Abstract

The use of the leaf image in Christina Rossetti and John Ruskin is expressive of their different attitudes towards human emotion. Rossetti, viewing emotion as a barrier to religious salvation, projects feeling into the natural world and thus fails to contemplate nature closely, refusing its comfort and preferring to look towards God. Inability to see the natural world is a central concern of Ruskin's "Modern Painters," and in Volume v his focus on the leaf, "inter alia," serves to teach his readers how to look. Ruskin highlights how the leaf grows, lives, and then falls in a spiral, whose trajectory offers an ideal model of emotion.

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