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Abstract: Mary Smith, the narrator of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, has been largely ignored by critics on account of her unobtrusiveness. But this essay argues that it is Mary's very unobtrusiveness that renders her worthy of critical examination. By muffling her narrator's status as a homodiegetic, first-person narrator, Gaskell creates a liminal figure who can quietly claim the privileges of first-person narrators and third-person narrators alike. Narrating in what this essay diagnoses as a counterfeit version of free indirect style, Mary is a singular literary entity who clarifies the premises and the implications of different modes of narration. Shamelessly moulding the content of her friends' lives for the sake of aesthetic effect, Mary is a provocative character who warns readers of the ethical stakes of telling stories about other people. In the process of dissecting Mary's pseudo-disembodiment, this essay also considers the frenetic temporality of Cranford, the novel's complex pronoun shifts and tense shifts, and the relationship of Cranford to the emergent Victorian railroad.
In the final chapter of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, the narrator of the novel, Mary Smith, gently deprecates her own provincialism: having 'vibrated all [her] life' between Drumble, the 'commercial town' from which she hails, 'and Cranford', the novel's titular village, she feels hardly entitled to criticise her Cranford friends for swallowing Peter Jenkyns's tall tales about his time in India.1
It is true that the scope of Mary's travels is small. 'Distant only twenty miles [from Cranford] on a railroad', Drumble is a far cry from the outer reaches of the Empire, even of England (CD, p.3). And yet, one effect of the preceding chapters has been to suggest that these twenty miles are sufficient to set Mary apart from all of the other characters in the novel. In the decades surrounding the publication of Cranford, many early adopters of rail travel in England reported feelings of disembodiment, detachment, and deindividuation, as the sights and sensations of rail travel - landscapes blurred together, one's body placidly hurtling forward - prevented them, as they never had been prevented before, from situating themselves relative to their physical environment.2 Unlike the 'accelerated intimacy' and 'accelerated death' that the rail's 'annihilation of space and time' were genuinely feared to induce, the distortion of one's body...