The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood: Model Heroines of Literature.
| Author | Enderle, Melanie |
Introduction
In 1848, the same year as the first Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, a group of seven subversive young male artists banded together in London as the secretive Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood or PRB. This close, sometimes quarrelsome assemblage opposed the deep-rooted, out-of-date customs and constrained parameters of the Royal Academy of Art where they met as students. The PRB sought to make a mark on the city's then contemporary art scene which they felt was uninspired and banal. Led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (then age twenty) who was later described as "the planet round which we all revolved," (1) together with William Holman Hunt (then age twenty-one) and John Everett Millais (then age nineteen), the new subjects and style introduced by the PRB roiled the status quo of British art, especially their creation of a new ideal of femininity. Yet, this modern-minded alliance did not concern themselves with forwarding equal rights for women. Instead, they perpetuated male stereotypes of women.
Despite their technically-adept prettiness, most Pre-Raphaelite artworks are about two things: sexual objectification and classism, and this becomes evident through a review of their paintings and scrutiny of the complex relationships between the painters and their muses, a cadre of working-class models recruited by the PRB including Fanny Cornforth (1835-1909), Emma Watkins (unknown), Elizabeth Eleanor "Lizzie" Siddal (1834-1862), Annie Miller (1835-1925), and Jane Burden Morris (1839-1914). For these women, association with these formidable artists offered a sense of worth, the possibility for upward mobility, and certainly advanced their places in society. However, the artists did not focus on the real-life situations of these women; they did not illustrate their humble origins and they eschewed their individual personalities. Instead, they painted them as specific feminine "types" or as possessing certain attributes ascribed to womanliness in all its guises--from subservient to seductive. Scrutiny of the unquestionably accepted gender and class practices of a nineteenth-century society that promoted patriarchal privilege may help explain some of today's twenty-first century gender issues which have ignited the #MeToo Movement. A fresh focus on the class and gender-specific predicaments and limitations that faced these women, may finally give them the value and the voice they were then denied, but as individuals have been entitled to all along. The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, as these models are sometimes known, will no longer be silenced.
The Pre-Raphaelite Ideal
This high-spirited triumvirate of newly-emerging artists were influenced by, among other things, the writings and lectures of the venerable John Ruskin (1819-1900). Following his directive to be truthful to nature, the audacious PRB studied nature for aesthetic inspiration, and even went so far as to jointly declare a new, more natural ideal of feminine beauty. For guidance, as their name pronounced, they turned to the straight-forward approach and stylistic naivety they admired in late-Medieval and early-Renaissance Flemish and Italian painting created before the high Renaissance art of Raphael (1483-1520). Forming strong notions of what a natural woman should look like, they disdained the traditional Victorian tenets of beauty, yet in regard to expectations of proper female behavior, they embraced the standards of the time.
In their promotion of a new ideal, they shared an affinity for women who possessed a combination of "strange and puissant physical loveliness with depth and remoteness of gaze." (2) The artists pursued statuesque models with strikingly handsome features with strong jaws, elongated necks, expressive eyes, pouting lips, and thick hair--beauties referred to by the poet Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) as "stunners." (3) The PRB woman might seem more robust and self-confident than the dainty British ideal, but rather than imbue their stunner with assertive empowerment, they still expected her to be docile and submissive. For the Pre-Raphaelites, vulnerability and passivity continued to be equated with desirable beauty.
The lives of the artists and their models were complicated. In their behavior and the art they produced, these men evinced the deeply entrenched and readily excused attitudes of Victorian gentlemen towards women. Their models were predominately uneducated and of the labor class and were often cast in roles that underlined the conventional patriarchal definition of women as subjugated, diffident creatures. And their paintings bolstered the gendered roles of obedient wife, demur sister, and virginal daughter. They celebrated piety and sacrifice while highlighting the consequences of fallen virtue, without offering mercy or hope for redemption. Ironically, the painters' actual models (an occupation of dubious repute) were from poor and working-class backgrounds; they were barmaids, shop girls, and prostitutes who became their mistresses, spouses, and housekeepers.
