Heroines on the Margins: Representations of Motherhood in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth

Abstract

In the nineteenth century the ideological construction of the maternal role and its strict codification gained particular relevance within a broader discourse on the formation of Victorian female identity and values associated with the rise of the middle-class and capitalist patriarchy. Regardless of the emphasis the predominant cultural discourse put on the institutionalization of maternal experience, it had been challenging for nineteenth-century authors to represent it in fictional works. The aim of this work is to investigate how the heroines of Anne Brontë’s novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth experience isolation and social marginalization as they embody some social deviances from the stigmatized female maternal ideal society strived to promote. However, the protagonists’ ethics in the education of their children are inscribed within the discourse on proper childrearing practices. In Brontë’s novel Helen Huntingdon, unable to control her husband’s brutal behaviour, leaves him and brings their child with her. In the attempt to preserve little Arthur’s moral well-being, she breaks the compactness of the family unit and defies conventions. Ruth, instead, embodies the archetype of the “fallen woman”, seduced and abandoned dealing with an unintended pregnancy. In this tale of sin, fall, and redemption it is precisely through motherhood that the heroine redempts herself and spiritually elevates.