Category: 360: Victorian Sexualities

She cried, “Laura,” up the garden,

“Did you miss me?

Come and kiss me.

Never mind my bruises,

Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices

Squeez’d from goblin fruits for you,

Goblin pulp and goblin dew.

Eat me, drink me, love me;

Laura, make much of me;

For your sake I have braved the glen

And had to do with goblin merchant men.”

“Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti, lines 468-474

    In Christina Rossetti’s poem, “Goblin Market,” she interprets sisterly love. On the surface, the poem tells the story of Lizzie and Laura’s strong bond of sisterhood and how it conquers anything. However, just below lies the sexual language shared between the two characters. After getting covered in fruit juice, Lizzie runs home and begs her sister to drink it off of her body so that she may hopefully be satisfied. “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / eat me, drink me, love me” (Rossetti 468, 71). Here, Lizzie lists all the different ways Lizzie could attain the fruit juice from off of her body. These action verbs are very demanding, giving off a sense of desperation. Lizzie, desperate to save her sister’s well-being, demands that Laura drink. This idea that Lizzie would do anything for her sister is what children are supposed to learn from this poem. However, the language Rossetti uses is overtly sexual. Because of this sexual language, readers get the idea that perhaps Lizzie and Laura cross the line between sisters and lovers. Due to earlier language—as well as the subject matter of the poem in general—about forbidden fruit, a famous tale from the Bible comes to mind. These Biblical themes include sin, and, if lovers, Lizzie and Laura would be breaking multiple rules. Incest, pre-marital sex, as well as sex with the same gender are all considered sins. This theme of blurring the line between sisters and lovers is common among Victorian literature. Perhaps this says something about this particular time period’s desires, repressed so much by popular culture that they think about taking them out on other close members of their lives.

“If there ever comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known.” Matthew Arnold

The image displayed above is a snapshot of a larger painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti that illustrates a bride and her four bridesmaids.  The painting is probably most famous for its exoticism, but for the purpose of this post I will be focusing on the two women above.

Throughout many of our texts, sisterly bonds prove to be very powerful and withstanding of all outside pressures and evils.  Our first duo, Laura and Marian, are so intimate that Carolyn Dever writes, “the union of Laura and Marian is […] a union based on emotional depth, mutual trust, and the presumption of permanence” (114).  In spite of Sir Percival’s plot to embezzle their family fortune and install Laura into an asylum in lieu of her phenotypical twin, the sisterly bond between these two half sisters maintains its resilience throughout the Woman in White.

More recently in the course we’ve been introduced to a new couple of sisters, Laura and Lizzie.  In her poem “Goblin Market,” Christina G. Rossetti describes the two, “like two pigeons in one nest” and “two blossoms on one stem” (478, 6, 2-5).  And in the face of “the haunted glen,/The wicked, quaint fruit merchant men” the women survive a near death.  And in its sum, the last few lines of the poem praise the strength of sisterly bonds: “‘For there is no friend like a sister/In calm or stormy weather;/To cheer one on the tedious way,/ to fetch one if one goes astray,/To lift one if one totters down,/To strengthen whilst one stands’ (488, 26, 21-26).

If we return to the painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the bride and her closest bridesmaid, most likely her sister, seem like a particularly potent pair.  There is a clear sexual tension present and both the women make bold eye contact with the gaze of their audience, suggesting their fearlessness.  But if you examine the two women separately:

their individual expressions maintain the innocence and purity of the ideal Victorian woman seen in many of the paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite artists.

And so it appears that the company of another woman or a group of women is what gives them their power.  This is something that Matthew Arnold clearly understood and I think it is also an underlying fear, perhaps, of other Victorian authors and painters.  For both pairs, Laura and Marian and Laura and Lizzie, possess a virtue, competence, and strength that suggests “a force such as the world has never known.”

 

 

The femme fatale is beautiful and powerful—and constantly oppressed. She is viewed as dangerous and because of this is tamed in a variety of ways. As Laura Mulvey argues in her article “The Femme Fatale as an Object”, one of the many ways in which the femme fatale is weakened is through representation in art. She explains that the painted woman has been reduced to “a type of formula of rotund pieces of flesh, hair and facial features. They weren’t portraying individual women, but an idealized composite of recognizable parts”(citation). This argument comes to life in a handful of Victorian works, a good example being Manet’s famous “Olympia”.

This piece is one of many works of art that depict the woman as an object to gaze at and admire. Like Mulvey argues, she is not an individual but an idealized woman. Her tiny feet, daintily covered genital area, stylized breasts, and outward gaze are all details that turn our subject into an object of male pleasure as opposed to a powerful sexual figure. Although the powerful sexual woman in art is elusive, she does in fact exist. Moreau’s “The Apparition” is a perfect example of the unrestrained femme fatale.

Unlike the vulnerable naked figure in the previous piece (and so many others), this woman is not vulnerable in the slightest. She is both naked and powerful—using her own sexuality to her advantage. This piece tells the story of Salome (the woman) who danced so beautifully and sensuously she was granted anything she desired, which happened to be the head of John the Baptist. Salome is sensuous, powerful, and quite obviously dangerous. She is the femme fatale unchecked.

