The Written and the Visual: Representations of Women in English Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Art [1 ed.] 9783737012539, 9783847112532

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Gesellschaftskritische Literatur – Texte, Autoren und Debatten

Band 10

Herausgegeben von Monika Wolting und Paweł Piszczatowski

Małgorzata Łuczyn´ska-Hołdys

The Written and the Visual Representations of Women in English Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Art

With 19 figures

V&R unipress

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über https://dnb.de abrufbar. Gedruckt mit finanzieller Unterstützung der Universität Warschau. © 2021, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Theaterstraße 13, D-37073 Göttingen Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Das Werk und seine Teile sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung in anderen als den gesetzlich zugelassenen Fällen bedarf der vorherigen schriftlichen Einwilligung des Verlages. Umschlagabbildung: John William Waterhouse, 1849–1917, British, Head of a Woman (Various lithographs from ‚The Studio‘ journal), 1896, Lithograph, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1977.25.5 http://collections.britishart.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3624924s Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISSN 2629-0510 ISBN 978-3-7370-1253-9

Contents

List of figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

9

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter One: Shaping subjectivity: the experience of female embodiment in William Blake’s The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Essentialism, embodiment and gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The dilemmas of adolescence: becoming a woman in The Book of Thel . The practice of femininity: Visions of the Daughters of Albion . . . . .

17 17 20 38

Chapter Two: Exuberant excess: John Keats’s “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Head in a pot and purple fantasies – the romantic grotesque . Unclaimed experience – trauma and madness in Keats’s poem From the Romantic to modern aesthetic – visual renderings of “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter Three: Between life and art: Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gender, art and sexual politics in “The Lady of Shalott” . . “The Lady of Shalott” on page and canvas . . . . . . . . . Inside the tower . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Catastrophe commences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Outside the tower . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “The Lady of Shalott” as a twentieth-century picture book

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63 63 73

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109 109 129 130 136 142 152

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Contents

Chapter Four: Female empowerment/female submission. Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rupturing boundaries: grotesque incongruity, female agency and excessive appetite in “Goblin Market” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ruskin, the grotesque and “Goblin Market” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The ending – contradictions resolved or reinstated? . . . . . . . . . . . Illustrating “Goblin Market”: indulgence, violence and aestheticism . . Early days: a fairy story of sin or pleasure? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . At the start of the twentieth century: “Goblin Market” as a cautionary tale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Goblin Market” for adult readers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

163 163 176 180 185 185 189 197

Instead of Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

207

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

211

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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List of figures

Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8 Figure 9 Figure 10 Figure 11 Figure 12 Figure 13 Figure 14 Figure 15 Figure 16 Figure 17 Figure 18 Figure 19

William Blake The Book of Thel plate ii, Copy H, The Library of Congress William Blake The Book of Thel plate 4, Copy H, The Library of Congress William Blake The Book of Thel plate 5, Copy H, The Library of Congress William Blake The Book of Thel plate 6, Copy H, The Library of Congress William Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion plate ii, Copy J, The Library of Congress William Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion plate iii, Copy J, The Library of Congress William Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion plate i, Copy J, The Library of Congress William Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion plate 3, Copy J, The Library of Congress William Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion plate 4, Copy J, The Library of Congress William Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion plate 6, Copy J, The Library of Congress William Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion plate 7, Copy J, The Library of Congress William Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion plate 8, Copy J, The Library of Congress John White Alexander Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1897, The Museum of Fine Art, Boston, image retrieved from The Library of Congress Hannah Frank To her Chamber Gone, 1928, The Estate of Hannah Frank Hannah Frank Isabella or the Pot of Basil, 1928, The Estate of Hannah Frank Hannah Frank, O, Melancholy, Turn Your Eyes Away, 1928, The Estate of Hannah Frank Walter Crane The Lady of Shalott, 1862, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund John Atkinson Grimshaw The Lady of Shalott, 1875 ca., Yale Center for British Art Hilary Paynter Goblin Market, a wood engraving, 2003, reprinted with the artist’s permission

Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to thank the institutions that have supported my research: the University of Warsaw, the Mary and Clifford Corbridge Trust of Robinson College (the University of Cambridge), Tate Gallery, British Library, David Winton Bell Gallery, and the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University (with special thanks to Professor George P. Landow and Terrence Abbott for letting me have the catalogue of the now legendary Pre-Raphaelite 1984 exhibition). I am also grateful to the staff at the Rare Books and the West Room of the Cambridge University Library for helping me trace and locate much primary material. I owe special thanks to Fiona Frank and Hilary Paynter, who kindly gave me their permission to reprint the illustrations I needed for my book, and to Ken Page, Interpretation Officer at Keats House, who helped to explain a factual detail concerning one of the paintings based on Keats’s “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”. I would also like to thank the artists Shelah Horvitz, Michael Ware, Carrianne Hendrickson, and Hilary Paynter, for sharing with me their thoughts on their particular works, which had been informative and inspirational for my work. Many others have graciously discussed different aspects of my research and offered guidance in various ways. I am very grateful to my friend and colleague, Barry Keane, who agreed to read the whole of my book before its publication, to Eliza Borkowska and Monika Opalin´ska for their perceptive comments and friendly advice. Finally, I wish to thank two very special people who offered unending support, help and encouragement: my beloved husband Andrzej, and the best friend one could possibly have, Beata Vetter. Thank you for being there for me!

Introduction “Looking is always a type of reading because it involves interpreting what is seen” (Julia Thomas, Reading Images 5)

Nineteenth-century poetry and art are to a large extent about women. Women become, variably, muses, femmes fatales, angels in the house, aesthetic icons, faithful lovers, madwomen, abandoned victims, prostitutes, or Madonnas. They are virtually central to the literature and painting of the period. Intimately tied with these various representations of women are different concepts of femininity and female roles; and the different reactions towards these concepts. The book The Written and the Visual. Representations of Women in English NineteenthCentury Poetry and Art investigates the points of contact between literature, art, and feminist criticism by offering an in-depth literary analysis of selected Romantic and Victorian poems whose protagonists are female, and a discussion of their wide-ranging visual history – a subject which has not yet been undertaken in a book-length study. W.J.T Mitchell, an authority on visual representation, tells us that “[i]mages are not just passive entities that coexist with their human hosts, any more than the microorganisms that dwell in our intestines. They change the way we think and see and dream. They refunction our memories and imaginations, bringing new criteria and new desires into the world” (Mitchell What Do Pictures Want 92). Mitchell is concerned with visual images, but this statement is equally true for literary representation. Nineteenth-century writers, as well as painters and illustrators from the nineteenth century onwards, openly show their preoccupation with gender roles. They do so by writing about women and by painting them. This is hardly surprising since the periods of Romanticism and Victorianism saw formative changes in thinking about gender norms and definitions. In the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792), Romanticism witnessed the birth of modern feminist thought. Often described as a manifesto, her essay provided a solid platform for the feminist cause and stimulated heated debates about the education, position, roles and responsibilities of both women and men. As is the case with all groundbreaking statements, this text was met with mixed responses, but it paved the way for what was to follow. In the Victorian period we observe a virtual surfeit of texts

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Introduction

and treatises concerning the subject – from Sarah Stickney Ellis’s The Women of England: Their Social Habits, and Domestic Duties (1839), Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House (1854), and John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (1865) to John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869) and Mona Caird’s The Morality of Marriage (1897). These voices resounded among writers and artists alike, who reacted by creating memorable, influential, and distinctive images of women – in poetry, painting, and book illustration. Some of these representations appeal primarily to aesthetic categories, but most of them voice some clearly defined perspective on women and femininity in general. In this way, these poems and their visual renderings respond to and participate in creating cultural, aesthetic, and social normative patterns. Likewise, when discussing the “immanently social character of the painterly sign”, Norman Bryson states that “all the codes of recognition flow through the image just as they do throughout the social milieu; as part of the global structure of signifying practice they interact at every point with the economic and political domains” (139). All of the texts which are my preoccupation in this book are about female characters; all are narratives about women’s struggles in society and about their paths towards self-definition. All are well-known and well-loved. Yet, I believe that my revisionist readings offer a fresh look at those familiar poems whilst also engaging with the existing literary criticism. My interpretations are informed by carefully chosen critical approaches, ranging from corporeal feminism, literary and aesthetic perspectives on the grotesque, the theory of trauma, and extending to the gaze theory. The choice of such a theoretical framework facilitates my feminist critique of the poems and underscores the fact that their concerns have not lost their relevance and still resonate well in the twenty-first century. The readings of literary texts are followed by a rich overview and analysis of visual renderings of the poems in question. My chapters bring to light some previously unknown or undiscussed works and reappraise many well-known paintings and illustrations. The archival material was accessed in the extensive collections of the Rare Books section of the University Library in Cambridge; for my consideration of contemporary illustrations, I personally contacted the artists, many of whom kindly shared with me their insights and intentions. As a result, this work offers fresh perspectives on familiar poems and will undoubtedly encourage a debate about changing cultural conceptions relating to gender which surface in visual responses to these texts. The five particular poems which form the backbone of my book have been selected for two reasons. First, they share the same concern at heart: easily yielding to feminist readings, they present the clash between individual desires and social expectations, the conflict which is conditioned by gender roles ascribed to women and men in the nineteenth-century society. Secondly, the number and diversity of their visual renderings that go well beyond the nine-

Introduction

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teenth century testify to the ongoing fascination with the poems’ universal themes; they also invite questions about the mutual relationship between text and illustration. Thus, the chapter on William Blake discusses the complicated and frequently ambiguous interaction between text and design in two of his early prophetic books: The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. This chapter stands out in the fact that Blake is the only artist to produce illustrations for his own works, and his poetry has not been illustrated by anyone else in subsequent decades. In contrast, other chapters examine a rich visual history of three other nineteenth-century poems. Nevertheless, the chapter on Blake establishes the context for further discussion: while Blake’s art problematizes the relations between poetry and illustration, his two poems herald the major theme of the book: stories about women and femininity told in verse and image. The next three chapters are devoted to “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” by John Keats, “The Lady of Shalott” by Alfred Tennyson, and “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti respectively. They follow the same pattern. First, I concentrate on close readings of the chosen poems; my interpretations are filtered through specific critical and theoretical lenses. The textual discussions are then followed by the exploration of the poems’ artistic legacy – the latter part of each of the three chapters focuses on how the ideas emerging as crucial from my interpretations figure in the visual renderings of the poems. Delving into this visual history, I discuss both the original nineteenth-century illustrated editions and the paintings inspired by the poems, as well as their twentieth- and even early twenty-firstcentury renditions in art and popular culture (for instance, in comic and picture books, in ceramic art). Much of the material I include has not been a subject of academic analysis so far. Such a broad scope – in terms of both the timeline and artistic genres – not only facilitates interactions between verse and illustration but also allows for the diverse artistic perspectives to engage in a dialogue, showing both the continuity and new tendencies in cultural ideas revolving around femininity and its representations in art and culture. In her book: The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Books, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra states that “[i]llustrations affect the reception and literary history of a text and cannot be ignored or dismissed as detachable additions to the original production” (4). She continues: “[e]xamination of a single text which has been illustrated over time tells us much about the history of its critical reception, and about the important role illustration plays in the production of meaning” (6). Crucially, the illustrator is first of all a reader of the text. Unlike painters, who frequently capitalised on common stock-motifs as subjects for their paintings but not necessarily had studied the source text itself (here the proliferation of almost uncountable Ladies of Shalott, Isabellas and Ophelias populating nineteenth-century canvases is an apt example), illustrators intimately familiarised themselves with a book they were supposed to embellish. As a

14

Introduction

result, their decisions as to which moments to choose and how to portray them were dictated by their own readings of the poems. Hence, the interaction of word and image in illustrated volumes is both lively and diverse. What is more, “[w]hen a single poem is illustrated by a number of different illustrators, it is possible to follow a particularized history of responses to an unchanging set of words whose ‘meaning’ none the less is always in the process of production by new sets of collaborators and co-producers (readers, illustrators, publishers, critics) in changing circumstances” (Kooistra “Victorian Poetry and Illustration” 401). On the other hand, “literary” paintings produced by a significant number of artists proliferate from the nineteenth century onwards, also betraying different approaches and attitudes both to the texts they relate to and to the specific ideas these texts present. This stimulates several intriguing questions: how do these representations change with time? What new meanings do the poems acquire in their visual renditions? Does the “reading” of specific motifs depend on the gender of the artist – was the text “read” differently by male and female illustrators? To what purposes were Romantic and Victorian literary texts illustrated by the nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists? What themes did they choose as the most important, and what is their personal attitude to these themes? What can their choices tell us about the universality of certain ideas and their later relevance in the twenty-first century? These are the queries the present book endeavours to pursue. While we can consider how visual interpretation changes when a text has many illustrators, illustrated books by a single artist/poet (which is the theme of my chapter on William Blake) exhibit a different dynamic. Blake’s aesthetically rich and intellectually challenging “double works” are a case in point, where the reader is presented with a sustained artistic idea that arises out of the – frequently troubled – relationship between text and design. In his Picture Theory, W.J.T. Mitchell explains that unlike volumes where the illustrator works separately from the author and where we can detect “more traditional formulas involving the clear subordination and suturing of one medium to the other, often with a straightforward division of labour”, in the “artist’s book” words and images “would tend to exhibit flexible, experimental, and ‘high tension’ relations […]” (91). Blake’s composite art is far from monolithic. It is fascinating to observe how his illuminated texts open up to various readings, and frequently, their visualverbal interaction involves a conflict that generates new meanings. Sometimes, the clash between word and image is so powerful that the effect is a seeming disintegration of artistic intent; yet, in the end, it provokes the reader to revisit and reconsider meanings previously taken as stable and conspicuous, and usually results in novel, thought-provoking interpretations. One way or another, “[t]he mutual independence, lively interaction and conflict between Blake’s poems and pictures is his way of enacting his vision of a liberated social and

Introduction

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psychological order […]”, W.J.T Mitchell concludes in his now-classic position Blake’s Composite Art (75). Finally, despite the famously heralded “pictorial turn” in the humanities,1 even today illustration is still frequently left out of the scholarly discussion of literary texts. While many Pre-Raphaelite paintings have attained substantial scholarly attention, a more inclusive venture into the realm of illustrated poetry in its various guises (as an illustrated book, a picture book, a children book) still remains a road less travelled. Although there is a growing number of publications relating to the Victorian visual and print culture, it seems that most scholarly work in this domain concerns either particular authors and the way they were illustrated throughout the Victorian era, or a relationship of single picturepainting pairs, rather than particular texts and their visual histories.2 What is more, the choice of “literary” paintings and illustrations that are discussed in the majority of academic articles is usually as canonical as it is predictable and repetitive: thus, for instance, Keats’s “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” is usually paired with Millais’s Lorenzo and Isabella, while Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” shares the stage with Hunt’s or Millais’s paintings under the same title. My book is a modest attempt to fill this gap and to pay tribute to the work of several less acclaimed artists and illustrators, whose visual renderings of the poems in question contribute to the rich history of these texts’ reception.

1 I am referring here to W.J.T. Mitchell’s article “The Pictorial Turn”, published in Artforum in March 1992, which later appeared as the first chapter of his book Picture Theory. 2 See, for instance, Lynn Pearce, Woman/Image/Text. Readings in Pre-Raphaelite Art and Literature (Toronto and Buffalo: Toronto University Press, 1991), Barbara Lupack, Illustrating Camelot (Cambridge: Brewer, 2008), Sarah Wootton, Consuming Keats: Nineteenth Century Representations in Art and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration. A Publishing History (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002).

Chapter One: Shaping subjectivity: the experience of female embodiment in William Blake’s The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion

Essentialism, embodiment and gender In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir asked a provocative, yet crucial question: “If… we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman?”(xIii). This point proved crucial for ensuing debates about feminism and generated arguments between the advocates of essentialism and the theorists of gender. As Elizabeth Grosz explains, essentialism entails the belief that those characteristics defined as women’s essence are shared in common by all women at all times. It implies a limit of the variations and possibilities of change – it is not possible for a subject to act in a manner contrary to her essence. Her essence underlies all the apparent variations differentiating women from each other. Essentialism thus refers to the existence of fixed characteristics, given attributes, and ahistorical functions that limit the possibilities of change and thus of social reorganization (Space, Time and Perversion 47–48).

Conversely, from the perspective of gender theory and social constructivism, there exists no fixed essence of femininity, since “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (de Beauvoir 281). Thus, sex gets effectively divorced from gender, one seen as biological, factual and given, and the other as gradually acquired. It exposes femininity as a construction, underlying the fact that what it is to be a woman is taught from birth rather than determined by biological characteristics. Western philosophical thought has been permeated by the mind-body dualism, which divides human experience into a corporeal and spiritual realm (Bordo 2–5). Invariably, as various feminist thinkers have shown, this dualism is gendered and hierarchical – it encodes the male/female binary, with the woman identified with the bodily, passive, sensual, emotional and thus more “natural” pole, and the man represented as a rational, spiritual, active and cultural being. This endless binary is strongly evaluative: nature in relation to culture is usually seen as representing “a lower order of existence” (Ortner 72). Such a mode of

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Shaping subjectivity: the experience of female embodiment

thinking has frequently led to violence: if the (female) body is considered a “lower” realm of existence, then it can easily be possessed, controlled, used, abused and subordinated to the (masculine) “higher” rational faculty. De Beauvoir recognizes the primary importance of the bodily experience, at the same time objecting to the primordial mind/body dichotomy: “To be present in the world implies strictly that there exists a body which is at once a material thing in the world and a point of view towards this world” (7). There is no such thing as separately existing categories of mind and body, and consequently, the classification of women as more corporeal and men as more rational proves inoperative. The body is integral to all our perceptions and any understanding of the human experience. It is “the vehicle of being in the world” (Merleau-Ponty 82). Yet, the female experience of embodiment is frequently problematic. Kathy Davies, the author of Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body, states that [f]rom the sexualisation of the female body in advertising to the mass rape of women in wartime, women’s bodies have been subjected to processes of exploitation, inferiorization, exclusion, control and violence. The female body is symbolically deployed in discourses of power – discourses which justify social inequality and power hierarchies based on gender and other forms of bodily difference”(10).

Similarly, de Beauvoir noted that the experience of embodiment is essentially different for men and women. Woman has always been constructed as man’s Other (xIv) and perceived through the prism of her biological specificity. Because of her biological characteristics – the experience of the menstruation cycle, pregnancy and menopause – she has been labelled unstable, fickle, emotional, unpredictable and frequently disruptive, as well as told what, as a woman, she may or may not do. Thus, while actions and opportunities for women have been unfairly constrained by social norms regulating bodily comportment, man remains free of such limitations, because he “superbly ignores the fact that his anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secret hormones” (xIiv). In essentialist practice, certain attitudes and features have been perceived as inherent and determined by biological sex. Thus, women apparently are gentler, more patient, more passive, less ambitious and rational, more caring and selfless than men. As Iris Marion Young explains, these features predestine them to specific roles, accordingly seen as natural, and usually based on self-denial, servitude and sacrifice: they are to take care of elders and children, preside over their homes, and provide support and assistance to others while disregarding their own needs (Young 22–23). When their behaviour does not comply with these rules, women may expect recrimination and ridicule; they are criticised as unwomanly, pronounced mentally disturbed and unfit to live in society, and

Essentialism, embodiment and gender

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frequently coerced into submission. “While not at all explained by biological distinctions between men and women, nevertheless there are deep social divisions of masculine and feminine gendered dispositions and experience which have implications for the psychic lives of men and women, their interactions with one another, their dispositions to care for children or exercise authority” (Young 14). In the following chapter, I aim to show how William Blake presents the experience of embodiment and the shaping of subjectivity as gender-specific in his two relatively early poetic texts, The Book of Thel (1789) and Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793). The first of the two poems is a narrative about an adolescent girl’s lived experience of becoming a woman, shaped entirely by a specific situation. Thel is essentially defined by her body – the fact that she was born female preconditions her future. Trapped by cultural expectations centred on her biological productivity (her capacity for giving birth) and the social roles ascribed to women, she can only object to what is perceived as “natural” female behaviour if she wants to assert her individual needs and desires. What is equally crucial is that she first has to recognize and acknowledge what it is that she wants from life. In this poem we find Blake’s representation of motherhood, culturally perceived as central to femininity and inextricably associated with the notion of the female being-in-the-world. In Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Blake describes the female experience of violation, rape, mutilation and subsequent recovery. Visions is an account of the lived experience of Oothoon, Thel’s successor, who bravely embraces the perspective of a relationship and a sexual union with a man she loves. Confident and affirmative of her sexuality, Oothoon soon faces the horror of violation, objectification, humiliation and rejection. Her being-in-the-world rapidly changes from joyous and blissful to utterly nightmarish and unspeakably painful. Yet, she still finds the power to resist and refuses to become a docile body, coerced into submission. In the second part of this chapter, I aim to investigate the representation of Oothoon’s experience of embodiment and the process of the shaping of her gendered subjectivity through the lens of corporeal feminism and Foucauldian power/knowledge theory, in order to show how Blake rejects the Cartesian dualism of body and mind, pronouncing it virtually impossible and psychologically detrimental.

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Shaping subjectivity: the experience of female embodiment

The dilemmas of adolescence: becoming a woman in The Book of Thel3 Blake critics most often see The Book of Thel (1789) as a thwarted attempt to pass from the state of Innocence to Experience.4 Blake’s heroine is usually perceived as a somewhat naive, indecisive young female afraid to “be born” into the world of adulthood and maturity, or as a soul that refuses to enter the body/the material world. Hence, there has been a tendency to pass judgment on Thel’s decision, attribute it to weakness, immaturity, or fear, and see it in pejorative terms.5 My claim is that Thel’s refusal to enter the world of Generation and experience her corporeality as a mature woman has nothing to do with relapsing into childhood, or with weakness and indecisiveness. Instead, I see it as proof of her maturity and independent spirit. In what follows, I want to trace Thel’s experience of becoming a woman as a rite of passage that has not been completed, not because of her immaturity, but because of her conscious decision to define herself. Although born a woman, Thel refuses to become a woman, to shape her life according to the social and cultural expectations invested in the concept of woman. The analysis is concerned with two main points. Firstly, I want to demonstrate how text and design in The Book of Thel enter a mutual semantic relationship of contradiction and/or redundancy rather than complementarity,6 and how their interaction contributes to the understanding of the poem’s meaning. Naturally, this claim is not new; W.J.T. Mitchell recognized this quality as early as 1978, writing that “the ‘unity’ of an illuminated book is a dynamic one, built upon the interaction of text and design as independent or contrary elements” (xviii). What I would like to

3 This analysis originally appeared in Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 46.3 (2013) as “Life exhal’d in milky fondness” – Becoming a Mother in William Blake’s The Book of Thel”. 4 See Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), p. 49, Kathleen Raine William Blake (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), p. 52, Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), pp. 232–33, S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988), p. 401, Robert F. Gleckner, The Piper and the Bard (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1959), pp. 163–64, and Magnus Ankarsjö, Blake and Gender, (Jefferson: McFarland, 2006), p. 62. 5 For example, Gleckner concludes that Thel is self-centred and sternly pronounces that she has to learn the life of self-sacrifice (163), while Stephen Behrendt asserts that, for Blake, Thel must have been an example of what he calls “the dead-end nature of narcissistic behavior” (The Moment of Explosion: Blake and the Illustration of Milton [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983], p. 27). For Susan Matthews, Thel’s flight means conforming to the stereotypes of femininity (Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011], p. 100). 6 For the various types of image-text relations, see A. Kibédi Varga, “Criteria for Describing Word-Image Relations”, Poetics Today 10 (1989), pp. 31–53.

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examine, however, is how this dynamic interaction reinforces a feminist reading of Blake’s text. Secondly, although there are critical texts that deal with Blake’s attitude to women, the majority of Blake scholarship on The Book of Thel does not seem sufficiently feminist. While Blake did not manifest an unwaveringly feminist stance throughout his poetry, in texts such as Thel or Visions he dealt with women’s issues in a way that may be deemed progressive. Consequently, I intend to focus on the problems of motherhood and childcare as rendered by Blake in his poem, since I perceive these notions to be essential for our understanding of Thel’s decision. Also, part of my argument is that, contrary to several critical readings, the message delivered by Thel’s three interlocutors (the Lilly, the Cloud, and the Clod of Clay) should not be seen as a positive statement that Blake wanted Thel to accept. Finally, the understanding of Thel’s dilemma whether or not to become a mother can shed light on some actions taken by other female characters in Blake’s later texts, Oothoon from Visions of the Daughters of Albion in particular. Generally, it has been agreed that the issues of gender and sexuality provide a valid interpretative context for The Book of Thel, as “the consequence of the expression of sexual desire is the great theme of Blake’s prophetic poems” (Hayes 144). Thus, David Worrall suggests that The Book of Thel is Blake’s correction to Swedenborg’s ideas of sexuality: Thel’s escape “with a shriek” is “a specific refusal of Swedenborg’s doctrine of conjugal love, a subject topical to contemporary Swedenborgians who were proposing to establish an African colony based on its principles” (17).7 However, as Susan Matthews notices, the vales of Har (the place that Worrall sees as the realm of Swedenborgian sexual union) are the world to which, and not from which, Thel flees (100). Matthews, in turn, sees the flight of Thel at the end of the poem as an escape from conflict rather than from sexuality and interprets the vales of Har as a world where “benefit to the other is benefit to the self” and where, consequently, the self does not exist (99). Also, for her, the flight back is not the assertion of the self but a surrender of the self: “At the end of the poem, Thel flees to a female dream like that of The Triumphs of Temper which makes sexual desire safe but demands as the price the taking on of a female identity” (100). In a similar vein, Magnus Ankarsjö, in William Blake and Gender, 7 Other important texts that discuss Blake’s connections to Swedenborg’s thought are Marsha Keith Schuchard Why Mrs. Blake Cried: William Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision (London: Century, 2006), Joseph Viscomi’s 1997, 1998, and 1999 essays on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Magnus Ankarsjö, William Blake and Religion (Jefferson: McFarland, 2009). Also, in their introduction to The Book of Thel in The Early Illuminated Books (Princeton: Princeton University Press/William Blake Trust, 1993), Eaves, Essick, and Viscomi note echoes of Swedenborgian thought (particularly with reference to his doctrine of use) in Blake’s poem (78).

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notes that “although sometimes executing successful representations of the female, Blake in the early poems is at pains to find an appropriate expression of the positive interactivity of man and woman” (3). He locates Thel within the circle of “childlike innocent characters” (5) and concludes that she “utterly fails and relapses back to childhood” (62). In the course of this chapter I hope to demonstrate that it is possible to see Thel’s decision not as a failure or a surrender of the self, but as an act of self-assertion, a conscious decision to reject the perspective (however attractive at times) of both sexual relationship and childbearing. Such a decision is not a product of an immature, wavering, childlike mind but testifies to the opposite. Last but not least, it also denotes her readiness to face the conflict that ensues from acting against the expectations of others. Modern critical readings recognize the importance of dialogical structure in The Book of Thel.8 Most of the poem is structured by question-answer exchanges, often summarized by Thel’s rephrasing of what she has heard. The common denominator of these conversations is Thel’s inquiry, which is followed by reassuring statements from other beings already familiar with the world that she contemplates entering. Then, the chief question is what it would mean for Thel to enter this world, Blake’s realm of Generation, or Experience. Entering it may be understood as a conscious decision to grow up and assume the social roles prescribed for a woman in the adult world – primarily the role of the mother. Crucially, however, pregnancy and motherhood are preceded by courtship and/or marriage. This point has been noted and discussed from various perspectives by modern critics. Thus, Harriet Kramer Linkin identifies what frightens Thel off as the sexual nature of human relationships in the world of Generation. She suggests that Thel’s “horror at being food for worms actually displaces her deeper fear of the phallus” and that Thel wilfully chooses to ignore the sexual implications of the Cloud’s speech, focusing on the nurturing function voiced by the Clod of Clay instead (69). In the wake of feminist criticism, Helen Bruder, in an interpretation to which I am deeply indebted, sees Thel as a poem in which “the sceptical enquiries of a determined young woman thoroughly unmask patriarchal ideology, an ideology which promised women that heterosexual romantic and maternal roles equalled heavenly fulfilment, but which Thel discovers amount to nothing less than death” (44). Reading the key passage in which the Clod of Clay appears as the mother of the Worm, she concludes that “anyone who ‘her life exhal’d / In milky fondness’ (Thel 4:8–9) has been severely gulled if she believes that this amounts to having ‘a crown that none can take away’ (Thel 5:4)” (51). My discussion coincides with the above interpretations in that I also think 8 See Marjorie Levinson, “‘The Book of Thel’ by William Blake: A Critical Reading”, ELH 47.2 (Summer 1980), pp. 287–303 and Harriet Kramer Linkin, “The Function of Dialogue in The Book of Thel”, Colby Quarterly 23.2 (June 1987), pp. 66–76.

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the ideology of self-sacrifice, as promoted by the Clod of Clay and the Lilly, to be the key to understanding Blake’s poem. In addition, I propose that Thel is actually attracted both to the idea of sexual union and to the idea of becoming a mother, but she cannot reconcile her desires with what such fulfilment would mean in a world where the female is generally given one role, that of a humble servant with no voice of her own. In such a situation, the experience of the embodiment cannot be a gratifying one. What frightens Thel off is the philosophy of utilitarianism and self-denial embodied in the Clod of Clay and, to a lesser extent, in the Lilly and the Cloud. The Cloud’s conviction that becoming “the food of worms” (3:23 E 5)9 might be enough to sing the song of self-fulfilment is another successful deterrent. Thel is an adolescent. Generally, her name has been interpreted as signifying “wish” or “desire”, but another meaning has also been suggested – “woman”.10 Thus, Thel contemplates what it means to be a woman, and whether it is what she really desires. Her interest in these questions, as well as her essential ambivalence, is mirrored in the title-page design (see figure 1), where she observes intently but with apprehension the passionate embrace of two tiny creatures emerging from a flowering plant, one male and one female.11 Kathleen Raine claims that the designs for Thel “express, even more than those of Songs of Innocence, the easy grace, freedom and expressive sweetness characteristic of Blake’s vision of ‘Innocence’” (52).12 Is that really so? Unquestionably, we see the characteristic weightlessness of Blake’s figures and delicate, almost fragile lines, but the apparent sweetness of the plates is deceptive. Careful observation reveals darker, more troubling echoes. Thel seems unsure how to understand the scene she is witnessing: the passionate embrace of the couple could be an externalization of their erotic love, but it could also be a scene of entrapment, against which the female seems to be striving.13 Could the raised arms of the female figure perhaps express her fear of the union? She is clearly moving away from the naked, plunging body of her partner. In his Illuminated Blake, David Erdman gives an account of Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the 9 All references to Blake’s poems, unless otherwise indicated, are to The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988). References are given by plate and verse number(s), followed by page in Erdman’s edition (E). 10 See Linkin, 67n7, relating the suggestion of E. B. Murray. 11 The plates that I discuss are from The Book of Thel copy H (The Library of Congress, www.loc. gov/resource/rbc0001.2005rosen1798/?st=gallery). Plates are numbered according to Erdman’s Illuminated Blake. 12 In a similar vein, Mitchell, in his Blake’s Composite Art (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), writes that “the title page depicts the courting dance of the Cloud and Dew as a whirling vortex of pleasure” (105). 13 Eaves, Essick, and Viscomi note the ambiguity of the scene in The Early Illuminated Books (82).

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Figure 1: William Blake The Book of Thel plate ii, Copy H, The Library of Congress

Plants as a possible source of Blake’s illustrations of plants in The Book of Thel. The Loves of the Plants appeared in 1789 as a part of The Botanic Garden, “a poetic guide, in the idiom of ‘The Rape of the Lock,’ to the sexual behaviour of the male and female parts of garden flowers” (33). The plant that Blake makes the focal point of the title page to Thel is anemone pulsatilla, a flower that needs the wind to open its petals. As Erdman recounts, Darwin’s imagery is straightforwardly erotic: the flower yearns for the wind’s “cherub-lips”, which are then to rend its “gauzy veil” (34). Ecstasy mixes with aggression and submission. Thel, standing aside, looks at the scene carefully but with uncertainty. On the one hand, she is fascinated by the promise of an adult, sexual relationship; on the other hand, she senses both violence and the power struggle inherent in such a relationship in the world of Generation. Thus, her fascination mingles with fear, but the questioning stance very well reflects her inquisitive attitude toward reality, her inner compulsion to ask unsettling questions. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and in his annotations to Lavater, Blake expresses his conviction that human life should mean an active search for ful-

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filment. He claims that it is better to “murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” (Marriage 10:67 E 38) and that “all Act [] is Virtue” (annotations to Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man p. 226, E 42). Staying passive, one becomes like contaminated standing water with “reptiles of the mind” (Marriage 19 E 42), since “he who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence” (Marriage 7:5 E 35). Although it is possible to see Thel as a passive, indecisive figure, since her search is inconclusive,14 this interpretation overlooks the fact that, unlike all the other characters in the poem, she exhibits a pondering, questioning attitude. The Lilly and the Clod exult in their productive, selfless lives. Thel’s sisters have also become characterised by the duties that they fulfil: as shepherdesses, they obediently “[lead] round their sunny flocks” (1:1 E 3), even if, as Bruder suggests, they run in circles (44–45). If they have desires, they do their best to suppress them. In contrast, Thel actively searches for fulfilment and ponders what this fulfilment implies and whether it would cost her dear. Her resistance is much more active than her compliance could ever be. Thel, as the reader meets her for the first time, is deeply worried, and she feels alienated in her anxieties, brooding over them “in paleness” and in secrecy (1:2 E 3). In this way, Blake stresses her position as an outsider, which she occupies at the beginning and retains to the end of the book. Although she inhabits the vales of Har, which have been traditionally interpreted as a paradise-like world (Blake’s Beulah or pre-existence), and thus is not subject to death, Thel in her first lamentation is concerned with mutability. She compares herself to all beautiful but transient phenomena in the material world, such as “a watry bow”, “a parting cloud”, “a reflection in a glass”, “dreams of infants”, “shadows in the water”, “music in the air” (1:8–11 E 3). It is informative to note that these comparisons echo Thel’s generally ambivalent stance towards embodiment: all the images she uses to describe herself are as volatile and ethereal as possible. The Lilly of the Valley, the first of Thel’s interlocutors, is puzzled by her worries, and asks “then why should Thel complain, / Why should the mistress of the vales of Har, utter a sigh?” (1:25, 2:1 E 4). Despite being a daughter of the Seraphim, Thel stubbornly refuses to see herself as immortal. While this point may be explained by noting that transience is the chief feature of the world that Thel contemplates entering – the cause of her fears – such an interpretation soon proves elusive: all the creatures that she talks to proclaim the existence of an afterlife, and the Clod of Clay, inviting Thel into her kingdom, assures her that “’tis given thee to enter, / And to return” (5:16–17 E 6). Though Thel need not fear disintegration in death, she is not comforted by any of the speeches and continues to cast herself as a transient, mutable being, different from those she meets on her way. As James 14 Some earlier critics seem to ignore Thel’s inquisitiveness, or to attribute it to a whiny, selfcentred attitude; see, for example, Damon 401, Bloom 53, and Frye 233.

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Swearingen perceptively notes, “[h]er unity with the life of the fabulous setting is already disrupted. That unity does not belong to the time of the poem; it is a narrative memory, a hypothetical condition ‘before’ her differentiation from other things living alongside her in the vales of Har” (“Will and Desire” 128). Gradually, however, she turns to contemplate a purpose rather than the transience of her existence. Very quickly, she concludes that there is no aim, no use in her life. She claims that she wants to leave a trace of her existence instead of disappearing without a mark. Thus, it may be suggested that death for Thel is nothing but insignificance. Nevertheless, the main problem around which the rest of the text is structured is how to signify without having one’s identity totally obliterated. The Lilly of the Valley is Thel’s opposite. She describes herself in terms of modesty, humility, hard work, and cheerfulness. She is “very small” and dwells in “lowly vales” (1:17 E 4); she is a weak and gentle maid who does not talk too much, only bows “her modest head” (2:17 E 4) and resides in “modest brooks” and “silent valleys” (1:22 E 4), where she goes to “mind her numerous charge among the verdant grass” (2:18 E 4). Her description adheres to the doctrine of selfsacrifice that underlies Thel. Morris Eaves, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi attribute this ideology to “contemporary handbooks for young ladies that taught the docile acceptance of servitude to masculine desires and expectations” (The Early Illuminated Books 80), and this seems to be the case with the Lilly. She believes that her behaviour is bound to be rewarded: she will be “clothed in light” and “fed with morning manna” (1:23 E 4). She feels gratefulness toward him “that smiles on all” (1:19 E 4) (critics still debate whether he is God from Eden or just a male cloud). Regardless of the ambiguity, this presence is unquestionably male and his behaviour, as well as the Lilly’s humble and grateful response from her position of dependency, defines her world as patriarchal. Since her existence amounts to a happy and fulfilled life in the Lilly’s perception, she cannot understand Thel’s doubts and worries. Why should Thel complain, if she will be rewarded in exactly the same way for exactly the same behaviour upon entering the adult social world? She previews Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “an angel-watered lily” (the ideal female) from the sonnets written to accompany the painting The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,15 a lily that “near God / Grows and is quiet” (lines 10– 11). Rossetti characterises Mary (the lily) by “simplicity of intellect, / And supreme patience” (lines 5–6), while her virtues correspond to the books that she studies: hope, faith, and charity. As her name suggests, the Lilly signifies purity, 15 Rossetti wrote two sonnets to accompany his painting; their collective title is “Mary’s Girlhood (For a Picture)”, and they are numbered I and II. The quotations come from the first sonnet (see the poem in the Rossetti Archive http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/s40.rap. htm).

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virginity, and innocence, but it is interesting to remember that lilies have another primary symbolic association: death. This makes Blake’s symbolism extraordinarily consistent and links the Lilly to other elements in the text associated with death and mourning: the Clod of Clay, tombs, worms, withering of the body, elegiac overtones. Would existence akin to that of the Lilly mean death for Thel? Strikingly, though, Thel sees the Lilly as the essence of motherhood and maternal care. We may recall here an interesting biographical speculation offered by S. Foster Damon, who suggests that The Book of Thel might have been an elegy written by Blake on the death of his daughter, lost through miscarriage (401), though no biographers support this conjecture. Certainly, the theme of motherhood is one of the chief concerns in Blake’s poem. What is the vision of motherhood endorsed by the text, then, and how does it clash with what Thel would like it to be? The answer is partly revealed in the first dialogic exchange, with the Lilly of the Valley, and implicated in all subsequent interactions that Thel initiates. When Thel rephrases the Lilly’s answer, she arrives at her own interpretation of the Lilly’s life. She describes her in terms of servitude and meekness, which become synonymous with nursing and mothering: the Lilly, Thel says, nourishes the innocent lamb, feeds him, cleans him, cherishes him. What is more, the Lilly is characterised by her “milky garments” (2:5 E 4), which straightforwardly figure breastfeeding and foreshadow the Clod’s “milky fondness” (4:9 E 5). Finally, she calmly accepts the prospect of her sacrifice: while the lamb devours her flowers she sits “smiling in his face” (2:6 E 4). The Lilly also attends to other living creatures: her perfume “revives the milked cow” and “tames the fire-breathing steed” (2:10 E 4). Therefore, the question implied in this passage concerns the extent to which selfless giving may be reconciled with one’s own needs. What is left of the Lilly when her flowers are cropped, her leaves become the bed for worms, and her perfume is scattered all over the grass? At the end of this encounter, Thel reasserts her difference from the Lilly, but it seems that her emotional response to the Lilly’s speech is not negative at all. As she contemplates the possibility of becoming a mother, she looks at the Lilly with interest and only slight apprehension. Thel’s own vision of nursing and care appears to have diverted her attention from the real meaning of the Lilly’s speech, which represents an essentially submissive position of humble dependence. Her positive attitude toward the Lilly (or her refashioning of the Lilly’s function) can be detected when she contrasts her futility with the Lilly’s existence. Thel imagines herself now as a “faint cloud” (2:11 E 4) that experiences mutability and does not leave a trace when it vanishes from its “pearly throne” (2:12 E 4). As if by the touch of a magic wand, the personified – distinctly male – Cloud appears. While the Cloud seems to answer Thel’s worries connected with mutability, stressing the life cycles in nature, he primarily embodies the principle of

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sexual love. The fact that Thel sees him as attractive is figured in her description of him as a “bright form” with a “golden head” (3:5 E 4), shiny and glittering. Erdman notes the tones of “sexual encounter and aggressive masculinity” in The Book of Thel, which he attributes to Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (The Illuminated Blake 33). Similarly, Bruder concludes that the Cloud’s speech is suggestive of violent appropriation: he, the only male in the text, violates the fair-eyed dew, who cries and trembles, afraid of their union (48). Such a reading, however, is not wholly convincing: after all, the Cloud is said to court the dew (courtship connotes gentle and tender behaviour), which results in the invitation to the dew’s shining tent. Thus, the sexual union that ensues is both feared and wanted by the “fair eyed dew” (3:13 E 5), and it happens with, rather than without, her consent. The dew, in her virginity, simultaneously desires and is afraid of sexual fulfilment. Hence, the Cloud is undeniably masculine and decisive, but not necessarily violent and aggressively appropriative.

