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Ressentiment in Gaskelvs Ruth 3 Under Cover: Sympathy and Ressentiment in GaskelVs Ruth Under the cover of sympathy with the dismissed labourers, Mr. Preston indulged his own private pique very pleasantly. — Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters Elizabeth Gaskell’s goal in Ruth (1853) was to elicit sympathy for the figure of the fallen woman by means of the detailed representation of an individual case.Yet as many readers have noted, the novel takes an am- bivalent approach to the category and the character with which it is most concerned. Critical of the social barriers that would place Ruth outside respectable society, Gaskell at the same time devised a heroine who is nat- urally good— indeed, one whose innocence borders on (and is figured as) an “unconsciousness” of the social norms she violates. R uth’s claim on readerly sympathy thus seems to derive less from a critique of the idea of fallenness than from her status as not truly fallen. And yet, as if doubting her heroine’s virtue, Gaskell requires Ruth to redeem herself. The novel remains unable to reconcile her supposed innocence with her deviation from it, and— as if to escape all the confusion— she dies at its end.1 1 For a useful review of Ruth criticism, see Elizabeth Helsinger, Robin Sheets, and William Veeder, eds., The Woman Question (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1983), 77 78 Fear of Falling Criticism of the novel has, understandably, been unable to leave the sub- ject of the fallen woman behind. But in addition to being concerned with the fate of fallen women, Ruth expresses Gaskell s general interest in sym- pathy as a solution to divisive social problems; in Mary Barton and North and South, for instance, individual sympathy is her solution to class conflict. Ruth, however, enacts a drama of identity transformation that expresses and reenacts the tensions sympathy is meant to resolve. Offered as the rep- resentative of a social category— a type— Ruth exemplifies the way the sympathetic object not only represents but dissolves into a generalized so- cial identity; like Daniel Deronda, as character she is inseparable from the imagining of a social type and the attempted resolution of a social prob- lem. What follows is that the sympathy she is meant to elicit— sympathy for the fallen woman— takes a form that expresses the social anxieties of those in a position to feel “for” her: those members o f the middle class for whom she embodies an ever-present fear of falling. According to some critics, sympathy was Gaskell’s own “cover story,” the fiction that enabled her to write— as, disavowing a conventionally masculine knowledge of fact, she claimed the conventionally feminine au- thority of feeling.2 Ruth too, in one of fiction’s most peculiar sympathetic gestures, also figures sympathy as cover: the novel’s plot concerns the way in which the Bensons— a minister and his sister, who sympathize with Ruth and take her into their home— invent a false identity for her, osten- sibly to shield her from censure. Ruth becomes known as the respectable widow Mrs. Denbigh, and her eventual exposure causes outrage in the community and especially in Mr. Bradshaw, the wealthy manufacturer and stern Puritan who has employed her as a governess. That sympathy should manifest itself as disguise brings out, not least, the way both involve an imaginative transgression of the boundaries of social 3:113-22. Angus Easson discusses the protestations that make Gaskell seem unconvinced of Ruth’s innocence in Elizabeth Gaskell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). 2 Terry Lovell writes that Gaskell claimed “the right to speak not from knowledge o f ‘the facts’ but from an identification with the feelings of an oppressed and suffering work- force.” Consuming Fictions (London: Verso, 1987), 87. See also Hilary Schor, Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel (N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 21-22. The phrase “cover story” comes from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (N ew Haven:Yale University Press, 1979), chap. 5. Under Cover 79 identity. It suggests, in ways I will develop further in this chapter, the sym- pathetic object s status as a figure for imaginative appropriation, enlisted in the construction of a spectator’s identity. And, most prominently, the deceit shifts the novel’s focus from R u th ’s fall to the Bensons’ lie, pointing toward what becomes the novels insistent concern: the inability of its middle-class characters to sustain their own tenuously constructed identities. Focusing not on the alleged crime but on the cover-up— creating transgression, in effect, where she insists none had existed before— Gaskell subordinates R uth’s situation to (and makes it appear no less than a displacement of) the situations