Elizabeth Gaskell and Manchester:
Identity, Culture and the Modern City
Conference, 19/20/21 July 2005

Such critics as Jennifer Uglow (Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories) and Deidre D’Albertis (Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text) bring attention to the multiplicity and complexity of Gaskell’s literary discourse and her appeal to diverse audiences. Throughout her works, D’Albertis, points out, we encounter “multiple subject positions and overlapping ideological discourses” (177).

Here I wish to discuss Elizabeth Gaskell’s attempts to record a multiplicity of voices traditionally silenced by dominant ideologies and monolithic histories. In her major novels, Mary Barton, Ruth, North and South, Sylvia’s Lovers and Wives and Daughters, as well as her short stories, Gaskell gives utterance to silenced individuals, thus expressing resistance to monological ideology and recognizing the importance of sociopolitical change in offering the unauthorized an opportunity to speak and to become social agents. In her preface to Mary Barton, Gaskell recounted her reason for writing it as the desire to give voice to the oppressed whose misery was unheeded by their oppressors. Prescient of terrorism, Gaskell warned that oppression ultimately affected everyone.

Starting with Ruth (1853), Elizabeth Gaskell gives utterance to women denied their subjectivity through her reconfigurations of famous and popular Pre-Raphaelite paintings. In her letters we may discover her acquaintance with the three founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and her admiration for their works. By redrawing Pre-Raphaelite paintings in her narratives, Gaskell seeks to further participate in contemporary debates on gender inequities; simultaneously she explores the role of Pre-Raphaelite visual art in the endorsement or subversion of gender stereotypes.

In Museum of Words, Hefferman reminds us that ekphrasis entails “the rhetorical technique of envoicing a silent object. Ekphrasis speaks not only about works of art but also to and for them” (1, 6-7). Through her reconfigurations of such popular paintings as Millais’s Mariana, Ophelia, Huguenot, Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, Ecce Ancilla Domini!, Hunt’s The Light of the World, Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus, and their identification with such female protagonists as Ruth, Margaret, Sylvia and Molly, I demonstrate, Gaskell gives voice to silent Pre-Raphaelite subjects.

The collision between silence and articulation, poignantly expressed in her fiction remained a problem in Elizabeth Gaskell’s own private life as her letters, particularly those responding to hostile reviewers, attest. Yet Elizabeth Gaskell’s simultaneously reticent and multifarious rhetoric invites us to explore more diligently the nuances and subtleties of her literary discourse. In her fiction that discourse takes on pictorial nuances as scenes and subjects reveal feminist reconfigurations of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. If we are then to appreciate and recognize Elizabeth Gaskell’s alternative possibilities for gendered subjectivity, I contend, we must also take into consideration the pictorial dimension of her narratives, for, as her major novels disclose, Gaskell’s challenge to gender ideology is often embedded within subtle Pre-Raphaelite iconography.

I intend to show pictures of Pre-Raphaelite paintings during my presentation.

Sophia Andres is Kathlyn Cosper Dunagan Professor in Humanities at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin, Odessa, Texas 79762
andres_s@utpb.edu