Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth has been pointed to as a primary source for the Marian Erle subplot of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh¹—and it is certainly arguable that Gaskell's sustained attention to her heroine's fall and redemption was the groundbreaking precedent for Barrett Browning's more-than-sympathetic depiction of a “fallen” woman.² That the increased critical attention paid to these two works over the past twenty years has yielded no extended reading of one against the other is surprising, particularly in view of the narrative overlap between them: both Marian and Ruth are vulnerable, friendless girls who apparently enjoy a privileged relationship to nature. Both become sexually “fallen” but prove exemplary mothers, and both dramatically reject socially redemptive marriage offers. Perhaps more significantly, each young woman's plight becomes a test-case for competing models of the correct Christian response to sin and societal evils. Ultimately, Gaskell and Barrett Browning both use narratives of fallenness to criticize the mechanistic social determinism that either condemned the unfortunate to their “necessary” fate or sought to apply prefabricated, institutional reform schemes.³

Such parallels, however, only serve to emphasize the central narrative and philosophical disjuncture between the two stories. For steam-ironed innocence, Marian and her literary older sister are a matched set; but Ruth's innocence is of a far different sort, the distance roughly measured out by that still-vexed distinction between “seduction” and “rape.” For, while young Ruth runs off and quite willingly lives “in sin” with her aristocratic lover until abandoned by him, Marian is treacherously delivered into a French brothel and conceives her child by an anonymous rapist while chloroformed. Ruth, then, offers the paradigm of innocence as tender, wide-eyed naivete, and goes some way toward proposing that even this most unspeakable of Victorian sins can look a good deal like youthful error; whereas Barrett Browning's Marian upholds a demanding and heroic paradigm of innocence as irreproachable virtue in the face of overpowering circumstance and social injustice.

Barrett Browning's clear intent to deny Marian any personal responsibility for her misfortunes has been taken by critics as evidence for both the poet's political progressiveness and political conservatism. Cora Kaplan concludes from the rape scene that Barrett Browning “was no more liberated about expressed female sexuality outside marriage than most of her readers” (25), whereas Angela Leighton finds that “Marian's unconsciousness is not a pretext to prove her innocent, but a truth to prove the guilt of the system” (112). Deirdre David's landmark study of Barrett Browning as an intellectually male-identified political conservative paradoxically identifies Marian's exculpation with the poet's one truly radical stand, her critique of the sexual hypocrisy of respectable women (117). Here the comparison with Ruth immediately adds critical perspective. For, by staging a hallucinatory rape as the scene of Marian's sexual “fall,” Barrett Browning not only sidesteps the question of a self-conscious female sexuality outside marriage (which Gaskell avoids by simply declining to narrate it), but also suppresses any direct or sustained indictment of the individual male perpetrator, which is strongly thematized in Ruth.⁴

I will not, however, be arguing here that either Gaskell or Barrett Browning achieves the more radical rewriting of the “fallen woman” narrative or the more incisive attack on Victorian social hypocrisy. Although both works contain clear challenges to the laws, customs and institutions governing the lives of those who have strayed, the authors insist on the primacy of the individual as the locus of amelioration, as opposed to large-scale adjustments of the social order.⁵ This emphasis on individual reformation implies, for both writers, that the remedy will ultimately take a spiritual form; oppression and injustice turn out to be merely the inescapable context within which, from biblical times to the present, individual souls meet temptation, sin, and salvation.⁶

All this is not to say that Gaskell and Barrett Browning were disengaged from the Victorian ideological fray; on the contrary, Ruth and Aurora Leigh stand as equally pointed (but diametrically opposed) statements on the hotly debated questions about human consciousness and character formation. I am especially indebted to Amanda Anderson's excellent and subtle exploration of the ways that narratives of female fallenness reflect and respond to various nineteenth-century determinisms and transcendentalisms. But where Anderson places Ruth and Aurora Leigh roughly on a continuum of increasing resistance to the prevalent determinist model of female fallenness, I want to read the two works in direct ideological opposition, Ruth offering a materialist and Aurora Leigh an idealist resolution to the philosophical, sociological, and theological problems posed by the specter of the fallen woman.

The dividing line between Gaskell's and Barrett Browning's world-views is clouded by the fact that they find a common enemy in the grosser sort of applied determinism represented in Ruth by the authoritarian Bradshaw and in Aurora Leigh by Romney's Christian Socialist reform schemes. Barrett Browning clearly contrasts Romney's utilitarian “diagrams” (3.744)⁷ with Aurora's idealistic creed of spontaneity, individuality, and love:

                                                                                What, if even God
Were chiefly God by living out Himself
To an individualism of the Infinite,
Eterne, intense, profuse—still throwing up
The golden spray of multitudinous worlds
In measure to the proclive weight and rush
Of His inner nature—the spontaneous love
Still proof and outflow of spontaneous life?

(3.750-57)

But Ruth, with its heavy emphasis on unselfconsciousness, habit, and gradual moral growth, is impossible to read as a plea for spontaneous transcendent heroism. If, as Anderson cogently argues, “Gaskell is using a story of fallenness to criticize utilitarian calculation and determinism” (129), it is no less true that the narrative of Ruth's history is minutely determined by Gaskell's materialist, cause-and-effect explanation of character:

The traditions of those bygone times, even to the smallest social particular, enable one to understand more clearly the circumstances which contributed to the formation of character. The daily life into which people are born, and into which they are absorbed before they are well aware, forms chains which only one in a hundred has moral strength enough to despise, and to break when the right time comes—when an inward necessity for independent individual action arises, which is superior to all outward conventionalities. Therefore it is well to know what were the chains of daily domestic habit which were the natural leading-strings of our forefathers before they learnt to go alone.

