The Eighth Lamp

Ruskin Studies Today

REVIEW

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, Performing the Victorian: John Ruskin and Identity in Theater, Science and Education, Ohio State University Press, 2007.

Reviewer: Dr Anuradha Chatterjee, Editor, The Eighth Lamp.

Performing the Victorian aims to counter the “popular and scholarly appropriation of Ruskin as the prime example of Victorian stodginess and stultifying patriarchy.” It does so by showing how “fundamentally Ruskin destabilizes categories of identity in much of his writings, particularly in works on theatre, science, and women’s education in the second half of his career.”[1] The destabilization and subversion of identity is not just in terms of gender. It is also in terms of ontological categories like race, nation, species, and self, as well as epistemological categories like animal, vegetable, mineral, art, science, theater, and life.

The book achieves this aim by relying on Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), Bodies that Matter (1993), and Undoing Gender (2004), and to some extent, Elin Diamond’s Performance and Cultural Politics (1996). Butler and Diamond argue that gender is not a fixed and natural category, and that gender does not exist until it is performed, and reiterated through subsequent citations to previously performed gendered acts.[2] Weltman does not merely ‘apply’ current theories to Ruskin’s work and life. Instead, she identifies and expands upon the theme of the theater – a concept that is common to gender theory as well as Ruskin’s life and his writings. The theme of the theater is explored in three different ways, which explains the subtle structuring of the book into three interrelated parts.

The first part deals with Ruskin’s exposure to operas, puppet shows, ballets, minstrelsy, drawing room comedies in Victorian London. It consists of Chapter One, “‘Mechanical Sheep’” and “‘Monstrous Powers”’: John Ruskin’s Pantomime Reality. This chapter shows that, for Ruskin, theater was as real as the life on the streets of London. The theater provided an idealized view of the world, which could serve as the model for daily existence. The chapter also shows that Victorian theater featured performances that blurred the boundaries between species, race, and gender (for instance Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves that featured women cross-dressed as thieves and smoking cigars). Such performances unsettled Ruskin.

The second part shows that Ruskin’s aversion boundary blurring performances was undermined in his writings on science and women’s education. This part consists of Chapters Two and Three. Chapter Two, “Pretty Frou Frou” Goes Demon Dancing: Performing Species and Gender, argues that Ruskin created a science that was “feminized as well as performative.”[3] Firstly, science was theorized as a theatrical act, which involved observing and appreciating nature, and not plundering it. Secondly, male scientists were asked to possess qualities like passiveness and sympathy, thereby having to act like women. Along similar lines, Ruskin constructed a female audience (young girls and housewives) in his scientific prose. Thirdly, science was feminized as well as performed. This was evidenced in Ruskin’s description of evolution, which according to him, occurred through the metamorphosis of one species into the other. Metamorphosis was significant because it was a shape shifting process, associated usually with women. The performative challenge was also posed to education. Chapter Three, Playground and Playhouse: Performance in Ruskin’s Education for Girls, argues that Ruskin’s Ethics of the Dust challenged the conventional power relation between the teacher and the student. Lessons were converted into a set of dialogues. As a result, education became a performance, which allowed the roles of performer and the spectator to become interchangeable. The interchangeability of identity was reinforced as Ruskin encouraged the girls to identify with their object of study, the crystals. In other words, the distinctions between animate and inanimate, subject and object, and the idea of a stable selfhood were questioned.

