SOURCE: “‘Peter Was a Lady Then’: Sexuality and Gender in Cranford,” in Sexuality in Victorian Fiction, University of Oklahoma Press, 1993, pp. 60-83.

In the following excerpt, Allen studies Victorian anxieties concerning sexuality and traditional gender roles as they are represented in Cranford.

In the first place, if the town of Cranford is “in possession of the Amazons,” Cranford, the novel in which it appears, may be in the possession of the feminists. Ever since Martin Dodsworth's charge that the novel expiates Elizabeth Gaskell's unconscious hostility to men through a recognition of the insufficiency of women (1963, 132-45), women readers have exercised their right to re-vision. For Elaine Showalter, the novel “is probably an Amazon utopia” set in the “wild zone” of women's experience outside the control of male-dominated society (1981, 201). Similarly, Patricia Wolfe argues that the novel is based on a repudiation of patriarchal values, evident in the town's movement...