The Regime of Gentility and Exclusion in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford

Abstract

This essay purports to examine in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford how the rule of gentility in the provincial town of Cranford produces an adverse effect on the members of the community. In the narrative of the novel, gentility is an ideological normative code of regulation and restrictions controlling the Cranfordians’ frame of mind. Michel Foucault's idea of the disciplinary mechanism is essential to understanding the politics of exclusionary gentility. In order to establish a pure community and a disciplined society, all the ladies of the Cranford community should conform to the coercive logic of binary division based on the categorization of polar opposites between the elegant and the vulgar. The Cranfordian virtue of elegance is essentially masked by the false consciousness of social hierarchy in ranks, pretension of nobleness, and disciplinary punishment on non-conformist of the genteel order. The narrative reveals a paradox of gentility since the Cranford’s female regime is actually constructed by the ruling systems dominated by patriarchal ideology, as suggested in the influence of Mr. Jenkyns’ pedagogy on his daughter Deborah, the arbiter of social manners and propriety. The Cranford ladies’ tastes known as small economies reflect their fetishistic obsession with objects rather than the practical utility of the objects. The ideal of self-sufficiency and frugality is nullified by their compulsive economy designed to satisfy their emotional needs. Thus Cranford debunks the myths of the aristocratic gentility by revealing the impossibility of female, noninterventional, self-sufficient economies of gentility.