England's great 19th
century art critic (
The Stones of Venice, Modern Painters
I-IV, The Seven Lamps of Architecture) had a single very
unhappy marriage. On his wedding night in 1848 Ruskin found his
wife's body so repulsive that he could not perform as expected.
He does not seem to have suffered from latent homosexuality. He
anticipated his wedding night with the gusto typical of
heterosexual males, writing Effie to say that the thought of
seeing her naked prompted unspeakable urges: "That little
undress bit! Ah—my sweet Lady—What naughty thoughts had I…"
Something about Effie's actual body, though, strangled his
visual fancies in their crib. During annulment proceedings six
years later he said, "It may be thought strange that I could
abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive. But
though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to
excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain
circumstances in her person which completely checked it."
The precise "circumstances" that chilled Ruskin's ardor may
never be known, but clearly they had to do with how Effie's
"person," i.e. her body, was "formed." She wrote to her father
that John had pled "various reasons" for not wanting to have sex
with her, but that he "finally this last year told me his true
reason," that "he had imagined women were quite different to
what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his
Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first
evening 10th April." What unimagined feature of women's bodies
did Ruskin behold for the first time that night? Starting with
Mary Lutyens, an early Ruskin biographer, most people have
assumed it was pubic hair, though alternative explanations have
been advanced. (Menstruation is only barely plausible: most
young men know that women bleed. Disfiguring skin disease seems
still less likely: that affliction would not be common to all
"women." Unattractive odor could explain such a strong reaction,
but it does not square with Effie's mention of "what he saw.")
The usual view, that Ruskin thought women have no hair between
their legs, can cite for a cause the fact that he was accustomed
to gazing on classical statues. (In addition to the originals he
no doubt viewed in Italian and French museums, countless
Victorian rooms were decorated with cheap reproductions.) The
syllogistic chain of ideas thus attributed to Ruskin—
classical statues depict ideal female
beauty; those statues have no pubic hair; ergo, beautiful
women lack pubic hair—accounts well for Bloom's thoughts. But if
Bloom wishes to transcend the messiness of genital hair he has
not let it stop him as it stopped Ruskin. And he ultimately
rejects the idealizing impulse in
Circe, attacking the
supposedly suprasexual Nymph as merely presexual: "If there were
only ethereal where would you all be, postulants and novices?
Shy but willing like an ass pissing." The stage directions too
attack her impersonation of purity: "Sacrilege! To attempt my
virtue!
(A large moist stain appears on her robe.) Sully
my innocence! You are not fit to touch the garment of a pure
woman."
The aestheticizing impulse that reputedly infected the fantasies
of one famous Victorian has been hilariously reproduced in
another Irish novel, this one set in Ruskin's era. In J. G.
Farrell's
The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), which is about
the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, two inexperienced young men, Harry
and Fleury, are intrigued with a young woman named Lucy whose
honor has been compromised. Chapter 16 directs the reader's
attention away from any sexual acts that Lucy may have committed
to the worst offense that another young woman, Louise, can
imagine. Louise supposes that Lucy "allowed, perhaps even
encouraged, certain things to be done to her by a man; she had
perhaps allowed her clothes to be fumbled with and
disarranged... she might even perhaps, for all Louise knew, have
been seen naked by him." It distresses Louise "That a man (let
us not call him a gentleman) should have been permitted to view
that sacred collection of bulges, gaps, tufts of hair and
rounded fleshy slopes." Exposing this "delightfully shaped body"
to the gaze of males represents "a betrayal of her sex."
The erotic charge that characterizes Louise's imagination of the
male gaze certainly attaches to Harry and Fleury, but it becomes
clear that their visual images do not include "tufts of hair."
In chapter 22, the young men experience a version of Ruskin's
wedding night when a black cloud of beetles called cockchafers
invades a room where Lucy is entertaining visitors at tea,
landing on everyone in the room but especially Lucy. She leaps
to her feet and furiously beats at the insects, which cling to
her everywhere and crawl into every available opening. In a
frenzy she pulls off all of her clothes, but still more insects
land on her, falling off in clumps as their weight accumulates.
Harry and Fleury, shocked at "the unfortunate turn the tea party
had taken," watch as "an effervescent mass detached itself from
one of her breasts, which was revealed to be the shape of a
plump carp, then from one of her diamond knee-caps, then an
ebony avalanche thundered from her spine down over her buttocks,
then from some other part of her." The
brief exposures give the young
men "a faint, flickering image of Lucy's delightful nakedness,"
and the erotic spectacle is distinctly aesthetic: watching it,
Fleury dreams up the idea of "a series of daguerrotypes which
would give the impression of movement."
Lucy becomes paralyzed with fear. The men hesitate to touch her,
but when she faints they decide to act. Tearing the boards off a
Bible to use as blades, they scrape the black crawling mass from
her backside and then begin on her front. As they expose swaths
of white flesh, they discover that Lucy's body is "remarkably
like the statues of young women they had seen... like, for
instance, the Collector's plaster cast of
Andromeda Exposed
to the Monster, though, of course, without any chains.
Indeed, Fleury felt quite like a sculptor as he worked away and
he thought that it must feel something like this to carve an
object of beauty out of the primeval rock. He became quite
carried away as with dexterous strokes he carved a particularly
exquisite right breast and set to work on the delicate fluting
of the ribs."
But it turns out that statues have not prepared the young men
for what they will find between Lucy's legs. She has hair
there, and "this caused them a bit of surprise at first. It
was not something that had ever occurred to them as possible,
likely, or even desirable." Having scraped at it to no effect,
Harry asks, "D'you think this is supposed to be here?"
Fleury, who "had never seen anything like it on a statue,"
says, "That's odd.... Better leave it, anyway, for the time
being. We can always come back to it later when we've done the
rest."
