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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University
JOHN RUSKIN'S JUVENILIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN ADMIRED FOR ITS FACILITY. AS a child he could compose dozens of lines in a day, and fair-copy the draft with minimal revision. In his family, this effortlessness was termed the heart's ease of composition. Years later, this quality was still employed by Ruskin as a criterion in literary criticism, a writer's ease indicating a felicitous imagination that, in Ruskin's view, must have been trained in a joyfully obedient childhood. With this criticism tending to biography--Scott's life is exemplary--ease of invention is attributed to a coherent self, the self and the work having been established together and without revision, as if great artists could suffer no false starts, only unhappy endings.
A complete survey of the early manuscripts supports the reputation of Ruskin's juvenilia for its heart's ease, but only in part. The manuscripts also reveal heavily revised and fragmented writing. Fragments, however, were expurgated by the editors of the juvenilia, thereby perpetuating the myth of Ruskin's heart's ease, at the expense of a different story indicated by the signs of textual difficulty. These indications can be related to psychological disturbance, which had its source in an enmeshment of narcissistic bonds in the Ruskin family. This web, destructive and inescapable, threatened the boy's self-esteem and coherence, and the resulting fragmentation of self was manifested in incomplete and heavily revised verse.
The often starkly contrasting indications of facility and difficulty of composition in the manuscripts tend to be identified with competing forms of romantic quest. In the fragmentary verse suppressed by Ruskin's editors, the boy borrows tropes from Byron that he uses to probe his ambivalent attachment to his mother. Margaret Ruskin is an "ocean's breast" in Byron's marine imagery. The young poet yearns to "drown" in this breast, yet he also contemptuously spurns and attacks the attachment. When these explorations prove too disturbing, Ruskin breaks off the draft and seeks to recover heart's ease. Relief is found by exchanging Byronic voyages for Wordsworthian excursions. This new verse, set in mountain country, is untroubled by revision, for Ruskin has abandoned the exploration of his ambivalent feelings about his mother and instead writes with greater assurance about his companionship with his father. The recovery of heart's ease depends on the support of a companionable, male alter ego.
With his early writing formed on these contrasting modes of romantic quest and their attendant conditions of self, Ruskin continued to dwell on those oppositions in his mature evaluations of romanticism. In his later, shifting assessments of Byron and Shelley, Wordsworth and Scott, Ruskin persisted in a concern with the romantics' relative ease of composition. According to Fors Clavigera and Fiction, Fair and Foul of the 1870s and 1880s, in which Ruskin reviews the romantics for the last time, a writer's facility, or lack thereof, serves as an index of his reception by modern urban audiences, who can drive a writer to distraction with "mercilessly demanded brain-toil."(1) The frenzied toil of the modern literary market is contrasted with Ruskin's childhood lessons, in which his mother is represented as strictly disciplining his reading, handwriting, pronunciation, and prosody. Ruskin means to pose the child's obedience, restraint, and self-sacrifice as an admonishment against the turbulence of contemporary market values. Modern audiences have lost the capacity for obedience and discipline, and, consequently, with the decline of authority and the rise of the popular market, intrinsic aesthetic value has been replaced by market exchange value. The result, in Ruskin's examples from romantic literature, is that the writer either succumbs to these market forces, as Scott did, or stands apart and criticizes them, as Byron did. In either case, no heart's ease of writing is possible.
As Linda Austin comments respecting Ruskin's defense of stable, intrinsic aesthetic value against market forces, the critic remained "forever his mother's pupil."(2) His apparently wooden autobiographical arguments reveal their psychological complexity, however, when compared against the actual evidence of heart's ease or disquiet in the juvenilia. For Ruskin, the modern writer's ambivalent relations with his audiences summon bitter memories from fifty years earlier of his mother's hostile reception of his boyhood verse. His mother, who is represented in the later writing as his infallible childhood guide, had actually been experienced in childhood as a treacherous, intrusive, and unpredictable audience for his poetry. On several occasions, Margaret attempted to prevent her son from writing poetry altogether, and these episodes of interference were especially responsible for the juvenilia that was never printed--the fragmented, anxiety-ridden writing that disturbs heart's ease in the manuscripts. Contrary to Ruskin's later autobiographical arguments, his attachment to his mother should be read, not in the way he intends, as a check on the fluctuations of exchange value, but in the opposite way, as the primary source of his anxiety about the vicissitudes of reception.
