Opposing the Audience: Ruskin and Thoreau

Decorative Initial M ost writings of the nineteenth-century sages do not, however, employ the second-person simply in a simple, direct attack upon the audience. Instead, they move back and forth between allying themselves with their audience and pulling away to attack it by shifting between you and we. Ruskin follows this manner of proceeding learned from Daniel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and other Hebrew prophets. Like them he adroitly positions himself in relation to his audience. Only rarely in "Traffic" -- for example, when he mentions that worship of the golden idols of Mammon is forbidden to "us" -- does Ruskin place himself in the same position as his listeners. Only then does he permit them to take him as a man like them. On the other hand, gestures of opposition, rhetorical strategies that place him at a distance from his listeners, occur frequently in the course of his attack upon his audience and what he terms "this idol of yours" (18.457). Such risky rhetorical strategies both set this genre off from most other literary forms and inevitably require special techniques to avoid alienating the sage's intended audience. In other words the crucial difficulty in thus positioning the prophetic voice outside and above the society of the sage's intended listeners is that he must find a way to be superior to them, and to convince them that he is superior to them, without alienating them. Or, to state this fundamental problem in slightly different terms: the audience is willing to pay attention only to someone extraordinary and set apart from the majority of men, but any claim that one possesses special insight threatens to drive it away.

This characteristic positioning of himself as sage in relation to his listeners appears earlier in "Traffic" when Ruskin first instructs them that England will inevitably pass away and then, moving to solace his listeners, reassures them that they have such a dilemma only because they have been deluded by those Others, by the false prophets of laissez faire capitalist economics. Ruskin opens this attack by forcing his listeners to realize that worshipping material success inevitably impoverishes a large portion of English society, after which he anticipates his audience's objections, openly admitting its hostility to him and his revelation: "You will tell me I need not preach against these things, for I cannot mend them. No, good friends, I cannot; but you can and you will; or something else can and will. Even good things have no abiding power -- and shall these evil things persist in victorious evil?" (18.455). Arguing that all history shows that change must come to men and societies, Ruskin adds that "it is yours to determine whether change of growth, or change of death" (18.455). Having briefly joined with his listeners when telling them that they can choose their own destinies, he immediately draws apart from them as, again striking the prophet's stance, he places contemporary phenomena in the context of eternity. "Shall the Parthenon," he asks, "be in the ruins on its rock, and Bolton Priory in its meadow, but these mills of yours be the consummation of the buildings of the earth, and their wheels as the wheels of eternity ?" ( 18. 455 ) .

Having first complimented his listeners when he joined with them in the promise that they could choose their own fates, he withdraws from them to place the Signs of the Times within the context of ancient history and eternity. Ruskin then again draws close to his audience by partially absolving it for the present condition of England when he admits that his listeners have not wished to harm others: "I know that none of the wrong is done with deliberate purpose. I know, on the contrary, that you wish your workmen well; that you do much for them, and that you desire to do more for them, if you saw your way to such benevolence safely." Continuing to mix absolution and blame, he adds that he realizes that "even all this wrong and misery are brought about by a warped sense of duty." Then, after having partially absolved his listeners from blame for their treatment of British workers, Ruskin adopts the first-person-plural pronoun to join momentarily with his audience when he claims that "all our hearts have been betrayed by the plausible impiety of the modern economist, telling us that 'To do the best for ourselves, is finally to do the best for others'. Friends, our great Master said not so; and most absolutely we shall find this world is not made so" 1;'8.455-56). Exchanging the second- for the first-person pronoun, Ruskin tries to loosen his audience's allegiance to utilitarian economics, for one way that the sage gains the assent of his listeners is to compliment them or promise them hope after having revealed their perilous condition.

In "A Plea for Captain John Brown," Thoreau follows a very similar strategy in defending the great abolitionist [Bibliographical note]. He begins one movement or section of the "Plea" gently enough, aligning himself with his listeners and readers when he tells them, "Our foes are in our midst and all about us." Claiming that hardly a house "but is divided against itself," Thoreau finds the cause, the foe, in "the all but universal woodenness of both head and heart ... which is the effect of our vice" and which breeds "fear, superstition, bigotry, persecution, and slavery of all kinds." Like Ruskin, Thoreau finds the root of the problem in a "worship of idols." Brown, he argues, was an exception, a true believer, "for he did not set up even a political graven image between him and his God." Having gently broached the topic of his audience's political, moral, and spiritual corruption, he then intensifies the charges by making them specific, after which he sets Brown apart from his audience. At this point Thoreau begins a new paragraph that violently attacks contemporary churches -- and his audience as well. Brown set up no idols between himself and God; the churches, which betray Christ, do: "A church that can never have done with excommunicating Christ while it exists! Away with your broad and flat churches, and your narrow and tall churches! Take a step forward, and invent a new style of outhouses. Invent a salt that will save you, and defend our nostrils" (120). Thoreau's Swiftian analogy between his satiric target and excrement, like his impatient parody of high-, low-, and broad church parties, climaxes in his use of you and your, since these pronouns emphasize that his audience is under direct attack. The audience Thoreau emphasizes, offends "our nostrils. "

In A Tale of a Tub Swift pointed out that satire is a glass, a mirror, in which a man sees every face but his own. As these examples from Ruskin and Thoreau reveal, the sage creates a different kind of satire from that found in neoclassical writers, for he in essence grabs the individual members of his audience by the scruff of the neck and forces them to see themselves in his dark mirror.

t">

Last modified 2000