Instead, the novel refigures that tale as a tale of second families—what we today call blended families—with all their complications, both happy and painful. One of the ways the novel seems most modern, and most astute to the contemporary reader, is in its dissection of the small but persistent tensions within a blended family. Molly resents the changes in her routine and environment that Mrs. Gibson makes, and Mr. Gibson (whose unromantic vision was for a manager of his house and daughter) resents his wife’s banishing of his favorite vulgarity, the eating of bread and cheese for supper. One could point to any number of scenes in the novel that carefully trace the nuances of petty resentments, annoyance, and discomfort that can sometimes emerge in these living situations. In the following example, taken from the scene in which the stepmother-to-be and her future stepdaughter first meet, the narrative captures the sense of suppressed feelings within a scene of forced felicity:
Molly did not speak, but it was by a strong effort that she kept silence. Mrs. Kirkpatrick fondled her hand more perseveringly than ever, hoping thus to express a sufficient amount of sympathy to prevent her from saying anything injudicious. But the caress had become wearisome to Molly, and only irritated her nerves. She took her hand out of Mrs. Kirkpatrick’s, with a slight manifestation of impatience (p. 138).
And in this second example, taken from the first time Molly and Cynthia meet as sisters, the narrative is explicit about the pleasures, as well as the inevitable awkwardness, of new relations:
Molly fell in love with her, so to speak, on the instant. She sat there warming her feet and hands, as much at ease as if she had been there all her life; not particularly attending to her mother—who, all the time, was studying either her or her dress—measuring Molly and Mr. Gibson with grave observant looks as if guessing how she should like them.
“There’s a hot breakfast ready for you in the dining-room, when you are ready for it,” said Mr. Gibson. “I’m sure you must want it after your night journey.” He looked round at his wife, at Cynthia’s mother, but she did not seem inclined to leave the warm room again.
... Cynthia rose and followed Molly upstairs.
“I’m so sorry there isn’t a fire for you,” said Molly, “but—I suppose it wasn’t ordered; and, of course, I don’t give any orders. Here is some hot water, though.”
“Stop a minute,” said Cynthia, getting hold of both Molly’s hands, and looking steadily into her face, but in such a manner that she did not dislike the inspection.
“I think I shall like you. I am so glad! I was afraid I should not. We’re all in a very awkward position together, aren’t we? I like your father’s looks, though” (p. 215).
The particular oddness of Cynthia and her mother’s relationship is here drawn for the first time, made more stark by the warmth of the newly met stepfather and sister; Mrs. Gibson not only does not meet her daughter where she is dropped by the coach, but she forgets to order a fire for her bedroom. Cynthia here alludes quite directly to what the narrative elsewhere works hard to suggest through the details of domestic life: the “very awkward position” they are in as strangers and yet also the nearest of relations.
Wives and Daughters,
although ostensibly structured around a slowly emerging marriage plot, is in fact an extraordinary depiction of the contours of blended families and, more generally, the rhythms of everyday family and married life.
The description of the other family that is dissected in
Wives
and
Daughters
is a more tragic depiction of family life than the (generally) comic presentation of the Gibson family. The family of Hamley Hall, equally divided between its ill and dying members and its hardy and stubborn ones, is subject to what feels like an inevitable series of misfortunes resulting from the clash of cultures and personality types within the family. Mrs. Hamley is an invalid in a literal sense, but one senses too that her sickness is a response to her husband: Her London upbringing and refined tastes are at odds with a loving but nevertheless uneducated and provincial husband. The Hamley’s two sons embody the opposition of their parents: Osborne, the elder, golden son, is poetic and destined for a brilliant career at university, while Roger is considered plodding and more like the father in his physical strength and proclivity for the outdoors. Roger, in fact, personifies the doctrine of “muscular Christianity,” a belief system equating moral and physical fitness that became widely accepted in the 1850s: “ ‘This Mr. Mason told me the tutor said that only half of Roger’s success was owing to his mental powers; the other half was owing to his perfect health, which enabled him to work harder and more continuously than most men without suffering’ ” (p. 365). Gaskell portrays the dangers of determining the life paths of one’s children and of patriarchal dominance; the novel’s most tragic plot traces the ill consequences of a son’s fear of his father’s disapproval. Although overbearing and authoritative, Squire Hamley is undemonstratively loving—a combination the novel suggests is particularly dangerous. His fundamental lack of insight into his own emotions is part of a larger preoccupation of the novel about the mismanagement of one’s inner life. When the Squire is faced with an inconceivable loss, the depiction of the collision between the earlier self—dogmatic and unforgiving—with the new self, which fiercely combines love, regret, and pain, is one of the more harrowing presentations in nineteenth-century literature. If not quite a depiction of redemption, Squire Hamley’s transformation is nevertheless a realistic presentation of the capacity for change.
