“The Febrile 'I'/Eye: Illness as Narrative Technique in

E. Gaskell’s 'Six Weeks at Heppenheim'”

I became like a spoilt child in my recovery;

every one whom I saw […] was thinking only

of me, so it was no wonder that I became my sole

object of thought.

(‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’ p.195)

It is the subject who determines himself as

object, in his encounter with the division of

subjectivity.

(Jacques Lacan, The Four

Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

p.185)

Becoming his ‘sole object of thought’ is what incites,

by way of a reversal of interest (and object), the

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nameless, male, English narrator/traveller in Elizabeth

Gaskell’s ‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’ to narrate, but also

to interfere in a series of events in the life of his

German sick-nurse, Thekla, using illness both as a means

and as a pretext for his unorthodox methods. Confined

for six weeks in the sick-chamber of a family-run inn in

the German village of Heppenheim, oscillating between

positions of activity and passivity and experiencing

alternating states of consciousness and semi-

consciousness while convalescing from ‘serious illness’

(SWH, p.190),1 the ailing narrator of Gaskell’s story is

struggling to cope with ennui through voyeuristic

absorption, by turning the inn-servant Thekla into an

objectified figure of scrutiny upon whom games of male

fantasy and domination are played out. In the meantime,

he experiences a period of severe physical and mental

exhaustion – ‘weak as a new-born babe […] a helpless

log’ (SWH, p.191), rather prone in ‘[his] weakness to

cry’ (SWH, p.192), – during which he totally surrenders

1 All references to Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’ are

from Cranford and Other Tales (London: Smith, Elder & Company, 1884),

pp.189-216.

2

to Thekla’s ministrations for his physical and emotional

sustenance, his recovery and survival. The tables are

subsequently turned in favour of the bed-ridden

narrator, whose medically subjugated body and mind

strike back by subjugating the body and mind of his

female carer into his own inquiring (and prying) gaze.

These are treated, rather indiscreetly, as objects of

knowledge and curiosity, in much the same way as his own

have been treated as such by the medical gaze and

practices.

The text is largely informed by the pervasiveness of

the Victorian sickroom scene, which, as Miriam Bailin

notes, ‘serves as a kind of forcing ground of the self –

a conventional rite of passage issuing in personal,

moral, or social recuperation’2 facilitating at the same

time the smooth workings of the plot towards resolution.

Bodily illness and ministration, intertwined with the

past and present of narration, in Gaskell’s text thus

function as a battlefield on which complex games of

gender and power are played out at the expense of the

2 Miriam Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.5.

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female party, on the one hand, and, on the other, they

are also employed as ‘high-handed plot contrivances to

bring events to their desired end’3 and as sentimental

plot devices to meet the expectations of a primarily

mainstream middle-class readership.

As with Cousin Phillis and ‘The Grey Woman’, her other

German (Gothic) tale, ‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’ is ‘an

attempt’, according to Peter Skrine, ‘to write in the

German manner’4 – that is, in the tradition of the German

Novelle, which was to become the favoured form among the

German writers of the early and mid-nineteenth century,

who used it extensively in an effort to ‘emulate[e] or

indeed anticipat[e] their scientific contemporaries by

developing and perfecting a photographic, almost

cinematic approach’5. The second of Elizabeth Gaskell’s

German stories and one of her least noticed short pieces,

‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’, her ‘most German story’6, was

first published in the Cornhill Magazine in May 1862 and, as3 Ibid., p.1.4 Peter Skrine, ‘Mrs Gaskell and Germany’, The Gaskell Society Journal Vol.7

(1993), pp.37-49, at p.45.5 Peter Skrine, ‘Elizabeth Gaskell and her German Stories’, The Gaskell

Society Journal Vol.12 (1998), pp.1-13, at p.5.6 Peter Skrine, ‘Mrs Gaskell and Germany’, p.45.

