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144 q Chapter 6 Fictive Kinship and Natural Affinities in Wives and Daughters The Cinderella story warns little girls that it is dangerous to be left alone with a widowed father, for a widowed father must remarry, and the daughter’s fate depends upon his choice of a wife. In some variants of the tale, the daughter suffers because the father replaces her mother with a cruel stepmother. In others, the daughter suffers because the father wishes to marry her himself. — Judith Lewis Herman, with Lisa Hirschman, Father-Daughter Incest, 1981 Of the three families in the foreground of Eliz­ abeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, only one is constructed through the discourse of breeding and heredity that pervades the early books of The Mill on the Floss, set at the same historical moment but within a distinctly differ­ ent provincial milieu. In representing the Hamleys, Gaskell devotes specific attention to intergenerational family resemblances and divergences in a way that recalls,but does not exactly repeat,Eliot’s text. Parents of different socio­ economic backgrounds—the daughter of a London merchant and the only son of “a very old family,if not aborigines”—produce two boys.1 “Osborne, the eldest—so called after his mother’s maiden name”—is to be the sole heir to the estate; he “was full of tastes, and had some talent. His appearance had all the grace and refinement of his mother’s”; as a boy, he was “almost as demonstrative as a girl” (WD 43). “He takes after madam’s side,” his father asserts, “who...can’t tell who was their grandfather” (WD 74). Roger, the younger, who will have to make his own way, is “clumsy and heavily built, like his father,” and appeared as a child “little likely to distinguish himself in intellectual pursuits” (WD 43). “Roger is like me,” says the squire, “a Hamley of Hamley, and no one who sees him in the street will ever think that red­ brown, big­boned, clumsy chap is of gentle blood” (WD 74). On the face of it, then, the elder son follows the mother; the younger “takes after” the FICTIVE KINSHIP AND NATURAL AFFINITIES 145 father. If Osborne’s association with poetry and sentiment further feminizes him,then the rugged Roger’s manliness is also written on the body:the elder dies, the younger thrives. Frederick Greenwood, the Cornhill editor who provided the postscript to Gaskell’s unfinished novel, took the “likeness in unlikeness” of the two offspring as both biologically and aesthetically appropriate: “When Squire Hamley took a wife, it was then provided that his two boys should be as naturally one and diverse as the fruit and the bloom on the bramble....These differences are precisely what might have been expected from the union of Squire Hamley with the town­bred, refined, delicate­minded woman whom he married” (WD 652). More recent efforts to stabilize the meanings of hered­ ity in Wives and Daughters also read the death of one brother and the survival of the other as bioculturally determined. For Mary Debrabant, “the Hamley plot comprises distinct criticism of social customs,” such as primogeniture and class endogamy, “superseded by the implications of Darwinian evolu­ tion”; the novel thus instantiates an “essential evolutionary law, the necessity to adapt, failing which certain groups are exterminated.”2 For Louise Hen­ son, who has illustrated the ways in which Gaskell’s fiction is not so much specifically Darwinian as informed by the scientific thinking that paved the way for The Origin of Species, “the children of this‘mixed’marriage,Osborne a sickly aesthete, and the robust and dynamic Roger, are associated with clear cultural developments, which the survival of one and the eradication of the other confirms”;the overdetermined fates of the two underline that “the narrative impetus of the novel is towards social and political change,” so the unfit heir must give way to the better­endowed second son.3 To read the novel in this way, however, requires repressing both the messi­ ness of contemporary scientific theory, which we explored in chapter 5, and the greater complexity of biological inheritance as Gaskell represents it: in the words of an earlier fictional representation that takes up related questions, “we’ve allas summut uh orther side in us” (WH 192). With each boy given the same educational opportunities,Osborne squanders his fellowship chance, while Roger throws off his dullness to become Senior Wrangler. The elder turns out to be no more inventive or...

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