Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  Who was really sick, and who was just being indulged and thereby made worse was clearly a vexing issue. Each family thought the other had produced a spoiled child who used illness as a way of getting attention. Could it be that both were right? John, like his parents, thought Effie was carrying on – needlessly, petulantly nourishing ill humour rather than genuinely being sick. Should a request to come down to dinner with a happy face be considered a tyranny? Old Mr Ruskin went further. He saw that at stake in his wife’s desire to exercise her medical skills and Effie’s resistance was the question of supremacy between the two women. He could understand Effie’s resentment. He knew his wife was disposed to lecture and would sometimes address a young person ‘in a way that is not pleasant before others’, but on the whole Mr Ruskin thought it the young person’s duty to defer to the one over sixty. That his model of deference conflicted with modes of young people’s independence he fully realised. He guessed that Effie had been schooled by worldly people ‘to be sure to assert at once the full authority of a married person and especially against that awful personage, a Mother in Law’.19 But he, for one, considered such rebellion vulgar.

  He did not mention it, but it could also have been considered ungrateful. The young Ruskins were living at 31 Park Street near Grosvenor Square, in the most fashionable part of London, in a townhouse leased for them at considerable cost by Mr Ruskin. They had their own brougham and horses stabled around the corner. They had a full complement of servants. In short, they lived a luxurious life, entirely at the expense of Mr Ruskin, who wanted his son to have a home and equipage suitable for entertaining people of rank, people his son was entitled by his education and accomplishments to know, such people as he himself, a mere tradesman, was not fit to mix with. John and Effie believed that neither of them needed nor even wanted such luxury and merely put up with it to please Mr Ruskin. For John, who was naturally disposed to be close to his parents and to follow their wishes in every way, there was nothing galling about accepting money from his father. It merely increased his gratitude and affection. But Effie was caught between gratitude – she liked pretty dresses and jewellery and her own father had barely been able to pay for her trousseau – and a less pleasant feeling which inspired her to show through her behaviour that the money entailed no obligation.

  After the disastrous bout of flu at Denmark Hill, Effie longed to return to her own house in Park Street, where her mother was to join her for a long visit. In Park Street, presumably, she could run her own life. But once more, Mrs Ruskin had opinions which had to be listened to, this time on the subject of the proper place for the guest room. There were two extra sleeping rooms in the Park Street house, a guest room on the top floor with the servants, and John’s dressing room, next to the bedroom he shared with Effie. Effie wanted to put her mother in John’s dressing room and move his dressing area to the top floor. Mrs Ruskin thought that the top-floor room with the servants was good enough for Mrs Gray and resented the slight to her son. Effie equally resented the slight to her mother. Had it been a question of slicing carrots, no doubt Mrs Ruskin would have advised the unique utility of the horizontal and Effie just as strongly urged the vertical. But while this analogy suggests the inevitability of the squabbles between Effie and Mrs Ruskin, it does not capture the gravity with which they were conducted, as though two sovereign nations were negotiating mineral rights.

  And then, Effie fled the field abruptly. She decided, perhaps out of pique at not being able to receive her mother as she chose, to return with her mother to Scotland. As soon as she left, John returned to Denmark Hill to live with his parents and soon thereafter left with them on the tour of the Alps he had hoped to make as his honeymoon, but which had been aborted by the revolution of 1848. They had been married less than a year, a time at which it may seem surprising for a young married woman to pay a three-month visit to her parents, and for a husband, without making any effort to see her, to take off with his parents on a six-month tour of the Continent. Even in that age of long visits and extended absences of spouses, the Ruskins’ separation was considered unusual.

  Effie’s friends in Perth were appalled at John for abandoning his wife, while John’s friends were indignant with her for abandoning him. Both sets of parents felt something was wrong but tried to act as though the situation were perfectly normal. Mr Ruskin wrote to Mr Gray, ‘I hear she may remain with you a few months – whilst my Son goes abroad – I should disapprove entirely of this, were my Son going abroad for his pleasure – but it seems as much a matter of Business as my travelling to Liverpool.’20 Perth rumour said that Effie was so unhappy in her marriage that she was arranging a trial separation, but folk wisdom and common gossip were in this case years ahead in insight about the parties concerned, who still believed themselves to be happily married. There is, I think, a kind of natural astonishment at the moments when one’s personal life coincides with the great, public, recurring events of mankind, when one marries, for example or produces a child. One is so amazed to have done it at all that one can by no means perceive it has been done badly. I suppose this to be the case with the Ruskins, for otherwise I cannot explain Effie’s bewilderment at the rumours of her marital unhappiness and the extraordinary series of love letters which John now began to write. ‘Do you know, pet, it seems almost a dream to me that we have ever been married: I look forward to meeting you: and to your next bridal night: and to the time when I shall again draw your dress from your snowy shoulders: and lean my cheek upon them, as if you were still my betrothed only: and I had never held you in my arms.’21