Figure 2: William Blake The Book of Thel plate 4, Copy H, The Library of Congress

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Thel’s attraction to the idea of partnership and sexual union is distinctly spelled out in the illustration accompanying plate 4 (see figure 2). The design serves as a visual bridge between plates 3 and 4. While the text of plate 3 consists of the Cloud’s speech, there is no visual equivalent of this scene on the plate. As I suggested earlier, I believe that some designs to The Book of Thel contradict, rather than complement, the text, and plates 3 and 4 are examples of this contradiction. There is nothing in the text of plate 3 to suggest that Thel has been convinced by the Cloud’s speech, which explains how a female can find meaning in the world of Generation. The text depicts the moment that Thel finds hard to accept when the Cloud defines the proper place and significance for her in such terms: Then if thou art the food of worms. O virgin of the skies, How great thy use. how great thy blessing; every thing that lives, Lives not alone, nor for itself. (3:25–27 E5)

Laura Quinney notices the contradiction between Thel’s expectations and the ultimate message communicated to her by the Cloud, and reads this statement as ironic: It would be a mistake to think that Blake endorses this idea. The Cloud goes on to explain, “everything that lives, / Lives not alone, nor for itself” (Thel 3:26–27, E5), but this assertion is not to be confused with Blake’s “Everything that lives is Holy” (MHH 25, E45; my italics). In the Cloud’s absurd suggestion, Blake is mocking the attempt to redeem strictly natural existence. Consciousness cannot be content with its fate because the body nurtures worms (32).

The conflict between Thel’s aspirations and the Cloud’s ideology is straightforwardly indicated when she complains in the previous lines: “And all shall say, without a use this shining woman liv’d, / Or did she only live. to be at death the food of worms” (3:22–23 E 5). This exchange testifies to the crucial misunderstanding: for Thel, feeding the worms is the ultimate sign of nothingness and insignificance, the abuse and wasting of her embodied self, while her interlocutor understands it as the essence of both use and significance. Despite the obvious conflict of attitudes and expectations, Blake chooses to portray Thel with open, outstretched arms prior to the moment in the text where this openness is indicated. Her verbal acceptance is delayed until after her conversation with the Clod of Clay in plate 5. Yet, in the design to plate 4, Thel is open and inviting; the apprehension signalled by her wary, cautious position as an outsider in the title plate has vanished. The explanation of this contradiction must be seen in her response to the Cloud’s appearance and the account of his sexual, impregnating function, rather than to his words about feeding the worms after death, which, as we have seen, clash

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acutely with Thel’s expectations. As yet, Thel overlooks the connection between motherhood and such a sacrifice: after all, she herself described the Lilly of the Valley as being devoured by the lamb, but at that moment she seemed to praise the Lilly for her nurturing stance. Blake depicts the Cloud in the design to plate 4 later than his appearance in the text, on the plate that simultaneously shows Thel’s encounter with the Worm. This device can be seen as an example of what Mitchell calls “the technique of syncopation” and defines it as placing designs “at a physical and metaphoric distance from their best textual reference” (193). A naked male figure flies with his arms outstretched in the upper part of the design, while in the lower part we see Thel standing above a little worm-like infant “wrapped in the Lillys leaf” (4:3 E 5). Blake’s decision to depict both encounters within one design suggests that the intention was to stress the inevitable relationship between sexuality and birth. If Thel decides to be a mother, she must first accept her role as a sexual partner. Thel looks at the Worm with arms ready to embrace. Strikingly, plate 4 shows one of the few moments in the designs to Thel where she stands as if inviting, or actively wanting to embrace, the new experience. In Blake’s designs, human postures are always suggestive of mental or spiritual conditions, and, as several critics have demonstrated, leaping, open, dancing figures with outstretched arms are often contrasted with bound, bent, constricted and confined, closed postures.16 Thel’s gesture is an exact parallel of the Cloud’s outstretched arms. Wanting to hold the baby, she accepts her sexuality as well and, like “fair eyed dew”, invites erotic union. Thus, my reading contradicts the view that Thel “is especially unresponsive to potentialities that she is unwilling to acknowledge in herself, most obviously her sexuality. Her interest assumes the form of a safe maternal superiority and attends to the Worm only as mediated by the Clod of Clay” (Swearingen “Will and Desire” 133). I believe that Thel consciously seeks the articulation of her feminine desire (as suggested by the possibilities of meaning inherent in her name), which embraces both sexual partnership and maternal love. However, she becomes discouraged and frightened by the implications accompanying this prospect mediated to her by other presences in the text (most crucially, the Clod of Clay) and seen during her thwarted attempt to enter Generation. 16 For a discussion of similar human figures and their postures, see Janet Warner, “Blake’s Figures of Despair: Man in His Spectre’s Power”, in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Morton D. Paley and Michael Phillips (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 208–24. Also, Kathleen Raine states straightforwardly: “There are, for Blake’s human figures, essentially two conditions – the unconfined freedom of unimpeded energy; and the constricted, fettered, weighted and cramped state of the prisoners of Urizen’s universe of mechanized nature” (111).

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Figure 3: William Blake The Book of Thel plate 5, Copy H, The Library of Congress

This discouragement is represented in the design to plate 5 (see figure 3), where Thel is sitting under a threatening plant, her posture the reverse of what it was in plate 4. Erdman identifies this plant as Meadia or dodecatheon, which “extends one blushing blossom above her [Thel’s] head, still closed (compare the bud thrusting near in Plate ii) but beginning to put forth long stamens (a strongly phallic assertion in the Darwinian context)” (The Illuminated Blake 39). Thel’s body posture communicates defensiveness. Embracing herself, she wants only to be left alone. This gesture is a frequent indicator of despair and dejection in Blake’s designs.17 At Thel’s feet, Blake depicts a mother playing with a child (a personified vision of the Clod and the Worm), but now Thel rejects even the experience that so far was attractive to her. Her bowed head obscures her face and suggests that she does not want to observe the joyful play. The flowers and plants in this plate are either predatory (on the right) or withered (on the left) and 17 Cf. the design for The First Book of Urizen pl. 7, where Los “howld in a dismal stupor” (7.1, E 74), as well as the figure of Theotormon embracing himself in Visions of the Daughters of Albion pl. i.

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powerfully communicate Thel’s inner state: threatened, she mourns her withered hopes. Behind her we see a gloomy, dark cloud. The price to pay for fulfilment as a lover and a mother, after all, turned out to be too high. Plate 5 is another example of the contradiction between design and text. Blake devotes two plates of text to Thel’s encounter with the Worm and the Clod of Clay, but while plate 4 describes Thel’s essentially positive vision of the Worm as a child and the emergence of the mother figure, the Clod of Clay, plate 5 stresses aspects of the feminine roles in the world of Generation that Thel rejects. The decision to separate, through the division between plates, these two verbal exchanges supports the claim that it is not the experience of motherhood that Thel rejects as such, but how this experience is mediated to her through the figure of the Clod, who is a sum of the attitudes of the female servitude and submissiveness and who, even more importantly, harbours the opinion of her unworthiness and insignificance as a person outside her role as a mother. Thus, in plate 4, the meeting with the Worm results in a spontaneous overflow of maternal feelings on Thel’s part: she sees the Worm as helpless, naked, weak, and crying, and pities it for its loneliness. In a way testifying to her lack of practice, she tries to comfort it, urging it not to weep (4:4 E 5). At this moment the Clod of Clay materializes and appears to Thel as pitying, humble, and caring. Blake connects her to Thel’s earlier perception of the Lilly’s milky garments: the image of the Clod’s nursing the Worm results in “her life exhal’d / In milky fondness” (4:8–9 E 5). This striking image communicates the essence of motherhood: on the one hand, selflessness on the verge of self-sacrifice when, breastfeeding a baby, the woman gives the best part of herself to her child; on the other hand, “milky fondness”, which suggests love and willingness to do so. It is not a grudging, calculating, resentful giving, but a true gift of the heart as well as of the body. This is the vision to which Thel is drawn, as we see her in plate 4, where she is standing with open arms full of love and tenderness. Toward the end of plate 4, however, complications emerge. The Clod of Clay proceeds to inform Thel of her own unworthiness: “Thou seest me the meanest thing, and so I am indeed; / My bosom of itself is cold. and of itself is dark” (4:11– 12 E 5). In short, alone and by herself, she believes that she is nothing. Embodied, she is a “thing” without relevance. She needs a man (God?) to give her significance and a function to uplift her status through marriage and childbirth, and this is how plate 5 starts: But he that loves the lowly, pours his oil upon my head. And kisses me, and binds his nuptial bands around my breast. And says; Thou mother of my children, I have loved thee. And I have given thee a crown that none can take away. (5:1–4 E 6)

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Although she finds erotic and maternal love alluring, Thel has no inclination to accept it as her only purpose of existence and her duty. She wants to see it as her active choice that would be appreciated and met with thankfulness, not as something she needs to be thankful for. Her maternal instincts to cherish and hold are alive and well, which is also true of her desire for partnership and marital union. Nevertheless, Thel’s intellect rebels at the Clod’s message which asserts her meaninglessness, her internal conviction that by herself she is dark, mean, and cold and is given meaning only by being impregnated. She does not want to accept the attitude indicated in the Clod’s humble “I ponder, and I cannot ponder; yet I live and love” (5:6 E 6). This is the probable reason for Thel’s unresponsiveness, shown in the design. Interestingly, this is a moment where the design and the text evidently clash again. In the text, Thel’s response to the Clod’s words suggests welcoming and willing reception: she wipes her tears and proclaims her readiness to enter Generation after all. The explanation of the shift in her stance, nevertheless, is peculiar: Thel rephrases the Clod’s speech but, as happened earlier in the conversation with the Lilly, it seems that she has heard a message different from the one understood by the reader. Has she even been listening to what the Clod said? Thel states: Alas! I knew not this, and therefore did I weep: That God would love a Worm I knew, and punish the evil foot That wilful, bruis’d its helpless form: but that he cherish’d It With milk and oil, I never knew; and therefore did I weep. (5:8–11 E 6)

When Thel was listening to the Lilly, she screened out the meaning of her words: instead of the Lilly’s proclamation of her smallness, humbleness, modesty, humility, and insignificance, Thel noticed only her nurturing, giving, open attitude. Now, summarizing what the Clod said, she concentrates on the notion that God cherishes every living creature (the Clod never said that!) and, consequently, she convinces herself to embrace embodiment, to seek fulfilment in the world of adulthood and maturity. At that point, she does not consciously notice the ideology endorsed by the Clod because the Clod talks about what Thel desires: love, marital union, and childbearing. The vision of partnership and maternity is so tempting that Thel overlooks graver implications in her words. It is as if the Thel of the text is more naive and more easily deluded than the Thel of the designs. No wonder that when she finally accepts her corporeality, enters Generation and sees with her own eyes the world whose patriarchal rules the Lilly, the Cloud, and the Clod of Clay described, she turns from it in revulsion, and, shrieking, flies back into the vales of Har.

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Figure 4: William Blake The Book of Thel plate 6, Copy H, The Library of Congress

The design accompanying the last plate of The Book of Thel (see figure 4) is an example of a verbal-visual relationship known as redundancy. While so far we have encountered one-to-one correspondence, by which every design has its equivalent in a passage of the text, the last design stands apart.18 Eaves, Essick, and Viscomi call this plate “less an illustration to the text than a visual commentary on it or a final vision providing an alternative ending to Thel” (The Early Illuminated Books 85). Blake presents a striking image of two young children and an adolescent girl riding a snake in a way suggestive of both the joy inherent in this activity and control exerted over the creature. The children play on the loops of the serpent; the girl, in a red dress in this copy, firmly holds the reins in her hand. Some critics do not identify the girl with Thel.19 Others, like Anne Mellor,

18 The tendency to accompany text with designs that seem not to illustrate it is prominent in other prophetic books, and the designs for The First Book of Urizen may serve as an example (see pls. 15 and 27). In The Book of Thel plate 1 is similar to a certain extent, but in comparison with the last plate it is still easier to find parallels with the text; Erdman suggests that “both the eagle man and the armed man adumbrate the ‘fighting men in ambush’ that haunt Thel in Plate 6” (Illuminated Blake 35). 19 Neither Erdman nor Damon identifies the girl with Thel. Damon sees “a girl, with a light bridle” guiding “the Serpent of Nature” (52), while Erdman decisively states that the girl is not

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see the design as a triumphant symbol of Thel’s overcoming her fears, suggesting that it is “an emblem of the ability of Innocence to bridle or control the evils of the land of death, […] and to reaffirm the wisdom of Innocence” (36), which will enable Thel later to “joyfully lead round her ‘sunny flocks,’ secure and lovingly productive in the mutable but holy world of Innocence” (37). The second part of Mellor’s statement is problematic. In my view, Thel is present in the design and she is triumphant, but her rite of passage has been precisely to recognize the fact that she does not want to be “lovingly productive” and to “joyfully lead […] her ‘sunny flocks,’” at least not round and round, as her sisters do in plate 1. Rather, I think that this design indicates Thel’s inner transformation: instead of female malleability and perfect compliance with the roles that have been written for her, she takes the reins of control into her own hands and writes her role herself. I see this design as the most optimistic, as it implies maturity and decisiveness on Thel’s part, but does not exclude joy and fulfilment (as suggested by the presence of the playing children). It appears that Thel has finally found a way out of her dilemma and a life in which her worth does not entirely depend on how good she is at serving and self-denial, a life of which we see only a glimpse and which is not narrated in her book. The change of colour of her dress in this copy, from white to dark pink, signifies that the rite of passage has perhaps been completed after all. Two poems from Songs of Innocence and of Experience that also deal with maternal love and childbearing throw additional light on Thel’s dilemma concerning fulfilment. The connections occur both on the visual and the textual level in ways too striking to ignore. “Infant Joy” and “Infant Sorrow” delineate contrasting visions of childhood and parenthood. Since the parents’ attitude to their parenthood – happiness or dejection – defines and determines the joy or sorrow of their children, the poems speak as much about the emotions of the children as of the adults. “Infant Joy” is visually linked to The Book of Thel through the plant image that forms the centre of the design. The same flower (anemone pulsatilla), although with different leaves, is used in the title page of The Book of Thel. Erdman discerns this similarity and goes on to ask: “And we might wonder how Thel would regard the bud (which gets in her way in Thel ii) if she could see the present scene in the open blossom?” (The Illuminated Blake 66). The anemone in the design has leaves and a stem strongly reminiscent of flames, and its blossom is also flamelike. Inside the flower, Blake depicts three human figures: a mother with a child on her knees and a winged female angel. The poem enacts happiness and unity both verbally and visually: the stems and the leaves enclose the text and culminate in the cup- or womb-like blossom in the upper part of the design, Thel and contrasts her “easy riding of the phallic serpent” with Thel’s shriek (Illuminated Blake 40).

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which delicately and safely shelters the nativity scene inside. The position of the mother tenderly bent over her child, as well as the presence of an angel, recalls representations of the Madonna and Christ, in accordance with one of the main motifs of Songs of Innocence, where Jesus is said to be identical with every living being, a child in particular.20 The dialogue that governs the poem testifies to the harmonious interaction between the mother and the child. The mother’s question “What shall I call thee?” (l. 3 E 16) signals receptivity and respect toward her newborn child. As a result, sweet joy befalls both of them, becoming the child’s name and the mother’s inner state. The womb-like shape of the flower and the flame and colour symbolism (the flower in copy C is dark pink, almost purple) suggest the possibility that the scene inside the flower imaginatively renders the situation prior to the birth, and that the two-day-old child has only just been conceived. In this reading, more than ever before, the notion of a passionate erotic relationship stands in the background. The child is the mother’s joy because it is the fruit of her erotic union with a man she loves. She may shelter her baby inside her womb and sing joyful lullabies because she herself feels happy and protected inside her relationship. Although no masculine element is literally present in the poem or in the picture, the presence of the father/partner figure is implicated both through the conception of the child and through the unity and happiness enacted in the design. In contrast, “Infant Sorrow” projects a diametrically different scene. The loving dialogue between the mother and the child of “Infant Joy” is replaced by the woeful monologue of the newborn, who “leap[s]” (l. 2 E 28) into the dangerous world, where nobody is happy about its birth: the parents, crying and groaning, give in to dejection and depression. The child becomes a devil (a “fiend”, l. 4 E 28), not a joy; it enters a world defined by struggle, aggression, and limitation; it struggles in the father’s hands and against the swaddling bands, which constrain it and make any free movement impossible. Exhausted by the conflict, the child gives up and agrees to suck its mother’s milk, but there is no “milky fondness”, no happy giving and taking: instead, the breastfed child is said to “sulk” upon the mother’s breast (l. 8 E 28). Clearly, there is no joy in their mutual relationship, only the baby’s needy hunger and the mother’s sense of duty and resignation. As John Bender and Anne Mellor suggest, Here, the child of innocent energy at first struggles against the chains of society and authority. But finally it capitulates, persuaded by developing reason that survival lies in accommodating oneself to the powers that be – even though such capitulation can only produce a life of frustration. The child is fed, but at the price of being swaddled and of “sulking” (301). 20 This motif recurs in Songs of Innocence: it can be found in “The Lamb”, “The Divine Image”, “On Anothers Sorrow” and “A Cradle Song”.

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Their reading of “Infant Sorrow” is primarily aimed at showing that there is a visual/verbal discrepancy between the design and the text, undermining the governing concept of the “sister arts” (298). The main disjunction, as this interpretation suggests, is between the newborn baby in the poem, swaddled and oppressed, and the one-and-half-a-year-old child in the design (304–05). Another divergence can be detected in the mother figure, who “leans forward in a pliant arc” with a “soft, tenderly beckoning […] gesture” toward her child (304). While the absence of the swaddling bands and the different age of the child are unmistakable, the gesture code that Blake uses in this design seems to echo the title page of The Book of Thel, where the couple emerging from the flower are presented in a similar way – one of the lovers with hands uplifted in a gesture of alarm, the other struggling to grasp and embrace her. Then, it may be concluded that the design for “Infant Sorrow” retains ambiguity similar to that in the title page for Thel. The child reaches away from the mother, communicating an ambivalent attitude toward her embrace, which may be perceived as tender or as restricting. Feeling helpless and naked, “piping loud” as in the poem, the child finally has no choice, however, but to succumb to the mother’s grasp. It is worth remembering that upon meeting the infant-Worm, Thel describes the baby in almost identical terms: “helpless”, “naked”, and “weeping” (4:5 E 5). Her dilemma can be summarized in the clashing visions of motherhood depicted in “Infant Joy” and “Infant Sorrow”. Thel yearns for fulfilment as a mother and as a partner similar to that indicated in “Infant Joy”, but does not think that such a vision is plausible in the world described by her interlocutors. Convinced that in the world of Generation motherhood would realise itself as metaphorically presented in “Infant Sorrow”, she visualises herself as an oppressed and unhappy mother, who would impose the same pattern of oppression on her baby. Since she does not want to become the groaning, grasping figure of “Infant Sorrow”, Thel rejects the prospect of erotic love and motherhood outright, at least for the time being. Her choice is deeply embedded in the question of gender difference in a patriarchal world presided over by a male God who legitimises the purpose of one’s existence by giving meaning to that which “of itself is cold. and of itself is dark” (Thel 4:12 E 5), where a female has no right to assert her worth if she does not fulfil her biological function of childbearing. In this world, the experience of the female embodiment cannot be positive and rewarding. Instead, Thel desires existence in a world where being a mother does not mean solely becoming food for worms, where she is allowed to think and ask questions, making her own free choices, and where she may expect gratitude for all that she has to offer. Thel comes to realise that gender roles and expectations are socially constituted and socially changeable, but the transformation does not come easily. Therefore, she opts out and withdraws, hoping that the future may yet bring a significant change.

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The practice of femininity: Visions of the Daughters of Albion21 The title page of Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) presents a striking scene: a naked young woman – the main heroine Oothoon – runs on the surface of a stormy ocean, looking up and frantically trying to reach a male god-like figure hovering above her (see figure 5).22 As David Erdman explains, he is Urizen, the god of reason, the lawgiver and instigator of religious norms and rules against which Oothoon will direct an angry diatribe later in the poem (Illuminated Blake 126); in the title page, however, we can sense her desperation to reach him. Urizen’s presentation prefigures Oothoon’s lover Theotormon in the engraved plates of the text that will follow – both figures embrace themselves in a defensive gesture of self-withdrawal. Blake indicates a distinct affinity between Urizen and Theotormon – the name of the latter suggests “the man tormented by his own idea of God” (Bloom Blake’s Apocalypse 106), and the torment of the hovering figure is directly perceptible, both in the contorted, terrified facial expression and in the flames that envelop his body. Their visual similarity is sustained in the text as well: while Urizen is responsible for the creation of the ideology under which Oothoon appears impure, it is Theotormon who acts as an agent of this ideology. Consequently, Oothoon attacks Urizenic thinking and tries to reach Theotormon, suggesting an alternative worldview. Thus, I propose that the figure in the title page may be understood both as Urizen, against whom Oothoon rebels and/or Theotormon, whose beliefs she would like to change. The dark, stormy and very dynamic character of the design, as well as its emotional atmosphere, indicate that the poem’s action will be dramatic and full of tension; the allegedly idyllic and gentle quality of the Thel designs gives room to the darker tones of unmasked persecution, violence and struggle. Visions of the Daughters of Albion is a text about oppression, enslavement, and impassioned pleas for women’s liberation.23 The first word, “ENSLAVED”, is 21 This subchapter was originally published as a scholarly article “The Experience of Female Embodiment in William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 19.1 (2020): 1–27. 22 The plates that I discuss are from Visions of the Daughters of Albion copy J (Library of Congress, ehttps://www.loc.gov/resource/rbc0001.2003rosen1803/?st=gallery). Plates ar numbered according to Erdman’s Illuminated Blake. 23 As neatly shown by Dennis M. Welch in “Essence, Gender, Race: Visions of the Daughters of Albion” (Studies in Romanticism 49.1 [2010], pp. 105–131, note 1), Blake scholarship relating to Visions of the Daughters of Albion can roughly be grouped into distinct categories. These include historical and Marxist readings, rhetorical and figurative criticism, the psycho-sexual, the philosophical and the feminist interpretations. The most representative recent feminist analyses and psychological readings are Harriet Kramer Linkin, “Revisioning Blake’s Oothoon”, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 23.4 (1990): 184–94; Helen P. Bruder, “Blake and Gender Studies”, Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies, ed. Nicholas M. Williams (New York: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 132–66 and her chapter devoted to Visions in William Blake and the

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Figure 5: William Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion plate ii, Copy J, The Library of Congress

printed by Blake in bold capitals and sets the tone and subject for the whole poem. It refers to the titular daughters of Albion – Englishwomen – whom Blake imagines as bound in chains and lamenting their oppression. The narrative that forms the body of the poem – the plight of Oothoon – is a vision the daughters of Albion are granted and with which they sympathise. Visions is also, or maybe primarily, a text about the body, as Oothoon’s experience is deeply rooted in the perception of her own body, both by herself and by others.24 Daughters of Albion, Dennis M. Welch, “Essence, Gender, Race: Visions of the Daughters of Albion”, Nancy Moore Goslee, “‘Soul’ in Blake’s Writing: Redeeming the Word”, Wordsworth Circle 33.1 (2002), pp. 18–23, Christopher Z. Hobson Blake and Homosexuality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2000). Also, Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly bring into focus Blake’s treatment of sexuality in their co-edited series on Blake: Queer Blake (2010) and Sexy Blake (2013), while a book by Tristanne Connolly William Blake and the Body (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2002) concentrates on many aspects of Blake’s portrayal of the body, with gender as its most important concern, but does not discuss Visions in detail. 24 The text which comes closest to the discussion of the female embodiment in Visions is Dennis M. Welch’s “Essence, Race, Gender: Visions of the Daughters of Albion”. Welch recognizes Oothoon as “embodied identity” (121), but does not at length dwell on the actual – material – experience of embodiment, instead framing his discussion against Locke’s concepts of es-

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Oothoon is often identified as the successor of the heroine from The Book of Thel. Thel did not accept the essentially submissive and servile role of a woman expected of her and ended up refusing embodiment altogether, as her decision not to enter the material world indicates. Her refusal also implied her giving up on love and partnership (which she doubted was possible to achieve in the patriarchal society she was supposed to become a part of). Oothoon, however, is prepared to make the choice which Thel escaped, and as we meet her at the beginning of Blake’s poem, she professes her readiness for a relationship with the man she loves, Theotormon. At this point in the text, she is in contact with her body: acknowledges its urges and desires, decides to act upon them. The terms Blake uses leave little doubt as to the fact that she proclaims her readiness for an essentially sexual encounter: Oothoon’s willingness to give herself to Theotormon is expressed in a metaphor of plucking the marigold flower which she puts to glow between her breasts; thus equipped, Oothoon sets out “in wing’d exulting swift delight” (1:9 E 46) to look for her beloved. Interestingly, as Caroline Jackson-Houlston notes, the picking of a flower is a culturally archetypal metaphor for sexual initiation, but it typically connotes “boastful male violence’. However, when “the woman initiates the action (plucking rather than being passively plucked) the sense is much more positive (even if the results of her sexual exploration are unhappy) because she moves from object to subject, and asserts her right to initiate sexual encounters” (153). Even if it is only for a fleeting moment, Blake grants Oothoon agency and the right to articulate her needs. Similarly to the Book of Thel, the visual-verbal interaction in Visions follows a complex pattern of syncopation (displacing) and contradiction. The plate illustrating “The Argument” (see figure 6) relates more closely to the scene described in Plate 1 from the text than it does to the lines with which it is spatially connected. In the design, we see Oothoon’s encounter with the Marigold, which echoes the conversation from Plate 1: sence and substance. Also, he suggests that the key to Oothoon’s identity is the interaction between her body and her self: “Oothoon possesses both an enduring identity (a personal ‘essence’), inherent and manifest in her imaginative body and its significant valuations, and – consistent with her essence – a self oppressed by, yet capable of resisting and even developing in response to, such constraints as slavery, rape, cultural ideology and social judgment” (109). My reading, in turn, avoids the polarisation of Oothoon into body and self, but concentrates instead on showing how her sense of identity is conditioned by her experience of embodiment. Another important discussion of the relation of soul to body in Visions is by Nancy Moore Goslee, who analyses Blake’s stance on embodiment in the context of both Enlightenment materialism and Saint Paul’s ideas about the duality of terrestrial and celestial bodies, voiced in Corinthians I, 15:39–44, but her essay is synthetic in nature, and she gives Visions only a cursory examination (“‘Soul’ in Blake’s Writing: Redeeming the Word,” Wordsworth Circle 33.1 [2002], pp. 18–23). In turn, in her Blake and the Body Tristanne Connolly writes about embodiment mostly in relation to Blake’s male characters, Urizen and Reuben.

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Figure 6: William Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion plate iii, Copy J, The Library of Congress

Art thou a flower? Art thou a nymph? I see thee now a flower, Now a nymph! I dare not pluck thee from thy dewy bed! The Golden nymph replied: ‘Pluck thou my flower, Oothoon the mild! Another flower shall spring, because the soul of sweet delight Can never pass away. She ceas’d, and clos’d her golden shrine. Then Oothoon pluck’d the flower, saying: I pluck thee from thy bed, Sweet flower, and put thee here to glow between my breasts (1:6–12 E 46)

The design shows a kneeling, naked Oothoon who presses her palms to her breasts and kisses the personified flower, in a gesture of affirmation. The positioning of her hands visually represents the act of putting the flower “to glow between [her] breasts”, thus signalling her readiness for a sexual encounter as well as an untroubled, happy relation with her body.25 The fact that Oothoon sees 25 A number of critical readings of Blake’s design point also to the possibility of a lesbian encounter between Oothoon and the female figure of the Marigold, “a consensual and cosensual enjoyment of sexuality between two female figures” (Jackson-Houlston 154) or see it as an implication of autoeroticism (Bruder William Blake and the Daughters of Albion 75–76). See also Christopher Z. Hobson, Blake and Homosexuality, pp. 29–31.

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the Marigold “now as a flower, now as a nymph” testifies to her imaginative faculty being alive and well; in his later poetry Blake affirms the ability to perceive imaginatively in similar terms: his imaginative universe is always seen as humanized. Although violent events are prefigured in the text of “The Argument” in the form of “terrible thunders” which are to tear Oothoon’s “virgin mantle in twain” (iii: 7–8 E 45), nothing in the plate which illustrates it indicates the violence to follow. Instead, the design is radiant, its light emanating and spreading from a tiny flower of marigold placed at the bottom right. Even though we can see this move in formal terms as merely displacing the image, in terms of meanings thus produced, the interaction between text and design is straightforwardly contradictory, which alerts the readers to further contradictions and their significance at the later stages of the poem. Oothoon does not get to enjoy her relationship with Theotormon; soon after she sets out, she is assaulted and raped by another man, Bromion, who violates and impregnates her. Violence is recorded in the language which Blake uses in his description: Bromion “rends” Oothoon with thunders, having deposited her on his “stormy bed” (1:16 E 46). Crucially, Bromion does not do it because he desires Oothoon sexually or because he wants to start a relationship with her: his only motivation is to reinstate his supreme position in relation to other men, in this case, Theotormon. Oothoon’s body, objectified by rape, is still further objectified as a field on which Bromion imprints his masculinist control and triumph. Bromion, claiming his possession and domination of Oothoon, uses the language of imperialistic rapacity, which testifies to his essentially materialist outlook: Thy soft American planes are mine, and mine thy north & south: Stampt with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun […] (1:20–21 E 46)

As many critics have suggested, Visions is a text that fuses feminist themes with criticism of slavery and racial oppression, as well as is pliant to ecocritical readings.26 The quoted lines voice, in Bethan Stevens’s words, the “tired trope of (erotic) foreign woman as (exotic) landscape” (141). Oothoon’s body is seen as a land upon which Bromion exerts his possessive politics; it is similar to a black slave, whose status is marked by a stamp, a sign of ownership. Blake sustains this correlation by visual means as well: the scene illustrated in Plate 2 (again the 26 See Nancy Moore Goslee, “Slavery and Sexual Character: Questioning the Master Trope in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion”, ELH 57.1 (1990), pp. 101–128, Barbara F. Lefcowitz, “Blake and the Natural World”, PMLA 89.1 (Jan., 1974), pp. 121–131, Kevin Hutchings, “Pastoral, Ideology, and Nature in William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion”, Interdisciplinary Studies In Literature and Environment 9.1 (2002), pp. 1–24, Kevin Hutchings, “Gender, Environment, and Imperialism in William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion”, Romantic Circles (2001).

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image is placed at some distance from its textual referent) features a black African, toiling on the land, his collapsed posture echoed by a fallen and withered tree on the right. As Elizabeth Grosz, the founder of corporeal feminism, notes, “[f]ar from being an inert, passive, noncultural and ahistorical term, the body may be seen as the crucial term, the site of contestation, in a series of economic, political, sexual and intellectual struggles” (Volatile Bodies 19). Likewise, Oothoon’s body becomes the site of power struggle. It evolves from a purely corporeal and sexual entity and becomes a sign whose signifier is “woman”, but whose signified is male possession, power, control and domination. Thus, Oothoon’s experience of embodiment at this point is a condition of complete objectification. Her body becomes a thing, a commodity, in the world of men. She has no influence on what has become of her. Her initial autonomy and agency – the fact that she consciously chose to enter the relationship with Theotormon – is promptly unmasked as an illusion. Her belief that she is a subject rather than an object is immediately set right by the regulatory practices of correction and coercion. Not only does Bromion take her body by force, but also he hastily informs Theotormon of his new “possession” in order to assert his supremacy. This move confirms the analysis, put forward by Luce Irigaray and Gayle Rubin, among others, of the exchange of women as a foundation of Western patriarchy.27 In a yet more shocking move, the moment he has stamped Oothoon with his signet/penis, Bromion brands her as a whore and rejects her as an impaired, broken vessel: Bromion spoke. behold this harlot here on Bromions bed […] Now thou maist marry Bromions harlot, and protect the child Of Bromions rage, that Oothoon shall put forth in nine moons time. (1:18, 2:1–2 E 46)

After losing her virginity, Oothoon loses her value in the world of men, because, as James Swearingen suggests, “she, like all victims, is property” (“The Enigma of Identity” 205). The rape is her total depreciation: she is taken as a commodity and then discarded. While Bromion appropriates her body to assert his virility and power, Oothoon is left to deal with both the immediate consequences of his act (unwanted pregnancy) an the stigma that the victim of rape is to be blamed for what happened, because she must have been “asking for it”: according to NicoleClaude Mathieu, the rape is always the woman’s fault, because she should not have spoken to that man, behaved the way she did, been in that area, allowed herself to be raped (Mathieu 182). 27 I am referring here to Luce Irigaray’s excerpt “Women on the Market” from This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 184 in particular, and Gayle Rubin’s essay “The Traffic in Women: notes on the political economy of sex”, in Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157–210.

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For Oothoon, however, the most devastating thing is that her beloved Theotormon rejects her. His behaviour marks his identification with the way of thinking advocated by her rapist. Bromion brands Oothoon a whore, but it is Theotormon’s reaction that validates and confirms this judgment. Because Oothoon loves him, and because she is traumatized by rape, at this point in the narrative she seems to accept the men’s hierarchical normalizing judgement which defines her as guilty and polluted and sets forth to correct herself. In his striking critique of the modern society, Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault describes the emergence of unprecedented discipline directed against the body, the discipline which, as Sandra Bartky notes, “invades the body and seeks to regulate its very forces and operations, the economy and efficiency of its movements” (25). This discipline is to a large extent self-inflicted, and Foucault turns to the concept of the Panopticon (the prison whose authority and power rests upon the sense of being watched continuously from a tall tower in its centre, the locus of power), to elaborate upon the ways in which the self-regulatory practices operate. In the words of Bartky, “knowing that he may be observed from the tower at any time, the inmate takes over the job of policing himself” (41).

Figure 7: William Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion plate i, Copy J, The Library of Congress

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Interestingly, in his engraved plates of Visions of the Daughters of Albion Blake includes a moveable page, which in most copies is the frontispiece, but in one copy (copy A, Erdman The Illuminated Blake 125) a tailpiece (see figure 7). It presents a striking scene: two figures, male and female (commonly interpreted as Bromion and Oothoon), are sitting back to back, chained to each other at the mouth of a cave, while a third figure (Theotormon) is crouching on the left, hiding his face in his arms. It has been noted by Roland A. Duerksen that another, more metaphorical reading of this plate is possible and that it seems congruous with the narrative continuity of Blake’s story. In his interpretation, the two bound figures allegorically represent the principles of terror and meekness – terrified masculinity and meekly submissive femininity – rather than Oothoon and Bromion; symbolically, the figures personify the oppression of mind and spirit that Blake’s text talks about (72). However, the most astounding feature of this picture is the perspective: the viewer assumes a position from within the cave, and this position enables him/her to see the sun in the sky, partly enveloped in a cloud shaped like an eye socket, with an eyeball inside. This sun/eye that observes everything is a focal point in the illustration, and a commentary on the whole text. Regarding this image, David Erdman in The Illuminated Blake comments that “we feel constantly stared at” (126–7). This constant visibility/observation from an as yet unidentified perceiver exterior to the main scene but always there recalls Foucault’s concept of the Panopticon. A sense of permanent visibility ensures the functioning of power and results in the implementation of discipline. This idea is relevant for the understanding of Blake’s poetical text: the three characters of the narrative are under constant surveillance, their behaviour being watched at all times, while they remain prisoners in the cave; the scrutiny of the external eye results in the incorporation of the “eye-deology”28 which, as we learn later, comes from Urizen, the god of reason and the creator of social and religious norms and standards. His ideology will be the focus of impassionate criticism coming from Oothoon in the latter part of the text; at this point, however, Oothoon subscribes to the ideology of the eye. Her rape and subsequent rejection result in temporal identity breakdown. She starts perceiving herself as constituted through others. Paraphrasing the words of Sartre, she exists for herself as a body known by the Other (351). Her body is a battlefield of contending gazes, each of them defining her according to their external standards: Bromion’s gaze objectifies her as a thing on which he may exert his sense of ownership, while Theotormon’s gaze is a source of hierarchical normalizing standards, telling her what she is not: pure, innocent, modest, virgin. 28 I am using the term “eye-deology” after Frank Hoerner, “Prolific Reflections: Blake’s Contortion of Surveillance in Visions of the Daughters of Albion”, Studies in Romanticism 35. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 119–150.

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In her response to these gazes, Oothoon considers herself defiled and looks for available measures to undo her guilt.29 Consumed by her physical and mental agony, she is too traumatized to “work through” her experience; she cannot even find relief in tears: Oothoon weeps not: she cannot weep! Her tears are locked up; But she can howl incessant writhing her soft snowy limbs. And calling Theotormons eagles to prey upon her flesh. I call with holy voice! Kings of the sounding air, Rend away this defiled bosom that I may reflect. The image of Theotormon on my pure transparent breast. (2:11–16 E 46)

In an image redolent with mythological overtones of Promethean punishment, Blake renders Oothoon’s traumatized subjectivity: she sets out to “purify” herself of the crime she has not committed. At this moment she fully complies with the standards imposed on her by the “eye-deology” in order to be seen as properly feminine, i. e. lovable, by Theotormon. She does so using violent and bloody means: the eagles are to tear her flesh out so that the “stain” of her defilement will disappear. Dennis M. Welch writes that “Oothoon’s sense of physical defilement is not at all unusual for a victim of rape. In fact, stories abound concerning such victims and their impulse to cleanse and purge themselves as soon and as thoroughly as possible after violation – even sometimes to the neglect of important physical evidence against the violator” (121). The question arises, however, how one may purify oneself of rape and its consequences? Given that Bromion impregnates her, it seems plausible to suggest that the act of rending away the flesh may metonymically refer to abortion. Though purposeful abortion was not made a statutory offence until 1803, in the late eighteenth century it was increasingly treated as a sin (Connolly 116); thus it was a morally charged decision, difficult to make. However, Oothoon’s impregnation is a result of rape, an extraordinary violation of her identity, and thus the desire to purify herself – to get rid of the unwanted life within her – is a psychologically plausible reaction. Nevertheless, this perspective does not make the very choice or the procedure of the termination of pregnancy any less radical, and Oothoon, already abused and violated, is in for another violation, this time by her own decision although not because of her own fault. The violent language of this passage supports this claim: the eagles “descend & rend their bleeding prey” (2:17 E 46). Oothoon’s body, first lovingly adorned with the marigold flower; then violated by rape, branded as sluttish and sinful and rejected altogether gets finally mutilated in a desperate 29 Similar interpretation has been proposed by Robert Essick: Oothoon “has accepted at least a portion of the masculinist ideology of rape – namely, that the woman is corrupted by her victimization” (46).

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attempt to live up to the norm. Oothoon disciplines herself to become a selfcorrected, “pliant”, docile body (Foucault 135). At the same time, she marks her status as inferior compared to the men she depends on, Bromion and Theotormon. At this stage in Blake’s text patriarchy wins. Visions is, however, a text both about oppression and about resistance. The moment Oothoon calls on the eagles is the turning point; Blake’s remarkable design (see figure 8) enters into a relation of contradiction with the written text: while the text describes the bloody horror of violence and mutilation of the body, the image communicates bodily ecstasy, with Oothoon sensually outstretched on a cloud, her legs parted, receiving Theotormon’s eagle whose descend on her body is like a caress rather than torture. As David Erdman notes, instead of being sharp and ravenous, the beak of the eagle is more like the bill of a swan (Illuminated Blake 131).

Figure 8: William Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion plate 3, Copy J, The Library of Congress

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This alternation is both striking and unusual; it walks a tightrope between visual representations of female victimisation and erotic rapture, on the one hand suggesting Oothoon’s self-inflicted punishment, on the other indicating the pleasure she derived from it. The line separating pleasure and pain is a thin one, and Oothoon’s rapture in the design may be explained in a double way. First, her traumatized consciousness may register the pain of her further mutilation as masochistic satisfaction, derived from the need for purification and punishment for the physical pleasure she might have experienced during her forced intercourse with Bromion. Secondly, we may understand the call for Theotormon’s eagle to repeat violence to her body as a phenomenon akin to what trauma experts have called the “double wounding” – the repetitiveness of the experience of trauma in the life of the survivor. According to Cathy Caruth, a traumatic wound “is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known” (Unclaimed Experience 4). It has to be unconsciously relived until it is available to consciousness. In her theory, it is the second wound in a trauma victim’s life which is significant, as it brings the acknowledgement of the original traumatic experience (Unclaimed Experience 2). In this interpretation, the painful rending of Oothoon’s flesh by the eagle turns out to be liberating, as it marks the beginning of the change in her perspective on the world and on herself. Better equipped to see the violence against women and the constraints imposed upon them resulting from the workings of patriarchy, Oothoon finally starts to question the ideology that labelled her a whore and recovers from being a docile, pliant body to become a voice and agent of resistance. Blake’s design, seemingly at odds with the sense of his words, registers the gain arising out of pain, the paradox of what Tristanne Connolly has called the “kill-or-cure-method” (33). Michelle Leigh Gompf proposes an analogous interpretation, writing that: “[t]he corrosive experience of the rending by Theotormon’s eagles allows or perhaps forces Oothoon to literally see differently, understand oppression and tyranny, and denounce this oppression” (68). In what follows, Oothoon turns to Theotormon expecting him to share her new awareness that “the soul of sweet delight can never be defil’d” (America a Prophecy 8:14 E 54). She hopes that he will understand that, as the nymphmarigold told Oothoon in Plate 1, even if a flower symbolising virginity is plucked, another one will grow in its place (Visions 1:9 E 46) – that, in short, innocence and purity are not a material thing, a hymen; they are a condition of being in the world, which depends on one’s subjective consciousness. Oothoon exclaims: […] Arise my Theotormon I am pure. Because the night is gone that clos’d me in its deadly black. They told me that the night & day were all that I could see;

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They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up. And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle. And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning Till all from life I was obliterated and erased. (2:28–34 E 47)

Oothoon celebrates her renewed sense of being in the world. The terms she uses in her speech leave no doubt to the fact that the change she records is an evolution of perception, allowing her to celebrate her renewed sense of being in the world. In a passionate attack upon empiricist philosophy, she denounces the epistemological position according to which all one knows and is depends on the five senses, the only objective and really existing channels of perception. Such a view results in imprisonment and finally obliteration of the self. In A Vision of the Last Judgment, Blake commented upon the importance of perception and point of view when he passionately claimed: I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation, & that to me it is hindrance and not Action; it is as the Dirt upon my feet, No part of Me. “What”, it will be Questiond, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” Oh, no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty!” I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight: I look thro it & not with it (E 565–566).

