he novel . . . associates unconsciousness with a desire to escape
middle-class identity and its seemingly inevitable transgressions. When Ruth
first meets Benson, she is about to drown herself-in the novel's words, to "seek
forgetfulness." Benson saves her by enabling her to replace one form of
self-forgetfulness with another; he falls, and his fall "did what no remonstrance
could have done; it called her out of herself" (97). That initial meeting
connects the capacity for sympathy with self-forgetfulness, and throughout the
novel, the possibility of Ruth's redemption is identified with Ruth's forgetting
of her former self. Indeed, she is most herself when most "out of herself;'
helping the poor and the sick in an effort "to forget what had gone before this
last twelve months" (191). (Benson too strives "to leave his life in the hands of
God, and to forget himself" [142].) It is as if the absence of consciousness Ruth
exemplifies, and for which Benson longs, expr esses a desire for relief from
conscious- ness, identified in this novel with an almost unbearable sense of
self- division. Indeed, it may be in her unconsciousness — identified with her
unselfconsciousness — that Ruth best exemplifies middle-class identity: sympathy
here resembles a state of forgetfulness that serves to assure the sympathizer of
the unquestioned, secure nature of his or her identity. After all, the issue for
middle-class identity, as the novel worries it (and Faith's comment implies) is
"remembering" who one is, as if identity inheres in its active maintenance. But
while sympathy here may seem to offer middle-class identity a welcome
unselfconsciousness, it also suggests the absence of an essential self: the way
in which identity built on identification with others may be imagined as no
identity at all. (pp. 88-90)
Related Materials
- Review of Audrey Jaffe's Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction
- Sympathy and the Embodiment of Culture in Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Gray
- Sympathy and Representation in Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne
- Infection and Feeling in Mrs. Gaskell's Ruth
- Sympathy and the Spirit of Capitalism in A Christmas Carol
References
Jaffe, Audrey. Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction. London and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.
Last modified December 4, 2004