llness threads its way all through Elizabeth Gaskell's second full-length novel, Ruth (1853). Indeed, Miriam Bailin counts "twelve pivotal illnesses" in it, and suggests that this is probably "the upper limit" of the Victorian author's inclusion of such episodes in a narrative (5). Moreover, even when the characters in this novel are not actually ill, they may be bone tired, weak, involved in or afflicted by an accident, depressed, suicidal, convalescent, or simply aged. Good health is so precarious as scarcely to be enjoyed: for example, according to a doctor called to attend on Ruth's son Leonard when he catches measles, those children who seem most full of life may go down with an illness more suddenly and completely than their less robust peers: "Vigorous children carried their force into everything; never did things by halves. If they were ill, they were sure to be in a high fever directly" (254).
Life expectancy then was far lower than it is today: around 33 years in large cities between 1838 and the 1860s (Davenport 472). This was partly because of the much greater risks to both mother and infant at childbirth itself, and partly also because rapid urbanisation resulted in inadequate sanitation and medical provision. Epidemics of measles, scarlet fever, smallpox, typhoid and cholera ravaged communities, whether urban or rural, with alarming regularity. However, as elsewhere in Gaskell's work, and in Victorian fiction in general, periods of sickness do more than reflect the incidence of ill health at the time. They serve the novelist in every aspect of her craft, from indicating social problems and providing material for protesting about them, to developing plot and character — and even helping to express her broader vision of life.
Close readings of individual episodes are valuable, as Hosanna Krienke has shown so admirably in dealing with Ruth's "spiritual convalescence" through the lens of Victorian devotional discourse about it (63-73). But an overview gives some sense of the sheer ubiquity of ill health, and the way it permeates every aspect of the novel. At the very beginning, Ruth is profoundly weary from her unaccustomed toil as a seamstress: her eyes ache from the strain, her ears have suffered from the constant sound of the sewing, and her forehead is hot as a result of the close atmosphere in the small workroom. Jenny Wood, the seamstresses' kindly forewoman, comforts her when she wakes in the night, dreaming of her dead mother, noting that she is feverish from over-tiredness. But Jenny herself displays, even more overtly through her coughing fits, the symptoms of poor health. Damaged by unhealthy working conditions, she soon falls desperately ill and has to be put to bed — upon which her mother comes to fetch her, to look after her at home in what promises to be a long, slow decline. Gaskell's protest on behalf of those forced to endure poor working conditions is clear, and she would repeat and develop that protest in her next novel, focusing on Bessie, the young mill-worker in North and South (1855), who eventually dies as a result of years of exposure to fluff in the carding room.
Seamstresses, by Frank Holl (1875).
The next victim in Ruth helps to highlight Ruth's virtue and activate the plot, as well as to appeal on behalf of the disadvantaged. Tom Brownson is a boy from "a mean little cottage" (21), saved from drowning in the river by Henry Bellingham, the dashing son of Mrs Bellingham at the Priory. The rescue occurs in Ruth's presence. She has already met the rescuer: the previous evening she had been sent with other seamstresses to an event at the Shire Hall, to attend to the ladies' ball-dresses. On that occasion, Bellingham had given her a white camellia to make up for his partner's impatience with her. Now he appears to her in true heroic mode, and he sees her — the same pretty, slender, auburn-haired girl he had admired the day before — carrying the inert child to his grandmother's. Ruth's kindness, and the poverty of the grandmother's home, are both on show here. Emotions run high: the boy is in such a state that his grandmother assumes he is dead, and it seems natural that, ostensibly to get word of Tom's recovery, Bellingham should propose to meet Ruth at the church on the following Sunday. The accident, almost a fatal one, marks the next stage along Ruth's difficult path.
Tom himself comes to no lasting harm from his immersion in the swift-flowing waters. The lad is later trained and employed in the stables at Bellingham Hall, and is last seen near the end of the narrative, in an indication that his master is no stage villain, hovering anxiously near Bellingham's sickbed. Yet Bellingham's solicitude for him at this point masks a keen interest in Ruth, and is ominous. The common association of the white camelia with purity would have been well-known then: "So pure!" Ruth had said (17), as she placed Bellingham's gift in water. Gaskell asserts her innocence and goodness of heart from the outset. However, once Ruth agrees to this third meeting, her innocence starts to be compromised. Hardly more than a child herself, without even Jenny's "warning voice" and "gentle wisdom" to support her (28), she easily falls under Bellingham's spell. Vague misgivings are overwhelmed by her feeling that the pleasure she takes in her "charming spring walk" with him cannot be wrong — and more "loitering" strolls follow (36). An affair between a scion of the landed gentry and a seamstress is likely to be doomed, and the seamstress is sure to bear the brunt of the misery involved.
