Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.
It could be argued that she used her character Maggie Tulliver, The Mill on the Floss, as a way of revealing the frustrations she felt at the oppression of her sex and also the belief that if a woman was clever she must possess ‘a man’s brain’. Maggie was portrayed as passionate, wayward and wholly discontented with the duties of the domestic hearth and the feminine activities of embroidery and piano playing. Eliot epitomises male attitudes towards women when she has her character Stephen saying:
I should like to know what is the proper function of women if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.
Eliot’s female character Dorothea Brooke, in her next novel Middlemarch, unlike Maggie, is the epitome of sweet passivity and tireless, selfless emotional support of her egotistical husband. The role of the Victorian woman was crucial, providing that she was dutiful, adoring and did not demonstrate any disturbing desire for independence. Notably, Eliot while remaining faithful to the man she loved was ostracised by her family for living with him not being married to him in many eyes this made her a ‘fallen woman’; Maggie in The Mill on the Floss was also ostracised by her family for running away with Stephen albeit unintentionally on her part making her a ‘fallen woman’ also. Thus, some people would argue that Maggie is almost autobiographical of Eliot and Dorothea is what society and her family wanted and expected Eliot to be.
The home and family were central to Victorian life, and at the centre of this was the pure and faithful wife, especially in middle-class homes. It was believed that women should not be permitted to participate in the public sphere of city life if they were to remain respectable. In order to avoid corruption by the transgressive values of prostitutes, or other vulnerable working-women, they should remain within the safety of their own homes.
The desire for respectability, purity and innocence manifested itself in the Victorian invention of the white wedding, white being the symbol of virginity and associated with the robes of The Virgin Mary and angels who were extremely important in the lives of these very religious people; the desire for faithfulness showing itself in the wedding vow ‘To love, honour and obey him’ not often used today. It was also notable that upon becoming betrothed or marrying any property or possessions, present or future, a woman owned through inheritance or any other means were transferred to her husband, whether they were together or not, in fact the woman herself became her husband’s property. It could be argued that women were confined to the home in this way because the natural way of inheritance was through the male line, and by treating women in this way a man could guarantee that his son was his son. This was, however, a very hypocritical stance that men took as many of them had mistresses and or visited prostitutes regularly. If, therefore, a wife left her husband because of his indiscretions she left with nothing and had no rights to her children, unless the child was illegitimate, or anything else; she could divorce her husband if she could prove not only infidelity but also desertion, cruelty, incest, rape, sodomy or bestiality.
These mistresses, unfaithful wives and prostitutes or, ‘fallen women’, were also a source of constant fascination to the Victorians and featured heavily in Pre-Raphaelite works and contemporary fiction. In the art and literature these women are almost always seen as a symbol of innocent suffering and treated with compassion and understanding. Charles Dickens, who set up a home for reformed prostitutes, wrote movingly about prostitutes in several of his novels, for example, Nancy in Oliver Twist and Little Emily in David Copperfield. Arguably the most famous of these literary fallen women is Tess of the D’Urbevilles who, like Mrs Gaskill’s Ruth before her, caused a public outcry; the public felt that Hardy had gone too far with the realism in his novel. It is interesting to note that Lizzie Siddall, one of the first girls to model for the Pre-Raphaelites had an ancestry not dissimilar to Tess; Lizzie was discovered working in the back room of a milliners shop in Leicester Square but her ancestry was that of a long line of craftsmen in South Yorkshire, and according to Lizzie’s niece her grandfather should have inherited Hope Hall, Sheffield. A tradition asserted that the Siddall’s were entitled to a coat of arms and other attributes of the landed gentry. Lizzie eventually married Rossetti in 1860, but was by this time seriously ill and he was leading the life of a free and easy man, Lizzie committed suicide with laudanum in 1862 leaving Rossetti grieving deeply and blaming himself for her death.
Many of the other girls that the Brotherhood asked to sit, as models, were from even more humble backgrounds some were in fact fallen women. Lizzie’s background was humble but that of Holman Hunt’s girlfriend Annie Miller was even more so, she was discovered living with her uncle and aunt behind a public house in Cross Keys Court. Hunt claimed to have been so moved by Dickens’ character Little Emily in David Copperfield that he set about finding a suitable area to create a painting on this subject and found Annie who at that time was a girl of easy virtue.
Hunt used Annie to model for his painting ‘The Awakening Conscience’ which caused a public outcry when it was exhibited for the first time in 1853 because of its taboo subject matter, prostitution. The painting shows a girl turned resolutely away from her lover who is trying in vain to capture her attention and coax her back into his embrace. A contemporary critic spoke of the girl’s ‘provocative state of undress’ and when the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy visitors were shocked by the clear moral implications of the domestic scene. At the time Annie was modelling for this painting Hunt was teaching her to read and write, this was symbolised in the painting by the book on the table, which has since been identified as ‘The Origin and Progress of the Art of Writing’. The ray of light falling across the carpet highlights the tangled embroidery threads that symbolise the girl’s entrapment in her situation, as does the convulvulus, otherwise known as bindweed, in a plant pot on the piano. The light also symbolises a religious revelation during which the girl’s conscience, after lying dormant for a long time, has been touched and her desire to escape from the situation is evident.
A mirror behind the girl shows that she is staring out of the window gazing at the spectacle of nature outside which, to her, symbolises an escape from her current predicament and a hope to return to lost innocence. The unmarried status of the girl is made immediately obvious by the lack of a wedding ring on her left hand; the fact that the man’s top hat and gloves are on the table suggests that he will be leaving soon. This is clearly not his home but has been set up for his mistress, Hunt went out of his way to find an appropriate room for the setting of this painting and found one in an area notorious for such arrangements St. John’s Wood. This aspect of the painting is one that we would not notice when looking at it, over a hundred years later, but the newness of the furniture and what that symbolised was obvious to the Victorian public.