4

Peter Skrine further notes, ‘it is unique in being set

entirely in Germany’7, as opposed to ‘The Grey Woman’,

which only partially unfolds there. To this effect, John

Geoffrey Sharps has also noted that, the story ‘was,

according to Miss Meta Gaskell, ‘planned and probably

written more than three years before, during her mother’s

autumnal stay at Heidelberg’8, while Peter Skrine places

its setting in ‘a small town some twenty miles north of

Heidelberg […] situated on the Bergstrasse […] along the

foot of the Odenwald, a chain of hills which forms the

outer eastern fringe of the Rhine valley […] famous for

its wine’9. As for Elizabeth Gaskell’s affinity with

German culture, this was largely due to her husband’s

familiarity with the German language and the country’s

culture as part of a wider interest on the part of

Unitarians in things German, but also the result of her

own inquisitive nature and active wit.10

‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’ shares with Cousin Phillis not

only a pastoral setting, but also the male narrator’s

self-preoccupation with subjectivity and his dwelling

upon his own image and situation at the expense of those

5

of his female protagonist. His urge for a retrospective

narration emanates from a strictly personal, existential

need to revisit and invest with meaning a series of acts

committed long ago and for which now, as a mature, self-

possessed ‘I’ who has outgrown the mistakes and confusion

of his past self, attempts, rather unsuccessfully, to

provide either an explanation or an excuse, for confusion

and unreliability still remain with him.

Interestingly, Gaskell’s construction of a distinctly

male narrative voice as the central consciousness

speaking from the very centre of the text subscribes to

the so-called cross-dressing narrative technique, a

technique which consists in an author’s decision to

employ a narrator belonging to the opposite sex of that

of his/her creator and which informs a number of well-

known nineteenth-century texts. Mainly a product of the7 Ibid., p.45.8 John Geoffry Sharps, Mrs Gaskell’s Observation and Invention: A Study of Her Non-

Biographical Works (Sussex: Linden Press, 1970), p.343.9 Peter Skrine, ‘Mrs Gaskell and her German Stories’, p.7.10As Anna Unsworth informs us in her article ‘Elizabeth Gaskell and

German Romanticism”, ‘Unitarians had, in fact, been visiting Germany

and learning German for the past half century [and] German had been

taught in the Dissenting Academies when this was unheard of at Oxford

and Cambridge’, The Gaskell Society Journal Vol.8 (1994), pp.1-14, at p.6.

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eighteenth-century, an age deeply preoccupied with masks

and masquerades both in daily life and literature, the

so-called ‘age of disguise’11 – with its widely-practiced

first-person epistolary writings and systematic

employment of the cross-dressing narrative mode –

naturally extended its influence upon the literary

practices of a number of nineteenth-century writers of

both sexes. It has been used, for instance, by Charles

Dickens in ten chapters of Bleak House (1852-53), all

bearing the title of ‘Esther’s Narrative’, which

alternate with the other chapters of the novel narrated

by an omniscient narrator; among women writers, it was

used by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein (1818), by Charlotte

and Emily Brontë in their novels The Professor (1857) and

Wuthering Heights (1847) respectively as well as by George

Eliot in her Gothic piece The Lifted Veil (1859). The

employment of the four male narrators by these female

authors, namely, Victor Frankenstein, William Crimsworth,

Mr. Lockwood and Latimer has been interpreted as an

attempt on the part of their creators to define their own

11 Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century

Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), p.2.

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position as ‘lonely outcast[s], barred from education and

inheritance’12. In the case of the Brontës and Eliot,

narrative cross-dressing has been read as the woman

writer’s (who, it should be noted, has her work published

under a male pseudonym) anxiety about the precarious

state of her veiled identity, while for George Eliot’s

The Lifted Veil in particular, the tale’s ‘unresolved and

deeply depressing mood’ reveals ‘Eliot’s anxiety at this

time about the revelation of the secret of her identity

as Marian Evans, and also, perhaps, of her relationship

with G.H. Lewes’13.

