A Victorian Alphabet: A Retrospect

Eighteen months ago, I began a series looking at twenty-six themes and topics in Victorian literature linked to the letters of the alphabet. Now, having recently posted Z (for Zuleika!), I’ll be recapping what we covered and linking to any posts you might have missed.

In ‘A is for Animals in Agnes Grey’, I look at how cruelty or kindness to animals is often indicative of moral fibre in the works of Emily and Anne Brontë. The fate of animals in literature can often foreshadow or mirror the lives of characters, but can also provide some of the most memorable incidents in a plot, making this theme a powerful tool for philosophical and moral exploration.

In ‘B is for Brownies in the Brain’, I examine Robert Louis Stevenson’s conception of the creative process in his essay ‘A Chapter on Dreams’. Where does literary inspiration come from and what forces could be at work in a writer’s subconscious?

In ‘C is for Caroline’s Coriolanus’, I review the use of Shakespeare in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and in the relationship between two of her characters (Robert and Caroline). Brontë argues for literature as a vehicle for emotional, as well as academic, education.

In ‘D is for Defending Daniel Deronda’, I argue for the complimentary nature of the Jewish and romantic ‘halves’ of George Eliot’s most divisive novel. Gwendolen and Daniel are united in their quest to find a vocation, whether religious or secular.

In ‘E is for the Eloi and Elysium’, I trace the heritage of nineteenth-century science fiction, and in particular H.G. Wells, in a modern flick starring Matt Damon. How does Victorian thinking on class, economics and evolution inform modern cinema?

In ‘F is for Fern Fever’, I write about the strange Victorian phenomenon of ‘pteridomania’ through the lens of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novel Vixen. How do hot houses relate to social status and what can women’s gardening habits tell us about them?

In ‘G is for Graves in Great Expectations’, I look at the graves which inspired those of Pip’s parents and siblings in Charles Dickens’s most popular novel. The graves also act as signs for the illiterate Pip to ‘read’, signifying the dangers of partial knowledge as well as the virtues of ignorance  - important ideas in a bildungsroman.

In ‘H is for Hardy’s Hair Extensions’, I expose the link between hair and attractive femininity in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders. What does it mean to take another woman’s hair? And how do Victorian ideas of ageing compare with our own?

In ‘I is for Infants, Industrialisation and Imagination’, Victorian novels dealing with factory workers are put under the microscope. What does it mean to infantilise the working classes and why does Dickens choose to deal with the position of workers and the education of children in the same novel (Hard Times)?

In ‘J is for Jealousy in Jewsbury’, I consider how stereotypes about actresses and wives are difficult to reconcile for male characters, but also the author, in Geraldine Jewsbury’s The Half-Sisters.

In ‘K is for ‘The Kraken’’, I provide a line-by-line reading of Tennyson’s poem about a fearsome sea monster, helping students approach new poems and dig into this poem in particular.

In ‘L is for Laura’s Landscapes’, I probe the gendered differences between landscape painting and portraiture in the most famous Victorian sensation novels. How comfortable can we be as modern readers with a conclusion to The Woman in White which leaves Laura still deluded about her role as artist as well as object?

In ‘M is for Melodrama, Murder and Maria Marten’, I blog about a real life murder case which inspired a swathe of nineteenth- and twentieth-century creative treatments. Why did Maria Marten capture the imagination of Victorian audiences?

In ‘N is for Nelly as Narrator’, I argue for the unreliability of Nelly as a source of information in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

In ‘O is for Openings’, I dissect the openings of Lady Audley’s Secret and The Woman in White. What can we learn from Braddon and Collins about creating suspense and drama? And how can writing thrill us in ways movies cannot?

In ‘P is for Pregnancy’, I reveal the ‘hidden signs’ a female character you’re reading about may be pregnant. Tuning into Victorian innuendos and pregnancy ‘symptoms’ could help improve your reading experience.

In ‘Q is for Quiz!’, you get to find our which Victorian heroine YOU should be.

In ‘R is for Rome’, my trip to the Italian capital spurs a reconsideration of Dorothea’s trip there in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Dorothea’s sheltered upbringing, Protestantism, and recent marriage all impact on her response to the city and so the chapters here offer valuable insight into her character.

In ‘S is for Swinburne, Sappho and Sadomasochism’, I write about Swinburne’s adaptation of Sapphic fragments in nineteenth-century verse. What is the appeal of Sappho? Is it sexual, sadistic, or poetic?