"Come and look at yourself in the pond." Ruth and Bellingham
in the frontispiece of Ruth and Other Tales.
The narrative now develops in what might seem to be broadly conventional stages, from elopement to subsequent abandonment and thence painfully to penance. But the trajectory continues to be marked by one spell of ill health after another, and its inception as well as its culmination is open to several interpretations. Spotted on one of her excursions with Bellingham by the proprietress of the sewing establishment, the stony-hearted Mrs Mason, Ruth is summarily dismissed from her work — which, uncongenial though it was, had at least provided her with accommodation and basic sustenance. She is profoundly shocked, overcome by the sense that she has no one else to turn to but her present companion. Bellingham himself reinforces this feeling, asking her to wait at a nearby inn while he fetches a carriage. There, at last struck by the danger of her situation, Ruth does think of seeking refuge instead with the elderly cottagers at her old home, Milham Grange. It is a feasible alternative. But she is still in a state of paralysis, with a "sick headache ... stupid and languid, and incapable of spirited exertion" (52). Nancy Henry describes Ruth's state as the sort of "sedated dreaminess" that occurs after taking opium (xxvi); another critic, Hilary Schor, talks of "the passive heroine's progress into the plot of the fallen woman" (6). But Ruth is neither drugged nor passive. Overcome to the point of collapse, she is physically unable to strike out on another path. The coincidental presence of the landlord (whom would naturally expect payment) smoking his pipe at the inn door also serves as a potent deterrent.
Bellingham takes full advantage of Ruth's condition: "I led her wrong" (75 )as he confesses to his mother later. But his hand too is forced when it comes to abandoning her. No one, not even this bold and dashing young man in his early twenties, is immune from illnes here. He is struck down by a serious fever in North Wales, where he has taken Ruth, and where they have enjoyed a short-lived idyll. His solicitous mother sweeps in, driving him out of this Eden-like context, and leaving Ruth pregnant and suicidal. This is ironic: he had once suggested that his mother might help Ruth. Here again, Gaskell employs physical weakness to move the plot forward. Ruth is in despair when she is found by the Dissenting Minister, Thurstan Benson. Benson, himself partially disabled as a result of an accident in infancy, and perhaps, in consequence, more understanding of others' suffering, is moved by the unknown young woman's anguish. Ruth turns away from him at first, but cannot leave him when, in hastening after her, he stumbles and groans with pain. From this point (and therefore partly because of her own inclination to care for others), he saves her both physically and spiritually by taking her home.
Benson lives with his sister, aptly named Faith, and their housekeeper, Sally, an elderly, no-nonsense but very generous-hearted person whose disapproval of the new arrival soon gives way to affection. Low both in health and spirts, Ruth's now endures the period of recovery from which she emerges spiritually and intellectually, as well as physically, strengthened. For this to be convincing, the process has to reflect "the mundane, durative timescale of convalescence" (Krienke 64), and the narrative slows in pace, allowing everyone in the Benson household to play a part in it. When Ruth's son Leonard is born during these months, Sally, for instance, helps by reminding the young mother of her maternal duties. On one occasion, she takes the baby briskly from her arms, amusing him while she lectures Ruth. As a potent threat, she uses the possibility of harming the baby by crying over him: "'Ay, that's it! smile, my pretty. Any one but a childlike thee,' continued she, turning to Ruth, 'would have known better than to bring ill-luck on thy babby by letting tears fall on its face before it was weaned. But thou'rt not fit to have a babby, and so I've said many a time. I've a great mind to buy thee a doll, and take thy babby mysel'" (146-47). The perceived danger to Leonard works on Ruth immediately: she responds with dignity. "Sally was quelled into silence by the gentle composure, the self-command over her passionate sorrow, which gave to Ruth an unconscious grandeur of demeanour as she came up to the old servant":
Give him back to me, please. I did not know it brought ill-luck, or if my heart broke I would not have let a tear drop on his face — I never will again. Thank you, Sally," as the servant relinquished him to her who came in the name of a mother. Sally watched Ruth's grave, sweet smile, as she followed up Sally's play with the tassel, and imitated, with all the docility inspired by love, every movement and sound which had amused her babe.
"Thou'lt be a mother after all," said Sally...." [147]
Ruth's responses to correction and instruction, as well as the fear of misfortune befalling her child, mark her out as an apt and willing pupil.
