New Year, New Fallen Woman: Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth Readalong

You're right of course @BishyBarnyBee , acceptable was the wrong word to use. People might turn a blind eye, but you would no longer be welcome in certain company.

I think chapter 8 shows us more about the relationship between B and his mother. It really is an unhealthy relationship between the two of them. She pits herself against Ruth in her son's mind, asking if he thinks it desirable that his mother should be under the same roof as the 'degraded girl'. She tenaciously nags at him but seems to know how far she can push before he might stand up to her. (We are told that B will rally against his mother's authority only when he was 'roused into passion').She does not care one iota for Ruth. She seeks only to save her golden boy from the situation he has found himself in. It is like she cannot accept that he had had any choice in the affair because if she were to accept that he was responsible for seducing Ruth then he would not be the golden boy anymore.

He seems to be a man-child. Sometimes he appears to be quite responsible and accepts that Ruth was an innocent and that there is nothing in Ruth's character that should be criticised. He defends Ruth against his mother's accusations regarding her character but then he also finds it tiresome that his mother is nagging at him, and so he wishes the whole sorry affair to be over. It is like he is a divided self.

I really liked Gaskell's observation that B associates his feelings of annoyance and anger with Ruth herself, as if it is Ruth that is causing him to feel these emotions. What's clever is that Gaskell makes this point immediately after telling us that B had been mulling over various plans, suggesting that B might have been considering doing right by Ruth in some way; that is, until his mother had come on the scene.

Oh Ruth! What will you do now? Cast aside by a man who has had his fun and now wishes he'd never met you.

I think we can see how Mr B came about: no doubt Mummy's Money has bought him out of plenty of trouble before now. Telling him not to blame himself, she feels sure the nasty woman is mostly to blame for leading him astray. And that note! 'Reminding' Ruth that she would bear her guilt and the guilt of any future man she should trap, like she trapped Mr B.

Hurrah Mr Benson is back! Hopefully he can help her get back on her feet again.

I guess the difference is that now you can (and should) get a divorce if you want to have an affair, whereas then it was much more difficult.

Which is interesting as we now feel the other way. A fast about turn in our morality assessment.

That is a good point @JamesGiantPledge1. Extra marital affairs were acceptable but sex before marriage was not.

Is it also that the other 2 ladies we read about were married? Marriage provided a shield of respectability and protected against having illegitimate children?

Bellingham is an extremely shallow man.
He really doesn't care about Ruth and can only think of her as an annoyance. They are an odious pair, B. and his mother, but thankfully there is Thurston Benson; a guardian angel if there ever was one.

Bellingham really is a total waste of space isn’t he?! Not only just ditching Ruth when he knows she has nowhere to go, but then not even doing it himself and just leaving it to his mother! Poor Ruth.

Of course there's also a class element. I guess from society's perspective, since they could never marry, the only thing a man like Bellingham would want from a girl like Ruth is sex. And so if she gives that to him, the expectation is that it would be in return for money in some way.

It's interesting - I was really surprised at the extent to which it was made clear that Anna's affair (& Emma's too to some extent) would have been acceptable if carried out discreetly. I'd been expecting something much more like Ruth, perhaps because I knew how this book had been received at the time. I don't know if the difference was down to different attitudes in English society, or because it's written by a woman?

That makes sense, cariadlet.

He would have abandoned Ruth long ago if she had refused to sleep with him.

I think she sees herself as fallen which, added to her natural diffidence, makes her accepting of the harsh judgement of others.

Ah Fuzzy, ce n'est que trop vrai! 😂

The idea of them sleeping together crept up on me too as a slow realisation, I must admit.

We are no longer in France, chère cassandre :)* *

Oh gosh @StColumbofNavron I think you're right, they're already sleeping together and I missed it! I feel a bit daft/naive now 😂I guess I was waiting for Gaskell to spell it out to me in words of one syllable.

But honestly Ruth seems so pure, I couldn't get my head round the idea that he had seduced her already.

Looking back, I guess the end of Ch 4 is the decisive moment, when they go off to London together. That makes Mrs Mason's rejection of Ruth all the more awful. And the fact that Ruth almost decides not to go with Bellingham but is deterred by sight of the landlord in the doorway and the cup of tea that hasn't yet been paid for.

I'm kind of revising my idea of the last couple of chapters now!

Great points @cassandre . I assume she is now his mistress and the sex is going on but I doubt we’ll be party to any outright referral to it.

I’m not fighting the name issue 😃

Yes, point taken. Maybe I'm being restrictive, wanting Gaskell to look at extramarital sex through the lens of female desire, when in fact she wants to make a point about social conditions and female vulnerability.

I agree that this isn't one of Gaskell's best novels, probably why it's less known. But I feel like she's doing a good job of making her political point, that girls like Ruth 'fall' largely not because of sexual desire, but because they have so little in their lives.

Those thoughts about the role played by chance in Ruth's downfall are also very perceptive, @Tarahumara !

Interesting post, @StColumbofNavron / @AgualusasLover ! And great responses too.

I agree, there is very little sexual chemistry in this novel so far. Bellingham is a very unsatisfactory hero, despite his grand moment of pulling the child out of the lake! In some ways he doesn't even seem particularly attracted to Ruth; he's so often petulant and impatient with her. And Ruth is too innocent to acknowledge any sexual feelings. I keep wondering how and when the actual sex is going to take place - yes, Ruth loves Bellingham, but sex doesn't even seem to be on her radar. ???

I suspect it was far easier for a male writer of the period to depict a female character with active sexual desires than it was for a woman writer. The topic was presumably still quite taboo for a female author to write about. The Bronte sisters seem more daring to me than Gaskell when it comes to acknowledging female sexual desire, but maybe they are an exception?

(These thoughts are partly brought to you by my experience of reading pre-modern women writers, who often bend over backward to insist that their stories and poems are chaste. Even if they're writing love literature, they tend to insist that their aim is to deter women from falling into the trap of love! Religion and love for God are safer topics. There are a few exceptions, like the French Renaissance poet Louise Labé, but in her own lifetime she was denigrated as a slut and a whore.)

I can see many feminist aspects to Gaskell's novel so far, but I wonder if she's going to join the ranks of early women writers who are ambivalent about female sexual desire.