In ‘T is for Text, Time (and Trains)’, I blog about the skillful way in which Thomas Hardy’s narrative techniques play with the passing of time. Moving from Victorian novels to romantic comedies and horror flicks, I offer my perspective on the manipulation of time in text.

In ‘U is for ‘Ulysses’ and You’, I remind you of the poetry scene in the latest James Bond movie and give a case for the continued appeal of Tennyson’s poem ‘Ulysses’.

In ‘V is for Vulnerable Victorian Virginity’, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth acts as an example of how female virginity is often presented in nineteenth-century literature.  

In ‘W is for Witchcraft’, I write about Hardy and Gaskell’s interest in magic and the supernatural. Witchcraft which we might think of as confined to earlier centuries is still very much alive in nineteenth-century rural England and in Victorian literature.

In ‘X is for Xmas’, I analyse the poem (and later carol) ‘Christmas Bells’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Which ideas about the Christmas period span the centuries and what was unique about celebrating the festival during the American Civil War.

In ‘Y is for Why Yellow?’, I answer the question about why this one colour was so important to writers in the 1890s. From fashionable magazines to madness-inducing wallpaper, why does yellow define the decade?

And finally, in ‘Z is for Zuleika’, Max Beerbohm’s letters offer an insight into the creative process which went into writing his novel – Zuleika Dobson.

Thank you so much to those who have stuck with me throughout the series and for all your comments and suggestions! I’m delighted to let you know I’ll be starting a new series in the next weeks, reviewing works of Neo-Victorian literature, so if you have any favourite works which fall into this category then let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

A Victorian Alphabet: Z is for Zuleika

After 25 letters in my Victorian Alphabet, I’m cheating a little bit here, as Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson, or An Oxford Love Story wasn’t actually published until 1911. But, having recently finished reading Rupert Hart-Davis’s Letters Of Max Beerbohm, 1892-1956, and seen how Zuleika, as a character and a novel, is such a strong presence in Max’s life long before the text’s publication (he began writing it in 1898), I feel justified in using her to round off this very Victorian series.

Zuleika Dobson is a satirical novel about a girl so attractive she makes the students at Oxford University commit suicide en masse, destroying the city and its institutions. An untalented magician, Zuleika’s appeal is partially due to her beauty and partially to the contradictions of her character which make her unable to love anyone:

“I could no more marry a man about whom I could not make a fool of myself than I could marry one who made a fool of himself about me. Else had I long ceased to be a spinster”.

While the novel moves away from Zuleika at times – whether to the history of Oxford’s most elite drinking society, to the birds which are harbingers of death for holders of a particular dukedom, or to the muse of history Clio – she dominates the novel, and also seems to have dominated its creation.

In his letters, Max even uses the word ‘Zuleika-ing’ to denote the act of writing and, in 1904, not only does he seem to have a very clear idea of the eventual plot, but he’s also personifying his work, talking about his inability to write a ‘skeleton’ of the rest of the novel, without it becoming a ‘full-fleshed figure’.

At the novel’s appearance, Max writes the following note to Robert Ross (who had been a close friend of Oscar Wilde):

‘My dear Bobbie, Poor old Zuleika! She is at length to be dragged out, blinking and staggering, into the light of day. And Heinemann [his publisher] will be sending her to the Reform Club, to wait for you there. Be kind, be courteous, to the hag. Incline your ear to her mumblings. Pretend not to hear the horrid creakings of her joints. Tell her she does not look a day older than when you saw her or at any rate her head and shoulders all those years ago. Don’t hint to her that she makes a goblin of the sun. Yours affectionately, Max’.

Here we see Beerbohm referencing the long gestation period his novel has been through. And we also see him using an identification between Zuleika the woman and Zuleika the novel to reference the faults in his writing (mere ‘mumblings’ with ‘creaking…joints’), while simultaneously pleading for kind critical judgement on them (without seeming to plead for himself).

With the reference to Zuleika’s head and shoulders as having appeared first, Max also seems to be alluding to one of the most famous stories of male birth, the emergence of Artemis from the head of her father Zeus. Writing a novel as a sort of pregnancy is an idea he returns to again in a letter to Arnold Bennett:

‘You mustn’t expect from me a ‘diabolically ingenious defence’ of Zuleika, any more than you would expect a woman who has just borne a child to be diabolically ingenious of defence of that child… “Madam, this baby is in many respects a very fine baby. I observe many inimitable touches of you in it. But, Madam, I am bound to say that its screams are more penetrating than a baby’s screams ought to be. I notice in its complexion a mottled quality which jars my colour-sense. And I cannot help wishing it were” etc. etc.… Will the young mother floor you in well-chosen words?’

