Class Blog

In Mona Caird’s “The Yellow Drawing-Room”, Vanora Haydon is placed into the complicated position of queenliness. The protagonist, Mr. St. Vincent, is hopelessly in love with her against what he considers to be his own best judgement. Because, to him, Vanora has “many qualities and ideas that are not suited to [her] sex” (106), and borders on “inevitably ridiculous” (107), she cannot be his ideal woman. He repeats several times that a woman’s true power lies in the “sacred realms where a woman is queen” (106). By this he means the home, as a wife and mother, which Vanora expresses absolutely no interest in. He also means by this that Vanora should be silent, submissive, and unopinionated. For Mr. St. Vincent, Vanora’s true power as queen lies in her giving up her authority and self to him and reigning only over “womanly” areas.  

But Vanora is already a queen in her own right, with a kingdom of her own. Her yellow drawing room serves as her own sacred realm where her authority reigns and her ideas are allowed to exist. In Victorian times, the country’s regent was a queen, and Vanora’s attitude about herself and her agency reflect the attitude that women are not simply wives and mothers, but leaders, and can hold positions of authority. Mr. St. Vincent’s rejection to this attitude because it is not “ideal” reflects the resistance against the “new woman” ideology and women’s liberation movements that were born out of the Victorian era and the extensive reign of a queen.  

My Last Duchess by Robert Browning tells the story of a duke who has taken an advisor from another nobleman whose daughter the duke is trying to marry. On his tour, the duke runs across a portrait of his ex-wife. This is not his last wife because it is his final love; she was his most recent. This seems to imply that this is a constant string of marriages and murders for him, and the woman that we see in this portrait is his latest victim. The meeting with the advisor suggests he is not slowing down. This oppressive violence towards women becomes even more insidious when one takes into account that the possessive nature does not end at the death of the duchess. The painting itself is an act of violence against the woman, for it takes away her autonomy as it both stills and silences her. She is objectified in a literal sense. Trapped within the oil paints bought by the duke’s wealth, she is his forever. His wealth and standing allowed him to marry her in the first place, allowed him to capture her image, and allowed him to kill her without consequence. He even covers her with a curtain so that he alone may be allowed to dictate who is allowed to see her “(since none puts by / The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)” (Browning). However, I think that the last three lines of the poem give the clearest demonstration of Browning’s intentions with this poem. Neptune taming a seahorse, a wild beast, made into a trophy, a possession. Similar to how the duke sought to tame his last duchess. Obvious symbology aside, how the duke talks about the trophy of Neptune is at the same level of grandeur as how he talks about his dead wife, and he moves on from her with startling ease. She is no more than a horse cast in bronze to him.

Help Me I’m Trapped Inside of This Computer,

Carmine “Red” Zingiber

In Mona Caird’s “The Yellow Drawing-Room,” Vanora is initially described by the narrator, Mr. St. Vincent, as “a headstrong and probably affected young person” (Caird 103). She is everything that St. Vincent hates in a woman; she is too loud and independent, and he detests her before he even meets her. However, his opinion of Vanora is immediately confused when he meets her for the first time. It seems that the last thing he expected to see in Vanora’s appearance was femininity, yet, “She was supremely, overpoweringly woman” (Caird 105). St. Vincent is bewildered at the fact that Vanora’s feminine beauty could exist at the same time as her headstrong personality. Surely a woman with a lovely figure and beautiful golden hair could never be anything but quiet and amenable.

A very similar instance occurs in Wilkie Collins’ “The Woman in White.” When Walter Hartright sees Marian for the first time, she is turned around, and Hartright marvels at the beauty and femininity of her body. However, the second that he sees Marian’s face, he is at once struck with the same confusion as Mr. St. Vincent. To Hartright, Marian’s masculine face completely contradicts the femininity of her body. Additionally, he makes judgements about her personality in a way that mimics St. Vincent’s judgements about Vanora: “Her expression – bright, frank, and intelligent – appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete” (Collins 35).

In these two instances, St. Vincent and Hatright both have a hard time grappling with the contradiction of the women’s ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ attributes. Hatright states it plainly, saying “to see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model […] was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognize yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of dreams” (Collins 35). The reactions of both men likely represent the general public’s views on gender roles. There is a very narrow definition of what a woman or a man can be, and anything that deviates from this is difficult to understand and accept.