Both The Professor and The Lifted Veil have often been

interpreted as unsuccessful literary endeavours by two

relatively inexperienced fiction writers and as

dramatizations of their ‘internalization of patriarchal

culture’s definition of the woman as “other”’14, and so is

partly the case with ‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’, one might

observe, only here things work in a slightly different12 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, eds., The Norton Anthology of Literature by

Women (New York: Norton, 1996), p.355.13 Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, ‘Revealed or Hidden?: Phantoms of Secrets in

George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil’, Literature and Its Presuppositions, eds. Tina

Krontiris and Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou (Thessaloniki: University Studio

Press, 1999), pp.187-198, at pp.188-189.

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way. In this text, Gaskell’s own internalization of

patriarchal structures inscribes itself and materializes

in her construction and employment of a physically ailing

male narrator who, while recovering in the hands of a his

female sick-nurse, becomes the means through which male

subjectivity and authority are briefly questioned,

suspended and exposed for what they are, namely, split,

intrusive and totally unreliable, only to be

conspicuously reinstated in a hegemonic position shortly

afterwards.

Although the motives behind a male writer’s decision to

construct and employ a female narrator are probably

different from those behind a female writer’s choice of a

male narrative voice, in both cases, narrative cross-

dressing as a cultural sign signifies a certain degree of

cultural anxiety when gender roles are involved.

According to Madeleine Kahn, ‘[w]omen are borrowing the

voice of authority, [while] men are seemingly abdicating

it’;15 in the case of the mid-Victorian female author’s

14 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer

and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1984), p.466.

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adoption of a male narrative perspective, however, we

could further observe that as well as succeeding in

appropriating a voice which marginalizes female

experience, the woman writer in general and Elizabeth

Gaskell in particular is still in a position to retain

her own sub-textual authority with its insider’s

knowledge of the actual conditions of women’s lives.

Moreover, one’s narrative masking as the opposite (or

other) of what one has been culturally as well as

biologically and/or anatomically conditioned to believe

one is, challenges traditional roles, while also

revealing some degree of uncertainty as to one’s ‘actual’

discursive gender position. Thus, stemming from the

writer’s own entrapment within what I shall call a

culturally-incited gender Imaginary,16 narrative cross-

dressing becomes the means through which an author’s

chosen narrating persona revels in fantasies of its own,

speaking either from the position of the excluded,

marginalized other, as when a male author chooses to

speak through a female narrating persona, or from the

privileged discursive position of the dominant masculine

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gender, as when a female author constructs a male

narrative voice.

‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’ consists in the gradual

unfolding of Thekla’s frustrated love for a fickle lover

narrated in the first person through the eyes of a

nameless Englishman. In the process of narration, along

with his own story, the narrator gradually imparts

Thekla’s own life story, passes judgement on the events

and eventually ventures to ‘rescue’ her from the hands of

the ill-meaning suitor, Frantz Weber, to hand her over to

another man by insinuating himself into a love triangle,

having first insinuated himself into Thekla’s trust and

15 Madelein Kahn, Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth-

Century English Novel (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1991), p.2.16 My term ‘gender Imaginary’ constitutes a combination of Jacque

Lacan’s and Judith Butler’s post-modern theories on the subject and

in using the term I have been inspired by both theorists’ work on the

(gendered) subject. If for Lacan, the Imaginary, as the human

subject’s fascination with the relation between itself and its image

during the Mirror Stage only reveals the fiction of the subject’s

sense of totality, for Butler, the subject’s identification with and

adoption of a female/male gender position possesses a purely

Imaginary dimension in that this gender position is only an

ideological fraud, an illusion and an imitation, in Butler’s own

phrasing, “a stylized repetition of acts” of a non-existent original

either/or gender category in The Judith Butler Reader, eds., Sarah Salih

and Judith Butler (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), p.114.

