SOURCE: "Ruskin and the Matriarchal Logos," in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, edited by Thais E. Morgan, Rutgers University Press, 1990, pp. 129-41.

In the following essay, Sawyer discusses Ruskin's view of girls and women in The Ethics of the Dust, "Of Queens' Gardens," and The Queen of the Air.

To define Victorian nonfiction prose as a discourse is almost invariably to think of it as masculine discourse—at least so long as we accept the customary description of the sages as a group of secular prophets. At the very beginning of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Hebrew prophets marked all sacred human speech as masculine by virtue of their roles as oracles of a patriarchal deity, a gender distinction repeated through the centuries by male clergy who have preached the law. In general, the figure of the Victorian sage as a prophet underscores the notion...