Victorian Women: 3. Ruth
We study six great books by and about women in our Victorian Women course, live online, September to November 2023.
Lecturer Clare Walker-Gore reflects upon each of the books in a series of blog posts. Here she looks at Ruth (1853) by Elizabeth Gaskell.
Ruth, unmarried mother
‘I beg your pardon; but something so shocking has just been discovered — I don't know how to word it — She will have a child. The doctor says so.’
She was allowed to make noises unnoticed for a few minutes. Her brother did not speak. At last she wanted his sympathy.
‘Isn’t it shocking, Thurstan? You might have knocked me down with a straw when he told me.’
‘Does she know?’
‘Yes; and I am not sure that that isn’t the worst part of all.’
‘How? — what do you mean?’
‘Oh! I was just beginning to have a good opinion of her, but I’m afraid she is very depraved. After the doctor was gone, she pulled the bed-curtain aside, and looked as if she wanted to speak to me. (I can't think how she heard, for we were close to the window, and spoke very low.) Well, I went to her, though I really had taken quite a turn against her. And she whispered, quite eagerly, ‘Did he say I should have a baby?’ Of course, I could not keep it from her; but I thought it my duty to look as cold and severe as I could. She did not seem to understand how it ought to be viewed, but took it just as if she had a right to have a baby. She said, ‘Oh, my God, I thank Thee! Oh! I will be so good!’ I had no patience with her then, so I left the room.’
Elizabeth Gaskell
In this passage from Gaskell’s Ruth, the minister’s sister Faith Benson is shocked not so much by the revelation that the unmarried, abandoned Ruth Hilton is pregnant, but by Ruth’s reaction to learning of her pregnancy. It is a response that anticipates what was found so shocking about the novel itself: not that Ruth should ‘fall’, nor indeed that she should have a baby as a result, but that she should be represented with such sympathy, and as a good mother to her child.
Faith’s gradual relenting towards Ruth, and her conversion to the idea that she should be allowed to bring up her own child, and be supported in doing so, is clearly intended as a model for the reader. Not everyone was convinced: Gaskell wrote to her friend Eliza Fox that several of their fellow Chapel-goers had actually burned the first volume of the novel, while ‘a third has forbidden his wife to read it.’
For others, however, Gaskell succeeded all too well: Charlotte Brontë wrote to ‘protest’ that she ought to allow Ruth, not less sympathy, but a happier ending. Why was it such a struggle for Gaskell to portray her ‘fallen’ heroine in a sympathetic light, and why did she decide to end the novel as she did?
In this lecture, we will explore the contradictions and complexities of the contemporary debate about ‘fallen women’, female sexuality, maternity, and public and private morality, as they are played out in Gaskell’s controversial second novel.
The Victorian Women course first ran in autumn 2022 and is repeated Sept.-Nov. 2023.
Dr Clare Walker Gore has taught at the Open University and the University of Cambridge. She is a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge.
