Challenging the Victorian Patriarchal Ethos: the Role of the Amazons in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford
Challenging the Victorian Patriarchal Ethos: the Role of the Amazons in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford

Author(s): Dana Vasiliu
Subject(s): Gender Studies, British Literature
Published by: Universitatea Petrol-Gaze din Ploieşti
Keywords: Victorian society; gender stereotypes; gender roles; Victorian literature;
Summary/Abstract: Quite popular throughout the nineteenth century, well known and loved by its Victorian readers, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford has more than often been unfairly dismissed by literary critics for its apparent lack of structure and dull sentimental overtones. Even though the rise of feminist criticism in the 1960s did some justice to the author, it nevertheless continued to cast shadow on some of her literary work. For the militant feminist movement of the late twentieth century, Cranford was old-fashioned, tributary to a strong, oppressive set of patriarchal values. More recently, the 2007 BBC production and its two-part sequel, Return to Cranford, broadcast in 2009, wronged Gaskell even more by presenting the viewer with a mélange of three texts (the novel and two short stories) forcibly re-articulated to add some romance into the mix. Thus, the aim of this paper is to re-contextualize and re-evaluate this Victorian novella with an eye to revealing the way in which the “genteel society” of Cranford struggles with gender stereotypes, fights male conventional claims to centrality and challenges the domestic ideology which bespeaks women’s submissiveness, frailty and ignorance.

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