Another Dispatch from Obvious Land

Because I'm trying very, very hard not to be the crazy person raging about the poor performance of various A's on some blog right now, (AHEM, Dan Johnson), I'm going so far to the opposite extreme as to record some long-dormant observations on a sparkling Victorian classic, Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. Vigilant readers may recall me making some reference to this book many months ago. Well, (and this is the titular dispatch), Victorian novels are long, and therefore, they take a long time to read. I just finished the novel. In fact, Wives and Daughters is actually so long that while I was reading it, I forgot that it is an unfinished novel, and was kind of peeved to find that 600+ pages of attention didn't even get me to the final wedding bells. Slogging through all those pages of "will she reveal her hidden semi-engagement and or won't she?," I was reminded of that horrible worm-based tropical disease that causes certain parts of the body to swell way beyond normal size. This book had a similar condition in its middle portion; there is simply only so much description of a goody-two-shoes like Molly Gibson that any reader can take before things start to look grotesque.

I'll say this for Gaskell, though: she's got claustrophobic small town existence down cold. (And that's a topic I happen to know a little something about.) And in her examination of the comprised conditions of family relations, both contractual and biological, she starts to get at what a struggle it is to be either a wife or a daughter (or for that matter, a husband or a son). In her emphasis on the difficulty of ever speaking clearly or openly, especially to those whom you love the most, Gaskell gets a central theme of modern fiction. Only in a very, very, very long-winded (and sporadically pleasing) way.