The third part of the book focuses on sexuality and its performative nature. It consists of Chapter Four and Five, and it reveals that the performative approach that served as the tool for undermining distinctions between gender, species, race, and self in Ruskin’s work, was unproductively used by twentieth century theatrical portrayals of Ruskin and his friend Oscar Wilde. Chapter Four, Ruskin and the Wilde Life: Self and Other on the Millennial Stage, argues that the 1995 opera Modern Painters and the 1999 play The Countess highlight carefully framed evidence about Ruskin’s personal life to emphasize the “prudish chauvinism” of Ruskin and his age. As a result, Ruskin’s profound contribution to art, architecture, literature, and social reform was occluded. In addition, the Victorian age was pushed into a stable and convenient category, as the inferior and the historical ‘Other’ of the liberated and modern twentieth century culture.[4] Similar attitudes were shown to prevail towards Oscar Wilde. Wilde was portrayed as being more liberated that Ruskin. However, he functioned as a proxy martyr that the audiences could identify and sympathize with, and leave the theater feeling slightly better about their own tribulations. Chapter Five, Queering Ruskin, challenges the twentieth century theatrical portrayals as well as the biographical accounts of Ruskin’s life, especially the accusations of pedophilia, which appears to have arisen due to his lack of sexual performance. Here performance is shown to have two meanings. Firstly, one must sexually perform to fit into a stable category – hetero/homosexual. Secondly, Ruskin’s lack of sexual performance was in itself is a performance of “sexual dissidence” or perversity.[5] The chapter suggests that postmodern identities are not as fluid as we believe them to be. It argues that identities, which are fundamentally performative in nature, have tended to become rigidly bipolar.

In conclusion, book demonstrates the following. Theater provides opportunities to reinvent ones life and identity, by rendering the division between reality and theater artificial. Reinvention is possible because performance allows boundaries between gender, self, and race to be fluid. These ideas emerge out of twentieth century discourses on sexuality and identity. However, their historicity matters little. On one hand, twentieth century theatrical and biographical accounts of Ruskin have been resistant to the idea of shifting identities, and they have reacted negatively to the fact that he did not perform a specific sexual identity. On the other, writings by Ruskin performed the removal of boundaries between self and other; men and women; animal and human; and organic and inorganic. Not only does Ruskin emerge as a more ‘progressive’ theorist, but also his work and his life reveals the gaps in current understandings of identity.

Performing the Victorian contributes to two related areas of scholarship. First is Critical Ruskin studies. Second is Theatre history. The field of critical Ruskin studies has emerged over the last decade or so, owing to the scholarship by Dinah Birch and Francis O’Gorman’s (Ruskin and Gender, 2002) and Weltman (Ruskin's Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture, 1999). These authors have reinterpreted Ruskin’s personal life as well as his attitude towards women and gender, to demonstrate postmodern as well as poststructuralist practices, such as the implicit subversion of gender roles, gendered subjectivities, and fluid sexual identities.[6] Performing the Victorian is a timely contribution to this growing field. Furthermore, Performing the Victorian coincides with and contributes to the growing body of scholarship on Ruskin’s involvement in the Victorian theatre. An AHRC funded project titled The Ruskinian Theatre: The Aesthetics of the Late Nineteenth Century Popular London Stage, 1870-1901 is underway in Ruskin Program at the Lancaster University, UK. This project investigates the extent to which Ruskin’s ideas on society, culture, and education influenced the aesthetics of Victorian theatre.[7] Performing the Victorian contributes to this specific area of scholarship. However, it also subtly differs from it. The book is interested not in historiography or sociology of the Victorian theater, but rather in theater as a literary method.

Performing the Victorian is an extremely well written book. Not only are the arguments well substantiated, but they also balance ‘empirical’ evidence with insightful and confident interrogation of ‘facts’. I particularly liked the last chapter, mainly because it is performative in style. It raises more questions than it answers. This is an important task, as the specter of “missing desire” has, in my mind, tended to compromise Ruskin’s status as a ‘serious’ thinker.[8] I also thought that the book is a well-structured document, which allows resonances to occur between its interrelated parts. The only negative criticism is that I had to read Chapter Two several times, in order to grasp the relation between feminization of science and its performance in Ruskin’s writings. However, it is entirely possible that this may have been due to my unfamiliarity with the specifics of the topic.

While Performing the Victorian will no doubt be an important critical text for students and scholars of gender studies and Victorian studies, I recommend it to scholars from other fields, such as architecture. As an architectural historian working in the field of critical theory, I find the competent literary criticism in this book valuable to the interpretation of architectural treatises. At a more personal level, I feel that the idea of performed and shifting identities is also relevant to the way Ruskin thought of architecture as performing its gender (feminine) through the act of dressing up; the way in which buildings are simultaneously masculine and feminine; and the way in which the craftsperson performs the act of divine creation by creating sculptural forms that mimic nature.[9] Overall, I enjoyed reading the book, and highly commend this brave piece of scholarship.