Molly (Justine Waddell) helping the much debilitated Mrs Hamey (Penelope Wilton) up the stairs early in the serial (and book)
Molly and her father, Mr Gibson (Bill Patterson), rebelling against the rigid and jealous Mrs Gibson (her father’s second wife) to grow close and have loving comfortable supper together while she is away, later in the serial (1999 BBC Wives & Daughters, scripted Andrew Davies
Dear friends and readers,
I trust I’m not exaggerating when I say I just finished a delightful, companionable and very instructive time with a class of older adults (around 23-26 people) reading Gaskell’s final novel masterpiece, Wives and Daughters. This long (some 650 pages) mid-century (written 1864-66) seeming pastoral novel took us some 6 weeks; some of us watched the film adaptation during the last 4 weeks. I found for us some very readable good essays on the larger more abstract themes of the book: the decline of the older gentry against the money-based agricultural new science; a world view which is based upon, and a landscape growing out of, early evolutionary theories about people’s relationship to animals, a Darwinian outlook (Roger Hamley, the second son, is modeled on Charles Darwin, Gaskell’s cousin whom she was friendly with, and some of whose work she had read); the new credit economy.
The class discussed at length the character-based ones: the education of a young woman in this society, what should it be like to lead her to a fulfilling and productive life — something far more useful and stimulating and even career-oriented than making hats and spending time on fashions or being sheerly idle; the importance of mothering, mothers, caring for one another truly as the basis of social life, sisterhood and women’s friendship. Of course the class system and importance of money, individual conflicts, gossip and communities — no English novel can be written without these.
Mr Gibson (Bill Paterson) introducing the two new sisters, Molly and Cynthia Kirkpatrick (Keeley Hawes)
To some readers the above may not sound exciting or absorbing — it may today seem commonplace as ideas to assert. I admit I left out what counted most in the class out of Gaskell and especially this novel: her astonishing creation of believable complex elusive personalities changing and developing in interaction with other personalities; the exquisite precision of her style and use of the just the right word to capture moments of being; the beauty of the evocative landscapes. The book is Tolstoyan in its memorable characters (who does not love Molly? detest Mrs Gibson, feel there is much in Mr Gibson and Cynthia Kirkpatrick we can’t get near), various intriguing depths of this and other sorts — from the book’s uses of memory, time passing, slow changes, and its surprisingly wide range of reference and radical ideas mingled in conversations at dinner tables too.
Osborne Hamley (Tom Hollander) manifesting that what is being asked of him, to be proud hierarchical obtuse master is beyond him
Tonight, though, I’d like to call attention to what is often overlooked in this book: it is assumed the book’s depiction of family life and sex is strictly conventional, with what we see of family life basically good for everyone, and a depiction of readily binary normative heterosexual sex for just about everyone with restrictive norms for controlling (keeping “safe”) women. Not so. In fact what this book calls attention to is how women (take Mrs Hamley) and young girls can be driven to illness, an early death, by the “killing” (Molly’s word) demand the individual sacrifice him or herself (more often her) for authority figures who turn out to be quietly predatory and bullying (Mrs Gibson) or noisily an ignorant (hard word I know for the squire who means very well). It is arguable that the Squire’s insistence he control his older son’s marriage choice, and dissatisfaction over who and what Osborne is, killed Osborne. The book is often discussed as one where lying and keeping secrets are shown to be the coward’s way of avoiding reality, but it is also one where these techniques are shown to be self-protective defenses against people close to you who cannot understand you and the large community. Mr Gibson may be too loving a father: his bad marriage choice results from his sexual panic when he finds Molly, age 17, is attracting suitors; he is as controlling as Mrs Gibson and his attitude towards “the sex” (“women”) is condescending, narrow; he marries badly because he does not begin to think of having a wife as an intimate partner. He does not expect women to be equal to men.
