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Didacticism and Audience in Elizabeth Gaskell's "Ruth" and Charlotte Yonge's "The Heir of Redclyffe"

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Didacticism and Audience in Elizabeth Gaskell's W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 1996 An Education in Virtue: Didacticism and Audience in Elizabeth Gaskell's "Ruth" and Charlotte Yonge's "The Heir of Redclyffe" Tayce Langley Clarke College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Clarke, Tayce Langley, "An Education in Virtue: Didacticism and Audience in Elizabeth Gaskell's "Ruth" and Charlotte Yonge's "The Heir of Redclyffe"" (1996). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539626062. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-49cq-ta79 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. AN EDUCATION IN VIRTUE: DIDACTICISM AND AUDIENCE IN ELIZABETH GASKELL'S RUTH AND CHARLOTTE YONGE' S' THE HEIR OF RF.DCLYFFE A Thesis Presented To The Faculty of the Department of English The College of William and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Tacye Langley Clarke 1996 APPROVAL SHEET This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Au Approved, May 19 96 K ? , U ) v ^ v --- Kim Wheatley Deborah Denenholz Morse Cu*. yufflu^ Elsa Nettels DEDICATION For my parents McKendree and Sandra Langley whose perseverance and faith have been a rich inheritance TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v ABSTRACT vi INTRODUCTION 2 PART I. THE EDUCATION OF A MORAL EXAMPLE 10 PART II. THE INSTRUCTED READER: AUTHORIAL INTRUSIONS IN THE NOVELS 5 7 PART III. "LADY NOVELISTS" AND THE LITERARY ESTABLISHMENT: THE RECEPTION OFTHE NOVELS 86 BIBLIOGRAPHY 13 3 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The writer wishes to express appreciation to Professor Kim Wheatley for her oversight of this project and for her insightful comments on the thesis. The author also greatly appreciates the careful reading and useful commentary provided by Professor Elsa Nettels and Professor Deborah Morse. Thanks is due to Bonnie Chandler for overseeing the bureaucratic details. Additional thanks goes to Darlene O'Dell, Rives Nicholson and Elizabeth Weston for their encouragement throughout the writing of this thesis. Finally, the author gives- spec-ial thanks to her parents, McKendree and Sandra Langley, for encouraging the life of the mind in the light of the Logos; to her husband, Stephen Clarke, Tor his judicious eye and unending patience; and to her friend and colleague, Jeanene Skillen, for her insight and empathy. v ABSTRACT In an effort to reevaluate two popular women writers of the nineteenth century by examining their shared conception of art, this study focuses upon the issue of didacticism in Charlotte Yonge's The Heir of Redclvffe and Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth, both published in 1853. Part I traces the education of the central characters of the novels, revealing the direct application of the authors' didacticism. Through intellectual and moral development, the characters go from being flawed humans to being moral examples, both for their respective communities and for their readers. Part II analyzes the methods Yonge and Gaskell employ in seeking to educate their readers by examining the didactic posture of the authorial presences. Gaskell's narrator, arguably the author's own persona, manifests her didacticism by speaking directly to the reader through authorial intrusions. Yonge, on the other hand, resists a direct confrontation with the reader, choosing instead to educate her reader through the discussions about reading that punctuate the novel. Part III discusses the original reception of the novels in order to analyze the audiences' reaction to Yonge's and Gaskell's didacticism. The extant record suggests that professional reviewers, unlike modern critics, accepted this novelistic didacticism. Interestingly, the greatest stumbling block for the reviewers is the gender of these novelists; reviewers of both The Heir of Redclvffe and Ruth seek to relegate both the authors and novels to a feminine sphere, ultimately downplaying their significance. Part III also explores the reactions of literary professionals and general readers in an attempt to understand the early reception of the novels. Finally, Gaskell's and Yonge's relations to the literary elite are explored as a possible explanation of the critical acclaim for Gaskell's albeit contentious discussion of "fallen" women and illegitimacy and the critical denunciation and general disregard of Yonge's bestselling novel. vi AN EDUCATION IN VIRTUE: DIDACTICISM AND AUDIENCE IN ELIZABETH GASKELL'S RUTH AND CHARLOTTE YONGE'S THE HEIR OF REDCLYFFE INTRODUCTION Published at the beginning of 1853, Gaskell's Ruth and Yonge's The Heir of Redclvffe are significant examples of English women's writing from the period. Superficially, their authors share little in common. Whereas Charlotte Yonge (1823-1901) propounded the beliefs of the High