Partly, the Benson household forms one of those "ad-hoc, flexible, small groups of caregivers" that "form most commonly to help someone who falls ill" in Victorian novels (Schaffer 61). But the fact that Ruth is staying with a minister is particularly significant. Gaskell herself went to stay with a minister in Newcastle, after leaving her boarding school, as was usual for Unitarian girls at this time, "for staying in the house of a minister was something of a cross between a finishing school and a university. She would be expected to take part in the serious debates on theology, politics, and literature that were part of the regular family life. She would be guided in her reading, taught by the minister and/or his wife, and even write essays" (Millard 8). No wonder that after her convalescence, Ruth (whom the Bensons introduce as the widowed Mrs Denbigh, in a kindly, well-meant and venial deception), is accomplished enough to be welcomed as a companion and governess by the well-to-do Bradshaws. She has emerged from her despair and pregnancy altogether improved. This is very much in line with the Unitarians' belief that people could be enabled to fulfil their potential with the correct guidance and encouragement.
However, and most unfortunately in Ruth's case, the truth about her background becomes known, and both she and young Leonard have to suffer the attendant humiliations. The almost universal and bitter scorn heaped upon unmarried mothers and their children is hard to credit now, but such women's desperate situation was a problem with which Gaskell herself had much experience: in her introduction to the novel, Henry traces both the historical and literary aspects of Ruth's genealogy. Her most obvious forbear is Esther in Gaskell's own Mary Barton, the heroine's aunt, who, as Henry puts it, "haunts the margins of the narrative, all too aware of her shame and of her unworthiness, in the eyes of society, to associate with her young niece" (xxv). Henry might have found useful material in the artwork of the time, too, and the way this kind of social exclusion persisted well after the publication of the novel.
Left: Richard Redgrave's The Outcast, 1851. Right: Fred Walker's The Lost Path, 1863, used for the cover of a Penguin edition of Ruth.
Ruth simply cannot escape widespread condemnation. People come to realise her essential virtue only when she is able to act it out in the public eye. Again, illness plays a crucial part in this. Always innately kind, but now no longer so weak as to be deflected by circumstance, Ruth first nurses the poverty-stricken in their own homes – a bricklayer who falls from scaffolding, for example — then offers her services as a sick nurse during a typhoid epidemic. This in itself was a sign of her spiritual growth: at this time "nursing was repeatedly invoked to verify in a way that no other activity apparently could the genuineness of one's affections, the essential goodness of one's character" (Bailin 11). In her new role, Ruth does more than attend to the sick: "The low-breathed sentences which she spoke into the ear of the sufferer and the dying carried them upwards to God" (327). During these years, Leonard nearly dies of measles, and the revelation of his illegitmacy also takes a toll on his health — until he too becomes aware of his mother's rehabilitation in the eyes of the world.
What completes Ruth's spiritual recovery and worldly fate is her absolute determination to nurse Bellingham himself (now known as Mr Donne, having changed his name for inheritance purposes) during his second serious illness in the novel. When his turn comes to fall prey to the epidemic, she tends him not out of rekindled passion, but in response to his being "ill — and alone" (369), hoping that in his feverish state he will not even recognise her. She is now fully competent to help him recover. However, she herself becomes infected, with fatal consequences.
Ruth's death-bed is the culmination of all the illnesses in the novel, and also of its spiritual meaning. The considerable ambiguity here is also its great strength, broadening its appeal to readers with a variety of different beliefs — or none. To some early readers, especially those of the Evangelical persuasion, it might have been seen as the final stage of Ruth's correction, an inevitable and just punishment for her sinful past. Gaskell, however, has already made her case plain through Benson's defiant statement to Bradshaw: "I state my firm belief, that it is God’s will that we should not dare to trample any of His creatures down to the hopeless dust; that it is God’s will that the women who have fallen should be numbered among those who have broken hearts to be bound up, not cast aside as lost beyond recall. If this be God’s will, as a thing of God it will stand; and He will open a way" (294). A way has certainly been found in Ruth's case. her death is presented as an apotheosis, and others, like those watching her as the end draws close, might well have accepted it as such:
They stood around her bed-side, not speaking, or sighing, or moaning; they were too much awed by the exquisite peacefulness of her look for that. Suddenly she opened wide her eyes, and gazed intently forwards, as if she saw some happy vision; which called out a lovely, rapturous, breathless smile. They held their very breaths.
