In Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), Michel Foucault uses Bentham’s Panopticon as a metaphor to analyse the reproduction of power in societies of surveillance. Foucault suggests that the Panopticon imposes “axial visibility” and “lateral invisibility” (200) as part of an overarching mechanism that “arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately” (200). The way in which the inmate’s cell is positioned in relation to the central tower renders an “axial visibility” (Foucault 200) of the individual while the partitions that separate each room result in a “lateral invisibility” (200) between the inmates. One primary aim of Panoptic surveillance is “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (201). In other words, the individual internalizes his/her position as an object of vision and manifests this awareness through self-surveillance.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) resonates with Foucault’s notions about the reproduction of power, focusing on female authorship in the nineteenth-century. In their analysis of the Grimm tale, “Little Snow White”, Gilbert and Gubar assert that patriarchal power is able to function automatically despite the patriarch’s physical absence; the King is omnipresent in “the patriarchal voice of judgment that rules the Queen’s—and every woman’s—self-evaluation” (38). In the same way, overwhelming patriarchal authority haunts the female writer in the attempts to construct her own narrative. The journey towards female literary autonomy is thus one in which “a woman writer must examine, assimilate, and transcend the extreme images of ‘angel’ and ‘monster’ which male authors have generated for her” (Gilbert and Gubar, 17). Gilbert and Gubar’s proposal points to liminality: it suggests that in order to transcend the dichotomy of “angel” and “monster”, one has to critically analyse patriarchal frameworks and locate herself within these frameworks. This essay argues that Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford resists the Panopticon of patriarchal authority through narrative liminality. The novel’s narrator, Mary Smith, is characterized by the unique locus she occupies—one that hovers between the partial first-person and the omnipotent third-person point of view. Coupled with the episodic nature of the text, Mary’s position as a narrator reveals the significance of narrative gaps and silences in Cranford. These absences are positioned within the body of the text but represent what evades linguistic representation, simultaneously revealing and concealing the silent stories of the Cranfordians. Through Mary, Elizabeth Gaskell presents the precarious possibility of female self-expression within the patriarchal visual field.
During the great Cranford panic, the Cranford ladies huddle together at Mrs. Forrester’s home and reveal their individual fears. Mary Smith “owned that [her] pet apprehension was eyes—eyes looking at [her], and watching [her], glittering out from some dull flat wooden surface” (Gaskell 97). The image of eyes peering out of an opaque surface is a recurring one. In the context of the Panopticon, opacity here reinforces the unilateral relationship of viewer and object in which the object is unable to contest his/her subordination. While the eyes are often described as the windows to the soul, the inability to look beyond the opaque surface allows the individual behind the gaze to retain anonymity and power. The first instance of this image appears when Mary and her company are waiting for Signor Brunoni’s magic show to begin, suggesting that Mary’s anxiety is rekindled by the appearance of this stranger. Out of the green curtain that had not been drawn up were “two odd eyes, seen through holes, as in the old tapestry story” (Gaskell 86). The story that Mary refers to here is speculated to be “one of the spooky stories which Gaskell delighted in” (211) by Dinah Birch in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Cranford and this corresponds to Mrs. Forrester’s fear of ghosts. This preoccupation with the supernatural does not necessarily emphasize the Cranfordians’ superstitions, but has a further implication with regard to the male gaze. Provocatively, Mary’s description of eyes peering out of holes is less sinister than what she describes to the other ladies during the great Cranford panic. In the former, it can be logically inferred that a particular individual is behind the gaze. The latter resembles the relationship between the Panopticon inmate and the central tower, in which the inmate is kept in a state of paranoia as he/she is unable to attribute the gaze to an individual. These differing situations depict two possible ways of experiencing the male gaze, the second being more debilitating than the first.
In light of Signor Brunoni’s identity, he represents a double intrusion into the female-dominated town as “a being of another sphere” (86)—a man and a foreigner. However, Signor Brunoni’s conjuring abilities generate an additional anxiety about his presence. Magic, like the supernatural, destabilizes the dichotomy of absence and presence. This is possibly the way in which the women of Cranford experience the Panoptic male gaze—both as an absence and a presence. While the Cranfordians actively deny their reliance on men and male presence in the town, Cranford’s peripheral position near the industrial town of Drumble and the newly built railroad undercuts this claim. In that sense, the Cranfordian vision of an untouched feminine geography that is self-sufficient and free from male intrusion is posited as an unachievable utopia.
