Elizabeth Gaskell and the English Provincial Novel by W. A. Craik

Author:W. A. Craik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

She has her uses also to the plot, especially when Frederick is coinci-dentally recognized by the rogue Leonards. The coincidence is made to seem both probable and palatable when it is Dixon who sees, recognizes and speaks to him first. Her whole wonderful history of the meeting-a comic delight in itself, its tone making it plain that, though the threat is a real one, the peril will not materialize – is above all superbly and naturally worked in the atmosphere of the main action, by dissipating for the reader and Margaret the melancholy of Mrs Hale’s death.

Dixon, delightful as she is, is notable even more for what she demonstrates of Elizabeth Gaskell making multifarious yet unobtrusive use of minor characters, whose value increases both thematically and structurally, at every appearance. In Mary Barton such characters seemed to have as many relationships with other characters as people in life: now she is less concerned with who knows who, and how they interconnect – Dixon’s circle of acquaintance is not much more than the three Hales – but is far more skilful at making such characters illuminate and vary tone, mood, implications of action and themes. As a personality Dixon could appear in Wives and Daughters; in the art that presents her, she is closer to the interpenetrating secondary figures of Sylvia’s Lovers.

Mrs Thornton, on the other hand, is, though splendid, more isolable from the rest of the novel. Formidable, even noble in essence, she is a deep rendering of a new kind of figure in the novel – the person no longer young, the great crises of whose life might be thought to be past, who yet has a full existence and response to life, and the power of suffering. She is original also in having a grip on what are all too often considered masculine affairs. In the past she has built up her son’s career, and she has a firm hold on the current business of the mill; one feels that she would have made a good master of men herself. Her closest, and only, immediate precursor of this kind is Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley. But what Charlotte Bronte has to claim vociferously – Shirley’s power to fill a man’s role as landlord – Elizabeth Gaskell takes for granted, and allows to emerge easily in the action and dialogue. Charlotte Bronte eventually destroys her case by letting Shirley, like Millamant, ‘dwindle into a wife’. Elizabeth Gaskell’s figure embodies authority, and breathes forth a faintly poignant, though unstressed, mood of unfulfilled and unrealizable potential.

Her chief role is in relation to her son. She is the stock from which he has sprung, with the basic qualities of strength, resolution and pride, with high though rigid principles of personal honour and justice to others, untempered by mercy. She provides for the reader the side of Thornton that he cannot himself reveal without seeming boastful or excessively self-analytical. The love between son and mother, wonderfully reticent as it is, reveals the powerful feelings of

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