A Moabite Among the Israelities: Ruth , Religion, and the Victorian Social Novel
When Elizabeth Gaskell's reputation was revived in the 1980s and 1990s, Ruth was reread along with the factory novels, and uneasily assimilated to the secular socio-economistic, feminist Gaskell that emerged at that time. Ruth 's overt religiosity was necessarily downplayed, however, and i...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
[2016]
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| In: |
Literature and theology
Year: 2016, Volume: 30, Issue: 1, Pages: 67-81 |
| RelBib Classification: | CD Christianity and Culture FD Contextual theology KAH Church history 1648-1913; modern history KDD Protestant Church NCC Social ethics TK Recent history |
| Online Access: |
Presumably Free Access Volltext (Resolving-System) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | When Elizabeth Gaskell's reputation was revived in the 1980s and 1990s, Ruth was reread along with the factory novels, and uneasily assimilated to the secular socio-economistic, feminist Gaskell that emerged at that time. Ruth 's overt religiosity was necessarily downplayed, however, and it was reconstructed as a social novel about the sexual double standard. What happened to religion? This article argues that it is effaced by historicism: Gaskell's and ours. Ruth was Gaskell's attempt to reimagine social fiction; but it was only a first stage, a transitional work that looks towards a different kind of ethical fiction-reading subject who will be a different kind of agent in social change. Rather than proposing a naively transcendental solution to the conditions of history and ideology, whether in the Romantic form of feeling or the Christian form of faith in God, Gaskell offers an explanatory fable of social renewal through the energy of the outsider. Ruth is like her Moabite namesake: she foregoes her own religious identity as a devout Protestant Christian to take up a greater genealogical imperative, to instate the lineage of a new secular religion. In this respect, the fate of Ruth itself has been somewhat akin to the fate of the biblical heroine. For it too stands as a kind of lone Moabite among the Israelites, an outsider fiction seeking religion's readmission to the vital debates about feminism, social realism, and the role of fiction in social change, and promising that it can go whither they go. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4623 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Literature and theology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/litthe/fru062 |