However, the peripheral position of Cranford in relation to masculine geography minimizes the intensity of the male gaze. While Mary’s apprehension and Miss Matty’s childhood fear of “being caught by her last leg, just as she was getting into bed, by some one concealed under it” (97) allude to a cognizance of omnipresent male power, both women express the desire to resist these fears. In her youth, Miss Matty would “take a flying leap from a distance, and so bring both her legs up safely into the bed” (97) and with the series of robberies happening in the neighbourhood, she devised a scheme with a penny ball to ensure that nobody was under her bed. While the image of Miss Matty leaping into her bed or rolling a penny ball underneath it is a comical one, it nonetheless demonstrates resistance against what could possibly be a crippling fear. Mary states that “if [she] dared to go up to [her] looking-glass when [she] was panic-stricken, [she] should certainly turn its back towards [her]” (97). It is worth noting the situation in which Mary imagines herself facing a mirror – in obscuring her own ability to see the eyes, Mary prevents the unknown voyeur from viewing her countenance. Recalling Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis of “Little Snow White”, Mary prevents herself from internalizing patriarchal power by turning the opaque surface of the mirror towards her own face. This renders her countenance unreadable to the Panoptic gaze and this becomes part of her narrative strategy of inserting silent female stories into the body of the text. Hilary Schor writes that just as the narrator “learns to “read” Miss Matty’s secret heartbreak, readers of Cranford are in turn instructed in varieties of readings, specifically in decoding what the novel terms the “effort at concealment”” (297). In other words, Mary’s narration is a didactic extrapolation of what she learns in her interaction with the Cranfordians, Miss Matty in particular. This narration guides the reader towards a reading that is primed to unveiling concealment, and thus, “gives a voice to what cannot otherwise be expressed” (Schor 297).
The chapter titled “Old Letters” simultaneously conceals and reveals an intense sense of loss that pervades Cranford, both as place and text. The narrator describes an occasion when she had been particularly annoyed by Miss Matty’s “candle economy” (Gaskell 42). Mary “fancied Miss Matty must be dreaming of her early life; for she spoke one or two words, in her uneasy sleep, bearing reference to persons who were dead long before” (43). However, Miss Matty woke “with a strange bewildered look around, as if [Mary and Martha] were not the people she expected to see about her. There was a little sad expression that shadowed her face as she recognised [Mary]; but immediately afterwards she tried to give [Mary] her usual smile” (43). Sleep, as a liminal space, becomes an avenue in which Miss Matty unwittingly reveals her attachment to the past. When Miss Matty awakes and realizes that she had been dreaming, the sad expression on her face hints to the disappointment she feels upon being transported to the present. Subsequently, Miss Matty quickly conceals this disappointment by smiling at Mary and assuming her usual demeanour. This self-censorship and the need to conceal emotions can be related to the condition of the Panopticon inmate—female stories are often highly regulated or silenced, for a good woman’s story should be already inscribed by male-prescribed narratives based on the dichotomy of “angel” and “monster”. For an old spinster such as Miss Matty, her narrative would have been side-lined considering the Victorian preoccupation with fallen women and angels. Even though Miss Matty’s “talk ran upon the days of her childhood and youth” (43), there is an awareness of the marginalized status of Miss Matty’s story. This is demonstrated through Mary’s self-censorship when she refrains from revealing the details of these accounts. Instead, the way in which Miss Matty’s story is manifested is through its lack of direct linguistic representation. By alerting the readers to Miss Matty’s grief through the description of body language, Mary is effectively priming the readers to read the silent stories behind what is unsaid in the text. Like Miss Matty, Mary too displays an awareness of the sanctions on female stories and adopts the use of a feminine language—the focus on small and seemingly unimportant details—to obscure the “axial visibility” (Foucault 200) of the penetrative male gaze. At the same time, through encouraging sympathy for Miss Matty, Mary is reducing the “lateral invisibility” (Foucault 200) between Miss Matty and the reader by establishing a sense of community and solidarity.
