Sunday, November 25, 2012

I recount my recent Gaskell jag

For my birthday this year, I bought myself a refurbished (i.e., cheap) Kindle. It has paid for itself in the intervening three months several times over with a) free public domain books and b) freeing up shelf-space of old favorites that were falling apart. A chief pleasure was a new old favorite, Elizabeth Gaskell's novels.

Mary Barton ***
Like a lot of Gaskell's novels, "Mary Barton" revolves about labor and management wrangles in the industrialized north of England. But "Mary Barton" is a little different from "North and South" in that it includes a lot more more overt moralizing on economic themes, the kind of moralizing that's probably actually good for people. Perhaps one of the novel's main notions is that capital and labor divorces workers and their masters from their common humanity. One working stiff puts it this way in the novel's ending chapters:

What we all feel sharpest is the want of inclination to try and help the evils which come like blights at times over the manufacturing places, while we see the masters can stop work and not suffer. If we saw the masters try for our sakes to find a remedy--even if they were long about it--even if they could find no help, and at the end of all could only say, "Poor fellows, our hearts are sore for ye; we've done all we could, and can't find a cure," we'd bear up like men through bad times.
In other words, labor could stand a lot of hard times if it thought management just gave a shit. Are you listening, WalMart?

Ruth****
This novel invites comparisons to "The Scarlet Letter," in that it explores many of the same themes of redemption and deception. But, it is much more realistic than Hawthorne's horrid novel (which I have reviled here), and ends by being a kind of feminist pro-life riff.

The eponymous title character is a scatterbrain who becomes pregnant and is taken in by Rev. Benson, a Methodist clergyman, his sister, and their housekeeper. The Bensons are torn about helping the girl and her child--they feel for her abandonment by her lover in a wholly human way, but they know that they could bring scandal in their church by bringing the girl home. So they concoct a lie that the girl is a widow.

Gaskell, however, brings Ruth's real history into the full glare of truth, which seems on the point of bringing down everyone who has helped her and her little boy, Leonard. However, the only thing Rev. Benson really regrets as things begin to fall about his ears is the deception about Ruth's background. He reminds Ruth, in a pretty radical homily, that being a Christian has often been at odds with conventional morality and social approval:

The world is not everything, Ruth; nor the is the want of men's good opinion and esteem the highest need which man has. Teach Leonard this. You would not wish his life to be one summer's day. You dared not make it so, if you had the power. Teach him to bid a noble Christian welcome to the trials which God sends.... Tell him of the hard and thorny path which was trodden once by the bleeding feet of One. Ruth! Think of the Saviour's life and cruel death, and of his divine faithfulness.
***SPOILER FOLLOWS*** It is Ruth's love for Leonard and her willingness to bear him at a time when suicide seemed an easier way out that allows her to live a full and happy life. Her goodness "buys" Leonard friends and a moral and financial legacy--one that is far more valuable than any his perfidious father could have given him.

Lizzie Leigh **
Even great novelists can turn out turkeys. "Lizzie Leigh" is a much shorter novel and seems to be a precursor to "Ruth," but without the depth. Pretty much a melodramatic weeper.

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