360: Victorian Sexualities – Page 4

Feeding the Motherless

This image from the Trout Gallery called “Feeding the Motherless”, appears simple at first. At a glance, it looks plainly as if a well put-together woman is feeding motherless birds with the tip of a feather in a dark walled-room that also contains a table. Simple enough, right?

However, a closer reading would prove that this etching is filled with Victorian connotations, ideals and limitations. Primarily, one must address the woman’s attire. She is wearing a white dress displaying her purity and innocence, a characteristic of women in this period that our class can seemingly never escape. Her hair is pinned back with lovely white flowers and she is wearing limited make up. Right from the beginning one can assume that she is of a higher class based on her outfit. She need not go into other methods of making money (prostitution), and can instead spend her time looking around for motherless bird’s nests. The white flowers in her hair also suggest that although she is chaste and pure, she’s most likely blooming and ready to be married off.

Now, one must address this feeding action that is taking place. There are two seemingly competing ideas about what could be going on here. My initial reaction, was, hey this looks a lot Marian, and also she’s taking care of some smaller frailer creature resembling Laura. The woman appears to be very intent on the birds showing this sort of stark determination. Many other women in the other etching we saw in class display women looking off into the distance forlornly, or moaning for their lover. Rarely we see a woman physically doing something in an etching, in contrast to her normal role as the object itself. However, this image could also read the opposite. In the reading we read for class this Wednesday, the British Library discusses women’s role in the domestic sphere. The site says, “Not only was it their job to counterbalance the moral taint of the public sphere in which their husbands laboured all day, they were also preparing the next generation to carry on this way of life,” (British Library). In essence it was the woman’s role to nurture youth, and have them grow up in the ways in which society was governed. Thus this woman feeds these baby birds, and nurtures them showing her ability to thus assume this motherly role to a real human child. Her hair is blooming like her body, and she’s ready to get prego. The dark background of the photo adds to this well by promoting this woman as the object of motherhood. There’s no distractions, just this pure and fertile woman.

So this leaves me with questions. What does this say about Marian now? Although she acts through determination and vigor, can she still not escape these stereotypical gender roles? She in essence becomes the mother of Laura, and even plays a similar role to Laura’s newborn son, so does she achieve the same status of man? We had such high hopes for Marian, but it seems that the cards lie where they are. This image of this woman suggests, “Women were assumed to desire marriage because it allowed them to become mothers rather than to pursue sexual or emotional satisfaction,” (British Library). This woman depicting a motherly vibe, is more likely a more chaste way of telling the general public that she’s ready to nuptially open her legs.

The Beguiling of Men

Adolphe Lalauze’s painting the “Beguiling of Merlin” depicts a woman named Nimue reading from a book of spells and seducing Merlin.[1] This image is highly reminsicent of the poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad” because they both feature a male figure being bewitched by a beautiful, mysterious woman. In both case, the woman in question—a femme fatale—seems supernatural in nature (in the Keats poem, she may be a faery or a changeling and in the Lalauze painting she reads spells that send Merlin into a trance.[2]

The Victorian web describes the femme fatale as a mixture of “sensual, erotic but invulnerable” traits, making her alluring, dangerous, but also demure enough to avoid suspicion.[3] In the Keats poem, for example, the woman in the meads cries during their lovemaking, implying that she pretends to be an virgin (the visions the knight experiences of other duped men implies she has seduced many men before him, thus negating her virginity).[4] In the painting, Nimue exposes her neck, a disarming move that demonstrates her vulnerability. However, it also indicates her erotic power over the man she seduces. The neck is an erogenous zone, therefor the sexual overtones of this action should not be underestimated.

Furthermore, parity between the poem and painting can be seen in the shared setting. In both instances, the femme fatale has bewitched a man in the heather. The beautiful, flowering setting of the meads and later the grot obscures the darker undertones of the femme fatale narrative. The combination of lovely scenery and innocence of the lady allow her to seduce the man and entrap him forever.

“I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.”[5]

Even when the man may suspect something is amiss–as evidenced when he notices her alarmingly “wild eyes”–he still proceeds with sleeping with her.[6] The wild eyes allude to her true nature, a nature that is steeped in folklore and magic. Indeed, perhaps this is what makes her so attractive in the first place. Once again, the idea of a dangerous woman is tied directly to both the natural and the supernatural world. In this case, perhaps the knight overlooked her wild eyes due to other, less obviously dangerous, aspects of her character. Her long hair, her light footfalls, and her beauty make her irresistible. Nimue of the painting has likewise lulled Merlin into a state of bliss, to the point where he is no longer standing and instead is lounging among the flowers in the bushes.[7] The lazy angle placement of his arm and hand also indicate that he is in a trance and he seems unable to take his eyes off of Nimue. Interestingly, in the Arthurian legend, Nimue learns the bewitching spells from Merlin. By using both her beauty and her erotic magnetism, the femme fatale is able to use the man for her own gain.

