Wives and Daughters Read Online Free PDF Page B

generations.
    Other differences that Gaskell registers about the changed status of women include the difference in education of the working classes. In the first chapter, the narrator alludes to a school for the working-class girls of the village: “She and the ladies, her daughters, had set up a school; not a school after the manner of schools nowadays, where far better intellectual teaching is given to the boys and girls of labourers and work-people than often falls to the lot of their betters in worldly estate; but a school of the kind we should call ‘industrial’” (p. 7). Gaskell is clearly marking a distinction between “then” and “now,” though her sense of the improvement in education for the poor “nowadays” is perhaps somewhat idealistic, considering that state-sponsored education was not established until the 1870s. The novel’s period of the late twenties was a threshold: a moment just prior to such things as the railway age, the penny post, Catholic emancipation, the extension of the vote, and the accession to the throne of Queen Victoria in 1837. It was, moreover, the real remembered world of Gaskell’s childhood, for even though the novel is set in the Midlands, Hollingford is clearly based on her childhood home in Knutsford, Cheshire, for which she retained an affection throughout her life.
     
    Wives and Daughters attempts to capture pre-Victorian country society at multiple levels, including the upper, middle, and working classes, and to capture the internal hierarchies within each of those class positions. Gaskell’s capacity for the detail makes her exceptionally capable of rendering the texture of the everyday and the nuances of social life. The subtitle of Wives and Daughters is “An Every-Day Story,” which at once announces the novel’s ambition and strategically asserts its verisimilitude. After all, if it is a story about the “everyday” rather than the “exceptional,” then it is a story about the real rather than the fantastic; of course, the novel is simply a fully imagined fictional world, but one in which the reader is encouraged to believe as “real” and eventually cannot help but do so. The subject matter—Holling—ford, Molly Gibson—is deliberately restricted, which makes it possible for a slowly unfolding narrative procedure to enact the world under consideration, effectively bodying forth a sense of its realness in its sheer dedication to details and commonplace (rather than exceptional) moments. As such, you will notice that the narrator is not particularly intrusive, and especially not declarative. You might contrast this narrative style with Jane Austen’s; Austen’s narrative voice has a considerably more authoritative tact, and her arguments are achieved via narrative assertions or Socratic-like debates between characters. The ideas that the reader takes in when reading Gaskell are unfolded rather than stated, as they are more likely to be in (for instance) the novels of George Eliot. Gaskell’s narrative style is subtle, one in which important facts unfold quietly in the form of self-reflexive analysis by characters. The “every-day story” of Molly Gibson’s coming of age in Hollingford in the late 1820s is, of course, a narrative ruse. By making Molly—a character at the center of the ordinary and the everyday whose subjectivity as a young woman on the threshold of the marrying age makes her interesting and even worthy of a story—the focus of the narrative, the novelist is able to dramatize that which is essentially unnarratable: everyday life.
    The nuances of social life in Hollingford demand the reader’s attention throughout the novel. One of Gaskell’s talents as a novelist is the evocation of the internal hierarchies and distinctions among and between the various classes. This talent makes the texture of everyday living seem particularly indebted to the web of classes present even within a county and a village. The contemporary reader