‘Ruth’ by Elizabeth Gaskell

There are novels which make you grow and expand your understanding of other people in ways you wouldn’t have predicted. I’ve recently read such a book. It’s ‘Ruth’ by Elizabeth Gaskell, an early Victorian story of a young mother, Ruth Hilton, and her illegitimate son, Leonard.

Ruth leaves her hometown with Mr Bellingham, a spoiled gentryman several years her senior, only to be abandoned by him and slut-shamed by his mother. Then, she finds help and compassion in the Benson family, who propose that she should take a guise of widowhood in order to protect herself and her child. Overall, the story spans over twelve years, since Ruth’s vaguely described affair to her death from typhoid fever.

If you know the nineteenth century convention, you may think that what Elizabeth Gaskell did was writing a typical novel about a fallen woman with an illegitimate child, about a girl ‘led astray’, whose inevitable end was a premature death. But Gaskell was neither praised for the book ending (even in her times) nor she intended Ruth to be a typical ‘fallen woman’ as they were depicted back then. Her book, actually, varied distinctively from the average story of this kind, and though I can’t proof it, it laid a path open to more modern interpretations, from ‘Kristin Lavransdatter’ in the 1920s to the recently published ‘The Foundling’ by Stacey Halls.

What was different at Gaskell’s, then? At first, she put her ‘fallen woman’ in the centre of the story, not as a cautionary character on the margins. At second, she openly criticized slut-shaming and called for not judging others by what they’d done in the past (which, in the case of illegitimate mothers, was still a big deal in the 1850s). At third, she expressed a view that a chosen family (Ruth living happily with the Bensons) was better than marrying your father’s child for the sake of placating society, and a better environment for rearing a child altogether. At fourth, she depicted Mr Bellingham not as an enticing bad-boy, but as an asshole (which he was). At fifth, her book-ending was Ruth’s death not because she was ‘fallen’, but rather because she was so selfless and helpful that she’d come to tend even to the man who’d left her.

We underappreciate is how many things go against society’s expectation in ‘Ruth’. Mr Benson, a person who isn’t able-bodied, is just a human being in this story, a character with their own aims and characteristics. He is a clergyman, he has friends, he is close to his family, and he comes to save Ruth. He isn’t helpless, lest ominous, and nor he is this tragic, Quasimodo-like figure. Bellingham’s descriptions, too, go against expectations. He is neither a cartoonish villain nor the Bronte-esque bad-boy deserving a second chance. What in other novel would be shown as an act of benevolence and redemption, i. e., a willingness to marry his child’s mother, here is but a whim of a spoiled gentryman, and, as a useless whim, is rejected by Ruth.

Do the circumstances of her death make her more saint than the saints, an unbelievable character, created as an innocent girl to pander to Gaskell’s public? I don’t think so. I’ve heard (and read) opinions that Ruth isn’t a convincing protagonist, that she is too meek and naive. But guess what? She doesn’t have to be otherwise. She doesn’t have to fulfil our vision of how a heroine should act. And, no, I’m not referring to the ‘those feminist retellings made us believe that in the nineteenth century, all women had been suffragists or wanted to be artists and scientists’. At first, I don’t think that writing retellings about women with such ambitions is inaccurate. At second, it seems to be that underestimating such protagonists as Ruth is older than the current trends in historical fiction. She isn’t out-going and stubborn like Scarlett O’Hara or Fermina Daza. She isn’t centered on analysing her ‘self’ like Jane Eyre or Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Bronte’s novels. She is like Kristin Lavransdatter, one of my favourite protagonists in literature overall. The notion of a great, forbidden love beyond boundaries fails the both heroines. They both have close relations with their child/children. They both seek consolation in religion. And they are both intelligent and resourceful without realizing it themselves; Ruth becomes and efficient, well-read governess and then, an efficient nurse, just as Kristin becomes an efficient manager of her husband’s estate. There are, of course, many differences. ‘Ruth’ is a concise story of a single mother finding support, ‘Kristin Lavransdatter’ is a long story of a turbulent marriage. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote about a heroine contemporary to her, Sigrid Undset set her most known novel in the fourteenth century. The two writers, overall, are separated by several decades. But it seems to me that Undset could have been inspired by ‘Ruth’, and this is actually good. These two novels (but not only them) have taught me to appreciate and respect characters who may not have the same ambitions and beliefs as we have today.