(2)

I

I will first argue that Ruth, though graced with a conventional Victorian set of modest and compassionate female instincts, actually represents Gaskell's attempt at a psychological realism, based on an empirical model of consciousness. Grappling with the (for her very concrete)⁸ problem of female fallenness, Gaskell draws her paradigms not from her Romantic literary influences, but from the Enlightenment-era associationist psychology of David Hartley and Joseph Priestley, fathers of her rational Unitarian belief system.⁹ I read Ruth by tracing Gaskell's dependence on three basic associationist principles: first, the primacy of sensible pleasure and pain as the building-blocks of consciousness; second, the emphasis on moral learning as the gradual acquisition of salutary associations and habits of mind; and third, the optimistic, Christian teleology whereby all behavior, virtuous or vicious, inevitably leads to moral advancement (manifested by a deep sense of humility) and salvation. Finally, I will discuss Gaskell's emphasis on unselfconsciousness and the extent to which moral reflexes are, in Ruth, superior to moral reasoning.

The first clue that Ruth is an associationist heroine comes from Gaskell's meticulous attention to the sensory environment and her tendency to describe Ruth's inner life as a series of more-or-less reflexive reactions to pleasures and pains. In Hartley's hedonistic scheme of human motivation, “all our internal feelings seem to be attended with some degree either of pleasure or pain … [by which] we are excited to pursue happiness, and … fly misery” (Introduction ii-iii). All “intellectual” values, from aesthetic enjoyment to moral choice, draw their force, by association, “from sensible and selfish pleasures” (1.461), and moral learning proceeds through healthy doses of pain. That Ruth's first awakening to her own “fallenness” arises from a punch in the nose is perhaps Gaskell's most literal application of Hartleyan principles:

Flitting about through the village, trying to catch all the beautiful sunny peeps at the scenery between the cold stone houses, which threw the radiant distance into aerial perspective far away, [Ruth] passed by the little shop; and, just issuing from it, came the nurse and baby, and little boy. The baby sat in placid dignity in her nurse's arms, with a face of queenly calm. Her fresh, soft, peachy complexion was really tempting; and Ruth, who was always fond of children, went up to coo and to smile at the little thing, and, after some “peep-boing,” she was about to snatch a kiss, when Harry, whose face had been reddening ever since the play began, lifted up his sturdy little right arm and hit Ruth a great blow on the face.

“Oh, for shame, sir!” said the nurse, snatching back his hand; “how dare you do that to the lady who is so kind as to speak to Sissy.”

“She's not a lady!” said he, indignantly. “She's a bad naughty girl—mamma said so, she did; and she shan't kiss our baby.”

The nurse reddened in her turn. She knew what he must have heard; but it was awkward to bring it out, standing face to face with the elegant young lady.

“Children pick up such notions, ma'am,” said she at last, apologetically to Ruth, who stood, white and still, with a new idea running through her mind.

(71-72)

Immersed in pleasurable sensations, a single-minded consciousness of aesthetic enjoyment in the natural world, young Ruth is particularly drawn to an infant (described sensually in terms of a forbidden fruit) only to receive a shocking physical blow and shaming words. Hilary Schor has read this scene persuasively as the violent socialization of a Romantic “natural heroine” (65). I want to suggest that, on associationist terms, Harry's little fist works as a benign instrument of what Priestley terms “natural education” (10), whereby the strong mental link between moral error and the “ridicule and inconveniences which naturally attend it” (12) fosters habits of right behavior. Hartley warns that only when “the moral sense is sufficiently generated … [after] some considerable progress in life,” can one love virtue “with great secret indeterminate pleasure” (1:452) rather than for its outer advantages. In the meanwhile, “one real wound received in fighting will make a man much more attentive … than having the same part touched many times with a foil” (Priestley 11). Instructive “wounds” include “the pungency of shame or disgrace” (Priestley 12).¹⁰

If pain is the tool, and association the process, of Ruth's education, then its goal is the unconscious formation of virtuous habits (rather than the conscious acquisition of virtuous principles). In Ruth's story the great preceptor is not shame, but the heartbreak of Bellingham's desertion (“sorrow” rather than moralized “guilt” or “remorse”), and Gaskell carefully traces the minute causal links by which this pain, however selfish, effectually inculcates virtuous reflexes. Ruth's fall begins with her naive acceptance of a gift (Bellingham's gallant camellia) from a stranger. But in Wales she refuses the fifty pounds from Bellingham's mother because it bears hurtful associations: “While he … loved me, he gave me many things—my watch … and I thought of them as signs of love. But this money pains my heart. He has left off loving me, and has gone away” (127). We soon learn that Ruth has also sold the watch; though Faith Benson interprets this as an act of “sacrifice” (129), Gaskell's narrative logic suggests that Ruth's real motive was the desire to rid herself of a painful reminder while at the same time warding off new gifts of still-uncertain meaning (the price of the watch pays the bills incurred by the Bensons during her illness). Ruth's moral reflexes are thus schooled to reject Mr. Bradshaw's patronizing advances, which she now instinctively regards as uncomfortable obligations: “I never reasoned why I felt as I did; I only knew that Mr. Bradshaw's giving me a present hurt me, instead of making me glad” (157). Reluctance to accept unearned gifts becomes a hallmark of Ruth's virtuous character and influence in her new community; Jemima Bradshaw, even at her sulkiest, is “thankful and glad” to know that Ruth has rejected one of her father's bribes—“that she was sure Ruth would never accept” (239).

The universalist eschatology Gaskell inherited from associationism provides a context for reconciling young Ruth's innocuous naivete with the “cardboard repentant Magadalene” (Stone 151) of the novel's second half.¹¹ Submitting God to the law of His own infinite benevolence, Hartley deduces the “ultimate happiness of all mankind” (Preface v) from association's “evident tendency to convert … happiness, mixed with … misery, into … pure happiness” (2.26). Ruth's increasing sense of her own sinful unworthiness (“how many things I have done wrong … what I have been” [434]) is merely the “positive humility, or deep sense of our own misery and imperfections” (1.455) of which Hartley claims that “when men are far advanced in this state, they may enjoy quiet and comfort, … for they approach to the paradisiacal state, in which our first parents, though naked, were not ashamed” (2.269). In this teleological Christian, but still fundamentally hedonistic scheme of character-development, self-sacrifice is not atonement but rather its own reward, and “such a one as [Ruth] has never been a great sinner; nor does she do her work as a penance, but for the love of God, and of the blessed Jesus” (429). Even Bradshaw ends up in Eccleston Chapel humbly “bowed down low in prayer” (422).