Other symbolic aspects of this painting are the cat which is playing with its captive bird under the table, a reminder of the man’s cavalier attitude towards the woman, and the cast off glove which is a reminder of the fate of a mistress once youth and beauty begin to fade; this fate being to be thrown out onto the streets and becoming a prostitute in order to survive while the man replaces her in his love nest with a younger woman. Another very subtle reference to this fate is the semi-clad female trapped under a bell jar on the piano clutching time in her arms. The sheet music on the floor is a tribute to Hunt’s friend, Edward Lear, who had set to music the words of Tennyson’s ‘Tears, idle tears’ from the poem The Princess they read:
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
The girl’s expression upon closer inspection is that of someone who is close to tears and perhaps thinking of happier times that have long since past. Hunt made a further hint at the solution of chastity, which is shown by the figures of Chastity and Cupid on the clock. At the time he painted The Awakening Conscience Hunt was interested in placing additional symbolism on the frame of his painting, on this one he had inscribed the verse from Proverbs which had initially inspired the painting “As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart”. He also designed marigolds as symbols of sorrow and bells of warning around the frame and places a star at the top to represent ‘the still voice’ of spiritual reawakening. Hunt was a deeply religious man, and his persistence at creating art with subjects of moral controversy, such as prostitution and adultery, earned him the nickname of the ‘High Priest’.
The painting’s stark realism was there for all to see and, unlike some of the literature that was around which touched upon these subjects but withdrew from being to graphic, could not be avoided by the viewing public. The literary prostitutes were often characters who only appeared in the background, for example Esther in Mary Barton, and were portrayed as women who had caused their own downfall and were unwilling or unable to improve their lot. It could be argued that Dickens’ Nancy in Oliver Twist also had an awakening of the conscience when she meets with Mr Brownlow and Rose Maylie to tell them what she knew of Noah Claypole; her sense of being trapped in the situation is accentuated when she says, “Nothing sir. You can do nothing to help me. I am past all hope, indeed.” Thus that same sense of helplessness symbolised by the tangled embroidery threads in The Awakening Conscience is communicated to the reader in prose.
Art was used to show the consequences of stepping outside of the accepted boundaries of society, a triptych painted by Egg portrays the fate of an unfaithful wife, in the first painting she is shown pleading for mercy, while her children look on, after her husband has discovered her adultery; the second, shows the children left alone after the death of their father gazing at the moon and thinking of their mother, depicts events some five years later; the third shows the unfaithful wife alone, destitute and homeless, also staring at the moon clutching her new child to her. Immorality of this sort was a major concern to the Victorians as more and more people moved into towns from the country, and each town developed its own area like St. John’s Wood.
The people in the towns had a romantic view of the countryside and rural people were frequently depicted as poor but happy. Ironically they were also depicted as being plump and well fed with ruddy complexions working hard at all ages, many artists depicted the father and his young son returning home after hours of hard labour in the fields but still appearing perfectly cheerful about it. It was people like Hardy who provided a more realistic account of rural poverty and the exploitation of the poor in his novels such as Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The winter scene portrayed by Hardy when Tess is digging up turnips is written with such realism the reader wants nothing more than to sit near the warmest fire and remain there, he describes it thus:
They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the forlorn aspect they bore in the landscape, not thinking of the justice or injustice of their lot. Even in such a position as theirs it was possible to exist in a dream. In the afternoon the rain came on again, and Marian said that they need not work any more. But if they did not work they would not be paid; so they worked on. It was so high a situation, this field, that the rain had no occasion to fall, but raced along horizontally upon the yelling wind, sticking into them like glass splinters till they were wet through.
The middle-class audience of this book was horrified at its realism; they did not want to have to think about anything other than their comfortable work free lives. It is interesting to note that the nouveau riche entrepreneurs of the North, who had probably at some time had similar experiences to Tess, despised the aristocracy for not working and in order that they were not associated with them in this way made a point of working and being seen at their businesses. The Pre-Raphaelites painted undoubtedly the best ‘true to nature’ landscapes on canvas, but Hardy’s astuteness at painting these realistic landscapes verbally is something that should also be admired and applauded.
Writers like Hardy, Eliot, Dickens and Gaskill were among the best at using words to paint realistic images inside their reader’s heads. They typically use recurrent iconographic descriptions, careful composition and pay close attention to contrasts of light and dark, colours and volume and mass. Their art is to blend the description of the landscape, plot and characters into one journey from the first page to the last, knowing that these metaphorical images were encouraging their readers to consider the need to address the social anxieties which existed outside of the novel.
It is important to remember when we read these novels and view these paintings more than a hundred years after they made their debut, that the Victorian era spanned sixty-four years and the anxieties of society at the beginning were completely different to those in the middle and at the end. We must also realise that they are novels and not, however realistic, factual records of events. It is clear to see how literary works influenced the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, especially Biblical ones in the case of Hunt, and that they used their mastery of art to attempt to influence the Victorian public to abandon their ‘laissez-faire’ attitude and address the social anxieties and problems of the period. It would be reasonable to assume that both author and artist succeeded, if this was in fact their aim, as towards the end of the Victorian era attempts were made to address some of these anxieties, for example sanitation, working conditions and living standards were improved.
Bibliography
Barnes R. (1998), The Pre-Raphaelites and their World, Tate Gallery Publishing, London.
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Electronic Resources
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/about03.shtml#mepl
The Pre-Raphaelites and their World (12)
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (293:13)
The Mill on the Floss Book 6 Chapter 6
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/about03.shtml#mepl
Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (18)
Ox ford Dictionary of Quotations (765:19)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles Ch.63
