Gaskell' S Mary Barton and Ruth

3 Melodrama, Morbidity, and Unthinking Sympathy: Gaskell' s Mary Barton and Ruth Like her contemporary and occasional publisher Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell was interested in the fallen woman as both a social problem and a literary topos. "Lizzie Leigh," Gaskell's first contri bution to Dickens's periodical Household Words, treats the rescue of a fallen woman as secured through maternal resistance to the social law. Gaskell also at least once engaged in an act of "rescue" herself, appealing by letter to Dickens for help in arranging passage to Aus tralia for a young woman she knew.1 Gaskell's central contribution to the contemporary debate on reforming the fallen, however, was her novel Ruth, which argued for the possibilities of redemption in a community free of prejudice. Although readers of the novel per ennially react to Ruth's exaggerated purity, attenuated agency, and seemingly gratuitous death, Gaskell' s admittedly uneven novel also works to expose the way cultural conventions and dominant modes of deterministic thinking themselves promote, and may even pro duce, the "downward path" that follows upon error. As her industrial novels demonstrate, Gaskell was concerned not exclusively with fallen women but with the condition of the urban poor in general. She did not, however, participate in any system of reform such as the one Dickens undertook at Urania Cottage. Throughout her life she advocated a resolutely individualistic and improvisatory charity, one in keeping with the tenets of her Uni tarian milieu. Her insistence on the uniqueness of the individual case and on the transformative potential of direct contact between i. Elizabeth Gaskell, The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell 98-99. Mary Barton and Ruth 109 members of different classes made uniform schemes and anonymous contributions anathema to her. 2 Mary Barton, her first industrial novel, promotes sympathetic encounters between persons as the precondition or even site of social melioration. For Gaskell, writing at the time of the 1848 revolutions and amid Chartist agitation in England, it is the "masters' " perceived indifference to the sufferings of the workers that has dangerously alienated the latter. The central task before the middle classes, then, is to "disabuse the work-people of so miserable an apprehension. "3 Gaskell' s recurrent ambivalence toward the workers she wants to help is registered here in the use of the word "miserable," which both blames the workers for a mis perception and evokes their immiseration. Yet Gaskell also displays ambivalence toward her own class, which she alternately chastises and defends. It is not that Gaskell excludes legislative change or concrete factory reform as desired ends-on the contrary, she explicitly supports them. But the call to sympathy remains fundamental, and she con tinually recurs to it. In appealing to a language of feeling, Gaskell' s novel does not significantly depart from the industrial novels of her time, which shared the belief that rationalized reform was contin uous with the utilitarian and dehumanizing spirit of industrialism itself. 4 This larger framework helps to explain why sympathy ap pears alternately as means and end in Mary Barton. In either case, however, transformative action requires a scenario of interclass rec ognition and response. In this chapter I examine and contrast Gaskell's depictions of fallenness in Mary Barton and Ruth. I argue that the representation 2. These convictions come up in Gaskell's correspondence. "The numbers of people who steadily refuse Mr. Gaskell's entreaties that they will give their time to anything, but will give him or me tens & hundreds, that don't do half the good that individual intercourse, & earnest conscientious thought for others would do." Also: "It is hard work making one's idea of life dear [sic] and I am more and more convinced that where every possible individual circumstance varies so completely all one can do is to judge for oneself and take especial care not to judge other[s] or for others." Gaskell, Letters 193, 548. For an account of the links between Unitarianism and in dividualized charity, see Angus Easson, Elizabeth Gaskell12; R. K. Webb, "The Gaskells as Unitarians" 147. 3. Elizabeth Gaskell, MaryBarton 38. The line is taken from Gaskell's preface. All further references to this edition are made parenthetically in the text. 4. See ArnoldKettle, "The Early Victorian Social-Problem Novel" 168-6g; on the promotion of sympathy during the "social-problem decade" of the 1840s, see John Lucas, "Mrs. Gaskell and Brotherhood." 