An Analysis Of The Female Characters In Gaskell’s Wives And Daughters

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) is one of the most important female writers in earlyand middle Victorian Age. She writes7novels,4novellas,1biography and morethan40short stories. In the past few decades, especially since1950s, there have beengrowing studies and researches about her, who actually has become an importantfigure in the field of Victorian studies. It is now widely recognized that she hasproduced a great variety of works over twenty years in her highly successful writingcareer. As a gifted storyteller with a zest for anecdote, legend, and socialobservations, Gaskell is innovative and experimental in the use of genre,particularly in the realm of fiction.This paper mainly deals with the characterization of her last novel, Wives andDaughters (1866). Wives and Daughters is Gaskell’s one of the masterpieces, inwhich, for the first time, she makes the unacknowledged problem to be a center,which is how to educate daughters to be wives. The four characters involved in thisstudy are four ones who are Mrs. Gibson, Mrs.Hamley, Cynthia and Molly. Amongthem Mrs. Gibson and Molly are unusually regarded as two subtle and penetratingcharacters in the novel. In Victorian society, women were generally restricted withinthe domestic sphere. They got married and would be responsible for the wholefamily. So Victorian women are often called “the angel in the house”(Stoneman,1987). This paper attempts to interpret Wives and Daughters from the perspective offeminism in order to find out the feminist ideologies in the novel as well as in thenovelist, which assert a belief in sexual equality and call for the eradication of sexistdomination in a transforming society.