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thatscarletflycatcher · 1 month ago

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The Maternal Pastoral of Ruth

(From Rosemarie Bodenheimer's The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction, Cornell University Press, 1988)

In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), pastoral writing functions as in Oliver Twist to create an alternative interior realm that protects its subject from the conventional language of social judgment. In Gaskell’s work, however, the natural world is not a utopia in which the narrative may find a place of rest but a realm of images for the emotional life which must give way to a confrontation with social life as it stands. In this second of her social-problem novels, Gaskell relies on the asocial pastoral as a way of reformulating the loaded social questions raised by a highly conventional story: the seduction and abandonment of a young seamstress. Gaskell’s defense of the natural virtue of a “fallen woman” and her bastard child put her up against one of the most rigid Victorian social codes, and one of the most formulaic story patterns, in which the seduction of an urban working girl is followed by prostitution and/or death.1 The pattern is one that Gaskell herself had used in Mary Barton (1848) to shape the fate of Esther Barton and the threat to her niece Mary; in “Lizzie Leigh” (1850), it lies behind the main story of a young prostitute rescued by her country mother. It is therefore of special interest to see how she set out to question and complicate the story in Ruth.

The novel was written as a kind of negotiation between two pressures: the strong sympathy Gaskell had developed for a sixteen-year-old prostitute whom she had helped to emigrate,and the knowledge —based in part on the public reception of Mary Barton—that she would be the target of intense social criticism when Ruth was published. Gaskell first told the story of her young protegee in a letter to Dickens asking his advice about the arrangement of an emigration plan. The child had lost her father at two; her mother was indifferent to her. Her uncle had placed her in an orphan school and then apprenticed her to a fashionable Manchester dressmaker. The business failing, the girl was placed with another dressmaker, who

“connived at the girl’s seduction by a surgeon in the neighborhood who called in when the poor creature was ill. Then she was in despair, and wrote to her mother (who had never corresponded with her all the time she was at school and an apprentice;) and while awaiting the answer went into the penitentiary; she wrote three times but no answer came, and in desperation she listened to a woman who had obtained admittance [to the penitentiary] solely as it turned out to decoy girls into her mode of life...”2

The final twist, as Gaskell told Dickens in a postscript, was the return of the seducing surgeon in the role of physician to the prison where the girl was being held for theft. When she fainted upon being brought before him, the story emerged, and the doctor was dismissed from his position.

As Gaskell unfolds it, this is clearly a “story”—the return of the seducer as physician makes a compelling ironic climax that was turned, in Ruth, into the fictional return of Bellingham as a parliamentary candidate. It is, in particular, a story of parental abandonment. Of all the misfortunes in the tale, Gaskell underscored only the parenthetical clause about the mother’s failure to correspond. Her horror arose especially from the initial violation of parental responsibility, which was repeated over and over in the failures of the adults who were in charge of the child. With its elements rearranged and romanticized, this story, and this emotional focus, formed the basis for Ruth.3

Gaskell’s personal and maternal commitment to the story took a very different form, then, from the fictional terms in which the “problem” of the fallen woman was usually conceived—as an indication of personal weakness, depravity, or social victimization; as a threat to “pure” women and a shame to the family; as an inexorable path toward hardened or despairing isolation. Her fear of the collision between the two conceptions is strikingly apparent in the letters written just before and after Ruth was published. In a letter to her daughter Marianne, Gaskell is evasive and nervous:

“when Ruth will be published whether this year, next, or ten years hence I don’t know. It is not written yet—although Agnes Sanders was told at a Leamington library that it was coming down next day. I have never asked for any copies for myself. But, as I say again, when or if ever I shall finish it I don’t know. I hate publishing because of the talk people make, which I always felt as a great impertinence, if they address their remarks to me in any way.”4

The gap between her private sense of the book and its public life was very real to her even before publication; she dreaded public discourse as a direct personal “impertinence,” a violation of her privacy. Since at this time the first two volumes were already at the publisher’s and she was to send off the completed manuscript a month later,5 her claim that the novel was not yet written is particularly odd, suggesting that she still imagined it as tied to her internal life rather than as an externalized, “written” object. Her fears were to be justified by the actual reception of Ruth.6 But the split between Ruth as a private conception and as a public issue had already been inscribed in the text itself. It takes form as a division between a pastoral argument about private feeling, which occupies the first nine chapters, and a social argument about the treatment of fallen women, which dominates the rest of the novel.

