Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Ruskin, John - Paul Sawyer (essay date 1990)

Paul Sawyer (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: "Ruskin and the Matriarchal Logos," in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, edited by Thais E. Morgan, Rutgers University Press, 1990, pp. 129-41.

[In the following essay, Sawyer discusses Ruskin's view of girls and women in The Ethics of the Dust, "Of Queens' Gardens," and The Queen of the Air.]

To define Victorian nonfiction prose as a discourse is almost invariably to think of it as masculine discourse—at least so long as we accept the customary description of the sages as a group of secular prophets. At the very beginning of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Hebrew prophets marked all sacred human speech as masculine by virtue of their roles as oracles of a patriarchal deity, a gender distinction repeated through the centuries by male clergy who have preached the law. In general, the figure of the Victorian sage as a prophet underscores the notion of...

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