Empiricists like Bromion and Theotormon – looking with and not through the eye – enclose their brains into narrow circles; for them, the sun is a round disk of fire, and a man is a tabula rasa, blank slate or white paper without built-in mental content. From this viewpoint, identity derives from data processed solely through sensory experience, and Oothoon, defiled, will remain impure and scarred forever. It is pertinent to recall that the motto for the whole poem, engraved on the title page, reads: “The Eye sees more than the Heart knows” – an ironic statement about the primacy of visual perception over subjective, emotional experience – a philosophy adhered to both by Bromion and Theotormon. Oothoon’s first argument “seeks to formulate her sense that she is not a mere accumulation of sensory experience without capacity for renewal” (Swearingen “The Enigma of Identity” 208). Her argument serves not to trivialize her experience of abuse by suggesting that it can be denied or wiped out by a sheer change of perspective, but to stress the idea of the complicated relationship between sensory experience and identity. Being embodied, Oothoon is not only her body – embodiment suggests receptivity and attention to the different sensations and needs that our embodied consciousness communicates; these needs are physical as well as emotional, intellectual or spiritual. Her rape is a fact, but how she will deal with it psychologically depends on her innate sense of self. This reading is congruent with

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Blake’s other well-known statements on perception which emphasise the importance of subjective processing of sensory experience over the objective recording of existing, empirical phenomena: “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way” (A Letter to Trusler E 702) “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 7:8 E 35) “Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ’d” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 10:69 E 38). However, Oothoon’s speech does not reach Theotormon, who, concentrated on his own misery, cannot hear her words. For him “the night and morn / Are both alike: a night of sighs, a morn of fresh tears” (2:37–8 E 47). Seeing the failure of her rhetoric, Oothoon moves on to different arguments. She considers the question of what constitutes individual identity, asking: With what sense is it that the chicken shuns the ravenous hawk? With what sense does the tame pigeon measure out the expanse? With what sense does the bee form cells? have not the mouse & frog Eyes and ears and sense of touch? yet are their habitations. And their pursuits, as different as their forms and as their joys. (3:2–6 E 47)

In this crucial passage, Oothoon puns on the word “sense” in its double meaning of sensory experience that the senses transmit, and the way in which we “make sense” of the world and of ourselves. When she asks “With what sense does the bee form cells”? her question does not concern whether the bee uses her sight, hearing or touch to perform her task, but she enquires what pushes the bee to do it – in short, what constitutes its identity, making a bee a bee. Even though the mouse and the frog share some general physical characteristics, having the same senses and recording similar sensory stimuli, each of these creatures is unique in its essence. Thus, it is not the experience we record through our senses that constitutes who we are, although it is equally true that consciousness cannot extract itself from the entanglement with the body. Oothoon is trying to suggest that regardless of what has happened to her, she remains herself. Equally importantly, she asserts that although all creatures share some universal characteristics, each of them is unique. The same should apply to humans: not everyone has the same needs, abilities or desires; therefore, it is necessarily unjust and hurtful to label people according to one normalizing perspective. Oothoon asks Theotormon to forsake “eye-deology”, to look at her afresh, to see her as she is, without preconceived notions of purity and sin. Simultaneously asserting her own innocence (“I bathe my wings. / And I am white and pure to hover round Theotormons breast” 3:19–20 E 47), she evokes images that praise experience rather than impeccability: “Sweetest the fruit that the worm feeds on. & the soul

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prey’d on by woe” (3:17 E 47). While refusing to see herself as defiled, at the same time she claims that lived experience rules out unreflexive idealism. No positive response, however, comes from Theotormon. He seems dissociated from his body, whose urges he successfully blocks, but, strikingly, he does not claim agency as far as his thoughts are concerned either: in his speech he perceives his mental processes as virtually living their own life, appearing and disappearing irrespective of himself. Thoughts come and go, just as emotions do; in his monologue, he repeatedly dwells on thought processes that bring joys or sorrows but perceives them as entirely independent from him. At the same time, he confesses that this status quo brings him nothing but misery: Tell me where dwell the thoughts forgotten till thou call them forth Tell me where dwell the joys of old! & where the ancient loves? And when will they renew again & the night of oblivion past? That I might traverse times & spaces far remote and bring Comforts into a present sorrow and a night of pain Where goest thou O thought? to what remote land is thy flight? If thou returnest to the present moment of affliction Wilt thou bring comforts on thy wings, and dews and honey and balm; Or poison from the desart wilds, from the eyes of the envier. (4:3–11 E 48)

Theotormon, then, is a man in torment, and the source of his torment is his system of beliefs as well as his compulsion to deny the unity between his mind and his body. Virtually a passive victim of eye-deology, he is trapped in this worldview, but unable to discern that the possibility for change would have to come from the inside. The design for plate 4 (see figure 9) visually renders this standstill: Theotormon’s body is shown as solidified, graphically resembling a rectangular object, possibly a stone, like the rock of the cave against which he is positioned; his bent head communicates his unresponsiveness and a lack of interest in the outside world. Strikingly, the delineation of his elongated crossed knees forms the iconic shape of the heart, also solidified and irresponsive towards Oothoon’s pleas. His attitude directly influences hers: Blake presents her as oppressed and imprisoned, hovering “by his side, perswading him in vain” (2:21 E 47), visually locked in the shape of a wave that hovers over Theotormon, and additionally chained to the rock by the shackles around her ankle. Unable to forsake her hopes for his reformation, Oothoon remains enslaved by her own feelings for her lover. However, the budding hope for possible progress is indicated by the large cracks in the rock behind her. Seeing that her pleas bring no effect, Oothoon vents her frustration in a direct attack upon the creator of norms and standards which oppress and castigate people – Urizen, who will, as Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant tell us, be “revealed as the fallen faculty of Reason in later works, mistakenly set up as deity

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Figure 9: William Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion plate 4, Copy J, The Library of Congress

over fallen humanity” (Blake’s Poetry and Designs 76 n.1). Oothoon’s third speech is an attack on religion and oppressive laws that arise out of religious norms. In particular, Oothoon condemns the marriage system that makes women prisoners, objectifies their bodies, teaches them to punish themselves for their desires and compels them to give birth to subsequent children conceived against their will: Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot; is bound In spells of law to one she loaths: and must she drag the chain Of life, in weary lust! must chilling murderous thoughts, obscure The clear heaven of her eternal spring? to bear the wintry rage Of a harsh terror driv’n to madness, bound to hold a rod Over her shrinking shoulders all the day; & all the night To turn the wheel of false desire: and longings that wake her womb To the abhorred birth of cherubs in the human form That live a pestilence & die a meteor 8c are no more. (5:21–29 E 49)

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In lines that follow, Oothoon protests against moral hypocrisy perpetrated by Urizenic religion. She lashes out at the concept of “subtil” false modesty, which teaches that physical pleasure is sinful but “sell[s] it in the night” (6:7,12 E 49); this hypocritical thinking further leads to the complete perversion of the contact with one’s body: on the one hand, it castigates natural impulses and needs as corrupt, on the other it promotes what Oothoon calls “the rewards of continence? / the self enjoyings of self denial” (7: 8–9 E 50), experiencing gratification from suppression and perversion of one’s bodily needs. Being the voice of resistance, from this impassionate criticism Blake’s heroine turns to the celebration of female sexuality. She declares: But Oothoon is not so, a virgin fill’d with virgin fancies Open to joy and to delight where ever beauty appears If in the morning sun I find it: there my eyes are fix’d In happy copulation; if in evening mild, wearied with work; Sit on a bank and draw the pleasures of this free born joy. (6: 21–23, 7: 1–2 E 50)

In harsh contrast with the teachings of “self enjoyings of self denial”, Oothoon sees that sensual pleasure is to be experienced everywhere, not only as a result of sex. It is ever-existent and all-pervasive, whenever beauty and joy appear. As Susan Matthews reminds us, Oothoon seems to be talking about ecstatic looking, as the word “copulation” “regains its now obsolete non-sexual meaning as the ‘action of coupling or linking two things together, or condition of being coupled’ that the OED lists for the last time in 1752” (16). This perspective brings to mind modern theories of sexuality, particularly those propagated by Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, which stress the multiplicity of female sensual pleasure. In the words of James Heffernan, Oothoon’s “startling formulation anticipates what contemporary French feminists have said about jouissance – a distinctively female kind of pleasure that is sensual, fluid, and almost endlessly diffused. ‘Woman,’ says Luce Irigaray, ‘has sex organs just about everywhere. She experiences pleasure almost everywhere’” (10). However, to offer a reading of Blake’s Visions as an unequivocal story of the liberation of female consciousness and imaginative insight would mean ignoring some crucial problematic issues present in the text. First, as Nancy Goslee perceptively notes, Oothoon’s professed imaginative and perceptual awakening is a result of rape, and, under such circumstances, it is hard to believe that it “leads to a liberating imaginative experience. Such a consolation appears more a dangerous after-the-fact rationalization” (114). From a feminist point of view, moreover, such thinking may distract one’s attention from the problem of sexual assault and violence, and even offer a partial justification of Bromion’s behaviour by pointing out the liberation of Oothoon’s consciousness as a positive outcome

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of a necessarily negative experience. The second problematic issue, partially connected with the former one, is mentioned by James Swearingen, who pays due attention to the fact that Oothoon seems to entirely disregard her past, rejecting the possibility that it has left a mark on her. Since the accumulation of past events partially constructs human identity, Oothoon’s rejection of the past is problematic and does not come on a par with her affirmation of intense joy she senses in the present. “To say ‘I am pure. / Because the night is gone that clos’d me in its deadly black’ acknowledges an evil event while claiming that it has no enduring significance, that the past leaves no more residuum on her than night does on eagle, lark, or nightingale” (“The Enigma of Identity” 207–208).

Figure 10: William Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion plate 6, Copy J, The Library of Congress

Also, the engraved scene which Blake visually joins to Oothoon’s liberated and joyful speech in plate 6 (see figure 10) clashes with the verbal message she tries to convey. While the text celebrates her awakened senses and imaginative openness to various stimuli, at the same time stressing her liberation from the oppressive tyranny of religious norms propagated by Urizen and adhered to by Theotormon, the design presents a vision of despair, self-punishment and abjection.

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We observe a visibly unhappy Oothoon, who covers her face in her hands, while Theotormon wields a whip over his back. However, the positioning of his hand is ambiguous: apart from flagellating himself, he may also be lashing at Oothoon. Metaphorically, his torment becomes hers. As noted by Erdman, the knots on the whip “look uncannily like the heads of the Marigold flowers” (Illuminated Blake 134). Neither looks at their partner. What, in Oothoon’s wishful thinking, might have been a triumphant proclamation of freedom and the affirmation of bodily joys, in the poem’s grim reality turns into punishment and self-torture. Yet, when compared with the engraving for Plate 4, this scene still hints at the possibility of progress: while in the former illustration Oothoon remains physically chained to the rock, in the latter picture she at least is granted physical freedom. The lack of shackles may metaphorically indicate that her process of liberation is underway. Furthermore, another thing that puzzles the readers and critics alike and is not consistent with the view of Oothoon as an autonomous, internally integral, liberated female character is the proposal she makes to Theotormon, which she wants to see as a proof that true love is not possessive: But silken nets and traps of adamant will Oothoon spread, And catch for thee girls of mild silver, or of furious gold; I’ll lie beside thee on a bank & view their wanton play In lovely copulation bliss on bliss with Theotormon: (7:23–26 E 50)

Oothoon’s proposal has caused critics considerable consternation. While it is plausible to consider it as “[t]he extraordinary mixture, of spirituality, sensuality, eroticism, and selfless delight in the joy of another” (Heffernan 16) the passage is redolent of darker tones as well. Its language and imagery of traps and nets brings to mind oppression; the fact that Oothoon is ready to watch Theotormon’s sexual pleasure with other women suggests both a voyeuristic “harem fantasy” (Bruder 82) and possible compensation for what Bromion did to her – the “wanton play” which Oothoon envisages can actually be another scene of sexual subjection. What is more, in offering to procure other women as objects of Theotormon’s enjoyment, she becomes an accomplice and an active agent of female oppression.30 Such a reading is sustained by the design accompanying Oothoon’s words on the page (see figure 11) – Blake engraves a plainly unhappy, huddled and cramped group of five women, the titular Daughters of Albion, who “are crouching in attitudes of despair” (Erdman Illuminated Blake 135). Liberated 30 A different perspective on this passage is offered by Christopher Z. Hobson, who claims that “Oothoon means to watch Theotormon and the ‘girls’ have sex, and to take sexual pleasure herself in doing so (perhaps while masturbating) – as implied by her recumbent posture and the phrase ‘bliss on bliss,’ which applies to herself as well as to Theotormon and the ‘girls’” (35).

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Figure 11: William Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion plate 7, Copy J, The Library of Congress

erotic love, while generally heartily applauded, at this point is presented as essentially problematic. Also, we have to remember that the crucial issue in the text – the enslavement of women – does not change in the course of the poem. In the words of Helen Bruder, “the most basic fact that the eye sees (even if the heart won’t admit it) about Visions is that in this poem men, however sadistic, inept or tormented, possess – just because of their sex – real power” (77). The poem ends with a standstill: Oothoon hovers around Theotormon, “perswading him in vain” (2:22 E 47), while other English women, the Daughters of Albion, “hear her woes, & eccho back her sighs” (8:13 E 51). This is a picture of stagnation and powerlessness, with little articulated hope for a substantial change in the foreseeable future. Therefore, to champion Oothoon as a female sexual liberation figure would be an overstatement, although, naturally, she remains one of the most carefully delineated and progressive heroines in Blake’s poetry. Yet, in a manner consistent throughout the book, the visual content of the last engraved plate (see figure 12) does not complement the verbal message. The

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Figure 12: William Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion plate 8, Copy J, The Library of Congress

image that accompanies the poem’s final passage again enters into a relationship of contradiction with the written text. There is a definite discrepancy between the text and the design, as the illustration undermines an unequivocally downbeat ending which the text seems to advocate. While the end of the poem envisages Oothoon as virtually powerless and with no apparent influence on her situation, we see her free and empowered in the design. She has apparently changed places with the Urizenic figure in the design for the title page and hovers in the air, prophetic, not clutching herself, but with her arms extended, as if transformed into wings.31 Out of the three figures of the Daughters of Albion, two look up at 31 Dennis M. Welch reads the design as a parody of the title page; he suggests that “[a]s an astute parody, the final plate includes elements of comparison and contrast with the title-page. Like Urizen, Oothoon has flames flowing from her bosom. These flames, along with surrounding storm clouds, imply on her part justifiable ire and conflict against the very powers and perspectives that oppress her and all who represent Otherness”. However, in what follows he perceives Oothoon first of all as tormented and victimised, and only additionally as expressing her subjectivity: “Unlike Urizen’s self-clutching arms, however, Oothoon’s reach out

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her, attentive, ready to listen and accept her message. There is no sign of either Theotormon, Bromion or Urizen – an indication that Oothoon has freed herself from their influence, and become fully inner-directed, guided by norms and ideas determined by herself rather than by others. Her liberation will start spreading far and wide, empowering other women to free themselves from patriarchal and religious tyranny and oppression, urging them to acknowledge, embrace and act on their desires – those communicated by their bodies as well as those coming from their hearts and minds. The question which still needs to be asked here concerns the reasons behind Blake’s complicating of the relationship between the text and design in Visions. If the designs for this poem consistently seem to run a parallel story – suggesting hope and acceptance instead of violation (“The Argument”), sexual ecstasy, not mutilation (Plate 3), oppression and despair, not happiness and liberation (Plate 6), female enslavement and usury in contrast to the happy sharing indicated in the text (Plate 7), and finally, female empowerment instead of powerlessness and stagnation (Plate 8), then there must be a purpose in Blake’s method. The explanation for these discrepancies appears to be twofold. First, the clash between what we learn from the text and what Blake portrays in the designs in “The Argument” and in the last plate of his poem seems to indicate shifts and changes in the point of view, corresponding with the question of who speaks in particular passages of the text. As Harriet Linkin has demonstrated, the narrative voice in Visions is an essential factor in understanding Blake’s text – the narrator is influenced by the eye-deology adhered to by male characters. According to Linkin, the concluding lines of the text replace conventional narrative past tense with a continuing present and move from exultation to resignation. Just as Oothoon reaches the apex of her awakening, the narrative reduces her culminating vision to daily activity; her resounding proclamations of liberty turn into the narrator’s “wails”, “sighs”, and “woes”. Given the narrator’s disconcerting summary view of Oothoon’s orations, many readers believe her prophetic insights conclude with failure, since she does not appear to free Theotormon or her sisters (185).

Linkin goes on to conclude that “[w]hile her progress towards prophecy is not constant or direct, she undergoes […] a developmental process that results in her acquiring prophetic stature by the conclusion of the poem” (188). In turn, the narrator interprets the last scene as testifying to the futility of Oothoon’s trial, in a cruciform, signifying not only her victimization, which includes others (in particular, Albion’s daughters, who huddle beneath her), but also her expansiveness, which extends to others in ‘generous love’” (7.29) (130). In contrast, I see this plate as an expression of female empowerment and a sign of Oothoon’s victory. I read the flame beneath her figure as a symbol of transformation, not torture; unlike the Urizenic figure on the title page, Oothoon is not consumed by it.

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passing judgment on her efforts and pronouncing that her plight was all in vain. He judges her endeavours by their objective, immediately visible results, and since Theotormon is not persuaded and still sits “conversing with shadows dire” (8:12 E51), the narrator promptly heralds Oothoon’s failure. He totally disregards the fact that the most important, empowering change has already happened in the heroine’s consciousness, and that failure or success of one’s process of maturation cannot be measured by other people’s reactions to it. Blake contradicts the narrator’s message by offering us the image instead, inviting his readers to see beyond his narrator’s narrowing perceptions and also extending the text’s narrative till a later point than covered by the words of the poem. The discrepancy between the sombre text of “The Argument” and the radiant image that accompanies it can also be explained by the change of the narrating voice. Crucially, “The Argument” is told not by an impersonal narrator, but we hear Oothoon’s voice without any mediation. However, while Blake visually represents Oothoon at the beginning of her road to maturity but still mentally residing in the realm of Innocence, thus cheerful and optimistic, the voice resounding in the eight lines of “The Argument” belongs to Blake’s heroine form a later stage of the poem, after she has entered the world of Experience. Oothoon offers us, in a concise form, her perspective: from the unabashed confession of her desires, through the acknowledgement of the fears connected with the perspective of losing her virginity to how she overcame them and assumed her agency only to be violated by her rapist. Though poetic, the account is psychologically realistic: both her reservations about deflowering and the “terrible thunders” (iii: 8 E 45) of rape add credibility to Oothoon’s story. In contrast, the design shows her as hopeful and idealistic, presenting her mental state from before the rape. This manoeuvre even more emphasises the horror waiting ahead: while the reader’s eye cannot yet detect it in the plate, Oothoon’s voice previews the violence to happen, tinging the idealism and radiance of Innocence with the taste of Experience looming ahead. Equally crucially, in this way Blake alerts us to shifts in voice and perspective which will appear crucial at the later stages of the poem, emphasising the relativity and subjective judgement audible in the voices of the narrator and three main characters. As far as the remaining three cases of the contradiction between the verbal and the visual are concerned, Blake’s message is primarily psychological. The scene with the eagles, gory and violent in the text yet delicate and ecstatic in the design, indicates the problematic line dividing pleasure from pain and the moment of transformation in Oothoon’s viewpoint, the point when she, for the first time so clearly, rendered Urizenic religion inoperative. In Plates 6 and 7, in turn, we encounter an opposite move: now the text abounds in positive imagery, as Oothoon exults in her newly acquired freedom and a capacity for selfless love, but the verbal message is immediately undermined by the grave and gloomy vision

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rendered in the illustrations. We may understand this clash as Blake’s reminder that progress and maturation are not linear processes, and that lapses can happen even on a generally positive track. In Plate 6 Oothoon, directed by wishful thinking, feels eager to celebrate the renewal of imaginative faculties and her victory over the oppressive ideology of the patriarchal world, failing to see that this world has not changed at all, that the transformation in Theotormon’s outlook must come from the inside, and that her words and wishes are not performative as far as he is concerned. Her eagerness and triumph also blind her to the fact that by her vain but persistent attempts to reach her lover she victimises herself, regularly allowing him to hurt her. The visual/verbal clash in Plate 7 operates similarly: while Oothoon proclaims selfless love and happy sexual sharing, she may either delude herself in her wish to compensate for the harm that befell her, or disregard the fact that, offering to procure other girls for Theotormon, she becomes an accomplice in treating women as objects. The complex, sometimes contradictory relationship between the word and image discourages the reader from settling for one “correct”, unchanging version of the story. Moreover, it problematizes and complicates the conclusions to which one may otherwise eagerly jump and alerts us to the fact that “as a man is, So he Sees” (Letter to Trusler E 702) – that vision is essentially subjective, and our opinions, hopes, fears, political and ideological convictions frequently prevent us from assuming a broader perspective. Most of all, Blake urges his readers to be constantly vigilant, to critically examine and revise their assumptions about themselves and the world, in order not to become the standing water that “breeds the reptiles of the mind” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 19 E 42). To conclude, both in The Book of Thel and in Visions of the Daughters of Albion Blake is concerned with the question of what it is to be a woman in a world ruled by men and governed by male-instigated norms. What is more, he acutely emphasises the importance of the female “body-as-lived” experience. Although, as Iris Marion Young notes, “Western metaphysics has postulated the idea of an autonomous individual subject, a self-enclosed ego that inhabits but is distinct from a body” (5), we must acknowledge the indissoluble unity of flesh and self, since the subject lives as flesh (Battersby in Young 5). Blake’s poems suggest that the shaping of female subjectivity is inextricably, intimately intertwined with embodiment: the way a woman experiences her body, the way her body is treated and perceived, conditions her self-awareness and the relationships she forms with the world and with others. From this perspective, Blake’s texts – although written over two hundred years ago – confirm what the twenty- and twenty-firstcentury feminist thinkers have asserted, namely that the mind/body dualism is ultimately invalid and inoperative. Adopting this perspective, Blake grants his female protagonists the voice and the space to speak aloud, to articulate and assert their emotional, intellectual, bodily and spiritual needs.

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Finally, it is crucial that the stories which both poems tell are rendered through the prism of Thel’s and Oothoon’s subjective, individual experience. The attitude towards what we can term female dissent in both poems is univocally positive and sympathetic. These texts openly voice feminist concerns and yield well to feminist readings. Blake displays an acute sensitivity and awareness concerning women’s issues, unprecedented among other so-called “canonical” Romantic poets. First and foremost, he gives his female characters the freedom of choice – whether or not to enter a sexual relationship and to give birth to a child (Thel), whether to openly display her readiness for erotic pleasure and to deny the ideology which condemns her to ostracism (Oothoon) – even if he does not present constructive alternatives to the most socially-expected choices. This is undoubtedly progressive when we realistically consider women’s situation at the end of the eighteenth century. Secondly and crucially, he always finds a way to speak from the inside rather than from the outside of a dramatic situation he constructs, which results in a non-judgemental stance and multiplies possible interpretations. Such a strategy makes him more akin to Keats’s camelion poet or even Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “inner standing point” than to Wordsworth’s egotistical sublime or Byron’s very personal manner of narration. In the case of The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion the “inner standing point” which Blake assumes is the perspective of the oppressed, internally conflicted, and victimised woman. Blake’s sympathetic attitude results from his extraordinary psychological insights into the human psyche and human relationships, which pervade his poetry from very early texts. His interest in an individual mind and its internal conflicts and contradictions finds its crowning manifestation in his major conception of the Four Zoas, which is as psychological as it is mythopoeic, but already in such texts as The Book of Thel, Visions of the Daughters of Albion and Songs of Innocence and of Experience Blake shows how perceptive and modern his awareness of the “mind-forg’d manacles” (“London” l. 8 E 27) is.

Chapter Two: Exuberant excess: John Keats’s “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil”

Head in a pot and purple fantasies – the romantic grotesque When a young woman falls for an inappropriate man of lower social status in a literary text, the readers familiar with the convention expect two things: romance and a looming disaster. The plot of John Keats’s poetic romance “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” (1818) not only capitalises on these expectations, but wildly exceeds them, and its synopsis is truly sensational. Isabella, a young lady from medieval Florence, is courted by a family’s servant, Lorenzo. The family disapproves. To prevent the undesirable connection, the girl’s two brothers decide to get rid of the unfortunate lover; they murder him and bury him in a forest. The girl has a dream vision, in which the lover’s ghost informs her about his fate. She runs to the forest, exhumes the body, cuts its head off and plants it in a pot with basil seeds. Then she spends her days mourning the lover and watering the pot with her abundant tears. The basil plant thrives, while the girl gradually withers. When the brothers take away the pot, Isabella dies. The story which forms the basis of Keats’s poem has its origins in Boccaccio’s Decameron (the fifth novel of the fourth day). The idea was suggested by William Hazlitt’s lecture “On Dryden and Pope” (February 3rd, 1818), which Keats attended (Allott 326). Keats did not depart from Boccaccio’s plot, but “translating” the story from prose to verse he distinctly changed its atmosphere, emphasised some elements rather than others, incorporated his own lengthy digressions and descriptive details, and introduced “conventions of the most popular romance genre of his day, the Gothic novel” (Lau 39). The poem can be considered a transition point in Keats’s poetic oeuvre – Jack Stillinger famously called it his “last large poetic failure” (“Keats and Romance” 593), showing how, in his view, the text marks Keats’s departure from the idealistic convention of romance to more realistic writing.32 Keats recorded his own 32 Stillinger calls Isabella “an anti-romance”, arguing that it exposes the danger of neglecting the real world in favour of dreams and fantasies, and that Keats abandons the conventions of

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dissatisfaction with the poem in his letter to Richard Woodhouse of September 22nd, so writing: “I shall persist in not publishing The Pot of Basil – It is too smokeable […] There is too much inexperience of life, and simplicity of knowledge in it […]. Isabella is what I should call were I a reviewer ‘A weak-sided Poem’ with an amusing sober-sadness about it” (Selected Letters 351). Keats seems to downplay his text substantially, particularly when one considers the issues which are its primary concern – obsession, murder, violation, progressive derangement, corpse dismemberment, necrophilia, to name but a few. To account for this, it is worth remembering that at the time of writing “Isabella” he was also formulating his poetic theory, moving from the principles of delicacy and poignancy, which he had believed to be central to poetic expression, to the principle he called “fine excess” (Yost 15–16). Keats defines this idea in his letter to John Taylor of February 27th: he claims that a poem should, first of all, strike the readers as wordings of their own highest thoughts, and “appear almost a Remembrance”. Moreover, its “touches of Beauty should never be half-way, making the reader breathless instead of content”. Finally, the poem’s imagery should seem natural like the setting of the sun, and leave the reader in a “luxury of Twilight” (Selected Letters 96–97). These words help to contextualise Keats’s dissatisfaction with “Isabella”. Indeed, the poem runs counter to the poet’s newly formed theory. “Isabella” is a poem of excess, but not in the “fine” sense advocated by Keats. Definitely, neither its imagery nor the actions it describes appear natural, and indeed it rather startles its readers than leaves them content. As far as the other poetic criteria are concerned, the delicacy and poignancy of the opening stanzas which relate the lovers’ yearnings in the tradition of romance soon give way first to the angry diatribe against the principles of materialism and capitalism embodied in the figures of Isabella’s brothers, and then to the gruesome and macabre spectacle that is the rest of the poem. Its overt and latent themes – madness, derangement, troubled eroticism, fixation on death, decay and disintegration – would more naturally appear in the poetry of the middle and late Victorian period, in particular in verse composed by the poets of the Decadence. Yet, these concerns

romance in order to include realistic and morbid details (“Keats and Romance”, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 8.4, “Nineteenth Century” [1968], pp. 593–605). His perspective is partially refuted by Beth Lau, who suggests that the poem may rather be read as a Gothic romance (“Madeline at Northanger Abbey: Keats’s Antiromances and Gothic Satire”, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 84.1 [Jan., 1985], pp. 30–50). For other critical texts debating Isabella’s debt to the tradition and genre of romance, see Evan Radcliffe “Keats, Ideals and Isabella”, Modern Language Quarterly 17.3 (September 1986), pp. 253–71, Susan Wolfson, The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986), pp. 285, 275, and Tilottama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980), pp. 129–132.

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found their perfect expression in Keats’s “Isabella”, the most gruesome and cruel of his romances. Criticising his own creation, Keats uses interesting vocabulary: he calls Isabella “smokeable” (prone to criticism), with a tinge of “amusing sober-sweetness”, while Richard Woodhouse reports that the poet also found it “mawkish” (Allott 330, n.54). Strikingly, Keats sees in it “the inexperience of life” and the “simplicity of knowledge” (Selected Letters, 351). It appears, however, that “Isabella” talks all too much about experience, only that of death and not of life, and its insights into the nature of grief and mourning are all but simple. In what follows, I wish to examine this famous “anti-romance” (Stillinger “Keats and Romance” 599), making recourse to the aesthetic and literary category of the grotesque as well as the psychological findings of the theory of trauma. Combining these perspectives allows for closer scrutiny of Keats’s daring and modern take on the old story and emphasises the fact that, despite its harsh criticism coming from both nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics,33 “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” has much to offer its readers being a disconcerting and unsettling text, precisely because of the psychological dimension which it offers. The second part of this chapter, in turn, will be an examination of numerous visual renderings of “Isabella” (extending from the 1840s up to 1920s), attempted in order to see what happens to the poem’s meaning when there is a shift from the verbal to the visual means of signification. The question that particularly interests me here is whether the concerns that form the basis for the present analysis of the poetic text will also be present in the visual realm. Keats’s notions of “amusing sober-sweetness” as well as the “mawkishness” (sentimentality) of “Isabella”, coupled with the startling – instead of “fine” – excess of the poem, bring to mind essential features of the grotesque, an aesthetic and literary category persistently difficult to define. There is a tendency to view the grotesque “as essentially a mixture of some way or other of both the comic and the terrifying (or the disgusting, repulsive, etc.) in a problematical (i. e. not easily resolvable) way”. The content of the grotesque must include “abnormality” (Thompson in Gillum 13). Moreover, the grotesque is “incongruous, and incongruity is funny. However, the grotesque incongruity may be so jarring and 33 Among critics whose view on the poem is negative are, among others: Matthew Arnold, “Preface to the First Edition of poems: 1853”, The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Miriam Allott (London, 1979), pp. 654–671; M. R. Ridley, Keats’ Craftsmanship (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1933), pp. 18–56; Bernard Blackstone, The Consecrated Urn: An Interpretation of Keats in Terms of Growth and Form (London: Longmans Green & Co, 1959), pp. 266–267; Douglas Bush, John Keats (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 77; Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 314, and Walter H. Evert, Aesthetic and Myth in the Poetry of Keats (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 225.

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Exuberant excess: John Keats’s “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil”

disturbing that revulsion or sympathy overpowers the sense of comedy” (Gillum 14). Wolfgang Kayser links such an experience to the idea of the uncanny, suggesting that the grotesque world is the once familiar, now alien, realm (276). It is disconcerting, sometimes funny, sometimes disgusting; it usually transgresses the bounds of decorum, provokes astonishment, shock, repulsion, or laughter. Moreover, the grotesque frequently makes use of the human body, particularly its sheer physicality. Michael Gillum notes that “[i]n his influential study of Rabelais, Mikhail Bakhtin showed that literary treatments of the grotesque body can serve variously to celebrate animal vitality, to humiliate satiric targets, or, in a darker vein, to remind us of our inevitable decay and death”, therefore “[t]he grotesque in art often reminds us that the body, with its smells, wastes, unruly appetites, and deformities, calls into question human idealisms and human pretensions” (14). Finally, Frances S. Connelly has persuasively argued for the existence of the traumatic strand of the grotesque, which combines the monstrous and the bizarre with the psychological (115–148). This description relates to “Isabella” in numerous ways. The most noticeable aspect is its incongruity: while there is something comic about the exaggerated sentimentality of the poem, and its central image – the young woman crying over the pot with a plant in it – may appear funny, the laughter quickly trails off when one is reminded of the ghastly contents of the pot and of how and why a human head found its resting place there. The sense of comedy is successfully overpowered by revulsion and horror when one ponders the actuality of the putrefying flesh and the unforgiving physicality of the human body. When the first wave of disgust wears off, the rotting head both as an image and a symbol reveals its further potential, pointing to the reality of death, the inevitability of decay and disintegration entirely beyond human control. Our sympathy for Isabella in mourning, gone mad because of the enormity of her loss, also battles an urge to laugh her off as a stock figure of female sensibility. However, Isabella is not only a figure to be commiserated with, but she also arouses anxiety and discomfort. Her chief and sole independent act, the marker of her subjectivity, is the exhumation of her lover’s corpse and the mutilation of his body with “duller steel than the Persèan sword” (l. 393).34 This act allies Isabella with a cultural construct of the figure of a madwoman. In her study of women and madness in English culture, Elaine Showalter recognises two basic representations of this cult figure in Romanticism: the harmless, docile and sentimental Crazy Jane (a servant from a 1793 ballad by Matthew “Monk” Lewis, who, after having been deserted by her lover goes mad and dies) and the violent 34 John Keats, “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil”, in The Complete Poems, edited by Miriam Allott (New York: Longman, 1970). All subsequent in-text parenthetical references are to the lines in the poem.

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Lucy, the bride of Lammermoor from Walter Scott’s celebrated novel. Lucy, coerced into marriage against her will, violently stabs her husband on their wedding night and afterwards is discovered dishevelled and covered in blood at the door of the bridal chamber. She epitomises violent and empowered femininity, as opposed to Jane, her victimised counterpart (11–14). Keats’s Isabella embodies both types: she is a docile, vulnerable woman, who has lost her mind because of her pain, and an enraged, violent madwoman simultaneously. Emphasising the violent and aggressive elements of the story, Diane Hoeveler calls “Isabella” a “shocking and angry poem” (324). As a romance, Keats’s text substantially departs from the idealism of the genre. Crucially, as Michael Gillum has noted, the grotesque “calls into question human idealisms and human pretensions” (14). Keats starts his poem in the convention of medieval romance: unlike Boccaccio, who begins his prose tale by the description of the wealth of Isabella’s brothers and does not dwell on the romantic side of the story,35 he devotes the first thirteen stanzas (a considerable part of the text) to the presentation of the love between Isabella and Lorenzo, in the idealistic courtly love tradition. Isabella is well-bred and assumes the place of a courtly lady; Lorenzo, a “young palmer in the name of love” (l. 2), the brothers’ servant, is granted the role of a courtly knight pining for the favours of the lady of his choice. Their courting also follows courtly love conventions: the lovers meet in secret, sigh and “nightly weep” (l. 8), knowing that their mutual affection is transgressive. Nevertheless, constant in their feelings, they rejoice in each other’s presence and trace each other’s sightings; Lorenzo plays the lute, Isabella embroiders. What is more, Keats describes their love in terms of physical and mental sickness, also a customary element of chivalric romances: it is “some stir of heart, some malady” (l. 4), a “sick longing” (l. 23), and “sad plight” (l. 25), “grief” (l. 58) which makes “their cheeks paler” (l. 26); finally Isabella “[falls] sick” (l. 34) because of unfulfilment. However, the idealistic tone of these descriptions seems purposefully forced: in their pathos and sentimentality, they seem exaggerated almost to the edge of parody. Soon in the text, there comes a moment when Keats outwardly seems to question the idealistic conventions of the romance. In stanza XII, we read: Too many tears for lovers have been shed, Too many sighs give we to them in fee, Too much pity of after they are dead, Too many doleful stories do we see, Whose matter in bright gold were best be read, […] (ll. 90–94) 35 Allott, in her introduction to the poem, quotes the whole opening section of Boccaccio’s text in the edition which Keats used (327–328).

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Exuberant excess: John Keats’s “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil”

Calling into doubt both the apparent unhappiness of courtly lovers and the adequacy of the readers’ response to their allegedly miserable fate, Keats records his wish to turn away from the early idealism of his poems such as Endymion and Calidore and to root his verse in a more earthly reality. This interpretation was proposed first by Jack Stillinger, who quotes Keats’s letter to Benjamin Bayley of February 23rd, written almost at the same time when “Isabella” was begun, where Keats complains about the inability of romance, “the most skyey Knight errantry”, to heal human suffering (“Keats and Romance” 594). A similar notion can be glimpsed in further stanzas of “Isabella”, most obviously when, having found out about Lorenzo’s murder, the heroine ventures to find the place where her lover was buried. Relating the morbid and macabre scene at the freshly opened grave, Keats exclaims, as if spurning himself for a departure from the idealistic atmosphere of the chivalric romance: Ah, wherefore all this wormy circumstance? Why linger at the yawning tomb so long? Oh, for the gentleness of old romance, The simple plaining of a minstrel’s song! Fair reader, at the old tale take a glance, For here, in truth, it doth not well belong To speak – Oh, turn thee to the very tale, And taste the music of that vision pale. (ll. 385–392)

The music of the old, gentle, idealistic tale is gone; instead, we are left to gape at the opened tomb. After finding out that Lorenzo has been cruelly murdered, Isabella ventures to find his grave; together with an old nurse who accompanies her, she dismembers Lorenzo’s body by “cut[ting] away no formless monster’s head” with “duller steel than the Persean sword” (ll. 393–394). The logic of the comparison is sound: distancing himself from the mythical – thus imaginary – story of Perseus decapitating the Medusa, Keats stresses the grim reality of the task undertaken by Isabella and her companion. Interestingly, the digging scene takes here much more space than it is granted in Boccaccio’s version, where it is noted matter-of-factly with no emotional emphasis; Keats, in turn, dwells on it much longer, appealing to the human morbid curiosity of death and demise. He devotes full seven stanzas Isabella’s visit to the forest where Lorenzo’s body was buried, not abstaining from morbid details. He makes his narrator muse over “clayey soil and gravel hard”, “coffined bones and funeral stole” (ll. 355–356), and goes on to describe the fervent digging which took three hours (l. 382) and led to the imminent discovery of the “horrid thing” (l. 381). What follows is the essence of the grotesque: all pretensions of idealism unmasked and discarded, Keats informs his readers how Isabella, moaning, kisses Lorenzo’s severed head, wraps it up in a silken scarf, takes it home and lovingly cleans it of all the mud and

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turf. We are not spared the details: the narrator describes the “smeared loam” covering the head, the “sepulchral cells” of Lorenzo’s dead eyes and his “wild hair” that she “calms” with a “golden comb” (403–8). Keats’s synesthetic and sensual images (the “clamminess” of the clayey soil, the “purple phantasies” twining sex and decay, the chill of the soiled glove, the stickiness of the smeared loam) evoke precisely the responses requested by the theorists of the grotesque: revulsion, pity and the sense of excess; the bounds of decorum are audibly transgressed. The reader ventures into a gothic, surrealistic, grotesque realm of Isabella’s subjective experience. Having prepared the head for its second burial, Isabella deposits it in a pot with earth and plants basil seeds all over it. The basil shrub that grows out of the head becomes a substitute for Lorenzo; she has created presence out of absence. From this point on, she and the pot are inseparable: the heroine spends her days nursing the plant with her tears, while it draws life “from the fast mouldering head there shut from view” (l. 348). Finally, the apogee of the text’s cruel materialism is reached when the brothers steal the pot from Isabella and discover its secret: “The thing was vile with green and livid spot, / and yet they knew it was Lorenzo’s face” (ll. 475–476). Following the German theorist of the grotesque Wolfgang Kayser, Geoffrey Harpham associates this category with such elements as suddenness, surprise, and estrangement: “the familiar and commonplace must be suddenly subverted or undermined by the uncanny or alien” (462). He concludes that, for an object to be grotesque, “it must arouse three responses. Laughter and astonishment are two; either disgust or horror is the third” (463). Similarly, Harold Bloom claims that “[a]stonishment is the mode of the Grotesque, though this is tinged with distaste, unlike the transcendent astonishment induced by the Sublime” (XV). Accordingly, “Isabella” is a text which undoubtedly provokes astonishment, even shock, and the vision it offers (particularly that of the dismembering of Lorenzo’s corpse and Isabella’s subsequent treatment of it) can easily arouse disgust, repulsion, and even horror. Nonetheless, the bathos of having the lover’s head buried in a pot with a herb growing out of it, and the consequent image of Isabella pining over her sweet basil are equally visible. Comic aspects, tinged with sadness and pity, provoke astonishment, at the same time moderating the repulsion and horror initially aroused. Sympathy walks hand in hand with absurdity and the macabre. The recurring and vivid emphasis on the incongruous and the absurd is at the very heart of the poem. The intermingling of the comic and the serious, the shocking and the nonsensical are nowhere better visible than in the mockery of the funeral ceremony and the subsequent mourning. Lorenzo’s body is uncanny in the sense that it constantly reminds the readers of the processes of death and decay. The severed head is grotesquely buried again, in a travesty of funeral ritual, in the pot with soil – yet, the purpose of this burial is different from ordinary. As

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Michael Gillum writes in his study of the grotesque in Faulkner: “Funerary ritual is a system for affirming the life that is now finished, for consoling the bereaved, and for asserting the bonds of community that survive the loss of an individual member. But above all, funerary ritual serves to cover the naked indignity of death” (17). In the case of Keats’s poem, the burial is undone, the body gets unearthed and exposed, not concealed, both to the eyes of Isabella and to the reader’s imagination. Lorenzo, whose life has brutally and cruelly finished, is given another life, but in a vegetable form, nourishing the basil plant whose roots, as the gruesome vision does not let us forget, grow from and become intertwined with his decaying skull. Life is asserted in its lowest, most materialistic form, a ghastly parody of immortality. The travesty of the funeral rite is also present in what is missing from Keats’s text: there is no further mention of the rest of Lorenzo’s body, exhumed, mutilated, left to rot in the forest. The reading of Keats’s poem that sees in it a mockery of sacred practices, a reversal of ceremonies, and which stresses the ambivalences of the text brings to mind the characteristics of the grotesque and the carnival as understood by Mikhail Bakhtin. Grotesque literature takes its roots in what Bakhtin identifies as folk humour and carnival ambivalence (Hobby and DeBoer 146). Writing about “grotesque realism”, Bakhtin emphasises its excessive, consumptive and materialistic aspects. Moreover, he identifies degradation as “[t]he essential principle of grotesque realism [….] the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; […] a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity” (19–20). However, this principle is not synonymous with annihilation and destruction; instead, it implies a refashioning, a new birth, even continual elevation (Hobby and DeBoer 147). In a similar vein, defining the carnivalesque as a powerful expression of the grotesque, Frances S. Connelly claims that “the tension between high and low is fundamental to the carnivalesque: it brings low that which is high and revitalizes the high by appropriating the low” (82). According to Bakhtin, “to degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down into the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth take place” (21). Lorenzo’s death is followed by his rebirth, in an organic form of the cherished plant. To quote Diane Hoeveler: “Once again in Keats’s poetry we are in the realm of the dependent male lover coming back to life through the power of the primal and much stronger female body” (331). At the same moment, it is worth pointing out that Keats’s text produces another reversal of notions and roles: as observed by at least two critics, the scene of Isabella’s three-hour labour to unearth Lorenzo’s corpse (l. 282), followed by the severing of the head, can be read as a mockery of the birth process; consequently, the nursing of the head in a pot filled with earth indicates not only the rebirth of Lorenzo but also the parody of

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childcare.36 Isabella’s potential as a motherly figure, and consequently, the confusion of the lover/mother/child roles surface in the language that Keats uses to talk about Isabella’s relationship with Lorenzo. Michael Lagory notes: “[s]everal metaphors reiterate the theme of ‘thwarted motherhood’: ‘cool her infant’s pain’ (36), ‘lullaby’ (340), ‘wean’ (462), and the ‘hen-bird’ that ‘breast[s] its eggs again’” (470–471). The metaphorical sequence of exhumation-desecration-second burial as both child delivery and rebirth brings to mind Bakhtin again: “Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one. […] Grotesque realism knows no other lower level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving” (21). The new life, sprouting of Lorenzo’s head, also fits with Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque body always “in the state of becoming”, “never finished, never completed” but “continually built, created” as it continually “builds and creates another body” (Bakhtin 317). The exhumation-birth metaphor and the idea of the gruesome conception looming in its shade suggest the twining of sex and death. The descriptive passages of the decapitation scene, and what follows it, merge two notions: violence and eroticism. “Possession of the beloved object”, writes Bataille in Eroticism, Death and Sexuality, “does not imply death, but the idea of death is linked with the urge to possess” (20). Isabella, chopping off her lover’s head, turns Lorenzo into an object she can possess. Kissing and caressing it while emitting “low moans” (l. 399), she performs an act which is necrophiliac in nature. Thus, her behaviour is transgressive: not only does she violate the taboo of touching the dead, but also she makes the dead thing an object of her erotic love. Keats hinted at this possibility before: during the process of digging out of the dead Lorenzo Isabella finds his soiled glove, which she places beneath her dress on her naked breasts, “where it dries / And freezes utterly unto the bone / Those dainties made to still an infant’s cries” (ll. 372–374). This image communicates a thwarted potential both of the sexual union of lovers and of Isabella’s motherhood, and speaks of a crushed sexual desire; one is reminded that Isabella reacted to Lorenzo’s disappearance weeping “alone for pleasures not to be” (l. 233). For her, Lorenzo’s absence from the start came to mean erotic frustration, the lack of sexual possession of her lover. Cutting off his head to never part with it, Isabella tries to appease emotional as well as sexual longing. “If the lover cannot possess the beloved he will sometimes think of killing her; often he would rather kill her than lose her” explains Georges Bataille (20). Isabella’s lover is already dead, but

36 Michael Lagory thus comments upon this passage: “As ‘labour’ connotes, the grave-digging resembles the delivery of a child” (329), while Diane Hoeveler concludes that the digging out of Lorenzo’s body and what follows later is an abortive birth of the head from the grave (333).