This division makes a discontinuity in the novel; it also contains and rebukes the contradictions that have always been noted in the novel’s argument. These contradictions may be readily summarized in the form of two questions: If Gaskell is intent on showing Ruth’s utter innocence and ignorance by arguing that she is simply a victim of Bellingham’s seduction, what are we to make of the early passages that suggest her suppressed sense of guilt and her intuition that what she is doing is wrong? And if Gaskell presents Ruth as an innocent, how can the bulk of the book be devoted to the proposition that she is a sinner who may expiate her sin and be recovered as a valuable member of society?7 Precisely such formulations of the case are, I argue, what Gaskell’s pastoral aims to challenge and set aside. The alternatives they offer are based on socially determined views of the fallen woman: either Ruth must be a victim of social forces beyond her control or she must be guilty of sexuality. The pastoral writing recasts Ruth’s fall in a different language, one that relies on the Wordsworthian conflation of nature and individual psychology. Her pastoral sensibility is not simply a guarantee of some innate, asocial innocence8 but a way of talking about emotional needs so fundamental that they achieve the status of “nature” whether they are socially named as innocence or as guilt. Thus the pastoral chapters allow Gaskell to describe Ruth’s fall as a natural emotional event that has a life independent of the social constructs that are later brought to bear upon it.

Wordsworth’s “Ruth” (published in 1800) seems to have provided both a model and an antagonist for the pastoral part of Gaskell’s enterprise.9 In that poem, Ruth is a little girl of six when her mother dies and her father remarries; left to her own devices, she wanders about in nature and becomes “an infant of the woods.”10 When she is grown, she is courted by a Youth from America, who marries and then abandons her before they set sail for the American wilderness, where he has promised that they will share a life in the forest. After a period of madness, Ruth returns to nature to live out the rest of her days, with no other home than barns or greenwood trees; she is, of course, one of Wordsworth’s blessed beggars and solitaries who never enters the social realm, but retains the customs of her childhood in “an innocent life, yet far astray!” But the poem does not simply associate nature with this radical and innocent solitude. In the figure of the Youth, nature shows its sinister aspects: lawless freedom, irregular impulse, voluptuous longing. Although Wordsworth does not admit any sexual irregularities into the plot of his poem, his language about the Youth suggests a more conventional context of seduction than he is willing to describe.

Gaskell follows Wordsworth in making her Ruth identify herself with nature in the absence of parental love, in imagining a courtship that seems to offer a pastoral life shared by two lovers of beauty, and in associating with the seducer a more rebellious and voluptuous idea of nature. Once Bellingham is disposed of, however, she has very different ideas about the continuation of Ruth’s life. Even for Ruth alone, images of nature become morally ambiguous, divided between the innocent and the dangerous. And Gaskell, arranging for her heroine’s rescue and socialization, argues not only against the unhappy endings of social seduction-and-abandonment tales but against the Romantic isolationism celebrated in Wordsworth’s poem. For her, Ruth must grow up out of the pastoral mode and into the social realm, developing her natural sensibility into domestic virtue.11 Although Gaskell fails to make a seamless progression from one mode to the other, her pastoral does succeed in making a place from which social responses to sexual falls may be distanced and criticized.

From her First appearance, Ruth is described as a spirit whose home is natural beauty, while the ambiguity of her class status strengthens the sense of an asocial positioning. She is immediately distinguished from her fellow apprentices by the strength of her need to be outside; when a break is allowed, she “sprang to the large old window, and pressed against it as a bird presses against the bars of its cage;”12 from the window she sees an old larch that is an image of herself, once surrounded by affectionate natural life, now “pent up and girded about with flagstones” (5). Despite bad weather, going outdoors on errands is her only restorative; the place she chooses in the seamstress’s attic is the coldest and darkest, but it allows her to look at an old wall panel that depicts a beautiful abundance of flowers (6—7). Unlike the literary flights of the urban Alton Locke, these images connect Ruth in memory to her mother and the country life she has lost with the deaths of her parents; for her the pastoral is literally a lost heritage.

Gaskell understands this heritage not as a symbolic guarantor of virtue and innocence but as an experience that leaves in Ruth what might be called a pastoral drive. In the life of the seamstresses she is claustrophobic; she needs and chooses to go out whenever she can. Her hunger for beauty is a consciousness that is oblivious of the social: when she goes to the hunt ball she sees the dancing figures as “a joyous and brilliant whole,” not caring to separate and name them as her companions do (14);the aristocracy is the stuff of dreams to her because “literally and figuratively their lives seemed to wander through flowery pleasure-paths” (17). In her mind, Mr. Bellingham is quite literally a way to get outside: he takes her for walks in the countryside and nourishes her need for beauty. The kind of innocence that Gaskell creates is not the innocence of utter passivity and helplessness but an obliviousness of social implication. Ruth makes choices according to her very strong need for a natural world associated in her experience with an affectionate and nurturing mother. To call her a Wordsworthian child does not mean that she is innocent the way Oliver Twist is, but that she embodies an actively asocial principle, a singular imagination that works emotionally and aesthetically rather than socially.