  In this time of assessment and reappraisal, Effie had been thinking about their wedding night, too. It was a year after the event, and she could at last tell her husband – perhaps admit to herself for the first time – that it had been a ‘trial’ for her, the experience at Blair Atholl a ‘cruel one’. Moreover snowy shoulders and the adolescent love talk of her husband’s letters were all very well, but she knew something was missing. Affectionate, sociable, daughter of fecund parents (her mother at the age of forty was pregnant with her thirteenth child when Effie got engaged), Effie had become a wife fully expecting to be a mother soon as well. To be deprived of children meant a very real loss to her, in status, and in a kind of companionship and activity which would have been all the more welcome in the face of her husband’s coldness. If a more instinctual disappointment underlay the one she could articulate, we have no way of knowing it. Probably she had no way of knowing it herself. For well-brought-up women the vocabulary for discussing sexual experience was the vocabulary for discussing the production of babies. There was widespread belief that for a woman to enjoy full physical health, she had to fulfil her biological function, maternity; and Effie, perhaps for this reason, took advantage of her residence in Scotland to consult the distinguished physician James Simpson about her now chronic bad health. Simpson, who discovered the use of chloroform as an anaesthetic in childbirth, was professor of midwifery at Edinburgh. He confirmed that something was definitely wrong with Effie. She received the diagnosis with a glee that Ruskin found irritatingly misplaced, for of course he did not understand that official recognition of her illness meant to her official recognition that something was wrong with him. We do not know what specific cures Dr Simpson suggested, but soon after her visit to him Effie wrote to her husband that seeing her little sister Alice made her want to have ‘a little Alice’ of her own. She could not have been much reassured by his jocular reply that he too wanted a little Alice – or a little Effie – only wished that they weren’t so small and unattractive. (Ruskin was made physically ill by his friend Acland’s habit of having his baby sit with the adults at the breakfast table.) But he also told her that their next wedding night would be better than the first: neither of them would be so frightened.22

  Something had clearly gone wrong with the marriage, and both ‘sides’ – the elder Grays and Ruskins as well as the married pair – attempted to fix the blame. Neither set of parents knew the marriage
was unconsummated, but they found plenty of other problems to discuss. From Mr Ruskin’s point of view, Effie was an undutiful wife, unsupportive of her husband’s work. She had unaccountably withdrawn from them and gone to Perth, where she knew John would not follow. She seemed unsympathetic to his stay in Europe, perversely wanting him home. Didn’t she realise that going home would mean giving up the ‘Haunts where his Genius finds food and occupation’?23 Ordinary people might find John’s business in the Alps incomprehensible, but didn’t Effie realise that only by such labour could he do the work he’d been put on earth to do? Mr Ruskin recommended (to her father) that she sacrifice all other feelings to duty and attempt to find pleasure in causing her husband no anxiety.

  But Mr Gray saw it differently. He knew that his daughter was not jealous of her husband’s work. That was a false issue. There was only one problem in the young people’s marriage: the elder Ruskins. If he might offer a word of advice, it was that Mr and Mrs Ruskin should leave John and Effie to themselves as much as possible. ‘Married people,’ he ventured to say, ‘are rather restive under the control and supervision of Parents tho’ proceeding from the kindest and most affectionate motives.’24

  How one warms to Mr Gray! How right he seems! While Mr Ruskin with his notions of duty and submissiveness sounds archaic, Mr Gray expresses the wisdom a contemporary upper-middle-class American would offer in response to the same situation. Freedom. Independence. Not for nothing did we cut the ties with the Mother Country. But Ruskin, in the opening paragraph of his autobiography, proclaims that he was, like his father before him, a Tory of the old school, of the school of Homer and Sir Walter Scott, men who believed in kings, in some people being better fit to rule than others, in such people exercising power for the good of their followers without the right to expect anything in return except deference. But deference they could expect. This political model applies to the family as well as the state, and one should see that the battle between John and Effie, between the Ruskins and the Grays, was to some extent an ideological battle, a clash of two sets of assumptions about power and authority.

  A great number of domestic manuals about woman’s place appeared in the 1830s and 1840s – suggesting, perhaps, that some people were beginning to forget what woman’s place was. It was a commonplace of such books that a woman gained power by surrendering power, that by asking for nothing, she won immense influence over her husband. According to Female Improvement, for example, it was a woman’s duty to ‘raise herself, by every means, in the esteem of her husband … and thus, far more than by insisting upon her way, or urging her own claims, she will secure a voice in her husband’s counsels and a place in his tenderest consideration’.25 This paternalistic paradox – surrender power that it may be gained – informs a typical critique by old Mr Ruskin of Effie’s behaviour and her father’s domestic politics.

  The ideas you express about married peoples Love of Independence makes me sore afraid that these very ideas, instilled into Phemy and encouraged, have been the cause of all the mischief – one thing I am sure of that had Phemy thrown herself entirely on our generosity and sought no independent authority, her Dominion over all our affections would have been greater at this day, and of all I know of my Son, her authority with him would have been great exactly in proportion as she had not sought to establish it on the exclusion of that of his parents…. The absence of petty jealousies which so beset young married women in their struggles for a childish authority would have certainly increased his Respect for his Wifes character.26

  A woman’s desire for independence and autonomy – like that of a colonial state – is childish, petty, petulantly rebellious.