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rather than lose him ultimately, she participates in violence that he had experienced and decapitates his corpse so as to possess and preserve him. Allegedly, the strongest taboos concern sexual reproduction and death (Bataille 55). The taboo on touching the dead man stems from the conviction that “[a]lthough motionless, the dead man had a part in the violence which had struck him down”, and that [a]ccording to this way of thinking, the violence which by striking at the dead man dislocates the ordered course of things does not cease to be dangerous once the victim is dead. It constitutes a supernatural peril which can be “caught” from the dead body. Death is a danger for those left behind […] The violence attendant upon a man’s death is only likely to tempt men in one direction: it may tend to be embodied in us against another living person; the desire to kill may take hold of us. The taboo on murder is a special aspect of the universal taboo on violence (Bataille 46–7).

Isabella violates the taboo on touching the dead and turns violent herself by further mutilating and desecrating Lorenzo’s body. Therefore, Lorenzo’s death is contagious in a double sense: first, the violence which killed him spreads further and poisons Isabella, and secondly, his decease brings on her disease, resulting in Isabella’s progressive physical and mental degeneration. The more the progeny of her love – the basil plant – thrives on the girl’s tears and the nourishment from Lorenzo’s rotting flesh, the closer her own death approaches. Isabella’s conduct brings together violence, eroticism, and death. The reader’s response oscillates between shock, revulsion, discomfort, and compassion. “The Grotesque does not address the rationalist in us or the scientist in us, but the vestigial primitive in us, the child in us, the potential psychotic in us”, says Bernard McElroy (5). Thus, it may be suggested that in his “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” Keats puts the category of the grotesque to two uses. First, it serves to mark his departure from the form and conventions of the romance; in other words, it maps his transition from the idealistic to what may be termed the surrealistic. Secondly, it proves vital as a means to portray Isabella’s psychological trauma and her subsequent mental degeneration. Unlike Jack Stillinger and other critics, who trace in this poem a departure from the idealistic mode to the realm of realism,37 I suggest that Keats goes much beyond the realistic convention in his stress on the morbid, the bizarre, and the irrational. Since surrealism strives to unite conscious and unconscious modes of experience, the world of dreams and reality, and heavily draws on the grotesque and the fantastic, I propose that it is this category that better describes Keats’s shift from romance and idealism. This shift, in turn, proves vital in representing Isabella’s subjective traumatic experience of violation and her subsequent mental degeneration. The remaining part of this section 37 Cf. Jack Stillinger, “Keats and Romance”, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 8.4 “Nineteenth Century” (1968), pp. 593–605.

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offers a reading of the poem from the perspective inspired by the theory of trauma and studies on female madness in the nineteenth-century culture.

Unclaimed experience – trauma and madness in Keats’s poem Critics have long recognized the psychological depth of Keats’s romance and advanced sophisticated interpretations based on this premise. Jack Stillinger stresses the “Wordsworthian […] interest in psychology that dominates the latter half of the poem”, especially the portrayal of Isabella’s “progressive derangement’” (“Keats and Romance” 603), while John Barnard calls the poem a psychological “diptych of before and after” (77). In my reading of “Isabella”, I suggest that Keats’s story presents an intersection between the two important psychological and cultural tropes: trauma and female madness. Isabella, a psychically traumatized heroine, acts like a madwoman: turns manic and violent, experiences dissociation from reality, and successively sinks into depression. These “mad” reactions are the direct result of the failure of her cognitive processes to deal with the trauma of learning about Lorenzo’s murder. Unable to narrate her trauma, she conforms to the stereotype of a hysterically silenced heroine, reacting to her loss and violation with progressive dissociation from reality, physical degeneration, and catatonia-like state. Finally, exposed to the second traumatic event duplicating the first wound (what the research on trauma calls “double wounding”), Isabella’s psyche turns out to be too fragile and shattered to deal with it, and the heroine dies. Crucially, in his depiction of Isabella as a madwoman, Keats goes beyond exploiting this theme’s potential for the creation of the gothic effect. Instead, he explores the reasons for and the process of Isabella’s psychic disintegration and creates a trauma narrative long before psychological trauma was recognized and described by psychiatrists, psychologists and cultural theorists. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) defines trauma as “direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury”, “witnessing an event that involves the above experience, learning about unexpected or violent death, serious harm, or threat of death, or injury experienced by a family member or close associate”. The person’s response to the event involves “intense fear, helplessness or horror”. Characteristic symptoms resulting from exposure to trauma are “persistent reexperiencing of the traumatic event”, “persistent avoidance of the stimuli associated with the trauma and numbing of general responsiveness” and “persistent symptoms of increased arousal” (463). Thus, trauma is the psychic consequence of an overwhelming experience that proves too severe for one’s psyche to process. The theories of trauma that flourished in the 1990s in the field of literary and

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cultural criticism popularized the concept of trauma as “an unrepresentable event that revealed the inherent contradictions within language and experience” (Balaev 363). The idea of the failure of consciousness to acknowledge the traumatic experience was explored, among others, by Cathy Caruth, whose model views trauma as “an unassimilated event that shatters identity and remains outside normal memory and narrative representation” (Balaev 363). Since this experience is not acknowledged in full, to use Caruth’s phrase, “not fully known” (Unclaimed Experience 4), it cannot be coherently narrated. Caruth writes: Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on (Unclaimed Experience 4).

The experience of trauma, then, is not synonymous with an exposure to a potentially traumatic event. It is the mode in which the event is experienced and processed that defines whether the person has been traumatized or not. Also, the phenomenon of “double wounding” is crucial for Caruth’s theory; she traces how trauma can repeat itself in the survivor’s life. She explains this phenomenon relating it to the myth of the Christian knight Tancred in Tasso’s sixteenthcentury epic Jerusalem Delivered, which tells how Tancred first killed his beloved Clorinda, not knowing her identity beneath her disguise as a knight, and then slashed a trunk of a tree in which the soul of his beloved was imprisoned, thus killing her twice. Only then did he hear the voice of Clorinda (identified as “the voice from the wound”) and became conscious of the consequences of his deed (Unclaimed Experience 2). According to Caruth, trauma is not available to consciousness “until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (Unclaimed Experience 4). Many other sources on trauma confirm Caruth’s stance.38 Two points prove vital for my perspective on Isabella as a trauma victim: first, the way the traumatic experience remains not fully available to one’s consciousness and consequently haunts a person later on through repetitive actions that trigger the traumatic memory; secondly, how a traumatic event destabilises one’s conceptions of reality and cognitive assumptions about oneself and one’s place in the world, undermining the foundations upon which a traumatized person’s sense of self is based. Isabella learns about the crucial traumatic event of the story, the violent death of her beloved Lorenzo, not directly, but through a vision. Lorenzo’s ghost appears in her sleep, informs her about the whereabouts of his provisional grave in 38 For the sources which disagree with the Caruthian model, see Michelle Balaev, “Trauma Studies”, A Companion to Literary Theory, ed. D. H. Richter (Chichester, West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2018), pp. 360–371.

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the forest, confesses his loneliness and pain, and implores Isabella to “[g]o, shed one tear upon [his] heather-bloom / And it shall comfort [him] within [his] tomb” (303–304). Isabella’s first words after waking up aptly testify to the shock she has experienced upon learning the news: “Ha, ha!” said she, “I knew not this hard life, I thought the worst was simple misery, I thought some Fate with pleasure or with strife Portioned us – happy days, or else to die. But there is crime – a brother’s bloody knife!” (ll. 329–333)

At this moment, Isabella experiences cognitive breakdown, as her assumptions about the world, her existence in the world and her most important relationships become utterly shattered. Judith Herman, referring to the works of Robert Lifton, in this reaction locates the key experience of trauma: “Traumatic events destroy the victim’s fundamental assumptions about the safety of the world, the positive value of the self, and the meaningful order of creation” (89). What is more, The damage to the survivor’s faith and sense of community is particularly severe when the traumatic events themselves involve the betrayal of important relationships. The imagery of these events often crystallizes around a moment of betrayal, and it is this breach of trust which gives the intrusive images their intense emotional power (96).

Isabella, who has so far entertained a belief in the fundamental fairness of fate, the distribution of pleasure and pain in equal parts, and who, as she claims, has remained ignorant about cruelty and barbarism, is shaken out of her naive assumptions. The “hard life” with which she is now confronted is very far from “simple misery” of Lorenzo’s absence and anxiety about his lot. The image of “a brother’s bloody knife” becomes a figurative expression of the breach of trust in family relationships, a foundation upon which she relied. Apart from the suddenness and horror of the news about Lorenzo’s death, Isabella may have found her ignorance of what was to happen equally difficult to accept. Even though the brothers must have, in one way or another, betrayed their hostility towards Lorenzo, she was not able to predict the violent outcome of her love relationship. As Keats’s narrator informs us, Isabella and Lorenzo’s last moments together were spent in a carefree manner: And as he thus over his passion hung, He heard a laugh full musical aloft, When, looking up, he saw her features bright Smile through an indoor lattice, all delight. […] […] “Good bye!” said she, And as he went she chanted merrily. (ll. 197–200, 207–209)

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Therefore, her reaction to the traumatic news is severe. Not only does she experience disbelief and shock, but the intensity of emotional pain has resulted in her partial dissociation from reality and in behaviour that appears aberrant and violent. After she has learned about Lorenzo’s death, her acts testify to a severe psychic wound that has led to the impairment of cognitive faculties and rational thinking. In a surge of what may be seen as a bout of mania, Isabella purports to regain a part of her lover. At first, however, she does not admit this even to herself. The narrator relates that “[…] she had devised / How she might secret to the forest hie; / How she might find the clay, so dearly prized, / And sing to it one latest lullaby;” (ll. 337–340). Yet, soon we learn that her intentions must have been more morbid from the start, as she has equipped herself with a knife. Moreover, her conduct seemed odd and unnatural even for a person who knew her best, her childhood nurse. Throughout their journey, Isabella is excited and hyperactive. Seeing the knife, the nurse asks: “What feverous hectic flame / Burns in thee, child? What good can thee betide, / That thou should’st smile again?” (ll. 348– 350). Finally, after finding the spot where Lorenzo has been buried, Isabella is wholly fixated on the unearthing of his body as she digs him out with the same knife. She does not experience any fatigue despite the fact that “[t]hree hours they laboured at this travail sore” (l. 382). Following earlier tradition, nineteenth-century psychiatry recognized mania and melancholia as two forms of mental illness (madness), with dementia coming as the third one (Hill and Laugharne, Radden 15).39 It is worth noting that while the term “mania” in the modern understanding of it signifies hypervigilance, overexcitement resulting in insomnia, and the delusions of grandiosity, at the beginning of the nineteenth century it primarily indicated overactivity, unruly, impulsive behaviour, and mood disorders (Hill and Laugharne, Andrews 185). A large number of patients sent to asylums had been diagnosed with mania for different reasons. Mania suggested violent impulses, destructive acts and frequently led to murder. On the other hand, melancholia signified numbing to stimuli, passivity, and a fixation on one particular thought/idea.40 From this 39 The life-size statues of mania and melancholia, “Raving and Melancholy Madness” were displayed at the entrance to the Bethlem Hospital from 1676 to 1815, the most famous works of the Danish sculptor Caius Gabriel Cibber (“Melancholy and Raving Madness: Statues”, BBC: A History of the World). 40 For instance, Pauline Prior describes numerous cases of women who killed their children and were diagnosed with puerperal or chronic mania. “Murder and Madness: Gender and the Insanity Defense in Nineteenth-Century Ireland”, New Hibernia Rev. 9.4 (Winter 2005), pp. 19–36. In turn, Edward Shorter comments on a 1883 clinical case of a woman diagnosed with mania after she had started destroying her books and ran out of the house barefoot; he concludes that in women mania might manifest itself in milder forms. What Psychiatry Left Out of the DSM-5, Routledge, New York, 2015, pp. 35–36. In turn, the medical understanding of the term “melancholia” at the beginning of the 19th century is provided by G. E. Berrios:

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perspective, Isabella’s hypervigilance, resistance to fatigue, her feverish look and, first of all, violent dismemberment of Lorenzo’s body allow for classifying her behaviour as manic in the nineteenth-century understanding of the term. Interestingly, there have been two perspectives that feminist critics assume when discussing the phenomenon of female madness. On the one hand, madness (particularly female hysteria) can be seen as a powerful form of rebellion against the strictures of patriarchal society, oppressive for women. In this viewpoint, it is empowering and defiant.41 On the other hand, it is also treated as a testimony to female frustration and helplessness. Elaine Showalter quotes Shoshana Feldman on madness: “Madness is quite the opposite of rebellion. Madness is the impasse confronting those whom cultural conditioning has deprived of the very means of protest or self-affirmation” (5). From this vantage point, we may understand Isabella’s behaviour as a testimony to her helplessness, the lack of agency in her life and choices, which reveals itself in her total dependence on her brothers. Through her abnormal, manic reactions, she tries to resume control over her lover’s body and her own fate,42 but this attempt is far from productive: even if Lorenzo’s head can spring into organic life in the form of a growing herb, Isabella’s lover is lost forever. After the account of Lorenzo’s second burial in the pot, Keats’s narrative moves to describe another stage in Isabella’s psychic journey. Manic overactivity has given way to almost complete dissociation from reality and the ensuing depression. If she could have been diagnosed with “raving madness” before, now she may epitomise its melancholy counterpart. Isabella gives all her remaining energy to the tending of the basil plant which grows on and out of Lorenzo’s decapitated head: And she forgot the stars, the moon, the sun, And she forgot the blue above the trees, And she forgot the dells where waters run, And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze. She had no knowledge when the day was done, “‘Melancholia’, wrote John Haslam in 1809, ‘the other form in which this disease (madness) is supposed to exist, is made by Dr Ferriar to consist in ‘intensity of idea’. By intensity of idea I presume is meant, that the mind is more strongly fixed on, or more frequently recurs to, a certain set of ideas, than when it is in a healthy state. . .’” (299). 41 For this perspective, see for instance Helene Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” trans. Annette Kuhn, Signs 7 (1981), pp. 41–55, Phyllis Chesler Women and Madness, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971, or Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979. 42 This perspective complies with the findings of the theory of trauma. I elaborate on it in the later part of this chapter – see my review of Judith Herman’s discussion of the research of Pierre Janet.

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And the new morn she saw not, but in peace Hung over her sweet basil evermore, And moistened it with tears unto the core. (ll. 417–424)

Isabella, forlorn and broken, arranges herself into a conventional posture of grief. The narrator tells us how she “hung over her sweet basil evermore, / And moistened it with tears unto the core”. Stacey McDowell comments: “The focal point of her vision obscures everything else, the repeated ‘she forgot’ culminates in ‘she saw not,’ as she focuses on the core of the basil plant, the core of Lorenzo’s head, the core of her own suffering” (28). Her life gets narrowed down to the function of mourning. She becomes completely cut off from the real world, insensitive to her own physical needs and sensations. As Jack Stillinger writes, With Isabella’s complete separation from the physical world, Keats has come a considerable distance from the beginning of his poem, where fair Isabella and the worshipful young Lorenzo were suffering all the agonies of high romantic love –“some stir of heart, some malady”, with dreams and nightly weeping (1–8). Courtly love has given place to psychology, love-sickness has become real sickness, and romance has been put down by the realism of “wormy circumstance” (“Keats and Romance” 603–604).

In Keats’s representation of Isabella’s mental condition, the notions of madness and trauma intersect. We may say that her madness is the direct result of her trauma, manifesting itself first in her irrational, manic behaviour, and next, in her depressive, melancholy stance. Isabella mourns Lorenzo, but we instinctively feel that there is something compulsive and obsessive about her conduct, not to mention the morbidity of her need to be constantly in the presence of his rotting head. Keats presents her behaviour as both metaphorically and literally unhealthy: the more she nourishes the plant, the sicker she becomes. Research on trauma proposes two concepts that describe the process of dealing with a traumatic past: “acting out” and “working through”. Dominick LaCapra explains that “acting out” occurs when sufferers become “stuck” in the past and live a restricted life, characterised by hypervigilance and a desire for security. For some time after a traumatic experience, such behaviour is normal and serves an adaptive purpose; however, prolonged “acting out” becomes pathological and prevents a healthy “working through” of the trauma. “Working through”, in turn, is a healing process. It involves gaining a critical distance to a traumatic experience, the acceptance of the fact that it has happened, as well as a recognition that it is over. That the survivor is able to retell the ordeal coherently is one of the symptoms of healing. The person who has worked through trauma can leave the painful past behind, distinguishing between present, past, and future (LaCapra).

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In these terms, Isabella is reliving her trauma repeatedly and continuously but is very far from working it out. Rather, helplessly fixated on the object that becomes tantamount to her traumatic experience, she cannot let it go. She is locked in a circle of obsessive re-enactments, understood as persistent re-experiencing of her pain and shock. What is more, this way of existing in the world soon takes its toll. While the basil grows “thick and green and beautiful” (l. 426), balmier and more vibrant every day, Isabella “withers, like a palm / Cut by an Indian for its juicy balm” (ll. 447–448). She perishes slowly, because tending the plant, she nurses her trauma, instead of setting herself free from it. She grows so dependent upon constant reliving and recollecting her pain that once her love object – the pot – is taken away from her, she dies. The concept of growth and feeding versus perishing and decay is the chief dichotomy in the poem. Keats consistently talks about shrinking and abundance, thriving versus withering. Already in the first part of the narrative, Lorenzo predicts his doom, saying “I will drink her [Isabella’s] tears” (l. 39) – a metaphorical idea which turns literal soon later. Just after Lorenzo has disappeared, Isabella’s withering starts; she “[b]y gradual decay from beauty fell” (l. 256). In a later passage, while describing the visit of Lorenzo’s ghost, Keats constructs an exquisite play on words. The ghost proclaims: “Thy beauty grows upon me, and I feel / A greater love through all my essence steal” (ll. 319–320). At the sight of her beauty, Lorenzo’s (the ghost’s?) love for her gets strengthened, but this statement is an ironic reversal of events in the imminent future – the growth of basil out of Lorenzo’s rotting flesh and Isabella’s loving care. The herb grows “thick and beautiful”, being watered by Isabella’s “thin tears” (l. 425); it draws strength and life from the mouldering, dead head as well as it is nurtured by Isabella’s life forces, slowly ebbing out of her. Thus, on one of its many layers of meaning, “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” is a grotesque parody of the theories of organicism, as well as a comment upon the economy of grief stemming from unprocessed traumatic memories.43 One point seems problematic in reading “Isabella” from the vantage point of trauma theory. Apart from “persistent re-experiencing of the traumatic event” and “persistent symptoms of increased arousal”, DSM IV lists “persistent 43 In her paper “Grotesque Organicism in Keats’s Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil”, Stacey McDowell suggests that unnatural literalised organicism of the poem relates to the “growth” of poetic creation, in this case unnatural and unoriginal, because stemming from Boccaccio. “The ‘wormy circumstance’ against which the poem protests, it may be argued, relates not only to the poem’s gruesome events and the physical matter of Lorenzo’s rotting remains, but also to the wormy circumstances of the poem’s composition: it grows not from the ‘rich soil’ of ‘natural genius’ as Addison had stipulated, but, worm-like, works through the richness of ‘old romance’ – the cultivated product of a corrupt poetic fertilizer” (22–3). Keats and Shelley Review 24 (2010), pp. 22–28.

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avoidance of the stimuli associated with the trauma and numbing of general responsiveness” (463) as characteristic symptoms resulting from exposure to trauma. Similarly, the notion of post-traumatic stress disorder holds that, apart from avoiding impulses that bring to mind the traumatic past, a trauma victim experiences anxiety and fear when traumatic memories impose themselves again on the victim’s consciousness. The rhythm of trauma, thus, can be described as alternating intrusion and constriction: In the aftermath of an experience of overwhelming danger, the two contradictory responses of intrusion and constriction establish an oscillating rhythm. This dialectic of opposing psychological states is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the posttraumatic syndromes (Herman 47).

While we can interpret Isabella’s constant tending of the basil plant as a persistent re-experiencing of the traumatic event, Keats’s heroine does not avoid stimuli connected with her trauma; on the contrary, she grows entirely dependent on them. This apparent contradiction, however, can be solved: in Trauma and Recovery Judith Herman notes diverse ways in which the victims of trauma try to undo the shock or resume control over their life: Adults as well as children often feel impelled to re-create the moment of terror, either in literal or in disguised form. Sometimes people reenact the traumatic moment with a fantasy of changing the outcome of the dangerous encounter. In their attempts to undo the traumatic moment, survivors may even put themselves at risk of further harm. Some reenactments are consciously chosen (39, emphasis mine).

Yet, Herman further argues that even consciously chosen, re-enactments “have a feeling of involuntariness” and “a driven, tenacious quality” (41). In what follows, she quotes a pioneering French psychologist Pierre Janet, who talked about a victim’s need to assimilate traumatic experience through (even illusory) restitution of control over the past: [Pierre] Janet spoke of the person’s need to “assimilate” and “liquidate” traumatic experience, which, when accomplished, produces a feeling of “triumph”. In his use of language, Janet implicitly recognized that helplessness constitutes the essential insult of trauma, and that restitution requires the restoration of a sense of efficacy and power. The traumatized person, he believed, “remains confronted by a difficult situation, one in which he has not been able to play a satisfactory part, one to which his adaptation has been imperfect, so that he continues to make efforts at adaptation” (41).

These observations legitimise the perspective on Isabella as a trauma victim and on her reactions as testifying to the post-traumatic stress disorder. The tending of the pot with her lover’s head can be seen as either the compulsive, driven, repetitive reviving of the traumatic moment or as a desperate attempt to regain control over her life by the partial undoing of her parting with Lorenzo. In this

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way, her traumatic past becomes to some extent corrected, and she compensates for her earlier helplessness and the lack of agency. Thus, Isabella’s life is reduced to the routine of her obsessive re-enactments. To use Cathy Caruth’s phrase, she becomes “possessed by the past”. She inhabits a mental state in which “the overwhelming events of the past repeatedly possess, in intrusive images and thoughts, the one who has lived through them” (Caruth “Recapturing the Past” 151). Her behaviour, although it resembles mourning, is nevertheless different. In mourning, the bereaved experiences certain natural stages: a period of denial, followed by attempts at bargaining, negotiating with fate/God, distress and anger, depression, and finally reconciliation.44 The last stage is a healthy closure. Other researchers of the topic list a period of numbing, distress and anger, thinking intensely of the lost person, scanning the environment to find him/her again, a recognition that the past cannot be undone, followed finally by a reorganisation of one’s life (Bowlby in Bronfen 327). In contrast, Isabella’s grief, in itself natural, grows in unnatural direction – instead of working through her pain, she “gets stuck” in her past, which she experiences as the present and to which she gives a permanent, never-changing quality. One may be reminded of Freud’s statement that melancholia itself is the incapacity to acknowledge or adequately mourn death.45 Finally, Keats’s poem dramatizes the silence of trauma. Isabella never articulates her pain; never relates her shock, fear, anger, or helplessness. Crucially, she never retells her experience, thus giving it a coherent, chronological, finite form. In this aspect, she resembles an archetypical trauma victim, Philomela from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. After being raped by her sister’s husband, Tereus, Philomela has her tongue cut out, so that she cannot relate what has happened to her. However, Philomela manages to communicate her fate by means of art: she weaves a tapestry in which she gives testimony to her past. In contrast, Isabella cannot recount, coherently or not, her ordeal. The pot of basil becomes an apt symbol of what remains hidden, pushed beyond the point of transparency: just as Isabella hides her trauma, so Lorenzo’s head – itself an object tantamount with it – remains hidden beyond the surface of the earth which fills the vase. Researchers on trauma agree that the “narrativity” – forming a coherent narrative memory – is a vital step towards recovery. Insistent re-experiencing of traumatic events through repetitive re-enactments has its roots in the victim’s impossibility to narrate their trauma in a coherent, logical way because it has not 44 These stages are described in full by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families. I have been using the New York: Scribner 2014 edition. 45 Freud’s ideas on this issue are articulated in full in his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 14 (London 1957), pp. 243–58.

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been assimilated. Caruth explains that “insistent re-enactments of the past do not simply serve as testimony to an event, but may also, paradoxically enough, bear witness to a past that was never fully experienced as it occurred” (Trauma 151). Consequently, the moment when “the survivor is able to retell coherently the ordeal is one of the symptoms of healing” (LaCapra). Thus, trauma can potentially lead to madness through the impossibility of remembering it coherently, with the simultaneous re-experiencing it in the form of incomplete, chaotic, distorted intrusions. Isabella’s attempt to process her trauma – her grotesque mourning-like ritual – remains unproductive and does not result in either the alleviation of pain or catharsis. Neither does it protect her from subsequent hurt. In fact, at the end of Keats’s poem, her trauma acquires a life of her own: Isabella laments not the death of Lorenzo, but the loss of the vase. In the words of Judith Herman: “Traumatic symptoms have a tendency to become disconnected from their source and to take on a life of their own” (34). To conclude, “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” can be named the cruellest of Keatsian romances. Although it shares the common theme of idealistic love threatened by cold reality with his other poems (e. g. “Lamia”, “The Eve of Saint Agnes”, Endymion, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”), it creates a macabre narrative, not of “fine excess”, but extreme in its expression and immediacy. The use of the grotesque serves to strengthen the poem’s emphasis on psychic, subjective reality which to detached observers seems exaggerated, unnatural and distorted, sometimes in a monstrous, sometimes comic way. Moreover, as theorised by Wolfgang Kayser, there are links between the aesthetic and literary category of the grotesque and the notions of madness and trauma. Kayser sees an encounter with madness as one of the primal experiences of the grotesque in life. In his view, the essence of the grotesque is the uncanny, alien, not recognized quality of the world we thought we knew. Madness is just such an experience: the known becomes unknown, grotesquely distorted (Kayser 276). Isabella’s trauma and her ensuing madness result from the severe shock of being confronted with a world that has drastically changed, and from losing a stable point of reference and a failed attempt at recreating what is known in a partially familiar, partially alien, distorted form. Cathy Caruth aptly describes the connection between trauma in its aspect of “not knowing” and literature: “If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is, indeed, at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience precisely meet” (Unclaimed Experience 3). “Not knowing” or not being able to tell is a crucial concern in “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil”. Its chief grotesque symbol – head in a pot – points at secrecy and “untellability” of trauma, which feeds on the unsaid and unexpressed. Finally, although Isabella’s odd behaviour can be sufficiently

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explained by the application of traditional terms describing mental instability – mania, violent behaviour, melancholia, depression – these acts and states all serve to elucidate the overriding concern of the poem, explorations in the workings of traumatized sensibility.

From the Romantic to modern aesthetic – visual renderings of “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil”46 John Keats has long been heralded the spiritual and aesthetic father of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood. The number of works and artists inspired by his poems is impressive, to say the least. Both the “official” members of the Brotherhood – William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as well as the artists loosely connected with the Pre-Raphaelites or just known to work “in the Pre-Raphaelite style” – produced paintings, drawings and illustrations based on Keats’s subjects. Keats’s popularity did not wane at the end of the nineteenth century. Even though the fin de siècle aesthetic changed considerably, the Decadent and the Art Nouveau artists, both male and female, still revived Keats’s poems. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Stephen Prickett singles Keats out as “the most potent single influence upon the art of the Victorian era” (qtd in Wootton Consuming Keats 10). Among the works which received the most attention and whose visual renderings exist in abundance are primarily Keats’s narrative poems – “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, Endymion, “The Eve of Saint Agnes” and “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil”. The artists savoured Keats’s loving attention to the sensual detail, coupled with his gift for the telling of enjoyable, frequently gothic and fantastic, stories. In the words of a critic, Keats “filled poems such as ‘Isabella’ and ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ with gorgeous, exquisitely detailed pictures that could be transferred, as it were, directly onto the painters’ canvases, and he seemed to act as a theorist as well as a practitioner of aestheticism […]” (Stillinger “The Story of Keats” 257). In what follows, I will examine various visual renderings of “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil”, tracing how superb realism characteristic for the PreRaphaelite style gradually gives way to the Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts symbolic renderings. Doing so, I will consider several questions. How do particular artists approach Keats’s narrative, which elements do they single out as the most important ones, and to what effect? How can their choices account for the 46 A preliminary, fragmentary version of this section appeared as “From the Romantic to Decadent Aesthetics: Illustrations for John Keats’s ‘Isabella, or the Pot of Basil’”, Things and Images in 18th and 19th century British Literature, edited by G. Bystydzien´ska (Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, 2016), pp. 155–167.

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changing aesthetic of the times in which the artworks were produced? How does the grotesque – a crucial aesthetic category in the poem – surface in paintings and illustrations of Keats’s romance (and does it at all)? How do the artists attempt to represent the unrepresentable, i. e. Isabella’s subjective experience of trauma and progressive derangement? Finally, the problem of gender in relation to art must also be addressed. As the subject of the illustrations is the woman, it is only logical to ask whether there are any substantial differences between interpretations produced by male and female artists, in their techniques, visual vocabulary, attitudes to their theme, and overall significance of their images.47 Keats’s poem was so often illustrated during the Victorian Age that in 1897 a critic from The Studio described Isabella as “a design which every black and white artist is doomed to attempt sooner or later” (Wootton “Into her Dream he Melted”). The romantic theme of thwarted love resulting in madness, accompanied by the macabre and grotesque elements and enhanced by Keatsian emphasis on the co-existence of pain and pleasure proved irresistible for several painters and illustrators. For my analysis, I have selected paintings and illustrations by both the nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists: John Everett Millais, George Scharf, William Holman Hunt, John Melhuish Strudwick, Isobel Gloag, Henrietta Rae, John White Alexander, Robert Anning Bell, Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, Paul Henry, Jessie Marion King, John William Waterhouse, Edward Reginald Frampton, George Henry Grenville Manton and Hannah Frank. Despite the number of names listed, it still must be noted that my selection does not give full justice to the artists’ and illustrators’ interest in Keats’s poem.48 The first famous visual rendering of the poem is the oil painting by John Everett Millais, Lorenzo and Isabella, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1849, soon after the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had come into existence.49 With its gorgeous colours, flattened space, sharp, realistic details coupled with symbolic elements, the painting is a fine example of the early Pre-Raphaelite style. Millais’s 47 Some of my analyses of the visual renderings of “Isabella” in the context of the grotesque, which are included here, have formed a basis of a scholarly article “Keats, the Grotesque, and the Victorian Visual Imagination: ‘Isabella; or the Pot of Basil,’” yet to be published in a postconference volume Romantic Dialogues and Afterlives, edited by Monika Coghen and Anna Paluchowska-Messing (Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press). 48 Visual representations of “Isabella” seem virtually uncountable. Other artists and illustrators who paid tribute to Keats’s poem are Joseph Severn, William James Neatby, Arthur Nowell, Averil Burleigh, Henry Neville, William Brown Macdougall, Ella M. Bedford, Henry Rheam and Mary Lizzie Macomber. The discussion of all Isabella-related images would be both beyond the scope of this chapter, as well as it would prove tiring and repetitive – many of the works are derivative either of the “classic” representations by Hunt and Waterhouse, or they heavily draw one upon another. 49 While Millais’s oil is the first famous representation of “Isabella”, the first painting based on Keats’s poem that I am aware of was Joseph Severn’s “Isabella on the Pot of Basil,” exhibited at the RA in 1840. The painting is now lost (Scott 357 n6).

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work also stands apart from all the other illustrations of Keats’s poem in its distinctly visible social dimension of the scene the artist decided to depict. Read literally, the painting refers to the first stanza of the poem, which describes how the lovers used to sit together at meals: “They could not sit together at meals but feel how well / It soothed each to be the other by” (ll. 5–6). The painting presents a dinner scene, but no one is eating; as Sarah Wootton suggests, “an overwhelming appetite for social superiority supersedes the actual activity of eating: a greed, not for food but position, undermines the convivial atmosphere usually attendant at communal meals” (Consuming Keats 51). The arrangement around the table tells of social aspirations and social difference – the representatives of different classes are grouped together, forming a binary opposition. This reading is consistent with Keats’s poem, which can be interpreted as a condemnation of the nineteenth-century class division and mercenary capitalism (Codell 347–348) embodied in the two brothers who treat others either as servants whom they can dispose of (Lorenzo) or as objects of financial exchange (Isabella). Visually, the painting is constructed along a single axis, the long table, which separates the two main spheres of the projected scene: the brothers versus Isabella and Lorenzo, the privileged versus the excluded. The table acts as a social divide: the characters located in the foreground on the right hand side all belong to the inferior social sphere or gender (servants, employees, women). We see the pair of lovers sitting together, with a page (whose social position is even lower than other servants/ employees) standing upright behind them. The group consists of Lorenzo – the employee of the brothers, Isabella, whose gender defines her position as underprivileged, and her old nurse sitting next to Lorenzo. Diane Hoeveler similarly sees them as representatives of “the dispossessed” (328). The two primary figures on the left are the brothers – one, holding up a glass of wine, contemplates his next move; the other epitomises ruthlessness and violence, as testified by his clenched, bared teeth and a nut-cracker, which he squeezes with a malicious and grim expression. Another man next in line watches the second brother with fascination, and his look suggests secret compliance. They exemplify the privileged group – the owners, employers, men. This division of the painting into two spheres can be interpreted from a different perspective as well: read allegorically, it may denote the dichotomy of youth and idealism versus cold calculation and experience, love and devotion versus ruthless cruelty. Millais tells the story through postures, gestures, facial expressions and symbolic details. The overturned salt refers both to the thwarting of the lovers’ hopes and to Lorenzo’s tragic end; Isabella, pale and with downcast eyes, accepts a plate of blood orange offered to her by Lorenzo; the orange presages his death as well as Isabella’s torment. The majolica pot of basil, as yet rather hidden than displayed, is nevertheless present in the background of the picture and foreshadows the ghastly story. Isabella represents modesty, mildness,

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and affection: with one hand accepting the orange, with the other she caresses the head of a dog, resting in her lap. This gesture finds its reversion on the other side of the table/axis: one of the brothers balances the chair over a dog sleeping under his seat, a suggestion that in a moment one of the chair legs will crush the dog’s paw. Disaster is suspended, yet it hangs in the air. Additionally, the brother’s leg aims at the first dog with sheer malice. All his gestures speak of cruelty, indifference to others and sadism, and people gathered around the table know that: interestingly, nobody is making eye-contact, but at least two diners (the page and the nurse) look at the brother’s extended leg kicking the dog in alarm. Opposite the brothers we see Lorenzo, wearing a long bright reddish-pink robe, whose colour prefigures his tragic end. It is interesting to observe that Lorenzo’s figure, despite the lack of a manly beard, resembles traditional presentations of the adult Christ in Late Medieval and Renaissance art. The red gown is one of the features that account for the similarity; other features are the long face, thin nose, brown hair parted in the middle, and a serious, demure but serene expression,50 reminiscent of various portraits of Jesus (e. g. The Disrobing of Christ by El Greco, Christ Carrying the Cross by Botticelli, Christ Appears to the Apostles by Duccio di Buoninsegna, and finally the Last Supper fresco by Leonardo da Vinci). Poignantly, the choice of the dinner scene, the situating of the figures by the rectangular table, as well as the number of people involved (twelve plus Lorenzo) also suggest Millais’s allusion to the Last Supper scene.51 When considered closely, the viewer will discern other meaningful elements which point to Leonardo’s painting – the spilt salt, which in the Last Supper fresco is knocked over by Judas; the knife symbolising violence and treachery; several wine glasses on the table; different reactions registered in facial expressions of the participants have all been included in Millais’s painting. It is literally Lorenzo’s last supper, consumed the evening before his death. Therefore, it may be proposed that for Millais Lorenzo is a type of Christ patiently awaiting his passion; that his offering of the blood orange to Isabella metaphorically indicates her future consumption of their relationship, in the form of her necrophiliac obsession with his severed head; that his cruel, unwarranted dismemberment by the brothers implies Lorenzo’s role of an innocent victim, while his future transformation into what Lynn Pearce calls “the ghostly Other” (89) – head in the pot, with basil sprouting out of it – suggests a parody of the afterlife. The choice of this particular scene of the narrative has several consequences: while Millais presents social ostracism, unfulfilled love, the victimisation of the lovers and the sense of 50 Another interesting fact to be considered here is that Millais painted himself as Lorenzo – the face that we look at is in fact the painter’s. 51 Carol Jacobi notes the importance of Leonardo’s painting for Millais’s oil, but does not pursue the topic. Sugar, Salt and Curdled Milk: Millais and the Synthetic Subject. Tate Papers 18 (2012).

