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rule, not for battle,  and her intellect is not for invention, or creation,
but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision  (WR, , ). For
Ruskin, women do not guide by what they do. (Indeed it is hard to see
what they could do, given the way Ruskin exclusively attributes all
active functions to men.) Rather, they guide by what they are, and what
they feel for others.
As in other Victorian domestic ideology, for Ruskin the importance
of the female domestic sphere is that it serves as a shelter from the
hardening e ects of the male public sphere:
This is the true nature of home  it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only
from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. Insofar as it is not this, it
is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and the
inconsistently minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world
 Romanticism, aesthetics, and nationalism
is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be a
home; it is then only a part of that outer world which you have roofed over, and
lighted re in. WR, ,
For Ruskin, the role of the woman in this private sphere is to serve
others:   She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infal-
libly wise  wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation 
(WR, , ). But whereas in typical Victorian domestic ideology, the
essence of this sympathetic role lies in its circumscribed application to
the private family sphere, Ruskin expands its application to his concept
of the state. Thus, far from being private, the sympathy of women
becomes a public function, even a public duty:
There is no su ering, no injustice, no misery, in the earth, but the guilt of it lies
with you [women]. Men can bear the sight of it, but you should not be able to
bear it. Men may tread it down without sympathy in their own struggle; but
men are feeble in sympathy, and contracted in hope; it is you only who can feel
the depths of pain, and conceive the way of its healing. WR, ,
For Ruskin, the social function of women has always been, and should
always remain, sympathy, and this emerges in this last quotation in
the anger behind his belief that they are now neglecting that role in
the modern era. Ruskin goes so far in insisting on the connection
between domesticity and the good of the state that he collapses one of
the basis tenets of domestic ideology, namely that there is a strict
separation between the public world of men and the domestic world
of women:
Generally, we are under an impression that a man s duties are public, and a
woman s private. But this is not altogether so. A man has a personal work or
duty, relating to his own home, and a public work or duty, which is the
expansion of the other, relating to the state. So a woman has a personal work or
duty, relating to her own home, and a public work or duty, which is the
expansion of that. WR, ,
Ruskin s opposition to a strict division between the public and private
spheres here is consistent with his overall rejection of the tenets of
individualistic liberalism that animate his criticism of classical political
economy.
In the end, women, or, rather the chivalric idealization of woman,
comes to take over the higher good previously contained for him in
religion and art, which Ruskin had linked together in his early accounts
of beauty. A connection can thus be seen between Ruskin s early
account of vital beauty in Modern Painters, vol. , and the representation
Ruskin on the state and the home
of domestic woman in Sesame and Lilies. In the former, Ruskin described
vital beauty both in terms of the functional beauty of a creature well-
formed to ful ll some purpose and the vital beauty of moral goodness. In
the latter, the vital beauty of domestic woman is expressed in terms of
moral perfection rather than in activity. Women ful ll their function by
being, rather than doing, which is attributed to men. Because their
  function  is nonpurposive, they come to resemble art objects. They
become like Kant s account of the work of art, purposive without a
purpose.
Ruskin s aestheticization of domestic woman thus removes autonomy
from the female subject. It is the paradoxical role of his ideal woman to
be a guide to all society and yet be unable to guide herself. It is precisely
this sort of paradox of Victorian domestic ideology that Elizabeth
Barrett Browning challenges in Aurora Leigh when she has her heroine
ask:
am I proved too weak
To stand alone, yet strong enough to bear
Such leaners on my shoulder? poor to think,
Yet rich enough to sympathise with thought?
, ,
Although Ruskin is in many ways the most engaged in the questions of
practical social reform of all the previous aesthetic statists, when viewed
against the narrative of modernity and modern subjectivity, he is often
the most antimodern. In terms of the roles of women, Ruskin is obvious-
ly, and even by his own admission in the preface to the edition,
against the modern tide of change. But viewing the question of
women s domestic roles from a broader historical perspective, there is
an interesting way in which the ideology of domesticity, which Ruskin
upholds, can itself be seen as the result of the same modernizing
processes of capitalism that Ruskin elsewhere opposes. For domestic
ideology as a whole can be seen as part of a central aspect of moderniz-
ation, the division of labor, speci cally, the division of labor according to
gender roles. Ruskin is blind to this because of his essentially non-
historical analysis of women. As I have shown, he develops a very
sophisticated understanding of the in uence of historical and sociologi-
cal factors on determining the role and condition of the male workman. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]