John Ruskin’s prominence as the author of “Of Queen’s Gardens,” his principal statement of Victorian gender opposition, makes him an ideal example for analyzing the power of mythic discourse to undermine gender division. Here, Ruskin creates a vision of feminine authority that draws simultaneously upon several sources (including the goddess Athena and Queen Victoria herself) to empower women in a worldwide arena redefined as a broader version of their domestic realm. In Ruskin’s effort to promote women’s expanded sphere of action, his mythmaking goes further than he anticipates: Ruskin feminizes both metaphor and language, and finally destabilizes the very notion of gender.
Ruskin’s Mythic Queen demonstrates that Victorian authors and artists used myth to challenge their culture’s rigid gender dichotomy. While Ruskin is usually seen as the most articulate advocate of nineteenth-century England’s sharply differentiated gender roles, Sharon Weltman shows that his mythopoetic prose yields many tools to break down fixed categories of gender.
This exciting revision of Ruskin situates him within a tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century myth, metaphor, and gender theorists, arguing for his significance as an example of how mythic discourse disrupts gender dichotomy even among those writers who seek to establish it.
Sharon Aronofsky Weltman is an Assistant Professor of English at Lousiana State University. She lives in Baton Rouge with her family. More info →
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Release date: February 1999
236 pages
Rights: World
Victorian Scandals
Repressions of Gender And Class
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In the popular mind, the word “Victorian” still evokes associations of repression, hypocrisy, and prudery. We persist in thinking that the Victorians were perpetually shocked by everything from minor breaches of domestic decorum to ministry-toppling causes célèbres.
Gender Studies · History · World and Comparative History · Victorian Studies · Journalism · Women’s Studies
Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs
Music as Social Discourse in the Victorian Novel
By Alisa Clapp-Itnyre
Music was at once one of the most idealized and one of the most contested art forms of the Victorian period. Yet this vitally important nineteenth-century cultural form has been studied by literary critics mainly as a system of thematic motifs. Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs positions music as a charged site of cultural struggle, promoted concurrently as a transcendent corrective to social ills and as a subversive cause of those ills.
British Literature · Literary Criticism · Literature · Victorian Studies
The Rescue of Romanticism
Walter Pater and John Ruskin
By Kenneth Daley
Valuable and timely in its long historical and critical perspective on the legacy of romanticism to Victorian art and thought, The Rescue of Romanticism is the first book-length study of the close intellectual relationship between Walter Pater and John Ruskin, the two most important Victorian critics of art.
British Literature · Literary Criticism · Literature · Victorian Studies
