RUTH: AN UNUSUAL PROSTITUTE. ELIZABETH GASKELL'S SPECULATIVE GAZE VS. VICTORIAN MASCULINE VISION OF WOMAN

Abstract

[...]nobody would explain their loose lives as the result of factors like poverty. [...]they were generally desperate women who had no other chance to survive, an unacceptable view to the Victorian mind, which could not tolerate any possible disharmonies in the ideal image of the world it intended to support. [...]if the existence of prostitution could not be denied, it was fundamental to drastically split wrong from right. [...]there was an investigation which ended with the publication of the first Contagious Diseases Act in 1864. Being a single mother parallels Ruth to a prostitute, with the aggravating circumstance that she succumbs to an upper-class seducer.

Headnote

Abstract: In a society based on prudery and repression of female sexuality, a prostitute reinforced the masculine dichotomised image of woman: Madonna/harlot. Prostitutes were liminal characters of subplots, until Gaskell's Ruth. The unlucky destiny of an unwed mother, compelled to work as a dressmaker in slavery condition, was supposed to be disturbing enough to shake Victorian hypocrisy.

The aim of my study is to analyze the novel as a contrasting counterpart of Victorian social beliefs and show the hermeneutic complexity of the protagonist who reacts by creating her own position in society without becoming a rebel.

Key words: action, fallen woman, labor, masculine judgement, prostitution, work

1. Introduction: The Great Social Evil

Prostitution was a theme long debated by the Victorians. A controversial subject since, on the one hand, it was considered a sort of business in perfect accordance with the new ethics imposed by the Industrial Revolution, as Peter Brooks (1992:144) notes: "the body of the prostitute is clearly the meeting place of eros and commerce"; but, on the other hand, it was in discordance with the Victorian strict moral principles. Prostitutes were considered fallen women and that implied that they were responsible for and not victims of their state. Besides, being a prostitute also meant being involved in illegal activities, as indeed they were often beggars, pickpockets or thieves too. For this reason, their position got even worse and they were doomed and pointed out as sinners by society.

Actually, nobody would explain their loose lives as the result of factors like poverty. However, they were generally desperate women who had no other chance to survive, an unacceptable view to the Victorian mind, which could not tolerate any possible disharmonies in the ideal image of the world it intended to support. Therefore, if the existence of prostitution could not be denied, it was fundamental to drastically split wrong from right. This kind of classification divided women into two categories: madonnas and harlots. This binary opposition was supposed to give a presumably correct orientation to a society which was both obsessed with and terrified by sex. Women were supposed to be confined within the family walls and to deal only with domestic affairs. That was how the rising middle class, always busy with money making and social climbing, expected them to behave and any infringement was harshly blamed. Fallen women were seen as linked to criminality and disease, and were considered a biological danger that society had to fight. As a result, there was an investigation which ended with the publication of the first Contagious Diseases Act in 1864. The commission was made up only of male members, no women were allowed. As rightly remarked by Elsie B. Michie (1993:92):

This kind of invisible masculine surveillance of female sexuality was characteristic of the way the Victorian social authority dealt generally with prostitution, though it tended more frequently to be discussed in terms of overseeing than of overhearing.

Prostitution stimulated the morbid imagination of a society which was constrained between two opposite tensions: voyeurism and prudery. Under the influence of Queen Victoria, in fact, the age turned excessively puritanical and sex became a taboo.

Artists and intellectuals showed much interest in this complicated subject because, unlike the Romantics, the Victorians did not want to be separated from the social context, but felt the urgency to contribute providing different opinions and stimulating new awareness in a society conscious of its own power. Prose writers, especially, were deeply involved in social, political and religious issues, so they became the spokesmen for their time. "Nineteenth-century writers were characteristically melodramtic and encapsulated the concept of a perpetual battle between good and evil, order and anarchy" (Weiner 1990:21).

