L’autodafé du souvenir : destruction et conservation des lettres dans Cranford (1851-1853) d’Elizabeth Gaskell

Abstract

In Cranford, Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell makes a singular use of letters, notably in the episode “Memory at Cranford,” in which the narrator and her friend Miss Matty go through old family letters together. As memorial artefacts replete with memories and history, these letters are nonetheless subjected to an autodafé, resulting in the disappearance of all material traces of past correspondents. The way Gaskell conceives of the writing of memory is therefore paradoxical: based on the destruction of the object, it simultaneously foregrounds the possibility of preserving it, particularly in the body of the text. Therefore, this questions the very materiality of a text concerned with memory-work, where letters are not simply objects that carry memory, but also “emissaries” of a bygone past. Cultivating Cranford’s kinship with the epistolary genre, Gaskell questions the durability and posterity of her text, the materiality of which proves to be just as precarious and flammable as letters are. The scenes of reading and destroying letters allow Gaskell to reflect on her own authorship and on the way her reade-recipients will receive this text.