Archive Project: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Painting of The Bride

In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting, which has many different titles associated with it from “The Bride” to “The Beloved” to “The King’s Daughter” where the focus is supposed to be on the pale woman at the center of the painting, but race is weaved throughout every detail of this piece. There are some symbols, some explicit, and some hidden aspects of race and colonialism embedded into the deeper meaning Rossetti’s work of art.

For one, the little Black girl is at the closest one to the audience in the painting. While she is at the forefront of the image, she is also tucked in the corner of the painting. She seems to be the flower girl, but she has  a lot of gold jewelry on while the rest of the women in the painting are more simple. This is playing up the historical aspect of British colonizing of African land for resources such as gold as well as the colonizing and controlling of Black bodies during slavery. While the girl is covered in gold, she is the only individual in the painting who has a naked torso, which queers the Black female body as a spectacle or as something to be looked at- there is sexualizing and fetishization of a young Black female body before she even reaches adulthood or goes through puberty.

There is one woman in the back of the painting, who for the most part is hidden from the audience’s view expept for part of her face. She seems to be either a mulatto woman, perhaps Egyptian, perhaps Muslim, perhaps Latina… It really is hard to tell exactly where she could be from, but her skin complexion gives off the impression of exoticism. It significantly represents how race is coded in Victorian English texts, just like sex, and not explicity talked about. Even when looking for a poem to pair with this painting, it was difficult to find one that related to race because Vitorian poets like Rossetti don’t explicity name the ethnicity of the female subjects.  And we see here the race of this woman, her full identity, is literally hidden from the audience while the little Black girl is positioned at the forefront, holding flowers- a symbol of life and fertility.

The bride seems to be wearing not the traditional white wedding gown, but what resembles a luxurious kimono and that could be a coded reference to Orientalism and colonialism. As an audience, we do not know where the painting’s setting is supposed to be or where this wedding is located geographically. There is definitely a sense of racial otherness, foreignness, and us vs. them in this piece because there are representations of non-Western culture all clumped together in one painting. There is not just reference to one race or geographical location, the symbols are recognizable enough to make a broad guess as to what part of the world is being referenced, but also too vague to tell what specific culture or community is being represented.

http://vqa.dickinson.edu/poem/brides-prelude

 

Citation:

Rossetti, Dante G. The Bride. 1865-1866; 1873. Tate Gallery, London. http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/s182.rap.html

Peter Pan is Lewis Carroll

A boat, beneath a sunny sky
Lingering onward dreamily

In an evening of July—

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear—

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?

-Lewis Carroll, 1871, Through the Looking-Glass

Carroll’s poem “A Boat, Beneath a Sunny Sky” is a more sophisticated re-write of the childhood nursery rhyme, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” which punctuates the transformation that Alice goes through from adolescent youth to a matured young adult.

On a website I found online (http://shenandoahliterary.org), which told the background of Carroll’s writing of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, Alice Pleasance Liddell was an actual person and not a fictional character.Carroll was friends with the Liddell family and would tell the Liddell children (there were three of them) stories about his own adventures while they would all hang out on a boat and Alice became his “muse”. This poem at the end of Through the Looking-Glass is just an autobiographical account of his relationship with Alice and the Liddell children as being something that engulfed his memories and haunted his dreams.

This is all very reminiscent of the tale of Peter Pan to me. Carroll was clearly saddened by the fact that Alice grew up and her youthful self still haunted him. Carroll is essentially begging Alice to never grow up, but that is only possible in his dreams and memories of her. He essentially took her and her two siblings to Wonderland through his stories, which is completely parallel to Peter Pan in the sense that Peter took Wendy and her two brothers to Neverland (Similar names for a childhood fantasy world… coincidence? I, personally, think not!). In both cases there are three children taken to an adolescent fantasy world where they frolic and roam free, with the little girl in the story being the center of attention and the fantasy for the man who is telling the story, yet alas, the girl must grow up eventually and leaves her mark on the guy who awakened her maturity or guided her through her transition. Carroll, like Peter Pan, realizes that children must grow up and be adults at one point- also there is the creepy factor that Carroll was an older man who probably spent a bit too much time with adolescent female children. Peter Pan could also be read technically as a really old man who chose to never “grow up” which may be symbolic of something else- but I digress.