[1] “The Beguiling of Merlin” ‘The Beguiling of Merlin’, Edward Burne-Jones. Lady Lever Art Gallery.

[2] “The Beguiling of Merlin”

[3] Lee, Elizabeth. “The Femme Fatale as Object.” The Victorian Web. Brown University, 1997.

[4] Keats, John. La Belle Dame Sans Merci. 1819.

[5] Keats, John.

[6] Keats, John.

[7] Burne-Jones, Edward. The Beguiling of Merlin. 1872-7. Oil on canvas. Trout Gallery, Carlisle PA.

Women, Nature, and Beauty

One theme I have been noticing during our recent studies on Victorian Sexualities is the theme of women being connected to nature. In John Keats’ poem, “La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad” the woman is described as ethereal and immersed in her natural setting. The scene is described near a lake with birds, squirrels, and harvests. Although the scene is being set up as eerie and lacking of life, the poem is still placed in the natural world immediately. One particularly striking stanza is when Keats writes, “I see a lily on thy brow,/ With anguish moist and fever-dew,/ and on the cheeks a fading rose/ Fast withereth too.” The mention of flowers and dew in this stanza is one of the many ways the narrator using aspects of the natural world to describe the beauty of the woman he is enchanted by. This portrayal of the beautiful woman as immersed in nature is also shown in the painting titled, “The Fair Dreamer.” This piece, published by the Illman brothers in the nineteenth century, depicts a young woman lounging on a tree, immersed in the shrubbery. Both the woman in the poem and the woman in the painting are portrayed as the epitome of beauty, and both are connected to the natural world. As I mentioned once in class, Sherry B. Ortner’s, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture” describes how women have been linked throughout history to nature whereas men have been connected to culture and progress. I noticed this in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” as well where the women were always somehow connected to nature whereas Frankenstein was the epitome of science and progress. I have been thinking about why this is and one theory I have come up with is that women and nature have two things in common; they are seen as mysterious and as beautiful. Man has been entranced from the beginning of time by nature and its force. In fact, most pronouns for nature are she/her/hers. Nature has also been linked to women as it has been ‘dominated’ by men, similar to the way men have ‘dominated’ society and women, in particular. As a result, in much of our literature and art, women are described as and portrayed as very close to the natural world.

Close Reading of the Fair Dreamer

http://collections.troutgallery.org/Obj18182?sid=59379&x=612537

The image that I chose is entitled the Fair Dreamer. The main subject of the image is a beautiful (fair) woman who appears to be asleep or is waking up as she is sprawled against the trunk of a willow tree. The setting is on the banks of a lake. There is also a parasol in one corner of the image and a rowboat in the other. What intrigues me the most about this image is the posture of the woman. She is stretching but in a way that looks exposing or inviting. Her arms are stretched above her with one lying across her forehead, her legs aren’t crossed, and her eyes are closed, possibly hinting that the body language of the woman could be interpreted as one of relaxation, fragility, or sexual desire. Her parasol, a tool that is used to shade/protect one’s self, also appears to have been tossed aside, which can imply that she is willingly giving off a sign of acceptance.

All of this reminded me of the readings that we covered in class that were about the female as a sexualized object. Elizabeth Lee’s article on the Victorian Web, the Femme Fatale as Object, discusses the fascination with the female body that many male artists of the Victorian Era felt. According to Jan Marsh, the femme fatale, a seductive and dangerous woman, became idealized to the point where they were “rendered decorative, depersonalized; they [became] passive figures rather than characters in a story or drama… women [were] reduced to an aesthetic arrangement of sexual parts, for male fantasies” (Lee 1). In short, male artists feared the “sexual destructiveness” of the femme fatale and thus began to view their female human models as perfect, sexually attractive objects with a lack of a real identity.

I think that Elizabeth Lee’s article can be connected to the Fair Dreamer because the women of this image is similar to a female model that a male artist from the Victorian Era would desire. As mentioned before, the body language of the woman is one of passiveness and sexuality. Though she is fully clothed, she is still beautiful with an inviting posture and a tranquil/gentle expression on her face. She is also asleep in nature, which further romanticizes the image and shows that she can be an example of a “femme fatale, whose dangerous sexual powers artists felt the need to reign in somehow to make her more palatable to Victorian audiences” (Lee 1). By making her asleep, the artist has successfully quelled her “threatening” side.

