Spinsters Re-Drawing Rooms in Gaskell’s Cranford

Abstract

The labels of’ spinster’ and ‘old maid’, in Victorian rhetoric, indicated much more than years and marital status. To fail to marry was to be relegated to an almost-invisible social position, to face the trials of often-straitened economic circumstances, and to be excluded from what was increasingly seen as woman’s sole purpose: providing domestic comfort to others.³ This chapter considers how Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford series, published in Household Words from December 1851 to May 1853, takes up the cause of the spinster, welcoming mid-Victorian readers into untraditional homes that had heretofore been barred from view. Gaskell used the venue of Charles Dickens’ Household Words, a magazine that capitalized on popular tropes of normative middle-class domesticity, to offer a more inclusive view of the inhabitants and the function of the drawing room and the parlor. The Cranford stories can be understood as reformist simply by virtue of Gaskell’s placement of unmarried old women at the center of the Victorian domestic interior and her attention to this location as a site of story. Because these women within their homes are the subject of her narrative, when Gaskell accesses these ‘under cover’ stories, she radically shifts the narrative terrain exemplified by her literary predecessor Mary Russell Mitford, whose sketches of village life focus on public arenas that marginalize elderly women.

I pique myself on knowing by sight, and by name, almost every man and boy in our parish, from eight years old to eighty — I cannot say quite so much for the women. They — the elder of them at least — are more within doors, more hidden. One does not meet them in the fields and highways; their duties are close housekeepers, and live under cover.

(Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village)¹

In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women … For keeping the trim gardens full of choice flowers without a weed to speck them; for frightening away little boys who look wistfully at the said flowers through the railings; for rushing out at the geese that occasionally venture in to the gardens if the gates are left open … for kindness (somewhat dictatorial) to the poor, and real tender good offices to each other whenever they are in distress, the ladies of Cranford are quite sufficient. ‘A man,’ as one of them observed to me once, ‘is so in the way in the house!’

(Elizabeth Gas kell, ‘Our Society at Cranford’)²