Ruskin and the Archetypes
cold, stone-like, and immovable in spirit. At a deeper level, however, this also suggests that one's moral and spiritual redemption remains of one's own choosing and the result of our own free will.
The alchemical process, as defined by Jung, plays a major role in The King of the Golden River, both thematically and imagistically. It is through the concept of change that Ruskin's world is created in his King of the Golden River, becomes resolved and is transformed back to normality. The obvious conflict in the plot is between the brothers Gluck, and Hans and Schwartz; between greed and charity; good and evil. These opposites are held together by the commonality of both blood and humanity; that is to say, on the simplest level, that the brothers are blood related, but are each driven by their human desires. Hans and Schwartz are driven by their greed whilst Gluck is driven by his desire to help his fellow man. Together they form one of the most basic of archetypal images, so favoured by Jung, that of the yin/yang symbol; the yin represented by the Hans and Schwartz and the yang by Gluck.
It is how the role of nature, as created by Ruskin, fits into Jung's alchemical model, that concerns us here, however. It is nature's representation within the text that forms the ultimate archetypal link between the brothers, thus fulfilling the third and fourth pre-requisites set forth by Jung. For the three brothers, it is the inextricable link to the land which truly unites them; each must make a spiritual journey of sorts to achieve their goal; for Jung, one of the most basic archetypal images was that of the river, which represented the path that one takes on the journey of life which is translated into the journey that the three bothers must make in The King of the Golden River.
The character of South-West Wind, Esq. is, again, another representation of nature with archetypal significance; in Jungian terms, South-West Wind esq. becomes symbolic of the mythical wise old man, a personification of one's spiritual and intuitive terms. Jung writes,
...the Old Man always appears when the hero is in a hopeless and desperate situation from which only profound reflection or a lucky idea ...can extricate him. But since, for internal and extern l reasons, the hero cannot accomplish this himself, the knowledge needed to compensate the deficiency comes in the
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