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thatscarletflycatcher · 20 days 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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texas-newmexico-history · 1 year ago

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#history #texas #biography #texashistory #brands #ranches

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genealogyrus · 3 months ago

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Родословная Стивена Кинга. ✅ Стивен Эдвин Кинг (англ. Stephen Edwin King; род. 21 сентября 1947, Портленд, Мэн, США) — американский писатель, работающий в разнообразных жанрах, включая у��асы, триллер, фантастику, фэнтези, мистику, драму, детектив, получил прозвище «Король ужасов». Продано более 350 миллионов экземпляров его книг, по которым было снято множество художественных фильмов и сериалов, телевизионных постановок, а также нарисованы различные комиксы. Кинг опубликовал 60 романов, в том числе семь под псевдонимом Ричард Бахман, и 5 научно-популярных книг. Он написал около 200 рассказов, большинство из которых были собраны в девять авторских сборников. Действие многих произведений Кинга происходит в его родном штате Мэн. Мать писателя, Нелли Рут Пиллсбери (англ. Nellie Ruth Pillsbury), была четвёртым ребёнком из восьми в семье Гая Герберта и Нелли Уэстон Фогг Пиллсбери. Она родилась 3 февраля 1913 года в городе Скарборо. Её личная жизнь долгое время не складывалась. Она дважды выходила замуж. 23 июля 1939 года сочеталась браком с капитаном торгового флота Дональдом Эдвардом Кингом. Отец писателя родился 11 мая 1914 года в семье Уильяма и Хелен Бауден Кинг в Перу (Индиана). Врачи поставили Рут диагноз бесплодие, и в 1945 году пара усыновила новорождённого Дэвида Виктора. Через два года, 21 сентября 1947 года в Портленде, несмотря на предполагаемую болезнь, в семье родился мальчик Стивен. Отец: Дональд Эдвин Поллок, псевдоним Кинг Мать: Нелли Рут Пиллсбери 📃 Поколенная роспись рода Кинг: 👫 1-е поколение 1. Стивен Кинг (1947–) 👫 2-е поколение 2. Дональд Эдвин Поллок, псевдоним Кинг (1914–1980) 3. Нелли Рут Пиллсбери (1913–1973) 👫 3-е поколение 4. Уильям Эдвин Поллок (1888–1918) 5. Хелен Алетия Боуден (1897–1968) 6. Гай Герберт Пиллсбери (1876–1965) 7. Нелли Вестерн Фогг (ок. 1877–1963) 👫 4-е поколение 8. Дэвид Риттенхаус Поллок (1857–1938) 9. Элизабет Дэвис (1860–1937) 10. Уильям Ф. Боуден (1860–1941) 11. Гарриет Р. «Хэтти» Клир (1870–1947) 12. Говард Ливитт Пиллсбери (1849–1926) 13. Сесилия Медиа Фосс (1853–1924) 14. Артур Дж. Фогг (1842–1908) 15. Сьюзен Энн Картер (1846–1907) 👫 5-е поколение 16. Джон Поллок (1828–1907) 17. Розанна Мария Риттенхаус (ок. 1828–1890) 18. Натан Дэвис (1822–1904). 19. Марта Мастон (1825–1910) 20. Уильям Т. Боуден (1828–1904) 21. Полли Энн Мэнесс (1833–1907) 22. Сэмюэл С. Клир (1847–1914) 23. Ловина Николс (1842–1917) 24. Чарльз Карл Пиллсбери (1810–1893) 25. Юнис М. Уотерхаус (1810–1871) 26. Джозеф Фосс (ок. 1802–1872) 27. Сьюзен Г. Робинсон (ок. 1816–1875) 28. Аса Рэнд Фогг (1812–1894) 29. Элизабет Х. Бабб (–ок. 1850) 30. Дэниел Картер (ок. 1811–) 31. Мэри Энн Месерв (около 1815–) 👫 6-е поколение 32. Джеймс Поллок (ок. 1781–стр. 1860) 33. Мэри Стэнли (ок. 1785–1860) 34. Тиглман Риттенхаус (ок. 1800–1866) 35. Пермелия Тулли (ок. 1800–1834) 40. Энох Боуден (ок. 1801–1886) 41. Делайла Хьюз (ок. 1802–) 42. Элси Манесс (c1806–p1880) 43. Элизабет —-— (ок. 1809–ок. 1880) 48. Джонатан Пиллсбери (1762–1833) 49. Шуа Милликен (ок. 1776–1864) 50. Ричард Уотерхаус (1782–1868) 51. Элизабет «Бетси» Смит (1782–1871) 56. Джордж Фогг (1784–1863) 57. Джоанна Фогг (ок. 1780–1861) 62. Эндрю Месерв 63. Юнис Бернелл 👫 7-е поколение 96. Дэвид Пиллсбери (1737–) 97. Анна —--- 98. Джеремайя Милликен 99. Сара Лорд 100. Натаниэль Уотерхаус (1756–1845) 101. Элизабет Кейн (1758–1840) 112. Джеремайя Фогг (1744–1815) 113. Мэри Уоррен (ок. 1742–1800) 124. Джордж Мезерв (1740–) 125. Сюзанна Стэйплс 126. Джон Бернелл 127. Лидия Уитни 👫 8-е поколение 192. Джозайя Пиллсбери (1686–стр. 1761) 193. Сара Келли 198. Авраам Лорд 199. Фиби Херд 200. Джозеф Уотерхаус (1711–1796) 201. Мэри Либби (–1756) 224. Сэмюэл Фогг 225. Рэйчел Маринер (1724–) 248. Джон Месерв (1708–1762) 249. Джемайма Хаббард (1712–1768) 254. Абель Уитни 255. Мэри —--- 👫 9-е поколение 384. Джоб Пиллсбери (1643–1716) 385. Кэтрин Гаветт (–1718) 398. Джеймс Херд (1696–) 399. Мэри Робертс (1701–) 400. Тимоти Уотерхаус (ок. 1675–) 401. Рут Мозес (–1769) 450. Джон Маринер 451. Сара Сойер (1683–1724) 496. Клемент Мезерв (ок. 1679–1746). 