One central element of Gaskell's moral psychology not explicitly drawn from associationism is her emphasis on unselfconsciousness as an essential virtue from which other virtues draw their power; Gaskell assures the reader that all virtue will have its reward, “provided only it be pure, simple, and unconscious of its own existence” (103). Ruth's love of natural beauty, though not a highly evolved virtue itself, contributes to her moral development insofar as “the grandeur of this beautiful earth absorb[s] all idea of separate and individual existence” (65), and her various impulses of sympathy are important primarily because they call her temporarily “out of herself,” an effect which Benson predicts motherhood will permanently reinforce: “‘Why, it draws her out of herself! If her life has hitherto been self-seeking, and wickedly thoughtless, here is the very instrument to make her forget herself, and be thoughtful for another. Teach her (and God will teach her, if man does not come between) to reverence her child; and this reverence will shut out sin,—will be purification’” (119). Ruth's path thus moves her from an early blank-slate hedonistic “thoughtlessness” to an evolved state of selfless unselfconsciousness, mediated by God's teaching as manifested in the natural experience of motherhood. The implicit tension in this passage is related to the apparent paradox of associationism which, while denying the existence of any instinctive virtue, nonetheless looks for educational experience to create automatic virtuous reflexes resembling instinct more than self-conscious moral choosing.

Gaskell uses associationism's recuperative, non-essentialist view of character to re-write the fatalistic narrative of female fallenness so typical of Victorian discourse. In so doing, she contrasts two kinds of determinism. On the one hand she presents Bradshaw's essentialist determinism, as summed up in the damning words “wanton” and “bastard” that he hurls at Ruth and her son when he discovers her true past (339). According to this view, Ruth is eternally and intrinsically vicious; any good behavior on her part is “hypocrisy” (337) rather than redemption. Gaskell neatly flips this paradigm by making Bradshaw's cruelty itself the direct cause of Ruth's one lapse into the state of apparent mental decay usually attributed to prostitutes: “her eyes were deep sunk and hollow, but glittered with feverish lustre” (352)—a direct allusion to the “bright, feverish, glittering eyes” of Esther, the doomed streetwalker from Gaskell's first novel Mary Barton (464). The narrative itself thus upholds Gaskell's allegiance to a God-centered but empirically observable determinism whereby human consciousness is subject to divine providence (as manifested in the natural laws of cause and effect) but has an infinite capacity for moral growth “if man does not come between” (119). Ruth's seducer has always already “come between,” but in the novel's optimistic moral scheme even this “stain” (299) works toward her early and efficient (but in any case inevitable) salvation.

II

Whereas Gaskell's reference-point is rational, Enlightenment materialism, Barrett Browning's is emotional Romantic idealism, performed through poetry as an explicit refutation of mechanistic models of selfhood. Though the poet's watchword is spontaneity, an examination of Marian's story reveals the systematic application of a personal life-theory distilled from Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle, and German idealism. Barrett Browning's frustrated search, in Casa Guidi Windows, for a hero possessing the kind of obvious greatness Carlyle could celebrate (great artists, visionaries, statesmen or generals) collapses by the poem's end into the domestic image of poetess/mother and prophet/child quietly affirming the continued possibility of Christian hope: “Poets are soothsayers still / … and creatures young / And tender, mighty meanings may unfold” (2.739-41). Marian's story, then, can be seen as an exploration of this alternative, feminized heroism, and though she fits none of his (male) categories of greatness, Marian functions very much like a Carlylean hero within the moral dynamics of Aurora Leigh. My reading will emphasize four idealist characteristics of Marian's consciousness: first, the soul is in some measure independent from and certainly superior to the body; thus Marian's moral learning proceeds through inspiration rather than sense-perception; second, this moral education happens against or in spite of Marian's environment; third, the implicit goal of moral education is righteous dignity rather than self-abasement; and fourth, the universe is a steep, hierarchical landscape, in which the virtuous few answer God's call by striving upward.

Marian's moral education is shaped to illustrate Aurora's idealist metaphysics of consciousness, whereby the sensual body and the reasoning mind are little better than encumbrances to the intuiting spirit. This scheme places physical sensation not only below but actively against the faculties of the pre-existing “conscious and eternal soul” (3.284).¹² Thrown into the physical world, man “feels out blind at first, disorganised / By sin i' the blood—his spirit-insight dulled / And crossed by his sensations” (1.817-19). Logic and reason are not much better: “books that prove / God's being so definitely, that man's doubt / Grows …” (1.782-84). Thus Marian's spiritual initiation at age three comes as a supernatural repudiation of both earthly sensation and human instruction:

A-hungering outward from the barren earth
For something like a joy. She liked, she said,
To dazzle black her sight against the sky,
For then, it seemed, some grand blind Love came down,
And groped her out and grasped her with a kiss;
.....This skyey father and mother both in one,
Instructed her and civilised her more
Than even Sunday school did afterward. …

(3.890-901)

Like Carlyle's “Great Man,” Marian will henceforth be “not a kindled lamp only, but rather a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven; a fountain of native original insight” (Carlyle 3-4).

“She learnt God that way, and was beat for it / Whenever she went home—yet came again” (3.895-96). The brutal conditions of Marian's childhood serve not only to foreground the social evils of Victorian poverty, but also to emphasize the transcendent spiritual strength by which Marian makes sound moral choices in spite of her environment. Once exposed to the fundamentals of revealed religion, “What God was, what he wanted from us all, / And how in choosing sin we vexed the Christ” (3.931-32), Marian's moral judgments are clear-cut though painful; she recognizes “the vileness of her kindred” (3.940) and can select “the sweet and good” (3.990) from among the “jangling influence” (3.984) of all the random poetry she encounters. Later she abandons her dressmaking apprenticeship to go nurse a sick needlewoman, though “She knew, by such an act, / All place and grace were forfeit in the house” (4.32-33).

