Ruth, by Elizabeth Gaskell

Thomas Hardy wrote a book very much like this one; it’s called “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” and most high schoolers remember it, correctly, as a dour, unrelentingly grim tragedy of a doomed girl: having lost her virtue, Tess is left basically without choices, and, finally, is executed for the murder of her upper-class seducer. Hardy is not exactly a cheerful writer: as he reveals the fate of his tragic heroine, his prose, though clearly sympathetic for poor Tess, is dark and uncompromising. Unfortunate she is born, and unfortunate she must remain.

Ruth, of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel by the same name, could be Tess’s twin: a pretty country girl with an unhappy childhood, seduced and led to ruin, almost unknowingly and certainly innocently, by an upper-class cad. Ruth suffers the humiliation of her downfall over a longer period than Tess, having been taken to a Welsh vacation town and paraded as a mistress, which, of course, antagonizes the proper townspeople. However, in Mrs. Gaskell’s imaginings, Ruth, while ultimately doomed, is given chances at salvation, and is doomed more through her own sense of duty than through any overseeing Fate. Moreover, Mrs. Gaskell’s voice, in contrast to the constant gloom and doom of hardy, is pleasant, even light, and manages to be exceedingly moralistic without ever seeming preachy—quite the accomplishment, if you ask me.

Indeed, the novel is, in a way, about redemption. Mrs. Gaskell sees the plight of “ruined” girls and sympathizes with it; what’s more, she protests against it, though this novel and several others. Ruth is hardly at fault for her transgression, Mrs. Gaskell seems to say, so why should it ruin her life? Through the Christian charity of a minister and his sister, Ruth is given another chance at a respectable life, pretending to be a widowed relation of theirs, and becomes a governess to an upstanding local family, while raising her young son, Leonard, whom she loves fiercely.

It is notable that Christian charity is what gives Ruth another chance; this book is strongly permeated with religion—true religion, even, seeing as how it focuses on the widowed (that’s Ruth) and fatherless (that’s Leonard) in their afflictions (the novel is still a tragedy. I’m warning you.). The most uplifting factor of the novel is Ruth herself; although Mrs. Gaskell goes perhaps a bit too far in emphasizing her saintliness, and so ends up somewhat heavy-handed in her descriptions of Ruth as a ministering angel, her gentleness, her modesty, her purity. However, playing up these aspects of Ruth’s character was probably the only way for Mrs. Gaskell to persuade her contemporary readers to not only accept a novel about such a shocking character—a fallen woman gone respectable! Heaven forbid!—but also to see that redemption really should be possible for such characters.

As a modern reader, I couldn’t quite empathize with the shock and horror that contemporary figures would have felt on seeing such a character, nor see the social progressiveness of Mrs. Gaskell in writing such a novel, but the attitudes of Ruth’s peers, that fallen women “meet with such leniency as they deserve” did get me thinking: what is today’s equivalent? We don’t judge loose women with such harshness nowadays—quite the opposite, we celebrate them—but there is a class of people we judge in the same way: the poor. Most members of the American middle class, I would venture to say, feel, somewhat obscurely and perhaps sub-consciously, that the poor are poor through some fault of their own, and, if they don’t meet with great leniency in society, their treatment is precisely what they deserve. It’s the old stench of Calvinism that still leaks into our culture, and, though the novelists, like Mrs. Gaskell, who are ready and willing to tackle the subject, are many, progress has been slight. I can’t help but shudder a bit when I think how future generations will judge us: will 22^nd-century readers, looking back on my time, have the same moral outrage towards society’s callous treatment of the poor as I do looking back on the Victorians? Only time will tell.