497. Элизабет Джонс 👫 10-е поколение 768. Уильям Пиллсбери (ок. 1606–1686) 769. Дороти Кросби (–стр. 1686) 796. Джон Херд (ок. 1667–) 797. Фиби Литтлфилд (ок. 1669–1697) 798. Хэтевил Робертс (–c1734/1735). 799. Лидия Робертс (–стр. 1719) 800. Ричард Уотерхаус (–ок. 1718) 801. Сара Ферналд (ок. 1640–ок. 1701) 802. Аарон Моисей (ок. 1651–1713) 803. Рут Шерберн (1660–) 902. Джеймс Сойер (–1703) 903. Сара Брей (–стр. 1726) 992. Клемент Мессерви (–a1720) 993. Элизабет —-— (–a1720) 👫 11-е поколение 1592. Джеймс Херд (ок. 1632–ок. 1675) 1593. Шуа Конли (ок. 1640–) 1596. Джон Робертс (ок. 1629–1694/95) 1597. Эбигейл Наттер (–стр. 1674) 1602. Ренальд ��ернальд (–c1656) 1603. Джоанна —-— (–c1660) 1604. Джон Мозес (ок. 1616–стр. 1693) 1605. Алиса —-— (–a1665) 1606. Генри Шерберн (1611–a1680) 1607. Ребекка Гиббонс (ок. 1617–1667) 1806. Томас Брей 👫 12-е поколение 3186. (вероятно) Авраам Конли 3192. Томас Робертс (–ок. 1674) 3193. Ребекка —-— (–a1673) 3194. Хатевил Наттер (ок. 1600–ок. 1675) 3195. Энн —-— (–стр. 1674) 3212. Джозеф Шерберн (–ок. 1621) 3214. Эмброуз Гиббонс (ок. 1592–ок. 1657) 3215. Элизабет —-— (–1655) 👫 13-е поколение 6388. Эдмунд Наттер (–a1633/34) 6389. Элизабет —-— (–1638) 6424. Генри Шерберн (–ок. 1598) Знаменитые родственники Стивена Кинга: 👤 Уильям Пиллсбери (1606 - 1686) Великое переселение иммигрантов 1640 7-й прадедушка 👤 Джон Лэнгдон Подписавший Конституцию США Троюродный брат, 6 раз удаленный через Генри Шерберна 👤 Джон Гринлиф Уиттиер Американский поэт «у камина» 4-й кузен, 5 раз удаленный через Джона Робертса 👤 Джон Сарджент Пиллсбери Соучредитель CA Pillsbury Co. Пятиродный брат, 3 раза удаленный через Уильяма Пиллсбери 👤 Генри Уэллс Соучредитель American Express и Wells Fargo and Co. Пятиродный брат, 5 раз удаленный через Томаса Робертса 👤 Чарльз А. Пиллсбери Соучредитель CA Pillsbury Co. 6-й кузен, 2 раза удаленный через Уильяма Пиллсбери 👤 Роберт Фрост Поэт и драматург Семиродный брат, дважды удаленный через доктора Ренальда Фернальда 👤 Милтон Брэдли Основатель компании Milton Bradley Семиродный брат, 3 раза удаленный через Томаса Робертса 👤 Чаннинг Кокс 49-й губернатор Массачусетса Семиродный кузен 3 раза удален через Хатевила Наттера 👤 Брук Адамс Актриса кино и телевидения 8-й кузен 1 раз удален через Джона Херда 👤 Чарли Дэй Актёр кино и телевидения 8-й кузен 1 раз удален через Джона Херда 👤 Сэр Уинстон Черчилль Премьер-министр Соединенного Королевства 8-й кузен, 2 раза удаленный через Томаса Робертса 👤 Меган Маркл Герцогиня Сассекская, актриса телевидения 8-й кузен, 2 раза удаленный через Уильяма Пиллсбери 👤 Луи Л'Амур Западный автор 9-й кузен через Генри Шерберна 👤 Джон Риттер Актёр кино и телевидения 9-й кузен 1 раз удален через Генри Шерберна 👤 Адриенна Марден Киноактриса 9-й кузен 1 раз удален через Томаса Робертса 👤 Джордж Герберт 8-й граф Карнарвон , владелец замка Хайклер (он же Аббатство Даунтон) 9-й кузен, 2 раза удаленный через Джона Робертса 👤 Натаниэль Филбрик Автор книги «В сердце моря» 10-й кузен 1 раз удален через Томаса Робертса 👤 Хилари Суонк Киноактриса 10-й кузен 1 раз удален через Томаса Робертса 👤 Келси Грэммер Актёр кино и телевидения 10-й кузен 1 раз удален через Томаса Робертса ПРОШЛОЕ - РЯДОМ! 🌳📚🔎 🌳📚🔎 🌳📚🔎 🌳📚🔎 🌳📚🔎 🌳📚🔎 🌳📚🔎 🌳📚🔎 ✅Услуги составления родословной, генеалогического древа. 📖 ЗАКАЗ РОДОСЛОВНОЙ на нашем сай��е: www.genealogyrus.ru/zakazat-issledovanie-rodoslovnoj 📖 ЗАКАЗ РОДОСЛОВНОЙ в нашей группе ВК: https://vk.com/app5619682_-66437473 ✉Или напишите нам: [email protected]