Max’s easy and familiar references to ‘Zuleika’ in his letters demonstrate beautifully the strong connection between artist and work (even an artist as humorous and, at times, flippant as Beerbohm). They also show the fascination ‘she’ as a character and as a project held over Max across several decades. Zuleika’s appeal may have decimated Oxford, but it has cemented Beerbohm’s place in literary history.

This is the last in my Victorian Alphabet series, so let me know if you have any new series ideas – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist. And, if you want to find out more about Beerbohm’s Oxford, then click here for my top tourist tips for Victorianists who find themselves in England’s best city!

A Victorian Alphabet: Y is for Why Yellow??

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) is a staple nineteenth-century text for students of literature in the English-speaking world, and especially the US. The 6,000-word short story is an account written in the first person of a woman, Jane, who has been confined to an upper room in a secluded house by her husband John as a result of a nervous disorder. There, having been prescribed a ‘rest cure’ for her hysteria, separated from her baby, and barred from writing, she goes slowly mad, convinced there is something living behind the room’s yellow wallpaper.

Even this straightforward summary raises lots of questions (and contains plenty of content for future blog posts!), but one central question stood out to me the first time I read the text (and seems to have occurred to multiple other students turning to Yahoo Answers for clarity!) – why is the wallpaper yellow, rather than any other shade?

The choice isn’t an accidental one, and is closely linked with contemporary ideas about the colour. Here’s how Jane introduces it first:

The colour is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

Two important and recurrent associations with yellow are noticeable – yellow is the colour of putrification and also of a milder kind of fading, caused by the passage of time.

Earlier in the century, Dickens had used yellow in the same way, frequently linking the colour to particular characters who are older and somehow linked to decay. This is how Pip first describes the home of Miss Havisham, perhaps the character in the English canon most associated with physical deterioration and the passage of time, in Great Expectations (1860-1):

I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre and was faded and yellow. 

In The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman is at pains to highlight that the paper is a yellow of these very associations of festering age, rather than say a sunny yellow:

It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.

Jane even links the rotting smell she finds pervading her room with the yellow paper itself:

The only thing I can think of that it is like is the COLOUR of the paper! A yellow smell.

In doing so, she is not merely exhibiting an increasing monomania with the paper. ‘Jane’, isolated though she is, is acting just like many other writers of the 1890s! For many (especially European) writers of the Fin de Siècle, yellow was the defining colour of the period, with its associations with degeneracy, the wasting away of the age, a sickliness brought on by inbreeding, boredom or excess.

There was a practical link too. In the nineteenth-century, scandalous French novels were bound in yellow paper to warn browsers of their racy contents. It is one of these books which helps to corrupt the impressionable Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, published the year before Gilman’s story.

Lord Henry gives Dorian a ‘book bound in yellow paper, the cover slightly torn and the edges soiled’. Note how its state of dilapidation is similar to Jane’s paper:

It is stripped off—the paper—in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down.

Later, in Wilde’s novella, Dorian pins the blame for his moral decline squarely on this book:

"Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that. Harry, promise me that you will never lend that book to any one. It does harm."

This suggestion – that a book, even a yellow book, can really poison a mind – is one which Wilde rejects firmly:

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

But it is interesting to note that Dorian’s book is not generic. It has a particular model as Wilde’s description of it makes clear. It is À Rebours (1884), by Joris-Karl Huysmans (which I reviewed on this blog in September 2013), a novel which is the quintessential story of the degenerate (French) life.

Here’s the effect the novel has on Dorian:

It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.

Dorian’s feelings of discovery and revelation here before a later fall match perfectly with the early stages of Jane’s fixation with the yellow wallpaper. The novel and the paper feel incomplete, raiments, something torn, but they inspire what could be described as creativity – Jane’s writing, Dorian’s beautiful life – but could also be identified as self-destructive madness.

When it came to naming a quarterly literary journal in London in 1894, its founders were in no doubt what to name it – The Yellow Book was the perfect descriptor of the age although it (fittingly!) died out before the end of the century (1897). With contributors including Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, H.G. Wells and Henry James, The Yellow Book shows just how much yellowness meant to writers of this period.