Ruth goes with Bellingham not—like her fictional sisters in sin—because she has aspirations to economic status or because she is starving or destitute. Gaskell explains the seduction morally and psychologically, as a result of parental abandonment on a large scale. In passages that most appear to muddle the issue of Ruth’s innocence by attributing to her a latent sense of guilt, Gaskell attempts to set the terms in another way: to present Ruth as a presocial being to whom she attributes a “natural” chastity without knowledge of it as a social concept. Gaskell herself naturalizes the concept of chastity, identifying it with a presocial spirit that recalls the legitimizing language of origin in Oliver Twist: “a brooding spirit with no definite form or shape that men should know it, but which is there, and present before we have recognized and realized its existence.” (43)

This bit of mystification allows her to retain the equation of woman and chastity while separating it from its punitive social consequences. Thus she argues that while Ruth has an intuitive social conscience that leads her to feel some guilt about her outings with Bellingham, she has no concepts to which to attach the feelings, and therefore no reason to value them. Her mother has died when she is at the critical age of twelve, and no other adult in her life will take the responsibility of recognizing that Ruth does not already know what young ladies may and may not do. And, as a presocial creature, Ruth acts according to the nature of a child: her moment of liaison with Bellingham comes after the last in a series of abandonments, when her employer fires her; she gives herself up to him because she feels that no other person will take care of her. The question of sexuality is overridden by Ruth’s need for a loving parent; innocence or guilt is subsumed in an argument about psychological need. The seduction episode is correspondingly suffused by Gaskell’s emotional appeal to the maternal and protective instincts of her readers.

The integrity of this argument is most brilliantly displayed in Gaskell’s treatment of Ruth after she has become Bellingham’s mistress. When they appear at the inn in Wales, nothing has changed, no “fall” has occurred; Ruth haunting the Welsh landscapes is, if anything, even more a solitary child of nature than she was before the seduction. Her sexuality is implicitly a part of natural affection,while the real disjunction lies, as before, in the gap between her natural behavior and the social interpretations of it, which begin to trouble her consciousness only now. It is difficult to believe in the extreme innocence that Gaskell portrays here, unless her decision is understood as a narrative move that intends some quietly radical challenges to the doctrine of female chastity. The Wales section implies that asexual relationship may be a natural fact separate from the social construct of “fall,” that social innocence and virginity are not identical. Throughout Gaskell takes care to show that Ruth’s primary emotions are the result of her attachment to Bellingham—anxiety, nurture, and the despair of abandonment—rather than the guilt and shame induced by the social code. It is not until Ruth enters society with the Bensons that she begins to feel the socially constructed emotions “appropriate” to her situation.

In the first nine chapters, which tell the story of the seduction and abandonment, Ruth’s emotional life is charted almost entirely through her responses to natural scenes, as though her real relationship were not with Bellingham but with nature.13 The main events in this narrative sequence are descriptive passages that stand in for the development of Ruth’s feelings for Bellingham and distinguish her emotional responses from his social ones. When Bellingham takes Ruth to see her old home at Milham Grange (44-50), the house is described as a picturesque overgrown pastoral inhabited only by the Wordsworthian figure of the old deaf laborer Thomas. Bellingham is an intruder in this world; he watches as Ruth is absorbed in a passion of memory and grief, obtruding his alien class sensibility in his repugnance to Ruth’s familiarity with Thomas. The old man intuits his threat, but Ruth is oblivious of social distinctions and implications, and cannot translate Thomas’s biblical warning into the appropriate social terms.

When the pair leave the cottage, they enter a vast, extended landscape that seems to express a moment of rich, wide possibility and pleasure just before the fatal decision (51—53). Standing on the summit of a hill surrounded by blooming gorse, they see flocks of birds at a pool, the hospitable inn, farm animals, and distant hills and spires; the view perfectly integrates human, animal, and plant life in a kind of open harmony that is shattered by their arrival at the inn and the appearance of social consciousness in the person of Ruth’s employer, Mrs. Mason. The wide fullness of this landscape will be replaced by the wide emptiness of the landscapes that will later represent Ruth’s loss of place in the ordinary world.

After the lovers appear in Wales, its starker landscapes express the growing gap between Ruth’s emotional life and human society. In the “Alpine country” Ruth becomes more of a spiritual Wordsworthian: “vast ideas of beauty and grandeur filled her mind at the sight of the mountains, now first beheld in full majesty . . . the grandeur of this beautiful earth absorbed all idea of separate and individual existence . . .” (64) Now Bellingham is associated with indoor social obligation, sulking and fretting in bad weather, while Ruth goes out and exults in every change of sky and scene. The only recorded change in her consciousness is her intensified wish to fill her being with inhuman images that blot out her own social identity. The different sensuality of Bellingham is suggested in the “green hollow” where the lovers have their last scene of harmony together (72-74). Only here, in the description of the “green gloom,” with its low pond reflecting a tiny fragment of sky, is the lovers’ “descent” into sexuality lightly figured. Bellingham, absorbed by the physical beauty that seems meaningless to Ruth, decks her hair with lilies and makes her look at herself in the pool, but she does so only for his pleasure. The underwater quality of this scene—the depth, the enclosure, the secrecy, the narcissistic worship—serves to delineate Bellingham’s wanton idea of natural beauty, and to distinguish it from Ruth’s.