https://genealogyrus.ru/blog/tpost/3d0m1suls1-rodoslovnaya-stivena-kinga

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brookstonalmanac · 7 months ago

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Birthdays 4.27

Beer Birthdays

Adam Gettelman (1847)

John Maier (1955)

Gwen Conley (1966)

Latiesha Cook (2004)

Five Favorite Birthdays

Rogers Hornsby; St. Louis Cardinals 2B (1896)

Walter Lantz; animator, Woody Woodpecker creator (1900)

George Petty; artist, illustrator (1894)

Kate Pierson; rock keyboardist, singer (1948)

Sergei Prokofiev; Russian composer (1891)

Famous Birthdays

Frank Abagnale Jr.; security consultant & criminal (1948)

Philip Abelson; physicist (1913)

Irving Adler; mathematician 1913)

Anouk Aimee; actor (1932)

Earl Anthony; bowler (1938)

Ludwig Bemelmans; Italian-American author & illustrator (1898)

Judy Carne; comedian (1939)

Wallace Carothers; chemist & inventor of nylon (1896)

Jenna Coleman; English actress (1986)

Cecil Day-Lewis; Anglo-Irish poet & author (1904)

Sandy Dennis; actor (1937)

Sheena Easton; pop singer (1959)

Charles Emanuel I; king of Sardinia (1701)

Ace Frehley; rock musician (1951)

Edward Gibbon; historian, writer (1737)

Ruth Glick; author (1942)

Ulysses S. Grant; 18th U.S. President (1822)

Pete Ham; rock musician (1947)

Sally Hawkins; English actress (1976)