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impending doom hovering over them, the macabre and grotesque elements – particularly Isabella’s ensuing obsession and madness – do not belong to the present moment. Realism supersedes the gothic and the irrational. Five years later, an illustrated edition of Keats’s poems was published by Edward Moxon, and, as the title announces, it is accompanied by “120 designs, original and from the antique, drawn on wood by George Scharf, Jun”. Scharf designed the title page for “Isabella”, followed by five illustrations, two large and three smaller. Despite the popularity of this edition at the moment of its publication and in the subsequent years, it is almost unknown now.52 In general, Scharf ’s attitude to illustrating the poem is to combine the sentimental with the gothic, the sensational and the grotesque. Also, unlike Millais and later Hunt, Strudwick, and many of their followers, Scharf makes the theme of violence and horror explicit in his designs. Thus, he actually portrays the moment of Lorenzo’s murder, and, even more surprisingly, the scene of dismemberment, not eliding the details – the severed head is visible, so is Lorenzo’s decapitated body. Particularly the last element makes Scharf ’s approach a daring and unique one – even if later illustrators present the head, none pays attention to the violated corpse.53 The sensational, gothic element is best visible in the design illustrating Isabella in her chamber, where the visitation of the ghost is signalled by the presence of its hand, emerging from behind the curtain. Finally, in the scene where Isabella tends the pot of basil (Scharf ’s illustration being probably the first rendering of what will later become the staple motif) the sentimental and the gothic merge. The former is present in the accumulation of stock elements suggesting a conventional expression of lovesickness – the discarded book of poetry of the floor, the musical instrument, the posture of Isabella, who shades her eyes leaning on the prie-dieu; the latter in the shocked, horrified expression of the brothers and in the size of the pot with basil which may have easily accommodated the head. Scharf ’s designs emphasise the grotesque quality of the poem and are grotesque themselves: exaggerated, almost comic sentimentality

52 The only text dealing with Keats’s early illustrated editions known to me is Helen E. Haworth’s “‘A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever?’: Early Illustrated Editions of Keats’s Poetry,” Harvard Library Bulletin 21 (1973), pp. 88–103. 53 The severed body of Lorenzo appears in one of Robert Anning Bell’s designs, but Bell places it at the bottom of the picture, thus not emphasising its presence the way Scharf does; moreover, Bell’s diagonal perspective also distracts the viewer’s attention from the corpse. Other illustrators censor the poem even further: Mcdougall’s (London: Kegan Paul, 1898) and Paul Henry’s (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1906) illustrated editions of “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” do not picture violence at all, the former only alluding to it in the scene where Isabella shows the knife to her nurse, and the latter concentrating on the gothic effect, created by almost claustrophobic atmosphere of the forest and the shadowy, wary countenances of both women.

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mixes with morbidity and violence, fragmentation and disfigurement express grief and horror. When Holman Hunt decided to paint his version of “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” in 1867, he was establishing a painterly tradition of presenting the key scene of the poem. Unlike Millais’s attempt to tell a complicated multi-layered story, Hunt’s painting moves away from the narrative and social to the aesthetic and personal level, becoming an intimate testimony of loss, but at the same time, it complies with the tradition of presenting the female body as a spectacle. From this moment on Isabella holding on to the basil pot will be recognized as a stock image for Keats’s narrative, emulated by several other artists – John William Waterhouse, Mary Lizzie Macomber, Henrietta Rae, George Henry Grenville Manton, Edward Reginald Frampton, Jessie Marion King, John White Alexander or Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale. Hunt situates his Isabella in the centre of the picture, makes her lean on a priedieu and tenderly embrace a big majolica vase, which contains, as we know, the mutilated head of her lover. In this way, he converts Isabella’s mourning into her private devotional ritual. Her figure is depicted in a close-up; Isabella’s enticing negligee and her naked feet (one of them prominently displayed), as much as the unmade bed visible in the background invite the viewer’s voyeuristic gaze. Sarah Wootton observes: “The patterned rug which has slipped from the waist reveals a transparent dress through which we can discern both her dark pubic hair and the radiance of the skin’s texture” (Consuming Keats 61). Her frontal position, her proximity to the viewer, and a realistic rendering of Isabella’s naked flesh under the flimsy gown constitute the woman as a spectacle, a source of visual pleasure for the masculine gaze. Compositionally, the painting is constructed upon the death-life opposition: the vase with the skull of the dead man is practically overgrown with Isabella’s hair; besides, it is decorated with self-explanatory details: a skull and a heart. The discarded withered rose on the floor speaks of the thwarted possibilities of an unfulfilled relationship; the watering can, on the other hand, suggests life and cultivation, epitomised by the thriving, bushy, thick basil plant. However, the most surprising quality of the painting stems from the way Hunt depicts Isabella – instead of the delicate, pale and withering heroine of Keats’s story we see the robust, opulent, fleshy figure with abundant hair, feminine curves of her body and visibly accented lips. Her hair is a visual equivalent of the basil plant and seems to grow out of the vase, stressing the grotesque flux and transformation. Loss generates gain – Isabella feeds herself on the cultivation of her grief over Lorenzo; the mourning becomes a luxury that she savours. The poem underscores Isabella’s growing madness, her “progressive derangement” (Stillinger “Keats and Romance” 603); the painting shows how her physicality – her body – benefits from her obsession. While in Keats’s poem Isabella is young, inex-

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perienced, barely a woman yet, in Hunt’s interpretation the cherishing of the vase with the head of his lover turns her into a nubile, sensuous, physically mature woman. The necrophiliac overtones of the story are difficult to ignore. Important biographical context complements the aesthetic reading of the painting. The features of Isabella belong to Hunt’s wife, Fanny Waugh. Having married Fanny in 1865, Hunt went with his newly wedded, and pregnant, wife to Florence, where he started to paint his deeply sensual works, like Il Dolce Far Niente (the only painting for which Fanny modelled, bearing distinctive similarities to Isabella). Tragically, Fanny died in Florence from fever in December 1866, and Hunt, at that time working on Isabella, changed the features and figure of his female model and replaced them with Fanny’s. Therefore, himself bereft, he immortalized his wife as a mourning person and made this painting a private memorial (Igra 236). As Judith Bronkhurst notes, the picture became “not only a celebration of the love Hunt had experienced during his year long marriage, in the sensuality of the figure of Isabella, but also an expression of the anguish of his bereavement” (qtd in Igra 236). When one considers the visual history of Keats’s poem in chronological order, John Melhuish Strudwick’s Isabella (1879) is next in line. Strudwick, an assistant and a follower of Edward Burne-Jones, became associated with the Pre-Raphaelite and later the “aesthetic” style. His painting is characterised by his attention to detail, the use of deep, bright colours and his keen representation of women and draperies, with an emphasis on surface patterns and textures. His Isabella painting is no exception in this respect, although it possesses interesting new elements, which differentiate the work from both Hunt’s and Millais’s. Hunt’s influence is visible in Strudwick’s decision to make the scene an interior one, include a prie-dieu and represent Isabella barefoot, and in the overall composition of the picture (rectangular, vertical format). In her Consuming Keats. Nineteenth-Century Representations in Art and Literature, Sarah Wootton dismisses the painting after a short discussion: “The overall presentation of Isabella lacks depth; and, by not interacting with the poetic source, the painting is rendered little more than a bejewelled beauty” (65). Yet, through its emphasis on lack and loss, the painting speaks more about mourning than Hunt’s canvas does, and it clearly relates to Keats’s poem. Also, although British Aestheticism stresses the purely visual and sensual qualities and disregards storytelling, Strudwick’s picture does tell the story through a number of important details. The oil relates to the following lines in Keats’s poem: “Piteous she looked on dead & / senseless things / Asking for her lost Basil amorously” (ll. 489–490). Surprisingly, the artist decided to portray the second bereavement in Isabella’s life – the moment when the vase has been taken away from her, in contrast to the usual representations depicting Isabella mourning Lorenzo, hunched over the basil pot/urn. The canvas visualises Isabella’s loss through a vivid indication of her sense of lack – next to

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Isabella’s figure, we see an empty metal flower stand which used to hold the precious vase. Its emptiness articulates Isabella’s deprivation and stresses her double bereavement: first, she had lost her lover; secondly, she lost the vase which she substituted Lorenzo with. The viewer’s eyes are automatically drawn to the vacant space where the vase used to be, and a moment later, to the view from the window in the background of the picture, where Strudwick added another narrative element, portraying the brothers as they carry the basil pot away from Isabella. Finally, single leaves on the floor next to the flower stand metonymically articulate an almost physical sense of loss of the object which used to be there and now is missing – only the remains are left. Yet, while on the one hand the painting emphasises emptiness and loss, on the other hand it stresses Isabella’s fleshiness and her sexuality by the depiction of her luxurious dress, her golden chain and pendent, her frontal position, accentuated breasts, and the erotic embrace represented on the bronze shield. Interestingly, we can see how this painting engages in the conversation with the dominant artistic traditions of Strudwick’s times. Isabella, standing in a typical contrapposto pose, supports her weight against the wooden piece of furniture next to her, with the other hand placed right below her left breast. The gesture stresses her physical longing and sexual frustration as well as bespeaks her emotional pain, but also – interestingly – both the arrangement of her body and the placing of her hand seem to allude to Botticelli’s famous The Birth of Venus, an influence and inspiration for many painters of the Grosvenor School to which Strudwick belonged.54 In a similar way, her paleness, emphasised by the sharp contrast of her almost white skin with the redness of her dress and hair, brings to mind both the pale, sad Venus of Botticelli’s Primavera as well as the white-faced goddess of Laus Veneris, one of the best-known paintings of Edward BurneJones, Strudwick’s teacher. Likewise, the scattering of the withered basil leaves on the floor may be another indirect quotation from Primavera, this time alluding to the passing of love and life. Aesthetically, the painting is gratifying through the use of lush colours and textures, its overt sensuality, and a reference to music (present in the form of the book with notes) to which allegedly all art should aspire. Additionally, like other examples of aestheticist painting, Strudwick’s Isabella testifies to “the glorification of the pale, aloof, languorous female type” (Denney 38). Still, just like in D. G. Rossetti’s paintings of women, Isabella’s face is serenely sad and withdrawn, and one may think that her serenity does not do justice to the tempest of feelings which she probably experiences at that moment. The motif of madness and derangement, so prominent in Keats’s narrative and hinted at in Hunt’s painting, here gets displaced by the emphasis on visually 54 For Botticelli as the inspiration for the painters of the Grosvenor School see Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, London: Tate Publishing, 2000, p. 126.

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pleasant elements. Thus, Strudwick’s painting negotiates a middle ground between purely aesthetic and narrative painting, with its accent on loss and bereavement on the one hand, and its static, vertical composition, sensual appeal and its devotion to artifice (elaborately designed flower stand, mosaic at the window) on the other. The earliest well-known painting of Keats’s poem by a woman artist is by Isobel L. Gloag. Her Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1895) creates a visual and interpretative departure from the artworks discussed so far. The painting, now untraced, was exhibited at the Royal Academy and named in Christopher Wood’s Victorian Painters (Wootton “Into her dream he melted”); it stresses the gloomy, oppressive atmosphere of the poem. As opposed to Hunt’s or Strudwick’s careful, detailed renderings, the contemplation of which should result in the spectator’s visual pleasure originating from a pleasing and sexually suggestive presentation of the female figure, Gloag’s image is disturbing. Her Isabella engages with the spectator’s gaze, but the look communicates unrest and alarm; as does her position. She is hunched and uncomfortable; her body language suggests tension and unease. She clasps the pot with basil in her arms, holding on fiercely to it, but the gesture is not nostalgic, as it was in Hunt’s stylized representation; rather, Isabella guards the pot in a protective, fierce and determined manner. The basil is wild and bushy, and its wildness corresponds with the heroine’s turbulent and agitated expression. The plant creeps everywhere – it seems to overgrow both Isabella’s dress and her hair and is duplicated in the mirror behind. Similarly, we may suggest, Isabella’s obsession takes hold of her mind. The pot is tilted sideward, so is one of the candles behind the heroine, which emphasises the chaotic and disorderly character of the scene. Gloag’s Isabella is a woman capable of exhuming her lover and dismembering his body; the painting captures the excess and the trauma of Keats’s narrative as persuasively as it stimulates compassion mingled with disquiet. Unlike most of both the earlier and the later visual renderings, Gloag’s picture recreates the dramatic and the turbulent aspects of the poem, hints at violence, madness and disintegration. The grotesque surfaces in the bushy abundance of the plant which acquires a life of its own, in the disquiet, the subjective emotional dimension, the excess and the disturbance the scene presents. In 1897 Henrietta Rae, a prominent female painter of the late Victorian era who specialised in classical, allegorical and literary subjects, produced a full-scale oil Isabella and the Pot of Basil. Rae’s treatment of the theme allies it with the earlier Pre-Raphaelite works on the subject. Her Isabella sits collapsed on the floor, not inside her room, but on the terrace overlooking the sea, the setting a probable result of the artist’s trip to Italy (Wootton Consuming Keats 71). The antique marble column and the balustrade with its elaborate reliefs testify to Rae’s fascination with classical themes and the influence of Frederick Leighton,

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whose lectures she attended while being a student at the Royal Academy of Arts (Devereux 215). The deep, contrastive, vivid colours of the painting, coupled with the depiction of the thriving plants in the background do not communicate imprisonment and despair. Also, the poem’s morbidity and troubling eroticism give way to sentimentality and nostalgia in Rae’s neo-classical representation. Isabella is a chaste picture when compared to Rae’s other works – the artist was primarily famous for painting female nudes (Devereux 217). Isabella encircles the vase with her arms; in her hands she also clasps a rosary. The addition of the religious element, probably an inspiration from Hunt, fuses the concept of love as devotion and religious worship and defines the heroine as pious and innocent. Overall, the painting’s aesthetic and sentimental qualities are most prominent, but this presentation forsakes the ambiguity of Keats’s story. The viewer, exposed to the image of melodramatic solitude and sorrow, finds it difficult to remember the gruesome and cruel context for this image. The painting was met with general acclaim (Wootton Consuming Keats 71), possibly because it elided the most troubling issues present in the story. Keats’s poem fared well also outside the British Isles. One of the American artists who became interested in the theme was John White Alexander, whose picture Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1897, see figure 13) can be defined as his “most self-consciously Symbolist work” (Moore 38). Alexander, who was influenced by other prominent Symbolist painters of the period (most notably James McNeill Whistler) is famous for his portrait painting, particularly the “decorative treatment of the female form” (Moore 34). As Sarah Wootton notes, his interest in Pre-Raphaelitism is also evident (“Keats’s Poetry” 279). His portraits usually feature female figures in long, flowing dresses in dark interiors, with an emphasis on decorative elegance, emotional intensity and aesthetic refinement, while neglecting narrative elements for the sake of an overall sensuous impression. Compared to Millais’s, Hunt’s, Rae’s or Strudwick’s paintings, Alexander’s canvas seems devoid of details and ornaments, almost bare. As is characteristic for the Symbolist art, the picture’s meaning lies behind the forms, lines, shapes, shades and colours: Alexander’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil demonstrates formal and narrative tenets of the Symbolist movement including its enigmatic theme, setting, and composition. As a reaction against the realism of Naturalism, many Symbolist artists embraced more obscure subjects and settings that originate from dreams or the imagination (Schneider).

Isabella is a full-length standing figure, occupying almost the entire space of the canvas. Seen from the side, with her head slightly twisted away from the viewer, Isabella’s figure seems to be less important than two other elements that function as the ostensible subjects of the painting: the voluminous, flowing dress which is the centre of the composition, and the large (much larger than in other paintings

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of the same subject) earthenware vase which she strokes lovingly with the tips of her fingers.

Figure 13: John White Alexander Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1897, The Museum of Fine Art, Boston, image retrieved from The Library of Congress

Sarah J. Moore lists characteristic traits of Alexander’s paintings of the 1890s: “formal simplicity, linear elegance, rigorous attention to surface structure, adherence to pictorial rather than illustrative motives, and preoccupation with colour harmonies of a single dominant tone” (34–35). All these features can easily be seen in Isabella. The narrow vertical format of the canvas stresses the decorative rather than narrative qualities of the picture. The viewer’s eye is caught by the elegant flowing lines and curves of the long unadorned gown. Its un-

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dulating, almost organic outline resembles a flower-stem, which brings to mind classic Art Nouveau shapes and forms. Although Isabella’s pose is static, the eerie light emanating from the gown seems to activate the composition. The tonal harmonies of the painting oscillate between brownish grey, olive, black and white, and produce an eerie, almost spectral, sombre atmosphere, adequate for the gruesome, macabre subject. As in Alexander’s other paintings of this period, “details of the physiognomy of the face were minimized and subordinated to the decorative treatment of the figure” (Moore 35). The painting does not tell a story, but impresses with its atmosphere of gloom, emptiness, and dejection; its aesthetic impact depends upon the marriage between the personal (Isabella’s grief and gloom) and the sensual (her half-open lips, fingers lingering upon the vase as if in a loving caress, the folds of her gown). A completely different emphasis was given to the Isabella story by Robert Anning Bell, who illustrated the 1897 edition of Keats’s Poems. Bell was a figure painter, illustrator, designer of mosaics, a member of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, and a Glasgow School of Art teacher. Brought up in Walter Crane’s tradition (Houfe 152), in his art, Bell combines decoration with the narrative. His take on “Isabella” is the first of the poem’s visual renderings by the artists connected with the Glasgow school. In The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790 to 1914 Robert Norton Ray groups Bell’s illustrations for Keats’s poems into two categories: the descriptive and the interpretative, and ascribes his Isabella prints to the latter category. He also concludes that “[i]ndeed, all four of the full-page illustrations for this poem are notable for their psychological penetration (182)”. Because of their different medium – black and white book designs in the Art Nouveau style – the pictures are visually very different from the previously discussed paintings, sterner and less sensuous. Bell’s treatment of the subject, however, is also innovative. The most famous design of the series presents a scene which had hitherto been elided by other artists – the moment of the dismemberment of Lorenzo’s body. Another different element is the location: Bell moves his scene from the standard setting of Isabella’s chamber to the forest where Lorenzo’s body is buried. The viewer’s attention is captivated by the macabre element in the picture – the figure of Isabella holding the decapitated head of Lorenzo in front of her, in a distinctly triumphant gesture. The subject and the treatment of the scene openly allude to the drawing of Salome with the head of John the Baptist entitled The Climax by Aubrey Beardsley, whose work influenced Robert Anning Bell. Bell’s illustration is aligned with the Decadent subjects: the aesthetics of the Decadent movement stresses the unnatural and the unhealthy, glorifying the sensational, erotic, morbid and grotesque element in the arts. Bell’s Isabella is no longer a passive, mourning, pitiable heroine: she is a raving Maenad in a frenzy, her madness drawing her to the commission of an unspeakable act. As Sarah Wootton argues,

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the design “visualises the decapitation of the hero as a moment of female sexual triumph” (Consuming Keats 72). The female body becomes a site of power and horror simultaneously; female power is constructed as lethal. The macabre scene transgresses all boundaries of taste and morals, and even Isabella’s nurse, who in Keats’s story accompanies the heroine to the forest, cannot bear to look at her pupil but covers her eyes in despair and disgust. Still, possibly because of its grotesque qualities, this illustration captures the force of Isabella’s emotions and presents the extreme to which she has been moved in her despair. Interestingly, Bell decided to tone down the violent aspect of the picture, and in his 1898 refashioning of the same theme we see Isabella in the forest with the head of Lorenzo, however, instead of holding the head up as she does in the previous illustration, now she embraces it tenderly, looks at it with love and covers it with kisses. The design refers to one specific line in Keats’s poem: “Pale Isabella kissed it, and low moaned” (399), and although the perverse eroticism of the scene is left intact, the emphasis switches from Isabella’s frenzy to her despair. A black and white illustration by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale that appeared in The Studio (1898) also offers a less conventional version of the subject. Brickdale pursued a dual career as a painter and illustrator of fine-coloured editions of literary texts; she was the first female member of the Institute of Painters in Oils (Marsh and Gerrish Nunn 152) In her revisionist and provocative drawing, Brickdale engages in a visual polemic with famous renderings of the subject by other artists. First of all, the format of the illustration is horizontal, not vertical. As a result, although central, the heroine is not displayed to the viewer in the manner characteristic for many other discussed representations. The position in which Brickdale depicts Isabella, although bearing on the tradition inaugurated by Hunt, is also distinct. Thus, Hunt’s influence can be immediately spotted in the “Isabella holding the vase” motif, but the presentation is not frontal; thus, the provocative, almost pornographic eroticism of Hunt’s female figure is abandoned. Moreover, this Isabella is not the nubile, fleshy, ripe-for-the-picking type, but remains girlish and coy, with her face partly averted from the viewer, and a veil of long flowing hair. While in Hunt’s painting the vase, though important, does not seem to capture the heroine’s immediate attention (rather, looking out of the canvas and making eye contact with the viewer she displays herself as an object of the spectator’s visual pleasure), Brickdale’s Isabella appears oblivious to her surroundings. She sits by the pot of basil, clutching on to the herb, and this depiction signals her dependence on the vase, her urge to possess it, and her affection for Lorenzo simultaneously. The choice of the horizontal landscape format is also meaningful, as it compresses Isabella’s figure and in this way comments on “social and psychological constraints” (Wootton Consuming Keats 72). The room strikes the viewer with its emptiness and stern, bare character. The repetitiveness of patterns in the upper part of the picture, created by the circles of

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the window panes, only punctuated by the falling folds of the curtains, is undermined by the unduly lines of Isabella’s gown which visibly resists formalization and tries to get out of the picture frames. It produces disruption and creates a sense of energy, despite the lack of any conceivable action depicted in the illustration. The sad and oppressive atmosphere is additionally emphasised by the blackness of the fabric, resembling a mourning crape, which flows out of the rigid rectangle of her chamber and indicates both Isabella’s grief and her desire to escape the oppression of the tyrannous brothers. Interestingly, Brickdale’s picture refuses to construct a perspective that would grant the spectator a position of superiority or ownership; the intimacy of the scene is preserved, the presentation does not encourage the controlling and possessive way of looking known as the male gaze. Its formal decorative qualities also distinguish the illustration: its swirling lines, which contrast with the geometrical shapes within shapes, and its dizzying kaleidoscope of patterns and textures bring to mind the art of both Aubrey Beardsley and the artists of the Glasgow style. In 1907 Keats’s poem was published by T. N. Foulis as the third of the Envelope Books series, issued by the publisher to place on the market famous verse at reasonable prices. Jessie Marion King, a Scottish artist and illustrator, was commissioned to illustrate the volume. She produced a cover design, a colour frontispiece and three exquisite colour illustrations. As a student of the Glasgow School of Art under the tutelage of Francis Henry Newberry, the headmaster, King developed her interest in the decorative arts; she was strongly influenced by the famous “Spooks” – Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Herbert MacNair, sisters Frances and Margaret MacDonald, themselves impacted by Aubrey Beardsley. She was drawn to their Celtic mysticism and the love of the occult (Lupack 95–6). King, today recognized as one of the most influential illustrators of the twentieth century “was credited, together with her contemporaries like Charles Rennie Mackintosh, with helping to create what is known as the Glasgow style” (Lupack 95). At the turn of the century, Glasgow became the centre of a modern movement in art and design in which women played key roles and achieved international recognition (Cherry 205). As noted by Sarah Wootton, King is “one of only a few illustrators to engage with the disturbing scene of Lorenzo’s disinterment in ‘Isabella’” (“Into her Dream he Melted”), the subject of the frontispiece. However, in stark contrast to Robert Anning Bell’s illustration of the same scene, King’s print eschews the violence of the scene altogether, barely hinting at the brutality inherent in it, and concentrates on affection instead; we witness how Isabella, lovingly and tenderly, lowers her face to kiss Lorenzo’s head, which she deposits in the pot with utmost care. In her rendering of the scene, King concentrates on intimacy and sensuality. The lovers are alone, not accompanied by the nurse (as they were in Bell’s illustration and in Keats’s poem). Isabella’s hair falls protectively upon Lorenzo’s severed head, partially veiling them from view;

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their lips will soon meet. There is no sign of Isabella’s knife or the rest of Lorenzo’s body – the lower part of the picture is obscured by mist raising from the ground, not permitting the viewer to see the details, which might otherwise have been depicted as gruesome and shocking. Instead of the triumphant heroine seen in the first of Bell’s paintings, King depicts a loving and caring Isabella, tender and almost maternal. The design of the picture also contributes to this effect. The stark, rigid lines of the trees contrast with the curved, billowing, flowing outline of Isabella’s body. Isabella’s femininity – defined as affectionate, curvy and caring – is contrasted with the vertical and spiky, stiff, inflexible trunks which metaphorically allude to the uncompromising, stringent and cruel nature of the brothers. The choice of Keats’s verses, “If love impersonate was ever dead / pale Isabella kissed it, and low moaned” (ll. 398–399) also emphasises the lovers’ affection, Isabella’s gentleness and her woe. Yet, the absurd element inherent in the picture cannot be completely elided, as the very nature of what Isabella does (she lowers the decapitated head into the pot while embracing it tenderly!) is the essence of the grotesque and the bizarre which structure the scene. By choosing this image to be the subject of the frontispiece, King removes it from the chronology of the narrative and singles it out as the most important moment of the story. The first of the three colour illustrations in the body of the book presents Isabella in the garden, as she misses Lorenzo and longs for his presence, not knowing about his fate yet. She sits, with her head bent, oblivious to her surroundings, pressing her hand to her breast in a conventional gesture suggesting the lack of her lover. As in all King’s illustrations for this poem, the decorative quality of the page is what most catches the reader’s attention. It is visible in detailed images of clouds, flowers and foliage, exquisite colours and decorations on the frames. She creates an “oval-within-an oval” effect, as the shape of the bench and the arches above Isabella echo the outline of her body, resulting in a striking symmetry within the image. In this illustration, as in all the others by King, Keats’s heroine is seen from the profile; Barbara Tepa Lupack observes that, since King in general found it challenging to draw beautiful faces, she “drew profiles with unvaryingly straight foreheads, sharp noses and pointed chins” (105). In the Isabella illustrations, this effect is softened by the heroine’s delicate mouth and long, flowing hair partially obscuring her face. The second of King’s illustrations, accompanied by the lines of Keats’s poem “She had no knowledge when the day was done, / And the new morn she saw not, but in peace / Hung over her sweet basil evermore” (ll. 421–423) presents a scene which chronologically follows the frontispiece. King radically departs from the nineteenth-century tradition of depicting this moment in Keats’s poem: unlike other (particularly male) artists, she does not show her heroine in any of the standard poses which work to reveal and stress the sensual curves of Isabella’s

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body. Instead, King’s Isabella is sitting in her chamber, nursing the basil pot, her billowing dress effectively hiding her figure from view. Although she occupies most of the illustration, she reminds huddled and hunched, rather hiding than exposing herself to the observer’s penetrating eyes. The curved, circular lines of her hair and dress create a soft and pleasing effect. Her face is only partly visible in half-profile, and her eyes are closed, as she engages in her reverie. However, the most outstanding feature of the illustration is that King positions the pot of basil between Isabella’s thighs. In this way, she stresses the sensuality and intimacy of the scene while eliding its potentially perverse eroticism. The bright halo forming itself behind the heroine’s head pronounces the scene sacred rather than profane, underlining both Isabella’s innocence and her innate strength since King’s halos became “symbols of the life forces of her figures” (Lupack 98). At the same time, nevertheless, the picture emphasises the lovers’ thwarted desire, Isabella’s unfulfilment and her wasted potential both as a lover and as a mother. The pot, tenderly nursed between her thighs, symbolically becomes the unborn child of her unconsummated relationship with Lorenzo, the reading linked to Keats’s poetic imagery of exhumation as a perverted birth. As a whole, King’s illustrations for the poem neglect or ignore the disturbing, at times gory narrative and concentrate on the magic of unfulfilled romance, yet escaping the puny sentimentality which characterises many other visual renderings of the text. King’s Isabella is at once delicate and vulnerable as well as determined and strong; on the one hand, King celebrates her femininity, stressing the graceful, billowy, curvy outlines of her figure and flowing hair and showing how she mourns her loss, but at the same time presents her as a person able to obtain the head of her lover and preserve it for herself. That same year of 1907, Keats’s poem appeared in print published by John Lane Company and accompanied by illustrations by Paul Henry, an Irish landscape painter and illustrator, under the influence of John McNeill Whistler, Jean Francois Millet, and Van Gogh, who in his later work turned to Post-Impressionism (Kennedy 44). His charcoal renderings of Keats’s poem make an unreal, gothic, almost spectral impression, mainly due to his use of blurred outlines and hazy background. Henry produced six illustrations for “Isabella”, out of which at least three merit discussion because of their distinct character. He illustrates the lines “Resolved, she took with her an aged nurse, / And went into that dismal foresthearse” (ll. 343–344), giving the figure of the nurse unusual prominence: she turns towards the spectator, “looking out” of the picture, while Isabella is relegated to the further plane of the design. The nurse, dressed in a black gown, contrasts with the white figure of her protégée. Her facial features, clearly outlined, communicate strength and resolve with a tint of malice perhaps? The other illustration, But in peace hung over her sweet Basil evermore projects a more familiar scene of Isabella lost in a romantically spectral reverie over the vase with

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her basil. Henry’s rendering brings to mind Alexander’s painting, due to the interplay of white and grey shades and the emphasis given to Isabella’s hand, which sensuously caresses the vase. The most interesting of the illustrations, however, seems to be the last one, For cruel ’tis, said she / To steal my Basil pot from me, which projects the scene of bereavement. Isabella leans over a table or – possibly – a prie-dieu which, we presume, hosted the missing vase. Paul Henry gives prominence to Isabella’s shapely, elongated hands, which clasp each other in a gesture communicating grief and absence. Her face is completely shaded from view by the curtain of her long, flowing hair. Her position is of abandonment, despair and helplessness, but the illustration grants her the privilege of privacy, not exploiting the scene’s potential for either the sensational or the excessively sensual effect. The same cannot be said about John William Waterhouse’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil, produced in 1907. His painting appears to be an immensely popular and generative visual rendering of one of the most popular motifs of the poem, which again presents Isabella’s mourning over the basil plant. Itself heavily indebted to Hunt, Waterhouse’s oil seems to have inspired a number of subsequent interpretations: for instance, a painting by Edward Reginald Frampton (1912). Waterhouse depicts Isabella kneeling in front of a substantial pot with the thriving herb. The stone pedestal upon which the pot is placed is decorated with the relief of a skull –probably an element borrowed from Hunt’s painting, just like the water jug standing at the bottom left of the picture. The woman’s position is reminiscent of Waterhouse’s other paintings of female figures, most prominently perhaps of his Mariana in the South. In both works, the artist fuses the ideas of femininity, enchantment, religious worship and lack or longing. His Isabella amorously encircles the basil pot in her arms, as she would be holding on to her lover, were he alive. Her slightly upturned face, closed eyes and semi-parted lips ready to receive a kiss from the absent Lorenzo suggest an almost erotic trance. She is smelling the basil plant, and the scene reflects “a contemporary fascination with the immediacy and emotional poignancy of smell for raising sentimental visions and visual memories of matters close to the heart, which was prevalent both in the literature of the period as well as in psychological research” (Christine Bradstreet). The intangible and ethereal odour of the basil plant can almost be seen: olfactory imagery is transmitted through Isabella’s rapturous facial expression, the proximity of the plant to her face, the abundance of the sumptuous basil, and the blurred haze that surrounds the basil sprigs. The painting projects an aura of privacy, but invades it simultaneously: the viewer gains access to an intimate scene of affectionate abandon. Isabella kneels in front of her lover’s substitute: her devotion to the pot is as ardent as any religious worship. There is a hint of almost mystic communion with palpable erotic overtones. Thus, Waterhouse’s painting suggests a conflation of the sensual and the

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spiritual, indicates vividness of olfactory imagination and maintains a traditional connection between femininity, fecundity and nature. Five years after Waterhouse had painted Isabella, Edward Reginald Frampton produced his version of the subject, though his painting is visibly modelled on Waterhouse’s. Frampton, collapsing the gap between love and religion, shows how an ethereal Isabella places the pot with Lorenzo’s head on the altar next to the figure of the crucified Christ. A comment from the catalogue of the Maas Gallery which hosts the painting reads: “In the Isabella, the idea which the artist intends to convey is that Isabella, having exalted her devotion to her murdered Lorenzo into a very religion, does not hesitate to set the pot of basil, containing his head, in the most sacred of all places, the very midst of the altar” (British Pictures 6). The influence of Waterhouse can be easily observed in the slight tilt of Isabella’s face upwards, her similar daydreaming expression, the loose folds of her dress, the depiction of her as she kneels in prayer, and the fabric draped around her arm. While in Waterhouse’s painting Isabella finds herself in her private garden, surrounded by other plants and trees, Frampton places his heroine in a private chapel; as a result, the painting is overloaded with quasi-religious elements. Thus, where Waterhouse suggestively hints at the “love-as-devotion” motif, Frampton’s picture is direct and unambiguous in its obtrusively sacrilegious character, but its purpose is clearly aesthetic rather than interpretative. George Henry Grenville Manton’s 1919 oil painting is next in the string of various post-Hunt and post-Waterhouse Isabellas. Like Waterhouse, Manton situates the heroine in the garden whose topography resembles the other artists’. The size of the pot and its pedestal also allude to the previously described paintings. However, Manton’s Isabella is not rapturous – she appears exhausted by her vigil and is probably dozing off. The painting appeals aesthetically through deep, lush contrastive colours, with bright and luminous flowers in the garden on the left and the velvety dark blue of Isabella’s dress. The atmosphere is dreamy and eerie, resulting from the “sfumato” technique of fine shading, which produces a blurred, soft and hazy effect. The painting does not contribute any new elements to the visual reception of Keats’s poem. Like King, Brickdale and Waterhouse, Manton exploits the atmospheric, visually gratifying qualities of his subject, disregarding the more disturbing and morbid ones. In the third decade of the twentieth century, unique visual renderings of selected moments in Keats’s narrative were accomplished by a Scottish artist, Hannah Frank, a continuator of the Glasgow style. Frank was a diverse artist: a poet and an illustrator, later also a sculptor. As an illustrator, she worked in pen and ink, producing a series of black and white drawings, their visual style reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley, yet remarkably her own. Her work has been called “the last link to Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement”. First as a student, then a teacher of Glasgow University, she was “the sole survivor of a

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group who experienced at first hand the momentum of a European art movement” (Jim McBeth). The first phase of her art, dating from 1925 to 1934, is characterised by ethereal, elongated lines, flowery shapes that create female bodies, striking contrasts in colour and texture, and the clarity of outline. Her series of illustrations for Keats’s “Isabella” was produced in 1928 for the Glasgow University Magazine. The series includes eight prints: Isabella I Can Half Perceive, To Her Chamber Gone, By Gradual Decay, It Was a Vision, And After Looking Round the Champaign Wide / Shows Her a Knife, O, Melancholy, And Many a Jealous Conference and finally, Isabella or the Pot of Basil. Compared with artworks by other artists, both male and female, Hannah Frank’s pen-and-ink drawings strike the viewer as being almost austere in their simplicity and the lack of ornamentation. She creates her narrative scenes using long, sweeping contours, often contrasting vertical and horizontal lines, or rigid vertical and sloping, gracefully curved outlines. The use of detail is minimal, and the ascetic character of the prints is further strengthened by the use of striking black and white contrasts. Like in Japanese prints, she relies on the two-dimensional plane of flat space, draws distinctly outlined silhouettes, frequently uses floral motifs and carefully disposes of white space. In By Gradual Decay Isabella sits outside, probably on a terrace, with tree trunks in the background. Her growing depression is indicated by her slumping posture, a disinterested look, drooping mouth corners and downcast eyes. Isabella does not know yet that Lorenzo is dead at this point in the text, but Frank’s image communicates the slow ebbing away of Isabella’s hope. The contrasts between the vertical trees and schematically outlined, horizontal lines of the background dominate the print and create the impression of heaviness and boredom. This print can be seen in dialogue with To Her Chamber Gone (see figure 14), a chronologically earlier moment in the narrative, in which the artist rendered Isabella’s reaction to Lorenzo’s awaited love confession. The latter picture portrays a love trance – Keats’s heroine sits in her room, but the window is open, the sky is visible, and a much more positive atmosphere is created due to the variety of lines and patterns: the tiled floor corresponds with latticed windows but contrasts with the graceful lines of Isabella’s long dress which visually alludes to the black, flowing gown in Brickdale’s painting. The print is also visibly lighter, with white colour dominating over grey and black. Isabella’s face is uplifted, her expression is rapturous, with eyes looking upwards and a half-opened mouth. With its striking originality and lyrical symbolism, the image is one of the extremely rare visualisations of Isabella in a moment of happiness. The print And, After Looking Round the Champaign Wide / Shows Her a Knife presents Isabella and her nurse, as they set out to the forest to dig out Lorenzo’s body. Isabella, in a white gown, visibly taller than her companion, is the focal point; Frank stresses the old age/youth binary using contrastive white and black

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Figure 14: Hannah Frank To her Chamber Gone, 1928, The Estate of Hannah Frank

colours. With her face averted, she displays a knife in her hand, as if in passing. She seems dissociated and outwardly disinterested; contrary to the passage in the poem, where the nurse perceives the girl as hectic and feverish, Frank’s Isabella is composed and unruffled. The background is barren and schematic, with only a billowing white cloud serving to illumine the figures and emphasise the spectral nature of their pursuit. While the artist has not chosen the scene of the unearthing of Lorenzo’s body, the next moment of the narrative, which also serves as the title page of the poem, shows the stock-figure of Isabella in mourning (see figure 15). Her self-assurance and calm are lost, yet even in this picture Isabella’s emotions are checked and contained: she weeps, kneeling, in front of the basil pot, yet her face is hidden in her hands and thus wholly obscured from view. The posture, which we read as an expression of grief, could also denote prayer or meditation. The title-page format of the illustration is reminiscent of a tombstone, with the carved inscriptions

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Figure 15: Hannah Frank Isabella or the Pot of Basil, 1928, The Estate of Hannah Frank

above and below the picture. The blackness of the print and its compressed space suggest that Isabella is buried alive, thus sharing Lorenzo’s lot. Also, a similar notion is indicated by the pattern on the pot – the tiny flowers create an impression of movement inside it, which is particularly morbid considering the contents “vile with green and livid spot” (l. 476). The one-dimensionality of the print, the striving for pure lines, the zero-point perspective, so characteristic for Hannah Frank’s art, here work to dispel any illusions (of visual depth, of the afterlife, of change). Thus, Frank’s treatment of the stock scene in Keats’s narrative is novel and impressive, not only because it extremely effectively communicates the despair and grief of the mourning Isabella, but also because it emphasises the grim reality of death, its finality, its vacuum, and the disintegration and decay of the body. Frank’s visual rendering avoids both the sentimentalization of Isabella’s fate and the aestheticisation of her body by not exposing her to the viewer’s eyes as a pleasing sight of female beauty.