Having thus acquired virtue through spiritual intuition guided and refined by catechism and poetry, Marian faces a challenge, as it evolves in the poem, to recognize and rise to the heroic dignity of her own God-given powers. At their first meeting, Aurora bitterly compares the coming marriage of Marian and Romney to a willing bride-sacrifice (“gracious virtues worn, / … to consume entire / For a living husband” [4.198-200]), while bemoaning the girl's ignorance of her own self-generated glory: “The cataracts of her soul had poured themselves, / And risen self-crowned in rainbow: would she ask / Who crowned her?—it sufficed that she was crowned” (4.184-86). The subsequent abduction, rape and madness paradoxically serve to focus Marian's knowledge of her own inner strength.¹³ Thus on learning that she will be a mother Marian watches herself, this time, overflowing with consciously powerful oceanic passion:

                                                                                                              [T]hrough all
The upbreak of the fountains of my heart
The rains had swelled too large …
.....                                                            … [W]hat was there to confess,
Except man's cruelty, except my wrong?
Except this anguish or this ecstasy?
This shame or glory? The light woman there
Was small to take it in: an acorn-cup
Would take the sea in sooner.

(7.53-69)

Now Marian, earlier described as “doglike” (4.281) in her devotion to Romney, points out her sublime indifference to Aurora's news of Romney: “‘Why, a beast, a dog … / Would show less hardness. But I'm dead, you see …’” (6.846-49).

If, by raising downtrodden Marian to the level of moral heroism, Barrett Browning directs a broadside at Victorian social elitism, she overturns the social hierarchy only to replace it with an equally rigid spiritual one.¹⁴ The moral landscape of Aurora Leigh is a steep one, where Christian reversal (the low shall be high) is possible but compromise is fatal. Evil and perdition surface as serious risks when Aurora condemns the snakelike Lady Waldemar to a Dantesque punishment-to-fit-the-crime: “Pay the price / Of lies, by being constrained to lie on still: / 'Tis easy for thy sort: a million more / Will scarcely damn thee deeper” (7.358-61). And her advice to Marian is equally harsh:

                                                            “If his mother's palms are clean
They need be glad of course in clasping [her child];
But if not, I would rather lay my hand,
Were I she, on God's brazen altar-bars
Red-hot with burning sacrificial lambs,
Than touch the sacred curls of such a child.”

(6.618-23)

Moral heroism requires an ascetic program of striving toward the highest goals while declining, or (from the elevated vantage point of one's ideals) disdaining worldly rewards. Marian's self-claimed “death” to this world and its values signals her attainment to a higher sense of duty and absolute commitment to her own holy vocation of motherhood. Were Marian's mother-love any less exalted by moral sacrifice, it would be vicious complacency: “We make henceforth a cushion of our faults / To sit and practise easy virtues on?” (6.726-27).

I hope it is beginning to be evident just how far removed Barrett Browning's brothel is from Gaskell's Welsh inn. The shift from Ruth's seduction to Marian's rape is only the most obvious marker of a shift from a materialist to an idealist paradigm of human learning and from a rational, universally applied explanation of human behavior (in Ruth) to an emotional and intrinsically elitist measure of character (in Aurora Leigh). This underlying philosophical difference also is evident in the two authors' treatments of their characters' experience of motherhood and the temptation of marriage.

III

The distance between Gaskell's rational materialism and Barrett Browning's romantic idealism can be seen through a comparison of the way motherhood brings moral advancement to Ruth and Marian. For Universalist Gaskell, good mothering is neither instinctual nor the result of virtue, but rather can be elicited from anyone under the right circumstances. The hierarchical universe of Aurora Leigh conversely abounds with bad mothers, and Marian's devotion marks her as exceptional and heroic. Gaskell's emphasis on pleasure/pain learning shows up in Ruth's childish ideas of motherhood and her need for instruction, whereas Marian's sudden, sublime, and passionate embrace of maternal responsibility reflects Barrett Browning's faith in the efficacy and immediacy of divinely-inspired intuition. Gaskell shows us the step-by-step associationist process whereby Ruth's mother-love leads to god-love; but for Marian the reverse is true; her superior quality of soul-connection to God endows her with holy powers of motherhood. Finally, the effect of motherhood on Ruth is to inculcate humility and absence of self-regard, whereas for Marian it initiates an articulate consciousness of her own inner strength and individual worth as a worker for God.

In Ruth, good motherhood is the result of associationist cause-and-effect learning and is accessible to anyone who experiences the necessary stimuli. Priestley explains this mechanical model of motherhood-as-habit in his parenting manual: “It is the constant, hourly attention a mother gives to her child, … and not any thing properly instinctive, that is the cause of the idea of it becoming associated with almost every idea and affection of her soul. … These are mechanical things” (56-7). And further: “[T]he more attention any child requires, as on account of sickness, & c., the more strongly is the affection of the parent attached to it” (42). Gaskell's confidence in the universal applicability of this mothering-mechanism surfaces in her depiction of Faith Benson: “I do not know whether she was older than her brother, but, probably owing to his infirmity requiring her care, she had something of a mother's manner towards him” (111). Later, Ruth's sickness produces mothering responses in Faith by much the same process: “the very dependence of one so helpless upon her care inclined her heart towards her” (115). Even harsh Mrs. Mason—“a widow [who] had to struggle for the sake of six or seven children left dependent on her exertions” (33)—and haughty Mrs. Bellingham—who “had sat by [her sick son] the night through, and was now daring to change her position for the first time” (84)—are capable of devoted nurturing under the right circumstances.