Casey Kasem; DJ (1932)

Jim Keltner; rock drummer (1942)

Theodor Kittelsen; Norwegian painter & illustrator (1857)

Jack Klugman; actor (1922)

Jules Lemaître; French playwright (1853)

Lizzo; singer and rapper (1988)

Samuel F.B. Morse; code inventor (1791)

Ann Peebles; soul singer-songwriter (1947)

Dave Peel; rock musician (1947)

Alan Reynolds; English painter (1926)

Enos Slaughter; St. Louis Cardinals RF (1916)

Herbert Spencer; English philosopher (1820)

James Samuel Stone; British historian (1852)

Yoshihiro Togashi; Japanese illustrator (1966)

Friedrich von Flotow; German composer (1812)

August Wilson; playwright (1945)

Mary Wollstonecraft; writer, feminist (1759)

#Events

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pmamtraveller · 8 months ago

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HARVESTERS RESTING (Ruth and Boaz), 1850 by JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET

Dirty and exhausted, harvesters and their tools are strewn around them as they rest before piles of golden grain. To the left of the group, a man introduces a woman.

Originally, MILLET'S inspiration for the piece came from the Bible's story of the Widow, RUTH, who encounters the landowner, BOAZ, a family friend and the man who would later become her husband, while out working in the fields. At his 1853 Salon, MILLET displayed the piece under the title "HARVESTERS RESTING."

The focus on the harvesters, and the grain piles behind them, allows for BOAZ and RUTH to be seen as secondary figures to the focal point. What we’ve seen here is not a romantic Old Testament narrative of faith connecting two people, but rather a modern group of hot, dusty field laborers resting after a day of work.

RUTH'S face is downcast shyly, and BOAZ, acting as intermediary, visually joining her figure with the group field workers. Thus, MILLET brings into focus the common laborer's centrality in history and scripture.

#harvesters resting #ruth and boaz #jean francois millet #realism #realism painting #realist painter #realist painting #realist #realism artwork

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raisab332012 · 1 year ago

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Mrs Anna Maeve Sullivan Waters (1833-1853) - Find a Grave https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/184441087/anna-maeve-waters

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andrew-simon-commonplace-book · 2 years ago

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The many sculptures of Ruth and their lack of effect on the view of women

Image citation Ruth. – Works – THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY, ART MUSEUM, AND BOTANICAL GARDENS. (1970, January 1). Retrieved December 9, 2022, from https://emuseum.huntington.org/objects/12212/ruth;jsessionid=11B165DE93FECEEE97784D5DA819220D

Many sculptures of Ruth have been made throughout history like the one shown above. This particular sculpture was made in 1853 by Chauncey Bradley Ives. What is peculiar about statues of Ruth being created throughout history is that the book of Ruth empowers women, which goes against societal beliefs at the time. At the time this particular statue was created, women couldn't even vote. If creators of a sculpture were so inspired by the book of Ruth to spend countless hours creating a sculpture of Ruth, then why don't you see these same individuals lobbying for women's rights or anything like that. Why is this? There are countless Sculptures of Ruth and hardly any examples of artists lobbying for women's rights. Did the authors not care about the message of the book or did this have to do with a different interpretation of the main message of the book. In Robert Martinez's article "Ruth- a case for women or a case for Patriarchy?" He argues that the book of Ruth supports patriarchal ideas just as much as pro-women ideas he often states that "Ruth is defined in relation to males" and she only makes something of herself after she gets a male's approval and then marries him. He states that without males the book of Ruth would have no value. Personally, I don't agree with this viewpoint, but it makes me wonder if this viewpoint explains why the sculptures of Ruth statues are not lobbying for woman's rights. Did everyone from before the early 1900s interpret the book of Ruth this way, and is that why there was a nonchalant attitude towards giving women rights in this period?

Article citation: Martinez, R. (n.d.). Ruth - A Case for Women, or a Case for Patriarchy?, 1–7.

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alliluyevas · 1 year ago

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While, as I said in the first post, most of the plural wives had significantly fewer children, I think it's interesting to compare Emmeline Free to Lucy and Emily, as she was the only one who actually had more children. Her pregnancies also overlap sometimes with Lucy's and Emily's, though not as much.