The novel is fascinated with the intelligent male’s capacity for errors in judgment, as well as the role of social mischance in deciding individuals’ fates. Gaskell shares these concerns with George Eliot, who in
Middlemarch
especially explores how social mischance and errors of judgment can get in the way of human aspiration. Gaskell is interested in these themes in
Wives and Daughters
but is much less likely to project the cause and effect through a tragic lens. For instance, in
Wives and Daughters,
when the often-absent Dr. Gibson happens to intercept the ridiculous Mr. Coxe’s missive of love to Molly, the web of effects that drives the story is set in motion, while in
Middlemarch
there is nothing ridiculous about the determining accidents (the meetings of Dorothea and Casaubon, and Lydgate and Rosamond) that drive their failures and compromises. In Gaskell’s novel certain significant errors of judgment—in particular, errors of judgment about whom one loves—are ameliorated by mischance before an irrevocable step is taken. Like
Middlemarch, Wives and Daughters
places the most serious errors in judgment squarely in the hands of the men of science. Roger Hamley wins repute by publishing a scientific paper responding to French theorists, while Lydgate’s ambitions to discover a primary tissue also derive from contemporary preoccupations in French medicine.
Middlemarch,
which was published six years after
Wives and Daughters,
charts the destruction of scientific ambition by bourgeois marriage. And the grand error in judgment resides with a woman, as it does in
Wives and Daughters,
with the key difference that Gaskell allows Roger to make a mistake and then rebound from it. As such, one might say that, like
Middlemarch, Wives and Daughters
meditates on the human capacity for self-deception and compromise, but unlike Eliot’s novel, Gaskell’s novel is less interested in tracing the irrevocable outcomes of a wrong choice. The woman Roger will eventually marry will not impede his scientific aspiration, but rather further it. In this and other ways the register of
Wives and Daughters
is “comic,” not in the sense that it is humorous but (as in Shakespeare’s comedies) in the sense that it promotes resolution and social harmony. The scientific men who are prone to making poor judgments in
Wives and Daughters
are not presented in a buffoonish light; on the contrary, the men of science in the novel (including Roger Hamley, Lord Hollingford, and Mr. Gibson) are clearly the most appealing and respected men in the book. The novel is imbued with references to natural history and contemporary (to the 1820s) scientific concerns, including the two-year journey of exploration and natural-history collection in “Abyssinia” that Roger Hamley pursues. As Deirdre D’Albertis suggests in
Dissembling Fictions,
Roger is patently modeled on Charles Darwin, who when young was a naturalist on the
Beagle
and who was Gaskell’s relative; Gaskell, in a letter to her editor George Smith, connects Roger’s travels with Darwin’s. Africa (specifically, the east coast of Africa that Roger follows) should be understood as a point in the novel’s triangulated geography: England, France, and Africa are implicated in the novel’s deepest concerns, even though the narrative’s focus does not leave Hollingford. To the denizens of the town, and especially Squire Hamley, France functions as the resented and feared “other” to England’s steady centrality; clearly, the specter of the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars (1800-1815) is still present, for there are repeated unfavorable references to the French, including references to “boney” (Napoléon Bonaparte) and “Johnny Crapaud” (an early version of the slur of the French as “frogs”). The great secret that Osborne keeps from his father has to do with France, for Squire Hamley’s aversion to the French is no secret. The resolution to which the novel ultimately comes suggests that social progress and the casting off of national prejudices are concomitant with each other. Africa, however, is not granted the same status, but rather functions symbolically in the novel as the opposite of Hollingford’s civilization.
