When the Living are scarier than the Dead
By: Jasmin James
Tags: Gothic, Horror Fiction, Books, Reading, Elizabeth Gaskell

In Defence of a Moralizing, ‘Preachy’ Writer

Elizabeth Gaskell is often overlooked as a novelist.

And with that I mean in the public consciousness-in the past twenty years, she has begun to garner some truly well-deserved recognition for her contributions to 19th century literature. Biographical research, making use of her own correspondence as well as feminist and Gothic analysis of her work have helped establish her fiction as part of the literary canon. Here, it’s her poignant reflections on human relationships and her accurate portrayal of the industrial conditions and class situations of her time that have been the grounds for a renewed appreciation of books like Mary Barton, North and South or Ruth.

But the general reader often shares fictional Madeleine Hanna’s opinion.

The protagonist of one of my favourite campus novels, The Marriage Plot, (I’ve written a piece about it, should you be interested 😃) is quite clear in what she thinks of Gaskell-someone whose work is enjoyable, but, ultimately, a guilty pleasure.

Not being as witty as Austen, as intellectual as Eliot or as intense as the Bronte’s, popular opinion paints the late Victorian writer in the colours of a ‘wholesome’ but also thoroughly sentimental religious writer.

There may be some truth to these assertions but that’s not all there is to her prose.

Unlike Eliot, who was accused of being unable of writing anything not couched in philosophy or Austen, who was selectively criticised for not writing more varied prose (yes, even the maker of dreamboats like Wentworth or Darcy faced criticism!), Gaskell definitely wrote about a larger social sphere than Austen’s ‘two bits of ivory’ without feeling the need to add philosophical digressions à la Eliot.

Don’t get me wrong, I love both authors but it’s undeniable that the picture of the world they paint is not the definitive one.

Often, Austen’s world is too perfect and Eliot’s too complex. The middle ground is to be found in Gaskell. (I am, of course aware that these author’s lived in different times/under different circumstances and am only judging according to the way certain similar ideas are expressed in their respective novels.)

Gaskell wrote stories about factory workers, maids, widows, mendicant preachers, murderers, thieves and prostitutes, stories about downtrodden men and women, young and old, lost and forgotten, struggling to get by in a world that favours the rich, beautiful as well as the well-connected and well-established.

This is, in some sense, exactly what Hardy did yet the fact that his bleak Wessex does not have a shred of religion to it could be why people are more willing to acknowledge his talents over Gaskell’s.

For me, that talent rests partly in her literary voice.

She writes with the speech of regular people in mind. Gaskell also has a knack for local accents that is hard to come by and her dialogue feels natural to the ear.

In his book On Writing, Stephen King writes that some novelists, like H.P.Lovecraft, are wonderful at crafting prose but shoddy at dialogue. Writing down conversations that engage people means talking to them, getting to know them intimately and listening to them with a keen ear in order to elucidate the rhythms of their speech. Gaskell may have character names change midway in her stories but when she has them actually speak, every word is distinctive and the emotion behind them is near tangible.

A mother of four, a bustling wife and active parishioner, she didn’t flinch from mingling with a subset of people and that shows vividly in her stories.

Her account of the struggles of women in their domestic sphere, and, generally, the powerlessness of women in a patriarchal society are more genuine in that sense than the storm-tossed romance that is Wuthering Heights. Even Middlemarch, despite its canvas of characters and themes, is a work of a different nature. Taking on a near spiritual dimension in its prose, it engages with questions of love, guilt as well as avarice from a vaulted, beautiful, yet, what one can’t help but observe, slightly depersonalized perspective.

Gaskell experimented a lot with narrative technique as well. She used frame narratives and tinkered around with the novella form, a distinctly German art at the time-so for people wanting more substantial proof for the worth of her literary output, it should be enough to consider the ways in which she tried to innovate the form her writing took over the years.

I believe that if she were alive today, she’d be completely harried. She’d be doing it all- hosting a podcast on feminine power both at home and the workplace, giving lectures, holding readings and going through any number of scripts regarding potential films based on her books.From pioneering the factory novel that caused Dickens to write Hard Times to gainsaying Charlotte Bronte’s reputation with her quintessential autobiography, the writer was prolific and keen to explore different genres.

Hence, Gothic Tales.