Item Details

title

Modality and Sociality in Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford

author

Perry, Hannah

abstract

This essay explores the expanse of modal affordances between the realist and gothic modes in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford. I will pay attention to the ways in which “The Panic” chapter is narratively jarring, depicting individuals behaving in ways counter to their previous characterization and invoking ghost stories and gothic motifs in what has been, up until this point, a narrative situated in a realist mode. This essay gives particular attention to the text’s narrative modes, primarily the realist and the gothic—the latter primarily through a well-known chapter, “The Panic”—to explore how Cranford engages in complex mediation practices to negotiate the town’s social identity. I propose that the narrative affordances of realist and gothic modes serve dual purposes: exposure and (narrative) production. Cranford simultaneously exposes the precarious situation of the Cranfordian life while also depicting the women imagining and subsequently producing new ways of being. In presenting a community of women insisting on their individuality and value as they find themselves vulnerable to destitution and unprotected by the institutions that superintend them, the text produces a system that is both speculative and referential.

subject

Empire

Gaskell

Gothic

Mode

Realism

Victorian

contributor

Pyke, Jenny (advisor)

Jenkins, Melissa (committee member)

Richard, Jessica (committee member)

date

2024-05-23T08:36:09Z (accessioned)

2024 (issued)

degree

English (discipline)

embargo

2029-06-01 (terms)

2029-06-01 (liftdate)

identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/109410 (uri)

language

en (iso)

publisher

Wake Forest University

type

Thesis