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CONSERVATION OF SYMPATHY IN CRANFORD

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2008

Jill Rappoport
Jill Rappoport*
Affiliation:
Villanova University
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Extract

By the mid-nineteenth century, British women had ample motivation for imagining forms of charity that did not require money. Property laws continued to deprive most married women of personal wealth and new statistics revealed a “surplus” of unmarried middle-class women lacking employment. Elizabeth Gaskell addressed these financial challenges by envisioning alternative forms of economic power for women. Her novella Cranford (1851–53) depicts a community of shabby-genteel women who support each other, in the virtual absence of men, through gift practices. Using principles of sympathetic and economic conservation, Cranford's system of exchange reworks material limitations, turning these women's lack of private property to their advantage. Cranford is among a number of mid-century works that treat sympathetic exchange in a sustained manner and on an expanded scale, writing women's charity in terms of sympathy and sisterhood rather than coin. By doing so, it not only co-opts the traditional province of the upper class by pitting middle-class women's care-giving against unfeeling wealth, but also defines a sympathetic gift economy in opposition to the masculinized marketplace essential to such models of charity as that of Dickens's turkey-buying Scrooge.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , March 2008 , pp. 95 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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