After Bellingham falls ill and his mother arrives to rescue him, Ruth’s relationship with nature begins to admit pain and the possibility of final oblivion. On the night when she crouches beside the door of Bellingham’s sickroom, her feelings of woe and loss are caught in the description of the landscape as it darkens, and then as the dawn gradually moves toward a glorious sunrise that prefigures Bellingham’s recovery. Finally we see Ruth, Tess-like, on a “bare table of moor” with a white road stretching emptily toward the distance into which Bellingham has disappeared. The desolation and bareness of the scene figures her sense of final abandonment; her consciousness records no feeling except her loss of Bellingham and the movements of insects and birds around her (93). After Thurstan Benson rescues her and takes her in, her suicidal despair takes her again to the windows, where she watches the storm clouds move and wishes to die into “the free, broad world” (99). Her yearning to “get out” reaches its furthest limit here. Yet the suicidal impulse, like all of Ruth’s emotions, is not a response to social guilt and shame but an extension of her propensity to respond to pain by merging herself with the inhuman beauty of natural process.

The pastoral writing disappears with Bellingham’s disappearance from Ruth’s life; the rhetoric that has located her in a realm apart from social interpretation and judgment has served its purpose. It returns only briefly when Bellingham returns, in the scenes on the sands of Abermouth (chap. 23 and 24), where the descriptions mirror the recurrence of painful confusion and conflict in Ruth’s feelings. In these scenes the solidity of the humanized, rooted landscape in which Ruth now has her social identity is threatened by the shifting sands of the beach where she confronts Bellingham in his new social identity as Mr. Donne. Once again Ruth is drawn to merge herself in the asocial oblivion of nature; before she confronts Bellingham she tries to walk beyond the human border marked by the black posts of the fishermen, into the ocean (291-293). This time, however, she has an independent sense of morality to defend, and, after the effort of rejecting her former lover, she collapses only after regaining the land, on a rock in which an ash tree is rooted (301). Now nature both images her desolation and comforts her with more clearly religious meanings; her old impulses take only a momentary flight from a steadier social existence.

The crucial elision in the novel occurs at the juncture between Ruth’s pastoral existence and her social one—that is, at the moment of her adoption by Thurstan and Faith Benson. During this part of the narrative Gaskell shifts her focus to the consciousnesses of the Bensons, so that Ruth is visible only from their points of view. She is now, for the first time, a “social problem,” one that we are asked to consider in the most generous possible way, from the unconventional perspective of Thurstan Benson. When we see her again she is conscious of her “sin” and aware of her social status and that of her child; the baffled perplexity with which she greeted social rebuffs during her liaison with Bellingham is instantly succeeded by an absorbing attitude of humility and repentance. This discontinuity in Ruth’s moral life signals the essential contradiction of Gaskell’s argument; it is not a matter of guilt and innocence but an unacknowledged shift from the natural to the social definition of what has happened.

Yet Gaskell proffers a bridge over the fissure: Ruth’s absorption in nature is now replaced by her “natural” joy in pregnancy—precisely the instinct that is to be the novel’s central argument for her social virtue. Against Faith’s conventional responses to the prospect of a bastard child, Thurstan articulates Gaskell’s creed, calling Ruth’s joy a “burst of nature from her heart,” and criticizing “the world’s way of treatment” for being “too apt to harden the mother’s natural love into something like hatred” (118—119). In this way the leap in Ruth’s moral life is buried under Gaskell’s strong appeal to the ideology of motherhood and obscured by the leap in her emotional life which turns her magically from a motherless child of the woods to a natural mother fiercely devoted to protecting her child from social castigation and harm.

Once having negotiated these chasms, Gaskell reasserts Ruth’s continuity with an earlier past. In the Benson household Ruth— still only sixteen years old—completes the growing up that was interrupted by her mother’s death. The narrative reminds us of Ruth’s own protected childhood, and suggests an ascent from the natural virtue associated with Mrs. Hilton to a higher form of asocial principle: “it seemed that their lives were pure and good, not merely from a lovely and beautiful nature, but from some law, the obedience to which was, of itself, harmonious peace, and which governed them almost implicitly, and with as little questioning on their part, as the glorious stars which haste not, rest not, in their eternal obedience” (141).

Now the world of flowers, too, is contained in a domestic and social order of household and garden;14 while Ruth’s grief is chastened and turned to domestic content by the ministrations of Sally and Faith. Although Ruth’s religious education is never specifically charted, we are meant to understand that Ruth’s love of nature turns into a love of God which, like that of Thurstan, sustains a higher-than-social morality.