The fourth and fifth paragraphs on page 108 of Mona Caird’s The Yellow Drawing-Room illustrate how intensely the narrator feels shame surrounding his sexuality. Although the narrator does not deny that he wishes to court Vanora, throughout this passage, he places distance between himself and the actual effects of a courtship, like sex. First, despite the fourth paragraph’s equal focus on Vanora and the narrator, seven of the eight sentences begin with “I.” This repetition obviously favors the narrator’s feelings over how they may affect Vanora. However, it also highlights the difficulties he has in figuring out his feelings. Every attempt he makes at naming his emotions falls flat and necessitates another sentence. He cannot say that complex feelings he has are not just love, but also sexual desires. As with many pieces of Victorian literature, the length of a passage or even an entire book reflects how the characters skirt around the unsaid.

When it comes time for the narrator to admit his love for Vanora, he falters, and writes, “I suppose I must have been in love with her…(Caird 108).” Instead of directly saying “I loved her,” the narrator creates both physical space on the page and a string of apologies for his feelings by adding two additional verb clauses. In a setting where marriage was at stake, love equated sex. By questioning his declaration of love, he distanced himself from the thought of having to perform with the confident, liberated Vanora in an intimate setting.

The narrator’s hidden desires become clearer in the following sentence, where he writes, “I longed to make her yield to me…I had a burning desire to subdue her (Caird 108). The sentence carries dual meanings, pointing to both the narrator’s wish to quell her rebellious, “New Woman,” characteristics, and wish to subdue her sexually. Because Vanora holds power over the narrator because she reputes his advances, he secretly wishes to match her power in a physical way. Using “burning,” an adjective frequently associated with the heat and intensity of sex, further paints this picture. However, the way he explains it is characteristically confusing and shadowed by inuendo.

The narrator’s shame revolving around sex can partially be pinned on the old-fashioned views on romance that he admits that he has. However, these textual elements point to an additional factor: how Vanora emasculates the narrator by refuting him. By losing the power in courtship that his gender would normally afford him, he becomes ashamed of his inability to be viewed as a legitimate, sexual man. He wishes to act as a “man” by being sexually dominant, but to plainly admit this would also implicate his feelings of insufficient masculinity.

In his article “The New Woman Fiction” from The Victorian Web, Dr. Andrzej Diniejko outlines the socially constructed image of the “New Woman” as it developed toward the end of the 19^th century. As Diniejko describes, the New Woman “departed from the stereotypical Victorian woman” in her desires for independence, education, and employment (Diniejko 2). This departure from traditional femininity was mocked in popular satirical depictions of the New Woman, which “usually pictured her riding a bicycle in bloomers and smoking a cigarette” (Diniejko 2). This image presents the New Woman as markedly masculine: she wears pants to allow her to straddle a bicycle and she smokes cigarettes, a typically male activity (for the time) involving a phallic object.

However, Diniejko qualifies this masculinization, considering Lyn Pykett’s observations of “the ambivalent representations of the New Woman in the late-Victorian discourse: ‘The New Woman was by turns: a mannish amazon and a Womanly woman…’” (qtd. in Diniejko 2). Pykett links these seemingly contradictory descriptions with “and,” illustrating the New Woman as a multi-faceted figure containing both masculinity and femininity. As a result, the New Woman evades gender distinctions as well as any kind of singular identity or face.

Considering these complexities of the New Woman, I will analyze how Mona Caird’s The Yellow Drawing Room engages with the cultural conversation. In the story, Vanora Haydon presents a fascinating take on the New Woman which both holds up and challenges the popular image. Before even meeting Vanora, Mr. St. Vincent learns of her garish decoration of the drawing room and determines that she must be “headstrong” and attention-seeking (Caird 103). He muses plainly, “I hate that sort of girl,” and contrasts her with his idea of the “true woman,” who is “retiring, unobtrusive, and indistinguishable” (Caird 103). Caird sets up Vanora against the image of “true” womanhood, playing into the popular masculinized caricature.

