Class Blog

In Christian Rossetti’s “In an Artist’s Studio“, she writes, about the man looking at the woman’s portrait: “He feeds upon her face by day and night, / And she with true kind eyes looks back on him, /…../Not as she is, but as she fills his dreams” (Rossetti 9-14). The “feeds upon her ” part seems sort of vampiric to me, but it’s interesting that Rossetti is referring to a British man. Most of the vampire-like connections we’ve talked about have been applied to foreigners, like Count Fosco and his animals, mesmerism, and love of sugar. Yet pretty much all the men in what we’ve read so far have fed on women. Even though the Count is the one with vampiric undertones, living with Percival is what sucks the life out of Laura. Hartright also feeds on Laura, in a similar way to the artist in “In an Artist’s Studio”; he has a picture he painted of Laura that looks back on as he is telling the story (Collins 51). The “true kind eyes” part makes the woman sound very innocent, endearing and submissive, a lot like Laura, but then the final line reveals that the woman only looks this way in an idealized version that the man imagined when he painted her. This reminded me of Perkins and Donaghy article, ” A Man’s Resolution: Narrative Strategies in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White” where they argue that Walter is an unreliable narrator and has his own motivations that bleed into everyone else’s narratives, since he is presumably the editor of all the “evidence” he compiled (Perkins & Donaghy 400). All this made me wonder if any of the New Women writers exploited vampire tropes when writing about bad husbands and men. “The New Woman Fiction” from the Victorian web mentioned that New Woman fiction dealt with the issues of “venereal diseases” and “domestic [and sexual] violence” (The New Woman in Late Victorian Fiction section), and I think those were both the two major shock factors in Dracula. 

Elizabeth Lee’s article “The Femme Fatale as Object” focuses on how women were portrayed in art and poetry in the 19th century. She states 

Such a treatment, therefore, not only objectified the woman, but also dismembered her body and her identity; the artistically rendered woman is no longer an individual person but really the pleasing arrangement of shapes and light, easily allowing “peaches and pears” to substitute for flesh. (Lee) 

Looking at Christina Rossetti’s poem “In an Artist’s Studio”, Lee’s description of how women were viewed and portrayed and encapsulated perfectly by Rossetti’s commentary on her brother’s studio and what occurs inside it. She states “A nameless girl in freshest summer greens,/A saint, and angel…” (Rossetti lines 6-7). This girl’s body and identity have been separated, or as Lee calls it, dismembered. The fact that she is nameless means that her identity has been lost. She is also not a person anymore. She is both a saint and an angel, which implies a form of death that has occurred. To be a saint and to be an angel, or both as this girl is, means she has to have died. In Rossetti’s poem, it’s a symbolic death. She is no longer a person to the artist, she is just a muse, something to paint. Her identity and her personhood are lost to the artist.

Rossetti continues by later stating “He feeds upon her face by day and night,/And she with true kind eyes looks back on him” (lines 9-10). The act of feeding calls to mind the act of consuming. The artist is consuming the woman’s image and using it for his art. Meanwhile, the woman looks back ignorantly, not knowing how the artist is using her. This connects with Lee’s claim that a woman’s image becomes just an assortment of shapes pleasing to the eyes “easily allowing “peaches and pears” to substitute for flesh” (Lee). The woman in Lee’s piece is being likened to a piece of fruit, something naturally sweet. The transformation from woman to food allows for her to be consumed by the artist, something Rossetti is commenting on in her poem. The artist is “consuming” the woman’s personhood and rather than spitting out seeds, he is spitting back out an image that leaves her without her identity or even her body, as even that, the artist had full control over how it is portrayed just like the woman’s unnatural body in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in La Grande Odalisque.

In Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s poem “The Portrait” there is a repeated theme of burial, both literally in the model’s death, but also metaphorically in the poet’s return to images of incarceration, suffocation and looking through.  Christina Rosetti’s “In an Artist’s Studio” speaks back against these images of confinement and locates their cause. 

The poem’s first quatrain is scanned as iambic pentameter, the meter which corresponds to walking or breathing, but the subject is eerily inanimate: 

“One face looks out from all his canvases,  

One selfsame figure sits of walks or leans: 

We found her hidden just behind those screens, 

That mirror gave back all her loveliness.” (“Artist’s” l. 1-4). 

