Resisting Growth through Fairy Tale in Ruskin's The King of the Golden River

Abstract

Resisting Growth through Fairy Tale in Ruskin's The King of the Golden River U. C. Knoepflmacher (bio) "How things bind and blend themselves together!" mused a seventy-year-old John Ruskin in the last paragraph of Praeterita, the lyrical autobiography concluded in 1889. In this remembrance of things past, Ruskin's most resolute attempt to come to terms with his origins, realism blends with an intense wishfulness. A lifetime's desire to retrieve the emblems of cultural wholeness and purity now takes the shape of a personal quest as an old man rummages through the residual layerings of his backward-looking, richly evocative mind. Young faces dissolve into old ones. Landscapes interpenetrate, merged by memory. Juxtaposition, always Ruskin's forte, yields likeness in unlikeness. Though the final vision is, appropriately enough, one of approaching darkness, a golden radiance also confers eternity on a moment in time: "Through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the mountainous clouds still lighted from the west, and the openly golden sky calm behind the Gate of Siena's heart, with its golden words, 'Cor magis tibi Sena pandit,' and the fireflies everywhere in the sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed with lightning, and more intense than the stars."1 Ruskin is alone as he imaginatively crosses this golden gate. But, in the previous paragraph, when he reconstructs still another refuge from darkness, his garden at Denmark Hill, he becomes rejuvenated by the company, not of one, but of two small Eves: "I draw back to my own home, twenty years ago, . . . and the Elysian walks with Joanie, and Paradisiacal with Rosie, under the peach-blossom branches by the little glittering stream which I had paved for them" (35:560). Here, too, nature and artifice fuse. Yet the awed observer of a skyscape is presented as lord of his own garden. He can pave the glittering brook. And he can screen the entering inmates. For it is significant that Ruskin's two companions should be remembered as children only, still "girlish" figures (542). His cousin "Joanie" Agnew is not yet Mrs. Arthur Severn, the matronly caretaker of Ruskin's [End Page 3] later, tormented years. Similarly, "Rosie" La Touche remains closer to the ten-year-old he first met in 1859 than to the young woman whose painful references to the "Eden-land" they so briefly shared now sting the "sorrowful" old man and remind him of having ever since "lost sight of that peach-blossom avenue" (561). He can reopen that avenue only by retreating into a precarious realm of imagined innocence. Almost half a century before he composed Praeterita, Ruskin fashioned another golden blending of art and nature as a preserve for the desexualized purity of childhood. If Praeterita enlists the nostalgia of memory, The King of the Golden River, though similarly retrogressive, activates those "forward-looking thoughts" and "stirrings of inquietude" which the growing child evokes, according to Wordsworth, in the maturing adult.2 The little book ostensibly intended for the thirteen-year-old Euphemia Gray (then known as "Phemy," but later as "Effie") was written in 1841 before Ruskin's delayed graduation from Oxford and before his propulsion into eminence with the publication of the first two volumes of Modern Painters (1843, 1846). Yet despite his later disparagement of the work, it contained in embryonic fashion many of the ideas Ruskin was to develop in his more serious theoretical writings. Still, as Jane Merrill Filstrup has rightly suggested, The King of the Golden River also "gives a glimpse" of the incipient fears that beset Ruskin during his "early manhood."3 And these fears not only stemmed from doubts about his "aesthetic appreciation of nature," as Filstrup shows, but also involved far more elementary insecurities about assuming the identity of an adult male. "Phemy's fairy tale," as its youthful author called it at the time, acted as an important emotional outlet for the over-nurtured only child of Margaret and John James Ruskin. By casting himself as a deprived and parentless child in Gluck, the boy-Cinderella, Ruskin could indulge emotions that did not fully erupt into his...