At the same time sexuality is fluid and gender roles too. Mr Gibson mothers Molly; Roger and Osborne both have many “feminine” characteristics too: nurturing, tender love. The women are forceful and strong. Lady Cumnor runs her big household; Mrs Hamley ran the business side of Hamey house; for better or worse, Mrs Gibson takes over the housekeeping in the Gibson household. The unmarried women seem to do very well.
Rosemary Pike as the independent-minded young Lady Harriet whose attraction to Molly signals Molly is potentially such another as she
This in a book where the central characters and interests of the story are feminocentric. The small, intimate, daily domestic behaviors and words and art are those that truly count. Lady Harriet, unmarried (and likely to remain so) Cumnor daughter, occasionally a mouth-piece for Gaskell, tells Lord Hollingford (amateur in the best sense of the word geologist, biologist, botanist) his finds may be the important intellectual truth which account for the attitudes and forms our society takes, but hers, about the daily ephemeral yet endlessly repeating living acts, however small and intimate, are where life is lived. Gaskell does write of industrial strikes and strife, abysmal poverty and early death from the unameliorated capitalist manufacturing system the characters live in (Mary Barton, North and South); of 18th century mutiny and pressing (Sylvia’s Lovers), of witch trials (misogyny and crazed religion — “Lois the Witch”), meditations on the 18th century enlightenment and revolution (My Lady Ludlow). But in all these books what makes us so deeply engaged is the same deep textual matter (the text itself, the scenes, and dialogues and meditations) left “richly indeterminate” that is the basis of Wives and Daughters (see Jose Billington’s book on Gaskell’s books as Tolstoyan). It should be no surprise that Gaskell can manipulate these kinds of texts to contain the funniest of scenes amid scenes of death, distress, bankruptcy, loss and change in Cranford too
We turn to Davies’ movie, which develops just the subversive material I’ve been talking about, which relies on the production of stress and sympathize to make us enter into any critiques of novels turned into films.
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Roger (Anthony Howell) and Molly early in the film sharing a vision of real nature in the microscope early in the film
Roget enabling Molly to have educated herself, and now travel with him as a collecting scientist
Davies’ commentary on why he did what he did, the analogues to other films and books he relied upon give us useful insight into Gaskell’s book and how he treated it. What he said about Molly Gibson shows how in his mind Gaskell’s book is such another as Austen’s books (written we should remember half-a century earlier):
It’s a pretty close run between her and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice for the most appealing heroine in English literature. I’m the father of a daughter, and Molly brought out those feelings in me. You feel very protective towards her, even though she can stick up for herself. She’s not the prettiest girl in the story, and you sympathize with her when all these chaps look past her and see Cynthia and immediately stop paying her any attention.
Of Osborne Hamley:
He was the character who gave me the most problem with the script, because when I read the book, I thought: “My God! This is the first gay character in 19th-century literature!” Then I thought: “No, it couldn’t be.” You get the feeling when Osborne comes on that the revelation about him is going to be that he’s gay, because in the book he really is quite effeminate in his manner. He seems to be a caricature of a gay character. He’s always talking about the opera, he’s very good with older ladies, he has a very close relationship with his mother, he can’t stand his father. The secret French wife and the child seemed a bit unlikely to me, and so I tried to make him more Keatsian – not a drooping spirit, but a passionate, poetic character, who just had the bad luck to have a growing and fatal illness.
Analogously, Davies dwells more on the sister pairs of Molly and Cynthia than Gaskell and he makes Cynthia more sympathetic, the feel of this relationship is also homoerotic and deeply sympathetic to women as his portrayal of the Misses Browning (Barbara Flynn and Deborah Findley)
Davies is working with a modern flexible sense of what a family and friends group truly consists in:
It’s about second families, isn’t it? In the book, of course, you’ve got second families because of people dying young. Nowadays, it’s because of divorce and remarriage. But the problems are the same, aren’t they?