Novelists showed a sympathetic attitude towards prostitution, which they used in their writings to sensitize their reading public. Charles Dickens, for example, who believed in the so called change of heart, thought that fallen women were capable of redemption if only they were offered the opportunity for useful repentance. For this purpose, prostitutes were taken to rescue homes, which were commonly bleak places, more similar to prisons than to houses where repentance was extorted. Dickens, who was always very active in social services and charities, was also truly engaged in the creation of a hostel located in the west side of London with his friend Angela Burdett-Couts. This hostel was Urania Cottage, Home for homeless women, but actually also for fallen women. Nevertheless, despite his sincere apprehension about this problem, his narrative embraced the rhetoric of contemporary social texts, based on the concept that women were divided into pure and impure and on the principle that dirt should be exorcised to be fully purified.

2. Gaskell's heroine: Ruth

A different approach was adopted by Elizabeth Gaskell. Her novels have generally been divided into two genres: domestic and social fictions.

Ruth, published in 1853, represents an interesting diversion on the theme of prostitution. Ruth Hilton, the protagonist of the novel, is a fallen woman, but not a stereotype. She is a round character, in which angelical aspects are mixed with carnal experiences. She is described as a very attractive young girl, but the narrator says that "Ruth was innocent and snowpure" (Gaskell 1853:182) and above all, that "she knew that she was beautiful; but that seemed abstract, and removed from herself. Her existence was in feeling, and thinking, and loving" (1853:307). She is even compared to a Madonna when her illegitimate son is born: "on the morning of Christ's nativity" (1853:530). The whole story aims to support the idea that one can become a fallen woman as a consequence of a series of misfortunes and not deliberately. The story is a paradigm of stigmatised situations which are, however, partly retold from a different perspective. Ruth is an orphan working together with other girls at Mrs. Benson's as a needlewoman; one day she accidentally meets Mr. Bellingham, an aristocrat who immediately feels attracted to her. They start to see each other secretly, but when Mrs. Benson finds out, she dismisses her. Alone in the world, she accepts to go to London with Henry Bellingham, but during their journey, Bellingham gets ill and his mother is asked to come and attend her son, who eventually deserts Ruth. Being Bellingham's lover without being married to him transforms Ruth into a fallen woman, namely into someone to be repelled by society like a prostitute; Ruth's unlucky destiny is anticipated by her positive answer to Bellingham: "Ruth says yes: the yes, the fatal word of which she so little imagined the infinite consequences" (1853:240). Being a single mother parallels Ruth to a prostitute, with the aggravating circumstance that she succumbs to an upper-class seducer.

Women who lost their virginity outside marriage were frowned upon as illegitimacy was sinful: as they showed desire they must be slaves to greed and lust. (Joyce 2008)

After being seduced and abandoned by her lover Bellingham, already fed up with her, Ruth begins a long path towards redemption, which ends with her death, as Joyce states: "it was acceptable for men to sin, but women, kept in the pure ideal, could not" (2008).

If a superficial reading of the story might classify it as a typical tearjerker novel, Ruth instead presents some novelties in the evolution of the concept of fallen woman. I have selected for my analysis two peculiar aspects of the novel: the representation of male and female gaze toward Ruth's misfortunes and the role of female work within society.

3. Male and female gaze compared

Male and female characters show a contrasting attitude, revealing that women support the stigmatisation of roles in society, by judging Ruth's bad, eventful life more harshly than men. Their strict and narrow minded behaviour is due to two factors: jealousy of Ruth's undisputed beauty and the importance of respectability as a fundamental, basic value of Victorian thought. The narrator focuses on this topic from the very beginning, when he describes Ruth's first employer:

Mrs Mason was a very worthy woman, but like many other worthy women, she had her foibles; and one (very natural to her calling) was to pay an extreme regard to appearances. (Gaskell 1853:32)

When Mrs. Mason fires Ruth, she does it for the sake of appearances. The latter's supposed relationship with Mr. Bellingham is sufficient reason to fear people's gossip and the loss of customers:

She said it was not faults of hers, for the girl was always a forward creature, boasting of her beauty, and saying how pretty she was, and stirring to get where her good looks could be seen and admired. (Gaskell 1853:443)

Ruth's power of seduction is as strong as it is unconscious, nevertheless it is perceived as a danger by the women surrounding her, which mirrors an archetypical female rivalry whose purpose is to gain men's favour and consideration. Yet, in this way, the female characters reinforce masculine power. For example, when Mrs. Bellingham goes to Mrs. Morgan's inn to take her spoilt son, Henry, to London - officially to help him recover his strength, but practically to take him away from Ruth - she completely justifies Henry's behaviour toward Ruth, despite his uneasiness:

