The
female teller of The
Arabian Nights,
holding out the promise of another tale – a tale leading to another
– has now been recast (in my mind) as Elizabeth Gaskell. Dickens, I
am told by a professor of English, addressed her as such, for her
short stories always contained suggestions of further. And told in
parts – two or three or more, as many were then, they would have
defied Poe's criteria defining a shorter work, for none could have
been read 'at a sitting'. Readers would have had to ponder the first
part until the next was published, continuing or concluding the tale.
A slower digestion of words would have allowed tales with layers,
such as hers were, to be more closely examined, and for the social
problems she may have raised to be considered, set in a world where
Time and Place are becoming different, or to characters who have
gained Independence appear so: they are part of a wider world; a
world that questions their own; a world that for all its progress of
simplification is actually more complex. Or the reader is introduced
to the woman's world of making do, including that of her reflections:
girlhood recalled, then the first flush of womanhood, before Age with
its grey locks knocked at the door, and turned all to memory. Here, a
woman's mind is preferred to her person.
Mrs
Gaskell's observations seem to me still current: Time and Place are
always changing, complicating rather than simplifying; and such
advancement, whilst it allows us to connect with the wider world,
causes us to neglect our local surroundings. Our horizons broadened
we lose much (in my opinion) by failing to narrow them. And yet a
woman's world is still not as broad as a man's, nor is her mind
consistently preferred to her person.
Picture credit: Scheherazade, Sophie Gengembre Anderson (source: WikiArt).
See
Cousin Phillis and Other Stories, Elizabeth
Gaskell (Oxford World Classics, 2010, introduction and notes by
Heather Glen.) From journal, November 2021.