Close Reading of Fannie’s Pets

From the archives of Dickinson’s Trout gallery (http://www.troutgallery.org/)

In the image called Fannie’s Pets there is a fair young woman, dressed in white (of course!) surrounded by animals of the forest. These animals are charged with symbolism in the painting which contribute to the overall message or themes being portrayed to the audience, who at the time was Victorian society. Rabbits symbolize fertility and procreation, doves represent purity and religion (most likely Christianity or Catholicism), chickens are symbolic of fertility and motherhood, and the rest of the animals seem to also have to do with sexual desire and reproduction, especially the Peacock. And with all these animals that are vulnerable and easily preyed upon (including this new Woman in White), there is a man lurking in the forest, acting as predator to the woman who would be his sexual prey. The forest itself is symbolic of a dark, creepy, mysterious space where evil and predators lurk. The man is crouched in a dark, shady corner watching amazed as he sees this woman, ultimately a Snow White figure who seems to be luring him in with her purity and youthful fertility to bear more lurking sons in the future.

Here, the image signifies that on the surface, this woman looks like the ideal Victorian “Angel in the House” as Kathryn Hughes’ article Gender Roles in the Nineteenth Century puts it. However, the symbolism of the animals around her show her in a different light, as a sexual creature who has her own desires and sexual identity even though she is yet another Woman in White to add to our ever-growing collection and is ultimately the same as Laura Fairlie or the woman in the painting Health and Beauty, or insert-other-woman-in-white. This connects to Christina Rosetti’s poem in which she says these women being painted are “The same one meaning, neither more or less” and ultimately stripped of their individual identities because their purpose is to serve as sustenance and carnal pleasure for men. There is an under-layer of fetishizing the body of women as part of sexual fantasy such as Walter Hartright’s portrait of Laura that he keeps with him all the time or the imagery from Rosetti’s poem of a man who “feeds upon her face by day and night” as she is a feast for his eyes. In Fannie’s Pets, this woman serves as a feast for her predator’s eyes and most likely mouth as well.

Appearance also plays a major role in how women were perceived. In Judith Flander’s article Prostitution, “women who dressed or behaved in ways men considered inappropriate were deemed to be whores.” So, if their skirts were held up “just a little higher” than respectable women, they would be considered “streetwalkers” or prostitutes which is such an arbitrary and vague ( and all around ridiculously wrong) way of labeling women. Tying it back to Fannie and her pets, she is attracting a suitor because she is not defying the male patriarchal standards of what a woman should be (which is chaste, a virgin, and smart but not smarter than a man) at least with her physical appearance. She is dressed modestly and fully covered and dressed in the fairest of whites to represent her youth, fertility, and virginity.

The Siren’s Call: Power Struggles between Genders

When discussing “In an Artist’s Studio” by Christina Rossetti, we made a point of mentioning the fact that while the muse “fills [the] dream[s]” of the artist (14), clearly his obsession and in many if not all of his waking thoughts, the artist too “feeds upon her face” (9). He is always thinking about her, gaining some sort of sustenance from her even as he is in her thrall – the power balance between genders is unsteady, more of a push-pull than one-way street as one might have expected.

The poem complicates the power struggle between genders, in a similar way to the siren in Supernatural episode 4×14, Sex and Violence. The siren appears to four different men as four different women, and to each of them she was “Perfect, and everything that they wanted” (source).

Once she had them in her thrall – similar to how in thrall the artist was – the siren has become their most important person, and asks them to kill the previously most important person in their life. For the first three men, it was their wives; for the fourth man, his sick and dependent mother; for Dean and Sam, it was each other. The promise each time is that once this other person is dead, the siren can “be with you, forever” (source).

By the time the siren has appeared to tempt Dean, however, she has taken the form of a man rather than a woman – see clip of the confrontation below:[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUreiz4uJKY”]

The siren is seeking to be loved – the subject of an obsessive, destructive love, that will give them the most power over a man, the power to destroy his entire life. This is a similar effect that the female muse has on the male artist in Christina Rossetti’s poem, but in the former, the man has no control and can only destroy; in the latter, the artist has some control – how to represent the female muse – and can use his obsession to create.

