Haunted Atlantic Waters: The Historic Traumas of Impressment, Slavery, and Whaling in Elizabeth Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers

Abstract

Keywords: Elizabeth Gaskell, Sylvia's Lovers, whaling, impressment, slavery, American Civil War

Gaskell’s choice of the important Yorkshire whaling port of Whitby (the novel’s Monkshaven) as the setting of Sylvia’s Lovers has a deep resonance. The Atlantic Ocean itself, so pervasively described in the novel as the primary element of Monkshaven’s atmosphere, is crucial to interpreting Sylvia’s Lovers as a novel of social protest. In Gaskell’s narrative, the Atlantic’s waters carry off impressed sailors during the early years of the Napoleonic Wars and are the killing grounds for whales in a brutal extraction ecology. The years in which Gaskell wrote her novel—during the American Civil War—evoke a third history throughout Sylvia’s Lovers: the horrific Atlantic slave trade and ongoing American slavery. Gaskell’s choice of Yorkshire as her setting, influenced by her recent writing of The Life of Charlotte Brontë, also suggests that Gaskell was thinking of British West Indian enslavement as well, a consistent background to the Brontë sisters’ novels from Emily’s Wuthering Heights to Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The pervading Atlantic waters in Sylvia’s Lovers are haunted with these brutal histories of violent displacement and bloody carnage. The novel is thus not only the “saddest story I ever wrote,” as Gaskell stated, but also the most harrowing, with its insistent representation or allusion to three interwoven historic traumas against which the individual tragedies of Sylvia’s Lovers are enacted. Gaskell’s Atlantic imaginary is imbued with these histories of violent displacement from family, community, and natural environment, whether impressed sailor, enslaved black American, or harpooned and dismembered whale, its skeletal “great ghastly whale jaws, bleached bare and white . . . the arches over the gateposts to many a field or moorland stretch” disfiguring the landscape and haunting the narrative. Sylvia’s Lovers is an expansive and trenchant novel of social protest against all of these oppressions.