ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by looking at the directions of feminist writing on Ruskin and the female, noting that they have accidentally occluded the substantial amount of thought he gave to masculinity from 1860. It discusses the models of male behaviour presented in A Knight's Faith and Valle Crucis, suggesting that they embody some of Ruskin's own displaced anxiety about gender roles. The episode of Ruskin’s love for Adele proved a narrative site for the deployment of various masculinizing strategies. But Ruskin’s marriage, with its public absence of children and its private absence of (penetrative) sex, was the major biographical problem in terms of manliness. Ruskin declared in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ that ‘The man’s power is active, progressive, defensive’ and yet it was defending his own identity as a man, in this post-Reminiscences climate, in the narratives of his sexual desire that was the high-profile endeavour of his first, largely male, middle-class biographers.