Slightly further into the chapter, Miss Matty was reminded of the task to destroy some of the old family letters such that they will not “be allowed to fall into the hands of strangers” (Gaskell 43). The letters represent an important narrative gap as their destruction sheds light on the suppression of female narratives. Though Miss Matty “had often spoken on the necessity of this task, [she] had always shrunk from it, with a timid dread of something painful” (43). As she undid the packet of old letters, Miss Matty sighed “but she stifled it directly, as if it were hardly right to regret the flight of time, or of life either” (43). Miss Matty’s suppression of regret implicitly comments on how progress often entails the forgetting of the past. While it is evident that Miss Matty cherishes the old letters, their existence becomes a burden to her as well. In the case of the letters written by Mrs. Jenkyns, the mother of Miss Matty and Deborah, Miss Matty’s dilemma of wanting to keep the letters and of the necessity to burn them stems from the sentimental value attached to the letters and the desire to protect Mrs. Jenkyns from any possible criticism. Through the letters, readers are acquainted with the process of transformation that Mrs. Jenkyns goes through from a frivolous young girl to a mother, a wife and an angel. While Mrs. Jenkyns’s transformation ultimately conforms to ideals propagated by the Victorian theory of gender, it simultaneously destabilizes them.
In the courtship phase, Mrs. Jenkyns does not respond well to Rector Jenkyns’s affections. Instead, “she was evidently annoyed at his demands upon her for expressions of love, and could not quite understand what he meant by repeating the same thing over in so many different ways” (44). Mrs. Jenkyns, in her days of youth, seems to be an individual with less emotional capacity than her suitor, who wrote letters “full of eager, passionate ardour, short homely sentences, right fresh from the heart” (44). Despite the Rector’s passionate love letters, Mrs. Jenkyns was more preoccupied with procuring a white ‘Paduasoy’ and other articles of dress. This episode subverts gender roles—the woman is presented as being worldlier than the man and less capable of handling affairs of the heart. Here, the Rector embodies characteristics commonly associated with women better than Mrs. Jenkyns does. When Mary remarks on the disjunction between the Rector’s love letters and his usual “Johnsonian style of the printed sermon” (44), it demonstrates how individuals present a different persona in private and to the public eye. The ideals put forth by the theory of gender are discredited and shown to be learnt by both the Rector and Mrs. Jenkyns, rather than innate.
In the case of Mrs. Jenkyns’s transformation, her story is one of intense loss as well. The “white, ghostly semblance” (44) of the burning letters hints at the condition of female narratives—they exist in a form that escapes detection. With the destruction of the letters, only Miss Matty and Mary will have any knowledge of the letters’ content. By confining Mrs. Jenkyns’s story to Miss Matty’s and Mary’s memory, away from the possibility of male interception, the narrative is able to exist in a wholly female space. For Mary, “[she] never knew what sad work the reading of old letters was before that evening, though [she] could hardly tell why” (43). The sense of sorrow that arises out of something that cannot be expressed through language seems to be what bonds the two women in this episode. Margaret Case Croskery, in her article titled “Mothers without Children, Unity without Plot: Cranford’s Radical Charm”, suggests that “it is this sympathetic resonance that defines Cranford’s charm and constitutes its radically different narrative” (207). For Croskery, maternal sentiments are crucial to the novel’s impulses. In a community of old spinsters and widows, it is only through reading between the lines that one is able to see how Cranford masks this pervasive maternal sense of loss. Letters, if conceptualized as the brainchild of a female writer, have to be discarded in a society where literary legitimacy is only awarded to men. Croskery writes that “the radical maternal drive in this novel emerges in its narrative structure” (208). The lacunae in Mary’s narration, such as the lack of information or the tendency to focus on details rather than what the entire episode implies, may be seen as part of this radical maternal drive that attempts to shield female stories from the Panoptic gaze.