In Aurora Leigh, on the other hand, motherhood is a holy commission to which many are called but only the heroically virtuous few will rise. Mothers who fail are unworthy of the name:

“I thought a child was given to sanctify
A woman—set her in the sight of all
The clear-eyed Heavens, a chosen minister
To do their business and lead spirits up
The difficult blue heights. A woman lives,
Not bettered, quickened toward the truth and good
Through being a mother? … then she's none! although
She damps her baby's cheeks by kissing them,
As we kill roses.”

(6.728-36)

Although in speaking of her own mother Aurora states broadly that “Women know / The way to rear up children” (1.47-48), the poem is nonetheless haunted by bad mothers. Aurora's aunt as surrogate mother is loveless and judgmental. Marian's mother is of course abominable, though herself the victim of abuse, and Lucy Gresham's paralytic grandmother is the type of vicious ingratitude. The wedding scene includes an evocation of “babies, hanging like a rag / Forgotten on their mother's neck—poor mouths, / Wiped clean of mother's milk by mother's blow / Before they are taught her cursing” (4.576-79). As matter for lofty poetic thought, “mother's breasts / … round the new-made creatures hanging there, / Throb luminous and harmonious like pure spheres” (5.16-18). But when they belong to real women, these mother-breasts are emblems of deceit, for example Lady Waldemar with her “bare breasts, / On which the pearls, drowned out of sight in milk, / Were lost … If the heart within / Were half as white!” (5.619-25). The procuress who abandons Marian at the brothel is described as “A woman … not a monster … both her breasts / Made right to suckle babes” (6.1183-84). Marian ultimately blames the numerous perverse mother-figures in her life for her undoing: “‘When mothers fail us, can we help ourselves?’” (6.1229).

Ruth and Marian both receive the news of impending motherhood with joy, but the quality and context of their responses again differs according to Gaskell's materialist and Barrett Browning's idealist approaches. Ruth, as we know, “was always fond of children” (71) and approached little Harry's baby sister, whose “fresh, soft, peachy complexion was really tempting” (71), with characteristically sensual gusto. Ruth's response to motherhood is, accordingly, childlike and hedonistic; she anticipates it as “a strange, new, delicious prospect” (126), like some exotic flower or charming view. Ruth's initial resolution to “be so good” (118) for her child lacks the moral strength to back it, and she continues to be preoccupied with thoughts of Bellingham, “depressed and languid under the conviction that he no longer loved her” (127). The heartbroken girl sulks over her baby for months before sharp-tongued Sally finally chides her: “‘My bonny boy! are they letting the salt tears drop on thy sweet face before thou'rt weaned? … Anyone but a child like thee, … would have known better than to bring ill-luck on thy baby by letting tears fall on its face …’” (173-74). By contrast, Marian's grief after her rape precludes all possibility of either pleasure or mere melancholy in this “cast-off life” (7.18). Deadened through suffering, like “a beaten ass / … having fallen through overloads” (7.19-20), she is “cold, numb” (7.51) and “grave and silent” (7.33). Marian's mother-joy carries a strength rooted in awareness of her irrevocable death to other joys, and immediately inspires the emotional self-discipline that Ruth must be taught. Thus Barrett Browning in a parallel crying-scene casts the young mother herself as knowing remonstrator:

          “I wish indeed you had never come
To make me sob until I vex the child.
It is not wholesome for these pleasure-plats
To be so early watered by our brine.
.....And so I've kept for ever in his sight
A sort of smile to please him. …”

(6.696-705)

Motherhood leads Ruth to a deepened sense of humility but Marian to a heightened sense of personal worth. It is a clearly-traced line of association that carries Ruth from the physical experience of having a young neighbor-child asleep in her arms to “the thought of the tiny darling who would lie on her breast before long” (151), and thence to the memory “that she was once white and sinless” and the realization “that she had gone astray” (151). Later that morning in Eccleston Chapel, Ruth is newly “contrite … and she sank down, and down, till she was kneeling on the floor of the pew and speaking to God in the spirit, if not in the words of the Prodigal Son: ‘Father! I have sinned against Heaven and before Thee, and am no more worthy to be called Thy child!’” (154). Marian conversely receives her child as a token of God's redemptive favor—“[God] says ‘I dropped the coin there: take it you, / And keep it—it shall pay you for the loss’” (6.683-84)—and proudly uses her son's love as evidence to defy Aurora's moralizing accusations in a dramatic deployment of Aurora's own eschatological and hierarchical vocabulary:

“You're great and pure; but were you purer still—
As if you had walked, we'll say, no otherwhere
Than up and down the New Jerusalem,
And held your trailing lute-string up yourself
From brushing the twelve stones
.....                                                            … The child would keep to me
Would choose his poor lost Marian, like me best. …”

(6.711-18)

For both Ruth and Marian, mother-love is strongly integrated with God-love, but again here the order of operations betrays a disparity in the underlying world-views. For Ruth, who “often feared that she loved [her son] too much—more than God Himself” (209), maternal passion is a sort of stepping-stone to the profound faith which later empowers her to choose moral duty over parental affection as her prime motivating force. This transfer of priorities happens gradually, through association and acquired habits of thought, as Ruth, praying nightly, would “speak to Him of her one treasure as she could speak to no earthly friend. And so, unconsciously, her love for her child led her up to love to God …” (209). For Marian, her son comes as a direct and efficacious revelation of divine providence; “‘And so I lived for him, and so he lives, / And so I know, by this time, God lives too’” (7.112-13). A sacred love triangle is thus formed:

He saw his mother's face, accepting it
In change for heaven itself with such a smile
.....So happy (half with her and half with Heaven)
.....                                                            … then, slowly as he smiled
She smiled too, slowly, smiling unaware,
And drawing from his countenance to hers
A fainter red, as if she watched a flame
And stood in it a-glow.

(6.589-611)

And this rapturous state (though not destined to last in the temporal world) is itself complete, holy and elevated: “seeing that love / Includes the whole of nature, rounding it / To love … no more—since no more can never be / Than just love” (6.601-4).