"I see the Light coming," said she. "The Light is coming," she said. And, raising herself slowly, she stretched out her arms, and then fell back, very still for evermore." [375]
One compelling argument in favour of a positive reading depends on intertextuality, specifically on looking at the novel's Biblical allusions. Ruth's name links her to the Old Testament Ruth, an outsider (a "Moabitess") in the Jewish community to which she comes, who is not blamed for having lain with Boaz at night, and who helps to transform the lives of others (see Stolpa 59). Gaskell's Ruth, like her Biblical forebear, has produced a son and, moreover, brought good to those around her — cheering the Benson household, helping the Bradshaws' eldest daughter, Jemima, to a better understanding of herself, and nursing the sick, often enough in terminal illnesses. All this might be lost on twenty-first century readers with little familiarity with the Bible. But Victorian readers noting the similarity would probably have been more inclined to see Ruth's death as a saintly, holy one, a reward for having redeemed herself.
In line with Gaskell's own beliefs, those who focussed on the New Testament could also have chosen a Unitarian rather than Evangelical approach here, emphasising "personal spiritual development" over atonement (Tollefson 48). Here again, the idea of penance gives way to the hope of redemption, and the acceptance that Ruth’s serene and transfiguring death is more reward than punishment. But there is no cut-and-dried way of reading the ending, and that may be exactly what was intended. Even critics veering towards the notion of punishment are likely to feel that, in view of her later good works, her death was undeserved, while those who see it as a reward may feel that her earlier sufferings were too extreme. Certainly the very fact that Ruth dies seems an acknowledgement that society has treated her, as a so-called "fallen woman," unfairly. Jennifer Stolpa believes that her death is, in fact, "meant to destabilize the reader's sense of justice. In a novel calling for reform in the treatment of such ‘fallen women,’" she continues, "Gaskell strives to leave the reader unhappy with the situation of the world at the novel’s conclusion" (62; emphasis added). Krienke too sees the novel as "asking the reader to resist its own ending" (73).
Illness has proved useful throughout the novel. Apart from moving the plot on, or slowing it down (in the case of Ruth's convalescence, when it gives time for her to mature as a woman, a mother and a caring individual), it has allowed for insights both into those suffering (especially Ruth), and those who care for them (like the Bensons), giving scope for the development of character in all concerned. Other events in the novel have contributed to these central ideas: the disgrace and rehabilitation of Bradshaw's son, Richard, for example: "nothing could exceed his penitence" (349); and the softening of Bradshaw's own self-righteous, judgemental, unforgiving nature after his seizure when hearing that Richard has been in an accident. As the century wore on, the aftermath of severe sickness or injury was increasingly recognised as a special time, a time of reflection, resolution of problems (perhaps the very ones that preceded physical symptoms), and recharging of energies. Gaskell, it seems, has understood this already. Her vision here is very much that of a Unitarian, with a keen appreciation of the natural world, including humanity itself, as the creation of a benign and powerful being who allows weaknesses to be overcome; indeed, these weaknesses, both moral and physical, play an important and even indispensable part in the process through which, with appropriate support rather than condemnation, the spirit can flourish.
Links to Related Material
- Ruth
- Infection and Feeling in Mrs Gaskell's Ruth
- The Role of the "Fallen Woman" in Three Victorian Novels: George Eliot's Adam Bede, Wilkie Collins's Armadale and Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton
- Fallen Women in Victorian Art
Bibliography
Bailin, Miriam. The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Davenport, R.J. "Urbanization and mortality in Britain, c. 1800–50." The Economic History Review. 73 (2020): 455-485. https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.12964
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn. Ruth. Edited by Nancy Henry. London: Dent, 2001. xxiii-xxxvii.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. Ruth and Other Tales. London: Smith. Elder & Co, 1887. [Illustration source] Internet Archive. From a copy in Cornell University Library. Web. 18 May 2023.
Henry, Nancy. Introduction. Ruth, by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell. London: Dent, 2001.
Krienke, Hosanna. Convalescence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Afterlife of Victorian Illness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. [Review]
Millard, Kay. “The Religion of Elizabeth Gaskell.” The Gaskell Society Journal 15 (2001): 1–13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45185753.
Schaffer, Talia. Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021. [Review]
Schor, Hilary M. Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Stolpa, Jennifer M. "What's in a Name? Echoes of Biblical Women in Elizabeth Gaskell's 'Ruth.'" The Gaskell Society Journal 18 (2004): 50–64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45185847.
Tollefson, Loretta Miles. "'Controlled Transgression': Ruth's Death and the Unitarian Concept of Sin." The Gaskell Journal 25 (2011): 48–62. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45179758.
Created 1 June 2023