Footnote 4, Chapter 10, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
The Queen of the Air receives extended treatment in the penultimate chapter of Raymond Fitch, The Poison Sky, a massive study of mythic and apocalyptic motifs in Ruskin. My book was completed before I had a chance to see Fitch's work, but his concerns and mine overlap at many points. Fitch proposes, for example, to interpret Ruskin's works "not as discrete objects but as moments of a process a continuous signifying intention in which the private and the public writings appear to be dominated by the same archetypal symbols" (p. 13). In the course of his career, Ruskin's writing "seems to move increasingly, even within its topical fragmentation, toward symbolic and mythic integration, as if he were himself attempting to draw the obsessional, the poetic, and the mythopoeic into the confines of discursive prose" (pp. 24-25). Fitch divides the "archetypal" content of Ruskin's works into three general categories: Purity; the Fall; and the Hero-Serpent Conflict. The detailed analysis that follows takes as its scope the whole range of Ruskin's work but unfortunately relies excessively on lengthy paraphrase.
Last modified December 2000