Emmeline married Brigham in April 1845, two days after her nineteenth birthday. He was forty-three. They had ten children:

Ella (born August 1847)

Marinda (July 1849)

Hyrum (January 1851)

Emmeline (February 1853)

Louisa (October 1855)

Lorenzo (September 1856)

Alonzo (December 1858)

Ruth (March 1861)

Daniel (February 1863)

Adella (October 1864)

Emmeline had three pregnancies that overlapped with both Lucy and Emily (Fanny + Emily + Marinda, Hyrum + Caroline + Ernest, Arta + Don Carlos + Louisa), though interestingly in two of those cases Lucy and Emily's children were within a couple months of each other and Emmeline's child was either a fair bit older or a fair bit younger (as much as you can get within a nine-month period). She also had three different pregnancies that overlapped with one of Lucy's but not one of Emily's (Emmeline + Shamira, Feramorz + Alonzo, Clarissa + Ruth).

In general, Emmeline's pregnancy spacing is probably the most even and consistent of any of the three women. The smallest gap between any of her children is eleven months (yikes), and the largest is 2 years + 8 months, but almost all her children are slightly less than 2 years apart. (These are the gaps before and after her daughter Louisa, who most records say was born in October 1855 but I've seen a couple that say October 1854, which would bring the spacing to a more even 18 months-2 years for every pregnancy, so that might be more statistically likely, though I don't want to discount that Louisa may have been an outlier.)

She also, interestingly, had her last child at 38, just like Emily and Lucy.

extremely nerdy statistics-based Mormonposting incoming:

So, I was examining some data about Brigham Young's wives and children, as you do, and I came to a very interesting realization about two of his wives, Lucy Decker and Emily Partridge, having quite strikingly parallel childbearing history. I'm going to just list their kids in bulletpoint and then analyze the two sets of data together because I think that will make the most visual sense.

Both women had seven children with Brigham Young. (Lucy also had two children with her first husband, but I'm only discussing kids fathered by Young in this analysis).

Lucy married Brigham Young as his first plural wife in June 1842, when she was twenty years old and he was forty-one. Their children were:

Heber (born in June 1845)

Fanny (January 1849)

Ernest (April 1851)

Shamira (March 1853)

Arta (April 1855)

Feramorz (September 1858)

Clarissa (July 1860)

Emily married BY in September 1844. She was either his fifth, sixth, or seventh plural wife (he married three different women in that month and we don't know the exact date of Emily's marriage). She was also twenty and he was forty-three. Their children were:

Edward (born October 1845)

Emily (March 1849)

Caroline (February 1851)

Don Carlos (May 1855)

Miriam (October 1857)

Josephine (February 1860)

Lura (April 1862)

As you can see, five pairs of these two women's children were born very close to each other (Heber + Edward four months apart, Fanny + Emily about six weeks apart, Caroline + Ernest also about six weeks apart, Arta + Don Carlos three weeks apart, and Josephine + Clarissa five months apart). Three of these pairs are extremely close in age, and in all five cases Lucy and Emily's pregnancies would have overlapped. I thought this was very interesting and also seems pretty statistically unlikely, but they seem to have been on what I will call a synced-up childbirth schedule for lack of a better term.

In general, both women are having children approximately every two years, give or take a few months, but there are a couple notable exceptions, including the one instance in which their childbirth schedules get really off track.

Lucy's Heber and Emily's Edward were the first two Young children born to plural wives, and the only ones born before the majority of the church left Nauvoo in early spring 1846. For the next two and a half years, Emily, Lucy, and their husband were mostly either on the road or living out of tents, wagons, and makeshift shacks. For most of 1847, Brigham was actually absent because he was part of the "vanguard pioneer company" that first reached the Salt Lake Valley and most of his wives were still back in Nebraska. I'm guessing this is why there is a larger than average gap (about three and a half years) between both boys and their younger sisters. Once they reach Utah, another sibling joins each woman's family in short order.

This is where the timelines diverge the most significantly. Lucy continues to give birth about every two years until her late thirties. Emily's third and fourth children, on the other hand, are more than four years apart. In November 1852, Emily's three children became seriously ill and seven-year-old Eddie sadly died. Afterwards, Emily, who seems to have felt that she was parenting and then grieving alone without any emotional support from her husband, wrote to Brigham asking for a divorce. It's unclear how he responded, but they stayed married. I'm guessing it took time to reconcile, and this is why Emily's childbirth pattern "skips" a period where Lucy continued to have pretty evenly spaced children, before getting back on the same general track when they both have sons less than a month apart in 1855.

