Biography of Sexual Nympholeptic John Ruskin Part 1

About the sexual nympholetpic and famous Victorian England art critic John Ruskin, history and biography of the man.

THE UNFULFILLED JOHN RUSKIN

John Ruskin (1819-1900), Victorian England's foremost art critic and essayist, would have been a challenge to any psychiatrist. He was a masturbatory nympholeptic (one who suffers "a frenzy of emotion, as for something unattainable") with latent homosexual qualities. Despite sieges of manic-depression which got worse after age 50 and, eventually, delusions and the disintegration of his personality, Ruskin was also a brilliant, charming dialectician, sensitive to all forms of beauty. He wrote 37 volumes, reflecting his passion for nature, pre-Raphaelite painting, and the "moral" significance of Gothic architecture. He was an honored man in his time.

Yet his nympholepsy contained the ingredients of Victorian restraint although he eventually gave up his belief in God. His effeminate, sensitive nature was enhanced by the adulation of both parents and what he considered "a convent-bred education." The possessiveness of a well-organized mother, and her ability to strengthen the emotional bonds between them, suggests a classic Freudian oedipal relationship. When Ruskin enrolled at Oxford, his mother moved into a house near his rooms so they could have dinner together every evening. And her letters to him when he was on the continent working on an art project barely disguised the intense passions she had for her only child. As a result, he failed in his marriage and apparently remained a virgin all his life.

In 1848, Effie Gray, a pretty, middle-class English girl of 19 became his wife. He was 29. But she was shocked to discover that he had no intention of consummating their marriage on their wedding night, offering her instead an abnormal pact, which she reluctantly accepted and he later violated, to postpone intercourse for 6 years. In 1854, still a virgin, she had the marriage annulled.

Not until middle age did Ruskin finally understand his parents' pernicious effect. Accusing them of ruining his life, he gave them their emotional walking papers. "You fed me effeminately," he said, and "thwarted in me the earnest fire and passion of life!" After his father died, Ruskin said that his father had forced him to sacrifice his life in vain.

Ruskin masturbated and reproached himself with "a vice" and "a suicide committed daily." Biographers seemed to think that Ruskin's main reason for disliking the sexual woman was his realization, on marrying Effie, that they had pubic hair. Up to that time, they claimed, he had seen only female statues with bald-pated pubes.

In his teens, Ruskin manifested the 1st symptoms of nympholepsy by falling in love with the 15-year-old daughter of his father's partner in the wine business. She was a staunch Catholic who resented his "patriotic and Protestant conceit," and when he showed her a story he had written in her honor, he suffered "the rippling ecstasies of [her] derision." Yet the impossibility of possessing her "enriched her like a halo." And once when he was in Turin, he wrote his father about a girl of 10 "with her black hair over her eyes and half-naked, bare-limbed to above the knees, and beautifully limbed, lying on the sand like a snake. . . ." He added, "I don't, of course, think it proper for girls to be bare-limbed on heaps of sand, but it was picturesque if not pleasing. . . ."

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