In the first half of this essay, I examine manuscripts of 1831-34 for the effects of one such episode of Margaret Ruskin's disapproval of her son's poetry. Her interference is registered in unpublished (and, in the view of Ruskin's editors, unpublishable) poetry, in which the boy negotiates his ambivalent feelings through contrasting modes of romantic quest. In the second half of the essay, I propose that Ruskin's mature evaluations of romanticism enabled him to recognize and pick apart the web of narcissistic family relationships that had trammeled his own early romantic poetry. Just as often, however, Ruskin's revaluations of romanticism only thwarted such recognition, maintaining his distance from meddlesome audiences, and keeping at bay the memories they evoked of narcissistic affliction.
Narcissistic Economies of Emotion in the Ruskin Family
If, according to Ruskin's later axiom, life is wealth, in the juvenilia wealth lay in the heart's ease of writing. The family letters of 1831, when Ruskin was twelve, are filled with finance metaphors, which reflect the rapid rise in the family's fortunes.(3) The affluence was invested in writing, with Ruskin's father, John James, paying his son a farthing per line of poetry (later raised to halfpenny a line). The so-called farthing bargain seems to have spurred especially extravagant productivity, although Ruskin never required much incentive to write poetry.(4) In a letter, the boy promises a return on the investment that will make his father "groan under the weight of lines the sea of rhymes which I shall load you with.... But I shall not make you quite overburdened for as fast as I load you with mountain after mountain heaped gigantic I shall lighten you of your money Hurra Forty lines [of the tour poem Iteriad] per day regularly" (RFL 220). The deluge of forty lines per day is rapturous, yet regular and controlled, so that the boy's creativity seems perfectly at ease, like Milton's "grateful mind" that "still pays, at once / Indebted and discharg'd" (Paradise Lost 4.55-57).
Ruskin's prolific outpouring alarms his mother, Margaret, however, who worries that her son will deplete his energy. "Mamma is continually talking to me as if she had made the farthing bargain," Ruskin complains to his father, "saying that I should weary out my brain or brains" (RFL 233). There ensues a debate in the family letters and in Ruskin's poetry over what might be called competing economies of the emotional expense of writing. Ruskin believes that he can expend emotion freely and inexhaustibly, without cost to his energy. His mother places limits on writing because she believes that emotion ought to be reserved--or, as she says, preserved--lest energy be depleted and the self drained. John James, wily businessman, plays both markets with their differing rules of investment.
Margaret distrusted creative outpouring in men. A male's creativity might be "indulged," a favorite term, but required controlling, in order to prevent overproductivity. For example, in an 1831 letter about the family of Ruskin's tutor, the Reverend Edward Andrews, Margaret praises the preacher's "wonderful talents the way he [runs] on" but clucks about his "flighty" behavior. His extravagance has issued in thirteen children, among other excesses. The blame for such indulgence, sexual or verbal, tends in Margaret's reasoning to be thrown onto women. She censures the "unwise indulgence of [Mrs. Andrews'] every caprice," resulting in "impatience and irritability as almost amounts to insanity." Mrs. Andrews' "caprice jealousy--unreasonableness and violence" are responsible, Margaret believes, for "marr[ing Dr. Andrews'] respectability and fortune and prevent[ing] his filling that place in society his talents entitle him to." Thus, in Margaret's mind, a creative but flighty man overindulges his wife, leading to the woman's overproductivity ("she had another child") and to her deserved retribution: "It is sad to think that the death of the Mother of thirteen living children should be looked forward to with pleasure even by her own husband and yet ... one scarcely wonder[s] at it" (RFL 242-43).
In contrast to the indulged Mrs. Andrews, Margaret combines submissiveness with control, thereby assuring the prosperity of the Ruskin household. On the one hand, she admits her subordination in financial matters: "I feel quite as much interest in these business matters as you can do," she tells her husband, for "how should it be otherwise when little either of enjoyment or suffering can reach me but through you.... [M]y heart exults in your powers and it gratifies both my pride ... and my affection that others should ... be made sensible of them" (RFL 223-24). On the other hand, she stiffens self-effacement with firm control, enforcing God's commandments in order to assure the family prosperity. In a brief sermon prefacing her censure of the Andrewses' profligacy, she recommends the bounty to be gained through submission to God. Her lecture, rife with finance metaphor, urges her husband to "preservation" rather than to expenditure: "the Almighty ... alone has made my endeavours to preserve your affection and promote your happiness ... so successful." She prays that the Lord will "continue and increase in me both the power and inclination to perform to the utmost every duty of love and gratitude. How can I be thankful enough for the goodness which has preserved you.... [B]usiness is influenced by the way in which the sabbath has been spent [owing to] ... the blessing of ... the giver of wisdom the orderer & controller of every feeling" (RFL 242; my emphasis). By Margaret's definitions, God orders and controls feeling, whereas error lies in unguarded expenditure of emotion. Her beliefs are manifested in hypochondriac fears of wasted health, which she frequently impresses on her son and husband: "taking too much fatigue both of body & mind," she repeatedly warns John James, will "take from our enjoyments when you are again in your home" (RFL 231).