It is within this context too then that The Yellow Wallpaper should be read. The question is not ‘why is the paper yellow?’. It might rather be ‘how do these ideas of degeneracy, and this link to the Aestheticism of the period, play into to Gilman’s other concerns, with gender, motherhood and madness?’

We’re nearly there! What should be 'Z' in my Victorian Alphabet?? It’s a tricky one so send me your suggestions – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

A Victorian Alphabet: X is for Xmas

Merry Christmas for a second year from the Secret Victorianist! Last year, at Christmas, I treated you to a tricky literary quiz and suggested some nineteenth-century party games to try with friends and family. This year, I’m taking a look at a Christmas poem from the period – ‘Christmas Bells’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1864).

I heard the bells on Christmas Day

Their old, familiar carols play,
    And wild and sweet
    The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
    Had rolled along
    The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
    A voice, a chime,
    A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
    And with the sound
    The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
    And made forlorn
    The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
    “For hate is strong,
    And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
    The Wrong shall fail,
    The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

Longfellow’s poem begins in self-conscientiously typical festive fashion, referencing the cyclical nature of Christmases – each one resembling the last -, in the ‘familiar carols’ and regular bells of Christmas morning. There is reference to the longevity of Christmas in the use of words from the very first Christmas ‘carol’, the words of the angels to the shepherds in the Nativity story, ‘peace on earth, good-will to men!’.

More than this, the poet imagines that this cry has ‘rolled along’ continuously, as an ‘unbroken song’, since the birth of Christ, spreading around the world. Longfellow conveys this idea of global harmony, through use of singulars for the collective celebration - ‘A voice, a chime,/A chant sublime’.

The Angel Appearing Before the Shepherds, Thomas Buchanan Read

Soon however, this harmony is broken, for the poet and the world, by a disruptive force – the American Civil War. The sound of war (the ‘cannon’, emanating in the South) ‘drowns’ out this announcement of peace, suggesting the poet, and his countrymen’s, hopelessness. The domestically destructive nature of a civil war is suggested through the use of language suggestive of home for the American continent (‘It was as if an earthquake rent,/The hearth-stones of a continent’) and reference to the, explicitly Christian, ‘households’ now suffering from war, while founded on a theology of peace.

In the final two stanzas, we are given two reactions to this. The poet despairs (‘hate is strong’), only, apparently, to be answered by a message of hope about the continuance of God (‘God is not dead, nor doth He sleep’), despite the current violence. However, the evenness of these stanzas (it’s not as if Longfellow introduces a second of celebration) means the poem does not end on an entirely convinced and joyous note. The sounds of peace and happiness, which begin the poem, do not return – the only comfort is the promise that they will. And it is even hinted, that this will come, not simply through the end of war, but through the military success of the ‘right’ side (‘The Wrong shall fail,/The Right prevail’).

What we have then, although this poem has subsequently been set to music and made a carol itself, is a poem, which, while it plays on the traditions of Christmas, and well-known themes of Christianity, speaks to a particular moment in nineteenth-century American history.

What should be ‘Y’ in my American Alphabet? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

A Victorian Alphabet: W is for Witchcraft

With Halloween just around the corner, I thought I’d use ‘W’ in my Victorian Alphabet to look at a subject not often associated with the nineteenth-century – witchcraft.

Those interested in witchcraft and the supernatural most often turn to Early Modern literature (Marlowe, Middleton, Greene, Rowley, Decker and Ford), especially as the mid-1600s saw the last execution of a witch in England, or to writings centred on the Salem Witch Trials in America, later in that century. Yet superstitions surrounding magic – and particularly women as workers of evil magic – were prevalent in the England, especially in rural communities, in the Victorian period.

Any visitor to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford (yet another city attraction which any budding victorianist should check out) can see English objects from the period with magical uses (e.g. a witch in a bottle, a pig’s heart struck through with pins and nails for warding away evil spirits) and the topic makes its mark on literature too.

Elizabeth Gaskell turned to the past and to Salem for her novella Lois the Witch (1861), which I wrote about previously, but Thomas Hardy is the writer whose interest in rural traditions gives us a picture of contemporary (or near contemporary) superstitions about witchcraft.