IV

The scenes in which Ruth and Marian reject socially-redeeming marriage offers serve as culminating demonstrations of their respective character development, insofar as “character,” in both the idealist and materialist belief-systems, is defined as the individual's ability to make moral decisions independent of societal rewards or punishments. Here it is worth quoting at length from J. S. Mill and Thomas Carlyle, representing respectively the materialist and idealist perspectives. The Mill of The Logic of the Moral Sciences, though secular, is Hartley's true inheritor with his associationist stress on pleasure/pain learning, and the reduction of “will” to the category of acquired “habit.” Like Hartley, he strives to persuade us that high moral standards can be derived from this mechanistic model of self:

As we proceed in the formation of habits, and become accustomed to will a particular act or a particular course of conduct because it is pleasurable, we at last continue to will it without any reference to its being pleasurable. … [T]he habit of willing to persevere in the course which he has chosen does not desert the moral hero, even when the reward … is anything but an equivalent for the sufferings he undergoes or the wishes which he may have to renounce. … It is only when our purposes have become independent of the feelings of pain or pleasure from which they originally took their rise that we are said to have a confirmed character.

(29)

Carlyle's idealist portrait of “character” (here from an essay on Goethe) displays the catastrophic and immediate concept of the self as intrinsically separate from and in struggle with its environment, along with the elitist assumption that this struggle can be won by only a “gifted” few: “… a will is cast abroad into the widest, wildest element, and gifted also in an extreme degree to prevail over this, to fashion this to its own form; in which subordinating and self-fashioning of its circumstances a character properly consists” (qtd. in Behnken 47). Thus we see that the measure of character for Mill is, in a sense, the individual's capacity for self-sacrifice (“wishes which he may have to renounce”), whereas the idealist character of Carlyle's Goethe realizes itself through categorical self-assertion. We see how materialist and idealist models of temptation and character are reflected in Ruth and Aurora Leigh: Ruth resists marriage-temptation through the instinctive martialing of unconscious habit, and in spite of her persistent, irrational love for Bellingham; whereas Marian rejects Romney through the strong-willed insistence on her own “death” (a metaphor that, as David Riede points out, Barrett Browning uses to evoke a kind of elevated and exclusive relationship to the divine) and affirmation of love as a holy power possessed in the individual choosing heart.

Gaskell adapts associationist models of intellectual and moral growth to her novelistic task of portraying character development. On Hartley's scale of “intellectual pleasures” we find “the pleasures arising from the beauty of the natural world” (1.418) on the bottom rung, one step above brute sensualism. Fittingly, then, Ruth's early state of innocent unselfconsciousness is consistently expressed in terms of a spontaneous enthusiasm for scenery. Indeed, Gaskell frequently offers lush descriptions of Ruth's visual impressions rather than narrating the girl's thoughts, thus suggesting a state of unanalyzed receptivity: “Bright colors flashed on the eyes and were gone … Ruth did not care to separate the figures that formed a joyous and brilliant whole …” (14). Ruth's emblematic posture—gazing through a window at a landscape—allegorizes the empirical model of selfhood whereby the inner life is built up from outer perceptions. As her heroine acquires the sublimated inward motivations that Hartley classifies as the pleasures of “sympathy,” “theopathy,” and “the moral sense,” Gaskell reverses her narrative's outward-striving organization of space and vision. Thus Ruth's nascent powers of compassion and reverence coalesce during her confinement in Bellingham's “hushed and darkened” sickroom in Wales (80); and when banished to a windowed gallery nearby, “Ruth crouched where no light fell … her senses seemed to have passed into the keeping of the invalid” (83). Now plants shadowed dimly on the inner walls are “more graceful thus than in reality,” and outside the window Ruth finds only “grey darkness” and disillusionment, until the sun rises over a newly spiritualized landscape (84). The description of Eccleston Chapel similarly gazes inward through vine-draped windows to where the bare inner walls receive mere “shadows of the beauty without,” but the very birds in the ivy are “emulous of the power of praise possessed … within” (152).

Gaskell sets the scene for Ruth's test of character by evoking a return to young Ruth's innocent hedonism and vulnerability to influence from the outer, sensory world. Journeying to the house at Abermouth, where the fatal reunion with her lover will occur, Ruth is “much delighted with all the new scenery” (253) and “was as great a child as any” (267). The house itself emphatically brings back the window-gazing imagery from the first half of the novel. “Bleak and exposed,” the house is virtually all windows and “wild sea views … from every part of the rooms, they saw the grey storms gather on the sea horizon” (259). Ruth's enchantment with the ever-changing sky recalls her days of cloud-watching in Wales before Bellingham's desertion and her initiation into sorrow and responsibility. But at Abermouth, the view is panoramic and the storm all-engulfing; “the house was wrapped in sheets of rain shutting out sky and sea” (259), thus emphasizing how far removed Ruth is from the pleasant and secure walled garden which has guarded and confined her outward gaze during seven years of sober life in the Benson home. Here at Abermouth, Gaskell seems to be saying, Ruth must once again stand alone in the world against temptation.

Though Ruth must face temptation alone, however, she is hardly unarmed; in Eccleston she has acquired the associations, habits, and sublimated desires which will, far more than any conscious principles of virtue, prove a sufficient bulwark against her former lover's new advances. Symbolically, the Abermouth house, though storm-lashed, is “built on the summit of a rock” (259), echoing Matthew 7:24-25. Ruth's childlike joy in new surroundings is constantly counterweighted by mother-yearning in “her absence from her child, which made one great and abiding sorrow” (258), and her determination “to be prudent” (253) is reinforced by the instructive pain of her recent self-laceration over Elizabeth's illness. Habits of care and responsibility thus serve to anchor her responsiveness to tempting pleasures. In the strongest throes of confused yearning occasioned by her first reunion with Bellingham, Ruth's still-fresh love for her betrayer is tempered and modified by the new values she has assumed as a mother. The torn, divided consciousness which epitomizes a state of temptation or moment of moral choice is literalized as Ruth “threw her body half out of the window into the cold night air” (274), but a chain of associated thoughts brings her safely back inside: though in her dazedness she views the clouded moon with “a foolish kind of pleasure” (274), the very storm now brings to mind consoling scriptural texts and the memory of having comforted her son on other rainy nights by reminding him of “the goodness and power of God” (274). Ruth has a strong and simple habit of prayer, up to now performed almost by rote: “It might be superstition … but, somehow, she never lay down to rest without saying, as she looked her last on her boy, ‘Thy will, not mine, be done’” (209). At Abermouth this same prayer returns to aid her on the morning of her ordeal.