The rest of the novel is about the tension between the natural virtue protected and nurtured under cover of the Bensons’ lie and conventional social responses to the fallen woman and the bastard child. Unlike Dickens, who creates an absolute split between his pastoral and social worlds, or Wordsworth, who flees the social world, Gaskell develops a genuine strain between the claims of the competing realms, formally containing it in the moral ambiguity of the lie. Like Margaret Hale’s lie in North and South, the Bensons’ representation of Ruth as a young widow is both right and wrong. It protects the naturally virtuous person from the social machinery of interpretation and condemnation which is incapable of reading character, rather like the machinations of Dickens’s pastoral characters in Oliver Twist. But in Gaskell’s work one cannot violate social law or convention without paying for it with social exposure. Ruth’s story is designed to make her suffer for her past, yet the act of exposure challenges conventional images of the fallen woman as a separate and tainted being who carries the threat of sin.

In developing Ruth’s own character and shaping her end, Gaskell reveals the pressure of her topic. Ruth’s meek perfection and selfless motherhood pull heavily at ideological strings, while her death from nursing her former lover falls too easily into the pattern of sacrificial but necessary punishment doled out to fallen women (Dickens’s Nancy, Trollope’s Jessie Phillips). Through the stories of the Bradshaw children, however, Gaskell makes a more indirect attack on the taboos connected with the fallen woman. In a way that must surely have formed a model for the Gradgrind family in Hard Times, Gaskell sets the turbulent careers of the children in a “model” household against the simple domestic generosity of a young woman “tainted” by her earlier experience.15 Richard Bradshaw’s story shows what true social hypocrisy is: Ruth’s lie covers an emotional truth, while Richard’s apparent dutifulness conceals a life of petty profligacy and business crime. Jemima Bradshaw—one of the novel’s most interesting characters—struggles with a conflict between natural love and social expectation which identifies her with Ruth’s earlier confusions.

Set tightly within a familial context, Jemima’s problem is that she loves the man she is socially supposed to marry. Her long, moody rebellion is a comic version of Ruth’s earlier tragedy: what Ruth does from natural feeling is utterly asocial; for Jemima the social acceptability of a match with Mr. Fahrquar seems to invalidate her feeling for him. Her internal and self-conscious battle with social convention is a limited version of Ruth’s unconscious pastoralism, which ends well partly because Jemima learns of Ruth’s past, and understands that the apparently perfect Ruth has experienced a more drastic form of her own turbulence. (Like Ruth’s, Jemima’s older lover partly takes the place of a parent.) Ruth’s influence on Jemima therefore inverts the fearful Victorian idea of the tainted woman: only after Jemima learns that Ruth has “fallen” does Ruth’s life help her to develop womanly sympathy and successful love: she defends Ruth against her father’s righteous condemnation and finds a special connection with her husband in their shared disregard of the public shame heaped on Ruth after her exposure. Gaskell’s analogy between the two women’s adolescent confusions also brings Ruth’s history closer to the normal social sphere, defying the conventional gap that set the terms for so many fictional confrontations between pure and fallen women.

As Ruth progresses from domestic motherhood to her role as private governess and finally to her public social work as a nurse, the pastoral sensibility of her childhood falls almost completely away, raising the question of its final status in Gaskell’s work. For her the pastoral is not a place in which a character may abide, nor can it act as a stable alternative realm outside of the social one. In both Dickens and Kingsley, the pastoral blurs into social meanings: Dickens’s utopian community, Kingsley’s transcendent realm of aristocratic appreciation and his lower world of animal passion. For Gaskell the pastoral is a position of psychological and moral isolation genuinely incommensurate with social life. While sensitivity to nature signals the potential of the spirit, it does not (as in Oliver Twist) automatically guarantee ideal character, which can be worked out only within the knowable terms of the domestic and the social spheres. Ruth's pastoral is a screen against which the isolated spirit projects itself when its emotions are uncontained in appropriate social relations. It is superseded by a direct confrontation with social prejudices made visible in a context that is finally committed to the belief that life in the social order is all we have. The difficulty of protecting a generous domestic order from the constructions of social life is delicately rendered in the economic and moral vulnerability of the Benson household; no pastoral havens remain in Gaskell’s fictional terrain.

Nevertheless, Gaskell’s special reliance on pastoral language in this novel makes an argument like Dickens’s, a protest like Kingsley’s, against the imprisonment of character in social determinants. She uses it to explain Ruth’s fall in a way that pulls clear of the dichotomy between guilt and victimization brought on by economic necessity or social aspiration. Like Oliver Twist, Ruth is given an inner nature made of pastoral language and an emotional heritage of affection that makes her internal history very different from her social record. Her character is firmly set in a wider-than-social world against which conventional social definitions declare their blindnesses. The nine chapters that open Ruth render nature as both a consolation and a danger, but they also set up an emotional and moral discontinuity between nature and society which lies at the heart of Gaskell’s claims for her heroine.