Le Chapeau de Brigand, Thomas Uwins (1833)

In The Return of the Native (1878) the heath dwellers are deeply suspicious of Eustacia Vye and the combination of her position as an outsider, dark beauty and lonely habits leaves her open to the charge of being a witch. In fact, this is how we are first introduced to her:

"He means, sir, that the lonesome dark-eyed creature up there that some say is a witch—ever I should call a fine young woman such a name—is always up to some odd conceit or other; and so perhaps 'tis she."

"I'd be very glad to ask her in wedlock, if she'd hae me and take the risk of her wild dark eyes ill-wishing me," said Grandfer Cantle staunchly.

"Don't ye say it, Father!" implored Christian.

Eustacia’s youth and beauty means that Timothy (the first speaker) is loath to call her a witch, while at the same time it is her attractive ‘wild dark eyes’ which make such an identification probable. As the novel progresses what we might dismiss as superstitious prattle from the locals becomes an important plot point. Eustacia is suspected to such a degree that she is physically assaulted in church, having been blamed for the illness of Susan Nunsuch’s children:

“We hadn't been hard at it for more than a minute when a most terrible screech sounded through church, as if somebody had just gied up their heart's blood. All the folk jumped up and then we found that Susan Nunsuch had pricked Miss Vye with a long stocking-needle, as she had threatened to do as soon as ever she could get the young lady to church, where she don't come very often. She've waited for this chance for weeks, so as to draw her blood and put an end to the bewitching of Susan's children that has been carried on so long. Sue followed her into church, sat next to her, and as soon as she could find a chance in went the stocking-needle into my lady's arm."

Susan Nunsuch’s victimisation of Eustacia sets in motion the closing events in the novel. She counters the girl’s suspected magic with her own, creating, attacking and eventually burning something resembling a voodoo doll she fashions to resemble Eustacia:

From her workbasket in the window-seat the woman took a paper of pins, of the old long and yellow sort, whose heads were disposed to come off at their first usage. These she began to thrust into the image in all directions, with apparently excruciating energy. Probably as many as fifty were thus inserted, some into the head of the wax model, some into the shoulders, some into the trunk, some upwards through the soles of the feet, till the figure was completely permeated with pins.

Eustacia’s death, which could be attributed to accident or suicide, could equally have a supernatural explanation because of Susan’s actions here. Witches might not be being burned at the stake in Victorian England but being suspected of witchcraft could, it seems, be equally life destroying.

This, of course, is not Hardy’s only treatment of superstitious traditions – consider Midsummer Eve in The Woodlanders (1886-7) or the role of Stonehenge in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). All too often the Victorian period can seem all too familiar and knowable, but there is plenty, even in realist fiction, for lovers of the uncanny this Halloween season.

What should be ‘X’ in my Victorian Alphabet? Please help me out! Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

A Victorian Alphabet: V is for Vulnerable Victorian Virginity

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853) is one of the most famous nineteenth-century novels to deal with a ‘fallen woman’, who loses her virginity before marriage and bears an illegitimate child. And sympathetic as the novel is to Ruth, a dressmaker’s apprentice who is only 15 at the time of her seduction, and designed as it is to highlight the ill treatment of women like her, the novel is instructive when it comes to understanding Victorian constructions of (female) virginity and explanations as to what can make it ‘vulnerable’.

There are many ways in which Ruth is presented as the archetypal virgin, whose seduction is, if not inevitable, far from surprising and maybe even a ‘natural’ result of her characteristics and the attendant circumstances of her situation:

1. The virgin is youthful, but physically developed

Like Thomas Hardy’s Tess, Gaskell’s Ruth has a dangerous (and apparently dangerously attractive!) mixture of extreme youth, with its corresponding naivety, and a sexually mature body. She first meets Henry Bellingham, who seduces her, through attending the Shire Ball as a sort of in situ lady’s maid, an office for which her employer picks her specifically because her ‘waving outline of figure’ will be ‘a credit to the [dressmaker’s] house’. Yet to Ruth her selection is ‘inexplicable’- a sure sign of her unworldliness. Ruth’s youth is such that, even when she is pregnant and abandoned, the servant Sally describes her as a ‘chit’ who cannot possibly be a widow and the narrator tells us, when her child is nearing year old, Ruth still looks so young that ‘she hardly seemed she could be the mother of the noble babe’. While emphasising Ruth’s age cements her victim status it is a crucial component of what attracts people to her – whether the caddish Bellingham (who, at 23, enjoys that he is her senior) or the kind clergyman Mr Benson who takes her in.