The control of emotion and body is advanced as a religious principle, but underlying Margaret's principles is a personal narcissistic fear. Margaret dreads that she may be incapable of discharging a debt of passion to John James. She is "always afraid when" John James has "been away any time" because she shrinks from his "imagination painting visions" of her. "The reality may disappoint you[.] I beg my own you will not ... fancy that which really is not[.] I know ... how very far short I fall of what you describe" (RFL 251). Margaret was right that, in his letters, John James's descriptions of conjugal desire could seem ardently overblown, but her modesty cannot be credited solely to realism. Her disavowals of herself as a sexual being rise from the same source as do her self-deprecation, hypochondriac warnings of depletion, and humiliating chastisement of female insanity and overproduction. Together, these fears point to a pathologically deficient sense of self.
Typical of a sufferer from narcissistic weakness, Margaret inflated even the most ordinary challenges to self-esteem, until her very existence seemed threatened. She aspired to improve herself in order to make herself worthy of John James, but her ambitions were driven less by self-respect than by a fear that John James might withdraw his love. "I feel most sensibly the difference between us," she regretted early in their engagement; "the fear that you may become equally sensible of the difference and cease to love sometimes distresses me greatly" (RFL 68). After the marriage, during John James's absence on business travels, Margaret felt herself supported so precariously that she welcomed even physical discomfort: her ability to withstand pain could prick her into recognizing how her husband had "made life of more consequence to me" (RFL 96).(5) As the marriage matured, Margaret did develop greater confidence, but her strengthened self-esteem remained largely apparent, resting, as it did, on masochistic defenses buttressed by a rigid principle--that emotion must be controlled and preserved. Otherwise, a drain would be opened on the feeble coherence of self.
If narcissistic anxiety lay behind Margaret's reserve, the same was true of her husband's extravagance. John James continually dwelt on his weak self-esteem, even though, as Viljoen remarks with some perplexity, he commanded Margaret's slavish adulation. Viljoen is inclined to explain John James's collapses of self-confidence as mere special pleading, a demand for caressing. Although he reciprocated Margaret's idolatry, his worship, in Viljoen's view, had been transferred to Margaret from his mother so that he could remain the idealized, egocentric son. Viljoen quotes approvingly Ruskin's insight that his father chose his wife as he chose his clerks--that is, with an eye "for subordinates who would be subordinate for ever" (RSH 150-51, 172; Works 35: 171). A less judgmental understanding of John James takes him at his word. He did suffer weak self-esteem, and a characteristic way to defend a vulnerable, narcissistically wounded self--an opposite yet complementary way to Margaret'smis to combine domination with extreme adulation.
The nature of John James's lack of self-esteem is evident in his fantasies. Margaret was warranted in her wariness of her husband's erotic imagination, in the respect that his fantasies grew more extravagant with increasing distance. During his travels, while Margaret agonized at home over the "too high colours" with which he described her (RFL 106), John James relied on distance--defensive withdrawal--to allow his imagination to work in safety. Keeping a safe distance had been a repeated theme in his earlier letters to his mother, which hint at what caused his need to protect himself. He was overwhelmed by the possessiveness of a hypochondriac mother, on the one hand, yet angered by his repudiation by an aloof father, on the other; understandably, therefore, John James kept away from home while also yearning for its imagined warmth (see, e.g., RFL 16-17). Whenever his travels brought him into the vicinity of his Scottish home, his self-esteem would plummet, in the anticipation that he would have to confront a father of whose "sagacity" he bitterly complained "in wishing me to be a Traveller" (RFL 57). He felt no less ambivalent about a mother capable of cementing her children to herself by denigrating their father; "the being I would love," she ominously declared, "I must likewise esteem" (RFL 5).
When his father lost his sanity, John James moderated his anguish with special pleading that strengthened his defenses and prevented self-awareness. All too conveniently, he pronounced his father to be "in a manner dead to all of us. We no more hold a place in his affections nor do any of us or our actions in the least interest him now" (RFL 80). From now on, John James would shield himself from "feelings [that] almost defy & overpower me. They are the more distressing because they are not comprehended & dare not be told" (RFL 86). It was to evade what "dare not be told," he admitted, that drove him into motion, "always seeking relief by removing when possible a little way from the cause of ... painful feelings" (RFL 58).
