Footnote 9, Chapter 1, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
indicates a link to material not in the original print version. [GPL]. By means of an idealized figure like Turner, Ruskin could circumvent the unconscious anxiety of trying to compete with his own father, an anxiety dramatized in Marcolini and "Leoni." The nurturing aspect ofJohn James Ruskin's relationship with his son has been insufficiently recognized, however. My remarks here are partly suggested by Erik Erikson's generalizations about fatherhood and religious communion. For example:"Children become aware of the attributes of maleness ... at about the time when they have the first courage for an autonomous existence -- autonomous from the maternal matrix in which they only seem to want to remain forever. Fathers, if they know how to hold and guide a child, function somewhat like guardians of the child's autonomous existence. Something passes from the man's bodily presence into the child's budding self -- and I believe that the idea of communion, that is, of partaking of a man's body, would not be such a simple and reassuring matter for so many were it not for that early experience" (Young Man Luther [New York, W. W. Norton, 19581, 124).
Last modified December 2000