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Abstract: Elizabeth Gaskell's novella Cousin Phillis has been described as her most 'perfect story' and on a surface level, the events at Hope Farm are evocative of a bygone romantic, pastoral idyll, which is just beginning to experience the encroachment of the Industrial Revolution and improved communication and transport links. However, through a focus on the semiotics of dress (Phillis's change from wearing pinafores to aprons), this article suggests the tale is rather a darker, more complex narrative which comments upon and challenges the Victorian ideological construction of female identity, centred upon refinement, virtue and modesty. The novella demonstrates how the progress from girlhood to womanhood is rather an indistinct process for the eponymous protagonist, unlike her male cousin. Cousin Phyllis demonstrates that females were infantilised even as grown women and physically and subjectively constrained, hence placed on a pedestal by John Ruskin for their state of 'majestic childishness'. Gaskell's treatment of this issue is examined through a focus on the significations of articles of dress: the pinafore and the apron are read as semiotic signs that reveal meanings unsayable and socially taboo in Victorian literature. Analysing the semiotic clues suggested by these articles of attire shows the complex dynamic relationship between society, the body and dress in the formation of female identity for this period. Through this, in her quiet fashion, Gaskell is in dialogue with the most debated questions of her day, the 'woman question' and the education and sexuality of girls.
The novella Cousin Phillis, serialised from November 1863 to February 1864 in The Cornhill Magazine, has been described as Elizabeth Gaskell's most 'perfect' story. Certainly on a surface level, the narrator's reminiscences about a bucolic, pastoral idyll aligned with the natural rhythms of the farming year grant the text a certain prelapsarian charm.1 Indeed, the very name 'Phillis' is redolent of a pastoral poetic tradition evoking Arcadian scenes of courtship and love.2 Furthermore, Shirley Foster declares that the rural setting of Hope Farm recalls Gaskell's own childhood days at 'Sandlebridge, the farm owned by [her] maternal grandfather, Samuel Holland', and no doubt to the middle class, largely urban readers of The Cornhill, the rural location of the novella was evocative of a former way of life that was now a...