Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell Page B

growth or insect might develop itself in that which now appeared insignificant? (p. 115).
    Of course it is Molly whom he cannot see as he searches out the rare specimen, which the attentive reader will recognize as a narrative forecasting of his future relation to her.
    Natural history in Wives and Daughters is more than a provider of analogies for love plots. The value natural history places on “observation” is mirrored by the novel. One of the best examples of this mirroring occurs in chapter 33, when Gaskell’s own observational powers and commitment to the description of natural detail appear side by side with the letter awarding Roger the scientific travel fellowship. The letter says that he had “great natural powers of comparison and classification of facts; he had shown himself to be an observer of a fine and accurate kind” (p. 364). The scene Gaskell describes invites the same kind of praise, and bears citing:
    It was one of those still and lovely autumn days when the red and yellow leaves are hanging-pegs to dewy, brilliant gossamer-webs; when the hedges are full of trailing brambles, loaded with ripe blackberries; when the air is full of the farewell whistles and pipes of birds, clear and short—not the long full-throated warbles of spring; when the whirr of the partridge’s wing is heard in the stubble-fields, as the sharp hoof-blows fall on the paved lanes; when here and there a leaf floats and flutters down to the ground, although there is not a single breath of wind. The country surgeon felt the beauty of the seasons more than most men (p. 362).
    The observer (here, Dr. Gibson) is present in the scene, and the details that are enumerated reveal a sensitivity to the process of observation familiar to a naturalist. In Wives and Daughters, those people who are strong observers are distinguished from those who cannot see the truth. It is no accident that Roger Hamley’s great error of judgment manifests itself as a failure of observation, one in which he cannot see the truth about a woman, but rather only a series of trite poetic images: She was a “a polar star, high up in the heavens, and so on, and so on; for, with all a lover’s quickness of imagination and triteness of fancy, he called her a star, a flower, a nymph, a witch, an angel, or a mermaid, a nightingale, a siren ...” (p. 368). The capacity to observe is equated in the novel with the capacity for truth—qualities most consistently present, not surprisingly, in Molly, the novel’s heroine.
    Natural history also functions in Wives and Daughters as a kind of analogy for its narrative procedure. That is, the novel makes a clear connection between interest in “out-of-door things” and the pursuit of a detailed exposition of everydayness, which can be said to be Gaskell’s ambition. In the following economical description of Roger, “everydayness” and “detail” are terms of value that are in line with knowledge of the natural world: “Roger was practical; interested in all out-of-door things, and he enjoyed the details, homely enough, which his father sometimes gave him of the everyday occurrences which the latter had noticed in the woods and the fields” (p. 248). In the same way that looking at objects under a microscope for Molly was palliative in her moment of deepest despair, here the practice of noticing nature knits together a father and son. The kind of knowledge that his father has—gathered from “everyday occurrences” that even this uneducated man had “noticed in the woods and fields”—is like the knowledge that Roger Hamley is pursuing as a naturalist and budding scientist, which in the coming years (but not yet) would become a proper subject at university. Roger’s interest in the “details” is matched by Gaskell’s narrative, which interests itself especially in the economic details of everyday life: how many bank notes are needed for a gown, the price that the Miss Brownings pay for tea, the specific