2. The virgin is beautiful

It almost goes without saying that Gaskell’s heroine will be beautiful and – importantly – artlessly and simply so. Ruth comes to Bellingham’s attention not only because of her good looks but because in them she contrasts with the ‘flippant, bright and artificial girl’ who is his dance partner at the ball. Ruth’s beauty is set off by its naturalness, as well as its childishness. When Bellingham begins to pursue her, we are told ‘He did not know why he was so fascinated by her. She was very beautiful, but he had seen others equally beautiful, and with many more agaceries calculated to set off the effect of their charms. There was, perhaps, something bewitching in the union of grace and loveliness of womanhood with the naiveté, simplicity, and innocence of an intelligent child’. Beauty is important (note how Gaskell does not say Bellingham has seen anyone more beautiful!) but it is not enough in itself to typify the idealised virginal figure of the Victorian period. 

Portrait of a Girld, John Everett Millais

3. The virgin is prized for her purity of thought, as well as body

Linked to these ideas of childishness and artless beauty is the virgin’s ignorance when it comes to all things sexual. It isn’t just that the virgin hasn’t had sex – we are led to believe she has never even thought of it. Gaskell is at pains to make this explicit for us: ‘She was too young when her mother died to have received any cautions or words of advice respecting the subject of a woman’s life…Ruth was innocent and snow-pure. She had heard of falling in love, but did not know the signs and the symptoms thereof’. Gaskell’s use of the phrase ‘falling in love’ here isn’t just nineteenth-century delicacy – the phrases mirrors Ruth’s few thoughts on the matter which have been emotional, not sexual – and her argument is almost contradictory. On the one hand Ruth’s ignorance is abnormal – the consequence of being orphaned young – but on the other it is entirely natural. The virgin is untouched by any polluting conversation or by any stirrings of desire from within. 

4. The virgin is linked to nature (for good and bad)

The naturalness of the virgin state – but also the fact that this state makes her a prime ‘target’ for men and ‘ready’ for reproduction – is also indicated through the pleasure fictional Victorian virgins are of shown to derive from their natural surroundings. Ruth’s claustrophobic urban quarters may be the inhospitable home from which she is tempted away by Bellington’s advances, but things only come to a crisis as a result of long country walks. And Ruth, as she appears when framed by nature, is all the more attractive in this environment: ‘She wound in and out in natural, graceful, wavy lines between the luxuriant and overgrown shrubs, which were fragrant with a leafy smell of spring growth; she went on, careless of watchful eyes, indeed unconscious, for the time, of their existence.’ The wavy lines of the country garden recall the ‘waving outline’ of Ruth’s own curvaceous figure and the almost overwhelming fecundity of nature also suggests her sexual readiness, even if her mind is ‘for the time’ unaware of this. In this way she again prefigures Tess – Hardy’s ‘pure woman’ – watched by Alex and Angel in fertile natural environments. 

5. The virgin is free from familial ties (and protection)

Ruth’s orphaned state (alluded to in point three) doesn’t just mark her out as ignorant of men’s desires – conversely it also labels her even more directly as a potential sexual partner. Without a home to leave, she is primed to create another family and show other people affection – both emotionally and economically. She has already done this platonically with her fellow apprentice Jenny, but, with Jenny ill and Bellingham pursuing her we are told ‘Jenny’s place in Ruth’s heart was filled up’. Ruth’s fertility and natural affection could have be beneficial to her, if only Henry Bellingham was a man willing to offer her a true (legitimate and marital) home.

When it comes to apportioning blame for Ruth’s ‘fall’, the fact that Ruth is such an embodiment of desirable virginity is not the only factor in her downfall. Many are blamed for her failure to adhere to strict Victorian codes of morality, including her seducer, class and economic factors, the unkindness of other women (particularly Mrs Mason and Miss Duncombe), her guardian and, of course, Ruth herself.

Gaskell was criticised for giving Ruth too many mitigating factors to excuse her behaviour (i.e. failing to confront Ruth’s own sexuality), but importantly she does not let her off the hook. Although it is rescinded later, and given under duress, there is a moment at which Ruth gives her consent: ‘Low, and soft, with much hesitation, came the “Yes”; the fatal word of which she so little imagined the infinite consequences.’ Many factors may make a young Victorian woman vulnerable – but the responsibility for protecting her virginity is ultimately her own.

What should ‘W’ be in my Victorian Alphabet? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist! And you can check out further posts on Elizabeth Gaskell here.