Ruskin’s Alpine Image in Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’

Despite the vexing historical question of whether John Ruskin and Christina Rossetti were actually personally acquainted,1 we can at least agree with Antony H. Harrison that ‘Christina read Ruskin with interest,’ a claim substantiated with a quotation from Rossetti’s correspondence: ‘Even in 1883, despite Ruskin’s “annoying” criticism of her late brother’s painting, she confided to her sister-in-law, Lucy, “I cannot help admiring much of [Ruskin’s] work”.’2 My attention to Ruskin’s artistic influence on Rossetti arises specifically from one fleeting image in ‘Goblin Market’ which may strike the reader as somewhat incongruous within the poem’s (dreamlike and nightmarish) evocation of, apparently, some version of agricultural and domesticated English countryside. After Laura has succumbed to the goblin fruit, the sisters resume their rural tasks the following day, and in the evening again descend to the brook to fetch pitchers of water. Rossetti writes: The image of distant, towering mountain peaks illuminated by the setting sun interestingly recalls not only the opening description in, but the morally charged metaphor at the heart of, Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River: In a secluded and mountainous part of Styria [in southern Austria] there was, in old time, a valley of the most surprising and luxuriant fertility. It was surrounded on all sides by steep and rocky mountains, rising into peaks, which were always covered with snow, and from which a number of torrents descended in constant cataracts. One of these fell westward, over the face of a crag so high that, when the sun had set to everything else, and all below was in darkness, his beams still shone full upon this waterfall, so that it looked like a shower of gold. It was, therefore, called by the people of the neighbourhood the Golden River.4 First written in 1841 for the 12-year-old Effie Gray—Ruskin’s future partner in a tragically unconsummated marriage—the fable appeared in book form in 1851, and was thus available to, and very likely read by, Rossetti before the composition of ‘Goblin Market’ in 1859. In tracing Ruskin’s influence on Rossetti, however, Harrison more problematically asserts that a ‘great number of Rossetti’s devotional poems, and many of her “secular” love poems as well, appear to be grounded in Ruskin’s theories of typical and vital beauty.’5 This argument leads him to observe that, [i]n a passage originally intended for the second volume of Modern Painters, Ruskin revealed the experiential origins of his conception of the beautiful. One July evening, observing a storm in the Alps, in an epiphanic moment he became aware of ‘the real meaning of the word Beautiful.’ The mountains, like ‘mighty pyramids[,] stood calmly at the heart of the high heaven,’ while ‘the ponderous storm writhed and moaned beneath them.’ At that moment [Ruskin] came to understand that all things in nature which are ‘the type of God’s attributes’ are capable of turning ‘the human soul from gazing upon itself’ and fixing the spirit ‘on the types of that which is to be its food for eternity.’6 Harrison asserts parallel responses of Ruskin and Rossetti: ‘This [rapturous perception of divine or transcendent beauty] is a common pattern of experience in Rossetti’s poetry, as it is in biographical reminiscences that punctuate her prose writings.’ As proof of the latter he offers the following excerpt from The Face of the Deep: ‘Once … after a day of flooding rain, I beheld the clouds roll up and depart and the auspicious sky reappear. Once … I beheld that moving of the mists which gives back to sight a vanished world. Those veils of heaven removed, beauty came to light. What will it be to see this same visible heaven itself removed and unimaginable beauty brought to light in glory and terror! auspicious to the elect, by aliens unendurable.’7 But the perception of divine beauty, as Rossetti’s identification of ‘the elect’ suggests, appears distinctly different in Ruskin and Rossetti. Ruskin’s position may be described as radically Romantic: ‘Nature, in Ruskin’s ecology, is not morally neutral, but … an expression of the divine Will.’8 George P. Landow, recognizing in Ruskin a Christianized version of Romantic nature worship, argues that ‘Ruskin’s apocalyptic vision [in the Alps] presses even further toward complete effacement of self in nature than Wordsworth’s ever did.’9 On the other hand, various scholars have remarked upon Rossetti’s rejection of Romantic nature; for example, Jerome Bump argues that ‘the traditional puritan tendency to believe that evil can assail us through our sense of beauty’ rendered Rossetti unable ‘to embrace the version of the Pre-Raphaelite revolt against dualism which most attracted [poetic inheritors of Romanticism]: a vision of the immanence of the supernatural in the natural.’10 Although we therefore cannot simply equate the perception of divine beauty in nature within the work of the two writers, there exists another possible artistic catalyst for Rossetti’s evocation or imitation of Ruskin’s Alpine image. The fatal belief that the Golden River can really become subjectively gold in Ruskin’s fable suggests some connection to his famous critique of the pathetic fallacy, in which he condemns the human tendency to project ‘emotional interiority or subjectivity’ onto nonhuman objects, thus exposing ‘a failure to recognize what he calls the “real power” inherent in those objects.’ A consideration of this critique’s influence on Rossetti leads Ashley Miller to contend that ‘Laura’s fall … is less a fall into the market—into a world of exchange that ultimately objectifies her—than it is a fall into subjective perception.’11 The parallel between the two writers ultimately emerges, I contend, through the presence of untransmuted erotic energy within their respective creative processes. While Lizzie’s description of the glowing crags at sunset logically associates her with the more ‘spiritual’ state in ‘Goblin Market’—as an evocation of Apollonian transcendence contrasting with the encroaching darkness and danger of the Dionysian world—the poem suggests for many readers an aporia between the spiritual and the erotic, between the heroic potential of both Lizzie and Laura. Such unresolved erotic energy is suggested by the curious conclusion of the poem: both maidens finally experience productive motherhood, with an emphasis on their deep emotional bond but with no mention, or description, of husbands. The human component of the all-male cast of The King of the Golden River is comprised of the ugly, aggressive, hypermasculine Schwartz and Hans, and the contrasting pubescent or prepubescent, mild-mannered, fair, and effeminate Gluck. The evacuation of the evil, uncharitable agents in the narrative is finally achieved by the metamorphosis of the two elder brothers into ‘Two Black Stones’ (42), a kind of castration image that serves as a prelude to the sweetness and light in the restored Treasure Valley. The apparent occlusion of the excessively ‘subjective’ in the form of sexual energy or involvement would seem unsurprising in two works ostensibly intended for children, although the deep interest taken by mature scholars and readers in these texts speaks to the significance of displaced erotic energy in the lives of both Ruskin and Rossetti—writers of deep, if different, religiosity.

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