Emily has her remaining children about one every 2.5 years and, like Lucy, has her last child at age 38. Having tracked this, I think it's very interesting, because you can see both how their childbearing trajectory conformed both to their own general pattern and to the patterns of the other, and also some pretty glaring anomalies that are probably connected to different dynamics in Emily and Lucy's respective marriages. Also, in terms of the social dynamics of polygamous marriage--it must have be weird to get pregnant and this other woman is immediately like "oh me too" and this happens five times. (Many of the other plural wives had a lot fewer children than either Emily or Lucy, and more seemingly "random" child spacing, so you don't really get any other instances where the same two women are repeatedly giving birth around the same time to this extent).

#me looking at this like. oh my god get a job stay away from her #i didnt want to put that in the body of the post but. jesus christ man. she did not have a moment's peace #Mormonposting tag

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historicalfictionsims · 3 years ago

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Mother's Day Lookbook (Part 1)

One of the requests on my followers survey was more lookbooks for different characters/age groups from the American Girl stories. Most of these women are the biological mother of a main character. Dolores is Josefina's aunt who eventually becomes her step-mother, while Océane is Marie-Grace's opera coach and eventual aunt.

Eetsa (1764), Martha Merriman (1774)

Mama Abbott (1812 - no first name), Dolores Romero (1824)

Aurélia Rey (1853), Océane Rousseau (1853)

Greta Larson (1854), Ruth Walker (1864)

CC thanks to @blogsimplesimmer, @buzzardly28, @coloresurbanos, @javitrulovesims, @linzlu, @mlyssimblr, @pandorasimbox, @peebsplays, @plumbobteasociety, @sheabuttyr, & Sifix (TSR)

WCIF always welcome! Part 2 of the lookbook here.

#sims 4 historical cc #ts4 historical cc #sims 4 lookbook #ts4 lookbook #american girl

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archduchessofnowhere · 3 years ago

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The Duchesses in Black: did Elisabeth really met her future husband wearing a black dress?

Duchess Ludovika had other matters on her mind when she and her daughters arrived in Bad Ischl on August 16, 1853. A migraine had forced her to interrupt the journey, so that her party arrived in Bad Ischl with some delay, upsetting all of Sophie’s carefully laid plans for the first day. Furthermore, while her daughters were with her on her arrival, Ludovika was accompanied by neither baggage nor ladies-in-waiting. All three women wore mourning for the death of an aunt.

Hamann, Brigitte (1986). The Reluctant Empress (translation by Ruth Hein)

The meeting at Ischl of the future Empress Elisabeth "Sisi" of Austria, then only a Duchess in Bavaria, with her cousin Franz Josef I of Austria, it's probably the most known moment of her life, thanks to the plenty of portrayals that it had in media. In August 16 of 1853 the Duchess Ludovika in Bavaria arrived in Ischl with her two eldest daughters, Helene "Néné" and Elisabeth "Sisi", to celebrate the birthday of the Emperor of Austria, who was also the son of Ludovika's elder sister the Archduchess Sophie. And in this birthday party, Franz Josef fell in love with Sisi. And with that, the teenaged girl was pulled out of obscurity into the spotlight.

There is one crucial detail that the portrayals of Elisabeth and Franz Josef's meeting omit: that Ludovika and her daughters arrived to the celebration wearing black because they were mourning an aunt. The only exception to this is the new series Sisi (2021-) that does shows Elisabeth meeting her future husband in a very modern looking black dress, although here she just does it because she's being Dramatic™ and not because her family is in mourning.

Last night I remembered this incident, the Duchesses arriving in black to the Emperor's birthday, when suddenly I realized something: who was the aunt that died? Ludovika had six sisters who survived infancy. Out of all of them, the first one to die was Auguste, Duchess of Leuchtenberg, who passed away in 1851. So she wasn't the aunt that Hamann refers to. The rest of Ludovika's sisters died in the 1870s. And neither could be one of Ludovika's sisters-in-law, for they died in 1838, 1854 and 1866 respectively. And Duke Max, Sisi and Nené's father, was an only child. Meaning: no aunt of Elisabeth and Helene died in 1853. So for who was the mourning?