After his marriage, periods of forced separation from Margaret permitted John James to unleash his erotic imagination without risk of being compromised. And, since his lofty superiority was upheld by Margaret's self-deflation, critical self-analysis could be postponed. "I know my utter Selfishness," he confessed to his wife, "& I mourn over it but I mend not in it." He had no need to mend narcissistic wounds, so long as he could indulge in fantasies of a maternal lover who would take care of his ego. "Myself only have I all my Life Studied but still I am pleased to think I can give my Love some pleasure in my feeling her infinite value to me.... My Esteem is as my Love & my Love is as my Esteem" (RFL 130). Thus, absence and fantasy were as necessary to John James's ego defense as they were harrowing to Margaret's; and, during his travels, while Margaret sought reality of self through pain and self-debasement, John James found "something of Existence when hanging over a Letter to you" (RFL 136)--domineering, that is, over a fantasy of his own construction.
This terrible enmeshment of John James's and Margaret's narcissistic defenses must be borne in mind when considering the effect on John Ruskin of his parents' apparently opposite and balanced approaches to affection--his father's spendthrift ardor and his mother's preservation, order, and control of feeling. According to Sheila Emerson, the elder Ruskins formed an "exceptionally close couple," while it was their son who prized them apart. While not using the term, Emerson regards Ruskin as the narcissist, not his parents, in that he created emotional distances between his parents artificially, enabling him to control the gaps defensively; that is, he invented emotional distances in order to fill them on his own terms. In this way, by maintaining control over human connections, Ruskin was able to yearn for communion while keeping himself impenetrable. Like Narcissus, he could reach for connections in the vacancy of his own reflection, safe from actual contact. Emerson extends this analysis, importantly, to Ruskin's future bellicose relations with audiences, and she suggests, for nineteenth-century writing in general, that the origins of "imagery of interconnection" be sought "in the intricate pattern of ties in earliest family life."(6) While I am in agreement with this description of Ruskin's defensive behavior, I propose to refine its explanation. Owing to the parental coils that I have described, Ruskin's narcissistic behavior would have consisted less in prizing his parents apart artificially than in replicating their divisive yet terribly bonded narcissism. Moreover, Ruskin did not need to invent emotional gaps that he could control. The separations had already been established in the family and were maintained by interdependent fears.
It was the recoil of those narcissistic fears, I believe, that prompted Margaret to thwart her son's poetry. In her view, John had to be saved from "writ[ing] himself out" (RFL 225), just as John James and Dr. Andrews had to be checked in their verbal and sexual "running on." Ruskin responded to her protests by writing still more poetry--romantic quests that, like his father's letters written on the run, expressed both aching need and imperious impenetrability.
"Heart's ease" versus Narcissistic Pain in Ruskin's Juvenilia
As a young man, John James Ruskin yearned to solace his "discontented feeling" that "dare not be told" by restoring "that Heartsease character that my juvenile writings possessed" (RFL 57). As it turned out, his heart's ease was supplied, amply, by his son's writings, with Margaret pointedly marveling over the "astonishing ease" with which he wrote letters, a talent that John had inherited from his father (RFL 176). Since then, readers have been taught to marvel with Margaret at the facility of Ruskin's juvenilia, while equally strong evidence of unease in the manuscripts has gone unnoticed. Revision and fragmentation do occur and can almost invariably be analyzed in terms of narcissistic disturbance.
As I have demonstrated elsewhere, troubled fragmentation in Ruskin's juvenile manuscripts can be correlated with repeated attempts by Margaret to put a check on her son's poetry writing or even to stop him from composing verse altogether.(7) Ruskin's responses to his mother's interference are most dramatically expressed in poems excluded from the standard editions of Ruskin's juvenilia. These angry and ambivalent poems are usually fragmentary, and fragments were, by policy, omitted from the authorized edition of Ruskin's poetry, W. G. Collingwood's 1891 edition of the Poems. Collingwood printed "only such verses as are of sufficient completeness to stand alone," in effect banning Ruskin's most disturbed poems, those directed against his mother.(8) Moreover, this caveat was silently extended beyond a principle of selection to justify heavy editorial intervention in what did get printed. Collingwood repunctuated and rephrased lines and even combined unrelated fragments, imparting a polish and a sense of closure to the poems that the originals do not necessarily warrant. Collingwood's practice was sustained by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, whose 1903 volume of Poems for the Library Edition merely reprinted the 1891 edited texts, occasionally adding notations of textual variants. The 1903 volume did expand Collingwood's selections with previously unpublished verse (again, extensively and silently repunctuated), but the most fragmentary and especially the violently angry verse remained suppressed.
The Library Edition has always had its critics--the earliest objections being raised, ironically, against its inclusion of too much manuscript material(9)--but no notice has been taken of its suppression of the early fragments, and, consequently, numerous misinterpretations have arisen regarding this justly famous body of Victorian juvenilia. Readers naturally have been attracted to the merrier and more...
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