So looking at Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland  tales with the context behind it now in mind, the text just seems to be autobiographical, or at least a retelling of events that actually occurred in the form of a “fictional”, fun children’s novel. Carroll is essentially keeping his memories of Alice in a metaphorical glass jar of sorts. He seems to embody the character that he saw Alice as, so her own personal narrative and personality is re-written by Carroll and that is the Alice we as a modern audience gets aquainted with.The children’s novel is Carroll’s way of keeping Alice youthful eternally, throughout time. An interesting connection between time and Alice is that in the modern movie directed by Steven Spielberg, Alice Through the Looking-Glass, Time is a personified character and Alice is running out of time throughout the movie to grow up and face the real-world where she is expected to marry and be a Victorian wife.

 

Also, here is a link to see some of the pictures that Carroll took of ALICE (who was brunette, by the way…).

Close Reading of Fannie’s Pets

IMG_3666
From the archives of Dickinson’s Trout gallery (http://www.troutgallery.org/)

In the image called Fannie’s Pets there is a fair young woman, dressed in white (of course!) surrounded by animals of the forest. These animals are charged with symbolism in the painting which contribute to the overall message or themes being portrayed to the audience, who at the time was Victorian society. Rabbits symbolize fertility and procreation, doves represent purity and religion (most likely Christianity or Catholicism), chickens are symbolic of fertility and motherhood, and the rest of the animals seem to also have to do with sexual desire and reproduction, especially the Peacock. And with all these animals that are vulnerable and easily preyed upon (including this new Woman in White), there is a man lurking in the forest, acting as predator to the woman who would be his sexual prey. The forest itself is symbolic of a dark, creepy, mysterious space where evil and predators lurk. The man is crouched in a dark, shady corner watching amazed as he sees this woman, ultimately a Snow White figure who seems to be luring him in with her purity and youthful fertility to bear more lurking sons in the future.

Here, the image signifies that on the surface, this woman looks like the ideal Victorian “Angel in the House” as Kathryn Hughes’ article Gender Roles in the Nineteenth Century puts itHowever, the symbolism of the animals around her show her in a different light, as a sexual creature who has her own desires and sexual identity even though she is yet another Woman in White to add to our ever-growing collection and is ultimately the same as Laura Fairlie or the woman in the painting Health and Beauty, or insert-other-woman-in-white. This connects to Christina Rosetti’s poem in which she says these women being painted are “The same one meaning, neither more or less” and ultimately stripped of their individual identities because their purpose is to serve as sustenance and carnal pleasure for men. There is an under-layer of fetishizing the body of women as part of sexual fantasy such as Walter Hartright’s portrait of Laura that he keeps with him all the time or the imagery from Rosetti’s poem of a man who “feeds upon her face by day and night” as she is a feast for his eyes. In Fannie’s Pets, this woman serves as a feast for her predator’s eyes and most likely mouth as well.

Appearance also plays a major role in how women were perceived. In Judith Flander’s article Prostitution, “women who dressed or behaved in ways men considered inappropriate were deemed to be whores.” So, if their skirts were held up “just a little higher” than respectable women, they would be considered “streetwalkers” or prostitutes which is such an arbitrary and vague ( and all around ridiculously wrong) way of labeling women. Tying it back to Fannie and her pets, she is attracting a suitor because she is not defying the male patriarchal standards of what a woman should be (which is chaste, a virgin, and smart but not smarter than a man) at least with her physical appearance. She is dressed modestly and fully covered and dressed in the fairest of whites to represent her youth, fertility, and virginity.