Church Oxford Movement, Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) was a Dissenter, the wife of a Unitarian minister. Yonge lived exclusively in rural Hampshire, whereas Gaskell's experience of both village life and urban Manchester colors her writing. Unmarried, Yonge devoted herself to her parents and her mentor, the Tractarian John Keble, submitting The Heir of Redclvffe to them for aesthetic and moral criticism before she sent the manuscript to the publishers. Gaskell, on the other hand, balanced her writing with an active family life; she raised her four surviving daughters, ran the busy home of a minister's family, and yet found time to turn out multiple novels and short stories, usually writing at the dining room table. Unlike Yonge, Gaskell interacted with the literary elite of the day, both personally and professionally. The novels this thesis will deal with are Gaskell's Ruth and Yonge's The Heir of Redclvffe. both published in 2 3 January, 1853. In her novel, Gaskell again confronts a social issue through fiction, intent on exposing the hypocrisy of society in its treatment of the "fallen woman." Yonge's subject, on the other hand, is the taming of an aristocratic youth as he becomes part of a conventional family in rural England. Although heated debates over the morality of Ruth took place, throughout England, critics of the day praised Gaskell for her artistic powers, defending the novelist against her detractors. Yonge's The Heir of Redclvffe, however, was a bestseller seldom noticed by professional critics, although it was read with great fervor by Oxford undergraduates, British soldiers in the Crimea and countless young women. Despite these theological, biographical and artistic differences, however, Yonge and Gaskell share a remarkably similar approach in The Heir of Redclvffe and Ruth. Both are unabashed in their didacticism, creating their main characters as an ideal for their readers to follow. Both Guy Morville of The Heir of Redclvffe and Ruth Hilton/Denbigh of Ruth do not enter the novels as ideals, however; rather, the authors detail the education of their respective characters, the development of Guy and Ruth as they struggle to overcome their past. Thus, as readers witness the progress of the characters' education, they ideally come to share in the education propounded by the author. Although the main focus of the novels is upon such 4 development, the authors are careful to include negative examples of their ideals. Ultimately, both authors reconcile these opponents to the protagonists, creating subplots that also carry on the theme of education. For both authors, education, while including the acquisition of skills and knowledge, is primarily a moral concern." At the same time that they engage in the book- learning of traditional education (represented in both novels by the acquisition of Latin--Guy at Oxford, Ruth in the study of Thurstan Benton), both Guy and Ruth receive a moral education, one that is ultimately more important. Under the guidance of his aunt Mrs. Edmonstone, Guy learns the virtues of self-control and duty, overcoming his youthful volatility. Ruth learns similar virtues under the tutelage of the Bensons, seeking to become a wise and capable mother to her fatherless son. Significantly, both Mrs. Edmonstone and the Bensons hold strong religious beliefs, suggesting a distinct connection between religion and moral education. In these novels, Gaskell and Yonge reveal, therefore, what I shall term a "moral aesthetic," an approach to novel- writing that stresses moral didacticism, emphasizing the responsibility of art to educate and reform its readers by revealing the transformation of a flawed character into a moral ideal. Counter to.modern aestheticism and "art for art's sake," the moral aesthetic heightens the power of art, 5 by asserting its potential to change the attitudes and develop the morality of the reader. Rather than be merely an escapist refuge, the novel acts as an agent of reform, challenging the reader. Ironically, however, this challenge comes through the medium of domestic life, usually depicted by professional critics as the bastion of conventionality and the status quo. Yonge and Gaskell's choice of a middle- class (in the case of Yonge, upper-middle class), domestic setting reflects the experience of their predominantly middle-class readers. Barbara Dennis, writing of Yonge's work, has noted: What her public wanted and what they got was a mirror- image of themselves and their own situations. Charlotte Yonge showed them what they wanted to be shown--that life is a drama, to be played out within the confines of the family, in the schoolroom and the drawing rooms of provincial towns. (Dennis, "Voices" 182) This immediacy/reflexiveness gives still greater relevance and power to the authors' didactic projects, showing the middle-class, domestic experience to be significant, perhaps even subversive, and creating middle-class characters as the new heroes.
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