This division is seemingly continued when Mr. St. Vincent considers Vanora’s plain sister Clara as his “ideal woman,” who would never decorate in bright yellow (Caird 104). However, upon seeing Vanora for the first time, Mr. St. Vincent observes her “mass of glistening, golden hair,” her “eyes like the sea,” and her “robust” figure (Caird 104). This description recalls Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, the pinnacle of the female form. Indeed, Mr. St. Vincent goes on to describe Vanora as “supremely, overpoweringly womanly. The womanhood of her sisters paled before the exuberant feminine quality which I could not but acknowledge in Vanora” (Caird 105). Here, Caird overthrows Mr. St. Vincent’s idea of the “true” or “ideal” woman,” because Vanora’s femininity exceeds that of her sister Clara. His “scheme of the universe” (Caird 105) is entirely upended by Vanora’s extreme womanliness and beauty, for although Vanora’s behavior frustrates gendered expectations, her image overwhelmingly fulfills them.

With the character of Vanora, Caird challenges the popular masculinization of the New Woman by presenting an overly feminine figure whose personality contradicts her appearance. Caird engages with the ambiguity observed by Lyn Pykett but completely avoids the “mannish amazon” image. On the outside, Vanora is purely feminine, yet beneath the surface she bewilders traditional gender norms. With this choice, Caird presents her own version of the New Woman which blends with the “true” woman,” casting doubt on the Victorians’ ability to clearly distinguish a traditional woman from a rebel.

In Mona Caird’s “The Yellow Drawing Room,” Clara is depicted as the archetypal “angel in the house.” This term stems from a Coventry Patmore poem describing the ideal woman as tame, docile, and living to serve men. The main character of this story, Mr. St. Vincent, comments that this ideal woman should be “retiring, unobtrusive, indistinguishable even until you come to know her well, and then she is very much like what every other true woman would be under the same conditions” (103). St. Vincent expresses “Certain suspicions which I had harboured that Clara Haydon was my ideal woman grew stronger as I watched her quiet English face bent over the tea-tray… If I was to give up my liberty, the reins should be handed over to a kind, sensible young woman like Clara, who would hate to make herself remarkable, or her drawing room yellow” (104). In other words, a woman who would not actually take the reigns or distinguish herself in any way.

Though St. Vincent clearly feels that Clara checks all the boxes of his perfect wife, it is not Clara that St. Vincent falls for. It is her total opposite– the wild, “new woman” Vanora, who stands out as much as the bright yellow walls she chose for the drawing room. He is incredibly sexually attracted to her, describing her figure as “robust, erect, pliant” and he expresses feeling “penetrated” by her “glowing atmosphere” (105-106). In sexual contexts, the word “penetrates” is usually an action a man does to a woman. Interestingly, here it is Vanora penetrating him, suggesting that she challenges his power and masculinity (not just through her personality, but also her sexuality). In comparison, Clara is physically described with much more boring terms, with a “straightforward look” and “blue eyes and a fair complexion” (104). 

St. Vincent’s contempt for Vanora’s behavior and attitude only seem to increase his sexual attraction towards her. He says, “all the dominating instincts of my manhood roused into activity by this hateful experience,” the sexual connotations of the phrase “my manhood roused” connecting his hatred to his lust (108). Further, this desire to dominate her suggests that he is turned on by Vanora’s disobedience and wants to “tame” her (both emotionally and physically).   

Ultimately, St. Vincent confesses that he loves and wants to marry Vanora. Clara, fades into the background of the story, still “gentle” when wounded by St. Vincent’s choice. 

St. Vincent’s feelings for Vanora, despite Clara meeting every one of his standards for the ideal woman, implies that as the “new woman” emerged, not only were men challenged, but the “angel in the house” was challenged. St. Vincent’s aggressive attraction to Vanora suggests that some Victorian men were intrigued by the “new woman,” desiring the sexual satisfaction of “taming” these women, presenting conflicting guidance for how women should draw in men.

This double standard continues today, as men are often sexually attracted to archetypes like the “femme fatale” that challenge their control. Simultaneously, they don’t want their power challenged, and also to some extent want “traditional wives.” Which is more appealing: an outspoken woman in a tight dress, or a loving, modest woman doing your laundry for you?

