Gleaning Ruth by Koosed Jennifer L.;

Author:Koosed, Jennifer L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Book of Ruth

Jane Hamilton’s novel The Book of Ruth is not obviously connected to the biblical story.41 There is no young widow, no foreigner, no love affair between women. The reader does not even discover that the female narrator’s name is Ruth until toward the end of the novel (although it can be inferred and assumed much earlier). Why, then, a title that links the novel so decisively to the biblical book? Through her work Hamilton provides an astute commentary on the book of Ruth as well as an exploration of what it means to be human. I see three ways in which Hamilton’s novel connects to the biblical story: 1) the setting of agricultural poverty; 2) the exploration of what it means to be compassionate; and 3) the absence of God.

Ruth lives in Honey Creek, Illinois, a small rural community near the border of Wisconsin. It is the kind of place where everyone knows one another, where one could “miss the town if you drive through listening to your favorite song or telling a story about your neighbor,”42 where few of the inhabitants ever leave the precincts. Ruth herself leaves Honey Creek for the first time only after she is a married woman with a child, and even then she goes only to another town in Illinois. She never crosses the state border. She grows up in an aging farmhouse in abject poverty. The entire community is struggling, but her family is particularly troubled. Her mother is a bitter, hard, abusive woman; her father drives off in the middle of the night without a word; her brother is exceptionally intelligent and lives in a world of his own; her only happy family memory is of a hot night when her father accidentally dropped a scoop of ice cream on her head and they all laughed and laughed. “It wasn’t until I was ten that I realized our family must be the ones with the wrung-out hearts, and that other people’s faces shone with sadness for us.”43 The novel is full of images of tending chickens, watching cows, canning produce grown in the backyard. Hamilton’s book paints an unflinching portrait of a poverty so brutal that it crushes the humanity out of almost everyone save the few who have the right combination of talent and luck to escape its confines. The story of Ruth is a story of women, the rural poor, the ones who barely have anything and then end up losing that too.

Ruth is considered stupid and slow, nearly retarded, by her immediate family and her teachers. The only people who sees possibilities in her are her Aunt Sid, who lives in a neighboring town, and an aging neighbor Ruth visits named Miss Finch. The reader, however, knows that despite her parochialism, her coarse speech, and her ignorance she is intelligent because she can recognize complexity; she understands nuance. Her curiosity and creativity make her seem stupid to those around her who have neither; their opprobrium reinforces her natural shyness; her silence confirms their assessment of her intellectual capabilities.

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