Gilbert Gaskell Quotes

In Victorian society, it was expected of women to be only buttresses to their male counterparts and to guard their feelings and egos; however, Phillis is so concentrated on striving to figure out the Italian, that she does not try to hide her intelligence or want of learning in order to retain Paul’s masculinity. In this way, Gaskell paints Phillis as a monster, because later on in the novel, Phillis’s unmasked intelligence hinders her from a woman’s greatest prize: marriage. When Paul’s father gives Paul his blessing to marry Phillis, Paul protests saying, “'You see she's so clever she's more like a man than a woman—she knows Latin and Greek’” (185). In this way, Phillis is serving as a warning to women reading the novel. Women who act like

Through having Phillis face repercussions for having unfeminine characteristics, Gaskell is confining herself in her writing by having Phillis embody the typical “monster” female character. Another way in which Gaskell falls victim to the female character dichotomy explained by Gilbert and Gubar is that her two female characters (one with more angelic qualities and the other with more monstrous qualities) are pitted against each other at times. Through Phillis’s monstrous curiosity in obtaining knowledge, she and her father tend to ostracize Cousin Holman from their relationship, as Cousin Holman can not follow along with most of their intellectual conversations. Paul observes this dynamic multiple times in the novel: “I had noticed before that she had fleeting shadows of jealousy even of Phillis, when her daughter and her husband appeared to have strong interests and sympathies in things

Through having both feminine and masculine qualities, Gaskell was subtly showing that a female character could be more than just a household saint or a callous imposter. When Paul describes his first sight of Phillus, he uses very romantic, poetic language to paint a picture of Phillis: “The westering sun shone full upon her, and made a slanting stream of light into the room within [...] And such white skin as it was! I have never seen the like” (162). However, Paul later says when he hears Cousin Holman speaking, “I thought I could rather speak to the owner of that voice than to the girl before me” (162). By having this contrast between Phillis being portrayed like a Pre-Raphaelite women and then showing Paul’s intimidation to Phillis, Gaskell shows that Phillis is not just a female character whose merit is based only on her looks and her submissiveness to the male characters; Phillis has much more to offer that places her above Paul in certain ways. This reversal of order would normally lead to Phillis being portrayed as a monster through the entirety of the novel; however, although she is occasionally depicted as one in the Gilbert and Gubar sense, Phillis’s intellectual ability and masculine traits does not drive her from the favor of any of the characters in the novel. Although Paul does not