The split subject of narration in Elizabeth Gaskell's first-person fiction

Abstract

My dissertation approaches a number of Elizabeth Gaskell’s first-person works, namely, Cranford, (1853) Cousin Phillis, (1863) “Six Weeks at Heppenheim”, (1862) “The Poor Clare” (1856) and “The Grey Woman”, (1861) through a post-modern perspective employing such theoretical frameworks as psychoanalytic theory, narratology and gender theory. It attempts to explore the problematics of Victorian subjectivity from a post-modern, to be more precise, from a Lacanian perspective. All along, I assume that the narrative subjectivity which emerges from Gaskell’s texts, both as a narrating and narrated one, is split, divided and fluid rather than concrete, autonomous and whole, despite clinging to illusions of autonomy and fantasies of wholeness. This is the result of the narrating subject’s misrecognition of its own subjectivity which occurs as part of the continuation or re-enactment of the prototypical encounter between the “I” and its mirror image (Which, again, is one of misrecognition and imaginary wholeness) as experienced in infancy during what Jacques Lacan has theorized as the Mirror Stage. I see it emerging, moreover, as a process in the form of a series of subject positions, imaginary identifications and psychic investments which are discursively, and hence ideologically produced by the symbolic system, rather than as an essence or stable ontological entity or substance. Although over the last two decades Elizabeth Gaskell has been established as one of the major, female, authorial figures as representative of what has come to be known as classic realism of nineteenth-century, she has seldom (if at all) been read as a writer of self-conscious fiction in the ways that some of her more acclaimed cohorts (as, for instance, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot) have and this is what this thesis will partly attempt to do. Despite their realistic frame of reference and mode of writing, which is generally informed by a belief in a world of consistent subjects as the origin of meaning, knowledge and action, the result of the dominant ideology of their time which is the post-Enlightment epoch of empiricism and industrial capitalism, Gaskell’s first-person texts subtly, but firmly subvert such certainties in ways that point to the instability of the speaking subject itself. Hence, her narrators’ splitting ambivalence is to be traced – as a branch of contemporary criticism has consistently attempted to do as regards her better known industrial fiction – even in the most realistically rendered of her narratives, thus giving credit to post-modern interpretations of subject formation. According to them, subjectivity is discursively constructed and dispersed across the range of discourses (cultural, political and economic) in which the “concrete” individual participates. Moreover, this project is intent upon embracing the view that since the narrating subject is constructed in the realm of the symbolic order, which is also the realm of discourse, mediation and ideology, then it is also discursively constructed in ideology itself, which in a seemingly “natural” way interpellates it also as a gendered, class-conscious and race-conscious subject, thus forcing it, through subtle coercion, to assume a predetermined set of seemingly fixed positions in a reality which is but a series of inter-subjective positions, repetitive role playing and masquerading. Narration, as the mutual interaction of both the narrator’s desire to narrate and the narratee’s desire for narrative, has a key role to play, of course, in the subject's “meaningful” being, since it seems to fulfill its primordial desire for a return to origins and past traumas or as Freud would have it a “return of the repressed” via a “compulsion to repeat”, which I see as the ultimate goal of all first-person narratives in general and Gaskell’s own in particular, that of domesticating otherness and/or coming to terms with trauma by re-telling. It is in this respect that my project also argues for first-person narration as symptomatic of the desire to reconstruct the past in the “now” of narration, a model analogous to the one we encounter in the analytic situation.