Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text (review)

Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text, by Deirdre d'Albertis; pp. 180. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997, $39.95.

"Mrs." Gaskell (as she has often been called) has tended to be cast as the blandest--and most traditionally feminine--of Victorian women writers, "impressionistically associated," as Deirdre d'Albertis dryly says here, "with English flower gardens, old lace, and the aromas of tea and toilet water" (12). In this study, d'Albertis gives us, in the tradition of such revisionist treatments of Elizabeth Gaskell as Hilary Schor's Scheherezade in the Marketplace (1992), an "Other" Gaskell, a "necessary [. . .] complement to the seraphic portrait of the novelist as guileless, ignorant, and unself-aware" (12). D'Albertis's Gaskell is, indeed, intensely artful--if not exactly a liar, a most equivocal, duplicitous truth-teller. And it is this "poetics of narrative dissimulation" (2) that entitles Gaskell to a place in the feminist literary canon along with women writers, such as Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, who have long been understood as speaking in a conflicted and complex voice about their culture.

In this sense, d'Albertis's argument both extends and revises the work of influential feminist critics, such as Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Elaine Showalter, who hear writers like Brontë and Eliot speaking in a double voice--a subversive voice hidden under a "voice-over" of acquiescence to dominant ideologies. Yet while Gaskell, even at her most political, has been heard as a monovocal champion of domestic ideology, d'Albertis gives us a startlingly different writer. She reads Gaskell as not Una but Duessa, focusing on images of lying and dissembling in her fiction--Margaret Hale's perjuring herself in a refusal to give up her fugitive brother in North and South (1855), the eponymous heroine's passing herself off as a respectable rather than a fallen woman in Ruth (1853), Sylvia's entering into marriage with her cousin under false premises in Sylvia's Lovers (1863), Cynthia Kirkpatrick's dance of flirtatious falsehood in Wives and Daughters (1866). Lying, or at least (in Dickinsonian fashion) telling the truth slant, is central to Gaskell's fiction, and these equivocal acts mirror the author's own ambiguous relation to various discourses involving gender in Victorian culture. D'Albertis thus sees Gaskell not so much as a "maternal" writer, a spokeswoman for domesticity, as a writer who interrogates the relation between male and female worlds. In this reading of Gaskell, the ambivalence and even confusion of her attitudes toward gender, which cause her "dissembling fictions [. . .] to ricochet almost uncontrollably between orthodoxy and radicalism" (13), is reflected in the generic experimentation of her fictions. The public and private worlds depicted in the "veritable magpie's assemblage" (17) of plots about women and politics are in subtle tension. For instance, as d'Albertis argues in Chapter Two, the traces of melodrama in Mary Barton (1848) and North and South, which uneasily coexist with "social realism" (58), reflect Gaskell's mixed feelings about women's entry into the public sphere; similarly, the "penitential narrative" of Ruth, which she explores in Chapter Three, is a "hybrid" of sympathy for and containment of the fallen heroine, as Gaskell tries to negotiate the tricky topic of the sexual woman's redemption.

Several chapters in d'Albertis's book place Gaskell's works in discursive and ideological contexts. Her reading of The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) in Chapter One examines how, in her portrait of Brontë, Gaskell strongly critiques romantic morbidity in women. (By doing so, Gaskell writes herself out of later feminist canons that privilege angry, discontented woman writers, canons which celebrate the very qualities Gaskell criticizes in Brontë.) In Chapter Four, d'Albertis traces the creative fusion of "male" political plots and "female" courtship plots in Sylvia's Lovers. Both plots concern rights, those of men in the anti-impressment plot and those of women, in a plot about marriage...