Author: Lady Merriweather

E. W. Fallerton’s etching Within the Lines Siege of Agra 1857 is more complex than it might initially seem. The figures are situated in a domestic space, enclosed in a house with a small window. Details suggest a rustic and “Eastern” setting: the bare walls; the Oriental rug; the large jars on the ground; the woman’s bare feet, her slippers lying beside her; and the woman’s draped clothing and head scarf, evocative of Indian or Middle Eastern fashion.

Even the woman’s skin tone and features are darker than the idealized European women depicted by many artists during the nineteenth century. She has dark hair, dark eyebrows, thick eyelashes, and a prominent nose. The baby’s white blanket, the central focus of the painting, emphasizes the darkness of the woman’s hands.

The title of the etching confirms this Eastern setting, as the “Siege of Agra” was a battle in India between Indian rebels and British colonialists [1]. This historical context problematizes Fallerton’s seemingly innocuous depiction of motherhood. The woman is depicted in a traditional “Mary, mother of Jesus” pose in Western art, with her eyes cast down toward the baby she holds in her arms.

Yet the baby she holds has white skin and light hair, as does the second child sleeping in the background. The etching thus suggests two possible narratives: the children are the result of “mixed” sexual relations with a British colonist; or, the children are not hers, and the Indian woman depicted is a nurse or servant. Both narratives problematize the notion of “natural” motherhood.

In his depiction of the Duchess in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll also interrogates domesticity and motherhood. The Duchess’s household, far from the nurturing environment depicted in Fallerton’s etching, is downright abusive. The cook throws frying pans at the pair, and the Duchess “toss[es] the baby violently up and down” as she sings a “lullaby” that advocates child abuse:

 “Speak roughly to your little boy,

And beat him when he sneezes” (46).

The Duchess “flings” the “queer-shaped little creature” at Alice, a mere child herself, to take care of it (47). Alice demonstrates a maternal instinct to protect the child that the Duchess clearly lacks: “Wouldn’t it be murder to leave it behind?” (48). However, when the baby starts turning into a pig, Alice thinks “it would be quite absurd for her to carry it any further,” and she is “relieved” as she watches the pig “trot quietly into the wood” (48).

The baby’s metamorphosis into a pig is unnatural, as the adjectives “queer-shaped” and “absurd” suggest. The word “unnatural” here is useful, as it historically denotes illegitimacy (OED). Like the figure in the etching, Alice is not the natural mother of the baby; by the end of the scene, they are not even the same species. The unnatural pig-child can no longer occupy the domestic sphere, and so takes refuge in the wilderness or wood. Perhaps Carroll, like Fallerton, is making a veiled commentary on race, motherhood, and illicit sexuality.

1. “Indian Mutiny.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2015. Web. 22 Mar. 2015. <http://academic.eb.com/EBchecked/topic/285821/Indian-Mutiny>.

Both Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market and the Illman Brothers’ etching The Fair Dreamer engage in a long artistic tradition of placing females in idyllic settings. In both texts, nature is associated with sexual desire and seduction.

While The Fair Dreamer may appear like an innocent portrait of a sleeping female figure, a closer look suggests salacious undertones. The bend of the tree on which the woman rests draws attention to the sensuous S-curve of her body. Although her body remains covered, the shadows and highlights on her skirts create the impression of stretched fabric and consequently suggest that her knees are spread apart provocatively. Reinforcing this sexual position, the tension in the clenched hand that tightly grips the tree branch suggests the ecstasy of climaxing, rather than the relaxation of sleeping. The propriety signified by her parasol and hat is cast carelessly aside as she basks in the wood by a brook on a lush summer day.

In a similar way, Goblin Market also posits nature as the site of sexual desire. For example, the poem repeatedly locates the goblin men selling their fruit in a “glen” (474, 477, 488) by a “brook” (474, 479, 488). This emphasis on sexual threat, represented by the goblin men, within a natural setting is emphasized by the parenthetical line “(Men sell not such in any town)” (488), “such” referring to “fruits” two lines previously. The populated “town” is free of corrupting fruit, but the “haunted glen” (488) is fraught with temptation. Like the etching, which suggests the fertility of summer by depicting a thick canopy of green leaves and tall reeds, the poem sets the action in “summer weather” (480). The “warm” wind suggests the heat of desire and passion (474).

Just as the curves of the woman’s figure are mirrored in the contour of the tree trunk in The Fair Dreamer, Goblin Market frequently compares the sisters to trees. For example, a simile likens Laura’s “gleaming neck” to a “moonlit poplar branch” (475), and later in the poem her “fallen” nature is compared to “a wind-uprooted tree” (487). Lizzie, too, is compared to a tree to emphasize her simultaneous strength and vulnerability:

“Like a fruit-crowned orange-tree

White with blossoms honey-sweet

Sore beset by wasp and bee” (484).

The stingers associated with “wasp and bee” here suggest a phallic metaphor, as does the earlier description of the “Their hungry thirsty roots” (474). In the poem, the antecedent of the pronoun “they” is ambiguous, referring to either “goblin men” or “fruits”; the phallic image of “roots” is paralleled in the skinny tree branch that the woman grips in The Fair Dreamer.

