Wives & Daughters - chapters 1-10

Sorry for not posting lately. We were really busy with Thanksgiving and such. If anybody still reads this blog, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving! Now, on with this post......

Honestly, I haven't really found too much in Wives and Daughters so far to make up an interesting blog post. Either Gaskell writes pure narrative or I'm bad at analyzing (probably the latter ;-). So sorry if this is a pretty boring first post.

The main character is a 17 year old girl named Molly Gibson, who is the daughter of a semi-brilliant country surgeon; her mother died when she was little. Not surprisingly, Molly & her father are pretty close. Although she has a sort of governess who lives with them, Molly lives in a slightly awkward position - two young interns live in the house to study under Dr. Gibson, and one of them seems to have acquired a fancy for Molly. After intercepting a love letter from the aforesaid smitten intern, Molly's father decides to send his daughter to visit friends for a while.

Molly becomes pretty close with Mr. & Mrs. Hamley, the people she's staying with. They always talk about their two college-age sons, who seem to be exact opposites of each other. The older son, Osborne, is polished, intellectual, and poetic (the family has high hopes for him), while Roger, the younger, is entirely uninterested in book learning, preferring all things natural and scientific. Roger comes home to visit for a while, and he and Molly don't really hit it off.

One day, Molly's father decides to get married again. The intended lady, a widow, has a daughter Molly's age, so you'd think the whole thing is a good idea. However, Mrs. Kirkpatrick sort of seems like a rather selfish, shallow person, and when Dr. Gibson informs Molly of the news, she freaks out. Later on, Roger finds her crying under a tree, and in a gruff sort of way, tries to console her. So I'm thinking that they'll probably become friends despite their initial personality clash.

Like Jane Austen's novels, there's a very clear distinction in Wives and Daughters between the "commoners" and the gentry. You know there will be the inevitable Rich-girl/guy-wants-to-marry-poor-guy/girl-but-snobby-parents-interfere situation. And I find it slightly not cool how suddenly Dr. Gibson decided to re-marry. Although he had been thinking about it for a while, he literally made the decision AND came up with who to marry all while riding over to a client's house. Yikes!

One thing about Victorian literature that always strikes me is the different and odd philosophies to be found in each book. (Alcott is one of the weirdest) Wives and Daughters is not excluded. Here's an excerpt in which Dr. Gibson tells Molly's governess how he would like her education to go:

"Don't teach Molly too much: she must sew, and read, and write, and do her sums; but I want to keep her a child, and if I find more learning desirable for her, I'll see about giving it to her myself. After all, I am not sure that reading or writing is necessary. Many a good woman gets married with only a cross instead of her name; it's rather a diluting of mother-wit, to my fancy; but, however we must yield to the prejudices of society, Miss Eyre, and so you may teach the child to read."

????

But besides these assorted oddities, I find Wives and Daughters to be a pretty good book so far. I like the everyday kind of story, not gothic novels a la Emily Bronte or Ann Radcliffe. The subtitle of Wives and Daughters is "An Everyday Story," so I think we're good to go.

Till next Monday....