11

favour. He thus acts as a marital go-between for the inn-

servant and her widowed employer (Fritz Müller, the

Halbmond inn landlord), contributing in this way to the

story’s rather conventional ending with Thekla changing

suitors, passing from Franz to Fritz (the difference

between the two, even linguistically, is negligible)

through the mediation of the narrator. The latter

misinterprets his inquisitiveness and intervention as an

act of gratitude towards her. He states:

As long as my fidgety inquisitiveness remained

ungratified, I felt as if I could not get well. But,

to do myself justice, it was more than

inquisitiveness. Thekla had tended me with the gentle,

thoughtful care of a sister, in the midst of her busy

life […]. Thekla was the one of all to whom I owed my

comfort, if not my life. If I could do anything to

smooth her path (and a little money goes a great way

in these primitive parts of Germany), how willingly

would I give it? (SWH, pp.195-96)

Being almost penniless and feeling rather bored ‘in

these primitive parts of Germany’, the narrator decides

12

to offer his unsolicited help by following a different

course of action, one towards Thekla’s emotional

disentanglement from what he judges to be a disastrous

love affair. In essence, however, like another Phillis

Holman, Thekla,17 Phillis’s German counterpart, simply

becomes a plaything in the narrator’s hands, as well as

an object of exchange between men fulfilling the

expectations and serving the interests of a patriarchal

community; Thekla’s own speech, just like that of

Phillis Holman, is barred from expression, her somatic

symptoms constituting the only outlet for her repressed

emotions. Incidentally, it is not without significance

that ‘Thekla’ is the only name by which the heroine is

referred to throughout the narrative as opposed to the

other characters of the story, whose surnames are

habitually mentioned and despite the fact that we are

given sufficient information about her rural family

background, there is no mention whatsoever of Thekla’s

17 According to Jenny Uglow, Gaskell’s use of this particular Germanname dates back to the Gaskells’ stay in Germany for a period of

eight weeks in 1858, ‘Thekla’ being the name ‘of the elegant, stylish

daughter of the Gaskells’ landlady, Frau Pickford.’ See, Elizabeth

Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London: Faber & Faber, 1999), p.143.

13

family name, something which further underscores her

marginality and outcast status as a mere peasant girl. A

recurrent, representative scene, among a number of

similar ones, is that in which the heroine is always

focalized through the semi-conscious, bed-ridden

narrator as her emotional conflict and turmoil manifest

themselves through bodily expression:

Turning a little I saw Thekla sitting near a table,

sewing diligently […]. Every now and then she stopped

to snuff at a candle; sometimes she began to ply her

needle again immediately; but once or twice she let

her busy hands lie idly in her lap, and looked into

the darkness, and thought deeply for a moment or two;

these pauses always ended in a kind of sobbing sigh,

the sound of which seemed to restore her to sewing

even more diligently than before. (SWH, p. 192)

As for the narrator, he seems to misrecognize and

disavow his own manipulative and coercive strategies

towards the heroine’s predicament, having convinced

himself that ‘[he] himself ha[s] but little to do with

[his] story’ (SWH, p.194). We thus encounter a narrating

14

subject at odds both with himself in the now of narration

and with his past, narrated counterpart, except for one

or two crucial moments, when, with hindsight, he sounds

critical of his past self, realizing his patronising

behaviour and indiscrete interference: ‘Somehow, I

persisted with the wilfulness of an invalid. I am ashamed

of it now’ (SWH, p.196), he recalls; ‘she [Thekla] kept

aloof from me; for I knew, or suspected, or had probed

too much’ (SWH, p.211), he further intimates to his

narratee in the now of narration. Similarly, upon hearing

about the German law concerning the enforcement of a

strictly fixed date for the commencement of grape

gathering in the area of the Rhine valley he exclaims:

‘What a strange and paternal law!’ (SWH, p.201) to repeat

himself seven pages later with a second, equally telling

indictment: ‘What a paternal government!’ (SWH, p.208),

thus indirectly, and, obviously subconsciously, also

commenting on his own paternalistic methods via misplaced

(and displaced) indignation and guilt.

As a dynamic presence, nature informs Romantic

literature extensively and a number of Gaskell’s texts,

15

including her first-person narratives, are no exception

as products of a post-Romantic mind’s literary

experiments in literary expression. As a result, the

setting of ‘Six weeks at Heppenheim’, like that of Cousin

Phillis of a year and a half later is pastoral, framed as it

is by the idyllic vineyard landscapes of rural Germany.

