PicTUres in Bleak HoUses: slavery and THe aesTHeTics of TransaTlanTic reform

in his 1853 chapter " The nature of Gothic, " John ruskin famously aligns different visual styles with different ethical connotations. The crude, unpolished style of Gothic ornament symbolizes a free and autonomous art production, while the perfect symmetry of modern english ornaments signifies the arduous, mechanical labor typical of the victorian factory. While ruskin's essay has stood as the prototype for an aesthetic theory founded upon a specific political stance, critics have missed a particularly pressing political issue that surfaces in this text. for here ruskin develops a theory of labor-aesthetics founded upon the key term of slavery, with direct reference to the British anti-slavery debate that was dominating public forums in the early 1850s. 1 if karl marx and friedrich engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto had described workers as " daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, " ruskin gives the metaphor a body and nerves as he describes the toll taken upon bodies of modern art-workers; for them " the eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger-point, and the soul's force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision. " 2 directing his readers to examine " this english room of yours, " in particular the finished ornaments that epitomize their national feeling, he laments, " alas! if read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in our england a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged african, or helot Greek. " 3 ruskin's rhetoric borrows its heat from the propaganda of the British anti-slavery movement. dwelling upon the repetitive " palsy " of glass bead makers' hands, he concludes that " every young lady, therefore, who buys glass beads is engaged in the slave trade, and in a much more cruel one than that which we have so long been endeavouring to put down. " 4 With this somewhat incongruous image , ruskin neatly bridges the divide between the worlds of factory production and domestic consumption, showing how British women unwittingly participate in a kind of slave trafficking by supporting wage slavery with their purchasing power.