As these two texts demonstrate, sexual desire is often juxtaposed with nature because of its fertility, seclusion, and phallic associations. Yet the texts muddy the exact relationship between nature and women: are women one with nature, or does nature pose a particular threat to them?

In his 1862 essay “Why are Women Redundant?” William Rathbone Greg laments the excess population of single, unmarried women in Great Britain. Greg argues that this excess leads to moral and social evils such as women finding employment outside of the home and women having sexual relations with other women. To remedy this problem, Greg offers a plan for female emigration in order to restore the balance between the sexes.

While Greg’s proposition may appear ridiculous to twenty-first-century readers, reading Greg’s essay alongside Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White illuminates Collins’s deep engagement with this issue of the redundant woman in his novel, particularly through the characters of Anne Catherick and Marian Halcombe.

In her almost identical physical appearance to Laura Fairlie, Anne Catherick is redundant because she is essentially the duplicate of another woman. The novel later reveals that Laura and Anne are half sisters by the same father. Because Laura is legitimate and married, she survives; by contrast, Anne—illegitimate and unmarried—dies. Anne’s death solves the problem of this redundancy, but not before their likeness enables Sir Percival and Count Fosco to create an elaborate scheme to steal Laura’s identity and fortune. In light of Greg’s essay, Collins appears to be commenting on the danger of redundant women.

By the end of the novel, Marian emerges as the true redundant woman. After Walter and Laura marry, they worry about “the consideration of Marian’s future” (621) as a single, unmarried woman. Marian resolves to live with Walter and Laura in what is essentially a marriage of three. Marian’s strange words to Walter deserve closer examination:

“Wait a little till there are children’s voices at your fireside. I will teach them to speak for me, in their language; and the first lesson they say to their father and mother will be – We can’t spare our aunt!”

Marian clearly indicates reproduction as a byproduct of marriage, echoing Greg’s concern over “the abnormal extent of female celibacy” (162). While Marian will be celibate as an unmarried woman, she describes assuming the domestic role of the mother-as-teacher, thereby splitting female obligations between herself and her half sister.

The word “spare” here is particularly complex. On one level, the word functions ironically because “spare” is synonymous with “redundant” or “extra.” The meaning of the sentence, however, lies in tension with this denotation; taking the definition of “spare” as “to part with” (OED), “We can’t spare our aunt!” means that the children believe Marian to be an absolutely essential part of their household. “Spare” may also carry a third, more nefarious meaning that contradicts the second: “to abstain from destroying, removing” (OED). In this interpretation of “can’t spare,” the children admit to the necessity of removing their aunt. According to Greg, this removal is necessary in order to eliminate the redundant woman. Collins clearly packs a lot of ambiguity into this line, which Greg’s essay helps illuminate.

The passage in which Marian describes Count Fosco reveals a Victorian anxiety and fascination with androgyny. On the surface, Marian begins her description of the Count by highlighting his masculine qualities: “His features have Napoleon’s magnificent regularity: his expression recalls the grandly calm, immovable power of the Great Soldier’s face” (218). While appearing to suggest the Count’s authority and stoicism, this comparison to Napoleon actually indicates the Count’s “perplexingly contradictory” (219) nature from the outset, since Napoleon was himself a contradictory figure in his short stature yet commanding demeanor.

Two paragraphs later, Marian explains the Count’s “contradictory” nature more fully: “Fat as he is, and old as he is, his movements are astonishingly light and easy. He is as noiseless in a room as any of us women” (219). As the simile “as noiseless in a room as any of us women” suggests, the Count’s incongruousness is rooted in his feminine attributes. Marian’s use of the collective first-person pronoun “us women” situates the Count in direct opposition to women; yet the comparative “as” linguistically bridges this gender divide, connecting the Count to the feminine through his “light and easy” movements.

Marian proceeds to emphasize the Count’s femininity through two more similes: “and, more than that, with all his look of unmistakable mental firmness and power, he is as nervously sensitive as the weakest of us. He starts at chance noises as inveterately as Laura herself” (219). Here, Marian successfully undermines the Count’s Napoleonic appearance of power by not only revealing his womanly nervousness but also linking the Count with the “weakest” of Marian’s sex. This superlative, along with the following direct comparison to Laura, highlights the Count’s feminine qualities.

This passage holds the key to Marian’s complex attitude toward the Count; she is at once fascinated and threatened by him. As Marian’s description reveals, he is both alluring and dangerous, not merely because of his increasingly suspicious behavior throughout the narrative, but because he unnaturally exhibits the qualities of both sexes. Even though Marian does not explicitly identify the Count’s androgyny as the reason for her discomfort with him, the novel’s keen preoccupation with identifying unknown figures by their sex illuminates the anxiety underlying Marian’s description of the Count. For example, when Marian and Laura encounter the figure at the boathouse, the first question Laura asks is, “Was it a man, or a woman?” (263). Marian asks the same question when Laura hears a noise outside of her room: “Was it a man or a woman?” (307). Clearly, The Woman in White, as evidenced by the title itself, consistently seeks to classify characters by sex, with “male” and “female” connoting a corresponding set of traits. Yet the Count complicates those binary categories, and, in true Victorian fashion, his deviance attracts simultaneous fascination and repulsion.