110 Tainted Souls and Painted Faces of Esther, Mary Barton's frequently overlooked prostitute figure, reflects a radical conception of the social force of aesthetic con ventions, showing the power of forms such as melodrama to con stitute human social identities. While recent critics have focused especially on the exemplary actions undertaken by heroines such as Mary Barton and Margaret Hale, they do not sufficientlyconsider how the rhetoric of fallenness functions in Gaskell' s work. 5 Gas kell' s representation of fallenness in Mary Barton bears similarities to Dickens's conception of narrative constraint, but whereas he betrays a fear of a pervasive narrative fallenness that is sometimes (though not necessarily) linked to environmental determinism, Gas kell isolates melodrama and romance as the specific genres of prostitution and fallenness. Further, scenes involving the prostitute Esther heighten the tension between Gaskell' s own reformist aes thetic and her conception of transformative action. For if what is important to Gaskell is the actual encounter between living persons, what does it mean for her audience merely to read a sympathetic literary depiction of the ostensible objects of concern? As we will see through an examination of the prostitute, whose privileged relation to the "literary" bequeaths her a special positioning within the novel, Gaskell secretly fears not only that sympathetic literary reading will preempt meliorative action but that the ideal of mu tually sympathetic recognition will be derailed as reading subjects convert their perceptions of sufferers into mournful narratives that preclude any hope for change. A rather different and more complicated problematic emerges in Ruth. Seduced innocent rather than inscribed victim, Ruth is both immune to and, paradoxically, rescued from the punishing social "laws" that enforce the fallen woman's downward path. For Gas kell, these laws participate in prevalent forms of thinking-both secular and religious--whose social power she acknowledges but would like to discredit. However, unlike some critics of overly deterministic understandings of selfhood and agency, Gaskell makes her primary counterposing appeal not to an autonomous self but rather to a sympathetic or fundamentally intersubjective self, one defined through its profoundly responsive orientation 5. For an excessive emphasis on Mary's agency, see Coral Lansbury, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Novel of Social Crisis. The best feminist approach to Gaskell's work as a whole-and a book to which my own reading is ' indebted-is Patsy Stoneman's Elizabeth Gaskell. Mary Barton and Ruth 111 toward others. As I discussed in Chapter 1, utilitarians and other radical reformers were anxious to justify or develop models of sympathetic action that would harmonize with the ideal of moral betterment that underlay their doctrines, yet this aim often re mained in conflict with the egoistic conceptions of the self inform ing their hedonistic philosophy. Gaskell avoids the problem of social atomism by privileging a sympathetic form of consciousness, one defined againstthe kind of moral autonomy that Dickens was so anxious to defend. In its vindication of a "pure" woman, then, Ruth reflects a critical stance toward deterministic discourse and egoistic forms of self hood. Remarkably, Gaskell's critique extends even to those forms of instrumental and calculative thinking associated with materialist, utilitarian, and deterministic philosophies; and ultimately, Ruth's portrayal of purity as unthinking sympathy reflectsa deeper anxiety that all reason may be instrumental. A second "fall" occurs in the novel when the spontaneously good Mr. Benson falls into calcu lation and "morbid" deliberation, thereby destroying his sympa thetic "instincts of conscience." In her attempt to advocate a redemptive morality, Gaskell thus rescripts fallenness to encompass those very forms of selfhood-rational, autonomous, deliberative against which fallenness is usually defined. If this redefinition presents a challenge to the dominant discourse, however, it also reinforces it, precisely by conceiving the reach of the utilitarian ethos as absolute, and by vainly seeking to shelter character and community from any form of calculation and deliberative rational interaction. In promoting unthinking purity as the antidote to an encroaching utilitarian and industrial ethos, Gaskell generates another problem: a profoundly vulnerable heroine. For Ruth's sympathetic respon siveness, the index of her purity, is also the cause of her sexual lapse and continued physical susceptibility. As a more fortified alternative to a discredited deliberative or instrumental conscious ness, accordingly, the novel elaborates through Ruth's redemption a form of sympathetic judgment rooted in maternity. Although this maternal mode clearly participates in the Victorian cult of motherhood, and as an intersubjective model is hardly dialogical, it

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