“The room was in a glow of golden light; no ladylike antidote, however strong, could lead one to ignore it. It was radiant, bold, unapologetic, unabashed. It was not the room that my ideal woman would have created. My ideal woman would unfailingly choose a nice tone of grey-blue. Certain suspicions which I had harboured that Clara Haydon was my ideal woman grew stronger as I watched her quiet English face bent over the tea-tray. I liked the straightforward look of the girl, her blue eyes and fair complexion. If I was to give up my liberty, the reins should be handed over to a kind, sensible young woman like Clara, who would hate to make herself remarkable, or her drawing-room yellow.” (Caird 104).

The narrator (presumably a man) describes the yellow drawing-room using the following description words: “It was radiant, bold, unapologetic, unabashed. It was not…” (Caird 104) Meaning, that the narrator does not use these noteworthy adjectives when illustrating his ‘ideal woman’ and his expectations for her, providing a stark contrast from a traditional ‘ladylike’ outlook. The yellow room represents a beak from conventional female autonomy, symbolizing the need for female autonomic independence, rights, and expression. The “grey-blue” color that the narrator prefers, doesn’t stand out or present the striking qualities in the analysis above. Therefore, the yellow room serves as a challenge to the norms of femininity in Victorian society.
The narrator’s selection of “a nice tone of grey-blue,” (Caird 104) as the ideal color for a woman’s drawing-room suggests his masculinized lens as to how a woman should behave in Victorian society. This is particularly relevant in the illustration of Clara Haydon, perceiving her as passive, submissive, and an idealized style of beauty. The keywords in the passage above connotate with the following claim: “quiet English face, … straightforward look, and blue eyes and fair complexion.” (Caird 104). Furthermore, this emphasizes the yellow room as a woman who does not rebel against constricting social and societal norms. With this description, Clara is perceived as an “Angel in the house,” (Victorian Web 2) and a limitation of women’s independence and self-autonomy in the domestic sphere, marriage, and confining middle-class wives in the home.

Though Mona Caird’s The Yellow Drawing-Room is full of color metaphors, framing color around the nature motifs throughout reveal the societal shift from grey-blue to yellow or rather the Old Woman to the New Woman. Nature offers a framework to contextualize colors and expand the color metaphors to the natural world, which connects to the woman’s place in both the private and public sphere or rather in the home and out in nature spheres.

The narrator positions the yellow room around nature motifs as initial points of disagreement with the type of woman Vanora is. Comparing types of women to color and nature elements like the sun, the narrator sets the room “…in a flow of golden light; no ladylike antidote, however strong, could lead one to ignore it. It was radiant, bold, unapologetic, unabashed. It was not the room that my ideal woman would have created. My ideal woman would unfailingly choose a nice tone of grey-blue” (Caird 1892, 104). The “flow of golden light” evokes both water and light imagery. The following ode to how “un-ladylike” these natural elements are separates women from the natural world, instead instructing a re-aligning to the narrator’s version of an “ideal woman” with “grey-blue” hues. Perhaps, Caird suggests the ridiculousness of the narrator’s obsession with associating light and color as a foundation to criticize a strong-headed woman.

The stark contrast between “yellow” and “grey-blue” offers a physical manifestation of the Old Woman transforming into the New Woman. That New Woman coding correlates yellow and radiance or “golden light” to the sun and a change to the natural world. Though, yellow is “unapologetic” and abrupt in its change from the narrator’s “ideal woman’s” choice of a “grey-blue” room, it is simultaneously natural as it blends with the sun’s light.

Posing “unapologetic” women with nature disassociates the narrator and society’s more “idealistic” definition for women’s positioning in gender hierarchies. If not the natural world as it is too “radiant” and “bold,” Caird codes men to desire women with what the Victorian era considered more natural, intuitive responsibilities and to more respected “grey-blue” rooms. The narrator disagrees with Vanora’s choice of nature as it differs from the Victorian era’s nature of gender structure positioning men in power over women.

Nature—sun and water—plays a role in Vanora’s womanhood, though, the narrator’s ideas of feminine nature in societal terms strays away from the natural world and absorbs order from societal instruction as he says Vanora continues “to think and act in disharmony with the feminine nature and genius” (Caird 1892, 106). While the narrator implicates nature and the sun’s rays, he also mentions the breaking from “feminine nature and genius.” The varying uses of nature stresses how society used scientific and natural elements in the Victorian era to prove women had instinctual domestic responsibilities and to associate a woman attuned to nature as estranged from those traditional roles.