Mary notes “how the girlish vanity was being weeded out of [Mrs. Jenkyns’s] heart by her love for her baby” (45). Based on the intermission between the couple’s correspondences, Mary concludes that they had gotten married. The social institution of marriage channels the object of maternal instincts, transferring it from writing to the child. Although Mrs. Jenkyns expresses girlish vanity in her early years, the letters she writes are expressions of female individuality unmediated by marriage. In this sense, the letters are embodiments of the female self and can be conceived as a product of asexual literary productivity prior to the child, who is a product of sexual relations. The image of the white ‘Paduasoy’ recurs after the marriage and from an article of dress that was supposed to adorn the adult female body, it had been “made into a christening cloak for her baby” (45). Throughout Mary’s stays in Cranford, there is an emphasis on the way Cranfordians dress. Clothes have the dual function of revealing and concealing at the same time and this is important in understanding Mrs. Jenkyns’s loss. Mary mentions that the Rector was not interested in the way she dressed and that Mrs. Jenkyns was adamant that “she would not be married till she had a ‘trousseau’ to her mind” (44). More than just having the girlish fantasy of wanting to appear attractive, Mrs. Jenkyns’s insistence on owning the white ‘Paduasoy’ suggests that it was important to the way she perceived herself. However, in cutting up the white ‘Paduasoy’ and re-appropriating its use, there is a suggestion that Mrs. Jenkyns had given up the impulse to conceive her self-image independently of social conventions for motherhood. Mrs. Jenkyns eventually dies from grief when Peter leaves home as a young man, demonstrating how motherhood has defined her existence after marriage.
This maternal desire to overcome loss through a reunion with Peter seems to be transferred to Miss Matty, who is neither a writer of her own story nor a mother. In a mysterious letter she writes to Mary, Miss Matty requests Mary’s help in procuring a hat to attend Signor Brunoni’s magic show. The letter was considerably incomprehensible as Miss Matty “began many sentences without ending them, running them one into another in much the same confused sort of way in which written words run together on blotting-paper” (80). Miss Matty’s style of writing can be seen as a parallel to Mary’s narration—it is rendered unreadable to readers who privilege conventional reading frames. Despite the strange language used in the letter, Mary is able to understand Miss Matty’s request for a sea-green turban. While the request for the sea-green turban may seem arbitrary, it reveals a deeper implication about the degree to which Miss Matty yearns for her brother’s return. In the chapter titled “Poor Peter”, Miss Matty tells Mary about how Peter left home and made his living at sea, before going to India. The sea-green turban, as a representation of exotic lands and the vast sea, may then be read as Miss Matty’s longing to know of Peter’s circumstances. As suggested by Hilary Schor, Mary’s narration is part of Cranford’s success because it “teach[es] us to read its own, specific language, and to master the village, and the novel, on its own terms” (303). Mary’s involvement in the text when she writes to Aga Jenkyns, believed to be Miss Matty’s brother, affirms the reading of the subtle signs sprinkled throughout the text about Miss Matty’s deep sense of loss.
To conclude, Mary’s narration directs the reader towards an unconventional reading of the text. Instead of drawing on conventional frameworks of understanding, Gaskell creates a uniquely feminine language that subtly reveals the untold stories of Cranford. This is done with the understanding of the pervasive nature of the Panoptic gaze and the dominance of the male voice in narratives. In order to escape these overwhelming forces that threaten female self-expression, Gaskell adopts the use of narrative gaps that both simultaneously conceal and reveal. As argued by Croskery, Gaskell “understands that the transformative power of sympathy is crucial to reform on both the personal and social level” (220) and attempts to foster solidarity by breaking down “lateral invisibility” (Foucault 200) between reader and characters. Although Gaskell’s insistence on sympathy as a cure to all social problems can seem dismissive of their severity, she presents a glimmer of hope of escaping the Panopticon by appealing to the human capacity for understanding. This championing of reform, while subtle, is nonetheless a powerful one—it presents the possibility of female self-expression, even within the patriarchal visual field. Cranford, as both place and text, embodies the contradiction of the necessity to conform to social norms and an active and gentle resistance that speaks through silence.
Works Cited
Croskery, Margaret C. “Mothers without Children, Unity without Plot: Cranford’s
Radical Charm.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 52.2, (1997): 198–220. Web. 22
March 2015.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1975. New York: Vintage
Books, 1995. Print.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. Cranford. 1998. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print.
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and
the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 1979. New Haven and London: Yale
Nota Bene Press, 2000. Print.
Schor, Hilary M. “Affairs of the Alphabet: Reading, Writing and Narrating in “Cranford””.
NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 22.3 (1989): 288–304. Web. 24 March 2015.
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