Barrett Browning figures Marian's moral growth through water images. Water appears throughout the poem as a metaphor for the destructive forces of time and fate; especially, in this fallen temporal world, it is that which separates and destroys: “in between us rushed the torrent-world / To blanch our faces like divided rocks, / And bar for ever mutual sight and touch / Except through swirl of spray and all that roar” (2.1245-48). The irrational and inchoate always appear in liquid form, as the gruesome parade of lower-class wedding guests “oozed into the church / In a dark slow stream, like blood” (4.553-54). Playing against the water imagery is Aurora's constant exhortation to “stand” and “walk”; in other words, to resist and willfully transcend the downward-sucking forces. Life is an inland (and upward) journey away from the sea and towards the sky. Interestingly, Marian is herself an embodiment of water through much of the poem; she is “mist” (3.811) and her soul contains “cataracts” (4.184), her hair is “a sudden waterfall” (3.1046) and her passionate wounded heart “overflowed the world and swamped the light” (3.1086). Barrett Browning thus places Marian in the same class of phenomena with nature and fate, but renders her passive as a personality; she is a willing Griselda to Romney when not the victim of raw emotional forces within herself. Marian's metaphorical “death,” figured strongly as a “drowning” (6.235-40 and 6.1117), paradoxically marks her rebirth in self-assertion against adversity and merely social conventions of morality. Reanimated, if not resurrected, by the holy call to motherhood, Marian finally attains to her full potential for self-sufficient and self-aware moral strength. Accordingly we see a pivotal role-reversal in Book IV, when Marian initially follows “As one who had forgot herself” (6.480) and then leads Aurora “by a narrow plank / Across devouring waters” (6.482-83 and 501-2). Henceforth it is Aurora who gloomily envies “The Dead's provision on the river-couch” (7.995), while Marian resolutely declines a bed “beneath the heavy Seine” (7.80).

The final test of Marian's character is fittingly presented as apotheosis rather than temptation as she usurps and surpasses the privileged rhetoric and totems previously reserved to Romney and Aurora. In place of Romney's angelic voice—“The music of an organ” (3.1219)—now Marian's voice, “thrilling, solemn, proud, pathetic” (9.196), commands and interrogates. Next to high Aurora, always so determined and “erect,” Marian is still further, and supernaturally, elevated:

She stood there, still and pallid as a saint,
Dilated, like a saint in ecstasy,
As if the floating moonshine interposed
Betwixt her foot and the earth, and raised her up
To float upon it.

(9.187-91)

Most importantly, in this scene Marian is the sole remaining defender of Aurora's divine love-principle. In order to fulfill her narrative function as mediator between Aurora and Romney, Marian must come to a mature participation in the Christian project as envisioned by Aurora: she must value her independence and individual call to action, her vocation (which in Marian's case, conveniently, is that of Motherhood and Self-Sacrifice); and she must value Love, both conjugal and filial, enough never to desecrate its earthly institutions through accepting a false (loveless) marriage for herself and a second-hand father for her son. When Ruth rejects Bellingham at Abermouth, saying she no longer loves him, her change of heart is firmly rooted in the moral education she has imbibed with her daily bread in the humble, spiritual Benson household—and in fact the narrative hints strongly that, underneath her new moral attainments still beats the tender heart of strong yearning for her former lover. Marian, by contrast, has every moral reason to marry Romney except—and for Barrett Browning it is crucial—that her heart does not beat for him.

In this comparative study, I have tried to clarify the extent to which two writers' allegiances to very different models of selfhood shaped their divergent approaches to the highly gendered topics of innocence, motherhood, marriage, and self-sacrifice. In seeking to undermine the fatalism of the “fallen woman” narrative, both writers face the task of re-tooling male-centered philosophies of selfhood (Hartley and Priestley both illustrate their life-theories with examples almost exclusively drawn from male experience, and Carlyle placed no women in his pantheon of Heroes). Gaskell takes the feminine virtue of modesty and universalizes it as Hartleyan “humility,” while Barrett Browning feminizes Carlyle's masculine category of heroism by applying it to the womanly realms of chastity, sympathy, and love. Gaskell chooses a model of selfhood potentially more adaptable to social and political progressivism¹⁵—but the spiritual values apparent in her emphasis on humility and her mistrust of moral reasoning limit the expression of that radical potential in her characters' lives. Barrett Browning, on the other hand, contains identity within the conservative and elitist parameters of individual heroism; here the chief tool of reform is exhortation or inspiration through exalted personal example. Though this philosophy implicitly condemns the majority of womankind to patriarchal oppression and the ravages of vice, it also allows for the radical portrayal of Marian Erle as a strong, self-realizing woman who consciously celebrates her own right to desire and to choose.

Notes

1. Cora Kaplan's exhaustive source-study offers Ruth as the major influence but also points out that Barrett Browning would have read The Scarlet Letter, and even finds threads of Marian in Mme. de Stael's Corinne and Arthur Clough's The Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich. Dolores Rosenblum states pointedly that “The most obvious link is Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth, from which Barrett Browning derived Marian Erle's story” (322, note 3).

2. For a well-researched discussion of exactly how unprecedented Gaskell was in taking a fallen woman for her heroine and treating her not just with sympathy but admiration, see Rubenius (176-216).

3. Amanda Anderson thoroughly and insightfully explores the relationship of female “fallenness” in literature to Victorian psychologies, moral philosophies, and social theories. I will follow Anderson's lead in questioning Ruth and Aurora Leigh from the standpoint of “materialist” and “idealist” concepts of character formation. For Anderson's analysis of the conventions and tendencies of narratives of fallenness in the Victorian press and social science, see especially the section headed “Moral Statistics and Magdalenism” (43-65).