Though, this gender structuring and difference in nature definitions advantaging men is contradicted when Caird also grants women slight mobility with the repeated mention of women having to “create” and “choose” colors, which implicates women at the centers of creation stories. Geographically, Caird locates women in domestic narratives as they both create rooms and are confined to them. This mobilized and confined space relates to Charlotte Perkin’s Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, in which the female narrator, diagnosed with hysteria and given the “rest cure” by her doctor husband, gains agency in her confined space by becoming one with the moving wallpaper (Gilman). The yellow coloring in both texts implicate bold colors and illness narratives as symptomatic of women straying away from the boxed in “feminine nature and genius” designed by men. Yellow draws attention to their misbehavior, painting targets on their backs and incentivizing a return to the traditional natural order even though there is anything but order at the end of The Yellow Drawing-Room when the narrator causes chaos between the sisters.

Image from the 2021 film rendition of The Yellow Wallpaper.

Works Cited:

Caird, Mona. The Yellow Drawing-Room. 1892.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. First Avenue Editions, A    division of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., 2017.

Image: https://www.filminquiry.com/the-yellow-wallpaper-2021-review/

 

In 1996, Walt Disney Pictures released their animated adaptation of Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame to widespread critical acclaim. Though Disney’s take on the classic deviates in several major ways from its source material, Claude Frollo—in the film, the Parisian Minister of Justice—is consistently driven to madness by his attraction to Esmeralda, a young Roma woman. This desire culminates in Frollo’s primary sung number, “Hellfire,” in which he laments his attraction to Esmeralda and claims she has sown these sinful thoughts within his mind. Mona Caird’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Drawing-Room” similarly follows a self-proclaimed man of virtue in conflict with his own desire for the transgressive Vanora. As the two grow to see each other more often, the narrator grows nearly mad with desire, believing her to be exerting some sort of influence over him. 

“Hellfire” places Frollo’s confession within the larger framing device of a prayer: “Beata Maria, you know I am a righteous man / Of my virtue, I am justly proud,” he sings, “Beata Maria, you know I’m so much purer than / The common, vulgar, weak, licentious crowd,” (Hulce 2:19). Frollo is framed as possessing moral authority and “purity” compared to the public, whose attitudes he deems “licentious.” The Hunchback of Notre Dame has the privilege of being a long-form work, and by this point in the film adaptation, it has been established that Frollo is ostensibly villainous despite his claims. “The Yellow Drawing-Room,” on the contrary, works within the confines of its length and also through the narration of its morally-superior protagonist. He often skirts around directly addressing his broader perspective on morality beyond conservatism, but in his first exchange with Vanora, he claims that “‘people don’t know what is good for them,'” (Caird 107). He creates a dichotomy between himself, the moral authority, and the rest of society. Within these parameters, it is impossible for either Frollo or Caird’s narrator to be incorrect in their persuasions.

Frollo and Caird’s narrator are similarly quick to blame the object of their affections for their emotions and deny all responsibility. Frollo is more direct: “It’s not my fault / I’m not to blame,” he argues, “It is the gypsy girl, the witch who sent this flame,” (Hulce 3:26). Esmeralda is labeled a “witch” (and later a “siren” at 3:48), a dehumanized being with undue influence over her perceived targets. Caird’s narrator is marginally more subtle, instead entreating that Vanora “must release him” as he is “led away by qualities which ought to repel [him],” (107). Neither woman has, until and in this moment, suggested to either man that she is romantically interested in him, but as they cannot admit their own agency, they instead label these women as villains searching to dispel their moral purity.

Though The Hunchback of Notre Dame was written by a Frenchman and during the Georgian era (while Caird wrote in the Victorian), the larger theme of blaming women for men’s moral failings runs throughout both works and profoundly influences the audience’s readings of morality as it relates to gender. In learning that Frollo and the narrator’s moral authority is built upon their incrimination of innocents, it is firmly established that such authority is nothing more but a facade.