Alongside the steady beat of the scansion, “One” is repeated in parallel to capture both the subject’s “face” and “figure” creating a preoccupation with the body.  There is also something interesting happening with the rhyme scheme: ABBA.  Since “we” find the “her” in question “behind those screens,” behind the surfaces of the painting, the speaker also metacognitively embeds the suggestion in the contained “B” lines: she “leans” on the “screens,” waiting to be let out of the “canvases” that are only interested in her external “loveliness,” and not her personhood. 

Moving into the second quatrain delivers similar information, but with a new twist from the speaker: “A saint, and angel – every canvas means, / The same one meaning, neither more nor less.” (“Artist’s” l. 7-8).  Again, the parallel pattern of descriptors trundles on, until the middle of line 7 with the emdash where the narrator explodes, making even further explicit what the parallelism suggests.  The monotonous iambic pentameter certainly mocks the meaninglessness of each creation, but the word “one” recalls the woman’s description from the first quatrain.  Here, the speaker criticizes both the artists’ monolithic conception of the woman’s personhood, and his compulsion to return to the same subject (either from inability to invent or obsession with a single rendering). 

 The poem’s criticism then turns vampiric: “He feeds upon her face by day and night, / And she with true kind eyes looks back on him” (“Artist’s” 9-10).  Jan Marsh writes that “women are rendered decorative, depersonalized;…reduced to an aesthetic arrangement of sexual parts, for male fantasies” (Lee).  In these lines, the sestet begins, and the rhyme scheme begins to indicate that the subject and artist are out of sync.  The consonance of “feeds” and “face” and parallelism of “day and night” suggest an uneven exchange where violence is done on the woman who can but passively “look back on him” with “aesthetic[ally] arrang[ed]”
“true kind eyes.” Even before the artist’s “dream” is mentioned in the final lines, the speaker hints at the fantasy of consumption whether that be in a sexual or metaphorical way. 

The final lines are also resonant with Marsh’s criticism: “Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright; / Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.” (“Artist’s” 13-14). The artist’s “dream” ultimately results in a Platonically dangerous echo-chamber where the artist is more interested in copying his idea of her (“Not as she is, but was”) and his paintings of her than the woman herself.  This is perhaps why in the first quatrain discusses the surface of the paintings rebounding “loveliness” – the paintings are the mirrors to one another, not to the woman, and so the woman is lost.  But not completely.  The repetition in the final three lines of “not as” resists his categorization of her identity, and the final line is unrhymed, resisting the traditional sestet resolution to show that the speaker recognizes that the artist’s “dream” is out of constancy with who she “is.” 

 

Works Cited: 

Rossetti, Christina. “In an Artist’s Studio.” The Poetry Foundation, [1896] 2025, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/146804/in-an-artist39s-studio. Accessed 12 March 2025. 

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. “The Portrait.” The Poetry Foundation, [1870] 2025, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45023/the-portrait-56d22459825d7. Accessed 12 March 2025. 

Lee, Elizabeth. “The Femme Fatale as Object.” The Victorian Web, 1996, https://victorianweb.org/gender/object.html. Accessed 12 March 2025. 

In class, we discussed the idea of the “Victorian Doppelgänger” and how it connects to The Woman in White. In the article we read it says, “Specifically, doppelgänger narratives involve a duality of the main character who is either duplicated in the figure of an identical second self or divided into polar opposite selves.” The original concept of the Victorian doppelganger was from the superstition that seeing one’s double was an omen of death. There are many doppelgängers or doubles in this novel that reflect the difference in the characters.

The clear double in the novel is between Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick. They are close enough in appearance that Anne is mistaken for Laura even after her death. While their physical similarity allows for the novel’s biggest deception, their different lives show where they differ. Laura is a wealthy woman of high status meaning she is protected, but her life is in the hands of the men who surround her. Anne is poor, but her perceived knowledge gives her a certain power against the people who try to bring her harm.

