Gender, Animals, and Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis

Öz

The so-called animal turn in the humanities has given rise to an increased interest in the ways in which representations of animals shape human cultures. In Victorian studies, scholars have attended to the significance of domestic pets and other animals in the production of Victorian ideologies and subjectivities. Recent studies often point out the role animals played in the formation of Victorian domesticity. While these studies in general assign a key role to animal figures in the mediation of traditional domesticity, this essay explores the opposite phenomenon taking place in the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis, a novella in which pets and farm animals are prominent. In this work, the eponymous protagonist, a young woman living on a farm, falls in love with a cosmopolitan engineer. Rather than portraying Phillis as an ethereal angelic creature who would be typical of the ideal Victorian woman, Gaskell ascribes to her a passionate nature, though hidden behind a constrained façade. Phillis is partly able to express her deep-set emotions, including her interest in the cosmopolitan engineer, when interacting with animals. This non-traditional gender role becomes possible through the representation of birds and the family dog. Animals enable the imagination of a femininity that resists restrictive gender codes. The traditional association of animals with women has sometimes worked to denigrate the latter, but as Gaskell shows that this link also has an emancipatory potential.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Animals
• Cousin Phillis
• domesticity
• femininity
• gender roles

Kaynakça

1. Derrida, J. (2008). The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham University Press.
2. Gaskell, E. (1857). The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Vol 1, London: Smith, Elder, and Co.
3. ---. (1986). Cranford/Cousin Phillis. London: Penguin Books. ---. (2008). North and South. New York: Oxford University Press.
4. ---. (2008). Wives and Daughters. New York: Oxford University Press.
5. Ayers, B, (2018). Gaskell’s Activism and Animal Agency. In Ayers (Ed.), Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash (pp. 23-44). London: Routledge.
6. Birke, L. & Parisi, L. (1999). Animals, Becoming. In P. Steeves (Ed), Animal Others: Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life (pp. 55-73). Albany: State University of New York Press.
7. Brown, P. L. (1992). The Pastoral and Anti-Pastoral in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis. The Victorian Newsletter 82, pp. 22-5.
8. Curtis, J. (1995). Manning the World: The Role of the Male Narrator in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis. Victorian Review,21(2), pp. 128-44.

9. Estévez-Saá, M., Lorenzo-Modia, M. J. (2018). The Ethics and Aesthetics of Eco-caring: Contemporary Debates on Ecofeminism(s). Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 47(2), pp. 123-46.
10. Howell, P. (2015). At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain. Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press.
11. Kerridge, R. (2014). Ecocritical Approaches to Literary Form and Genre: Urgency, Depth, Provisionality, Temporality. In Garrard (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (pp. 362-376). London: Oxford University Press.
12. Kreilkamp, I. (2018). Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
13. Mazzeno L. & Morrison R. (2017). Introduction. In Mazzeno and Morrison (Eds.), Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (pp. 1-17). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
14. Moore, G. (2017). Beastly Criminals and Criminal Beasts: Stray Women and Stray Dogs in Oliver Twist. In Morse and Danahay (Eds.), Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture(pp. 201-14). New York: Routledge.
15. Morse, D. M. & Danahay, M. (2017). Introduction. In Morse and Danahay (Eds.), Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (pp. 1-12). New York: Routledge.
16. Nagel, T. (1974). “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review, 83(1), 435-50.
17. Nochlin, L. (1978). “Lost and Found: Once More the Fallen Woman.” Art Bulletin 60, 139-53.
18. Ritvo, H. (1989). The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in Victorian England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
19. Weil, K. (2010). “A Report on the Animal Turn.” differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 21(2), 1-23.
20. Ya-Chu Yang, Karen. (2018) Introduction. In Vakoch and Mickey (Eds.), Women and Nature? Beyond Dualism in Gender, Body, Environment (pp. 3-10). New York: Routledge.
21. Yeniyurt, K. (2017). “Black Beauty: The Emotional Work of Pretend Play.” In Mazzeno and Morrison(Eds.), Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (pp. 233-49). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.