Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years

12. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Well-Tempered Madness

217 12 Elizabeth Gaskell A Well-Tempered Madness Thomas P. Fair Through its insightful scrutiny of language and allusion, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic dissects Victorian women authors’ repressed madness and anger as a coded response to exploitation, domination, marginalization, and economic dependency.1 Gilbert and Gubar ’s investigations of canonical works by Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, and George Eliot posit a feminine imagination operating from within a prison of gender and sexuality in order to subvert patriarchal oppression. Initial critical reception generally perceived the work as an apt continuation of Kate Millett’s groundbreaking Sexual Politics (1968) and as an important progression from feminist literary criticism begun by Patricia Meyer Spacks, Ellen Moers, and Elaine Showalter.2 But Gilbert and Gubar’s approach also raised controversy among feminist critics: Madwoman was received as both persuasively argued and unpersuasively monolithic. Nina Auerbach, for example, claimed that Gilbert and Gubar’s “rich compendium of images, fears, and dreams of power that haunted nineteenth-century women writers is a definitive , if not totally consistent, study of the mythos of subversion out of which the woman’s tradition arose.” Auerbach’s reservations about the book’s limitations , though, were shared by other critics. Madwoman, she wrote, “posits a patriarchal oppressor who is more gargantuan than any I have ever met, in the nineteenth century or our own.”3 Did all Victorian women writers register anger and rebellion against a titanic patriarchal oppressor? 218 Thomas P. Fair Perhaps because Elizabeth Gaskell takes a less adversarial and more elusive position, one that places her outside the main critical direction taken in The Madwoman in the Attic, she is notably absent from Gilbert and Gubar’s monumental work.4 Deirdre d’Albertis argues in Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text, that Gaskell“is written out of Madwoman in the Attic because she in no way resembles their preferred type of the angry Romantic artist.”5 Exploring the possibilities for freedom and selfexpression for a woman in the domestic sphere of the emergent middle class, Gaskell avoided the potentially reductive relationship of a female author’s struggle against her male precursors or her characters’ endeavors against the limiting and debilitating patriarchy noted in Madwoman. An interpretation of Gaskell’s novels against Gilbert and Gubar’s critical assertions challenges their analysis of the restrictions and obstacles faced by female characters in the work of Victorian women writers. Although historically and culturally Gaskell’s female protagonists must contend with a social environment that, in part, contains oppositions identified and detailed by Gilbert and Gubar,6 Gaskell’s fictional environments reflect several complex, competing relationships —class, economics, and gender—more intricate than those identified in Madwoman. Operating within realistic and conventional social models of marriage and family to demonstrate the range of possibilities for a woman ’s fulfillment, Gaskell often balances, either internally or externally (and with equal success), a rebellious individual with a conventional figure. Gaskell appears to be reinforcing the hegemonic paradigm when, in fact, she is subverting it to allow her rebellious heroines agency and the opportunity to fashion their own success from within the system that would attempt to contain them within its traditional boundaries. In this essay, I want to re‑ insert Elizabeth Gaskell into the discussion of the nineteenth-century woman writer’s literary imagination: Gaskell’s portrayals of women’s psychological , domestic, and political stratagems temper the madness of their revolt and should be read as an imperative alternative to the oppressed and enraged madwoman. Often marginalized as a quaint chronicler of village life and manners, Gaskell actually promotes a complex vision of domestic relationships with an intricate interplay of individual desires and traditional demands. This complicated, multifaceted aspect of Gaskell’s novels is the focus of Felicia Bonaparte’s The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester (1992) in which she offers an interesting but speculative biographical investigation of Gaskell’s work. Bonaparte’sargumentsegmentsGaskell’spersonalityandwritingintothatof a sentimental and traditional“Mrs.Gaskell”and that of a fully realized if not feminist author,a“demon”reminiscent of Gilbert and Gubar’s madwoman.7 The psychological suppositions and the absence of a domestic and social- Elizabeth Gaskell 219 cultural context so integral to Gaskell’s writing, however, significantly undercut Bonaparte’s overall analysis. Gaskell’s presentation of female consciousness in relation to patriarchal authority functions within an ambiguous if not elusive framework that simultaneously reflects and...