Another double that I recognized in the novel is between Walter Hartright and Sir Percival Glyde. Walter is seen, as recognized from his telling last name, as the “good guy” who is driven by his morality and pursues justice when others have been wronged. He is honest, passionate, and loyal to Marian and Laura. In contrast, Sir Percival is deceptive and relies on lies to maintain his status. He experiences his downfall from his lies and secrets. Their relationships with Laura highlight their differences and show the difference between virtue and villainy.

Another double I found interesting was between Mrs. Catherick and Mrs. Clements. Although Mrs. Catherick is Anne’s biological mom, she is cold and self-interested. She is more focused on keeping her status and reputation than protecting her own daughter. Mrs. Clements is not Anne’s biological mom, but she is nurturing and protective towards Anne. She raises Anne as her own and steps into the role of her mother. Mrs. Clements is genuinely kind and seeks out the best for Anne. They represent motherhood in the Victorian era and the reader sees how their care influenced Anne. Despite their significantly different roles, I find it interesting that Mrs. Clements ends up being part of the reason for Anne’s demise. She brings Anne to Count Fosco, thinking she was helping Anne, but she was deceived by him, and he is the cause of Anne’s untimely death.

The use of doubles in this novel reinforces the themes of the novel. By mirroring characters and contrasting them against each other, Collins highlights the differences between good and evil, truth and deceit, and justice and corruption. It also reflects morality and choice. The doubles show how the characters can be so similar but take vastly different paths. The doubles not only drive the plot but show human nature.

“The outside of the man you were marrying was fair enough to see. He was neither tall nor short—he was a little below the middle size. A light, active, high-spirited man—about five-and-forty years old, to look at. He had a pale face, and was bald over the forehead, but had dark hair on the rest of his head. His beard was shaven on his chin, but was let to grow, of a fine rich brown, on his cheeks and his upper lip. His eyes were brown too, and very bright; his nose straight and handsome and delicate enough to have done for a woman’s. His hands the same. He was troubled from time to time with a dry hacking cough, and when he put up his white right hand to his mouth, he showed the red scar of an old wound across the back of it. Have I dreamt of the right man? You know best, Miss Fairlie; and you can say if I was deceived or not. Read next, what I saw beneath the outside—I entreat you, read, and profit.”

I was really drawn to Freud’s understanding of dreams, and, as it pertains to the text, I was interested in the letter written by Anne Catherick to Miss Fairlie. Here, I’ll analyse the Freudian influences of Victorian understandings of dreams, which adds another layer of complexity to the already suspenseful reading of the letter. Anne’s description of Sir Percival Glyde as “fair enough to see” but urging Miss Fairlie to “read next, what I saw beneath the outside” is laden with both conscious and unconscious insight. It provides an essential clue to the tension between appearances and hidden truths, an idea central to the narrative of The Woman in White. Anne’s letter can be seen as an attempt to reveal the truth, which is something that has been deeply buried by Sir Percival. Anne, as a character, embodies the struggle of the repressed voice fighting to break free. In her letter, she is not just offering a description of Sir Percival; she is, in fact, attempting to expose the hidden, unconscious layers of his identity that she knows are dangerous and deceitful. Freud’s theory of the return of the repressed is relevant here. Anne herself is a repressed figure, in the literal sense of being confined to an asylum, so her experiences with Sir Percival result in the suppression of her truth. In the letter, Anne seeks to break that silence, demanding that Miss Fairlie “read next, what I saw beneath the outside.” This can be seen as a call to confront the repressed truths about Sir Percival, which, like all repressed material, will inevitably return. I feel that Freud would point to Sir Percival Glyde’s scar on the back of his hand as a sign of a repressed past, an evident manifestation of his guilty past that cannot be hidden completely. Here, Freud would likely argue that there’s a danger of ignoring psychological truths that lie beneath the surface, which is a topic that the novel itself seeks to explore. In Anne writing the letter, she mirrors the novel’s broader thematic concern with the return of repressed elements: those aspects of the self or the past that cannot remain concealed forever. With this understanding, the letter isn’t her describing Glyde’s physicality, but rather represents an unconscious struggle to bring forth the repressed truth. The dream is explained by Freud’s idea that what is repressed will eventually find a way to surface. Or who knows, maybe she took Benadryl and saw the hat man instead of Sir Percival Glyde! 

I’m walking away, but don’t worry, I’m still following all the rules… kinda.

