SOURCE: "The Education of Cousin Phillis," in Nineteenth Century Literature, Vol. 50, No. 1, June, 1995, pp. 27-50.

In the following excerpt, Rogers contends that Phillis's male education in Cousin Phillis is not liberating, as other critics have argued, but prescriptive and ultimately damaging.

For Elizabeth Gaskell the story of Phillis Holman's disappointment in her first love in Cousin Phillis (1865) is inseparable from the process and content of her unusual education. As both daughter and lover—the only roles open to her as learner—Phillis is inescapably a pupil of men who control her education in ways that serve their interests. Learning from men what men traditionally have taught other men does not make her, as her cousin Paul naively supposes, "more like a man than a woman." On the contrary, the lessons of her reading and the experience of male tuition inculcate contradictory and damaging definitions of womanhood, diminishing her...