The Ruskinian Draughtsman

Abstract Chapter 2 turns to the disfigured amateur artist, Philip Wakem, from George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860). Philip directly exemplifies the practices of the Ruskinian amateur artist—even Ruskin himself—and these practices turn him, like Ruskin, from artist to author. Philip in fact practices innocence of the eye, or tries to, as an artist. Philip is a potential but always thwarted lover in a novel characterized by an endlessly unraveling marriage plot for the protagonist, Maggie Tulliver. Philip, through his art making, effaces his body when confronted with an all-too-knowing viewer. Despite his own attempted ethical optics, Philip is nearly never perceived with an innocent eye; even Maggie looks at him lovingly but not innocently. Assuming a conjunction between disability, undesirability, and asexuality, critics have emasculated Philip far more completely than the novel does, and the chapter reconsiders the status of Philip as lover and artistic and moral exemplar.