Footnote 13, Chapter 5, 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]. In a brief psychoanalytic reading, Richard Ellmann suggests that "consummation and defilement were irrevocably united" in Ruskin's mind and that Venice passes from virgin to whore, the transition, presumably, being copulation. He also speculates that Ruskin chose the date of Venice's fall (May 8, 1418) because it preceded his own conception by exactly four hundred years (The Golden Codgers [New York: Oxford University Press, 1973] 45-50). These connections may indeed be present, but the interpretation would have to be qualified by the implications of the present passage. My argument is that the general symbolizing structure of ruins, by which the past is defiled yet survives in spirit, serves also to join together other contradictions, conscious and unconscious-for example, the defilement of the mother alongside the fantasy of her continued purity, the inevitability of sin and the primacy of innocence, and so forth. (As I have mentioned, Ruskin gives several dates for the fall of Venice.)
Last modified December 2000