After wandering the vast oceans with Captain Ahab and his crew, wallowing in whale oil, sliding about in blubber, and washing down mouldy ship biscuit with three-year-old water, a reader naturally seeks a snug room in which to tuck her skirts about her, dry her feet and brew a fresh cup of tea.
Two books I read last month seemed a caricature of men’s literature and women’s, and an online discussion about that divide put me in a mood to compare apples and oranges. On the whaling ship Pequod , or anywhere at all in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick , the reader navigates an entirely male universe, from the docks of Massachusetts to the South Pacific. I often lump this novel in with The Old Man And The Sea , but Moby- Dick is not as relentlessly about the hunt as Hemingway’s novel. Ishmael, our narrator, is widely read and gregarious. He writes of art, mythology, and the tattoos of savages while educating us about the bones, organs, habits and habitats of the whale, and even the case law of whaling. The advantage of a 19th Century novel is its leviathan scale and unpredictability. If you’re bored of the subject, hang in there. An entirely unrelated subject will shortly emerge. This one has a bit of everything in it and has been called The Great American Novel.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s slender Cranford has never been called The Great anything. It has a cast of mostly women. “Cranford is in possession of the Amazons,” declares our narrator. In fact, she says, whenever a married couple settles here the gentleman leaves to work in a distant town, joins the army, goes to sea, or dies outright. The ladies of Cranford seldom know what to do with the men who do appear.
In that era and in that class of English society, women without men were usually poor, and those who attempted to earn sacrificed their social status. When Miss Matty Jenkyns loses her small capital, she overcomes her squeamishness to sell tea. Once she is reunited with her long-lost brother, and presumably his money, she happily gives up her shop. Yet Miss Matty and her set are never idle. Their constant labour and thrift keep them independent, respectable and saviours of neighbours in distress.
Unlike Melville’s whalers, who make their fortunes from hunting, the Cranford women can only wear their poverty with grace. But Gaskell wrote other novels, large, sweaty and smoky, in which she strove to represent authentically the social conflicts of the industrial age. In Cranford she created a smaller, pre-industrial world with flawlessly rendered dialogue and sympathetic characters. From that narrow beginning her women disperse toward various destinies, in loving families or in solitude, and stitch together a society.
Melville seizes a far larger canvas, but with every chapter he narrows his story to the obsession of one man who ultimately drowns his entire world. All that survives the voyage of the Pequod is Ishmael, an outcaste as always, but far more haunted than before.
