Elizabeth Gaskell’s second novel, Ruth, focused, as had her first, Mary Barton (1848), on a young working-class woman. However, in Ruth she makes a heroine of an unlikely figure in a seamstress who bears an illegitimate child. While other novels of her era featured unmarried pregnant women, the characters generally died, often by violence, as if they committed social suicide through their pregnancies.
Dedicated to social reform, Gaskell used her novels to comment on British society and its failure to care for its marginalized segments. When Henry Bellingham, a member of a higher class, seduces Ruth and abandons her, Gaskell clearly illustrates his lack of responsibility, both personal and social.
Ruth first meets Bellingham as she serves ladies at a ball. Innocent of the possible consequences, she accompanies him to Wales, where he falls ill, necessitating the arrival of his mother, who summarily dismisses the pregnant Ruth with a £50 payoff. While Ruth would gladly accept death, Thurstan Benson, an English clergyman on vacation in Wales, and his sister, the aptly named Faith, rescue her. Gaskell suggests the power of faith to overcome civil judgments, but does not overtly emphasize organized religion. Rather, she emphasizes the power of the spirit willing to be in touch with something greater than itself, as suggested in the romantic theories of the British poet William Wordsworth. Romantic influences are also evident in the awakening that Ruth undergoes when exposed to the wonders of nature.
In the Bensons’ Eccleston home, Ruth assumes the identity of a widowed relation named Mrs. Denbigh and raises her son, Leonard. The community welcomes her, and she eventually acts as governess to the wealthy Bradshaw family. When Bellingham, calling himself Donne, reappears, he proposes marriage to Ruth, but she declines, believing he would be a poor role model for Leonard. Although Bellingham has renamed himself, he has gained no new self-understanding or identity improving his values.
A crisis occurs when the Bradshaws learn of Ruth’s past and dismiss her, resulting in the rejection by the community of the entire Benson family and also provoking Leonard’s horror over discovering the truth about his birth. The persistent Ruth later works in a medical ward during a cholera epidemic, her heroic and selfless actions winning her and the Bensons a new place in the community. A physician named Dr. Davis offers to support Leonard’s education as a doctor, promising a happy ending to Ruth’s story. However, Bellingham/Donne again falls ill, and Ruth feels she must nurse him, then catches his disease and dies as he recovers. The community mourns her loss and clearly values her humanity far more than they judge her past errors.
Because in each of her first two novels Gaskell wrote of topics about which she had little firsthand knowledge, they were not received well critically, although both proved popular. Still, her characterizations are praised and her sympathy with Ruth as a victim of the social injustice she so abhorred remains pronounced. She employs Mr. Bradshaw as a representative of those who practice a strict moral code, but one directed by law, rather than spirit. While Bradshaw himself is a devoted Christian, resisting temptations such as those offered by the theater, he makes his own son a hypocrite, forcing him to lie about his theater attendance. That parent/son relationship offers a contrast to the much more understanding one shared by Ruth and Leonard.
Bellingham/Donne also offers a contrast to Ruth in his ego-centered behavior. While Ruth undergoes an epiphany in Wales regarding the beauty of the world and her own inner beauty, Bellingham is blind to such elements. He goes to Wales primarily to promote his secret alliance with the innocent Ruth. Ruth’s admirable development of self-awareness, rather than egotism, allows her to recognize her own weaknesses and to change her behavior as a result, something impossible for her seducer. Her total absence of guile is well represented in a scene where she is so moved by Benson’s sermon, Faith must cling to her limp hand, “helpless on a cushion,” as Ruth “sat on the ground, bowed down and crushed in her sorrow, till all was ended.”
Ruth retains a dignity that gains the admiration even of Bradshaw, her onetime accuser. In the closing scene following her death, after he visits the graveyard to plan a monument for Ruth’s grave, Bradshaw leads the grieving Leonard into the Benson house, choked with sympathy, and eyes filled with tears. Only Bellingham/Donne learns nothing from Ruth, refusing to kiss her on her deathbed, and leaving his son in Benson’s care, offering money to help atone for his “youthful folly.” In a satisfying response, Benson, only then realizing that Donne is Leonard’s father, rejects his money in Leonard’s name, telling him sternly, “Men may call such actions as yours, youthful follies! There is another name for them with God, Sir!”
While Gaskell’s craftsmanship in her two early novels may pale in contrast to that evident in her far better work Cranford (1853), they remain important examples of the “problem novel” of her era. Both continue to be studied and read for pleasure, and will likely never go out of print.
Bibliography
Easson, Angus. Introduction to Ruth, by Elizabeth Gaskell. New York: Penguin, 1997, vii–xxiv.