As we can learn from Gaskell’s correspondence,18 ‘Six

Weeks at Heppenheim’, which, as its title denotes, is

partly a travelogue, was written rather hastily with

Gaskell expecting to make some profit out of its

publication. In writing it, however, she was rehearsing

an interesting narrative technique, that of the

unreliable external narrator/traveller/recorder, who is

not a mere observer of the narrated events, as he/she

almost invariably declares, but also an instrumental

agent in shaping the course and outcome of these events,

18 On March 18th 1862, she wrote to her publisher George Smith: ‘I

have not a scrap of anything written by me but the beginning\first

chapter/of a sort of Memoir of Mme de Sévigné and her Times, – but I

will write you as good a short story as I can if it will be of any

help to you, & you will let me know soon against what time you want

it. For the April number I suppose?’ See, The Lettersof Mrs Gaskell eds,

J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Mandolin Press, 1997),

p.679.

16

who is, in other words, a key participant in his/her

narrated world. She would use the same technique, a year

and a half later, in more sophisticated ways and with

more subtle effects, in her subsequent piece, Cousin Phillis,

of which ‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’ could be regarded as a

forerunner, or, in John Chapple’s terms, ‘a trial run’19.

The story is also rich in undertones of the cult of

the individual and is informed by Romantic attitudes,

thus displaying an affinity with the spirit and

aesthetics of German Romanticism,20 within whose

philosophical frame the subjective articulation and/or

recording of personal/subjective experience becomes the

most privileged position of representation. As part of19 John Chapple, ‘Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Six Weeks at Heppenheim”: Art

and Life’, Revista di Studi Vittoriani Vol. 2.3 (1997), pp. 5-17, at p.13.20 The term, according to Anna Unsworth, was ‘first used by Mme de

Stäel in her book On Germany which, published in France between 1810

and 1813 and in England in 1813, opened the doors of Europe to the

German literary and philosophical movement’ (10). Unitarians were

among those who proved particularly receptive (because of their

disadvantageous position in English society) to the new ideas of such

philosophers as Schelling, the Schlegels, Hegel, Eichorn and of

literary figures such as Goethe. Goethe’s epistolary novella The

Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and his novel Wilhem Meister (1807-1821)

were particularly well-known to Gaskell, who makes explicit reference

to him and his works in a number of her works, as for instance in

Cranford and in her historical novel Sylvia’s Lovers (1863).

17

Romanticism’s concern for the common man and its renewed

interest in folk culture – the result of the democratic

ideas of a very recent revolutionary era – Gaskell’s

choice of narrator seems to be modelled on the

quintessential Romantic figure of the traveller/wanderer

– almost invariably male – searching for new localities,

both real and imaginary, and new vistas for the mind

among common people. Like Paul Manning, the mobile, male

narrator/visitor of Cousin Phillis, and the nameless, male

narrator/lawyer/wanderer of Gaskell’s Gothic tale ‘The

Poor Clare’, as well as the external, nameless English

narrator/traveller (of unspecified gender) of her other

Gothic tale, ‘The Grey Woman’, the narrator/traveller of

‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’, is male, English, nameless as

well as on the threshold of the legal profession.21 The

beginning of the story, like that of Cousin Phillis, is

devoted to his own autobiographical details:

21 There is evidence in Gaskell’s letters that the figure upon whom

her narrators/travellers were modelled was Charles B. Bosanque, a man

she met at Heidelberg in 1858, and who was just about to start

training as a lawyer. ‘He was there’, she wrote to Charles Eliot

Norton, ‘after being at Eton, & having taken his degree at Oxford

where he was at Balliol, a pupil of Jowett’s’ See, Letters, p.647.

18

After I left Oxford, I determined to spend some months

in travel before settling down in life. My father had

left me a few thousands, the income arising from which

would be enough to provide for all the necessary

requirements of a lawyer’s education; such as lodgings

in a quiet part of London, fees and payment to the

distinguished barrister with whom I was to read […].