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The majority of visual interpretations of Keats’s poem concentrate on the scene of Isabella’s mourning; some pictures also render the moments in the narrative prior to it. The ending of the story is not frequently chosen as a painterly subject. Out of the discussed artworks, only John Melhuish Strudwick’s and Paul Henry’s works illustrate Isabella’s reaction after the vase has been taken away, but still, they are primarily the variations on the mourning scene. In contrast, Hannah Frank devotes one print to illustrate Keats’s lines on melancholy, present in the text as a comment on Isabella’s second loss and identified by the critics as one of the poet’s departures from Boccaccio. Keats inserts into the poem two invocations to melancholy, contrary in nature. The first one comes just after the description of Isabella’s mourning ritual. In this passage, Keats emphasises pervasive gain that can come from weeping – a luxury of indulging in mourning, without the need to face the outer world. He writes: O Melancholy, linger here awhile! O Music, Music, breathe despondingly! O Echo, Echo, from some sombre isle, Unknown, Lethean, sigh to us – Oh, sigh! Spirits in grief, lift up your heads, and smile. Lift up your heads, sweet spirits, heavily, And make a pale light in your cypress glooms, Tinting with silver wan your marble tombs. (ll. 433–440)

As the narrative unfolds, however, and the brothers commit their second fiendish and thoughtless crime by depriving Isabella of her sole comfort stemming from her ritual of mourning, the second invocation to Melancholy reads differently: O Melancholy, turn thine eyes away! O Music, Music, breathe despondingly! O Echo, Echo, on some other day, From isles Lethean, sigh to us – Oh, sigh! Spirits of grief, sing not your “Well-a-way!” For Isabel, sweet Isabel, will die – Will die a death too lone and incomplete, Now they have ta’en away her basil sweet. (ll. 481–488)

The conventional expression of grief is not adequate anymore at the moment when Isabella is confronted with the second loss which will, as we know, soon destroy her. As Ralph Pite suggests: “[t]he familiar modes of grief, of plaining, fall short of the second bereavement she suffers when she is robbed. The voice of compassion cannot encompass ‘the real of ’ sorrow” (299). In O, Melancholy, Turn Your Eyes Away (see figure 16) Hannah Frank pictures Isabella just before her death. While in her other drawings she was usually

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Figure 16: Hannah Frank, O, Melancholy, Turn Your Eyes Away, 1928, The Estate of Hannah Frank

depicted with the prevalence of white or grey tones, in the last of the prints she is wholly enveloped in black. The black background merges with the blackness of Isabella’s figure, while the only white element is the ghastly paleness of her delicate face and a fragment of her elbow. Perry Nodelman, quoting the psychologists Benjamin Wright and Lee Rainswater, notes that it is saturation that more meaningfully communicates emotions than colour or shade and that forcefulness depends on colour darkness (66). The intense, saturated blackness of this print and its dense texture efficiently convey depression and helplessness; similarly, the simple and austere but assuredly drawn strokes conspire to communicate a sadness too deep for tears, or for any embellishment in the picture: the scene is created by the use of a few spare diagonal lines that outline Isabella’s figure and two vertical ones that create a column against which she leans. Less is

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more: the ascetic nature of the print pronounces solitude, despair and emptiness more than any other visual rendering of the poem. To conclude, it is apparent that Keats’s poem “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” proved fascinating for nineteenth- and twentieth-century male and female artists painting in different styles. While the Pre-Raphaelites explored the marriage between realism and the symbolic details, which narrated the romantic story, the Aesthetes concentrated on the subject’s decorative and sensuous elements. In turn, the Symbolist painters strongly emphasised its emotional, subjective qualities, evoking mood through shadow, colour and gesture. In this way, they moved away from the objective, realist representations and returned to the Romantic notions of heightened subjectivity and individualism. The Art Nouveau and the Decadent artists found the macabre, visually disturbing, grim elements in the poem most appealing; frequently, they also stressed the perverse eroticism of the depicted scene. Finally, early twentieth-century depictions (except for Hannah Frank’s works) primarily exploited the theme for its romantic and nostalgic potential. While Isabella’s trauma and progressive derangement remain the crucial concerns of Keats’s poem, most of its visual renderings depict female madness as melancholia, finding it a more decorous illustrative strategy. This decision allows the artists to concentrate on representing Isabella’s grief and loneliness, and at the same time to capitalise on the aesthetic value of the female figure. Hunt, Strudwick, Waterhouse, Alexander, Frampton, Manton and, to a lesser extent, Rae, all present Keats’s heroine accentuating her femininity and sensuality, through meticulous attention given to the curves of Isabella’s body, the textures of her dress, the emphasis on her hair, lips, bare flesh of her neck and feet, her sensuous and dreamy expression. Furthermore, while Hunt and Strudwick place the viewer in the position of an intruder, who glimpses an intimate private scene in the woman’s boudoir (a strategy also adopted by Waterhouse, Manton and Frampton), Alexander additionally creates a spectacle of special effects out of Isabella’s figure, generated by the impressionistic play of light and shape. In this way, most of these representations belong to “late Victorian art’s prevalent genre of single, symbolic, female figure” which “depersonalized women and made them mere decorative” (Kooistra Artist and Critic 111); Keats’s heroine becomes both an impersonal icon of loss and mourning and a source of visual pleasure for (mainly) her male spectators.55 Also, while the tradition of the poem’s visual 55 It is interesting to observe how dramatically these interpretations differ from Millais’s painting, whose main idea lies in portraying social and class relations; Sarah Wootton notes that there is “the disparity between the subversive interpretations of Keats’s poems produced during the formative phase of the Brotherhood and the conventionality of later works” (10). Her remark is pertinent to my discussion of “Isabella” pictures in that, indeed, there is a point in the visual history of the poem in which male artists start to produce variations and replicas of the same

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rendering as the “woman and the vase” motif stems from Hunt and possibly Scharf, many of the later paintings – particularly Rae’s, Waterhouse’s, Manton’s and Frampton’s – quote one another with no reservations and are primarily derivative. Despite their aesthetic merit, their primary purpose is to outwardly evoke a mood of melancholia and sentiment while inwardly catering for the spectator’s need to see the pleasing sight of a lovely female face and figure. Doing so, these artists use a literary title as a label attached to the painting which otherwise might be read as a “Keepsake beauty” – one of the uncountable portraits of idealized dainty ladies, expressing standard moods of rejection, dejection, loneliness, as well as “soulfulness” (Altick 88), arranged in conventional poses, often in the presence of a readily identifiable attribute responsible for mood enhancement (flowers, poetry book, musical instrument, etc.). The more disturbing, violent and/or macabre aspects of Isabella’s derangement were less popular among the artists and, consequently, present only in few illustrations. The whirlwind of uncontrolled emotions, female rage transformed into the momentary triumph, is presented in Bell’s painting depicting Isabella as dangerous and destructive in her incarnation of a madwoman. George Scharf (at least in some of his illustrations) focuses on the gothic and the sensational, not avoiding the sentimental angle the story takes, which brings his work closer to the aesthetic of the grotesque than many other visual interpretations. Isobel Gloag, while rendering Isabella’s mental instability, distinctly hints at the potential of female anger and stresses the dramatic and turbulent circumstances of Isabella’s oppressive situation. These paintings and illustrations are notable exceptions in their overt engagement with the grotesque; this grotesque quality, so pivotal in Keats’s poem, in most visual representations becomes displaced by the sentimental and aesthetic concerns, and even when it surfaces in other artworks, it appears to the eye as a secondary quality only. Hence, it can be sensed in Jessie Marion King’s illustration which depicts Lorenzo’s dismembered head as an object of Isabella’s affection and caresses, but the artist’s subtle, emotional rendition does not emphasise morbidity so much as it concentrates on Isabella’s tenderness. Similarly, the grotesque indirectly emerges in Holman Hunt’s representation: the painting hints at what is known, but not seen, at the processes of decay and transformation, the constant flux, indicated by the growth and flourishing of Isabella’s body in contrast with the decomposition of Lorenzo’s severed head. Hunt’s picture achieves the paradoxical and perfectly grotesque twining of robust sexuality with physical disintegration. Finally, whereas there does not seem to be a systematic and consistent difference between visual representations of Keats’s poem by male and female motif – cf. my earlier discussion of the paintings by Strudwick, Waterhouse, Manton, Frampton and, to a degree, Alexander.

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artists, certain distinct features are nevertheless possible to discern. King’s, Gloag’s and Brickdale’s approaches to the rendering of the female face and body are visually different from the male Pre-Raphaelite tradition. They do not accentuate the elements which had come to indicate feminine sensual appeal, such as full parted lips, clearly outlined faces with drowsy, dreamlike expression, exposed white flesh of necks and shoulders. Their female silhouettes have a more schematic, fairy-tale quality, rather sketched than realistically outlined, while their faces are frequently partially obscured. Moreover, their figures are protected from view by the generous, undulating fabric of their dresses, thus definitely escaping the scrutiny of the gaze; finally, in none of their paintings do the material objects play a prominent role – there is a distinct lack of ornaments, jewellery or any possessions distracting the viewer’s attention for the central scene. Even Henrietta Rae, whose oil draws on the Pre-Raphaelite tradition in the use of colours and the emphasis on textures and decoration, chooses to sentimentalize Isabella rather than display her for the sensual pleasure of the spectator. In turn, Hanna Frank, in her symbolic and forceful drawings of striking originality rehabilitates Isabella from the excess of sentimentality, offering a more serious and spiritual version of female sensibility instead. Thus, while emphasising Isabella’s emotionality and loss, female artists’ representations contend with the signification of “woman” as primarily corporeal and sexual. The fact that so many “Isabella” paintings were produced over the span of almost eighty years undoubtedly testifies to two important ideas: the profound influence of Keats’s poetry on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists, and the unwavering popularity and commercial value of sensationalism, sentimentality and aestheticism, which find expression in the established artistic convention of the rendering of the female body. Yet, after Hannah Frank, there is no attempt to produce a modern visual version of Keats’s story that I am familiar with. The “woman and the vase” convention has probably reached the limits of its creative and marketing potential; it can be revived only as a parody.56 Other aspects of the “Isabella” story, such as the surrealistic, grotesque experience of madness, and the shaping of female traumatized sensibility, are still awaiting their painterly rendering.

56 Susan Herbert, one of the most distinctive contemporary cat artists, achieves a very successful – and loving – parody of “Isabella” in her Cat Art Print “Isabella & The Pot Of Basil”.

Chapter Three: Between life and art: Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”

Gender, art and sexual politics in “The Lady of Shalott” Commenting on “The Lady of Shalott”, Tennyson noted that “[t]he new-born love for something, for someone in the wide world from which she has been so long secluded, takes her out of the region of shadows into that of realities” (Memoir I, 116–17). In this way, he unknowingly set the direction for much of the poem’s criticism from the nineteenth century till the present day.57 “The Lady of Shalott” has conventionally been perceived as an allegory of the opposition between the world of art/imagination and life, the two incompatible polarities. Those critics who adhere to such an interpretation see the Lady as an artist who must refrain from personal involvement in social and political reality, if she is to create. In his canonical study The Poetry of Tennyson, Dwight Culler reads the poem as a narrative of the creative process leading to an assertion that the poet cannot directly participate in reality but must view it through the mirror of the poetic imagination and weave it into the tapestry of his art (46); in similar terms, Alastair W. Thomson asserts that Tennyson’s text “represents the dilemma of the introspective artist, condemned to a life of shadows, and risking destruction if he turns to reality” (qtd in Plasa 247). In turn, E.D.H. Johnson interprets the Lady’s web and mirror as “metaphors for the creative imagination which has been shattered by the intrusion of direct experience” (9). Other scholars, more favourably assessing the Lady’s flight from Shalott to Camelot, nevertheless uphold the life/art conflict.58 Alternative recent readings feature the Lady as the Tennysonian creative imagination, externalised and embodied in the figure of a 57 The veracity of Tennyson’s comment has been undermined by Dwight Culler. He sees it as intentional fallacy on the part of Canon Ainger, who quotes these words in his Tennyson the Young (1891). See The Poetry of Tennyson (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 44. 58 See, for instance, Flavia M. Alaya, “Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’: The triumph of Art”, Victorian Poetry 8.4 (Winter 1970), pp. 273–289, and Edgar F. Shannon Jr. “Poetry as Vision: Sight and Insight in ‘The Lady of Shalott’”, Victorian Poetry 19.3 (Autumn 1981), pp. 207–223.

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woman, an explanation which partly obliterates other important gender implications of the poem.59 In these explications, the Lady’s death is a sign of the unresolved conflict between art/imagination and life/reality. Yet, it is evident that the issues of sexual politics function as the main paradigm along which the story operates, providing the essential interpretative framework for the understanding of the poem. While it is true that artistic creation is its central theme, this creation is accomplished by a woman artist, a fact which must not be underestimated. Making the Lady of Shalott its chief protagonist, Tennyson engages with the concepts of womanhood, the Victorian domestic ideology of the separate spheres, and the specificity of art production in his times. Naturally, the fact that “The Lady of Shalott” is a gender-specific text has not gone unnoticed. Several illuminating readings of the poem interpret the story as a testimony to the workings of patriarchy that isolates women from public life, denies them any activity of consequence, and punishes them cruelly for any attempted rebellion. Carl Plasa looks closely at how Tennyson’s text both undermines and perpetuates the patriarchal order: “Even as the Lady’s movement from Shalott to Camelot figures the deregulation of patriarchal gender codes and is variously resisted by the text, the desire which propels it – being for marriage – seems to work to reestablish the text in a relation of continuity with the patriarchal status quo” (251). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar claim that the Lady is a “memento mori of female helplessness, aesthetic isolation, and virginal vulnerability carried to deadly extremes” (618). Moreover, some of the numerous critical analyses of Tennyson’s text endeavour to reconcile the issue of artistic creation with the problematics of Victorian sexual politics. Thus, Joseph Chadwick concludes that By making the Lady an emblem for the artist and the Lady’s body an emblem for the artwork, then, this poem raises fundamental questions about both her femininity and her artistry. It questions the viability of both a femininity constituted through domestic, privatized subjectivity (the very femininity Tennyson later endorses in The Princess) and an aesthetic which insists on the privileged, autonomous nature of the artistic imagination (the aesthetic Hallam sees as basic to Tennyson’s early work) (26).

In turn, Ellen J. Stockstill suggests that the Lady’s “status as a contained woman is her ‘curse’ because, while she is an artist, she must reproduce the patriarchal 59 Carol Christ discusses the poetry of Tennyson and Browning in the context of the troubled relation between gender and authorship (“Feminine Subject in Victorian Poetry”, ELH 54.2 [Summer, 1987], pp. 385–401); John Dixon Hunt in The Pre-Raphaelite Imagination 1848– 1900 describes “the use of the beautiful woman as an image of the poet’s introspection” (177); John Hughes glosses Tennyson’s identification with the feminine principle as “coexistence, entwinement, and alternation, in Tennyson’s imagination, of male and female personae” for artistic and aesthetic purposes (“‘Hang there like fruit, my soul’: Tennyson’s feminine imaginings”, Victorian Poetry 45.2 [Summer 2007], p. 96).

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world she is separated from”. Consequently, “[l]eaving her site of production, the Lady rebels against the propagation of patriarchically assigned gender roles and constructions. She will no longer reproduce the gendered images in the mirror” (14–15). Kathy Alexis Psomiades reads the poem in a similar vein: “[b]y transforming a story about the difficulties of controlling the production and reception of art into a story about a beautiful woman who dies for love, the poem allows for the dangers of the marketplace to be eroticized and distanced through their deflection from the register of economics to the register of gender and sexuality”. Tracing the revisions of the poem through its two different versions, from 1832 and 1842, she further maintains that “a poem that in 1832 is about the dangers and necessities of going public, given the continuity between artist and artwork, becomes, by 1842, a poem about the inviolability of art and the artist, even in the most compromising of situations”. Still, an understanding of mid – Victorian gender ideology lies at the heart of this transformation (Beauty’s Body 26–28). The fact that Tennyson’s poem was one of the most widely and willingly illustrated literary texts in the nineteenth century when the “woman question” so prominently featured in the intellectual and ideological climate of the age is not accidental. The popularity of the poem and its allure for painters and illustrators is sufficiently evidenced by the fact that in 1985 Bell Gallery at the Department of Art, Brown University held an exhibition “Ladies of Shalott: a Victorian Masterpiece and its Contexts”, devoted solely to pictorial renderings of the poem. “The Lady of Shalott” was illustrated by – among others – William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John William Waterhouse, Howard Pyle, Elizabeth Siddall, John Atkinson Grimshaw, Arthur Hughes, William Maw Egley, Byam Shaw, Walter Crane and George E. Robertson in the nineteenth century; Sidney Harold Meteyard, Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale and Florence Harrison at the beginning of the twentieth century; Fyffe Christie and Shelah Horvitz and at a later stage of the twentieth century; the most recent renderings are by Jeff Barson (undated) and Donato Giancola (2004). Moreover, Tennyson’s text was also reissued as a picture book with illustrations by Bernadette Watts (1966), Charles Keeping (1986) and Geneviève Côté (2005). This short, and by no means complete overview of various attempts to depict Tennyson’s heroine at different moments of the poetic story unequivocally demonstrates not only the fact that the Lady of Shalott has become a Victorian aesthetic icon, but also that the issues confronted by the poem still resonate with its readers. My reading of “The Lady of Shalott” sees the Lady as a woman artist figure, and tries to reconcile the interpretations of the poem in reference to the Victorian sexual and gender politics with those explications which postulate the issue of artistic creation at its very heart; a new element that I want to address specifically are the limitations imposed on female artists in the Victorian era concerning the production and reception of art. Like Erik Gray and Kathy Alex Psomiades, I

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similarly claim that what is at stake when the Lady leaves her loom and decides to cross the boundary and enter Camelot is her future as a self-reflexive artist, an attempt for which she is punished. Moreover, I suggest that the trope of sight and seeing is crucial for understanding the motivation behind the Lady’s decision and that this trope is furrowed by gender complexities. To see – to actively gaze – is to assume control; to be seen/gazed at is to become visible, thus less marginalized, but also, as the poem suggests at its ending, to be objectified as a sight/spectacle, a thing to be contemplated and interpreted accordingly. Finally, I want to see how these issues are present in selected paintings, drawings and illustrations meant as visual renderings of Tennyson’s text, and to what extent the ways of looking at “The Lady of Shalott” evolve in time. The most apparent and striking feature of the poem is that it projects a world split into two opposites, organized around a river/boundary between the isle of Shalott with its castle of “[f]our grey walls, and four grey towers” (l. 15) and colourful Camelot, bustling with life and energy. By constructing its paradigmatic opposition, the poem problematizes the relations between art and society and the dynamics of creativity. While there has been a discussion whether or not it is legitimate to read this antithesis as encoding art/life binary and whether the polarity is not illusory in itself (Chadwick 27, Plasa 249), the fact that the Lady perceives the split as operative remains relatively certain. Shalott is a place visibly different from its binary: it remains isolated from the “outer” world by water, obscured from view by willows and aspens which act as a veil and distance the Lady from the active life of commerce, production (“heavy barges” l. 20, shallops “silken-sailed” l. 22) and land cultivation (“long fields of barley and of rye” l. 2, “reapers, reaping early” l. 28) that characterises Camelot. Since it is the Lady’s place, it becomes a female sphere, silent, quiet and apparently static. In this sense, the poem perfectly substantiates Mary Poovey’s claim that social and literary representations of gender in the Victorian era were governed by “the emergence of oppositional formulations” (3). The Lady remains “imbower[ed]” by the “silent isle” (l. 17). Thomas Jeffers concludes: “the Island of Shalott is less a summerhouse (a ‘bower’) than a prison: the Lady is encircled in a ‘socially constructed’ feminine space, with flowers to gladden her dull days, while phallic towers ‘overlook’ – both ‘survey’ and ‘not see’ – her” (“Nice Threads” 58). The use of the verb “imbower” points at the latent ambiguity of meaning: it may imply a hiding place and protection, but at the same time it resonates with less positive overtones of restriction and the lack of free movement; several critics suggested that the medieval setting of the poem provides a perspective through which we may look at the situation of women in Tennyson’s time: like the medieval Lady sitting in her tower, her mobility and choice physically restricted, the Victorian woman remains imprisoned by social expectations and roles her gender requires her to perform, which she internal-

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izes.60 In turn, if we ponder the more positive implications of the word, we may want to ask why the Lady needs to be protected, and who or what from. Read along the lines of the Victorian domestic ideology, this idea remains paradoxical: the Victorian woman needs protection from the brutality and pollution of everyday life, yet at the same time she is an angelic figure herself protecting the sanctity of the Victorian home. Moreover, “as the guardians of that home, women were thus charged with the role of leading and guiding those very men whose superiority to themselves they were constantly enjoined to acknowledge” (Caine 44). Endowed with the “woman’s mission”61, the Victorian lady from the middle or upper class faced obligations and limitations which were advertised as positive, a source of pride, a sign of her moral superiority and a testimony to her supposedly unique worth and virtue. The Lady of Shalott, hidden from view by the foliage of the trees surrounding the castle, remains on the margin of public life which passes her by. Her position is “[b]y the margin, willow-veiled” (l. 19). Simultaneously, she becomes a tantalising “veiled” mystery for those from the other sphere: invisible, remote, her existence asserted only by the sound of her song. The reapers in the fields of Camelot give her the status of the bewildering “Other”, literally not from this world, a mythical, insubstantial phantom: the “fairy” Lady of Shalott (l. 35). The questions asked within the stanza: But who hath seen her wave her hand? Or at the casement seen her stand? Or is she known in all the land, The Lady of Shalott? (ll. 24–27)

can only be answered in the negative: “nobody has seen her” and “no, she is not known”. Female presence gets effectively marginalized and defamiliarized, and comes to signify mysterious allure and otherworldly charm. Significantly, constructing his female protagonist as remote, alien and withdrawn from everyday

60 See, for instance, Carl Plasa, “‘Cracked from Side to Side’: Sexual Politics in ‘The Lady of Shalott,’” Victorian Poetry 30.3/4, Centennial of Alfred, Lord Tennyson: 1809–1892 (Autumn– Winter 1992), pp. 247–263 and Joseph Chadwick, “Blessing and a Curse: The Poetics of Privacy in Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott,’” Victorian Poetry 24.1 (Spring 1986), p. 29 in particular. 61 I am using the term “woman’s mission” having in mind Elgar Hicks’s oil triptych under the same title: it records the role and position of woman solely in terms of service, support and protection she is to offer to other members of family: bringing up a child, supporting and consoling a husband, taking care of an elderly parent. This positioning defines women as bound to the private sphere, successfully cut off from affairs of the world away from their home.

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exchange, Tennyson stresses the fact that women were not perceived as active and significant agents in shaping the social and political climate of his age. The problem of gender roles encoded in the division between Shalott and Camelot gets further problematized by the fact that the Lady is an artist. Thus, the ideology of the separate spheres within the poem works to underline the limitations and obstacles female artists had to face if they wanted to be recognized as such in nineteenth-century England. In the 1840s female artists were still few in England, although their number steadily increased later in the age. Yet, “[m]ost commentators found women’s claim to the identity of artist, a complication of already existing standards, habits and norms” (Gerrish Nunn Problem Pictures 95). This was because, in relation to art, the traditional female role was not that of an active and executive artist, but of a passive model or muse. Pamela Gerrish Nunn neatly explains: Patriarchal ideology […] had established the ideal and natural relationship of women to fine art as not executive at all, in fact, but as passive, mute and often only symbolic, the inspiration of the male creator and, while the emergence of the professional artist effected a disruption of the allegedly fundamental relationship between muse, model, mistress and the male creator, this relationship was so ingrained in men’s attitude to artmaking that it manifested a phoenix-like resistance to its threatened annihilation (Problem Pictures 15).

These insights are explanatory of why it was much more difficult to become a professional artist if one were a woman; after all, men had real power in a patriarchal society, being art critics, exhibition reviewers, heads of art schools and art teachers. Thus, the first fundamental problem on the way to becoming an artist while being a woman in Victorian England was access to art education and training. The most respected institution training artists, the Royal Academy of Art, did not admit women, despite attempts to change this status quo.62 It was not before 1860 that women started to become admitted to the Academy, and it was still not considered natural. In 1860 Laura Herford presented her candidate drawings with her initials only and got accepted as a student, which caused considerable dismay. From that time onwards, more women were admitted annually (Marsh 12). Still, their training remained different from the one offered to male students – they were not allowed to attend a life class, which was a considerable disadvantage, as it was the only proper way to learn to paint the human body. Moreover, Jan Marsh notes that in the nineteenth century, female artists were traditionally assigned the spheres of decorative drawing, illustration and embroidery, and they were similarly restrained in terms of their medium, being 62 In 1859 a group of 38 female artists signed a petition for the admittance of female students to the Academy, yet the attempt was unsuccessful (Marsh “Women and Art” 12).

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expected to work in chalk, watercolour or pencil, but decidedly not in oil, which remained a masculine medium (19, 26). Female art was considered sentimental, possessive of grace and charm, and it was held that – as such – it should concentrate on domestic subjects or flower painting. Not surprisingly, women produced a whole range of domestic paintings, depicting middle-class femininity – women sewing, reading, embroidering, taking care of children, and thus promoting domesticity as the preferred model of womanhood (Cherry 120). In contrast, subjects traditionally considered “great” – history, religious, allegorical, epic painting – hailed from the male domain. The size of a painting, too, was a gendered issue: while big oils were appropriate for male artists, women had to be satisfied with small-scale painting (Marsh 27). Thus, the ideological necessity of separate spheres was clearly visible in painting, in a firm conviction that a woman’s work must be distinguished from that of her male contemporaries (Problem Pictures Gerrish Nunn 98). If women were to paint at all, they had to remain within their female sphere, not to mix and contend with men.63 Numerous attempts on the part of female painters to break from these conventions and produce “masculine” subjects, in “masculine medium” and on large canvases were met with sheer hostility and crushing criticism. Finally, women were not to sell their paintings – it was the amateur, not the professional practice of art that was a sign of bourgeois and aristocratic femininity (Cherry Painting Women 131), a conviction which to a large extent barred women from entering the market. In the field of literature, the situation was not radically different. Traditional female genres were romance, sentimental literature, advice manuals, and the novel (primarily gothic fiction and novels of manners), written and aimed at women. “Serious” subjects, social criticism or epic forms were not perceived fit for women writers. Financial reasons may partly explain resistance and hostility to women who wanted actually to earn their living as ambitious writers – writing is “economically viable, if not [a] universally lucrative, profession” (Poovey 103), and it might have granted women steady income, which in turn could have boosted their independence from men. It is symptomatic that two of the most popular female authors of the era – George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) and Charlotte Brontë – published under male pseudonyms, while Elizabeth Barrett Browning had to face severe criticism for attempting an epic form in her long poem Aurora Leigh.64

63 The entire essay by Jan Marsh “Women and art 1850–1900” is devoted to the gendering of male and female artistic space. Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), pp. 10–53. 64 More information about gendered hierarchy of literary texts can be found in Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford UP,

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All of these concerns are addressed by Tennyson’s poem. The Lady of Shalott produces her own work of art, a tapestry. Sitting in her tower in complete isolation, she weaves a fabric vibrant with colours. Crucially, although her subject are the images of the life of Camelot, she does not create out of her own immediate experience but imitates the sights reflected in the mirror. She is expressly forbidden to look out of the window and directly see the scenes which she reproduces. Should it happen so, she will be punished by a mysterious curse whose nature and origin remain unknown. Thus, the first two parts of the poem describe the circumstances of the Lady’s work and set out a context for the imminent change and its consequences, described in later parts of the text. Part three renders the Lady’s budding sense of dissatisfaction and prepares the readers for the moment when she breaks the rules by forsaking her work and looking through the window at Lancelot who appears in her mirror like a falling star. As a consequence, the mirror cracks, the tapestry floats out of the window, and the Lady announces that the curse has befallen her. Part four describes a radical transformation in the heroine’s life, as she leaves her bower/tower and sets out to sail to Camelot. She does not survive the journey, doubtless the result of the curse. By making his heroine a weaver, Tennyson enters into a dialogue with two contradictory cultural traditions. On the one hand, weaving is a conventional female craft, a domestic work perceived as an appropriate occupation for women, which is accomplished in the shelter of the domestic space. On the other hand, in literary and cultural tradition from antiquity onwards, a female weaver becomes tantamount to a female artist. In her book Weaving the Word: The Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production Kathryn Sullivan Kruger notes that the concept of weaving as a trope for artistic creation exists in different languages and mythologies in the world (34). Moreover, the history of weaving is a history of women’s work, while in literature “weaving becomes, in the hands of women, a tool of signifying, and their textiles represent a text inscribed with a personal and/ or political message” (22–23). From the story of Ariadne to the myth of Philomela, female tapestry functions not only as an aesthetic work of art but also as a text, revealing a story. Roland Barthes explained the connection between cloth and text, stating that because of the plurality of signifiers that weave it, the text is like a woven material; additionally, “etymologically the text is a tissue, a woven fabric” (159). Thus, the interpretative challenge for readers of Tennyson’s text is an attempt to reconcile these two opposed traditions in an interpretation that does them both justice.

1987) and Marjorie Stone, “Genre Subversion and Gender Inversion: The Princess and Aurora Leigh”, Victorian Poetry 25.2 (1987), pp. 101–127.

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What is the Lady’s art, then, and what kind of statement does she make by leaving it aside, its threads unravelling as the tapestry floats out of the window? What is the curse that falls on her, and what precisely brings it on? As we are told in the first two parts of the poem, the Lady spends her time productively and is entirely devoted to her craft. Sitting by her loom, she weaves night and day steadily, not thinking about much else but creating a colourful web, described as “gay” and “magic” (l. 38). However, because she does not reproduce the world she sees but only the images that reflect in the mirror, her art is as mimetic as it is impersonal. Traditionally, images of women looking into the mirror belong to the vanitas imagery – showing the foolishness of worldly vanity – and in this way, they signify self-centredness, egotistical pride or self-absorption; the looker becomes a variant of the Narcissus figure. However, the Lady is not granted the sensuous luxury of falling in love with her image – the mirror, reflecting the world she is not a part of, does not reflect the artist. This fact is pertinent, as it figures the absence of female artists from the public sphere of production, reception and consumption of art. Her weaving of the web is at once a creative activity and, as Stockstill claims, a perpetuation of the ideology concerning the underprivileged position of women, particularly women artists, in society (14). As long as the Lady embraces her solitude and seclusion and accepts them as natural, the weaving can go on; she can produce her artwork without upsetting the social balance which relegates her to the margin of society. However, her work is also a burden, and she will slowly come to realise it. The images reflected in the mirror all connote vigorous activity and change, from the barges that sail up the river to the lovers that are “lately wed” (l. 70). The people – “[a]n abbot on an ambling pad”, “a troop of damsels glad”, a curly shepherd-lad” (ll. 55–57) and market girls, dressed in red cloaks – are all engaged in social activities and relations; in opposition to the main heroine, they figure inclusion. Even though the mirror shows the outside world as incorporating two genders, the Lady still remains on the outskirts. This fact illustrates that the key to the Lady’s otherness does not lie solely in her gender (since the world of Camelot includes women), neither in her social class (we see both market girls and damsels on the way to Camelot). Nevertheless, the binary opposition of Camelot/ Shalott, with its traditional polarity of active versus passive, public versus private culturally evokes gender opposition as well. Therefore, I read the Lady’s exclusion from the sphere of public, active Camelot as conditioned both by her occupation and her gender. As a woman artist, the only way she can sense the outer world is by contemplating its shadows. The trope of “[s]hadows of the world” (l. 48) reflected in the mirror is, of course, redolent of Platonic overtones. The Lady looks at the reflections of life and not the reality. She is prevented from any direct confrontation by the curse,

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which she believes will fall on her “if she stay / To look down to Camelot” (ll. 40– 41). In Plato’s cave, however, the prisoners remain unaware of the fact that they do not engage in reality; the Lady, in contrast, knows it all too well. Therefore, it is her choice to accept the limitations imposed on her that the first two parts of the text present. Till the climactic moment when, propelled by Lancelot’s sudden appearance, she runs to the window, the Lady seems to accept her situation and even revels in it. She works day and night all year long, with a dedication bordering on obsession and probably resulting in exhaustion, although she does not seem to mind. As an artist, she is wholly engrossed in her work and does not think about much else, having “little other care” (l. 44). She sings while working, and the song is cheerful and loud enough to be heard outside her tower.65 We may ask then, why it is that the appearance of Lancelot has such a dramatic effect on the Lady who, after all, has seen many various scenes of social life in Camelot in the glassy surface of the looking glass so far. The scene, naturally, is cloaked in the romantic idiom of chivalry and courtly love: the knight, most attractive and dazzlingly handsome, rides up from his world to the Lady’s tower in order to rescue her from distress, only in Tennyson’s version this moment marks the beginning of a serious conflict. As we see, the Lady falls for the knight; but, since it seems expedient to read the poem less in romantic terms and more as a complex figuration, the question is what the metaphor of falling in love denotes in the context of the Lady’s artistic vocation. The text of the poem prepares its readers for the dramatic action before the spectacular breaking of the mirror. The Lady observes a succession of figures reflected in the mirror and pauses at the sight of knights “riding two and two” (l. 61) realising how distant and distinct her situation is. The revelation that she has no “loyal knight and true” (l. 62) has been read as an important change in the Lady’s awareness, leading to her upcoming rebellion.66 Yet, the narrating voice asserts that this scene is not a source of vexation for the weaver; on the contrary, we find out that “in her web she still delights / To weave the mirror’s magic sights” (ll. 64–65). It may be suggested, then, that the Lady is both aware of her “otherness” and not yet troubled by it. Thomas L. Jeffers, articulating the Lady’s situation as an artist, lists the advantages of not being involved in everyday concerns: “her not being busy with the affairs of commerce, politics, war – or, since she’s single, with a husband and children – frees her to concentrate on her weaving” (“Nice Threads” 61). Still, the change comes soon later, when at the 65 In my reading I disagree with Isobel Armstrong, who sees the Lady’s occupation as exploitation, infers that her work is devoid of pleasure and suggests an affinity with the physical toil of agrarian reapers (Victorian Poetry 82). 66 This interpretation can be found, for instance, in Thomas L. Jeffers, “Nice Threads”, pp. 62–63 and David Staines, Tennyson’s Camelot: The Idylls of the King and its Medieval Sources (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1982), pp. 10–11.

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sight of “two young lovers lately wed” (l. 70) she utters her famous proclamation “I am half sick of shadows” (l. 71). Nevertheless, even then her feeling of dispiritedness is only partial, as the phrase “half sick” indicates. It is only the arrival of “the glitzy Lancelot, all dazzle flame sparkle glitter and flash” (Jeffers “Nice Threads” 63) that prompts her into action. Important insights and understandings take time; consequently, arriving at the point in which actual transformation of self-awareness can be accomplished is a process which does not happen in a blink of an eye, although it may frequently seem so. Lancelot figures everything the Lady is deprived of in her grey tower: colour, action, excitement, personal contact. Unlike the other knights she glimpsed in the window, or even the married lovers, he materializes as a real, not hypothetical, option, being recognizable (not impersonal), single, and approaching the tower. In a story of artistic maturation and development, he represents all glamorous opportunities ahead of an artist: fame, recognition, critical acclaim, financial gratification, involvement, and a sense that one’s work matters. The Lady falls in love with this prospect, and her slowly growing dissatisfaction bursts out as a fire kindled by Lancelot’s flame. Deborah Cherry relates an interesting etymological change in the meaning of the word “lady”, which from signifying a high-born woman in earlier periods, in the nineteenth century came to denote middle-class femininity ordered around conduct and appearance, and first of all, bound to home (Painting Women 120). This valorisation was equally operative in the case of female artists. To be ladylike was to conform to specific codes of femininity connoting modesty, servitude, temperance, patience, chastity and home-oriented thinking. To be a lady-artist signified engaging in genres, subjects and forms deemed appropriate for women, as much as it also denoted an amateur rather than the professional pursuit of art. His medieval sources easily and naturally explain Tennyson’s choice of the name of his heroine. It can be read literally as indicating an aristocratic woman but set within the context of the nineteenth-century “woman question” debate it provokes reflection about the lady artist’s propriety of conduct. The story of the artist’s rebellion against the prescribed norms also evokes a question about the consequences of a possible dissent from those norms. The most immediate after-effects, which become apparent when the Lady looks out of the window, concern her artistic product and the object crucial for the creation of her work: the mirror. The breaking of the glass is a crack in the specific conception of the artist which the Lady embodies – not engaged in the world but detached from it, not producing a text that can actively shape reality but only an image of the existing order which it perpetuates. This conception also denotes a woman artist complying with the unwritten rules concerning the subjects and genres suitable for her gender. The web which flies out of the window figures the artist’s desire to be seen and appreciated, as much as it shows

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that the traditionally female craft of weaving is not an option for a woman who wants to be active, professional, politically engaged and financially independent. So far, the Lady’s work has not been seen by anyone and, even if it was aesthetically gratifying, it did not enter the public sphere; thus, it could not be exhibited and reviewed. Female art, the text seems to imply, is invisible and marginalised, just as the Lady – a woman artist – remains on the verge of society. Therefore, the Lady’s decision to look towards Camelot, prompted by the intrusion of Lancelot with his sexual promise, is a statement against the invisibility and marginalisation of both female artists and female (feminine?) art. The Lady, forsaking her loom and her web (the tropes for traditional female artistic occupation) decides to create another text, in which she is a signifier herself. Her activities after she has looked down to Camelot seem well-planned and coherent, not an effect of sudden emotional turmoil: Down she came and found a boat Beneath a willow left afloat, And round about the prow she wrote The Lady of Shalott. […] And at the closing of the day She loosed the chain, and down she lay; The broad stream bore her far away, The Lady of Shalott. (ll. 123–126, 132–135)

Not only did she find the time to write (carve?) her name on the prow of the boat, but she must have spent some time on preparations: she enters the boat wearing a snowy white gown, having taken with her a fit tool for inscribing her name. Such practical arrangements suggest that some time has elapsed between the climactic moment of her first look through the window and her leaving of the castle. Thus, although it is usually understood that these events happen in rapid succession (Lancelot appears; she looks through the window; the mirror cracks; she leaves the tower), I suggest that the Lady’s actions from the fourth part of the poem are an effect of more deliberation than it is frequently assumed. The textual divide between parts three and four seems to support this statement; so does the change in the weather and landscape, from the dazzling sun and blue unclouded sky in part three to pale yellow woods and stormy east winds in part four. The change is not only in terms of the weather; it also suggests a succession of autumn after a sunny summer, an alternation that does not occur instantly. This temporal gap is crucial for understanding the nature of the curse and the action the Lady of Shalott undertakes. The curse has usually been interpreted as an impending punishment for breaking the social gender code operative in Victorian England, reinstating the underprivileged position of women. Ellen Stockstill understands it as “the ulti-

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mate inescapable nature of assigned gender roles and sexualities in patriarchal power structures” (15), while Joseph Chadwick defines it as “the private/public split which structures her self and her world” which he sees at the same time as ideologically imposed, but otherwise illusory (29). Thomas Jeffers suggests that the curse is “compounded by her being an artist, dedicated to her work, and by her being a woman artist, denied the educational and market freedoms enjoyed by her male colleagues” (“Nice Threads” 68). The last suggestion seems particularly tempting in the light of the reading I am undertaking, but why would the curse then fall on the Lady the moment she forsakes her work? Seen from this perspective, her life and work up to that fateful moment are already cursed. After all, the advantages of being male in Victorian society and therefore having access to education and the market (denied to women) are paradigmatic of this culture, while Tennyson’s narrative concerns some vital and daring transformation which triggers the curse. Erik Grey offers an interpretation which coincides with my reading of Tennyson’s poem in that he suggests that the curse is a compulsion of the artist to work in accord with her/his vocation, to remain true to oneself, still realising that this decision can be dangerous, or even potentially suicidal, and definitely counter to what is expected. He writes: “The Lady of Shalott, […] is aware of the curse that hangs over her, and she brings it upon herself with a series of decisive actions” (45), and further sees it as an experience “with which every artist – even the greatest – must be familiar: to know what is better; to know what one approves and admires; and yet with every word, every brushstroke, every stitch, to watch oneself do worse” (46). Therefore, I propose that the Lady’s curse is the insight into and the understanding of the nature of the work which she produced so far, and the dissatisfaction leading to the attempt to change it. Although it seems sudden and unexpected, the onset of the curse is a process, initiated by a succession of images recorded in the mirror and culminating in the appearance of Lancelot who zooms through the Lady’s field of vision like a meteor. His arrival is an apt metaphor for the workings of fate – the metamorphosis has to be completed, the transformation cannot be undone. The evolution of the Lady’s consciousness is like an effect of the tragic flaw, leading to her downfall. At the same time, she is fully conscious of the change and knows the price which will be paid for it. Therefore, I suggest that the text is a poetic Künstlerroman, figuring the process of the artist’s coming of age. The maturation achieved by the woman artist in her case is synonymous with her destruction. Tennyson’s poem specifically mentions the Lady’s premonition that the disaster will inevitably strike: she is a “bold seër in a trance, / Seeing all his own mischance” (ll. 128–129), driven by a firm conviction that no other decision has been possible. Once she has realised her marginality both as a woman and as an artist, she is compelled to try

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something new in both life and art (the figure of Lancelot tropes both of these) and finally to be seen and recognised, despite the consequences. Needless to say, she cannot go back to Shalott and exist at the margin of society, weaving the mimetic web which, although beautiful, is a sign of her conformity; nor can she remain alive as a female artist creating another art in a hostile environment, resistant to reform. The question of looking, of being looked at, and the quality of the gaze are at the heart of Tennyson’s poem. In spectatorship theories, to be an active onlooker/ viewer differs substantially from being a passive object of the gaze. To look and see means to be in control, to assume agency in the act of looking. Frequently, however, the look transforms into a gaze, and its positive connotations are subsequently muted. As Jonathan Schroeder notes, “to gaze implies more than to look at – it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze” (Schroeder 58). In culture, looking is also a gendered activity. “The phallocratic order splits looking into active and passive moments. The gaze is masculine, and that upon which it gazes is feminine” (Young 65). In his influential BBC series of the 1970s “Ways of Seeing”, John Berger famously postulated that a woman “is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself” and thus wholly dependent upon the way she is perceived. As a result, “she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight” (Berger 46–47). Therefore, being the gazer suggests a higher, privileged position in relation to the object of the gaze; it can imply possession, power and knowledge. On the other hand, to be hidden from view also implies the lack of power, as invisibility frequently translates to non-existence. Hence, the idea of looking is hugely problematic in Tennyson’s poem. First of all, the Lady is concealed from view and thus almost completely obliterated from public life, so is her art. Not known in her land, never seen, only occasionally heard, the woman artist has no chance to make a public appearance if she stays invisible in her tower. However, she is neither the gazer nor the object of the gaze for the first two parts of the poem: she is denied the right of active looking, as she is forbidden to look out of the window. In this context, her direct gaze at Lancelot figures a change more substantial than we might initially assume: it is a transgressive look, as it upsets gender polarity implied in the Shalott/ Camelot split. Carl Plasa infers: Appropriating the gaze, the Lady enters the position of the desiring subject and so enacts – at the scopic level – the crossing from “feminine” to “masculine” gender positions originally figured in the projected foray from Shalott to Camelot. In this respect her action not only results in cracking the mirror literally, but also embodies an overturning of that for which the mirror is the figure – the ideological status quo (257).