4. Aurora herself makes a strong distinction between seduction and rape in judging Marian's moral status. Watching mother and child together, Aurora is inwardly touched but nonetheless hurls more than forty lines of moralistic abuse, undeterred by Marian's ironic evocation of “‘The common law, by which the poor and weak / Are trodden underfoot by vicious men, / And loathed for ever after by the good’” (6.667-69). Aurora relents only on hearing the crucial fact that the girl was not “‘seduced, / But simply, murdered’” (6.770-71). Did Marian not wield this circumstantial defense, we may well suspect that Aurora, like Charlotte Brontë's St. John Rivers, would have offered “evangelical charity” but no “spontaneous, genuine, genial compassion” (349).

5. Leighton makes a strong case for reading Aurora Leigh as a radical feminist critique of the Victorian social code, persuasively foregrounding the poem's many ironic sideswipes at the unjust and exploitative “law.” However, Leighton's reading underemphasizes the poem's explicit ongoing rejection of large-scale reform efforts and consistent condemnation of individual vice: “[A]ll society, / Howe'er unequal, monstrous, crazed and cursed, / Is but the expression of men's single lives …” (8.875-77). Stone points out Gaskell's allegiance to Carlyle's “industrial chivalry” model of social reform, whereby “Individualism is both the evil and its cure, provided that industrialists transform themselves by donning the chivalric trappings of the presumably selfless knights of old” (137).

6. The opening line of Aurora Leigh directly quotes Ecclesiastes and links the poem to an age-old stance of resignation to oppression:

   If thou seest the oppression of the poor, and violent perverting of judgment and justice, … marvel not at the matter; for he that is higher than the highest regardeth; and there be higher than they.

   (Ecc. 5:8)

7. All Aurora Leigh quotations follow the McSweeney edition.

8. We know from Gaskell's correspondence with Dickens that she was personally involved in the “rescue” of at least one young unwed mother (Schor 49).

9. Gallagher has aptly observed that “The ‘real’ reality for [Gaskell] does not lie behind human behavior in a set of scientific laws; it is on the very surface of life, and although it is often obscured by conventional modes of perception, it can be adequately represented in common language” (65). Indeed, Gaskell's use of associationist principles, though marked, is far from dogmatic (especially compared to the work of her contemporary, Harriet Martineau) and she regularly draws on literary and cultural conventions that, strictly examined, contradict them. For example, much of Ruth's early behavior can be explained in terms of the ideology of feminine modesty so thoroughly explored in Yeazell's Fictions of Modesty. That the writings of Joseph Priestley were well known to Gaskell is highly probable, as she was a well-educated and strongly-identified Unitarian; furthermore, both her father and Dr. William Turner (the model for Thurston Benson) had studied with Priestley as young men. Obviously I want to argue that this influence is more strongly felt than not in Ruth's portrayal of character and consciousness.

10. The instructive value of pain is never explicitly propounded in Ruth; indeed the scene of Leonard's whipping (202-4) would seem to be a plea against systematic (“artificial” as opposed to “natural” in Priestleyan terms) corporal punishment. In Mary Barton, however, we find the tragically undereducated John Barton hoping that God “would, may be, teach me right from wrong, even if it were with many stripes. I've been sore puzzled here. I would go through Hell-fire if I could but get free from sin at last, it's such an awful thing” (433). Such a vision could only stem from the Hartleyan associationist eschatology (here paraphrased by Goeffrey Rowell) whereby “In Hell, resurrected bodies of the wicked will undergo torment, all senses intact, but … the purpose of this punishment is primarily reformatory” (Rowell 34).

11. Ruth's psychological (rather than circumstantial) innocence has invited critics to literary categorization instead of political assessment, the majority pigeonholing her as a Romantic “natural heroine.” Misled by the novel's clear, non-bombastic exposition and the aptly observed fact that it is Ruth's most sympathetic qualities (love of nature and spontaneous trust) that lead to her fall, Schor, Stone, and Easson come to the anachronistic conclusion that Gaskell's project was one of radical exculpation rather than rational explication of Ruth's sexual fall. Such readings are perplexed by the deeply Christian rhetoric in the novel's second half:

    [H]asn't Gaskell, in presenting her character sympathetically, contrived to make her sinless in the event and yet to react afterwards as though she had sinned?

    (Easson 118)

    Ruth, as a natural heroine, cannot “fall,” except into confusion and guilt; as a socialized being and, in the terms of the rest of the novel, as a Christian heroine, she is already fallen.

    (Schor 66)

    Ruth, who is entirely lacking in will at the time of her seduction, must gain a sense of identity precisely so that she can repudiate and atone for the presumed willfulness of her youth.

    (Stone 151)

12. For the purposes of my argument I am focusing on the anti-materialist aspect of Barrett Browning's philosophy; for a more complex discussion of her model of spiritual/material cohesion, see Joyce Zonana.

13. According to Barrett Browning, Marian “had to be dragged through the uttermost debasement of circumstances to arrive at the sentiment of personal dignity” (Letters [The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning] 2:242).

14. Deborah Byrd similarly remarks on Barrett Browning's conservative and essentialist affection for hierarchical models of value: “Accepting the patriarchal notion that some verse forms are inherently more noble than others, she apparently does not realize that the idea of a hierarchy of literary forms historically has been used to disparage and to exclude from the literary canon much of the verse written by women” (28).

15. “Interestingly, associationism … was seen as the progressive theory of mind at that time and politicized by being connected with the radical ideas of Bentham. … [It] was taken seriously as the democratic form precisely because it emphasized the influence of environment and the external world on the self rather than the innate and privileged independent power of mind. Associationism held out the possibility of transforming consciousness through training and education, culture and nurture. Moreover, the tabula rasa meant that everyone starts off with the same handicap” (Armstrong 32-33).

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