A good example of this discourse can be easily seen in the painting Preparing Tea by Jane Maria Bowkett. This painting clearly shows a mother and her two daughters busily preparing tea in anticipation for her husband and their fathers arrival back from work. The little girls are helping their mom by preparing toast and bringing in their fathers slippers. The mother is setting the table, preparing the tea and eagerly glancing out the window at the train seen to be approaching. The room is cosy, with a fireplace being at the centre of the room, the cat is sitting contently in front of the fire. The home looks like an upper working class to middle class home due to the plush decoration and materials used, including the table cloth and tea set. Another good example of this idea is a painting by Joseph Clarke named The Labourer’s Welcome. This depicts a farm labourer returning home to his cosy little cottage. His wife is a pretty lady and seems very domesticated as the home is very neat and she is sowing. There is also a cat in this painting which seems to be a recurring theme in most paintings of the Victorian home, maybe it is a symbol of a warm and welcoming place. In the painting, the husbands reflection can be seen in the mirror and all attention seems to be on him entering the room. The male is on a higher level then the woman in the picture, maybe this could be seen as a statement of the man being a higher social being than the woman. Both of these paintings portray the ideal Victorian family scene, but how true to Victorian society was this? These paintings certainly provide the viewing population with a strong sense of moral values and would have painted a perfect picture of the expectations within the Victorian family unit through numerous hidden messages. Paintings were often used as a source of reference and these examples clearly state that the family home is key and the key to good and happy family is the upstanding women at the heart of it.
Although women were portrayed as the stereotypical moral housewife, another side of Victorian women was also portrayed through 19th century art. These views were not painted to show how the Victorians wanted to live be but more a moral tale of how not to behave i.e. if you act in a certain way this is what will happen to you! “Sex was the Victorian bogey, but the full weight of the moral code fell more heavily on female offenders – unfaithful wives, unmarried mothers, mistresses, and prostitutes. Although a man was free to do what he liked, provided he kept quite about it, a lapse in a woman was thought of as a terrible thing” (Wood 1976, pg 135). “The representation of female adultery was a vital component of the broader regulation of femininity within the family structure. If woman’s mission was produced as the norm for adult female behaviour, then female adultery stood as the most explicit form of deviation” (Nead 1988, pg 48). The royal academy displayed one of the most depicted pictures of adultery during the 19th century, Augustus Egg’s trilogy Past and Present. This series of three paintings tells a story of an adulteress wife. In painting one, the husband has discovered his wifes infidelity. The husband seems to be holding a crushed letter in his hand, maybe this is a letter from the wifes lover, the women is poised on the floor as if she is praying for forgiveness. There are many hidden symbols within the painting, for example, the children are building a house of cards which seems to be falling down, maybe representing the falling down of their family/household. There is an apple on the table maybe symbolising a poison apple; the wife being the poison of the family. The second and third paintings are said to be taking place at the same time, five years after the first painting, and the death of the father and husband. In painting two, we can see the two girls alone, morning the loss of their father and mother, staring out the window at the moon. At the same time their mother is seen in picture three alone, with another child staring at the same moon, more hidden clues are available in the paintings as in picture one, for example above the mother, under the arches there are posters advertising plays such as Victims and A cure for love and pleasure trips to Paris. Everything in this series of paintings tells a moral story, a tale of what could happen if a woman was to take the wrong path. This would have provided a strong message for any Victorian women.
Although the painters of the 19th century were devoted to attention to detail, it would be wrong to think that these depictions of modern Victorian life were all true. In reality, most middle class families were very different to that seen in pictures painted by Clarke and Bowkett. Women played a more active roll, both within and outside of the home. Women were often contributing to the household income, their choice of occupations was limited, but the work was just are arduous as that of the mans occupation. They worked on farms, became servants for upper class families, worked in shops and often undertook seamstress work and ran small family businesses from their own home. Richard Redgrave’s The Seamstress, became the first picture to draw attention to overworked women in Victorian society, it shows a working class woman working into the early hours of the morning (Wood 1976, pg 126). It wasn’t only the women in Victorian families that were not represented true to life, painters had to tackle two important things when painting, their own attitudes, and the attitudes of the society who would be viewing these paintings. The Victorians didn’t want to see unpleasant scenes such as poverty and death (often very true to life in a working class Victorian family). If a painter wanted to approach such a situation it would have to be sugar coated, for example for a painter to approach the subject of death he would often portrait a very dignified widow such as that in the painting by Emily Mary Osborn named For the Last Time, rather than showing the death of the father, he painted a dignified women morning the loss of a family member.
Overall, nineteenth century paintings were used to portray certain discourses. The painters used their art to put across an ideal view of how the Victorian society should be run and lived in. The Victorian painters were almost like the journalists of today’s society and the paintings like our daily papers, showing us the parts of society that they wish us to see and disguising the truths that they would rather us not know about or we would rather not see. They used their paintings as a way in which to educate and influence society’s views and values, like the way in which our newspapers put forward popular discourses today. The painters did an extremely good job of painting a picture of the ideal Victorian family, though it can be argued as to how accurate the scenes were. However accurate or disillusioned 19th century art may or may not have been, it has defiantly presented us with a very comprehensive view of the Victorian age and the norms and values that went along with living in such a society.
Bibliography
Nead, L (1988) Myths Of Sexuality – Representations of Women in Victorian Britain, Oxford: Basil Blackwell Inc
Wood, C (1976) Victorian Panorama- Paintings of Victorian Life, London: Faber and Faber Ltd
Marsh, J (1987) Pre-Raphaelite Women, London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd
The Victorian Web - 2003 –
