(DOWNLOAD) "Domestic Hybrids: Ruskin, Victorian Fiction, And Darwin's Botany (John Ruskin) (Critical Essay)" by 1500-1900 Studies in English Literature " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Domestic Hybrids: Ruskin, Victorian Fiction, And Darwin's Botany (John Ruskin) (Critical Essay)
- Author : 1500-1900 Studies in English Literature
- Release Date : January 22, 2008
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 75 KB
Description
Opening his 1880-81 series of essays for The Nineteenth Century, later given the collective title "Fiction, Fair and Foul," John Ruskin recollects the plants along the lane near his Herne Hill home, where as a boy and a young man he derived both pleasure and intellectual benefit from his studies of the primroses and daisies. But the lane is now a site of suburban development and industrial waste, Ruskin complains, so a child of the present can only experience "the thrill of scientific vanity in the primary analysis of some unheard-of process of corruption." (1) Such scientific pleasure in the analysis of corruption, Ruskin then contends, both has its corollary in, and has contributed to, the stimulation experienced by readers of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Honore de Balzac and Victor Hugo, whose "science of fiction" is "like the botany of leaf-lichens" (34:268). To elucidate the meaning of his collection's title--the witches' chant in Macbeth that fair is foul, and foul is fair--Ruskin argues that depictions of deformity and physical mutilation express the modern novelist's unhealthy "love of thorniness" and inhuman cold-bloodedness--"whence," he writes, "the last Darwinian process of the witches' charm--'cool it with a baboon's blood, then the charm is firm and good'" (34:279-80n). Contending, in still another botanical simile, that the morbid cataloging of diseased characters resembles the detailed depiction of the blotches on the skin of blighted fruit, Ruskin denounces a prurient obsession with love and sex. "It is quite curious," he notes, "how often the catastrophe, or the leading interest, of a modern novel, turns upon the want, both in maid and bachelor, of the common self-command which was taught to their grandmothers and grandfathers as the first element of ordinarily decent behaviour" (34:282).