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However, in his analysis of the ways of the visual response to a painting, Norman Bryson further problematizes ways of looking. He differentiates between the gaze and the glance, stating that the gaze is magisterial, aloof, active, objectifying and penetrating, while the glance is quick, furtive, secretive, and connotes desire. Unlike the gaze, which is disengaged and implies a slow and luxurious act of contemplation from a privileged position, the glance is involved, fragmentary and restless (94–95). From this vantage point, the Lady performs a glance rather than a gaze – her look, although transgressive, does not connote her magisterial privileged position towards the object of her attention, but her subjectivity, desire, and the decision to act upon it. The moment of the Lady’s look is the central dramatic point of the story. This is an empowering moment in which she actively assumes control of her life, forsakes the old order and embraces change. Her look is performative, as it drastically upsets the equilibrium of accepted social relations and positions. Soon after the glance at Lancelot, which posited her as an active, desiring subject, she repeats the look as she embarks on her journey to Camelot: And down the river’s dim expanse Like some bold seër in a trance, Seeing all his own mischance – With a glassy countenance Did she look to Camelot. (ll. 127–131)

This passage presents her – with pathos – as decisive, authoritative and fully determined. Her “glassy countenance” replaces the cracked mirror. Sharyn R. Udall reads this, too, as a sign of the Lady’s subjectivity: “Losing her old identity, she finds another and becomes a ‘self-reflecting woman’ instead of a reflection of the woman who is the prisoner of the patriarchal mirror/male-authored text” (36). As a seer, she senses her undoing, and yet, transfixed, she can do no other than cross the safe boundary of the river. Even as she dies, her eyes remain fixed on the public sphere of Lancelot, her ultimate destination: “And her eyes were darkened wholly, / Turned to towered Camelot” (ll. 148–149). With its hope of another kind of life and art, Camelot is the mythical fairyland, but its promise proves a mirage. The mystery of the Lady’s death puzzled critics and readers alike. The most common interpretation is that her death is a punishment for entering a taboo territory, a transgression of the order society deemed natural and beneficent. Shallot and Camelot must remain irreconcilable since the ideology of separate spheres articulates “a ‘natural’ difference between the sexes [to] delineate social roles” (Poovey 2). Yet, as Poovey insists, “the representation of biological sexuality, the definition of sexual difference, and the organization of sexual relations

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are social, not natural phenomena” (2). Questioning the “naturalness” of such a social organization, the Lady of Shalott becomes a victim of the ideology she perpetuated for a long time. Yet, her last journey by itself is a testimony to her metamorphosis – not only does she dare to undertake the crossing, but also the song which she sings on her way, her swan song,67 radically differs from the ditty she used to sing while working. It is “a carol, mournful, holy, / Chanted loudly, chanted lowly” (ll. 145–146), not a carefree song of an unquestioning weaver, happy with her craft. The transition of a woman artist from the society’s margins, and out of a clearly defined artistic territory, into a world occupied by male artists and critics alike had to end fatally in Tennyson’s times. Nevertheless, her death remains as much a warning as it is an audibly articulated statement about the gender divide operative in the Victorian era. Apart from being an archetypal crossing by water, her journey to Camelot also enacts the Lady’s transition from the subject position of a “seër in a trance” (l. 128) to a passive status of an object to be looked upon and interpreted, yet it strangely incorporates both of these positions. Commenting on Tennyson’s “Lancelot and Elaine” (a version of “The Lady of Shalott” story which also ends with Elaine’s death), Elisabeth Bronfen suggests that the text “depicts a woman using death as a conscious act of setting a mark, as a form of writing with her body, a materialisation of the sign” and explains that “[d]ying is a move beyond communication yet also functions as these women’s one effective communicative act, in a cultural or kinship situation otherwise disinclined towards feminine authorship” (Over Her Dear Body 141). Moreover, it “involves self-reflexivity in so far as death is chosen and performed by the woman herself, in an act that makes her both object and subject of dying and of representation”, for “suicide implies an authorship with one’s own life, a form of writing the self and writing death that is ambivalently poised between self-construction and self-destruction” (141–142). The Lady becomes both an artist carefully planning and executing her final creative opus, and the very same opus, a thing. Wanting to make a mark by her dramatic appearance in Camelot, the Lady posits her own body as a work of art/text to decipher. She enters Camelot as a beautiful, if puzzling, aesthetic object, put on display by her own author.68 “What Tennyson’s poem conversely demonstrates is that art and life, the aesthetic and the political, are fully interwoven” (Plasa 248), and that the personal is political. The Lady literally replaces her previous product – the tapestry – which, although aesthetically gratifying, would not offer a message radical enough. The world 67 In the 1832 version of the poem Tennyson specifically linked the dying Lady with the swan, singing its last song. 68 My interpretation here is indebted to a similar reading – which I quote later – proposed by Kathy Alexis Psomiades in her book Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 25–28.

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represented on her tapestry was a faithful reproduction of the reality of Camelot reflected in the mirror, reproducing the ideological structures of the patriarchal world (Stockstill 14, Plasa 353). Therefore, the crucial replacement which occurs in the poem – the substitution of the Lady’s text/tapestry with her body, posited as a work of art, and presented as a spectacle – articulates a message to the audience at Camelot about the position of a woman artist (against being given an ambivalent place of the “Other”, an abject, marginalized anomaly, for the right to enter the market actively, to produce, exhibit and get a financial reward for her work) and about art itself (which can fully signify only when it is not mimetic and impersonal). For the Lady, to look down to Camelot also means to destroy the artwork she has been working on. The change is as dramatic as it is irreversible: there is no going back. The final important aspect of the poem is the response to the Lady’s arrival at Camelot and to the message her dead body becomes for the spectators. When A gleaming shape she floated by, Dead-pale between the houses high, Silent into Camelot […] (ll. 156–158)

the response to her appearance is curiosity and general uneasiness, mixed with universal incomprehension. The knights and dames “crossed themselves for fear” (l. 166) after they have read the name of the woman artist at the prow of her boat but failed to obtain a ready-made answer to their query: “Who is this? and what is here?” (l. 163). Their encounter with the dead body of the beautiful woman which cannot speak is a confrontation with the world of shadows, resembling a response to Freud’s uncanny – it shatters the familiar and customary perception of the surrounding world. Freud writes: “many people experience the feeling [of the uncanny] in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts” (241–242). The Lady of Shalott is at the same time familiar (a beautiful woman) and alien (a dead body, a female artist). She enters the sphere which was denied to her when she was alive. Her appearance in Camelot triggers cognitive dissonance in the spectators – we may say that staging herself as a work of art that teases (us) out of thought, in her death, she achieves success she could not have achieved alive. Staging her death, she forces others to read her life.69 In this sense her appearance results in a shock which may, in the future, become a nugget of discomfort and displeasure, possibly leading to the questioning of “naturalness” of norms and divisions con69 Margaret Higonnet writes: “To take one’s life is to force others to read one’s death” (103). “Speaking Silences. Women’s Suicide”, in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 68–83.

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cerning masculinity and femininity. Still, her death remains a failure: neither the Lady as an artist, nor the art she aspires to can be integrated with the public sphere of Camelot. The discomfort she causes in a complacent, self-satisfied society does not compensate for the price she pays herself. Tennyson’s poem underwent serious changes between its first publication in 1832 and the final 1842 version. The alternations in the last stanzas are significant, as it seems that the earlier poem articulated a more sympathetic and friendlier position towards the Lady – and towards other female artists limited by the constraints of living in the patriarchal world – than the revised final version. The 1832 text closes with the stanza: They crossed themselves, their stars they blest, Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire and guest. There lay a parchment on her breast, That puzzled more than all the rest, The wellfed wits at Camelot. “The web was woven curiously The charm is broken utterly, Draw near and fear not, – this is I, The Lady of Shalott”.70

The poem ends with the Lady’s words and gives her a voice even in death by including the parchment that disappears in the later revision. The parchment relates the Lady’s story with its most significant elements – the web, the charm, the assertion of identity, the solemnity of her death. It situates her as a dead artist, whose story provokes sympathy and pathos. Tennyson’s revision in 1842 changes the tone of this ending in such a way that it undermines the Lady’s tragedy, substituting her last words with a cursory remark by Lancelot and shifting the focus from the dead artist’s body to the figure of the knight: Who is this? and what is here? And in the lighted palace near Died the sound of royal cheer; And they crossed themselves for fear, All the knights at Camelot: But Lancelot mused a little space; He said, “She has a lovely face; God in his mercy lend her grace, The Lady of Shalott”. (ll. 163–171)

70 This version is quoted by Christopher Ricks in his Tennyson. A Selected Edition, which I have been using throughout this chapter. Note to lines 163–71, p. 27.

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In the 1842 version, the Lady fully embodies a work of art on display – silent, mysterious and incomprehensible. Kathy Psomiades infers: “The 1842 changes separate woman from artist at the poem’s end by erasing the Lady’s text and replacing it with her face and Lancelot’s masculine response to that face” (Beauty’s Body 27). The “mischance” she sensed before her death can relate to this fact, the crucial paradox of this narrative: although she finally becomes visible, the crossing of the invisibility/visibility divide also means complete objectification. Underlining the differences between the two versions of the last stanza, the critic further explains: Once disembodied, she is now all body; once all subject, she is now all object; and with her last moments of subjectivity she stages herself as art. Thus when the Lady of Shalott becomes a visible body in a moment of sensational self-display, a beautiful object for the contemplation of the multitude, she is no longer artist, but art object. Her fall figures the dangers of going public, of being misread, of labor congealing in an object, of being subject to misinterpretation and misvaluation. It also distances those dangers by translating them into the dangers of an erotic fall (Psomiades Beauty’s Body 26).

Furthermore, Lancelot’s remark points to his complete unawareness that he, albeit unconsciously, was one of the reasons for the Lady’s death. In this way, it also figures general incomprehension of how limiting and oppressive patriarchal ideology proves for women in general and women artists in particular. Lancelot’s “musing” strikes the reader as both insensitive and patronizing – he manages to depreciate the Lady’s heroic story and to downplay it to a cursory and conventional statement about female beauty. Joseph Chadwick concludes that the contrast between the Lady’s look at Lancelot and Lancelot’s look at the Lady “defines a discrepancy of value”, because “[w]hile the Lady dies for her look at Lancelot, Lancelot’s reaction to the sight of her dead form is to ‘[muse] ‘a little space’ and to offer a blessing that is merely appreciative, suspiciously close in tone to a museum-goer’s casual comment on a painting […]” (25). The variance of these two encounters evokes Norman Bryson’s distinction between the gaze and the glance: while she glanced at him from her tower, investing her look with longing and desire, he, unmoved and detached, gazes at her from above seeing her as a beautiful object. Ironically, in this case, the body as a work of art remains misread. Lancelot’s comment evokes familiar and safe categories, aesthetic and eschatological: in his reading, the artist and her struggle do not have any profound meaning. The use of the past tense “had” locates the Lady in the finite, fixed order and the blessing he bestows very efficiently delegates her out of this world. His attitude also exhibits no curiosity about the reason and meaning of her arrival – for Lancelot, she remains a mere source of aesthetic pleasure. His evaluation of the Lady’s body as a thing of beauty also neutralises the threat and

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discomfort her appearance causes in Camelot. Having reviewed her beauty, Lancelot safely disarms any impulse to enquire about the reasons for her death. In conclusion, it is the conflict between individual aspirations and social expectations, further problematized by the fact that the individual in question is a female artist, that “The Lady of Shalott” articulates. By translating this chief conflict into romantic and erotic terms, the poem both makes its theme more alluring and presents the gender divide prevailing in the Victorian era as impossible to breach. In so doing, Tennyson’s text defines its stance towards the issues which it addresses – the place for women and for female artistic creation in the patriarchal world of the Victorian times – as ambivalent and self-divided. On the one hand, it depicts the underprivileged position of women artists, shows the difficulties and limitations they had to face, and, by making the heroine undertake an attempt to transgress the boundary between the two spheres, it shows a sympathetic and supportive attitude towards the “woman question”. Moreover, it unmasks the illusion that there actually exists an independent female domain, completely distinct from the public sphere, and shows that “both women and artists are dependent on the public world from which they seem to be separated and safe” (Psomiades “The Lady of Shalott” 41). Also, the text underlines the fact that while the Lady’s “active choice of fate is also a form of sacrifice and murder” it is so because “she can design her self-representation only from within her cultural image repertoire” (Bronfen Over Her Dead Body 288).71 By making this fact plain, the poem critiques a world in which the “cultural repertoire” of selfrepresentation for women is narrowed down to such few possibilities. On the other hand, by making the Lady die in the process of subversion despite her bravery and determination, Tennyson’s poem presents the punishment for the attempted transition and declares the task undoable, while it also plays with the concept of nature and “naturalness” of existing social order. The bottom line of the story is that the heroine’s transgression is unnatural, and therefore, it cannot be accomplished. Edward Shannon comments on the end of the poem: “[w]hile the dying year prefigures the dissolution of the Lady, the setting makes death appear natural, not calamitous, and a fitting aspect of the human condition” (217). In my understanding, however, the universal message about the “human condition” suppresses important gender implications of the story: it is a woman whose death is to appear a natural consequence for her “unnatural” transgression, and subsequently, the sense of her personal calamity should not get muted by aesthetic and romantic concerns. From this perspective, my reading coincides with Carl Plasa’s statement that “Tennyson’s poem finds itself nego-

71 I am using use here a remark made by Elisabeth Bronfen in her discussion of Fraülein Else, a 1924 novella by Austro-Hungarian author Arthur Schnitzler.

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tiating opposed political impulses – reaction and subversion, the weaving and the unthreading of the ‘web’ of patriarchal ideology” (255).

“The Lady of Shalott” on page and canvas When Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt drew up a list of “Immortals” or their artistic heroes in 1848, Alfred Tennyson’s name was included in the inventory (Prettejohn 277). Together with Keats, Tennyson was one of the most frequently illustrated poets of the nineteenth century. “The Lady of Shalott” has enjoyed unceasing popularity as a subject for visual interpretation. The 1985 exhibition at David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, consisting to a large extent of the works illustrating the poem, is an apt testimony to this popularity. As Loraine Kooistra argues, there were around fifty recorded visual renderings of “The Lady of Shalott” by the end of the Victorian era (“Victorian Poetry and Illustration” 401); they were followed by a number of later works by, for instance, Sidney Harold Meteyard, Florence Harrison, Fyffe Christie, Jeff Barson, Donato Giancola or Shelah Horvitz, as well as by illustrations in the poem’s picture book editions by Bernadette Watts, Charles Keeping and Geneviève Côté. Among these renderings, some are widely recognized or even iconic (like Holman Hunt’s or William Waterhouse’s paintings), while others remain relatively less known. In the following section, I will examine some of the artistic interpretations of the poem, paying attention to how they relate to the chief concerns of the Victorian era: the woman question debate, the existing gender ideology of the nineteenth century, and the problematic status of female artists and female creative activity. The artistic choices concerning the illustration of literary works inevitably privilege particular readings, and the awareness of what is underlined and what is suppressed shows how the reception of Tennyson’s poem has depended upon the cultural climate and social conflicts and patters not only of the nineteenth century, but also of the later periods. Certain motifs and moments of the narrative prevail over others: the visual renderings of “The Lady of Shalott” frequently present the Lady at her loom, either working or lost in a reverie. Equally often, the artists illustrate the climactic moment of the Lady’s performative gaze or her journey towards Camelot and subsequent reactions to her appearance there. Each of these moments is characterised by a different mood and emphasis. The portrayals of the Lady weaving in her tower are mostly dreamy and nostalgic, and many of them stress the Lady’s frustration and the sense of isolation (except for Elizabeth Siddall’s drawing, which is the most positive of the group). In turn, the representations of the climactic moment of the mirror breaking and the boat journey create a tense, dramatic and tragic atmosphere, while the renderings of the last episode from the

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poem are profoundly unsettling depictions of the scopic and sexual theme of the dead woman as a spectacle. From the first group, Elizabeth Siddall’s drawing (1853) is chronologically the earliest, followed by the works of Howard Pyle (1881), Sidney Harold Meteyard (1913), John William Waterhouse (1916) and most recently, Shelah Horvitz (1981).

Inside the tower Elizabeth Siddall’s pen and ink drawing combines two motifs: the Lady’s weaving and the moment when she turns to look at Lancelot. Siddall is exceptional in representing the Lady as an artist in her studio: the loom at which Tennyson’s heroine is sitting occupies the central part of the sketch and is prominent in size. The Lady seems engrossed in her work. Although the impact of the figure of Lancelot who flashes in the mirror must have been dramatic enough to make her break the prohibition and actually look through the window, she remains seated, only partly turning away from her weaving; her hands still rest on the frame of the loom. Her depiction is demure and modest, her hair is pulled back in an orderly fashion, and her gown is plain and simple, not accentuating any of the seductive curves of the female body. She is an autonomous subject rather than the passive object of the look. Also, Siddall constructs a specific viewing position – we look at the Lady from inside her chamber, instead of observing her from the outside: “[i]n Siddal’s drawing, the audience is obviously inside the tower room with the Lady; one can observe both the window (through which the curse enters) and the magic mirror (reflecting Lancelot’s figure)” (Kruger 122). This interiority of the gaze invites the audience to sympathise and identify with the heroine and share her perspective. Ideologically, the picture is divided into two spheres: the inside of the tower and the outside world visible through the window. This division echoes the separation of the feminine and masculine spheres, with the Lady inside and Lancelot outside the tower. Yet, Siddall does not seem to portray this separation as oppressive for women or detrimental to women’s work – the Lady’s interior is not uncomfortable or cluttered, but “a cool, spacious, airy workroom with evidence of past labour”; moreover, “[a] woman artist is located in a plain interior, reminiscent of a nun’s cell” (Cherry 190). Such positioning fosters creativity and protects against unwanted distractions. Deborah Cherry argues that: [t]his contrast between interior and exterior, glimpsed through the apertures, not only carried an ideological separation of the spaces of masculinity and femininity but also constituted art as an activity distanced from the exterior world, a theory being elaborated in Pre-Raphaelite circles of the 1850s against the predominant critical discourses of realism (190).

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Furthermore, since the central prominent inanimate element in the drawing is the loom, Siddall underscores the importance of female professional activity and artistic production. Additionally, we can observe a canvas-like tapestry hanging on the wall above the loom, a palpable element of the Lady’s devotion to her work. Therefore, in this drawing, the heroine does not rebel against her separation from the active, social world but welcomes her seclusion, as it fosters her engagement in her art. Unlike in many other representations of the moment of the fateful look, the Lady is composed and self-assured: there is no turmoil, no chaos, no destruction. Instead, she turns towards the window as if wanting to see who interferes with her work. Moreover, “her expression reflects neither expectancy nor sexual excitement” (Shefer 25). Her look is an impulse, a fateful split-second response. Siddall does not hint at the Lady’s desire to escape from her tower, nor does she dwell upon the disastrous consequences of the artist’s transgression. The Lady at her loom is also the subject of one of Howard Pyle’s designs for his richly illustrated edition of “The Lady of Shalott”, his first Arthurian work, commissioned by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1881 (Lupack 182). The edition, never reprinted, resembles an illuminated manuscript, rich in floral imagery, with vivid colours and elaborate lettering. It is composed “of ornately decorated pages featuring large, elaborate initial capital letters as well as busy images of major and minor characters from the poem, interesting backgrounds and designs such as the fleur-de-lys, and a variety of scenes from nature as described in Tennyson’s lines” (Lupack 182). Pyle, a renowned American illustrator, teacher, writer and muralist, produced over forty elaborately designed and illustrated pages of Tennyson’s poem, combining vivid, emotionally laden illustrations with decorative, Gothic-style lettering. Pyle’s technique was based on close scrutiny of Durer woodcuts (Houfe 61), visible in his emphasis on a clearly delineated, firm line, one that exudes emotional tension. As observed by Jill P. May and Robert E. May, his whole work bears connections to the Arts and Crafts movement and Walter Crane’s style in particular. Nevertheless, as far as “The Lady of Shalott” is concerned, the artist was dissatisfied with the overall effect, and critics also offered only lukewarm praise (May, May 28–29). The Lady at her work is one of the more remarkable illustrations in the volume, particularly regarding the depiction of the Tennysonian heroine as an artist. Like in Siddall’s drawing, she is wholly engaged in her weaving. Pyle presents her bowed and slightly slouching over the tapestry she is producing. Her figure fills the page, as if too big for the space she is allotted; the claustrophobic effect pronounces her confinement. She looks modest and chaste – her hair is in plaits, additionally covered with a transparent bluish veil. A plain and unadorned gown in soft folds veils the Lady’s body. The tapestry design presents a female figure, probably standing at the bank of a river, possibly the Lady’s alter ego from Camelot. Surprisingly, Pyle’s illustration does not include either the mirror or the

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window – we only see the dim interior of the room, decorated solely with balls of wool used for the tapestry – but he adds a vase with white flowers, an element laden with intertextual meaning. Tennyson’s poem mentions lilies as flowers associated with the Lady’s sphere; Shalott is “a space of flowers” where “the lilies blow / Round an island there below (ll. 16, 7–8). Therefore, the addition of the vase with lilies is fully warranted by the text, but its position at the bottom left of the picture brings to mind another iconic nineteenth-century image of a young woman immersed in her handiwork – D.G. Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin. Rossetti’s painting depicts the young Virgin Mary embroidering the lily held in front of her by a little angel. The context of Rossetti’s piece is female education and upbringing; he represents Mary as a pious, diligent, humble, hardworking young girl. Her upright posture, modest dress, and absorption in the embroidery all communicate her submission to parental instruction and, therefore, point to her future acceptance of her divine calling. Pyle’s Lady, dressed modestly in blue (Mary’s colour), accompanied by white lilies (Mary’s flower) and diligently working at her loom, functions as a statement of female chastity, patience and obedience. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Sidney Harold Meteyard and John William Waterhouse both painted the Lady of Shalott in her room and at her loom, but their paintings differ substantially from Siddall’s or Pyle’s representations. They refer to the same line in Tennyson’s poem: “I am half sick of shadows” (l. 71) and therefore record the Lady’s growing displeasure with her situation. Meteyard, an art teacher, artist and stained-glass designer, was particularly indebted to Edward Burne-Jones and the Arts and Crafts movement, and these influences visibly surface in his picture; in turn, Waterhouse, although sometimes wrongly called a Pre-Raphaelite (Hobson 9), was a Victorian Classicist, primarily influenced by Alma-Tadema. Nevertheless, in his renderings of “The Lady of Shalott” (particularly in the painting dating to 1888) the echoes of the Pre-Raphaelites are unmistakable (Vincent 315). Meteyard’s painting (1913) exemplifies his interest in “mythological, allegorical, and poetical” themes of art (Marshall and Wildman). His Lady of Shalott is depicted as she dozes off in front of her work. The atmosphere of the picture is languid and dreamy; the painter represents artistic creativity as depending on inspiration and imagination rather than as a product of unceasing hard work. The painting’s aesthetic appeal results from the pervasive predominance of one colour only, which strongly suggests a particular mood. The omnipresent deep blue establishes the atmosphere of monotony, silence and stagnation; within a conventional system of visual signification, blue is the colour of serenity and calm, but also connotes sadness. This colour hegemony is emphasized even more by the contrast with abundant white flowers (this time not lilies) and the

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whiteness of the Lady’s skin, which underlines the sensuality of the scene and its dreamy atmosphere saturated by longing. As noted by Marshall and Wildman: […] Meteyard distinguished his version by replacing the usual loom with a piece of embroidery, on which we see the Lady working in parts rather than producing the sequential imagery of a weaving. This enhances the image of the Lady as a creative artist able to revise and edit her work rather than being constrained merely to reproduce the narrative as she sees it pass by her window;[…]

Nevertheless, the Lady’s embroidery more distinctly than weaving speaks of boredom and displeasure felt by women in general and women artists in particular at not being able to do what they pleased, in the private and professional spheres; while weaving is culturally connected with artistic activity as well as it is perceived as a traditionally female occupation, embroidery is, first of all, an appropriate female craft. In this representation, the Lady is a reclining figure, tired and irritated by the repetitiveness and futility of her occupation; she longs to join the public sphere, do something that matters and engage in living her life. The mirror reflects her dreams which find their expression in the image of two “lately wed” lovers from the poem (l. 70). Meteyard makes the Lady’s longing for emotional and sexual fulfilment a driving force for her impending rebellion. John William Waterhouse’s ‘I Am Half Sick of Shadows’ Said the Lady of Shalott (1915) is chronologically the last of the three paintings produced by the artist as visual explications of Tennyson’s poem. Interestingly, the chronology of the paintings runs contrary to the events of the narrative – thus, the latest (1915) oil represents the earliest of the three scenes which Waterhouse decided to paint, the other being The Lady of Shalott, Looking at Lancelot (1894) and the most famous rendering of the Lady in the boat (1888). In ‘I Am Half Sick of Shadows’ Said the Lady of Shalott Waterhouse, similarly to Meteyard, depicts the Lady as she has abandoned her weaving and sinks in a reverie instead. Her uplifted arms, dreamily crossed behind her head, underline her musing and pensive state as much as they work to the advantage of the male gaze, accentuating the curves, the fullness and roundness of her body, which consequently appears as a perfect, immaculate aesthetic form, solidified into an object of art. In her book Woman/Image/Text. Readings in Pre-Raphaelite Art and Literature, Lynne Pearce links Meteyard’s and Waterhouse’s paintings, stating that they “owe more to each other and the iconographic traditions of half a century than to their nominal source” (71) and comments upon them: Both these paintings are blatant representations of “sexual frustration”, in which the Lady is represented in such a way as to emphasise a wasting/wasted sensuality. […] In both cases, too, the eroticism of the representation is increased by the claustrophobic confines in which the Lady is placed; her very body gives the impression of bursting out of the pictorial space in which it has been contained (83–84, n.2).

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By slightly shifting the Lady’s figure to the left, Waterhouse makes the oval mirror the focal point of the painting, which stresses its importance. Through the immediately apparent contrast between the darkness of the interior of the Lady’s tower and the light of the outside world, seen in the mirror but not illuminating the cell, the artist underscored other operative oppositions: freedom and open space versus the sense of constraint and imprisonment; movement and progress which characterises Camelot in sharp contrast with the stagnation and monotony of Shallot. Inside the tower, the darkness dominates: the only distinctly visible hues belong to the tapestry which, as we know, reflects the colours of the outside world, and to the Lady’s dress, which emanates a deep, sensual scarlet, an indication of her thwarted, but now awakening sensuality. In her languid and hazy musing, the Lady contemplates the images in the mirror which reflects the pair of the newlyweds and, in the distance, the flanks and towers of Camelot. Waterhouse adds an element which Tennyson does not mention, and paints a bridge over the river. Read symbolically, the bridge speaks of a new perspective, a possibility of change which is budding in the Lady’s mind and soon will gain urgency. Tennyson’s motif of a young woman condemned to work in solitary confinement, with its audible overtones of unfulfilled desire proved timeless, which is evidenced by the number of artists in the second half of the twentieth century who were equally enraptured by “The Lady of Shalott”. In 1957 Fyffe Christie, a British figurative painter and muralist, produced a monumental draught screen on four panels, oil on hardboard. His work first of all attempts to tell the whole story in a manner characteristic for Italian late medieval and early Renaissance painters, thus bringing to mind paintings by Piero della Francesca or Giotto. The choice of panel structure, the use of the continuous narrative to represent progress in time (a straightforward lateral progression across the foreground of the picture) and the repetition of the central image – the Lady in the tower – made Christie’s oil a daring and unconventional approach to Tennyson’s poem. In the centre of the painting, Christie places a vertical axis in the shape of a dead tree, which separates two main representations of the Lady in the tower. On the left, she is depicted as she works at her loom, looking only at the images that flash in the mirror above her, while the central panel presents the same place and the same figure, but his time framed by the window, through which she attempts to look at the outside world. As explained by art critics, “[d]uring the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the repetition of figures was a readily understood and entirely acceptable artistic convention for signalling movement from one moment in time to another and one narrative event to another” (“Time and Narrative”). Our “reading” of the picture is also enabled by a visual convention of an eye moving from right to left, in the same mode as we read print. In this way, we assume chronological order within particular pictures – the events represented

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on the left happen earlier than those on the right (Nodelman 135). Thus, as the viewer’s eye travels further to the right, it encounters a subsequent scene from the poem: the dead Lady in her boat, received and perceived as a spectacle by the Camelot people. Repetition of figures within the painting is not limited to the Lady only; Christie depicts Lancelot three times: at the upper left corner, as a small figure on a horse, not visible to the Lady yet; centrally presented in front of the Lady’s casement, prominent with his shield, helmet and plume (all mentioned in the text) and finally as he stands directly above the boat, looking at the dead woman, his helmet in his hand. Another repeated element is the figure of a reaper with his scythe, reappearing at least twice (it is hard to determine whether the fieldworker in the top right corner, next to Lancelot on the horse, is the same figure as well or not). Each depiction of duplicate figures or objects suggests another moment in time. The symbolic elements of the scythe, of the dead tree and the reaped corn all pronounce the Lady’s inevitable perdition. Like in the Italian early Renaissance art, the extensive cast of characters and the complex composition makes viewing this picture a challenging experience; the viewer’s attention is distracted from the basic circumstances of the narrative by a vast number of other figures, whose presence creates an impression of ongoing activity and motion that enlivens the central scene. The amount of so many distracting details, figures and activities can be traced to the principle of “variety in an istoria”, advertised by Alberti in his “On Painting” treatise (“Time and Narrative”). As a result, the individual story of the Lady has to be patiently discovered and recreated episode by episode; through such “reading” of the painting, the viewer is compelled to contemplate the narrative in greater detail, which fosters sympathy and identification with the heroine and makes the visual experience imitate the mechanisms of understanding the written text. Finally, the Lady inside the tower, caught at the moment of deciding what to do, is also depicted in a modern drawing by Shelah Horvitz, a contemporary American realist painter. As she explained in our email correspondence, Horvitz executed her Lady of Shalott drawing in 1981 as a final project for a class on PreRaphaelite Art and Literature at Brown University, taught by Professor George Landow. In 1983 the piece was published in The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies together with Horvitz’s essay “My Lady of Shallot”, and the drawing was subsequently displayed in the 1985 exhibition Ladies of Shalott: A Victorian Masterpiece and its Contexts, at David Winton Bell Gallery (Brown University). Unlike Christie, who concentrated on the narrative and its stages, Horvitz gives prominence to the Lady herself, and through her posture, body and surroundings she manages to convey a sense of unbearable tension and anxiety. Huddled and hunched, with her knees drawn up and embraced, Horvitz’s Lady of Shalott sits, fully naked, in her cell-like room. The fact that the room is a prison is underscored by a single narrow chink in the tower wall, which replaces

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the window. The artist explains her concept in the essay, where she elaborates upon the most meaningful details. The mirror, oval and almost as big as the Lady’s figure, reflects a naked Lancelot and the face of Guinevere, modelled upon the representations of Jane Morris. Naturally, the images are purely symbolic, reflecting the Lady’s thoughts and not the “objective” reality; it is a consistent move regarding the absence of the window in the room. The other face in the mirror is that of King Arthur’s, stern and observing. Horvitz explains her startling decision to depict the Lady naked: Because more emotive force may be achieved through the body than through the face, my Lady’s pose is crucial as the organizing force for the entire work. I have her drawn in upon herself, hugging her legs, facing away from the loom. I also have represented her naked, which demands an explanation, since I have never seen a naked Lady of Shalott. From a formal point of view she is naked because with clothes covering her there was no way I could show the tension in her muscles – the latissimus dorsi in her back flexed and the bicep squeezed against her knee. From the standpoint of content, she is naked because she not only obviously craves sensuality and sexuality but also because she is defenceless against the curse. I have used nudity to convey both sexuality and vulnerability (64).

Apart from anxiety and tension, the Lady’s desperation and fear also pervade the drawing. Hugging her knees, she tries to protect herself from any unwanted intrusion (according to the author’s explication, she both wants and fears sexuality). Moreover, she covers her naked body to avoid the male gaze of Lancelot, and possibly also the viewer’s. The scopic theme features prominently in Horvitz’s piece; while we look at the picture, the Lady looks ahead, deep in thoughts, contemplating what decision to take and shielding her nakedness from intrusive glances. She is observed by Lancelot and Guinevere, while King Arthur’s eye looks out of the picture at the viewer caught at the moment of watching. Thus, the Lady is presented as a passive object of an active gaze, and Horvitz shows her visible discomfort. The persistence of these multiple gazes strengthens the sense of claustrophobia, confinement and surveillance, which the picture exudes.

Catastrophe commences When William Maw Egley painted The Lady of Shalott in 1858, his oil was chronologically the first fully developed and accomplished painting depicting the next stage in Tennyson’s narrative – the moment of the fateful look the Lady casts at Camelot. Egley’s painting shares some similarities with Elizabeth Siddall’s drawing in that in both works the loom occupies a prominent space, but while Siddall primarily emphasises the Lady’s work, Egley shows her as she abandons her weaving in order to have a good look at the passing Lancelot – and also to be

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seen by him. Her curiosity piqued, the heroine stands next to an amazingly huge window (her room no longer resembles a claustrophobic cell), mesmerized by the vision of Lancelot, whose figure we can see in the mirror. As is apparent from Egley’s representation, his Lancelot is equally arrested by the sight of the Lady; he pauses on his way and turns in the direction of Shalott. Egley does not conceptualise this incident as an impending disaster; on the contrary, he captures the moment of a budding infatuation, as the man and the woman make eye-contact. In the poem Lancelot is imagined as an embodiment of light; also here, he brings the sun and warmth into the Lady’s life, which is why the scene is pervaded by warm hues as the rays of the setting sun illumine the chamber. This painting’s meaning is romance with all its attendant magic: the suddenness, inaccessibility, tension, desire, challenge. Substantially more dramatic emphasis is given to this climactic point in William Holman Hunt’s, Howard Pyle’s and John William Waterhouse’s renderings of the moment of the fateful look. Hunt’s oil, which exists in two versions, the canvas in Wadsworth Collection and a smaller copy in Manchester Art Gallery (both created between 1886 and 1905), is probably the best-known visual representation of Tennyson’s poem, rivalled only by Waterhouse’s 1888 The Lady of Shalott. As numerous critics have shown, the final version of the painting is a revision of an earlier design made for the Moxon illustrated edition of Tennyson’s poems in 1857.72 It is no exaggeration to say that the figure of the Lady must have haunted Hunt for the most of his artistic career: he had been working on the topic from the 1850s, when he did his first sketch, till the final oil version, which he accomplished five years before his death. The Moxon Tennyson design was supposed to represent “the soul’s failure to accept faithfully the high purpose of life” (Kooistra “Victorian Poetry and Illustration” 402), and Hunt’s conviction that art should have a public and a moral function clearly pervades this artwork. Hunt’s Lady of Shalott is a fallen woman, a frenzied rebel and nearly a witch; she is a woman oozing sexuality, no longer in the state of innocence. Although clad in a tunic in the 1857 design and a pink robe in the oil painting, and in both swaddled in the threads from the unravelling tapestry, her body emanates energy, female rage and power. From underneath her dress we get a glimpse at her white 72 For a detailed history of Hunt’s two successive drawings of “The Lady of Shalott”, 1850 and 1857, and of the subsequent oil treatment of the topic, see Sharyn R. Udall, “Between Dream and Shadow: William Holman Hunt’s ‘Lady of Shalott’”, Woman’s Art Journal 11.1 (Spring– Summer, 1990), pp. 34–38, Abigail Joseph, “‘Impressions of Weird Fate’: Revision and Crisis in ‘The Lady of Shalott’”, Journal of Victorian Culture 22.2 (2017), pp. 183–203, Andrew Leng, “The ideology of ‘eternal truth’: William Holman Hunt and The Lady of Shalott 1850–1905”, Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 7.4, pp. 314–328 and Miriam Neuringer, “The Burden of Meaning: Hunt’s Lady of Shalott”, in Ladies of Shalott: A Victorian Masterpiece and Its Contexts, Exhibition Catalogue of Brown University, ed. G.P. Landow (Providence, RI: Brown University 1985), pp. 61–70.

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underwear, which may indicate “the Lady’s arousal as well as her virginity” (Kruger 117). Hunt portrays her within the frame of the loom, thus stressing, intentionally or not, the idea of the woman’s claustrophobic confinement. The moment he chooses to depict is the point in the narrative when the punishment commences: we see the crack in the mirror, the flying, omnipresent threads of the unravelling tapestry and the figure of Lancelot, who rides away from the Lady’s tower. The Lady is caught in an awkward motion as she springs up from her work as if fired by some sudden burst of energy. The most characteristic motif of the 1857 drawing and the subsequent oil painting is the untamed whirlwind of the Lady’s hair, which fills the upper part of the picture and seems to live a life of its own, even transgressing the spacial divide between the outer and the inner spheres in the painting (some of the wisps escape outside the window above the mirror). The storm of wild auburn hair stands in stark contrast to the conventional hairstyles of virtuous, devout Victorian women. As Sharyn R. Udall notes, “[t]he Pre-Raphaelite painters were inordinately fond of long, flowing hair; it has been convincingly interpreted in their work as a symbol of female sensuality. Here it becomes what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar call a ‘metaphor for monstrous female sexual energies’” (36). Moreover, these “apparently flowing tresses” can be regarded as “the most telling indication of her loss of aesthetic and moral control” (Stein 294). Thus, in Hunt’s version, the Lady signals awakened, unrestrained sensuality: the whole of her body – her hair, her partly naked forearms, the accentuated hips, even her naked feet – communicate tension and tantalizing sexual energy. This by itself is enough to see her as a fallen woman: in Victorian discourses on gender, respectable femininity is typified by passivity, restraint and a virtual absence of sexual impulse.73 Moreover, the painting conveys powerful emotions, particularly female rage at being constricted and confined, and an urge to rebel against those constrictions. Since Hunt seems to have shared the notion that these are not appropriate feelings to be experienced by a pious and faithful Victorian woman, he punished Tennyson’s heroine by making her a fallen, defiant, morally dubious, must-be-mad-to-do-it rebel.74

73 Cf. Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, I988), p. 7, Amy Lindt and Stephanie Brzuzy, Battleground: Women, Gender and Sexuality, vol. 1. (London, Greenwood Press, 2008), p. 166, Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces. The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 43–44, Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity. Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-De-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) pp. 74, 119. 74 The conviction that Hunt’s Lady of Shalott is punished for her inappropriate behaviour is commonly shared by critics. Cf. Andrew Leng, op.cit., Lynne Pearce, op.cit. pp. 78–80, Sharyn R. Udall, op. cit. pp. 36–37, and Miriam Neuringer, op.cit. pp. 64–65 especially.

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Hunt’s idea to allegorize the Lady of Shalott as a fallen soul was spelled out in his 1905 catalogue entry, where he describes the painting and his intentions in detail. He states: The parable, as interpreted in this painting, illustrates the failure of a human soul towards its accepted responsibility. The lady typifying the Soul is bound to represent faithfully the workings of the high purpose of King Arthur’s rule […]. In this mood she casts aside duty to her spiritual self, and at this ill-fated moment Sir Lancelot comes riding by heedlessly singing on his way […]. Having forfeited the blessing due to unswerving loyalty, destruction and confusion have overtaken her (qtd in Leng 323).

This intention also derives from the painting’s background, where Hunt presents mythological and religious scenes, further explaining his valuation of the Lady’s decision and conduct. On the left, he depicts the Virgin with the Child, typifying humility and patience, and possibly modelled upon Andrea della Robbia’s sculptures (Wagstaff 16); naturally, Virgin Mary is also the ideal of submissive, serving and humble femininity. On the right we see Hercules in the Garden of Hesperides, embodying valour and courage. Additionally, Hunt adorns Hercules’s head with an aureole, an element to be read within the frame of typological symbolism: as in the 1857 drawing this place was occupied by a figure of the crucified Christ, “[t]he hero’s halo marks him as a pagan “type” of Christ, who on the cross conquers the serpent Sin” (Jeffers “Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott” 245). In this way Hunt underlines the moral layer of his allegory in which the Lady is an antitype of both Hercules and the Virgin Mary, and condemns her as selfish, unrestrained, disloyal and evil; her punishment is well deserved. As suggested by Lynne Pearce, however, the reception of the painting by modern viewers (particularly women and especially feminists) seriously diverges from Hunt’s intentions, as the Lady “is speaking her anger, frustration and outrage to us at the same time as she is, in Hunt’s moral schema, enacting her punishment” (79). Moreover, “[t]he wild, half-crazed expression that Hunt and his followers assumed would be read as an alarming caricature of women who neglect their proper function, is received by the twentieth-century viewer as a spirited defiance of the impossible Catch-22 in which she has been placed” (78). Crucially, despite Hunt’s intentions, his painting construes the Lady as a courageous, daring figure who actively shapes her fate; owing to the accumulated frustration and resentment, she can burst the chains of convention and decency, rebelling against living the life of isolation and repetitiveness. In Hunt’s canvas, this attitude is visible in the Lady’s determination to free herself from the swaddling threads and to get out of the magic circle of duty indicated by the frame of her loom. J. W. Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott (Looking at Lancelot) (1894) shares some characteristics with Hunt’s rendering: it also presents the Lady standing in

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her small chamber, with the threads of the tapestry similarly restraining her movement, and the background of the picture is also filled by a round, cracked mirror which reflects the back of the Lady’s head and the passing figure of Lancelot. Waterhouse’s familiarity with Hunt’s version is well-documented; Anthony Hobson comments upon his conscious efforts to avoid duplicating the composition of Hunt’s Moxon Tennyson illustration. For instance, Waterhouse initially planned to paint a rectangular, not circular mirror in order to depart from Hunt’s design (Hobson 53). Unlike Hunt, however, Waterhouse’s perspective is different: he situates his viewer directly outside the tower’s window – in this way, the Lady looking out meets the spectator’s gaze. Through this daring decision, Waterhouse reverses the power relations according to which a woman in a painting is a passive object of the gaze, and turns the visual dynamic back on the viewer. Consequently, the visual pleasure the spectator might have experienced admiring the shapes and curves of the Lady’s feminine body in his chronologically later I’m half sick of shadows picture now changes into visual discomfort. This representation reinstates a democracy of looking, whereas the Lady is positioned as an active viewer and subverts the convention of woman as a passive object of the gaze, connoting “to-be-looked-at-ness”.75 Finally, Waterhouse’s Lady, looking at Lancelot (us?) despite the explicit prohibition, flouts all conventions and emerges defiant and energetic, as a representative of what Kathy Alexis Psomiades calls “bad femininity” (Beauty’s Body 29) – femininity which does not submissively accept limitations imposed on it by the patriarchal established social and cultural order. Similarly, in her analysis of different experiences of the female embodiment Sara Bartky writes: Feminine faces, as well as bodies, are trained to the expression of deference. Under male scrutiny, women will avert their eyes or cast them downward; the female gaze is trained to abandon its claim to the sovereign status of seer. The “nice” girl learns to avoid the bold and unfettered staring of the “loose” woman who looks at whatever and whomever she pleases (30).

Waterhouse’s Lady, represented in 1894, ceases to be the “nice girl” she is in his other renditions and becomes a self-sufficient, mature, daring figure instead, the figure which offers the most potential for a feminist reading. Interestingly, Waterhouse also pays more attention to the Lady’s facial expression than Holman Hunt did in his work, where her face was visible only in 75 Laura Mulvey coined the term “to-be-looked-at-ness” to connote the way women are usually represented as a spectacle and a source of the visual pleasure of the male spectator. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 837. John Berger proposes corresponding ideas about gender politics of the gaze. Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin Books, 1977).