I would call attention — and Davies does too — to how Mr Gibson and Molly are the central bonded pair of the book. This is one of the subversive areas of the novel. Is Mr Gibson doing the right thing the way he persists in trying to keep Molly a child? He can’t, and his attempts at procuring a dragon-lady chaperon lead to much unhappiness and sickness in Molly. The book’s first climax of the book is Mr Gibson confronting Molly with what he has heard about her “loose” behavior with Mr Preston; the second of this Gibson plot is supposed probably to be Mr Gibson accepting Roger’s explanation for why he has realized it was not Cynthia who would make him happy but Molly.
I noticed again the book’s other story, the Hamley and mostly male one, had been rearranged so as to make the Hamley story as and more important than the Gibson one. Davies often takes the male story of a novel by a woman and makes it central where in the original novel it is subordinate or at least very much secondary — though this is not true of Gaskell’s book. The last part of W&D is more changed from the book than the earlier parts — it is after all unfinished and Davies takes more open liberties than with Middlemarch or other of his adaptations of older classic novels. Not only is Preston made sympathetic, but as Gaskell didn’t get to finish the book, Davies choses his own ending and alters matter coming up to it to fit — Molly becomes free to explore and wander around the world (as a married woman). All book long she was educating herself under Roger’s tutelage and in the film adaptation we see her reading, copying out picture; Roger’s first present is a wasp’s nest (dead).
Molly has received a wasp’s nest from Roger, delivered to the Miss Brownings (that’s Phoebe, Deborah Findlay) while her father has placed her out of their house
Nonetheless, as I’ve suggested, this is very much a woman’s film, showing a woman’s world and it is at the intimate level of reality such things are experienced as destroying life. Mothering is central to everyone’s experience of growing up. Today the home is hard for many women to escape still.
In the book (softened in the film into comedy) Mrs Gibson is made one of the obtuse unchangeable horrors of life: a continual liar, deceitful, obtuse to all but her ugly way of seeing the world (not just utterly materialistic but everyone and thing is measured by rank – it is a misogynistic stereotype), but now the sexuality between Mr and Mrs Gibson (why he lets her get away with what he allows) complicates it as it’s brought out. In one manuscript the book was called The Two Mothers: the other would be Mrs Hamley who is seen comforting Molly several times and Mrs Gibson never. In the modern sense Mrs Gibson is allow to inflict emotional abuse on Molly by continually objecting, over-riding, mocking, complaining, demanding, controlling.
Mrs Hamley and Molly
To turn to a few particulars, Davies develops further his depiction of the father and daughter as intensely loving and interdependent, this really revelatory of Davies’ preoccupations and presentation of him self in his work. IN the film Mr Gibson believes Molly’s story, accepts her refusal to tell it all and immediately guesses the real culprit is Cynthia – – it is so painful in the book where at first he does not believe Molly. In the film Molly is not quite as ill (in the book she seems to come close to dying), and in the film Mr Gibson is using the illness that to try to keep Roger and Molly apart. It is in the film more emphatically than the book Lady Harriet (Rosamund Pike) to the rescue of Molly, Osborne dies, and Molly and Roger (Anthony Howell) marry: we are spared the wedding (though we do have the reception afterwards — see the comments below) and instead have that appropriate expansive walk into an Africa sunset (I doubt it looks like Ethiopia). The growth of new enlightened attitudes in medicine and respect for science (this is part of Mr Gibson’s role), is part of the novel, and the film adds this is the age of women travelers (see some of the film studies in my supplementary reading list). Much of the proto-feminism of Molly’s remarks are in Gaskell, not made up; the dialogues we hear are often in the book.
In this retelling Davies, the film-makers, and actors combine to make Osborne’s death and his father’s grief very like Shakespeare’s Lear. Gambon has Lear in mind as he staggers home with the corpse in his arms; when Gambon as the squire howls; when he realizes Osborne will never eat again.