The thought of living in such a monotonous grey

district for years made me all the more anxious to

prolong my holiday by all the economy which could eke

out my fifty pounds […]. I had as fair a knowledge of

German and French as any untravelled Englishman can

have; […] I had been through France into Switzerland,

where I had gone beyond my strength in the way of

walking, and I was on my way home, when one evening I

came to the village of Heppenheim, on the Berg-

Strasse. (SWH, p.189)

Though unnamed, the retrospective narrator sounds

particularly eager to establish his identity and his

socio-economic and educational background at the outset.

An Oxford graduate touring the continent as part of the

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already well-established tradition of the Grand Tour

‘before settling down in life’, he is equally eager to

affirm what he perceives to be only his peripheral

implication in the events to be imparted. ‘I have

stated’, he maintains at the beginning of the second

paragraph of the story, ‘this much about myself to

explain how I fell in with the little story that I am

going to record, but with which I had not much to do – my

part in it being little more than that of a sympathetic

spectator’ (SWH, p.189). Five pages later, he repeats

the point: “But I myself have but little to do with my

story: I only name […] things, and repeat […]

conversations” (194). As the story unfolds, however, his

part in it becomes rather more that that of a mere

observer and recorder of events. Like Paul Manning of

Cousin Phillis, and that other nameless, male narrator of

‘The Poor Clare’, he becomes crucially implicated in the

narrated events via his intrusive tactics and,

eventually, his interference.

His curiosity is sparked off the moment when his gaze

is first attracted by the sight of Thekla as her figure

20

is bathed in the afternoon light, while his subsequent

interference is foreshadowed by his detailed – almost

photographic – account of their first encounter. The

scene is also strongly reminiscent of Paul Manning’s

first encounter with Phillis Holman in Cousin Phillis:22

She came near; the light fell on her while I was in

shadow. She was a tall young woman, with a fine strong

figure, a pleasant face, expressive of goodness and

sense, and with a good deal of comeliness about it

too, although the fair complexion was bronzed and

reddened by weather, so as to have lost much of its

delicacy, and the features, as I had afterwards

opportunity enough of observing, were anything but

regular. She had white teeth, however, and well-opened

blue eyes – grave-looking eyes which had shed tears

for past sorrow – plenty of light-brown hair, rather22 The scene of Paul Manning’s first encounter with Phillis Holman

displays the same tone and style as well as a similar preoccupation

with the subjective effects of light in the process of perception: ‘I

see her now – cousin Phillis. The westering sun shone full upon her,

and made a slanting stream of light into the room within. She was

dressed in dark blue cotton of some kind; up to her throat, down to

her wrists […] She had light hair, nearer yellow than any other

colour. She looked me steadily in the face with large quiet eyes,

wondering, but untroubled by the sight of a stranger’ See, (CP 12).

21

elaborately plaited, and fastened up by two great

silver pins. That was all – perhaps more than all – I

noticed that first night […]. A shiver passed over me;

she looked at me, and then said: “the gentleman is

cold; shall I light the stove?” Something vexed me – I

am not usually so impatient: it was the coming of

serious illness – I did not like to be noticed so

closely; […] I answered sharply and abruptly: ‘No;

bring supper quickly; that is all I want.’ Her quiet,

sad eyes met mine for a moment; but I saw no change in

their expression, as if I had vexed her with my

rudeness […] and that is pretty nearly all I can

remember of Thekla that first evening at Heppenheim.

(SWH, p.190-91)

Although the narrator’s knowledge of German is, as he

claims, as limited as that of ‘any untravelled

Englishman’, his mediation of German customs and

character resembles that of a native to the extent that,

though both a stranger as well as a foreigner, he not

only jumps to conclusions about Thekla’s sorrowful eyes,

but also succeeds in becoming her confidant and thus

22

learn her love-secrets, which he associates with a

tantalizing letter she is seen reading:

When I wakened dawn was stealing into the room […].

