4 Victorians Journal “A Feminine Morbidness of Conscience”: Disability, Gender, and the Economy of Agency in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth BY DEBORAH M. FRATZ As Deirdre D’Albertis observes, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853) stands apart from Victorian narratives of female sexual fallenness by featuring an unmarried mother as a central character who ascends rather than continues to fall (74).1 Supported by Thurstan Benson, a physically disabled Dissenting minister, Ruth evolves from a victim of circumstances to a virtuous woman who completes her moral redemption in a typhoid hospital. Granting Ruth the power to change seemingly contradicts Amanda Anderson’s argument in Tainted Souls, Painted Faces that “fallen” female characters are victims ofexternal forces that destabilize identity and compromise the capacity for self-determination, in contrast to male characters that maintain stable identities and are capable of positive deliberation and autonomy.1 2 In Anderson’s view, fallenness and fallen women serve as sites of tension about the feasibility ofself-determined action—very like Gaskell’s concern in Ruth about acquiring and maintaining moral agency (18). Despite Ruth’s remarkable growth, Anderson’s argument remains applicable to Gaskell’s novel because the economy of agency she describes as operating between the fallen woman and the normative man is maintained in a different pairing: the fallen woman and a disabled man. The presence of disability appears to realign the ways that gendered conceptions of agency operate. Anderson’s theorization is complicated by disability’s influence when it depletes the agency of a male character more profoundly than sexual fallenness compromises the agency of a female character. Gaskell represents Benson as lacking full powers of agency because disability creates a feminine consciousness in him. The stigma ofphysical difference forces him to constantly acknowledge his disability’s impact on social relations, which in turn instills a profound sensitivity to social negotiations. His stigma predisposes him to empathize with Ruth: the condescension and compromised authority he experiences heighten his awareness of Ruth’s social stigma as an unmarried mother. But the qualities that distinguish Benson from other men in this novel— consideration and sympathy—are vexed by his indecision, as Gaskell suggests that disability directly contributes to his moral paralysis. He facilitates Ruth’s moral recovery in practical, material ways, but his vacillation weakens the active powers that Victorians associated with normative masculinity. In this sense, he too may be considered “fallen”—from the social power granted to the middle-class man as a clergyman, head of a household, and possessor of masculine rationality. When 1 D’Albertis reads Ruth as a penitential narrative “offering an alternative feminine morality, based primarily on sympathy ... against the cold rationalism ofmasculine political economy” (77-78). 2 Anderson argues that “fallenness should be understood principally in relation to a normative masculine identity seen to possess the capacity for autonomous action, enlightened rationality, and self-control” (13). Victorians Journal 5 positive powers ofsympathy debilitate his capacity for rational, decisive action, his character increasingly loses agency, figuring him more like a Victorian woman than a man. Benson’s disability overpowers the benefits ofhis gender,—principally rationality and self-government—making him more vulnerable to a loss ofagency even than Ruth, a fallen woman. Indecision and self-doubt contribute to Benson’s only significant downfall in this novel. To smooth Ruth’s path by hiding her sexual indiscretion, Benson presents her to his community as a young widowed relative and provides her with a recuperative domestic environment that allows her to acquire emotional stability, education, and moral strength. When rumors uncover Ruth’s past, the moral codes of normative class and gender condemn them both. Paradoxically, the lie enables Ruth’s full atonement: her opportunity for moral evolution is not possible without the asylum the Bensons provide, yet Gaskell maintains that Benson’s lie is a failing nearly equal to Ruth’s original transgression. The novel implies that if Benson had acted decisively, as a normative Victorian man, he would not have hidden Ruth’s history. The feminine qualities shared by Ruth and Benson offer a more humane moral authority but, as Gaskell sees it, at the cost of weakness and vacillation. When the novel links Benson’s indecision with...