  John’s political assumptions, like his dear father’s, were rooted ultimately in the Biblical description of how woman was created after man, subordinate to him, intended for his pleasure and service. This natural hierarchy applied also to age, and if John’s parents had interfered in his life and Effie’s, it seemed to him they had every right to do so. Or did Effie think that in return for all the care and energy he had devoted to his son, Mr Ruskin should receive in return nothing but a demand to stand aside, ‘that he should hint nothing – ask nothing – blame nothing – and expect nothing’?

  I should indeed dread to think that such were the deliberate principles on which my wife intended to act – or was encouraged to act by her parents – and I hope to see her outgrow with her girls frocks – that contemptible dread of interference and petulant resistance to authority which begins in pride – and is nourished in folly – and ends in pain. ‘Restiveness’ I am accustomed to regard as unpromising character even in horses and asses – I look for meekness and gentleness in woman.27

  It was her duty to attend to him, not his, as she seemed to expect, to attend to her. Ruskin could never see the disintegration of his marriage in any other light and consequently felt not the slightest remorse for his behaviour. (Perhaps we should not expect self-awareness from a man who, in writing to his wife, compares her to a horse – to the horse’s advantage.) In 1854 he sent a letter to his old friend at Oxford, Dr Acland, which he believed to vindicate himself completely. ‘Most men, I suppose, find their wives a comfort, & a help. I found mine perpetually in need of comfort – & in need of help, and as far as was in my power, I gave her both. I found however that the more I gave the less I was thanked – and I would not allow the main work of my life to be interfered with. I would not spend my days in leaving cards, nor my nights in leaning against the walls of drawing rooms.’ All in all, he did not think many husbands could look back upon their married lives with more security of having done all they could for their wives than he.

  The pathos of the Ruskins’ marriage is in the absolute irreconcilability of their points of view. Effie was aware of being constantly criticised and told how to behave. Nothing she did was right: she dressed too loudly and was too social or she was not social enough. It was hard for her to separate in her mind her husband from his parents, but when she did, she wondered why he had married her. He did not want children, and he did not want much of her company. He was always secluded in his study, writing or sketching or measuring some cathedral. Her presence gave him no pleasure. He avoided her, using work as an excuse. Cut off from her family, from children, from her husband, Effie found in marriage nothing but emotional starvation. But no more than any man had John Ruskin married for misery or to make his wife miserable. He looked for solace in marriage and found none. His wife seemed to be constantly accusing him of failure and was grateful for nothing he did for her. The plot from his point of view weirdly prefigures (by some twenty years) the story of Lydgate and Rosamund Vincy in Middlemarch: a high-minded man, dedicated to his work, is seduced by a pretty face and appealing manners and thinks he can annex the charming creature for life without seriously altering his pattern of living. But he underestimates her will and the triviality of her goals. She needs his connections for her petty social purposes and treats the gold of his intelligence as though it were no more than common, serviceable tin. If, however, we can sympathise with Ruskin as a Lydgate married to a Rosamund Vincy, the story of their marriage from Effie’s point of view is uncannily similar to that of Dorothea Brooke’s marriage to Casaubon – the story of an ardent, high-spirited woman who married an emotionally and sexually defective man. The anticipations of Middlemarch are all the more uncanny because the novelistic vision this material seems to me to demand is that of George Eliot, whose great theme was the egotism of perception and who assumed that all action rightly portrayed was a tragic – or comic – clash of understandings.

  It is George Eliot’s tolerant, stereoscopic gaze, with its refusal to see in the most inviting circumstances anything so simple as a villain, that I should wish to direct upon the small series of well-intentioned divergences ending up in a giant disaster which was the Ruskins’ marriage. When marriages go wrong, the people concerned may be excused if they seek a clear and simple reason for their misery, but we – observers, readers, friends �
� should try to achieve a more complicated view and a more embracing sympathy. We should try to. And yet, I find myself rooting for Effie. Perhaps she was frivolous. She never pretended to be anything more than a well-bred young lady, and such young ladies were frivolous by vocation, by education, by social definition. What would have convinced Ruskin of her seriousness? Nothing short of total devotion and submission to himself. Later, he would say she was crazy. One deplores the flinging about of such judgmental terms. Still, it must be said that if either of them was crazy, he was.

  triangle

  After their eight-month separation, during which Effie stayed with her parents in Perth and John travelled with his on the Continent, the Ruskins were reunited – but only after an argument about whether John should travel to Perth to meet Effie and escort her back to London or whether instead Effie should travel alone to London in order to greet her husband upon his return from abroad. John, as it turned out, went to Perth, reluctant, resentful, convinced that his wife confused him with the pincushion she wore around her waist. Soon after their reunion, Effie suggested that the two of them live for a while in Venice. Her plan was to escape the senior Ruskins, whom she believed to be at the root of her problems with John. Since he already had The Stones of Venice in mind, he liked the idea of living in Venice where he could continue to gather material. So off they went, leaving vacant again for months the ill-fated house in Park Street, which was costing old Mr Ruskin so much money.