Cardwell’s Andrew Davies includes a few remarks on this film. She singles out strong female protagonists but does not sufficiently see the weak males which hold center of films: emotional men, needing ties — the Squire, Osborne. Strong men are men who follow a work ethic — Roger and Mr Gibson
Davies also builds up Preston’s (Iain Glenn) relationship with Cynthia, and shows sympathy for Preston in insisting on his point of view: he loved her, thought she loved him, is intensely enamored of her sexually, won’t let go. This is very like Davies 2002 Dr Zhivago (Granada/WBGH, Giacomo Campiotti, Anne Pivcevic, discussed in another blog) where the same interaction of feeling and sentiment informs Davies’ conception of Lara (who like Cynthia at first loves and then turns to hatred) and Komarovksy (Sam Neill was more subtle about showing this, but then he’s the older man). (This emphasis and perspective is a development out of Elizabeth Gaskell, but one could read Gaskell’s text quite another way — as sheerly hostile to Preston as a cold unscrupulous cruel ambitious man.)
Although in black-and-white this still captures the aggressive sexual energy Ian Glenn projects as Mr Preston
The sexuality of a man (Preston’s) gripped by a woman is repeated in Davies’s portrait of Mr Gibson’s (Bill Patterson) marriage to Mrs. Gibson (aka Hyacinth Kirkpatrick, Francesca Annis)
The film genre is richly pastoral, indeed Arcadian environment, with richly colored flowers and much dark greenery. The houses of the wealthy are ornate; there is much scientific equipment to be seen, books, botanizing in the Hamley as well as Gibson household. When we are in Africa, we move to a burnt-orange, yellow and brown palette, but there too intense beauty is caught. All this is fascinating and well-done.
It’s telling that in an interview with Nic Ransome Davies says he’s usually rejected from fully American projects, and himself called “effete.” The demands for intense physical masculinity in American typologies are often avoided by Davies. But Davies is talking of how this very macho culture precludes doing sensitive perceptive film-adaptations of better novels in the US cinemas — and tells one story of his own experience of rejection and its grounds.
I noticed the music echoed music in Brideshead Revisited and nostalgia was worked up, use of blurring, the mise-en-scene rich and ornate greens, and this was done especially in the sequence where Mrs Gibson went to London with Cynthia and we have a few minutes of the renewal of Mr Gibson and Mollys’ relationship. Davies is daring here — he again and again in his series broaches this area of the older man loving the young girl, here really a father and daughter. It reminded me of Sebastian and Charles Ryder sequences with a use of voice-over too as the father and daughter revel together at a picnic in a meadow, and eating before the fireplace alone.
The film also exhibits intertexuality with famous books: Squire Hamley (Michael Gambon is just brilliant) coming out with Osborne in his arms, and the use of “never” shows Lear and Cordelia are meant. Osborne’s death with the fly over him is naturalistic death. Strong secularism in Gaskell’s book becomes a lack of providential patterning. Davies turns to Austen for some of the bitterly ironic but subdued lines of Gibson to his wife. Brideshead Revisited techniques are seen in the build up of Roger and Molly’s romance, but also the use of dance from Austen, and the final “yes” scene is clearly James Joyce’s Ulysses’ Molly. Roger and Molly are modelled partly on Edmund Bertram and Fanny Price, but it’s clear Roger is also another Yuri Zhivago or Arthur Clenham (Davies has also made a brilliant Little Dorrit).
Squire Hamley (Michael Gambon) and Molly reading a letter of congratulation for Roger together — reading letters together is all about memory, bringing the past and the absent one close in our imaginations
But finally or for the Gaskell fan, constant reader or watcher, it’s the film’s coterminous terrain with Cranford Chronicles and the Return to Cranford (where letters are central), or Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters with her Cranford stories that provides the subterranean basso continuo of the book and film. I am back with how feminocentric Wives and Daughters is. However blurred, this still captures that: another “Amazon’s” world. But this would require another blog (unless I’ve already written on these parallels in all the Gaskell material on this and other of my blogs) on the marvelous Cranford Chronicles and Return to Cranford. Here is one I wrote with a friend long ago, before I started on my journey through Gaskell’s writing.
Molly, Cynthia, Mrs Gibson (Francesca Annis), and the Miss Brownings (Barbara Flynn and Deborah Findlay)
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 