JAY WALKER

“For example, he is immensely fat. Before this time I have always especially disliked corpulent humanity. I have always maintained that the popular notion of connecting excessive grossness of size and excessive good-humour as inseparable allies was equivalent to declaring, either that no people but amiable people ever get fat, or that the accidental addition of so many pounds of flesh has a directly favourable influence over the disposition of the person on whose body they accumulate. I have invariably combated both these absurd assertions by quoting examples of fat people who were as mean, vicious, and cruel as the leanest and the worst of their neighbours. I have asked whether Henry the Eighth was an amiable character? Whether Pope Alexander the Sixth was a good man? Whether Mr. Murderer and Mrs. Murderess Manning were not both unusually stout people? Whether hired nurses, proverbially as cruel a set of women as are to be found in all England, were not, for the most part, also as fat a set of women as are to be found in all England?—and so on, through dozens of other examples, modern and ancient, native and foreign, high and low. Holding these strong opinions on the subject with might and main as I do at this moment, here, nevertheless, is Count Fosco, as fat as Henry the Eighth himself, established in my favour, at one day’s notice, without let or hindrance from his own odious corpulence. Marvellous indeed!” (Collins PG)

The question of fatness as it relates to consumption is one that we see as the women in the story with bigger frames are framed as having bigger appetites. The framing of fatness as a moral failing is something that has persisted for only heaven knows how long and yet here we see another stereotype of fat people, that they are good-natured. Here we see Marian offer what seems to be a diatribe against the very idea of stereotypes in saying that they’re simply inane, “either that no people but amiable people ever get fat, or that the accidental addition of so many pounds of flesh has a directly favourable influence over the disposition of the person on whose body they accumulate. I have invariably combated both these absurd assertions by quoting examples of fat people who were as mean, vicious, and cruel as the leanest and the worst of their neighbours.” (Collins PG) This condemnation of bigotry, or at the very least the enumeration of the flaws of stereotyping is symbolic of the trope many Victorian novels have. They make a good point but they miss it entirely. Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded is another such novel that seems to miss its own point. It shows a young woman getting groomed, it is written almost as a horror novel, and then she ends the novel marrying her groomer and it’s framed as a good thing. Victorian novels love to play at being subversive but at the end of the day they are invested in the creation and the upkeep of British “normalcy”. At the end of this novel our main character is raising white British children.

Writing from the side of the sea,

Red.

On pages 273-74, Marain has a dream in which she sees Walter Hartright in various settings such as stranded on a wrecked ship, in a forest, lying on the steps of an old temple, and in front of a tomb. Throughout this dream, Marian’s subconscious places Hartright into numerous deadly situations. Throughout the situations he becomes more and more alone, and in larger amounts of danger. Throughout this passage, Walter often refers to himself, and the “me” is italicized. It is also used in reference to his fate, usually him being spared. For Marian to think of Hartright in this way shows that she thinks of him as separate from other variables in her life, and he is going to be responsible for solving whatever mysteries are surrounding them. 

In Freud’s “Remembering, repeating, and working through,” he discusses dreams as a way for unconscious desires and memories to come to the surface. Especially in terms of repetition, where he believes that one “repeats everything that has already made its way from the sources of the repressed into his manifest personality” (page 151). Before describing her dream, Marian claims that she has not thought of or talked about Hartright all day, but he just appeared in her mind. This combined with the repetition of him appearing repeatedly in multiple different locations shows that she is experiencing an unconscious fixation on Walter Hartright, despite her conscious denial of thinking about him. The fact that these thoughts only appear when she claims to not be in control of her mind support Freud’s idea that our repressed desires come to us in dreams and other “weakened” states. While Marian appears to be one of the stronger women in the novel, this dream shows her unconscious fears that she does not want to acknowledge, as well as her fixation with Hartright.

