This panel consisted of three papers from Kent, Roehampton and Tlemcen,
together creating a flowing analysis of the transformation objects
and texts in Gaskell's oeuvre.
The first paper by Alison Lundie, “A Woman's Touch: Domestic Arts of
Clothing and Needlework Materialising Transformations in Identity”
interrogated and socially located Gaskell's rich description of “a
shawl” in the first chapter of Mary Barton. Lundie
described the codified understanding of shawls in Gaskell: how the
skilled and artful arrangement of their shawls and the skilled use of
needlecraft marked textile factory “hands” as holders of
embodied cultural capital. Through this articulation of taste,
knowledge and skill, textile workers re-instated their creative
identity – readdressing the metonymic dismissal of individual
identity and the industrialisation of the body through the euphemism
“hands”. Lundie
also illustrated the sexualised and ageist codes of shawl wearing
that dictated the appropriate thickness of material and the depth of
the point down the back according to age and size – a point which
created a dialogue with the concepts of of shawls and tea in the
objectification of the female body in the next paper by Dr Tara Puri,
entitled “Unstable Objects: Reading Shawls, tea and calico
in North and South”.
Puri's
paper
applied her excellent distillation of Homi Bhabha's “The World and
the Home” to North and South in order to discuss how these
'unhomely moments' collapsed the exotic and the demotic through the
imagined sensual tourism of these commodities, which are described as
smelling like spice. The cultural appropriation of tea and calico
function as markers of objectified cultural capital, highlighting the
transformative powers of imperial possessions – that through these
social codes are themselves transformed from emblems of the exotic
into markers of class and gender.
Finally,
Wassila
Mouro's
paper
“Intertextuality in Wives and Daughters
by Elizabeth Gaskell” discussed the intertextual references in
Gaskell - which are so regularly referenced but so rarely questioned
- and submitted these to rigorous theoretical analysis. Mouro drew
out examples of Gaskell's use of integration, collage and citation
and brought them into wider discussions of polyphony and the
impossibility of autonomous authorship. But under this analysis,
Gaskell does not succumb to a Barthesian death, as both Gaskell and
the protagonist, Molly Gibson, enter into a polyphonic dialogue of
rich literary heritage.
The idea of hands
was a recurrent theme within the panel as a symbol of classed and
gendered objectification and fragmentation of the female body.
Another trope that came to the fore was the idea of the “stitching
together” of things and of ideas – an analogy Gaskell refers to
in her correspondences. This concept of “stitching together”
unified ideas within the papers about the ways in which Gaskell and
her characters adopted and adapted texts and objects as a means of
'curating' (for lack of a more appropriate word) the self in nuanced
and artful displays of distinction.
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