... don't be too severe in your self reproaches while you are so feeble, dear Henry. It is right to repent, but I have no doubt in my own mind she led you wrong with her artifices. (Gaskell 1853:423)

Harder words are pronounced by Faith Benson, when she knows that the child Ruth is expecting is illegitimate: "it would be better for her to die at once" (1853:466). The imposition of respectability leads to hypocrisy, for instance, when Mrs. Morgan, the owner of the inn where Bellingham and Ruth spend a period together, advises Ruth to use the rear door, not to be seen by her other customers.

A different perception of Ruth's beauty is shared by the male characters, more sensuous and carnal according to Mr. Bellingham, more spiritual and religious according to Mr. Benson.

Her beauty was all that Mr Bellingham cared for, and it was supreme, it was all he recognised of her and he was proud of it. (Gaskell 1853:307)

Rosemary Langridge (2011:52) notes:

The masculine gaze is made very much apparent in descriptions of Bellingham's treatment of Ruth as he delights in watching her, decorating her and generally possessing her as a beautiful object.

Mr. Benson, who rescues Ruth after Mr. Bellingham's escape to London, unlike his sister who would send Ruth to "Fordham Penitentiary, the best place for such a character" (1853:447), rejoices over the child's advent. Fordham Penitentiary is supposed to be one of those Magdalene Asylums created with the mission to reinsert women into society, but as years progressed they became prison-like places, characterized by cruelty. Mr. Benson is a dissenting clergyman who embodies Unitarian thought. Gaskell was a Unitarian too and she rejected Original Sin, believing that the human mind and soul were not innate, but had immense potential for growth. In this respect, Mr. Benson comments:

... the world has, indeed, made these children miserable, innocent, as they are; but I doubt if this be according to the will of God, unless it be his punishment for the parents' guilt; and even then the world's way of treatment is too apt to harden the mother's natural love into something like hatred. (Gaskell 1853:497)

Unitarians considered the environment as fundamentally responsible for shaping and determining an individual's character and fate. This religious viewpoint permeates Gaskell's response to the problem of the fallen woman, perceiving female sexuality not to be inherently corruptible or dangerous. The novelist challenges the institutionalised separatist response of penitentiary restoration by locating Ruth's redemptive process within the family home of the Bensons. Gaskell offers female solidarity and the role of motherhood as the ideal ameliorative solutions (Webster 2012:10).

The arrival of Jemima in the story has the function of criticizing the association between the fallen and a sinful nature. Jemima is the daughter of Mr. Bradshaw, in whose household Ruth finds employment as a governess. At the beginning, Jemima, like other female characters, looks at Ruth suspiciously and is jealous, since her suitor, Mr. Farquar, her father's business partner, seems to admire Ruth very much. However, Jemima makes a tum in the development of the narration when she rebels against her father's hard doctrines, the perfect embodiment of Calvinistic values, in which he drew a "clear line of partition" between two groups of people, one to which he belonged and another composed of individuals in need of "lectures, admonitions and exhortations" (1953:623-624).

4. Vita Activa

Ruth does not simply represent an interesting and uncommon character in the way she is perceived and depicted throughout the narration, she is not a mere passive figure acted by others. She is instead an active actant in the way she endeavours to find her position in society by totally devoting herself to work. "

As (seamstress), mother, governess and nurse, she becomes involved in occupations which rely on careful surveillance and the active, productive use of her potentially subversive femininity. (Landridge 2011:52-53)

From this perspective, Ruth can be definitely defined as the heroine of a Bildungsroman.

