Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell Page A

eastern Africa. The visual interruption of the English country scene with the sublime scenery of Africa is one that the original novel does not make; the reader is never even privy to Roger’s letters, which are not reproduced within the narrative nor read aloud by the neglectful Cynthia, so Africa never gets represented in any meaningful or evocative way. Instead, Africa stands in for absolute absence, the place from which one returns.
    The scientific exploration that Roger is sent on is but part of the broader discourse of science in the novel. Moreover, Roger’s scientific interest in the natural world, which Molly then adopts, seems to provide an analogy for the work that Elizabeth Gaskell is performing in her narrative. One way of understanding Wives and Daughters is to think of it as an analysis of people in their particular environment—a kind of “social ecology” in which the observation of a single person or specimen in its environment teaches one about general patterns or truths. The methodology of natural history emphasizes close observation of the common or everyday, to better understand how the particular fits into the broader rubric of nature. Likewise, the novel studies or observes Molly and the inhabitants of Hollingford to better understand the broader category of human nature. This scientific-like observation of Hollingford is one way of understanding the rhetorical conceit behind the novel’s subtitle (“An Every-Day Story”); the author and the natural historian share a common perspective and commitment. As a biographer notes, “Gaskell claims simply to look, like Roger Hamley, into a pool which others might pass by: the everyday life of families in a country district. But she knew that her dull-looking specimens would turn out to be rich and rare” (Uglow, p. 585).
    Roger Hamley is the character most profoundly associated with the study of nature: “He had been out dredging in ponds and ditches, and had his wet sling-net, with its imprisoned treasures of nastiness, over his shoulder” (p. 115). The study of nature comes indoors as well, where the primary tool of the early-nineteenth-century scientist is employed:
    That evening he adjusted his microscope, and put the treasures he had collected in his morning’s ramble on a little table; and then he asked his mother to come and admire. Of course Molly came too, and this was what he had intended. He tried to interest her in his pursuit, cherished her first little morsel of curiosity, and nursed it into a very proper desire for further information. Then he brought out books on the subject, and translated the slightly pompous and technical language into homely everyday speech. Molly had come down to dinner wondering how the long hours till bedtime would ever pass away ... But prayers and bedtime came along before she expected; she had been refreshed by a new current of thought, and she was very thankful to Roger (pp. 121-122).
    Here the study of natural objects is represented as palliative, for Molly had been deeply upset by the news of her father’s remarriage; the scene also captures the first moment that Molly values Roger. He had found her outside crying earlier in the day, a scene in which his innate tenderness is demonstrated through a plant and in which he sees Molly (as if for the first time) while looking out for a particularly rare specimen:
    He did not see Molly as he crossed the terrace-walk ... when, looking among the grass and wild plants under the trees, he spied out one which was rare, one which he had been long wishing to find in flower, and saw it at last, with those bright keen eyes of his. Down went his net, skilfully twisted so as to retain its contents while it lay amid the herbage, and he himself went with light and well-planted footsteps in search of the treasure. He was so great a lover of nature that, without any thought, but habitually, he always avoided treading unnecessarily on any plant; who knew what long-sought