Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell Read Free Book Online

gentry, the professional class, and the commercial moneyed class. The novel reserves its highest distinction for Molly, however, who through her intelligence and manners succeeds in earning the admiration of the younger generation of the Towers, including Lady Harriet and Lord Hollingford, and who eventually has her worth discovered by Squire Hamley’s family. One way of understanding Cynthia’s ubiquitous popularity (and subsequent class mobility) in light of the more understated admiration felt for Molly is to see that Gaskell’s novel is a limited critique of the commercialization of marriage. Cynthia knowingly parlays her capacity to attract a number of marriage proposals, while Molly’s guileless-ness ultimately is rewarded with the more prestigious marriage.
    Cynthia is neither wholly bad nor wholly good, but rather of a mixed condition—a condition that suits her particularly to Gaskell’s everyday novel. Molly, although her character is unimpeachable and her mind lively, is not an angel playing to Cynthia’s fallenness, but rather—as she introduces herself to Lady Cumnor when but twelve—“ ‘only Molly Gibson’” (p. 22). At most, the stability of Molly’s character is contrasted with Cynthia’s chameleon-like quality, of which Gaskell seems particularly critical, at the same time as the novel suggests that this quality in Cynthia is not a character flaw so much as a necessary strategy for survival. That is, the critique is of the society that produces Cynthia, rather than Cynthia herself Gaskell’s novel operates within a realist rather than a melodramatic idiom; whatever subtle distinction is being drawn between the two girls (primarily one of character) does not get enacted through stark differences in their respective fates.
    In fact, Wives and Daughters seems to be rewriting some of the more traditional literary scripts for women. Mrs. Gibson is not the wicked stepmother of fairy tales, a genre that is evoked in the novel’s very first paragraph: “To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl.” Two things are important to understand about this opening: First, the “country” and the “shire” are introduced only by way of reducing the topic to what it intends to focus on, which is the story of this little girl. In this way, the novel aligns itself with the tradition of the bildungsroman, which is a type of novel that traces the development of an individual (often beginning with a significant event in a young life) in a social and moral context; as such, Wives and Daughters is akin to such Dickens novels as David Copperfield and Great Expectations. The second thing to understand about the opening is that the tone deliberately evokes the flat declarative style of the fairy tale—a style that is further emphasized by the events that quickly follow. Visiting the great people of the neighborhood, the young girl falls asleep underneath a tree, is woken by a woman who will turn out to be her stepmother, and is likened in fun to Goldilocks: “ ‘Oh, ho!’ said he. ‘Are you the little girl who has been sleeping in my bed?’ He imitated the deep voice of the fabulous bear ... but Molly had never read the ‘Three Bears,’ and fancied that his anger was real; she trembled a little, and drew nearer to the kind lady who had beckoned her as to a refuge” (p. 22). Wives and Daughters evokes the genre of the fairy tale, with its fantastic and cautionary tales of stepmothers and girls who overstep their bounds, in order to contrast its own purpose, which is strongly realist. Molly falls asleep under a tree so that the reader might wonder what kind of world this heroine will wake up to. The world she wakes up to is not a fairy-tale world of good and evil, but one of mixed effects and