The pastoral arguments that emerge from Oliver Twist, Alton Locke, and Ruth all work, in one way or another, to formalize a stance above or beyond an explanatory narrative tied to the consequentiality of social determinism. In the variety of those stances it also becomes possible to see why Wordsworth proved so especially fertile in the imaginations of socially anxious Victorians. Wordsworth offered a “pastoral within,” a way of talking that could evoke individual alternatives to social deadlocks without denying that those deadlocks were there, or likely to remain. Furnished in pastoral images, the interiors of characters’ minds make separate and finer histories than their social worlds can record. Wordsworthian rhetoric could also sanction the myth of a spiritual inheritance that was not the same as a lost social past and that did not simply yearn for a golden age. So Oliver Twist’s prehistory defies social institutions as they develop in history, and Ruth’s early childhood sanctifies the socially reprehensible form of her yearning for love and protection. And Wordsworth provided a way to spiritualize wildness, to submerge passional drives of need or sexuality in language that presented the asocial as a transcendence rather than a violation of social codes.

Perhaps most powerfully of all, Wordsworthian language could work as a blurring of class difference: it stood at the same time for literary culture and for the special powers of humble and working-class people. This identification is especially strong in Dickens and Trollope: for Oliver Twist and Michael Armstrong extensive reading is virtually synonymous with life in the country, and their natural affinity for books matches their spiritual affinity with nature. For Alton Locke the worlds of nature and books are always parallel: equally desirable, equally impossible transcendences of social life. Even Ruth, originally formed in the mode of the blessed Wordsworthian vagrant, later manifests—as though inevitably—a special talent for book-learning and a natural gentility of manner. Through the unexamined conflation of nature and culture, all of these characters are rendered socially equal with their appreciative middle-class readers without having followed the same social courses. As Wordsworth sidestepped social guilt by projecting special spiritual and moral powers upon the poor and vagrant figures of his poems, the novelists who followed him entangled nature with education and culture, making fictional pastoral into a rhetorical substitute for social ascent.

Notes:

1 Coral Lansbury suggests that “prostitution was not merely a social condition but a literary convention with accepted modes of expression to mark the progress from virgin to harlot and eventual suicide” {Elizabeth Gaskell [Boston, 1984], p. 25).

2 Gaskell, Letters, pp. 98—99.

3Winifred Gerin sketches the story in Elizabeth Gaskell, pp. 104—105.

4Gaskell, Letters, p. 209.

5Gerin, Elizabeth Gaskell, p. 137.

6 See ibid., pp. 137-141, and Gaskell, Letters, pp. 220-227.

7Margaret Ganz develops the most extended argument about Gaskell’s contradictions in Elizabeth Gaskell, pp. 105- 31. Angus Easson makes a succinct statement of the problem in Elizabeth Gaskell, pp. 117-125. Lansbury gets around the issue by constructing a Ruth so malleable that she is entirely determined by the circumstances of her surroundings (Elizabeth Gaskell, pp. 25-27).

8 Several critics have taken note of Ruth’s pastoral nature. See especially Craik, Elizabeth Gaskell, pp. 55-60; Sally Mitchell, The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class, and Women’s Reading, 1835-1880 (Bowling Green, O., 1981), pp. 32- 8; and Easson, Elizabeth Gaskell, pp. 115-117.

9Gaskell’s love and knowledge of Wordsworth’s poetry are evident in her letters of 12 May 1836 and 18 August 1838, in which she describes working with her husband on prose imitations of the poets and helping him with lectures on the poetry of humble life (Letters, pp. 7, 33). Gerin attests to her love of Wordsworth and her excitement at meeting him in 1849 (Elizabeth Gaskell, p. 103). Donald D. Stone argues that Gaskell deliberately allied herself with Wordsworthian ideas in order to justify herself as a writer. His analysis of Ruth, attributing the flaws in the novel to Gaskell’s need to punish as well as to celebrate Romantic qualities, seems to conflate the willful and the quiescent romanticisms his book intends to distinguish. See Romantic Impulse, pp. 144—153.

10The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (New York, !933)> PP- 192-195-

11Sally Mitchell reads Ruth as a story about the need to overcome Wordsworthian innocence and to make choices in the knowledge of good and evil (Fallen Angel, p. 35).

12Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth (London, 1967), p. 4. Further references to this edition will appear in the text.

13 Gaskell’s use of “setting” in Ruth is discussed in a more symbolic mode in Craik, Elizabeth Gaskell, pp. 56—60.

14Craik notes the combination of nature and domesticity at the Bensons’ (ibid., p. 58).

15Numerous critics, including Craik (ibid., p. 72) and Lansbury (Elizabeth Gaskell, p. 32), have noticed this connection.