The Women in White Narrative

It seemportrait-of-a-woman-in-whites that the legends and stories of women in white always involve a forbidden lover. The artist Frida Kahlo drew an unfinished portrait of a woman in white which was painted in 1930 (to the left). Some people thought that this woman was Frida’s first lesbian lover, which makes an interesting connection to Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White when looking at the homo-erotic, incestual relationship between Laura and Marian. Marion seems like more of a lover than Walter Hartright for most of the novel. An example of this relationship is when Marian tells Laura to keep herself safe by locking herself in her room, “I will come back again, love, in an hour or less… Lock the door; and open it to nobody, until I come upstairs again.’ I kissed her, and left her,” (302) Marian can’t part with Laura without a kiss, she is Laura’s protector and very passionate about her. Marian is very enthusiastic to get Laura away from Sir Percival so claim her as “mine” once again which is the character of a lover and not a sibling. So there is an irony is the stereotypical symbolism of the color white meaning purity and innocence when these women in white have healthy sexual appetites and partake in relationships that society would consider sinful and (gasp!) scandalous.

Also, there seems to be a connection between phantom women in white and phantom girls in white, which would explain why both Anne and Laura are treated like children. In Esther Inglis-Arkell’s article “Why are There so Many Ghost Stories about a ‘Woman in White’?”, she discusses how these ghost little girls in white evolve into the women in white we have come to know all too well. Arkell describes the little girl phantoms as having more of a personality whether that be playful, somber, or simply evil or menacing. Anne is the perfect example of this in an earlier scene with Walter after he brings up Sir Percival’s name in front of her for the first time and Anne’s pitiful and melancholy character transforms into something a bit more menacing. “The instant I pronounced that name she started to her feet; and a scream burst from her that rang through the churchyard and made my heart leap in me with the terror of it,” (105). Anne is usually portrayed as an innocent child that we as the audience want to empathize with. But then she has this child-like tantrum that makes the situation a bit more sinister and hair-raising. She is upset by an evil betrayal on the part of Sir Percival but quickly goes back to her innocent, doe-eyed, ghost-child persona.

According to Arkell, the woman in white’s narrative is always involving “love, sex, betrayal, murder … She’s someone’s unhappy wife, or illicit lover, or suicidal betrothed, or some other sad tale of romantic woe.” Does this sound familiar (Laura Fairlie-Glyde)?
The-Woman-in-White-29211_1

 

 

 

 

Links to Sources:

Woman in White Legends

Frida Kahlo’s Woman in White

Laura Fairlie Has Passed Away

Laura Fairlie’s wedding with Sir Percival Glyde seems to signify the end of the world for quite a few people. Marion takes it especially hard and acts as if once Laura marries Sir Percival, she will be dead. “She will be his Laura instead of mine!… [it is] as if writing of her marriage were like writing of her death” (185).This novel really seems to be Laura’s coming of age narrative because all her life, all she has known was Marion and her loyal promise to marry Sir Percival.

When she was exposed to Walter Hartwright and to what true love feels like, everything changed and she had to sacrifice her desires in order to keep her word. She is forced to leave her childhood innocence behind and leave her sister, whom she was inseparable with all her life in order to “grow up” and marry another man like she was meant to do according to familial expectations. Once Laura marries Sir Percival, her own sense of individual identity will cease to exist. She has to sacrifice true love, family, and possibly her inheritance (which she does not yet have access to) in order to marry a man who she promised her late father she would wed.

There is a theme her in which women were only meant to marry and once they did that, it’s like their life is over and they have accomplished all there is to accomplish at that point in their life, it’s portrayed as a rite of passage into adulthood and maturity for the ideal Victorian woman represented by Laura. She now has wifely duties that she is expected to fulfill after she is married not only in the sense of the domestic sphere and responsibility, but also there is a loss of her sexual innocence that comes with marriage. This loss of virginity is only hinted at when Marion discusses the loss of Laura’s innocence through the image of her “pretty little white bed” (194) she’s leaving behind after her wedding, only like a true Victorian novel does.

Marion really emphasizes this point when she states,”It is all over. They are married” (195) and mourns Laura’s death (oops… I meant marriage).