Men and Women and Created Equal: John Ruskin #8

Initially, I found this piece of writing, Sesame and Lilies. Lecture II.—Lilies: Of Queens’ Gardens, by John Ruskin to be quite confusing. The quote from the Septuagint at the beginning confused me. But as I read along in this lecture, I think I understood the overall message Ruskin is trying to express. My interpretation of this reading is that Ruskin is trying to convey the point that there is no difference between male and female, we actually work in harmony. In addition, woman can attain as much power as a man as long as they are educated.

I feel that this quote sums up Ruskin’s ideas:

“That to use books rightly, was to go to them for help: to appeal to them, when our own knowledge and power of thought failed: to be led by them into wider sight—purer conception—than our own, and receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinion.”

            To closely analyze this quote, I feel the author is trying to use flowery language to express that books (education) are the key to success. In a closer look, “appeal to them” means that our human brain does not always see success but we can educate ourselves with books and other forms of knowledge to be as successful as we can achieve. I googled that Ruskin is from the early 1900’s which means this essay is very innovative for its time. Next, he even explained a unique trend in Shakespeare’s works.

“Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare has no heroes:—he has only heroines.”
I believe that this quote is true. Ruskin does point out the trend that Shakespeare creates his male main characters to have major fatal flaws. We can even see this very accurately through Macbeth. Although Macbeth was a strong male warrior, he was a flawed human (as I wrote about in my last post) and he was very weak in the beginning of the novel. His transition at the end of the novel truly exemplified his flaws, the evil search for blood and his mental breakdowns (seeing ghosts and invisible blood).


In conclusion, although this essay still confuses me at parts, I believe from the first quote above, I have found the main message of this essay. This is a powerful and innovative essay for its time that was very beneficial to read.

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