#Elizabeth Gaskell #Ruth #literary criticism #Rosemarie Bodenheimer #I don't necessarily agree with every single point #but it's all thought provoking and some of the concepts I think are genius #the switch in the narrative provided by Ruth's transformation from orphan into mother is *boom*

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abwwia · 2 years ago

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What a treasure! - with a special dedication to @dinahvaginaart

Women Painters of the World, from the time of Caterina Vigri, 1413–1463, to Rosa Bonheur and the present day, assembled and edited by #WalterShawSparrow, lists an overview of prominent #womenpainters up to 1905, the year of publication.

How is this NOT ?! a compulsory book at the each and every #artcourse?! #artherstory

Here's the list of the painters (this will keep me busy for some time :)

Louise Abbéma

Madame Abran (Marthe Abran, 1866-1908)

Georges Achille-Fould

Helen Allingham

Anna Alma-Tadema

Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema

Sophie Gengembre Anderson

Helen Cordelia Angell

Sofonisba Anguissola

Christine Angus

Berthe Art

Gerardina Jacoba van de Sande Bakhuyzen

Antonia de Bañuelos

Rose Maynard Barton

Marie Bashkirtseff

Jeanna Bauck

Amalie Bauerlë

Mary Beale

Lady Diana Beauclerk

Cecilia Beaux

Ana Bešlić

Marie-Guillemine Benoist

Marie Bilders-van Bosse

Lily Blatherwick

Tina Blau

Nelly Bodenheim

Kossa Bokchan

Rosa Bonheur

Mlle. Bouillier

Madame Bovi[2]

Olga Boznanska

Louise Breslau

Elena Brockmann

Jennie Augusta Brownscombe

Anne Frances Byrne

Katharine Cameron

Margaret Cameron (Mary Margaret Cameron)

Marie Gabrielle Capet

Margaret Sarah Carpenter

Madeleine Carpentier

Rosalba Carriera

Mary Cassatt

Marie Cazin

Francine Charderon

Marian Emma Chase

Zoé-Laure de Chatillon

Jeanne-Elisabeth Chaudet

Lilian Cheviot

Mlle. Claudie

Christabel Cockerell

Marie Amélie Cogniet

Uranie Alphonsine Colin-Libour

Jacqueline Comerre-Paton

Cornelia Conant

Delphine Arnould de Cool-Fortin

Diana Coomans

Maria Cosway

Amelia Curran

Louise Danse

Héléna Arsène Darmesteter

Maria Davids

Césarine Davin-Mirvault

Evelyn De Morgan

Jane Mary Dealy

Virginie Demont-Breton

Marie Destrée-Danse

Margaret Isabel Dicksee

Agnese Dolci

Angèle Dubos

Victoria Dubourg

Clémentine-Hélène Dufau

Mary Elizabeth Duffield-Rosenberg

Maud Earl

Marie Ellenrieder

Alix-Louise Enault

Alice Maud Fanner

Catherine Maria Fanshawe

Jeanne Fichel

Author

Walter Shaw Sparrow

Country

United Kingdom

Language

English language

Genre

Art history

Publisher

Hodder & Stoughton, Frederick A. Stokes

Publication date

1905

Pages

331

The purpose of the book was to prove wrong the statement that "the achievements of women painters have been second-rate."[1] The book includes well over 300 images of paintings by over 200 painters, most of whom were born in the 19th century and won medals at various international exhibitions. The book is a useful reference work for anyone studying women's art of the late 19th century

Louise Abbéma

Madame Abran (Marthe Abran, 1866-1908)

Georges Achille-Fould

Helen Allingham

Anna Alma-Tadema

Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema

Sophie Gengembre Anderson

Helen Cordelia Angell

Sofonisba Anguissola

Christine Angus

Berthe Art

Gerardina Jacoba van de Sande Bakhuyzen

Antonia de Bañuelos

Rose Maynard Barton

Marie Bashkirtseff

Jeanna Bauck

Amalie Bauerlë

Mary Beale

Lady Diana Beauclerk

Cecilia Beaux

Ana Bešlić

Marie-Guillemine Benoist

Marie Bilders-van Bosse

Lily Blatherwick

Tina Blau

Nelly Bodenheim

Kossa Bokchan

Rosa Bonheur

Mlle. Bouillier

Madame Bovi[2]

Olga Boznanska

Louise Breslau

Elena Brockmann

Jennie Augusta Brownscombe

Anne Frances Byrne

Katharine Cameron

Margaret Cameron (Mary Margaret Cameron)