When characters leave Hollingford, the narrative does not follow them on their journey; neither Roger, who traverses the east coast of Africa, nor Cynthia, who spends weeks in London, is present in the narrative when away, except through the occasional letter. Africa functions in the novel’s geographical triangulation as the imagined absence or emptiness, the place where one is “away” rather than a location in its own right. This geopolitical nearsightedness is underscored by Roger’s scientific pursuits while there: He is a natural historian collecting “unknown” specimens and “discovering” new places, which are then duly presented to the Geographical Society via letters and in person, when he returns. That Africa conjures up frightening associations for the women of Hollingford is probably a correct presentation of English cultural attitudes; lurid descriptions of Africa (especially of cannibalism) would have been familiar from newspapers and journal reports from the early decades of the nineteenth century through mid-century, when John Speke and David Livingstone made their storied journeys. One of the most jarring aspects of the BBC film version of
Wives and Daughters
(1999)—replayed in the United States on the PBS
ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre
series—is the choice that was made to show Roger Hamley occasionally in the landscape of eastern Africa. The visual interruption of the English country scene with the sublime scenery of Africa is one that the original novel does not make; the reader is never even privy to Roger’s letters, which are not reproduced within the narrative nor read aloud by the neglectful Cynthia, so Africa never gets represented in any meaningful or evocative way. Instead, Africa stands in for absolute absence, the place from which one returns.
The scientific exploration that Roger is sent on is but part of the broader discourse of science in the novel. Moreover, Roger’s scientific interest in the natural world, which Molly then adopts, seems to provide an analogy for the work that Elizabeth Gaskell is performing in her narrative. One way of understanding
Wives and Daughters
is to think of it as an analysis of people in their particular environment—a kind of “social ecology” in which the observation of a single person or specimen in its environment teaches one about general patterns or truths. The methodology of natural history emphasizes close observation of the common or everyday, to better understand how the particular fits into the broader rubric of nature. Likewise, the novel studies or observes Molly and the inhabitants of Hollingford to better understand the broader category of human nature. This scientific-like observation of Hollingford is one way of understanding the rhetorical conceit behind the novel’s subtitle (“An Every-Day Story”); the author and the natural historian share a common perspective and commitment. As a biographer notes, “Gaskell claims simply to look, like Roger Hamley, into a pool which others might pass by: the everyday life of families in a country district. But she knew that her dull-looking specimens would turn out to be rich and rare” (Uglow, p. 585).
Roger Hamley is the character most profoundly associated with the study of nature: “He had been out dredging in ponds and ditches, and had his wet sling-net, with its imprisoned treasures of nastiness, over his shoulder” (p. 115). The study of nature comes indoors as well, where the primary tool of the early-nineteenth-century scientist is employed:
That evening he adjusted his microscope, and put the treasures he had collected in his morning’s ramble on a little table; and then he asked his mother to come and admire. Of course Molly came too, and this was what he had intended. He tried to interest her in his pursuit, cherished her first little morsel of curiosity, and nursed it into a very proper desire for further information. Then he brought out books on the subject, and translated the slightly pompous and technical language into homely everyday speech. Molly had come down to dinner wondering how the long hours till bedtime would ever pass away ... But prayers and bedtime came along before she expected; she had been refreshed by a new current of thought, and she was very thankful to Roger (pp. 121-122).
Here the study of natural objects is represented as palliative, for Molly had been deeply upset by the news of her father’s remarriage; the scene also captures the first moment that Molly values Roger. He had found her outside crying earlier in the day, a scene in which his innate tenderness is demonstrated through a plant and in which he sees Molly (as if for the first time) while looking out for a particularly rare specimen: