Abstract
This chapter provides close reading of a number of Elizabeth Gaskell’s short stories, which illustrate the gloomy side of Judith Butler’s theory of performativity. In these stories, which are rarely examined by literary critics, characters are compelled by discourses rather than able to manipulate or resignify them. The analysis then moves to the opposite type of text, novels that contain characters who are capable of resignifying the compulsory discourses that surround them. The focus of this section of the chapter is on Wives and Daughters, with some attention also to North and South. Mary Barton is discussed as a bridging text between Gaskell’s early short fiction and later novels. The strongest argument for the cheerful hypothesis of performativity is to be found in Gaskell’s novels, but it is not clear from them which factors make it possible for discourse to be resignified.
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Notes
- 1.
Full bibliographic information for all editions I cite can be found in the References list.
- 2.
See Schaub (2004), “Sympathy and Discipline in Mary Barton ,” which argues that Gaskell’s vision of workers whose sympathy for owners would cause them to discipline themselves makes the novel more sinister than it is generally taken to be, when it is read as preaching sympathy to the factory owners. In that article, I engage extensively with prior criticism of the novel, a discussion that I omit here for space reasons.
- 3.
Butler (1990), Gender Trouble , 140, emphasis in original. Further references to this text will be given parenthetically and abbreviated as GT for clarity.
- 4.
In the last paragraph of the story, Gaskell abruptly changes direction, when Susan takes Michael Hurst’s widow and surviving children to live with her, and they “banish” the ghosts (129). However, it is not possible to make this event square with the timeline laid out in the first, framing chapter of the story, and it seems inconsistent with the theory of mind that is portrayed in the other ghost tales. “Half a Life-Time Ago” is a revised version of “Martha Preston,” an earlier story that was more optimistic (Foster 2007, 115), and the abrupt shift in the ending of the later version might be a relic of that earlier material.
- 5.
Wives and Daughters is Gaskell’s most fully developed novel in its minuteness of description of characters’ inner thought processes; see Josie Billington’s introduction to the Pickering Masters edition of the novel for excellent analysis of examples of Gaskell’s ability to convey complex states of mind through as little as the choice of a single word (2006, xiv–xx).
- 6.
Butler (1993), Bodies That Matter , 122–4. Further references to this text will be given parenthetically and abbreviated as BTM for clarity.
- 7.
Although I see the short story form as imposing compression and restriction on Gaskell’s ability to develop characters, others have described the short story format as providing Gaskell freedom to experiment. See Alan Shelston (2011), “Exploring the Boundaries in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Shorter Fiction”; and Benedetta Bini (2011), “‘The cat on her knee’: Gaskell’s Leave-Taking.” And, of course, it is entirely possible to find extremely circumscribed and subjectivated characters in Gaskell’s novels. Perhaps the strongest example is Ruth Hilton in Ruth, a “fallen woman” much like Lizzie Leigh or Esther in Mary Barton , whom Deidre d’Albertis describes in her introduction to the Pickering Masters edition of the novel as being “curiously oblivious” about her own nature and as avoiding self-awareness. D’Albertis ascribes this to the difficulty in naming a “fallen woman” as anything other than the product of “competing discourses on sexual commerce,” leading to a situation in which the title character of a novel “resists individuation” (2006, ix).
- 8.
While Butler is often thought of as a founder of queer theory and primarily as a gender theorist, and Gender Trouble does focus almost exclusively on the discourse of gender, the theoretical framework she describes for how performativity works, both in shaping a subject and in a subject’s own performance, can apply equally well to many other discourses that have a similar social heft. Butler acknowledges in Bodies That Matter that “no one [demographic] term can serve as foundational” (240), and analyzes specific texts in light of discourses of race. In investigating British literature, social class is an equally important discourse.
- 9.
Occasionally, an author acknowledges the fact that s/he and Butler “part ways” on some specific application, as Emma Karin Brandin (2010) puts it (32n7), and argues for the decision. Such explicit engagement with the theory is not the issue I am highlighting here.
- 10.
Morris had described him as losing control through melodrama while Tange says he avoids that loss of control in histrionics. This might seem contradictory, but in fact I think both critics are right, and that Mr. Gibson is as complex as the novel itself is.
- 11.
References
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Schaub, M. (2019). Strict Performativity and the Limits of Resignification in Stories and Novels. In: Performativity in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Shorter Fiction. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26314-0_2
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