The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell Read Free Book Online Page B

loving-friend” (Easson, p. 388).
    Although it is a quaint notion to picture Brontë and Gaskell as toilers in the same “vineyard,” the true extent of their literary sisterhood is debatable. Gaskell was a noted “condition of England” novelist, whose fiction was a vehicle for education and reform, although her work is more nuanced than this rubric suggests, and she moved away from this model in later novels, as in the posthumously published Wives and Daughters (1866). She gives voice to the concerns of disenfranchised workers in her industrial novel, Mary Barton (1848), and, in her most controversial novel, Ruth (1853), she depicts the confluence of social and economic forces that lead to the seduction of a young woman. Gaskell allows Ruth to survive her shame and lead a useful life for a time, only to impose a penitential ending in which Ruth dies in an act of self-sacrifice. While aspects of Gaskell’s work may seem overly sentimental to today’s readers, she leverages emotion to build the reader sympathy necessary to open up settled moral questions to a new angle of vision. How do we define criminality? Is stealing a loaf of bread to feed a starving child more immoral than legalized institutional thefts such as the exploitation of labor and the derogation of personal dignity? Gaskell asserts in the preface to Mary Barton that she is interested in exploring “the state of feeling” on topical issues, not in debating economic facts and figures. She does so, in part, to stay within the proscribed sphere of her sex, but also because she wants her reader to learn to sympathize, not to theorize.
    Gaskell viewed fiction writing as a natural extension of the missionary or “rescue work” that she performed as the wife of a Unitarian minister in the great manufacturing hub of Manchester. (For details on Gaskell’s missionary work, see Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell:A Habit of Stories.) This is not to say that her books were traditionalist; Ruth was burned (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 154). But she does at times undercut the full radical potential of the sympathy she awakens by imposing a recuperative ending. Brontë objected to Ruth’s death, for example, on the grounds that it diminishes the novel’s efficacy as an agent of change: “ ‘Such a book may restore hope and energy to many who thought they had forfeited their right to both.... Yet hear my protest! Why should she die? Why are we to shut up the book weeping?’ ” (p. 406). Significantly, Brontë encases her political critique in an affective one, perhaps aware that she was treading on sensitive ground.
    There is a similar hesitancy, unlike Brontë’s forthright and assured voice when addressing critical questions in letters to Williams, for example, in the rhetorical question she puts to Gaskell about the pressure she might encounter to conform to proscribed standards and beliefs in her work: “Do you, who have so many friends,—so large a circle of acquaintance,—find it easy, when you sit down to write, to isolate yourself from all those ties, and their sweet associations, so as to be your own woman, uninfluenced or swayed by the consciousness of how your work might affect other minds.... Does no luminous cloud ever come between you and the severe Truth, as you know it in your own secret and clear-seeing soul? Don’t answer this question; it is not intended to be answered” (pp. 433-434). Although Brontë is careful to bestow the ladylike designation “sweet associations,” upon them, she is prodding Gaskell to reassess the ties that may bind her to a conventionalism she might not adhere to in her “secret and clear-seeing soul.” Brontë pushes Gaskell to confront her own limitations as a writer here, and urges her toward a greater degree of verisimilitude.
    Brontë’s social impulse is harder to characterize than is Gaskell’s, which is what may account for Gaskell’s ambivalence about her work. (Critics have begun to consider the