I kept searching but still I couldn't find an aunt, uncle or cousin of any degree that died in 1853. The quote from Hamann's biography that opens this post doesn't cite a source, and given that apparently no relative, not even a distant one, of them died in that year, I started doubting if the story of them wearing black was even true to begin with. So I went back to The Reluctant Empress, and some pages after the quote from above I came across this:

Care went to providing the designated bride at least with an exquisite coiffure, even though she would have to appear before the Emperor in her dusty black traveling dress. Sisi looked after her own hair—simple long braids. She never noticed that Archduchess Sophie had a watchful eye, not only for Helene, but for Elisabeth as well. At any rate, Sophie later described this hairdressing scene at great length to her sister Marie of Saxony, stressing the “charm and grace” of the younger girl’s movements, “all the more so as she was so completely unaware of having produced such a pleasing effect. In spite of the mourning . . . Sissy [sic] was adorable in her very plain, high-necked black dress.” [13] Next to her completely artless, childlike sister, Helene seemed all at once very austere. The black dress was not flattering to her—and perhaps really did determine the course of her life, as some people later claimed.

We have a source here! A direct quote from Sophie! Hamann tells us that: "Sophie's detailed letter was published in the Reichspost, April 22, 1934. The quotations that follow are from the same source". Interestingly, there's no mention of the black dresses in Corti's Elisabeth, published in 1936, although maybe he just didn't knew about the letter. Earlier biographies don't mention it either (more understandable in those cases, given that the letter hadn't been published yet).

But I still couldn't answer the question that prompted this improvised investigation: who was the mourning for if no relative of them had died that year?

The Lonely Empress by Joan Haslip it's the major English biography on Empress Elisabeth. Sadly I don't own a copy, and the Archive.org doesn't have it either, so I haven't read it yet. But you can read some fragments of it on Google Books, and luckily for me, I was able to find a mention of the mourning dresses:

Meanwhile the Archduchess was awaiting her sister and nieces in the hotel where she had taken rooms for them. Not only were they over an hour late in arriving, but to her annoyance they all appeared dressed in black, in mourning for one of the Queen of Bavaria's aunts. Sophia was particularly irritated because her son was due at the villa in half an hour; there was no time for them to change, and with her pale face and dark hair Nene looked her very worst in black.

Haslip, Joan (1965). The Lonely Empress.

The quote goes on but Google didn't let me read more. But even so, I had a new clue!! My first thought was that Hamann misquoted Haslip and that's how we ended with the aunt thing, or maybe not even that, because I guess you can make the case that "an aunt" could mean someone elses's aunt and not the girls'. But Haslip isn't in the bibliography of The Reluctant Empress, so where did she got it from remains a mystery.

In 1853 the Queen of Bavaria was Marie of Prussia, the wife of King Maximilian II of Bavaria, who was Ludovika's nephew and therefore Elisabeth and Helene's cousin. So now I was once again going down the rabbit hole, checking every relative of Queen Marie and, once again, none that I could find had died in 1853. I was about about to fall in despair (?) when I realized that there was other Queen of Bavaria at that time: Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen, the wife of King Ludwig I who amidst scandal abdicated the Bavarian throne in favor of his son Maximilian in 1848. I was reading a list of Therese's siblings when FINALLY:

Georg, Duke of Saxe-Altenburg (Hildburghausen, 24 July 1796 - Hummelshain, 3 August 1853)

I DID IT!! I found the relative!!! It was not Queen Therese's aunt who died, but her brother, and therefore King Maximilian's uncle. How did that turn into "the Queen of Bavaria's aunt" and then just "an aunt" I still don't know, but it was likely a case of misquotation that kept being repeated because no one double checked how many aunts of Elisabeth died in 1853 (zero).

To answer the question of the title, did Elisabeth really wear black when she met her future husband? The answer is yes. Was she in mourning for the passing of an aunt? The answer is no: they were mourning the death of an uncle of the King of Bavaria, which honestly explains why everyone was annoyed and not sad about this.

#tl;dr: yes but the dying aunt part it's fake news. read the whole thing to find out who actually died!#also I noticed that Helene looking bad in black isn't in quotation in neither Haslip's nor Hamann's book #which makes me wonder if it's something that Sophie actually wrote in the letter or if it's the authors taking artistic liberties #historian: brigitte hamann #historian: joan haslip #the lonely empress #the reluctant empress #empress elisabeth of austria #ludovika of bavaria duchess in bavaria #helene in bavaria hereditary princess of thurn und taxis #franz josef i of austria #historicwomendaily

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