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Criticism of Elizabeth Gaskell's novels has always been attuned to questions of gender and sexuality. Most critics have focused exclusively, however, on problems of sexual conflict: on Gaskell's representation of confining gender roles, sexual inequality, and other forms of Victorian patriarchal oppression. Because of Gaskell's complex treatment of such problems, the focus on sexual conflict-important as it is-has been unable to move beyond a mixed account, tracing equally both her challenges to conventional sexist ideology and her concessions to it. 1 Many readers have linked her apparently ambivalent treatment of sexual conflict to her general ambivalence about social change, in an increasingly standard view of Gaskell as a" divided" social analyst. 2 But the isolation of sexual conflict (or compromise) as the main object of gender-oriented critiques has deflected attention from Gaskell's fundamental and …