Both femme fatales – the muse and the siren – complicate the power struggle between genders. The poem emphasizes that the struggle is not one way, that both the man and the woman can hold power; the episode reveals that the threat of overwhelming power can come from more that one gender. Rather than men being overwhelmed only by romantic or sexual desire (based on the normative sexuality of the Victorian era (at least on the surface), assuming that threat can only come from women), suddenly a man’s weakness can be more personal, familial rather than erotic; suddenly, the overwhelming power can come from a sexual female or a male relative – men’s weaknesses have doubled, men and women rather than just women. But in today’s world, when gender roles, gender itself and sexuality are so much more fluid, do these worries about gendered power struggles still hold power? Or have they become obsolete, in some ways?

Laura, Anne, and the Fragility of Ill Girls

Femininity is an interesting thing in Collins’ Woman in White. In my previous post, I talked about how it seemed like Laura was the perfect candidate for a traumatic incident (I so wish I had been wrong for her sake) because her specific brand of femininity allowed for her to be a projection of anyone’s future. In my opinion, Laura’s fragility is an extension of her expression of femininity, which definitely plays into the familiar trope of “Ill Girls.”

Coming out of the prominently Victorian notion that women are delicate creatures, combined with the rise of constrictive corsets, illnesses that don’t actually exist (like hysteria) got you sent to an asylum or relegated to a ‘fainting couch’. In terms of writing, this idea of femininity became a trope in which slight, beautiful women with alabaster skin became sick in novels with things like “consumption” or an unnamable illness that made her eyes brighter and skin paler, only pronouncing her beauty more. This is the idea of the delicate “Ill Girl” – the innocently fictional young woman who needs attention and reassurance that she is admired.

Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick both embody types of the Ill Girl, one more desirable than the other. Anne resembles more of a similarly ill character, Sweeney Todd’s wife, Lucy, who goes mad and becomes homeless and unrecognizable after she is publicly raped. Anne, after escaping from the asylum she was imprisoned in, seems sickly and pale to Walter as well as mad. She offers cryptic messages (like Lucy), and Walter notices that she may have been beautiful before her madness (also like Lucy). Her illness is not something to pine after, she is a harrowed shell of her former self, and her mutable identity is taken advantage of by Sir Glyde and Fosco who fake Laura’s death. This aversion to the Ill Girl trope makes Laura’s experience with it all the more visible. She is defined by her madness, not her fragility or femininity – she is the trope namer of the “Woman in White”.

Living in a tiny apartment together, Laura is tended by Marian and Walter, who despair about how ill and unlike herself she is. When she is worried that she’s a burden and not at all contributing, Walter assures her that he could sell her paintings (even though he only keeps them himself). She is portrayed as a tragic character, her beauty and frailty expounded upon with her post-asylum sickness, but like the sweet, tragic Ophelia from Hamlet, she remains static and one-dimensional. She has the opportunity to rise above her circumstances, but is kept in place as a porcelain doll to take care of. She is so close to crumbling into insanity like Ophelia does – only to be a reason for Walter to feel heroic. Unsurprisingly, she only regains her health when Walter and Marian’s circumstances start to improve, and she is almost back to her old when Walter and Laura finally marry.

Sources:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VictorianNovelDisease

http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/hamlet/opheliacharacter.html

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheOphelia

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IllGirl

Laura, a moment of strength?

“They had passed the hill above the churchyard, when Lady Glyde insisted on turning back to look her last at her mother’s grave. Ms. Halcombe tried to shake her resolution; but, in this one instance, tried in vain. She was immovable. Her dull eyes lit with a sudden fire and flashed through the veil hungover them. Her wasted fingers strengthened, moment by moment, round the friendly arm that they had held so listlessly until this time. I believe in my soul that the Hand of God was pointing there way back to them, and that the most innocent and most afflicted of His creatures was chosen and that dread moment, to see it.” (430)

What immediately shocked me about this paragraph was that Laura has this fleeting moment of extreme determination, that we rarely see in her, especially after her encounters in the asylum and those two awful men. She was “immovable” showing strength. Her eyes “lit with a sudden fire”, flashing through her veil, breaking free of the erasure that Percival and Fosco bestowed on her, even if only for a moment. These “wasted fingers” came alive to her own disposition, breaking free of their listlessness. This is a moment where we see Laura acting on her accord which she doesn’t usually do, but she still has the aura of a daze around her.

Another note is her shocking likeness to Anne, once again. Not only is she hanging around the grave of her mother, in a misty night, but she is followed by a caretaker (Marian resembling Mrs. Clements). And there they find Walter. The last sentence of this passage also proves interesting because it seems as if the hand of god has lumped these two unfortunate souls together of Anne and Laura. Although I’m not sure who this “them” is that god is pointing too. Maybe it’s the grave? It’s also interesting to think about how Anne and Laura are seen as the most innocent, but also the most afflicted, so what does this say? Are the innocent always characterized as the most manipulated? Usually, that’s the case.

