in Romantic literature, and he plays the part of Mentor to the heroine’s Telemachus in large part by teaching her to reject Romantic culture, too (137). As Deirdre D’Albertis has argued, Lord Hollingford, Gibson (the heroine ’s father), and Roger employ scientific discourse to “legitimize rational accounts of social organization profitable to some and debilitating to others , accounts that expand to justify gender discrimination, racial divisions, and imperial projects.”4 But the Darwinian competition between the Hamley brothers, discussed by D’Albertis in relation to the “empowerment of male selection,” is shaped significantly by the discourse of sensibility as a means of identifying the elder, Osborne, with a Romantic past that must be discarded as an ineffective cultural mutation.5 Here the informing scientific discourse is broadly that of Darwinian evolution, but, in its particulars, it is firmly rooted in turn-of-the-century medical concepts of the nervous body, particularly as they relate to philosophical constructions of sensibility and emerging organicist notions of the place of the individual within the nation. Through these two scientific discourses, Gaskell divides the main characters of her novel into two groups. The first is morally and medically pathologized: They have nervous bodies, superficial or flawed sentiments, and, through their egotism, cause most of the trouble in the novel. They all, moreover, favor the literature of the Romantic period, particularly romances and the poetry of Felicia Hemans, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Byron, and William Wordsworth. The second group includes the healthier bodies of the narrative, all with deep but private sentiments and a willingness to sacrifice their personal comfort for the good of others that makes it possible for many of the problems in the novel to be fixed. They all read “serious ” literature, a category that, in Gaskell’s novel, includes science, philosophy, agriculture, and specifically pre-Romantic literature. The identification of Romanticism with egotism is not an uncommon one. Henry Maudsley, for instance, a contemporary of Gaskell’s and the author of treatises on psychology, refers to a time of “great self-feeling” as “the stage of Byronism.”6 Such thinking informs, but is not limited to, Victorian representations of second-generation Romantic poets as effete, juvenile, or sickly. In his well-known essay on P. B. Shelley (1852), Robert Browning excuses the poet’s “passionate, impatient struggles” as the “[c]rude convictions of boyhood” for which “all boys have been pardoned . They are growing-pains, accompanied by temporary distortion, of 164 Julia M. Wright [3.227.0.245] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 05:42 GMT) the soul,” and then speculates that “had Shelley lived he would have finally...