Salome is the free femme fatale for two main reasons. First of all, she stands out. The entire painting focuses on her and her victim. In artworks that repress the femme fatale, the woman is objectified and stripped of her own identity. Salome’s possession of her own name is the possession of her own identity. She is not another woman to look at and gaze upon but a woman to revere. But you couldn’t gaze into her eyes even if you desired to. The objectified femme fatale cannot consent to give her gaze to others for it is always on display at the leisure of the man. But Salome is turned away, almost as if she is dismissing those trying to gaze upon her.

Salome is the reason why the femme fatale is oppressed, restricted and objectified. She wields the unchecked sexual power than men are so afraid of…and maybe this fear is for good reason. Who knows whose head she’ll want next.

In his essay Why Are Women Redundant? William Rathbone Gregg discusses what he saw as a great problem facing the Victorian age: Single women.  Single, working women were not fulfilling their womanly duties, (to be married to men and care for the home and children) and instead were wasting their lives working and remaining unmarried.

“There are hundreds of thousands of women…who, in place of completing, sweetening, and embellishing the existence of others, are compelled to lead an independent and incomplete existence of their own….In great cities, thousands, again, are toiling in the ill-paid métier of sempstresses and needlewomen, wasting life and soul, gathering the scantiest subsistence, and surrounded by the most overpowering and insidious temptations” (Gregg, 158).

This particular quote from Gregg’s article brought to mind the poem The Lady of Shalott by Lord Alfred Tennyson, specifically the first stanza of the second section of the poem.

In the first stanza we are told that, “No time hath she to sport and play:/ A charmed web she weaves alway.” (II. 37-38). Here we are introduced to the Lady of Shalott in a similar manner to how Gregg describes the single women; She is alone (single) and spends her days working with no time to  do anything else for her own enjoyment and with little in return. Similar to these single, working women, the Lady of Shalott is also surrounded by temptation. “A curse is on her, if she stay/ Her weaving, either night or day,/ To look down to Camelot” (II. 39-41). I believe that this line takes what Gregg is saying a step further, and that while the temptations are present, it is indulging in them that would lead to a single woman’s end, (and similarly the Lady of Shalott). Additionally, because later in the poem the Lady of Shalott does give into temptation, single women cannot be trusted to have the strength of will to stay away from such dangerous temptations.

What I interpreted the repercussions to be for giving into these temptations is that the woman becomes unmarriable, and just like the Lady of Shalott they are doomed to die alone as a single woman. In a way, this poem can be viewed as a warning to single women, that they must marry to avoid this terrible fate the Lady of Shalott was left to.

   

 

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?

Having viewed the painting of The Lady of Shalott by John William Waterhouse before reading the poem that it was originally inspired by, I already felt struck by this incredible painting. After examining both the poem and the painting, it is evident to see how both poet and artist reject traditional Victorian ideals, while even furthering the ideologies of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. There is a constant struggle in the poem between the indoor and outdoor life, which reflects these difficulties for women in Victorian society. In Part I, it is explained that she is inside “Four gray walls, and four gray towers, / Overlook a space of flowers.” The gray color of the enclosing walls paired with an removed view of outside emphasize the contrast between the dull, trapped life of many 18^th century women who were only ever considered a domestic figure. When the Lady of Shalott ventures to explore Camelot and the outside world, this is what leads to her fatal demise. Her attempt to traverse societal lines and explore what a woman should not explore is the ultimate deviation from the rigidity of Victorian society.

 

The poem, though, is not what intrigues me most. I found Waterhouse’s artistic interpretation of this poem intriguing in what he decided to include or not include. He incorporates the gray walls as a backdrop of the painting, an element that seems to be completely forgotten about. The stairs and the walls are also the only geometrically aligned elements to the painting, which reflects the rigidity of the life she has literally turned her back on. Waterhouse includes the lilies in the pond as well as the “willowy hills and fields among,” making sure to include the natural details that so characterize a majority of this poem. He also includes the tapestry, which was a major focus during the duration of her “entrapment” until this escape. He adds three candles, in which the last of them is about to be blown out, reflecting her soon impending death.

 

As we have in detail discussed this idea of the femme fatale, this painting seems to abandon this idea altogether, portraying the focal female in the virginal white, reflecting what is in the poem, but also through her physical appearance, which is not as detailed in the text. Waterhouse’s choice to depict her with long red hair, red lips, and an open chest with a tilted back head reflects her repression, and more so than just her domestic repression but the sexual repression that was so prevalent during this time. Over everything, though, it is her facial expression, which seems to be so distinctive to Waterhouse’s work over the rest. Her sorrowful, mourning countenance so clearly depicts a pained woman, on her final journey to end her suffering. However, in evaluating how she might represent the whole of Victorian female society, I think back to “In an Artist’s Studio” by Christina Rossetti and I wonder if, for the male audience, “she fills his dream,” or the opposite, because of her expression and the fact that she is not looking outwards. Did this painting intend on a sort of exposition into the repression of women and their depictions in art as well? In my opinion, I would say yes. Perhaps this is why I found it to be such an incredible piece.