Marie Gabrielle Capet

Margaret Sarah Carpenter

Madeleine Carpentier

Rosalba Carriera

Mary Cassatt

Marie Cazin

Francine Charderon

Marian Emma Chase

Zoé-Laure de Chatillon

Jeanne-Elisabeth Chaudet

Lilian Cheviot

Mlle. Claudie

Christabel Cockerell

Marie Amélie Cogniet

Uranie Alphonsine Colin-Libour

Jacqueline Comerre-Paton

Cornelia Conant

Delphine Arnould de Cool-Fortin

Diana Coomans

Maria Cosway

Amelia Curran

Louise Danse

Héléna Arsène Darmesteter

Maria Davids

Césarine Davin-Mirvault

Evelyn De Morgan

Jane Mary Dealy

Virginie Demont-Breton

Marie Destrée-Danse

Margaret Isabel Dicksee

Agnese Dolci

Angèle Dubos

Victoria Dubourg

Clémentine-Hélène Dufau

Mary Elizabeth Duffield-Rosenberg

Maud Earl

Marie Ellenrieder

Alix-Louise Enault

Alice Maud Fanner

Catherine Maria Fanshawe

Jeanne Fichel

Rosalie Filleul

Fanny Fleury

Julia Bracewell Folkard

Lavinia Fontana

Elizabeth Adela Forbes

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale

Consuélo Fould

Empress Frederick of Germany

Elizabeth Jane Gardner

Artemisia Gentileschi[3]

Diana Ghisi

Ketty Gilsoul-Hoppe

Marie-Éléonore Godefroid

Eva Gonzalès

Maude Goodman

Mary L. Gow

Kate Greenaway

Rosina Mantovani Gutti

Gertrude Demain Hammond

Emily Hart

Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot

Alice Havers

Ivy Heitland

Catharina van Hemessen

Matilda Heming

Mrs. John Herford

Emma Herland

E. Baily Hilda

Dora Hitz

A. M. Hobson

Adrienne van Hogendorp-s' Jacob

Lady Holroyd

Amelia Hotham

M. J. A. Houdon

Joséphine Houssaye

Barbara Elisabeth van Houten

Sina Mesdag van Houten

Julia Beatrice How

Mary Young Hunter

Helen Hyde

Katarina Ivanović

Infanta María de la Paz of Spain

Olga Jančić

Blanche Jenkins

Marie Jensen

Olga Jevrić

Louisa Jopling

Ljubinka Jovanović

Mina Karadžić

Angelica Kauffman

Irena Kazazić

Lucy E. Kemp-Welch

Jessie M. King

Elisa Koch

Käthe Kollwitz

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard

Ethel Larcombe

Hermine Laucota

Madame Le Roy

Louise-Émilie Leleux-Giraud

Judith Leyster

Barbara Longhi

Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll

Marie Seymour Lucas

Marie Lucas Robiquet

Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy

Ann Macbeth

Biddie Macdonald

Jessie Macgregor

Violet Manners, Duchess of Rutland

E. Marcotte

Ana Marinković

Madeline Marrable

Edith Martineau

Caroline de Maupeou

Constance Mayer

Anne Mee

Margaret Meen

Maria S. Merian

Anna Lea Merritt

Georgette Meunier

Eulalie Morin

Berthe Morisot

Mary Moser

Marie Nicolas

Beatrice Offor

Adeline Oppenheim Guimard

Blanche Paymal-Amouroux

Marie Petiet

Nadežda Petrović

Zora Petrović

Constance Phillott

Maria Katharina Prestel

Henrietta Rae

Suor Barbara Ragnoni

Catharine Read

Marie Magdeleine Real del Sarte

Flora Macdonald Reid

Maria G. Silva Reis

Mrs. J. Robertson

Suze Robertson

Ottilie Roederstein

Juana Romani

Adèle Romany

Jeanne Rongier

Henriëtte Ronner-Knip

Baroness Lambert de Rothschild

Sophie Rude

Rachel Ruysch

Eugénie Salanson

Adelaïde Salles-Wagner

Amy Sawyer

Helene Schjerfbeck

Félicie Schneider

Anna Maria Schurman

Thérèse Schwartze

Doña Stuart Sindici

Elisabetta Sirani

Sienese Nun Sister A

Sienese Nun Sister B

Minnie Smythe

Élisabeth Sonrel

Lavinia, Countess Spencer

M. E. Edwards Staples

Louisa Starr

Marianne Stokes

Elizabeth Strong

Mary Ann Rankin (Mrs. J. M. Swan)

Annie Louise Swynnerton

E. De Tavernier

Elizabeth Upton, Baroness Templetown

Ellen Thesleff

Elizabeth Thompson

Maria Tibaldi m. Subleyras

Frédérique Vallet-Bisson

Caroline de Valory

Mlle. de Vanteuil[4]

Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun

Caterina Vigri

Vukosava Velimirović

Ana Vidjen

Draginja Vlasic

Beta Vukanović

Louisa Lady Waterford

Hermine Waternau

Caroline Watson

Cecilia Wentworth

E. Wesmael

Florence White

Maria Wiik

Julie Wolfthorn

Juliette Wytsman

Annie Marie Youngman

Jenny Zillhardt.

#womensart #artbywomen #palianshow #womeninarts #greatfemaleartist

#greatfemalepainters #herstory #forgottenartists #mustread

#art herstory #women's art #art by women #women painters

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