Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-l82ql Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-29T15:16:44.570Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

MALTHUSIAN MENOPAUSE: AGING AND SEXUALITY IN ELIZABETH GASKELL'S CRANFORD

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2005

Lisa Niles
Lisa Niles
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

IN AN EARLY VERSION of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford sketches, “The Last Generation of England” (1849), the narrator expresses a “wish…to put upon record some of the details of country town life,…for even in small towns, scarcely removed from villages, the phases of society are rapidly changing” (319). Before she begins her ethnographic preservation project, however, the narrator provides a disclaimer, suggesting the difficulty of categorizing the various aspects of what she is about to write: “As for classing the details with which I am acquainted under any heads, that will be impossible from their heterogeneous nature; I must write them down as they arise in my memory” (319). She then goes on to provide precisely what she claims is impossible–a categorical litany of the local inhabitants, beginning with the daughters of “very old” families who, “if unmarried, retired to live in–on their annuities, and gave the ton to the society there” (319). The reader is quickly taken through the town's social register, from “widows of the cadets of these same families,” to “professional men and their wives,” to a “grade lower…a class of single or widow ladies,” and on “[b]elow again,” to “the shopkeepers,” “the usual respectable and disrespectable poor,” and “a set of young men, [hanging about] ready for mischief and brutality” (319–20). Through her description, the narrator performs a double disavowal; heterogeneity prevents classification, but that very heterogeneity is itself what produces the need to classify. The rural society that serves as a precursor to Cranford (1851–53) represents a diversity that must be categorized–its hierarchy organized according to its uniqueness of place. Rendered as particular, readily-identifiable positions within the eccentric space of provincial English society, Cranford's denizens are inscribed through the Victorian fascination with taxonomy–a fascination with the seemingly paradoxical possibilities of “classing the details.”

Type
EDITORS' TOPIC: VICTORIAN TAXONOMIES
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , March 2005 , pp. 293 - 310
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alison Archibald. 1840 “On Population.” Blackwood's Magazine 48: 808– 24. Rpt. Spengler 1: n.p.Google Scholar
Auerbach Nina. 1978. Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard UP
Barbre Joy Webster. 1993. “Meno-Boomers and Moral Guardians: An Exploration of the Cultural Construction of Menopause.” Menopause: A Midlife Passage. Ed. Joan C. Callahan. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 23– 35.
Beeton Isabella. 1861. 2000. Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management. Ed. Nicola Humble. Oxford: Oxford UP
Cass Jeffrey. 1999 “‘The Scraps, Patches, and Rags of Daily Life’: Gaskell's Oriental Other and the Conservation of Cranford.” Papers on Language and Literature 35: 417– 33.Google Scholar
Cobbe Frances Power. 1877 “The Little Health of Ladies.” Contemporary Review 31: 276– 96.Google Scholar
Cobbe Frances Power. 1862 “What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?” Fraser's Magazine 66: 595– 615.Google Scholar
Colella Silvana. 2002 “Intimations of Mortality: The Malthusian Plot in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 24: 17– 32.Google Scholar
Collin Dorothy M. 1986 “The Composition and Publication of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford.” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 69: 59– 95.Google Scholar
Coyle Jean M., ed. 1997. Handbook on Women and Aging. Westport: Greenwood
Craik Dinah Mulock. 1861. A Woman's Thoughts About Women. 1858. Philadelphia: Peterson
Croskery Margaret. 1997 “Mothers without Children, Unity without Plot: Cranford's Radical Charm.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 52: 198– 220.Google Scholar
Davies Henry. 1860. A Hand-Book of Domestic Medicine: Popularly Arranged. London: Bohn
Ellis Havelock. 1902. Man and Woman. 3rd ed. New York: Scribner's
Ellis Sarah Stickney. 1842. The Daughters of England. New York: Appleton
Ellis Sarah Stickney. 1839. The Women of England. London: Fisher
1999. Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations. Ed. Kathleen Woodward. Bloomington: Indiana UP
Gaskell Elizabeth. 1986. Cranford/Cousin Phillis. 1851–53, 1863–64. Ed. Peter Keating. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin
Gaskell Elizabeth. 1849 “The Last Generation in England.” Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art 5: 45– 48. Rpt. Cranford/Cousin Phyllis 319– 26.Google Scholar
Gaskell Elizabeth. 1967. The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell. Eds. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard. Cambridge, Harvard UP
Gillooly Eileen. 1992 “Humor as Daughterly Defense in Cranford.” ELH 59: 883– 910.Google Scholar
Greg W. R. 1862 “Why Are Women Redundant?” National Review 14: 434– 60.Google Scholar
Hickson W. E. “Malthus on Population.” Westminster Review 52 (1849–50) 133– 201. Rpt. Spengler Vol. 1: n.p.
Hughes Linda K., and Michael Lund. 1999. Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell's Work. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia
Knezevic Borislav. 2003. Figures of Finance and Capitalism: Writing, Class, and Capital in the Age of Dickens. New York: Routledge
Lansbury Coral. 1975. Elizabeth Gaskell: The Novel of Social Crisis. London: Elek
Malthus T. R. 1989. An Essay on the Principle of Population. 1803–1826. Ed. Patricia James. Variorum ed. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP
Mangum Teresa. “Little Women: The Aging Female Character in Nineteenth-Century British Children's Literature.” Figuring Age. 59– 87.
Markson Elizabeth W. “Sagacious, Sinful, or Superfluous? The Social Construction of Older Women.” Coyle 53– 71.
Martin Carol A. 1983 “Gaskell, Darwin, and North and South.” Studies in the Novel 15: 91– 107.Google Scholar
Martin Emily. 1997. “Medical Metaphors of Women's Bodies: Menstruation and Menopause.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia UP, 15– 41.
Michelet Jules. 1858. L'amour. Paris: Hachette
Miller Andrew H. 1994 “Subjectivity Ltd: The Discourse of Liability in the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1856 and Gaskell's Cranford.” ELH 61: 139– 57.Google Scholar
Mitchell B. R. 1988. British Historical Statistics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP
Mulvihill James. 1995 “Economies of Living in Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 50: 337– 59.Google Scholar
Munich Adrienne. 1996. Queen Victoria's Secrets. New York: Columbia UP
1992. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. CD-ROM. Oxford: Oxford UP
Poovey Mary. 1998. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P
Poovey Mary. 1988. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: U of Chicago P
1859 “Queen Bees or Working Bees?: Review of a Paper Read by Miss Bessie Parkes to the Social Science Congress.” Saturday Review 12 Nov. 575– 76.
Schor Hilary M. 1992. Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP
Sherman Susan R. “Images of Middle-Aged and Older Women: Historical, Cultural, and Personal.” Coyle 14– 28.
Spencer Herbert. 1852 “A Theory of Population, Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility.” Westminster Review n.s. 1.1: 468– 501. Rpt. Spengler 1: n.p.Google Scholar
Spengler Joseph J., ed. 1973. Population Problems in the Victorian Age: Debates on the Issue from Nineteenth Century Critical Journals. 2 vols. Hants, UK: Gregg
Stevenson William. 1824 “The Political Economist (No. II, Part II).” Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 16: 34– 45.Google Scholar
Tilt Edward John. 1882. The Change of Life, in Health and Disease. 1857. 4th ed. New York: Bermingham
Uglow Jenny. 1993. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. New York: Farrar
Vicinus Martha. 1972. Suffer and Be Still; Women in the Victorian Age. Bloomington: Indiana UP
Woodward Kathleen. Introduction. 1999. Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations. Bloomington: Indiana UP ix– xxix.