Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell

With 2019 winding down, I decided to tackle one more classic before the new year arrived. Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell was the next on my list. Unlike most of the other classics I have read this year, I literally do not remember how I ended up purchasing this book or why I put it on my list. The price sticker on my copy was from Borders though, so I presumably purchased it there before the chain closed. I still miss that place so much. I remember then having a lot of classics that I couldn't find in other stores and a fun assortment of junk to look at too. I'm drifting off topic though. Let's get back to Ruth.

This novel was published in 1853 and is classified as a social novel. The social issue it deals with is the stigma suffered by women who have a child out of wedlock. The plot follows Ruth Hilton, a young woman who is about to turn 16. As the novel begins, Ruth is working as an apprentice for a seamstress. She is an orphan without any friends or family to help support her, and this loneliness makes an easy target for Henry Bellingham, an upper class 23-year-old man with an eye for pleasure. At the beginning of the story, Henry seduces Ruth and lures her away from her apprenticeship to a small inn in Wales, where they live together for a few months. Eventually, he abandons her there without a word and returns to his normal life. Ruth is left on her own, devastated, friendless, and pregnant.

Fortunately, for her, a kindly pastor and his sister take pity on her and offer to let her live in their home under an assumed identity. As she is out of options, Ruth agrees to pretend to be a young widow distantly related to the pair. She lives with them for several years, repenting for her past choices and trying to raise her child to be a good Christian. Eventually, however, Bellingham comes back into her life and her secret is revealed. Shut out of society and afraid for her child's future prospects, Ruth must find a way to support her family and move on with her life.

I did not enjoy Ruth very much, for a lot of reasons. However, there were some elements of it that were interesting. One of those things is Gaskell's advocacy for unwed mothers. Having a child out of wedlock in the Victorian period essentially ruined a woman's life. Once their situation was known publicly, they would be shunned from respectable society and denied employment. Even their child, once born, would suffer these same consequences. Through Ruth's example, Gaskell advocates for these women to be forgiven and allowed to redeem themselves. While I don't necessarily love Ruth as an example of a "fallen woman," I do like that Gaskell was using her work to support women and was unafraid to advance a view that was quite controversial in its time.

I also like the juxtaposition of Ruth's story with that of Richard Bradshaw's. Towards the end of the story, Richard, a man thus far characterized by his irresponsibility, steals a significant amount of money from another character. His actions are completely illegal and wrong. There is no ambiguity or mitigating circumstances to confuse the issue. However, instead of being arrested, his friends, family, and even the man he stole from bend over backwards to help him out of his difficulties and hide his crimes. He faces no legal consequences and his friends find him another job in a new city so he can have a fresh start. His former business partner even starts to set aside money for him for when he proves himself worthy of it again.

This stands in stark contrast to Ruth's position. For the social crime of allowing herself to be seduced by an older man, she is made to suffer tremendously. Once her secret is revealed, she is immediately fired from her job, insulted, shamed, and rejected from polite society. While the family that took her in stands by her, there is little they can do to help her situation. She essentially becomes a depressed hermit for years before eventually being hired to do some nursing work that no one else is willing to do. Her eventual redemption is only partial and comes at great personal cost. These contrasting stories do an excellent job showing the double standard that existed between men and women who violated rules in this time period. Gaskell never comments on this inequality directly in her narration, but the difference in the two characters' experiences speaks clearly to the reader. This gross injustice is what I think I will remember the most about this novel.
 
Unfortunately, this is where the enjoyment of this classic ended for me. I had a lot of issues with the pacing, characters, and ending of the novel. The story moved slowly, Gaskell's paragraphs were over-long, and the plot got bogged down with too many characters suffering from fainting spells and vague illnesses that all required a lot of nursing and hand-wringing to get through. The combination of these factors meant that the book acted like a sleeping pill on me. I started nodding off almost immediately every time I picked it up. I had to rely on large amounts of coffee and reading sections out loud to keep myself engaged and awake. I read old novels all the time, and I don't usually have this much of an issue making my way through them. Something about this story just didn't work for me.

Part of the problem was that I never really connected with Ruth. She is a good character with extremely admirable qualities, and that's actually a problem here. She's not a convincing example of a "fallen woman" working towards redemption. At the start of the story, Ruth is an extremely naive 15-year-old orphan girl. She is seduced by a wealthy 23-year-old man who engages in a focused campaign to sleep with her. She is more of a victim than anything else. In an effort to create a sympathetic protagonist, Gaskell made her too blameless. This weakened her point that women in these situations are deserving of forgiveness--there's simply not enough to forgive Ruth for.

The ending of the story was also very disappointing. Without spoiling anything specific, it causes Ruth to revert back to some feelings that I hoped she had left behind forever, and paying dearly for it. It was a shame to see her go backwards right at the end and it clouded Gaskell's overall message. I'm not sure what the theme of the story was meant to be now that I've finished reading. Obviously, there are some lessons presented regarding forgiveness, hypocrisy, and sexism, but I could not detect one unifying idea that I was supposed to take away from the novel.

So, as it turns out, Ruth was definitely not the book for me. While it raised some worthy points and taught me about the plight of unwed mothers in the 19th century, its style, pacing, and especially its ending all took away from my reading experience. This was a big surprise to me, as I read Mary Barton in college and really enjoyed it. I'm  not giving up on Gaskell though; I'm still interested in reading some of her other work. Wives and Daughters is on my Classics Club list, and I want to get around to North and South one day too. It's a bummer to end my 2019 reading on a book I didn't like all that much, but hopefully I'll enjoy the rest of her work more in the future.


Challenge Tally
Classics Club (#73 on my list): 62/100 


Total Books Read in 2019: 81