Her Fingers Had a Restless Habit…

“Her fingers had a restless habit, which I remembered in her as a child, of always playing with the first thing that came to hand, whenever anyone was talking to her. On this occasion they wandered to the album, and toyed absently about the margin of the little water-colour drawing. The expression of melancholy deepened on her face,” (142).

I find it very interesting to note that as soon as we discuss Freud’s ideas about repressed trauma through repetitive actions, we get this passage with Laura’s fiddling fingers. But before I get into that, let’s just unpack this a little bit. The word choice in the first sentence proves that it’s not Laura that has a restless habit, but her fingers. In this way, although the audience knows that they are a part of her own body and actions, they are somewhat disconnected. In fact, they almost serve a purpose to distract her from what’s going on around her and more specifically the conversations that she has. Freud would highlight upon the idea that she has been doing this since childhood, and would see this repetitive action as a symptom of some repressed trauma. What that trauma could be, I don’t know, but it’s definitely something that she would have to constantly distract herself from.

However, this repetitive act is a little different because of the object she’s drawn to and what that represents. She moves to the little album of water color drawings that Mr. Hartwright had left, and implicitly we know what’s going on. She misses and loves him. And the fact that her face “deepened with melancholy” proves that. She’s not absentmindedly playing with the thing like she usually does, she’s overwhelmed with emotion.

Finally, Laura consistently gets characterized with child-like associations. Her innocence and pureness radiates throughout the novel, and then with the words in this passage like “restless”, “toyed”, and “playing” it sends the message home.

Because of Laura’s need to distract herself, and her common associations with being a child, it proves that “pure” women need both of these things: to keep themselves busy while also being protected. The Women in White does a good job at implicitly showing this sentiment throughout the novel.

Happiness in the Darkest of Times

The door opened; and Laura came in alone. So she had entered the breakfast-room at Limmeridge House, on the morning when we parted. Slowly and falteringly, in sorrow and in hesitation, she had once approached me. Now, she came with the haste of happiness in her feet, with the light of happiness radiant in her face. Of their own accord, those dear arms clasped themselves round me; of their own accord, the sweet lips came to mine. ‘My darling!’ she whispered, ‘we may own we love each other, now?’ Her head nestled with a tender contentedness on my bosom. ‘Oh,’ she said, innocently, ‘I am so happy at last!’ (561)

Since Walter’s first departure, Laura has been through hell, to say the least. Following her marriage to the lying and self-righteous Sir Percival Glyde, Laura’s quality of life steadily declines. A quick recap: after leaving Limmeridge House and coming back from Italy, she complies with her abusive husband (who has taken her fortune) only to be kicked out of Blackwater Park. On her way back, she is drugged and abducted by the Count and put into a mental institution. Her identity is given to Anne Catherick, who is then announced dead. Laura escapes from the mental institution with Marian’s help, but then lives a life on the run. She develops PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) from her time in the mental institution and spends months recovering from it. Gradually she returns to her old self, and then, in the passage above, she gets engaged to Walter. Now, after everything she’s been through, she’s finally happy.

When she first said goodbye to Walter, she had everything an upperclass Victorian woman should have. She lived in a large house with servants, she had a suitor, she had an inheritance, and she was talented and beautiful. Why wasn’t she happy before, then? And now that she’s living in poverty and has been through absolute hell, she’s happy?

Her statement to Walter when she first said goodbye to him closely resembles what she says to Walter above: “‘Oh!’ she said, innocently, ‘how could I let you go, after we have passed so many happy days together!'” (126). Collins uses the word ‘innocently’ in both passages, despite everything that Laura has now been through. When Laura was once “strangely pale and strangely quiet,” her face now radiates with happiness (125).

I think this passage ties back to the Victorian views on class and social constructs. When she was wealthy, Laura was expected to marry someone of a high stature, like Sir Percival. It was impractical for her to be in love with a lowly drawing-master such as Walter, because a woman of her status would never marry anyone so beneath her. However, she never wanted to marry Percival, and she was never happy when she was married to him. Now that her fortune is lost, she is free to marry whoever she pleases, regardless of societal status. Thus, in this regard, the lack of social constructs upon the lower class allows Laura more freedom, which is all she ever really wanted. In turn, she’s happier than she was at the beginning of the novel, despite the hell she’s been through.