Laura Fairlie is the beautiful object of the affection of many men and women across The Woman in White. Her introduction at the hands of Walter Hartright presents us with a heavenly image. In describing her eyes, he writes, “The charm – most gently and yet most distinctly expressed – which they shed over the whole face, so covers and transforms its little natural human blemishes elsewhere, that it is difficult to estimate the relative merits and defects of the other features” (Collins 51). To the reader, Laura is given this angelic quality that is certainly super-human. Now, what does it mean that she is described most often at the hands of Walter? He is a character introduced to us, before all else, as an artist. The epithet given to Walter in the title of the first section of the novel’s body is “Teacher of Drawing” (Collins 9). Sent to Limmeridge to teach Laura and her sister how to improve their watercolor painting abilities, he was always intended to be viewed as an artist who himself was seeing the world with an artistic lens. Thus, we are given an artist’s vision of who Laura Fairlie is, a question that becomes very literal and central to our story by the end of the narrative.
Christina Rossetti’s “In the Artist’s Studio” offers a woman’s perspective on the Victorian male artist. The sister to Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina would have been herself very absorbed in the artistic movement, both as a model for several of his paintings and a friend to the other members. Dante Gabriel Rossetti often used his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, as not just a muse, but as the model for nearly all of his paintings that depicted women. Christina responds to this constant depiction of the same woman, the same face, in “In the Artist’s Studio”. She writes that “every canvas means / The same one meaning, neither more nor less” (Rossetti 7-8). By constantly using the same model, her brother is effectively deifying Elizabeth, making her into his own object with the image of her face and body. It removes her autonomy, in a way, instead making her his canvas to project any image or connotation onto.
Walter Hartright, although he does not use Laura Fairlie as a model for widely spread or praised artwork, does something of this sort to her in his writing of her. Of her brother’s subject, Rossetti writes, “A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens, / A saint, an angel . . .” (6-7). This reflects Hartright’s first descriptions of Laura, where he writes, “. . . there dawns upon me brightly, from the dark greenish-brown background of the summer-house, a light, youthful figure . . .” (Collins 51). In describing her hair, he refers to it as “not flaxen, and yet almost as light; not golden, and yet almost as glossy” (Collins 51). He’s making her seem like an angel, almost taking away her normalcy and humanity, much in the way that Dante Gabriel Rossetti did to Elizabeth in his paintings. In the words of Christina Rossetti, Laura is appearing in Walter’s narrative “Not as she is, but as she fills his dream” (14). Laura is not a person in Walter’s writing. She is simply a dream, an object of his affection, a blank canvas for him to paint the woman that he wishes for.
I really enjoyed how you compared Laura to the real life of context of Elizabeth Siddal as it demonstrates how the making of objectification of a muse occurs. Art can sometimes be portrayed as something universal and something that allows everyone a sense of creativity. The study of how it is also a way of enforcing a lens and view onto marginalized groups of people and specifically, in this case women, shows how the values portrayed as the ideal of beauty isn’t an inherent sense and are created by structural inequalities. Art then becomes a way of controlling and influencing people overtime as it enforces a created normality (like idea of a muse which is more controlling a woman’s sense of identity).
This is such a cool and interesting observation about Hartright! Him being an artist is more than a career to him, it is an identity. This made me think about our reading “A Man’s Resolution.” Hartright describes himself as a hero, without being very heroic. Perhaps his deification of Laura adds to this? Maybe he is trying to further prove his heroism and his masculinity by ‘getting’ the perfect woman, which again limits Laura to an object?