Even these, however, are dependent on a masculine order which assigns them a secondary role.

Women also operate here within an essentially non-linear temporality. Unlike the men, whose gaze extends outwards as they construct and act on a future for themselves, the women dream of a past or a ‘might have been‘. Hester, for instance, wistfully though hopelessly imagines Philip as her husband, while Sylvia, cocooned in the glow of her newly aroused love for Kinraid, sits down ‘to meditate and dream about her great happiness in being beloved by her hero‘, her visionary constructions inuring her to all apprehensions of forthcoming tragedy – ‘no fear of the cold, glittering icebergs bearing mercilessly down on the Urania, nor shuddering anticipation of the dark waves of evil import, crossed her mind' (p. 193). After he disappears, presumed drowned, she desperately clings to the past, trying to reconstruct that ‘bright, handsome face, that face which was fading from her memory, overtasked in the too frequent efforts to recall it' (p. 244).

Later, when Sylvia's married life has become more and more of a torture to her, her imprisonment in the timeless circularity of her emotions – she hardly lives in the present at all – becomes almost intolerable. Significantly, the only peace she finds is out of doors, away from the restricting patriarchal environment of the dark house; she takes her baby ‘to the freedom and solitude of the sea-shore… here, she was as happy as she ever expected to be in this world' (p. 327). In a passage reminiscent of Matthew Arnold's ‘Dover Beach’,21 the restless flux of her internal feelings is signified in natural imagery:

she would sit down on a broken piece of rock, and fall to gazing on the advancing waves catching the sunlight on their crests, advancing, receding, for ever and for ever, as they had done all her life long—as they did when she had walked with them that once by the side of Kinraid.

For all its apparent impotence and painfulness, however, the female world of the novel has its own power and strength which is finally prioritized. If women are normally alienated or excluded from the dominant modes of male action and speech-making, they have their own mode of communication: they speak to each other through gesture, touch, voiceless sympathy, and they have an innate understanding of emotional complexity – Bell, for example, has a ‘deeper insight into her daughter's heart than her husband, in spite of his greater knowledge of the events that had happened to affect it' (p. 219), and Sylvia understands her mother better than Robson does. Bell also instinctively responds to the drenched and distressed Hester, who, when she has come to Haytersbank Farm to take mother and daughter to the imprisoned Robson, has been repulsed by Sylvia: ‘a hand was put out, like that which took the dove into the ark, and Hester was drawn into the warmth and the light' (p. 268). Shamed by her mother's humanity, Sylvia herself takes Hester's hands and the other young woman responds by touching ‘Sylvia's shoulder with a soft, caressing gesture' (p. 270). Later, in the moving scene in which Hester finally reveals her secret to Sylvia, the latter takes the grief-stricken woman in her arms, ‘holding her, and soothing her with caresses and broken words' (p. 402).

The emphases here on hands and touch, replacing articulate verbal communication, foregrounds the maternal and healing aspects of femininity. Significantly, when Kinraid appears to enact a similarly female role, his actions hint at manipulation or possessiveness: in the scene where he engages himself to Sylvia, ‘he had fast hold of her hand' (p. 179); and even when he seems to reverse gender functions (‘He lulled and soothed her in his arms, as if she had been a weeping child and he her mother' (p. 182)), his love is shown as tempered by a self-considering awareness – ‘for various reasons he was not sorry that circumstances had given him the chance of seeing her alone, and obtaining her promise to marry him without being obliged to tell either her father or her mother’.

Ultimately, the novel asserts the primacy of female values. Forgiveness and altruistic acknowledgement of the ‘other' – something which Sylvia herself has to learn – become the motivating force behind Philip's last hours, as, with his hand now held ‘tight in her warm, living grasp' (p. 452), he sees the falsity of his previous reliance on specious (male) reasoning in order to impose his pattern of desire on her. Moreover, at the end women have been able to insert themselves into the male world. Sylvia finds a voice as she speaks of her knowledge of male treachery: ‘I'm speaking like a woman; like a woman as finds out she's been cheated by men as she trusted, and has no help for it' (p. 402). Hester becomes a partner in the business after all, following Philip's disappearance. They are also enabled to insert themselves into the processes of history. Hester founds alms-houses in Monkshaven, and though they are inscribed as ‘erected in memory of P. H.’ it is she, rather than Philip, who is remembered through them. The narrative conclusion, too, is framed as recall, spoken by the bathing woman at the Public Baths to ‘a lady’, a fanciful reconstruction of Gaskell's own experiences at Whitby, listening to the local people; through the female narration and the final concentration on the subsequent lives of Sylvia, Hester and little Bella, women are empowered as subjects and tellers of stories, while men disappear from the text.

III

Sylvia's Lovers not only explores issues of gender and social change within the context of dramatic historical events, but also, on a more intimate level, is a powerful study of sexual tensions and conflictual or unfulfilled relationships.