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“Strange and Rare Visitants”: Spinsters and Domestic Space in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford

2010; Routledge; Volume: 32; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08905495.2010.493444

1477-2663

Anna Lepine,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes [1] In the nineteenth century, the spinster’s body was frequently compared to fruit. In Every Woman’s Book; or, What is Love? (1838 Carlile, Richard. 1892. Every Woman’s Book; or, What is Love? 1838, London: Robert Forder. [Google Scholar]), for example, Richard Carlile suggests that human “ripeness” is connected to sexual activity: In animation, as well as vegetation, ripeness is a point of health to be gained and enjoyed; and, as the animal so far differs from the vegetable, as to be a self‐renovating and self‐preserving machine, to make ripeness wholesome it must be duly enjoyed. If the proper excretions be not prompted, ripeness is either never accomplished, or if accomplished hastens to decay. They, therefore, who abstain from sexual intercourse, are generally useless for the purposes of civil life. (5–6) Similarly, the heroine of “Single Life Versus Married Life,” an article appearing in the Penny Illustrated Paper in October of 1866, is pitied for having “hasten[ed] to decay”: “Poor Louisa! She is an old maid. The full grape has shrunk into the withered raisin—just as sweet, but not so tempting” (246). Lillie Hamilton French’s orchard imagery thus taps into this pattern of the spinster’s representation. [2] Lillie Hamilton French (1854–1903) was an American writer based in New York. In addition to her 40‐year career with Harper’s Bazaar (as both a contributor and a staff member), she wrote several novels and two home decorating books, Homes and their Decoration (1903) and The House Dignified (1908). [3] The fact that the spinster found herself without a room of her own in the Victorian domestic home was exacerbated by the increasing specialization of room function over the nineteenth century. The “consciously contrived” space of the Victorian home was theoretically divided into front and back, upstairs and downstairs, with children’s rooms, sick rooms, servants’ rooms, female drawing rooms and male libraries. See Donald (105–07); also Aslet and Powers. [4] The 1851 census (which asked respondents their marital status and famously reported a numerical imbalance of the sexes) likely sparked the Victorians’ growing interest in the shrinking space(s) available to spinsters. [5] Dolin reads the ladies’ refusal to distinguish between private and community property (which includes both home spaces and stories) as a protest against contradictory laws that allowed single women the right to own houses but not to vote. [6] Ruskin’s own recently annulled marriage to Effie Chambers Gray was unconsummated; hence his own “vestal temple” had remained pure. [7] Unmarried women (known under the law as feme sole) maintained their right to own property; once they married, they became “covered” by their husbands (legally, feme covert). Tim Dolin explains: In law, women of property included unmarried women and spinsters (the single woman who ‘has the same rights to property as a man’, in Bodichon’s words) who might be possessed of a fortune or existing on the barest income; and separated wives who fought for legal access to their own property and earnings. Until the married women’s property laws were changed – first in 1870, but not with any real success until 1882 – women under common law (that is to say, ninety percent of Victorian women) were legally absorbed upon marriage into the identity of their husbands. Their legal personality was accordingly suspended. (2–3) [8] Cobbe’s antipathy toward nomadism forms a direct contrast with the positive Romantic trope of wandering. To the Romantics, wandering or vagrancy implied a freedom from possessions. As Celeste Langan argues, “the Romantic text turns the Kantian ‘subject without properties’ into the ‘subject without property,’” thus paving the way for equality between vagrant and poet (21). Conversely, spinster wanderers might be seen as subjects with property, and many caricatures of old maids show them traveling surrounded by all their worldly goods (umbrellas, hat boxes, parrots, etc.). The ladies of Cranford distrust the many men who wander (like the Romantics) in and out of their village, so different from their explicitly feminine travels through village space they have reconfigured as domestic. [9] Taken in the context of colonialism, Cobbe’s comment implicitly advocates not the rights of all women but specifically Englishwomen to make homes anywhere they please, thus positing a portable English domesticity that superseded the customs of foreign inhabitants in their actual homes. As Amy Kaplan points out, “the conditions of domesticity often become markers that distinguish civilization from savagery” (479). However, Cobbe’s validation of a single woman’s right to travel is significant, for traveling by oneself was perceived as incompatible with femininity. As Maria Frawley explains, such women were cast in monstrous terms: “manly women,” “sea serpents” and (most interestingly in the context of Cranford) “fair amazons” (113). To counter these labels, many women placed greater emphasis on their efforts to “domesticate” the natives in an attempt to preserve their image as proper Victorian women. [10] The novel was initially envisioned as a short story. “Our Society at Cranford” (which became chapters 1 and 2) was published in Charles Dickens’s Household Words in December 1851. Asked to continue the tales, Gaskell wrote the remaining episodes, which were published serially until May 1853. The first one‐volume edition of Cranford was issued in June 1853. An additional story involving the characters of Cranford, “The Cage at Cranford,” was published in Dickens’s All the Year Round in November 1863. [11] For a fascinating reading of how Gaskell reconfigures menopause as a remedy for Malthusian overpopulation, see Niles. [12] As d’Albertis points out, an interest in disguise and dissembling pervades all of Gaskell’s novels. [13] See, for example, Auerbach’s discussion of Captain Brown’s death in Communities of Women (81). [14] For a compelling analysis of this scene, including the intertextual significance of Mr. Holbrook’s choice of “Locksley Hall,” see Schor (102–04). [15] As Carse observes, Mary Smith is not even named until chapter 14 (318). [16] In most Victorian chronologies of spinsterhood, a single woman’s charms could decline as early as age twenty‐five, and were often believed to expire around age thirty. Ocasionally, women are admitted to be attractive as late as thirty‐five. Julia Swan points out that in two articles on the spinster from Eliza Cook’s Journal in 1849 and 1850, the author believes that “the rubicon age was taken to be thirty, after which one becomes an ‘old maid’” (35). Charlotte Yonge is more generous, stating that it would be “ridiculous” if a woman did not keep to the ranks of youth up to age thirty or thirty‐five (284), but she also admits that in “old‐fashioned novels,” women between the ages of twenty‐five and thirty “were absolute old maids” (284). Moreover, her extension of a woman’s young maidenhood to age thirty‐five is meant to be generous. Lilian Bell’s novel, The Love Affairs of an Old Maid (1895 Bell, Lilian. 1895. The Love Affairs of an Old Maid, London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co.. [Google Scholar]) opens on the night her spinster protagonist must “bury” her youth—her thirtieth birthday. The woman specifically associates the death of her maidenhood with this threshold: “To‐night I am a gay young thing of twenty‐nine. To‐morrow I shall be an old maid” (3). [17] Both Carse and Jaffe point to the generic or imaginative quality of the name “Mary Smith.”