The Trouble with Comfort: Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, and Leafy Emotion

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. ********** This article emerged from thinking about two lines about falling leaves by Victorian writers: the first by Christina Rossetti, the second by John Ruskin. In her Christian poem 'A Better Resurrection' (1857) Rossetti writes: 'My life is in the falling leaf'; and in his study of aesthetics, Modern Painters, Ruskin writes that life is 'partly as the falling leaf'. (1) What does it mean for a life to be in or as a falling leaf? For both writers, the leaf image speaks to the experience of feeling as a human being, or what it means to be a human being. For Rossetti, this affective being is Christian, a subject position which for her involves erasing the worldly self to look forward to a potentially paradisial existence. Withdrawing her representation of feeling into the autumnal image of the falling leaf, she almost erases, or as Jerome McGann argues, 'extinguishes', affective experience, rendering her felt existence one that looks forward to death. (2) Rossetti effectively sublimates her felt experience in the falling leaf. Ruskin, however, is more optimistic, regarding his life as the falling leaf, a statement which I argue here is based more on the movement the leaf makes as it drops, as opposed to the process of dying that Rossetti sees in the falling leaf. The leaf captures felt existence for Ruskin in a manner that in part reflects his reading of Wordsworth's argument that we should seek to understand life through its emotional content: that our feelings about the material world signify what it means to be a human more than our physical relationship with the material world itself. This is not to argue that the action of the fallen leaf can be simply mapped onto an equivalent emotion, like depression (the leaf falls down, the narrator of the poem feels down); but that the movement a falling leaf makes provides a model of emotion for Ruskin. To model emotion on a falling leaf holds many parallels with current theories of emotion, particularly those forwarded by Teresa Brennan in The Transmission of Affect. (3) Here Brennan argues that human emotion works by being broadcast into the air between people, moving back and forth and being reshaped as it travels. What Brennan means by this is that the emotions or affects of one person, and the improving or gloomy energies these affects involve, can enter into another person through the body and mind. Affects for Brennan are physiological, i.e. physical or material, sensations or energies that accompany judgements we make about situations or people. We project or transmit affects and then others are impressed or affected by them. The interpretation of such an impression will vary from person to person, Brennan argues: a negative affect, for example, such as anxiety, is received by a seriously depressed person in a way that differs greatly from its reception by a relaxed or contented person. The thoughts we attach to the affects we encounter remain our own, however, the product of a particular historical conjunction of our experiences and how we interpret such affects. This speaks to Ruskin, I think, because he wants to privilege a modern art that will represent the leaf so tenderly that the image of the leaf will itself transmit a certain kind of affect--a familial and domestic one--that will reassure and relieve the viewer. …