of those members of the community for whom identity itself seems fundamentally little more than a form of covering up. The common critical view of the novel’s ambivalence— that Gaskell attempted to con- struct an innocent character but could not escape her belief in that charac- ter’s sexual guilt— may thus be expanded to include the way sexuality in Ruth becomes a figure, and cover, for issues of class identity. Like the Bensons, Gaskell attempts to protect R uth’s identity by distracting atten- tion from it, moving away from the idea of sexual transgression as if to mit- igate it by creating another kind of transgression on which to focus. But the movement away from sexuality produces more, rather than less, trans- gressive energy, as Gaskell’s attempt to elicit sympathy for the fallen woman becomes a story about the the fallen identity of the Victorian middle class.3 Ruth is only one of many divided and uneasy characters in the novel. Thurstan Benson and his sister Faith are at odds with the conventional so- ciety dominated by the wealthy manufacturer Bradshaw, who patronizes them; the brother, in particular, suffers from a vague emotional distress that ultimately takes shape as a struggle of conscience over his role in the de- ceit. Bradshaw, who expresses his own status anxiety in his treatment of the Bensons, has a troubled conscience as well: embarked on a scheme to bribe voters to elect his candidate for Parliament (the candidate, Donne, is 3 M y use o f the term “transgression” draws upon the work o f Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969). The fallen woman is, o f course, traditionally regarded as a site o f dangerous feeling, particularly feeling perceived as disruptive to the family. Susan Staves argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “seduced maiden” novels express anxiety about what Lawrence Stone has termed “affective individualism”: the shift from an assumed traditional, patriarchal con- tinuity and familial order to an emphasis on individual will and desire. Staves, “British Seduced Maidens,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 14 (1980-81): 109-34. 8o Fear of Falling the former Bellingham, Ruth s seducer), he warns himself to take care that “the slack-principled Mr. Bradshaw of one month of ferment and ex- citement, might not be confounded with the highly conscientious and deeply-religious Mr. Bradshaw, who went to chapel twice a day.”4 Farquhar, the man Bradshaw s daughter Jemima is to marry, seems to R uth to possess “two characters”: “the old one... a man acting up to a high stan- dard of lofty principle,... [and] the new one... cold and calculating in all he did” (228). And Jemima herself is caught between “awe” at her father and a desire to follow her ow n “passionate impulses” (211). Bradshaws relationship to Donne suggests an underlying cause for this nearly universal condition of self-division. The politician s aristocratic man- ner makes Bradshaw aware of the “incontestable difference of rank and stan- dard that there was, in every respect, between his guest and his own fam- ily. ... It was something indescribable— a quiet being at ease, and expecting every one else to be so— an attention to women, which was so habitual as to be unconsciously exercised... a happy choice of simple and expressive words” (261-62).“In fact,” it seems to Bradshaw,“Mr. Donne had been born and cradled in all that wealth could purchase, and so had his ancestors be- fore him for so many generations, that refinement and luxury seemed the natural condition of man, and they that dwelt without were in the position of monsters” (265). The difference between Donne and Bradshaw, as the latter sees it, is one of consciousness versus unconsciousness, the natural ver- sus the forced (“His mode of living, though strained to a high pitch just at this time... was no more than Mr. Donne was accustomed to every day of his life” [265]), and aristocratic identity versus “monstrous” and self-con- scious self creation. Indeed, Bradshaw s “straining,” his moral and economic uneasiness, is only one example of a moral and economic discontent that affects almost all the novels characters: an awareness of and uneasiness about identity constructed and anxiously maintained rather than assumed as nat- ural. In particular, the novels characters are tormented by the way in which a rigid adherence to the conventions of middle-class behavior inevitably gives way to a determination to deviate from those conventions.5 4 Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth (N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 307. Subsequent references included in text. 5 See John Kucich, The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), for a discussion o f the role of transgression in the formation of Victorian middle-class identity.
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