Thekla was standing by the stove, where she had been

preparing the bouillon I should require on wakening.

But she did not notice my half-open eyes, although her

face was turned towards the bed. She was reading a

letter slowly […]. She folded it up softly and

slowly, and replaced it in her pocket […]. Then she

looked before her […] her eyes filled with tears […].

The thought of this letter haunted me, especially as

more than once, I, wakeful or watchful during the

ensuing nights, either saw it in her hands, or

suspected that she had been recurring to it from

noticing the same sorrowful, dreamy look upon her face

when she thought herself unobserved. Most likely,

everyone has noticed how inconsistently out of

proportion some ideas become when one is shut up in

any place without change of scene or thought. I really

grew quite irritated about this letter. If I did not

see it, I suspected it lay perdu in her pocket. What

23

was in it? Of course it was a love-letter; but if so,

what was going wrong in the course of her love? […] at

last the gratification of my curiosity about this

letter seemed to me a duty that I owed to myself.

(SWH, p.195)

Through narcissistic identification with his own image

(‘I became my sole object of thought’ [SWH, p.195], he

tells us), he becomes both the subject and the object of

his narration. He subsequently turns Thekla’s letter into

his second best ‘sole object of thought’ by assigning to

it the position of a much-coveted object of desire, one

that he strives to become possessed of, so as to delve

into its contents, which he hopes will satisfy his ‘out

of proportion’ curiosity in an effort to keep himself

sane and occupied while convalescing. When he eventually

persuades Thekla to grant him access23 to this as well as

other similar love-letters, a new obsession takes over,

one related to his unsolicited intimation of her private

23 He actually cajoles Thekla into making him her confidant: ‘if you

had a brother here, Thekla, you would let him give you his sympathy

if he could not give you his help, and you would not blame yourself

if you had shown him your sorrow, should you? I tell you again, let

me be as a brother to you’ (SWH, p.197).

24

story to her employer, Fritz Müller, with both of them

taking action to know all they can about her unworthy

suitor ‘for Thekla’s sake’ (SWH, p.203), as they both

say. In the meantime, the narrator conventionally revels

in phantasizing and plotting a number of possible, happy-

ending scenarios for Thekla and her suitors, though as

Fritz Müller once observes, ‘[o]ne has perhaps no right

to rule for another person’s happiness’ (SWH, p.204).

Commenting on the story, John Chapple has rightly

noted that ‘it would be unjust to ignore it as a mere

catchpenny’24, despite what he sees as the story’s narrow

field of vision.25 However, it is precisely because of

its limited scope of narrative vision, which is

restricted to that of a single, male consciousness –

also becoming manifest as semi-consciousness – that ‘Six

Weeks at Heppenheim’, I want to argue, is worthy of

24 ‘Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Six Weeks at Heppenheim”: Art and Life’, p.5.

Angus Easson has also commented on the unsatisfactory, conventional

plot and melodramatic tone of the story with ‘the woes of Thekla and

her loyalty to a feckless lover, produc[ing] irritation rather than

sympathy’ in Elizabeth Gaskell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979),

p.221.25 John Chapple, ‘Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Six Weels at Heppenheim”: Art

and Life”’, p.7.

25

attention as part of Gaskell’s experimentation with more

self-conscious and sophisticated narrative strategies

than that of the omniscient narration, which she had

used in her industrial and historical novels. By having

the story narrated through the eyes of a male, partly

homodiegetic, partly autodiegetic persona,26 Gaskell

succeeds in accentuating female repression and exclusion

as these are illustrated through the flat, objectified

character of the low-ranking, uneducated inn-servant,

Thekla, whose marginal status seems to be no different

from that of Gaskell’s subsequent middle-class, English

heroine, Phillis Holman, the educated daughter of a

farmer minister, a domestic servant in her parents’

home. Moreover, by placing her narrator’s past self in

26 The terms constitute part of Gérard Genette’s typology in his

seminal work Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. trans., E. Lewin

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980) in which Genette discusses

the various categories of narrative analysis as well as the function

of the narrator and the narratee. He also provides an analysis of

‘point of view’ by introducing his three basic types of narrator: the

‘heterodiegetic’, an omniscient narrator who is absent from his/her

own narrative, the ‘homodiegetic’, a narrator who is inside his/her

narrative, as in a first-person narratives like ‘Six Weeks at

Heppenheim’ and Cousin Phillis and the ‘autodiegetic’, a narrator who is

inside the narrative and also the main character, as in

autobiographical narratives.