The PRB posed their models in a variety of scenes of everyday life or in illustrations drawn from literature, especially favoring Romantic stories and tales such as Arthurian legends, Italian poetry, Greek mythology, Biblical scripture, and Shakespearean plots. They presented the women as chaste damsels in distress, dangerous femme fatales, or honorable heroines, yet in whatever role she played, the PRB woman maintained a passive nature, wore an unfocused expression, and resided within a constricted space. From the start, and continuing as a recurring motif, the Pre-Raphaelites simultaneously elevated these women as worthy of attention, yet their own prejudices and misogynistic tendencies repeatedly shine through their work. They singled out these women as physical exemplars of beauty, while also undermining their value as individuals.
The Sexualized Stunner
In the painting by William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Il Dolce Far Niente (fig. 1), meaning "sweet idleness," the model Annie Miller as an unidentified female figure occupies a well-appointed interior and absentmindedly glances into the distance beyond the viewer. Devoid of narrative, the painting appears to simply admire a docile woman unburdened by any responsibilities, challenges, or concerns. Any specific historical context or didactic content is replaced by expressions of femininity extenuated by the inclusion of symbolic objects, colors, and patterns. This idle beauty with luxuriant, loose hair is dressed in an exotic costume and sits with her head tilted and hands entwined on an ornate, inlaid foreign-looking chair with her back to a wall on which a convex mirror hangs. The mirror enhances the complexity of the painting and expands the viewer's sense of space as it reflects and reinforces the safety of the domestic sphere warmed by a glowing fire.
Holman Hunt was inspired by the series of "stunners" painted by Rossetti beginning in the 1860s. Referred to by the artist as "visions of carnal loveliness," (4) paintings such as Bocca Baciata, (Lips That Have Been Kissed) (fig. 2), were created to be looked at and adored in adherence to the modern-day edict of "beauty for beauty's sake" first championed by the nineteenth-century French philosopher Victor Cousin. Rossetti placed his tame stunners within cramped chambers, caught at quiet, sometimes intimate moments. Often absorbed in thought, they braid their masses of tangled hair or admire themselves in looking glasses. These women, who radiate a sexuality that is eminently desirable are "both dressed, yet undressed." (5) They remain unaware of, or possibly purposely ignore the viewer, as though meeting the admirer's gaze would confirm their own sexual objectification.
Rossetti's Bocca Baciata originates from a lewd story by the fourteenth-century Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) about a woman with many lovers, but whose "much-kissed mouth" never seems spoiled. Here, the recently kissed beauty holds a marigold, plucked from the wall of flowers behind her. Marigolds are symbols of regret and sorrow--the very feelings she is projecting in the painting--and the message conveyed here is one of male fantasy of allure and eternal purity.
The painting relates to the real-life story of its model. Fanny Cornforth, whose real name may have been Sarah Cox, was the voluptuous daughter of a blacksmith. She was also unabashedly crude and believed to have been a prostitute known for her ability to crack nuts with her teeth. (6) She and Rossetti probably met in the Strand in 1856 when she was twenty and he was twenty-eight. Often disparaged by those close to Rossetti, she was unwavering in her loyalty to him to the end and may have been the artist's truest female friend. (7)
Fanny appears again as the self-absorbed Aurelia (Fazio 's Mistress) (fig. 3), inspired by the fourteenth-century Italian poet Fazio degli Uberti (1326-1360). Many PRB paintings were exhibited with excerpts of text, and the following words that accompanied Aurelia emphasize her loveliness and the feelings Fazio possessed for his mistress:
I look at the crisp golden-threaded hair Whereof, to thrall my heart, Love twists a net ... I look at the amorous beautiful mouth ... I look at her white easy neck, so well From shoulders and from bosom lifted out Aurelia and the other indolent stunners portrayed by Rossetti and the PRB have been labeled by historian J. B. Bullen as "sexualized women." Bullen explains that the stunners are fascinating...
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