Sweets are constantly consumed in George Eliot’s short story, “Brother Jacob.” In the opening chapter, Mr. David Faux convinces his brother, Jacob, that he is able to turn the guineas he has stolen from their mother into candies. David does this in order to keep Jacob from revealing his secret: that he intends to take their mother’s money and use it to help him create a new life for himself in the West Indies where he believes he can improve his lot in life and become something more than a confectioner. Though “David chose his line [of work] without a moment’s hesitation; and with a rashness inspired by a sweet tooth . . . the tooth lost its relish and fell into blank indifference; and all the while, his mind expanded, his ambitions took new shapes” (49). By stating that David was “rash” when making his decision to become a confectioner, the narrator implies that there was a certain level of immaturity on David’s part. However, now the narrator seems to suggest that David has outgrown his sweet tooth, and with his maturation, his life as a confectioner no longer suits. Why is this? Why is sugar and its consumption controversial in the nineteenth centruy?

Laura Eastlake provides answers. She claims that by midcentury, “sugar and sweet-eating were associated with juvenility, femininity, and the domestic sphere” and were considered “antithetical to adult British manliness” (516). If sugar and sweets were associated with youth, femininity, and the domestic sphere, David’s desire to change his life begins to make more sense. As a young British man, his work as a confectioner provides him with no means to elevate himself within society. His maturation and loss of his sweet tooth seem to imply that he wants to become the epitome of British manliness; however, because of the work that he does and the negative way that sweet-eating is viewed, he is unable to do so. Instead, he is forced to stay in this perpetual state of juvenility and unseriousness. Thus, the tension between the life that David wants to leave behind and the one that he wants to create becomes clear. If he is to be a “real” man, he must give up sweets on all fronts.

Eastlake also claims that in addition to being associated with juvenility and unmanliness, the “seemingly domestic acts of sugar consumption became highly politicized and were made analogous to the consumption not only of slave labor but of human bodies and blood” (516). As someone who makes his living on the selling and consumption of sugar, David’s connection to sugar plantations is established. Taking Eastlake’s claims into account and the narrator’s suggestion that David wants to create a new life for himself outside of being a confectioner, I wonder if perhaps Eliot is critiquing both what it means to be a British man and the practice of slavery simultaneously. If British men who are the epitome of manliness should not consume sugar and sweets, then it would seem that sugar plantations should not hold value to them. By extension, I would argue that Eliot suggests that British men who are the epitome of manliness should therefore not support slavery and the way that sugar plantations are managed.

Throughout The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins uses a lot of flowery, over the top language to describe simple interactions between Walter Hartright and Laura Fairlie. These interactions, exclusively described from Walter’s perspective, convincingly portray the pent up sexual and romantic tension between the two. In Victorian society, English men and women were forbidden from discussing topics such as sex and desire openly, because they were considered extremely taboo. According to an excerpt from Sex, Scandal, and the Novel “sexual unspeakability does not function simply as a collection of prohibitions for Victorian writers. Rather, it affords them abundant opportunities to develop an elaborate discourse – richly ambiguous, subtly coded, prolix and polyvalent – that we now recognize and designate by the very term literary” (Cohen 3). Essentially, the strict nature of Victorian society as it relates to sexuality caused Victorian authors to develop their own covert methods for describing sexual desire and passion. Many of Walter’s passages are devoted to romanticizing his relationship with Laura, especially when describing their early interactions when they were merely student and teacher. When lamenting about his feelings for her, he writes “Yes my hardly-earned self-control was completely lost to me as if I had never possessed it; lost to me, as it is lost every day to other men, in other critical situations, where women are concerned” (Collins 66). With this statement, Walter is acknowledging an age-old sentiment that women are “temptations” to men, and that the trap of womanly wiles must be avoided for it can be disastrous in certain situations. He continues “I should have asked why any room in the house was better than home to me when she entered it, and barren as a desert when she went out again-why I always noticed and remembered the little changes in her dress that I had noticed and remembers in no other women before- why I saw her, and heard her, and touched her (when we shook hands at night and morning) as I had never seen, heard, and touched any other woman’s before” (Collins 66). It is evident in the way that Hartright carefully chooses his words so as not to so much as approach vulgarity when describing his attraction to Laura, that he is trying to be the perfect British gentlemen. For example, when he mentions the thrill of touching her, he immediately clarifies that they only made physical contact through the chaste gesture of shaking hands. Because Walter is prevented from acting on his feelings due to his position and the expectations of polite Victorian society, he is relegated to waxing poetic about his painful experience of falling for Laura.