26

the position of the physically incapacitated, mentally

frail voyeur, who by dint of his passive state and self-

absorption, operates as a transparent consciousness,

developing into what John Chapple terms ‘a super-

sensitive recorder of character and incident’27, Gaskell,

whether consciously or not, positions him in a

privileged position, that of a voyeur, from which he can

revel in the close observation of his object of

scrutiny (and phantasy) on the one hand, while evading

criticism (due to his illness), on the other, his

indiscretion and intrusiveness becoming known only to

his narratee in the now of narration. ‘Watching her’, he

recalls, ‘had a sort of dreamy interest for me; this

diligence of hers was a pleasant contrast to my repose;

it seemed to enhance the flavour of my rest. I was too

much of an animal just then to have my sympathy, or even

my curiosity, excited by her look of sad remembrance, or

by her sighs’ (SWH, p.192), thus deriving sado-

masochistic pleasure out of his position and hers.

27 John Chapple, ‘Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Six Weeks at Heppenheim’”: Art

and Life’, p.9.

27

Like Paul Manning of Cousin Phillis, the narrator of ‘Six

Weeks at Heppenheim’ oscillates between what Sigmund

Freud terms ‘the two pairs of opposites: sadism -

masochism and scopophilia – exhibitionism’ (“Instincts

and their Vicissitudes” 205),28 as he does between the

two types of object choice, namely ‘narcissistic’ and

‘attachment’, as exemplified in his 1916-17 paper ‘The

Libido Theory and Narcissism’. The latter type of object

choice (‘attachment’) is what mainly informs both the

narrator’s action (as a character) and his discursive

practices (as narrator) here as part of his obsession

with ‘people who have become precious through satisfying

vital needs [and who] are chosen as objects of the

libido’29 (476-77). Thus, it is not only Thekla, the

narrator’s principal carer, who falls prey to his

scrutinizing tactics and manipulation, as we have seen,

but also the two other parties of the love triangle:

Frantz Weber and Fritz Müller, the latter eventually

winning Thekla’s hand rather conventionally. All three

of them have become vital to the narrator’s physical and

mental sustenance and self-preservation as objects of

28

his phantasy and desire. If, as Jacques Lacan has

claimed, ‘[t]he phantasy is the support of desire’30 for

the human subject, then ‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’, as

the chronicle of a survival, has provided the narrating

subject of Gaskell’s story both with the objects and

their support (the phantasies) necessary for the

preservation of the ‘I’ and its own misrecognitions,

which were to culminate a year and a half later with the

publication of Gaskell’s masterpiece Cousin Phillis.

28 Sigmund Freud, ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’, The Essentials of

Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, ed., Anna Freud (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1991), pp.198-217, at p.205. He further observes:

The preliminary stage of the scopophilic instinct, in which the

subject’s own body is the object of the scopophilia, must be

classed under narcissism, and […] we must describe it as a

narcissistic formation. The active scopophilic instinct develops

from this, by leaving narcissism behind. The passive scopophilic

instinct, on the contrary, holds fast to the narcissistic object.

Similarly, the transformation of sadism into masochism implies a

return to the narcissistic object. And in both these cases […]

the narcissistic subject is, through identification, replaced by

another extraneous ego. (p.210)29 Sigmund Freud, ‘Libido Theory and Narcissism.’ Introductory Lectures on

Psychoanalysis: The Penguin Freud Library, Vol.1, trans. James Strachey, ed.,

Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), pp.461-81, at pp.476-

77.30 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan

Sheridan, ed., Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1978), p.185.

29

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Greece

Notes

30