المستخلص: |
The Other, in de Beauvoir’s sense, implies the object, the woman as a commodity whose value is gauged by a patriarchal society deriving its moral standards from a capitalist system of oppression and exploitation. This controversial issue has been tackled by in- ter-disciplinary approaches such as, Marxism and Cultural Materialism whose main principles are, up to a point, combined within the trend of Socialist Feminism. The latter is a “theory that explains the origins of women’s oppression in the interaction of both capitalism and the patriarchy” (Tong 119). Indeed, the economic and sexist oppression -being the consequences of the socio-economic situation of the mid-Victorian period- are highly-ranked concerns in Socialist Feminism. Feminist debates show interest in the reassessment of patriarchal values that are the focal interest in this paper taking Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel, Ruth (1853), as a case study. This fictional work, which deals with one of the taboo questions, sexual deviance, serves as a testing ground for an investigation of the author’s rewriting of the established double-standard of Victorian morality. Ruth is a narrative of sexual transgression that marks an authorial attempt to introduce an alternative vision of the sexual fall. Therefore, the present analysis diagnoses the discursive strategies the novelist adopts to interrogate and evaluate the conventional norms of female sexuality. At this junction, if we accept the view that Gaskell’s writing is in challenge of the Victorian stereotypes of fallen women, it is interesting to see how far her discourse can be considered as subversive.
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