To describe Ruth's personal evolution and her new female awareness, I would borrow the three categories of labor, work and action analysed by Hanna Arendt in her essay The Human Condition, published in 1958. Arendt manages to attain a definition of the human condition by investigating the actual meaning of human action and seeking for an answer to the question: who is man? We could adapt this question and try to define woman. Arendt focuses her phenomenological analysis on the condition of human existence and on the activities closely connected with it. As anticipated above, Arendt's investigation is based on three fundamental models of action, because only action can rescue mankind from Nature and allows it to make a new start on something absolutely unexpected and unpredictable. The subject of this action is the citizen. In Ruth's existential path, these three categories coexist. Labor is the activity which allows man to survive and it also concerns the biological process, as it is rooted in natality. The human being working to this purpose is called by Arendt animal laborans (1958:58-96). Ruth struggles to survive, becoming a seamstress, which was considered by the Victorians a natural profession for a woman. She is also happy to become the mother of Leonard, despite the 1834 Poor Reform Law that had removed all legal and financial support for unwed mothers, causing the consequent feminization of poverty (Logan 1998).

Work, on the contrary, provides an artificial world of things; within its borders, each individual life is housed. Work and its products, the artefact made by homo faber, confer a measure of permanence and durability on the inutility of mortal life. The Industrial Revolution emphasized the importance of work; Adam Smith considered it the fundamental source of wealth and Marx identified manpower as the origin of productivity and therefore the pivot of human essence (Pansera 2008:63). Arendt (1958:22) instead states that the supremacy of work went into the harmful spiral of excessive productivity, without considering all other human potentialities which form the vita activa: "human life in so far as it is actively engaged in doing something, is always rooted in a world of men and of manmade things which it never leaves or altogether trascends". The dressmaker Ruth is treated like a slave with no rights. Gaskell, like other novelists of her age, points out the impossible political emancipation of workers - a condition which got even worse when it was woman-related. Nevertheless, Ruth becomes the maker of her social redemption when she starts to work as a governess. This used to be the only decent job suitable for a woman and allowed by society. In this role, Ruth finally finds her dimension and the praise of her environment.

The last category considered by Arendt is action. Action is related to human existence and can never manifest through a predictable, deterministic series of consequences, since the subject, by acting, is placed within a complicated web of relationships with others, which cannot be predicted.

5. Conclusion

Action is irreversible, as it is based on initium, a new start, opposed to destruction and death, which is the doom of any human being. Yet, man has the faculty to interrupt this process when he allows the start of something new. This thrust is decidedly altruistic in contrast to the mere biological needs of survival determined by a clearly selfish imprint. Ruth's life intersects with other characters' lives, tracing a path often accidentally, but confined to the strict rules of a peculiar context. Yet, she is not a New Woman in the strictest sense, since she never behaves like a rebel. She accepts some compromises like telling the lie that she is a widow or using femininity convincingly, looking very modest and submissive. It is precisely within that context that she strives to find her way of living successfully, although the epilogue is disappointing. Ruth's death was a topic much questioned and discussed in Gaskell's time too. Even Charlotte Bronte was unhappy about the death of Gaskell's heroine (Webster 2012:25). Yet Gaskell thought that was the logical end for someone who was ill judged by society. More than being a compromise about what people expected to see, the epilogue wants to foster further reflections on the topic of fallen women in the reading public.

References

References

Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Chigago: Chigago University Press.

Brooks, P. 1992 (1984). Reading the Plot. Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge Ma: Harvard University Press.

Gaskell, E. 1853. Ruth. [Online]. Available: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4275-h/4275-h.htm [accessed 2014, August 10].

Joyce, F. 2008. 'Prostitution and the Nineteenth Century: In Search of the 'The Great Social Evil" in Reinvention: a Journal of Undergraduate Research 1(1). [Online]. Available: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/go/reinventionjoumal/volumelissuel/joyce [accesed 2014, July 18].

Langridge, R. 2011. 'The Tearful Gaze in Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth: Crying, Watching and Nursing' in Journal of International Women's Studies, vol. 12 (2), pp. 47-60.

Logan, D. A. 1998. Fallenness in Victorian Women's Writing: Marry, Stitch, Die, or Do Worse. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. eBook.

Michie, E. B. 1993. Outside the Pale. Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the Victorian Woman Writer. Ithaca NY : Cornell University Press.

Pansera, M. T. 2008. 'Hannah Arendt e l'antropologia filosófica' in Etica & Politca/Ethics &Politics, vol. XI, pp. 58-74.

Webster, R. 2012. T Think I Must Be an Improper Woman without Knowing it': Falleness and Unitarianism in Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth' in Victorian Network, vol. 4 (2), pp. 10-25.