One significant aspect of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” that sets it apart from other Victorian poems we have read so far is its portrayal of a functional relationship between two women. “The Blessed Damozel,” “The Lady of Shalott,” “My Last Duchess,” and “In an Artist’s Studio” have all explicitly stated the genders of the two main participants in the action of the poems; invariably, they have featured a man and a woman. In most of these poems, with the possible exception of “In an Artist’s Studio,” the man and woman are involved in a heterosexual romantic relationship. In contrast, “Goblin Market” portrays two sisters living and working together in harmony.

While the relationship between Laura and Lizzie is established as sisterly, there are several instances during the poem in which Rossetti hints at a deeper connection between the two women. For example, early on in the poem, Laura and Lizzie “[crouch] close together… / With clasping arms and cautioning lips / With tingling cheeks and finger tips.” Later, as the sisters fall asleep, the poem describes them as “Cheek to cheek and breast to breast / Locked together in one nest.” This language redefines the relationship between the sisters as something more romantic and intimate.

Perhaps the most convincing indication of the sisters’ relationship as romantic partners is seen in the final stanza of the poem. While the lines “when both were wives / With children of their own” seem to indicate a very traditional ending to the poem in which both women marry into separate families, the conspicuous lack of any mention of their husbands can suggest another conclusion. Instead, it can be interpreted that the women act as wives to each other, forming an unconventional family unit between themselves and their children. This reimagined family, while atypical for the Victorian era, reflects an arguably stronger and more successful romantic relationship than the other poems we have read so far. Instead of the unequal power dynamic seen in “My Last Duchess” and “In an Artist’s Studio,” or the yearned-for but unrealistic relationships of “The Lady of Shalott” and “The Blessed Damozel,” Laura and Lizzie are a functional couple, living and raising children in mutual admiration and respect.

 

During the Victorian Era, women were considered unnecessary. Many women were not valued and thought of in a negative way. This concept is depicted in William Greg’s article “Why are Women Redundant?” At one point he states, “there is an enormous and increasing number of single women in the nation, a number quite disproportionate and quite abnormal” (158) and “[women] who remain unmarried constitute the problem to be solved, the evil and anomaly to be cured” (159). These ideas reflect the overall ideas of Victorian societies. Many believed married women were responsible for domestic duties, and had no real responsibilities other than these. Unmarried women, on the other hand, were viewed as burdens, as people who did nothing other than get in the way and cause harm.

Many of these ideas were portrayed through Victorian art and literature. Eugene Gaujean depicts the notion that certain women can be nuisances in the print “The Two Friends”. In the print there is a cat sitting on a chair next to reading glasses, knitting materials, and a crumpled newspaper. Cats are often considered feminine pets and associated with females, much like the concepts of knitting and reading. These all are reflective of feminine, domestic activities. If the cat represents the common Victorian women at the time, it shows how women were restricted to common household activities, many of which were scoffed at. However, if the cat were to represent unmarried Victorian women, it shows how they were often times in the way of others. The cat is sitting directly in the middle of the chair where typically a woman would be sitting. Not only does the cat replace the woman in this sense, but is also shown prohibiting work from being accomplished. Woman, often times, were considered inconvenient, much like the cat in the print.

Upon viewing Gaujean’s etching, “The Apparition” the Victorian Femme Fatale comes to mind. The sensual depiction of Solome is one that can be paralleled to the Femme Fatale as described by Jan Marsh[1], “She allows that artists gazed, fascinated but repelled, at women of a curious frigidity, cold but sensual, erotic but invulnerable.” Solome’s “cold but sensual” stance and searing gaze at St. John is one that fully embodies the Femme Fatale, as she is depicted standing erect with her hands reaching out to posses St. John. Additionally, Solome is portrayed as “invulnerable” because she holds the most power out of everyone for having just summoned St. John’s head on a platter. However, Solome defies Marsh’s “boiled down” Femme Fatale. Discussed by Marsh, “Women are rendered decorative, depersonalized; they become passive figures rather than characters in a story or drama… Women are reduced to an aesthetic arrangement of sexual parts, for male fantasies.” The depiction and story behind Solome is not one consistent to Marsh’s definition. Solome’s dance that she performs in order to be granted a wish, St. John’s head, not only fulfills the male desire but it also fulfills her own desire. Yes, Solome is sexually objectified as she uses a dance to coax her stepfather, but she does it knowingly so. Her sexual objectification is not used solely to fulfill “male fantasies” but fulfills her own desires as well. Additionally, Solome’s intense gaze at St. John, rather than at the viewers observing the etching, protects her own authority over her own self and body.

The story behind the etching displays a kind of sexual advocacy not seen before. The fact that Solome utilizes societal objectification of her body in her favor is very interesting. I believe that this image could have really inspired Victorian women to cultivate their sexual influence over the patriarchy.

 

 

[1] http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/object.html