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profile, with her gaze fixed on the floor. Also, by depicting her figure frontally as she makes eye contact with the viewer, the artist fosters identification with the Lady and a more sympathetic response to her plight. The Lady’s expression is profound, intense, and solemn: there is no welcoming infatuation that transpires from Egley’s depiction, no frustration or anger like in Hunt’s oil. This Lady meets her destiny with a serious, heartfelt resolve; even if she is surprised and anxious, she seems deeply aware that this is the turning point in her story, and neither welcomes it with enthusiasm nor shrinks from it in fear. Poignantly, while in Waterhouse’s ‘I’m half sick of shadows’ said the Lady of Shalott (1915) the colour of the Lady’s robe suggests her awakening desire, in this painting the white gown substitutes for the red dress – as a result, the emphasis is on innocence and virginity rather than on sexual frustration. The same moment, albeit to a very different overall effect, is depicted in Howard Pyle’s The Lady of Shalott: Mirror Breaking, another of his designs for the 1881 illustrated edition of Tennyson’s poem. Pyle also captures the Lady when she realises that the curse has befallen her, but the energy and anger of Hunt’s rendering, as much as the determination and intensity of Waterhouse’s painting, give way to a rather lame expression of surprise and confusion. The Lady is depicted standing at the window, but she turns away from the sight of Lancelot and looks back at the mirror, of which we see only a part of the frame and several broken shards. Pyle’s interpretation indicates that the sound of the glass breaking must have provoked her to look back from the window. While Lancelot seems completely unruffled as he rides on, possibly not even realising he has been seen from the tower, the Lady’s posture suggests that she has been looking out for some time and is mostly surprised, even alarmed, by the sudden intervention. She presses her hand to her cheek and with consternation surveys the destruction wrought in her chamber, yet the depiction of her reaction is not entirely convincing. Pyle indicates the disaster by suggesting the undoing of the Lady’s work: her tapestry unravels while the balls of thread lie scattered on the floor. Vertical crack-like lines can be detected in the walls of her chamber as if her whole familiar world was falling apart. Through symbol and gesture, the pictorial dynamics, the colour and mood, Pyle makes Tennyson’s heroine the victim of a sentimental romantic melodrama. Nevertheless, this version lacks the energy and drama typical for both Hunt’s and Waterhouse’s renderings. In 1923 Blackie & Son published an edition of poems entitled Tennyson’s Dream of Fair Women and Other Poems, as a part of their “Beautiful Books” series. The volume was illustrated by Florence Harrison and includes seven colour plates and numerous other black and white drawings by the artist. The “Lady of Shalott” opens with a heading, a line drawing decoration reminiscent of the Glasgow Style, which shows the Lady as if framed by the rectangular window, with an oval mirror-like aureole around her head and balls of thread scattered

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above and below the lettering. Yet, Harrison gives the narrative a more extensive treatment in one of her colour plates of the volume. Her Lady of Shalott is conceived as another version of the embowered woman motif, and the artist’s emphasis is primarily romance. The picture emanates a wistful nostalgia. The viewer’s perspective is from the outside of the chamber – probably from another window of the castle – and such a viewing position allows for closer scrutiny of the Lady’s figure as well as grants us a view of the passing Lancelot directly below. Harrison further romanticises the scene by adding several significant details: the white gown of the Lady suggesting her innocence and youth, the heart-shaped pattern of the latticed window framing her figure, two turtledoves flying nearby76 and a parchment (maybe a love letter?) she holds in her hand and is about to drop down from her window. As Kathryn Kruger notes, “[s]ince the fifteenth century turtledoves were a common motif in European art. Almost always painted or carved together, their union symbolized ‘true love.’ They frequently decorated marriage and courting mirrors, which were fashionable gifts throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (117–8). As much as Harrison’s emphasis on the Lady’s confinement within the tower, all these details situate the painting within the visual tradition of representing an imprisoned damsel in distress waiting for rescue, a goal of the male hero’s quest.77

Outside the tower Three different approaches to the theme can be observed in the paintings that represent the Lady outside the tower. The first of them is to focus on the preparations for the journey; secondly, the motif of the journey as such seems to have been extremely popular among various artists; and thirdly, a number of artworks depict the moment of the Lady’s arrival to Camelot. As a detailed analysis of all of these representations would much exceed the scope of this chapter, I have decided to concentrate on seven selected works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Crane, George E. Robertson, Byam Shaw, John William Waterhouse, Jeff Barson and Donato Giancola, believing that as much as they merit attention for their own sake, they are also valuable comments on chief issues presented in Tennyson’s poem: the tension between captivity and release; woman as an artist versus woman as an icon; aestheticism and the reception of art.

76 The turtledoves seem to be a direct borrowing from Holman Hunt, who also includes this motif in his painting. 77 For a general survey of representations of women at windows, see Elaine Shefer, “The Woman at the Window in Victorian Art and Christina Rossetti as the Subject of Millais’s Mariana”, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Studies 4.1 (1983), pp. 14–25.

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If I had to select an iconic visual rendering of “The Lady of Shalott” recognised by the general audience, Waterhouse’s 1888 painting should be the one to choose. The painting’s ongoing popularity is confirmed by the fact that it is circulated as an image on posters, postcards, mugs, pens, T-shirts, calendars, and notebooks. The painting is undoubtedly visually seductive: its appeal partly derives from its half realistic, half impressionistic nature. On the one hand, the fully and meticulously realised landscape attracts attention, on the other, Waterhouse turns towards a more momentous, hazy, impressionistic rendering of the outdoor setting characteristic for the end-of-the-century French plein-air painters (Hobson 41). The artwork enchants with its fading, tantalising colours and, first of all, the depiction of the figure of Tennyson’s heroine who prepares for her last journey. The viewer encounters “the perennially attractive image of the young innocent girl”, so characteristic for Waterhouse (Hobson 9). “Like some bold seër in a trance, / Seeing all his own mischance” (ll. 128–129) she is about to undo the chain of her boat and float towards her destiny. Departing from the letter of the poem, where “out flew the web and floated wide” (l. 114), Waterhouse makes his heroine take the tapestry she has so patiently woven with her. The two visible roundels on the fabric present the Lady and Lancelot, while the third roundel is covered, the end of the story yet unknown. The presence of the tapestry suggests its importance as the product of the Lady’s work, but also as a text to be read and interpreted itself, telling her life story when she is no longer alive; thus, the tapestry will become an inscription on another aesthetic object – the woman’s dead body. Out of the three large-scale paintings Waterhouse executed on the subject, the 1888 oil is the earliest; interestingly, it most distinctly concentrates on the Lady’s innocence and suffering. While the figures in the 1894 and 1915 canvases were given dark hair and much more voluptuous shapes, this Lady is visibly different, feeble and slender, an embodiment of distressed, afflicted, virginal femininity, described by Lynne Pearce as “an icon of ravished innocence” (80). Iconographically, this is conveyed through several important details: the colour of her robe (white) and hair (much fairer), the presence of religious symbolism (crucifix, rosary) and her tragic, solemn expression as she awaits her doom. Unlike Hunt’s powerful, energetic trespasser, Waterhouse’s Lady seems devoid of agency and determination. Even though we see her as she releases the boat’s chain (a decisive action, after all), she is a forlorn, resigned and passive victim of her fate to which she succumbs without rebellion. The details absent from the poem – the crucifix, rosary, candles and lantern – add a powerfully religious slant to the painting and emphasise the Lady’s piety and devotion. The lantern, which signals light but also death, is reminiscent of Hunt’s famous presentation of Christ as the “light of the world” in his 1854 extremely popular painting; the candles (two of them blown) suggest impending death, while the

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whiteness of the Lady’s robe resembles a shroud. In this way, romantic passion or artistic vocation are no longer the central concerns in this version, displaced by the notions of female sacrifice, piety and martyrdom. Consequently, her journey is not a mark of her rebellion, but of her surrender to the inevitable fate. The moment just before the journey is given a different focus altogether in a rendition by John Byam Shaw, a British painter, designer, teacher and illustrator strongly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites. His oil painting “The Lady of Shallot” (1898) stands apart in Shaw’s decision to present Tennyson’s heroine as she carves her name on the prow of the boat. The picture foretells death and doom, but in a different way and with a different emphasis than Waterhouse’s canvas. Thus, the falling leaves indicate the end of the cycle and the Lady’s attire is also significant. Although she is not dressed in black, certain dark elements – the dark veil and a black crape-like fabric draped around her arms – resemble conventional mourning fashion in Victorian England. Moreover, swaddled in cloth, the Lady does not resemble a “beauty on display” version of the subject by Waterhouse, Meteyard or Harrison. Her body’s outline is not accentuated, and her face is visible only in profile, yet it becomes immediately apparent that she would not win a beauty contest, were she to compete with Pre-Raphaelite “stunners”. She looks haggard, grave, pale and tired, presumably also older than other representations of the Tennysonian weaver. Indeed, it is not the conventional feminine beauty that is the chief focus of the painting. Instead, Byam Shaw emphasises the issues of authorship and agency – the Lady, writing (carving?) her name on the prow asserts herself as an artist and the executor of her fate. Last but not least, Arthur Hughes’s depiction of the Lady setting out for her journey merits attention. Hughes, attracted by the Arthurian subjects and fascinated by the Pre-Raphaelites, produced two oil paintings based on Tennyson’s ballad, the first of which (a preliminary oil), was executed in the early sixties. It shows the Lady setting off for Camelot; she seems deeply moved but hopeful. The branches of the weeping willow, which she puts aside, indicate an overcome barrier between Camelot and Shalott. Hughes – as well as many other artists painting the Lady in her boat – makes use of the visual convention according to which “not simply […] one always moves to the right, but […] one voyages away from home to the right and returns to the left” (Nodelman 164). The direction of the Lady’s gaze (to the right) suggests an opening perspective of a new life towards which she sails. The mood of the painting is primarily romantic; the impressionistic, blurred colours add a soft, lyrical quality to the scene. Hughes’s Lady is neither a victim, nor a perpetrator; she is young, hopeful, and in love. The spectator’s eye is caught by the “Shalott” inscription on the boat, which disappears in the later oil. The presence of the inscription and the trailing swans suggest that the artist took his inspiration from the earlier, 1832 version of Tennyson’s poem.

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The remaining renditions all show the Lady dead or dying. While the works by Walter Crane and John Atkinson Grimshaw portray the journey and give sole emphasis to the figure of the heroine, in the artworks by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Arthur Hughes, George Robertson, Jeff Barson and Donato Giancola the confrontation with the dead female body and the question of the spectator’s gaze are of utmost importance. The dead Lady of Shalott, floating with the course of the river to enter the realm from which she was excluded, becomes a powerful, yet disturbing sign. As Elisabeth Bronfen suggests in her book on death and femininity, as far as death is chosen and performed by the woman herself, it is an act that makes her both the object and subject of representation (Over Her Dead Body 141–142). In death, the Lady of Shalott achieves what she could not have achieved living in Shalott: attention and recognition. Her body, a text to be deciphered, is a sign not only of conventional female beauty but also of the order she courageously destabilises by appearing where she should not be. Moreover, the dead body – particularly the dead body of a beautiful woman – resonates with distinctly problematic overtones. On the one hand, like Freud’s uncanny, the corpse produces cognitive dissonance, being at once known and unfamiliar; its spectators are at the same time repelled and fascinated, experience abjection, horror, and sexual fascination.78 The dead body destabilises known and familiar categories, like position, site and reference: “cadaver is not in place, not here and yet it is not elsewhere” (Blanchot in Bronfen Over Her Dead Body 52). On the other hand, the body of a beautiful woman is an aesthetic object, admired for its beauty and consequently objectified. Thus, we can certainly talk about the violence of representation, in the sense that the corpse, already harmed and violated by death, is abused for the second time, by becoming an inanimate object of visual pleasure. The renditions of the Lady’s dead body floating down to Camelot by Walter Crane (1862, see figure 17) and John Atkinson Grimshaw (1875 ca., see figure 18, and 1878) stress the desolation and loneliness of the Lady’s death. She occupies the space in-between in her boat, neither at home (Shalott) nor at her destination (Camelot). Thus, the emphasis is on incomplete transition, interrupted by death. The river’s expanse, the emptiness of the landscape, and the depressing colours produce the effect of misery and bleakness. In Crane’s painting, the Lady is a spectral waxen figure, death-like and doll-like at the same time. Her hair flows down into the river, leading the eye to the water and the darkened landscape. The flatness of her body, almost entirely hidden in her boat, and her presentation from profile do not encourage the voyeuristic gaze, but stress the grimness and mystery of her death, producing the effect of unfamiliarity, strangeness and 78 Cf. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press 1982), p. 19 and Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, p. 20.

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Figure 17: Walter Crane The Lady of Shalott, 1862, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund

unease. When compared with other renderings of the same moment, Crane’s painting is distinguished by the fact that it best reflects the “uncanniness” of the scene. Moreover, the picture is “marked by […] nostalgia and medieval character” (Lupack 145). Both Grimshaw’s versions are similar to Crane’s canvas as far as the emptiness of the landscape is concerned. The 1875 oil depicts a misty grey-yellow scene, the vast expanse of water illumined by spectral moonlight; his later version presents a similarly empty landscape, coloured by ghostly reds and yellows, thus bringing to mind a post-apocalyptic moment of destruction. In both paintings, however, the perspective is different than in Crane’s rendition: the Lady is depicted in front of the spectator, her torso uplifted, resting against a pillow (in 1878 picture), and more carefully posed, which allows a better look at the dying woman. Characteristically, all three representations exude calm and tranquillity rather than violence; the Lady’s face, in the natural surroundings, also appears serene and resigned, recording no sign of internal struggle. In contrast to his oil study of the early sixties, Arthur Hughes’s fully developed oil on canvas (1872–73) departs from the hopeful, romantic atmosphere of the Lady’s tryst in favour of a more sombre portrayal of her death. The painting combines sentimentality with poetic realism, the first evident in the theme of the

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Figure 18: John Atkinson Grimshaw The Lady of Shalott, 1875 ca., Yale Center for British Art

dead woman, the other in the treatment of landscape and the choice of country life as a background. Hughes’s Lady lies, supine and dead, with her unseeing eyes still open and fixed at a distance. The expression of her face, as well as the rendition of the scenery – the water reeds, the trees in the background – are reminiscent of another famous representation of the floating body of a dead woman, John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851–52). However, unlike Millais’s sharp and detailed rendering of the smallest elements of plants and foliage, so characteristic for the Pre-Raphaelite style, Hughes’s landscape is hazier and more impressionistic. Hughes preserves the swans from his earlier study, but the inscription of the name on the boat disappears. The most significant change, however, is that while in the earlier version the Lady, presented alone, was the chief subject of the rendering, in his later painting Hughes made her share the space with a group of onlookers standing on the left and occupying a large part of the foreground. The introduction of the observers connects the picture with several other renditions that focus on the impression the Lady makes on her arrival in Camelot. In Hughes’s painting, nevertheless, she is seen not by the knights and ladies, but by accidental country girls who happen to pass by. Hughes’s interest in the countryside and rural scenes, visible in many of his works from the period, might have resulted from Ruskin’s comment about his painting “The King’s Orchards” that he should “be content with cottagers instead of Kings’ Orchards” (Gibson 758). Thus, this representation of the gaze at the lifeless Lady of Shalott is both gender- and class-specific: unlike in all other

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known renditions, here village women, patently not aristocratic, look at her body. Their poses register various reactions, from calm poise and interest to unease and fear. Hughes maintains the distance between those who look and the scrutinized object. The Lady is not within the observers’ reach; neither do they approach her close. Their gaze is not intrusive. In this way, Hughes stresses the uncanniness of her dead body rather than dwells on the sensuous and sensational potential of the female corpse. The final group of artworks to be discussed in this section all present what Kathy Alexis Psomiades has called “the Lancelot moment”, at which “a masculine observer stands mystified before a beautiful, insentient female body” (Beauty’s Body 40). This moment marks the transformation of the corpse of the dead woman into an object of art, thus making it a commodity form, and foregrounds aesthetic experience to be derived from this encounter. The renditions by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Robertson, Jeff Barson and Donato Giancola all figure this confrontation as a spectacle in which the beautiful feminine body is scrutinized by the musing, inquisitive gaze of her male observer. In all of these interpretations, we find the “clearly demarcated gender roles, the interplay of accessible surface and inaccessible depth, and the interplay of knowing and not knowing”, which Psomiades finds to be the central features of aestheticism (Beauty’s Body 60). Let us start with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illustration for the Moxon Tennyson edition (1857), a tailpiece of the poem, providing a balance for William Holman Hunt’s headpiece. In a compositionally crowded close-up Rossetti presents the towering, visually dominating figure of Lancelot looking at the Lady’s body in the boat. In her study Rossetti, Dante and Ourselves, Nicolette Gray notes that in his early work, Rossetti’s characteristic stylistic feature is enclosed, clattered space: “with very few exceptions the setting to the figures is an enclosed space, in many cases so confined that there is no room for them to stand upright. In the majority of designs, the setting is a small room, in others the space is enclosed by a curtain, a high hedge, dense foliage, or an architectural arrangement of walls and steps. The effect is a sense of airlessness” (qtd in Taylor 26). In his design for “The Lady of Shalott” the sense of enclosure comes from the figure of Lancelot himself, regardless of the extremely elaborate background filled with decorative, narrative as well as symbolic details. The picture’s composition is distinctly hierarchical, with Lancelot marking the vertical axis of the scene and being its most important and strongly delineated element. The knight’s bulky body, seemingly pressing against the limits of the picture, prevails over the horizontal shape of the Lady’s corpse. In illustration, larger figures tend to overpower those that occupy less space – also in the sense of attention we grant them.79 Elias Canetti argues that 79 This idea has been proposed by Perry Nodelman in his discussion on the relationships of

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the moment when a masculine spectator surveys the dead body of a beautiful woman is the manifestation of power and triumph – not only is the male spectator a survivor, being alive but also the dead body is in a passive, fallen, horizontal position, while he stands erect, manifesting control, domination and superiority (in Bronfen Over Her Dead Body 65). Lancelot looks at the Lady intently but dispassionately, puzzled, trying to “read” her meaning. Ironically, she came into visibility precisely because of her death; he was not aware of her existence or his influence upon it while she was alive. As he utters his comment “She has a lovely face; / God in his mercy lend her grace” (ll. 169–170) his words are like “a museum-goer’s casual comment on a painting after a momentary glance” (Chadwick 25). Furthermore, the proximity between both figures emphasises the intimate character of the moment, as well as the fact that Lancelot intrudes into the Lady’s personal sphere. This contrasts with Arthur Hughes’s painting, where the female spectators are represented at a distance from the Lady’s body; their positioning suggests anxiety, but also respect and reverence – though puzzled and curious, they are not intrusive. Referring to Rossetti’s use of archaic, flat perspective and medieval costumes, the critics have looked for the metaphysical meaning of the scene. For instance, Simon Houfe compares the illustration to a missal painting (93), while Peggy Fogelman sees a spiritual connection between the Lady and the knight and even reverence on the side of the latter, although she also notes the ambiguity of the representation (24). Kathryn Sullivan Kruger equally positively comments on Rossetti’s piece: “In keeping with the Romantic tradition, Rossetti represents Lancelot gazing lovingly and longingly at the pale and silent face of the Lady of Shalott” (129). Looking at the scene in a less idealising way, however, we may note its disturbing, even violent potential: the female corpse, solidified into an art form, becomes an object of visual scrutiny for the male spectator; he is an active viewer, she – a passive object of his gaze. Dead, vulnerable and mute, she remains solely in the viewer’s power, who, apart from appraising her visually, also attempts his own “reading”, an interpretation of the corpse’s meaning. K.K. Ruthven’s words about the “androcentric” and “phallocratic” ways of reading women’s bodies in culture are pertinent here: It is believed that in the phallocratic order of knowledge perpetuated in our patriarchal society, the kind of looking which results in “knowing” is likely to be exploitative. For knowledge is treated as something quite separated from the knower, and as capable of being known “objectively”, provided the knower aspires to “impersonality”, separating the self from object in order to give the self power over objects (2). visual objects to one another within a picture book. Words About Pictures. The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1988), p. 128.

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Lost in terms of how to understand the sight in front of him, Lancelot tries to interpret what he sees “objectively”, referring to the surface features of the work of art the Lady of Shalott becomes, but not able to access the depth of personal meaning underneath. This scene emblematises the process of interpretation Roland Barthes proposed under the term of the death of the author.80 The Lady, the author and director of the spectacle, is dead; the work of art – her corpse (installation?) – remains. Not knowing anything about the author, the context or the reason for the production of this work of art, the audience interprets the Lady’s dead body solely on their own terms, aspiring to objectivity and impersonality, but violating and abusing her in the process of objectification. George Robertson’s The Lady of Shalott: ‘out upon the wharf they came, / knight and burgher lord and dame’ oil on canvas (1864) concentrates less on Lancelot’s individual response to the figure of the Lady but visualises the moment of her discovery at the entrance to Camelot instead. By making it a huge canvas (137.8 by 194.3 cm) and representing a public, epic scene with a large number of viewers gathered around the boat, Robertson underscores the potential of this event as a visually striking spectacle. With the white semi-transparent dress draped around her, the Lady’s body becomes an object of sensational display, yet Lancelot’s figure attracts equal attention. He stands back, composed but somewhat cautious, not trying to approach close or to impose on her in the manner of Rossetti’s knight. Still, the idea of the gaze is at the centre of Robertson’s interpretation: while Lancelot looks at the Lady, the other viewers observe both Lancelot’s reaction to her arrival as well as her lifeless body. Surprise and morbid curiosity seem to be the prevalent responses, but looking closely, one may also observe dispassionate detachment, indifference, sympathy and unease. The scale of the painting and the number of featured spectators make the scene an opposite of an intimate encounter but allow for a more general and nuanced representation. Elisabeth Bronfen has argued that the representations of male and female dead bodies differ significantly, and women’s deaths and corpses are usually more spectacularly visualised, often in a more sexualised manner (“Risky Resemblances” 19). Two recent painterly interpretations of “The Lady of Shalott”, by Jeff Barson (date unknown) and Donato Giancola (2004) do much to confirm this statement. Both artists chose to represent a scene absent from Tennyson’s poem. In Barson’s painting, Lancelot, standing alone on the river bank, observes the Lady; in Giancola’s rendition, the Lady is being dragged out of the water by two knights, while two others (one of them presumably Lancelot) accompany the scene. In both representations, the Lady is a beautiful sexualised object, entirely 80 Cf. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”, in Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1997), pp. 142–148.

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vulnerable and at the mercy of men. In Barson’s work, she is depicted in a highly eroticised way, with both arms lifted above her head, decoratively posed in her boat. The fabric covering her body is flimsy and semi-transparent; her hips and breasts are accentuated, and her position is that of sexual abandon. Her luxuriously creamy complexion, half-parted lips and the voluptuous curves of her body suggest sensuous self-indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh. Her unconsciousness is a sign of her either wilful or helpless surrender. She is not a trapped and apprehensive victim, or a free and active agent of her fate; on the contrary, she is there to provide visual pleasure and a promise of sexual fulfilment both to the observant knight and to the viewer. The trail of white birds (presumably doves) suggests her virginity, while a garland of red flowers implies her yearning for love and fulfilment. Also, the diagonal lines of the flock of the birds and the shape of the boat create a visual triangle, which encloses the knight and the Lady inside and stresses the private, intimate character of the scene. Lancelot gazes at her from above and maintains the voyeur’s distance; he assumes the stance of the aesthetically involved spectator. Yet, the knight’s armour, shield, and position on horseback all function as signs of power and control in contrast to the Lady’s submission. They enforce his strength, mobility and masculinity. Thus, Barson’s painting reverberates with problematic overtones of vulnerability and availability of an insentient woman and stresses the voyeuristic, almost pornographic potential of the scene. Donato Giancola, a contemporary American artist and illustrator who specialises in imaginative realism and fantasy subjects, represents the death of the Lady of Shalott in yet another manner. His rendition is similar to Barson’s representation in that the Lady also becomes the insentient collapsing woman entirely at men’s disposal; however, where Barson’s approach concentrates on the pleasures of detached observing, Giancola’s painting is a scene of action and involvement, much more emotionally charged. The Lady is represented as a dead or dying bride, in a luxuriant white bridal dress, with a hint of a smile lingering on her lips; there is no boat – the situation necessitates direct, tactile contact with the dead woman. We may speculate that her would-be spouse (Lancelot?) is the knight without the helmet depicted centrally on the left. Represented on the same horizontal plane with the Lady – which marks their mutual relationship as more equal than in Barson’s painting – he looks at her with longing and sadness. The painting’s title – Elegy for Darkness – emphasises loss and mourning, but also problematizes the topic. One may wonder what darkness stands for – is it death? Exclusion? Violence? Likewise, elegiac art is by nature exploitative, shifting emphasis from the departed person to her/his mourners. In this case, Lancelot’s mourning may shade or completely conceal the Lady’s personal tragedy, as we turn to sympathise with his loss, not with her misfortune.

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Interestingly, by painting the Lady as a drowned, visibly weighty body, not a pliant and limp nymph but a heavy burden, Giancola makes the topic more realistic, at the same time showing both death and femininity as a problem. Two men are needed to haul the Lady’s – not cooperating – body out of the water; what will happen to her later? The death of the beautiful woman is no longer to be surveyed from a comfortable position of a bystander but requires response, effort and involvement. Finally, Giancola takes artistic liberties with Tennyson’s poem by painting the scene absent from the narrative, which results in the further defamiliarisation of the topic. In consequence, the viewers are more alert and willing to ask questions about the meaning of what they see: who is this woman? Is she dead? What happened to her? Who are the men and where are they taking her? Have they harmed or violated her before? Accordingly, the spectators are cast in the position of puzzled observers at Camelot, similarly pondering the strange sight they bear witness to.

“The Lady of Shalott” as a twentieth-century picture book The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the growing popularity of a distinct artistic genre which fuses word and image – the picture book. Although championed by Randolph Cadelcott, Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway in the last third of the nineteenth century (Nodelman 2), picture books reemerged as volumes to read and study, not only by children but also by adults and critics, during the last decades of the twentieth century. This emergent popularity of the genre may be accounted for by the rapid development of digital technology, the growth of interest in visual literacy, as well as the emergence of the semiotic and reader-response theories, two approaches which seem crucial for the study of visual images understood as signs in a language the reader actively deciphers. Unlike books with occasional illustrations, picture books demand a different reading strategy and result in a different reading experience. Barbara Keifer, a children’s literature researcher, states, “I would argue, then, that the picturebook is a unique art object, a combination of image and idea that allows the reader to come away with more than the sum of the two parts” (p. 6). Also, both the complexity and uniqueness of the genre has been noted by scholars; Perry Nodelman states that “[g]iven their saturation with meaning, it is clear that understanding the subtleties inherent in the pictures in picture books takes great skill and much knowledge” (20) and goes on to suggest that “[a]ll kinds of pictures can convey visual information and create moods; all illustrations can amplify the meaning of a text. But it is the unique rhythm of pictures and words working together that distinguishes picture books from all other forms of both visual and verbal art” (276). Picture books invite rereading: the reader experi-

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ences the constant temptation to go backward and forwards, to compare and examine the combination of word and image on successive pages; the interaction between verbal text and its visual representation is dynamic and extends to influence our understanding of both previous and subsequent pages. “[E]ach picture in a picture book establishes a context for the picture that follows – becomes a schema that determines how we will perceive the next picture” (Nodelman 176). Given their complexity and intellectual challenge, it is hardly surprising that picture books, although initially aimed at children and teenagers, have become a genre for adult readers as well, a phenomenon which similarly extends to comics and graphic novels. Keifer writes: “Yet many modern picturebooks are intellectually and visually sophisticated and may demand a range of experiences and developmental understandings beyond many young children”; moreover, “throughout its long and varied history, the picturebook has had a broad audience and a wide appreciation as an art object in its own right” (70). The encounter with “The Lady of Shalott” as a picture book is as surprising as it is an aesthetically gratifying experience, which also invites reflection about the remarkably contemporary resonance of Tennyson’s poem. In 1966 “The Lady of Shalott” with illustrations by Bernadette Watts was published by Dobson, London; twenty years later Tennyson’s ballad, illustrated by Charles Keeping appeared with Oxford University Press, while in 2005 Kids Can Press (Toronto) issued the poem as a picture book in a series “Visions in Poetry”, designed and illustrated by Geneviève Côté. Neither of the editions was given a critical recognition, and the first two today remain – at least to the general public – unknown, yet the aesthetic and interpretative decisions made by the illustrators deserve critical consideration. Bernadette Watts is primarily known for her illustrations of fairy stories and folk tales, such as Red Riding Hood and The Smallest Snowflake. In an interview published on her website, she confesses: A deep love of these stories has remained constant, almost actually part of me. I have always written stories and drawn pictures. The two things have always been linked. I did not choose to make picture books at a certain age, it was there right from the start, just like eating or walking (Interview).

Her “Lady of Shalott” follows the convention of a picture fairy tale for children: by the use of soft, muted colours and outlines and the way of representing human figures (mostly not individualised) that resemble fairies and elves, she creates the impression of unreality and lightness. The book utilises the format of one large image in a two-page spread, typically associated with the visual narrative pattern of picture books. This results in a slower pace of reading; furthermore, the image gains visual prominence over the text that is never printed centrally on a page.

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Watts’s Lady is a good fairy mother, with her tall pointed hat and a long dress with unnaturally wide sleeves, while her Lancelot is an unexperienced, young page, intimidated by the sight of the Lady in the last illustration. Discussing potential relationships between text and image, in Ways of the Illustrator: Visual Communication in Children’s Literature Joseph Schwarcz suggests two basic patterns of the interaction between words and pictures in books for children: congruency and deviation. While the first category indicates a harmonious relationship, the second term encompasses opposition between the two media, when an illustration departs from the meaning conveyed by the text; an extreme example of such a relationship Schwarcz calls “counterpoint” – a situation when the illustrations tell a different story from the text (15). To a large extent, Watts’s illustrations intentionally deviate from Tennyson’s text. First of all, Watts does not represent any violent or sad elements of the story: there is no mirror-cracking, no swan song, and, most crucially, no death: at the end of the story the Lady is alive and well, turning her back on her puzzled observers at Camelot. Also, the notion of imprisonment is elided: Watts frequently depicts the Lady outside the castle, in barley fields, surrounded by people. Even when she is weaving her web in her chamber, we know that she is inside only from the lines of Tennyson’s poem – the castle and her room are not represented in the illustrations, the background of the page is left blank. As a result, the impression is of open space and air, not constriction and claustrophobia. Moreover, when the text describes the crucial moment of mirror-breaking, Watts presents the Lady leaving her room and chasing Lancelot outside the castle. Thus, the tension and tragedy of Tennyson’s story are suppressed and the final product is a dreamy, nostalgic fairy tale, telling a different story than the poem describes. Yet, attentive (adult) readers may find in this edition other, less idealistic echoes as well. In Words about Pictures. The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books Perry Nodelman proposes that picture books imply two diverse viewers: “a viewer with a mastery of many skills and much knowledge” who will be able to process and understand a nuanced relationship between words and pictures – meaningful aspects of visual imagery, distortions of meaning, visual jokes – as well as “a viewer who is innocent, unsophisticated – childlike” (Nodelman 21). These remarks are pertinent to those picture books which, although they are created for children or young readers, still include adult content. “The Lady of Shalott” is just such a text – on the surface a romantic story, appealing through its medieval setting which gives it a fairy-tale aura, in closer contact it becomes a challenging, though still aesthetically pleasing experience. Bernadette Watts’s picture book engages two distinct types of audience. On the one hand, the childlike, guileless readers will dwell on the magical, romantic mood of the illustrations that accompany Tennyson’s text, appreciating the fact that the Lady stays alive at the end; they will see the story primarily as a narrative about

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following one’s heart and desires. On the other hand, experienced viewers will ponder a more complex relationship between the text and image. This second audience might notice how colours problematize the story: when the illustrations depict the Lady in her castle, the colours of her dress are vibrant and intense; why does she become almost completely colourless when she leaves Shalott in part four of the poem? Does she take the greyness of Shalott with her? Is it why she cannot integrate with the life of Camelot? Does the avoidance of colour actually imply the death of her dreams and her disillusionment in contact with reality? Is it an indication that she does not fit into any other place? Attentive readers will also recognize the fact that although the Lady stays alive in the last picture, this does not necessarily imply a happy ending – we see her propped against the boat, turned away from the inhabitants of Camelot, while her facial expression and slumped body speak of disappointment. The sulking Lady is an outsider in Camelot; she becomes visibly uprooted – having forsaken her home for her dreams, she has now no place where she fully belongs. In turn, when Charles Keeping decided to produce monochrome illustrations for “The Lady of Shalott” in 1986, his aesthetic and ideological choices were completely different. Keeping’s version is also a picture book, but not for young children: his work from the period, as his biographer and critic Douglas Martin tells us, appropriates “the large pictorial book format, hitherto associated with very young children, as a container for the sensitive handling of themes of nearadult sex and violence” (136). Keeping, always attracted to “heroes and history, myths and mystery” (123), is also known for his innovative illustrations for Beouwulf (1982), and for the complete works of Charles Dickens for the Folio Society (1978–86) (135). His “Lady of Shallot” incorporates the themes of violence, the grotesque, sexual violation, voyeurism and death. Through the choice of monochrome pictures, Keeping stresses the heavy atmosphere and solemnity of the story, which in Tennyson’s poem become that much more audible only in its last part. Even the use of grey wash does not tone done the foreboding and threatening mood. Keeping’s male figures are bulky, partly-shaded, looming over the page, represented frontally and ready for confrontation; the sickles of the reapers resemble weapons, the helmets of the knights from the last page and their sombre expressions do not invite an encounter. They stare ahead, their facial features are grotesquely exaggerated, and the fact that they are depicted in a close-up makes the reader feel threatened by their inquisitive look; in this way, we may imaginatively enter the situation of the Lady, at whom their look is directed. Keeping also underscores the theme of imprisonment, the need for freedom and the tragic consequences of this drive: in the mirror breaking scene we see the reflection of the Lady, cracked altogether, with only her hands desperately trying to reach beyond the glassy surface. Her shattered mirror image foreshadows her destruction and doom. Interestingly, despite a heated debate with the publisher,

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Keeping upheld his decision not to include the loom in the story, arguing that “it was all a loom of the imagination” (Martin 150). Thus, on those pages in which Tennyson’s text speaks about the Lady’s patient weaving, Keeping’s illustrations depict her sitting, pensive, deep in thought, with her hands folded in her lap. Her motionless posture suggests waiting, helplessness and monotony: she spends her time doing nothing, not able to integrate with society or embark on any productive and fulfilling activity. The routine and repetitiveness of her days get emphasised when she is depicted in the same position – with a slight variation of an angle only – in two pictures of one double-spread; this duplication audibly expresses the lack of any change in the Lady’s life before the coming of Lancelot. Keeping seems to use duplicated images for emphasis, and occasionally also to indicate movement – similar device occurs a number of times: when in the text of the poem the knights “come riding two and two” (l. 61) just before the Lady realises her frustration, when Lancelot appears and when she gets up to look through the window. The last illustration in this edition of the poem warrants particular attention. As Perry Nodelman notes, “[s]ince stories characteristically achieve a state of balance only at the end, and only by moving beyond the disruptions and tensions that constitute their plots, it is often only the last picture in a picture book, the one depicting the resolution, that satisfies traditional ideas of balanced composition” (126). In his last illustration Keeping depicts the Lady in the boat, dead, arranged into a strangely sexualised pose and shown from above. The unusual perspective makes the boat resemble a coffin; the presentation is perfectly grotesque, simultaneously stressing physicality, sexuality and death. The Lady is in the process of becoming – from her living body she mutates into an object, an icon, a source of morbid visual pleasure, akin to that described by Seamus Heaney in his unsettling poem “Punishment”. Keeping addresses the morbid and the macabre, the violence of the gaze, and modernizes the story for his readers. The format of a monochrome illustration is well-suited to the sombre, disturbing perspective of the artist. According to Nodelman, “we commonly associate black and white with uncompromising truth, utter absence of subjective colouring”, which gives the image a documentary quality, “that shows exactly what there is to see without the frivolous intrusion of color” (67). This picture changes and challenges our expectations of the visual rendering of a well-known story; it introduces and highlights adult content latent in the text and emphasises the poem’s sexual, unsettling, violent and potentially abusive overtones. Commenting on the illustrator’s choices in The Lady of Shalott and in the other three poems Keeping illustrated at the same time, Douglas Martin observes that: “[…] here is a story that has been incompletely told because either the protagonists, or their narrators […] are prisoners of the conventions of the age in which they

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live”, therefore “the illustrator may comment freely from within his own contemporary perspective” (136). In 2006, a Canadian illustrator Geneviève Côté won the Elizabeth MrazikCleaver Canadian Picture Book Award for her illustrated “Lady of Shalott” (Kids Can Press, 2005), the third title to be published in an innovative series “Visions in Poetry”, featuring classic poems reinterpreted by contemporary artists and aimed at young readers. The feature bound to strike the readers at the first, even provisional glance at the book is its unusual, small and slightly elongated format, which makes the thin volume accessible and pleasant to handle, and the distinctive illustrative mode, stylized to imitate a child’s drawings. The pictures are sketchy; the depictions of human figures frequently resort to the convention of drawing faces within an oval shape, with eyes and mouths indicated by cursory contours. The drawings are characterised by delicate minimalism, the ethereal mood of the captured moment. The addition of animals – sheep, a donkey, a dog – makes the book space a friendly and domestic one. The predominant colour is blue, which may signify the waters surrounding Shalott, the longing and sadness of the Lady, but also the hope of a different, happier ending. Alongside the decision to settle on a purposefully schematic, yet refreshingly novel illustrative manner, Côté also consistently modernises the story, thus stressing its contemporaneity. She does so by depicting overhead electrical power lines, distinctly twentieth-century barges, reapers that wear black suits and black sunglasses, the goggles on Lancelot’s head, and cars. Similarly, the portrayal of the two lovers, who in the text pass alongside the road to Camelot, yet in Côté’s drawings lie in a passionate embrace, indicates the urgency of the Lady’s longing and contributes to the more tangible and less idealised feel of the story. The representation of the fateful look also merits consideration. First, Côté presents the moment when the Lady spots Lancelot’s figure in the distance. The picture actually shows a reflection of the Lady as she looks at the mirror that reflects the window. Despite the free space on the page, the “real” Lady is not drawn. The next illustration – when the Lady rises to come near to the window – is also an image reflected in the mirror, although the mirror frame is not included. As a result, both pictures comment on the possible confusion between illusion and reality, appearances and facts. Has the Lady confused her existence in the world of shadows with real life? At the moment of the performative look, she approaches the window, but instead of leaning out, she glances back at her room, uncomfortable and anxious, as if wanting to see if she has already deserved the curse, or possibly not sure what is real and what is only imagined. However, the sequence of events is indicated on the next page – her image is repeated on a double-spread (without any accompanying text). At this moment, we recognise that the curse is at work, as the mirror crashes, which partly obliterates our view of the heroine. Only now do we realise that we look at the mirror, just as the Lady

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has become conscious of the crack in her existence. The status of reality is reasserted. The duplication of images, this time for emphasis, is also used when Côté imagines the Lady’s journey: the same image is repeated three times – once as a tiny drawing accompanying the text, surrounded by plenty of white space, which may denote the unknown; then on the next double-spread, with a different background, as if the journey was not earth-, but space-bound; and once again on the page that shows how the Lady floats to Camelot. Given that the book cover also duplicates the double-spread depiction dominated by the black background, it distinctly defines the Lady’s journey as the most important motif and moment of this book. In her journey, she is a cocooned butterfly-to-be, a chrysalis waiting for the transformation; a smile lingers on her lips, her expression is serene and hopeful. It is an image of ascent, with the boat’s prow directed upwards in a diagonal axis. In the double-spread depiction, she flies into cosmic space, accompanied only by leaves and flowers, reminiscent of stars and planets. This interpretation gives an alternative meaning to the end of Tennyson’s narrative, stressing the Lady-artist’s transformative potential for rebirth and change, promising her a future different than the one the poem describes. She emerges from her ordeal very much alive, victorious and hopeful, ready to spread her wings. The Lady escapes the imprisonment and limitations of her life in Shalott, but does not land at Camelot either: rather, she is bound for a new, better, more joyful and free existence outside of the Camelot-Shalott binary. Adding a personal twist to the story, Côté included an additional last image in the picture book, after Tennyson’s text has finished, which is clearly intended as the story’s punchline. It shows the tiny figure of a woman butterfly, in flight over the towers and buildings of Camelot. Côté’s interpretation is undoubtedly the most optimistic of existing visual renderings of Tennyson’s ballad, and a comment on the time-transcending nature of the story: the space flight on which the Lady embarks will eventually bring her to the reality of the twenty-first-century readers; her choices and dilemmas, in a different guise, continue to provoke reflection and enchant us today. To conclude, it remains apparent that “The Lady of Shalott” is a text that permeated the nineteenth-century visual culture, and has continued to do so up till our contemporary times. Artists, seduced by the beauty of the poem and persuasiveness of the poetic subject, have attempted visualisations of the crucial episodes of Tennyson’s narrative. They have capitalised on the motif of the embowered maiden, the intersection of death, femininity, violence, the aesthetics and the theme of chivalric, unfulfilled love. However, as argued by Lynne Pearce, the Lady of Shalott, alive through the poem’s renderings and duplications, became a theme per se, illustrated, quoted and commented on by representations which refer to other visual depictions, not necessarily in direct connection with

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the poetic text (71). This feature was noticed already in the nineteenth century by an art critic and theorist John Ruskin, who concluded that: [M]any of the plates are very noble things, though not, it seems to me, illustrations of your [Tennyson] poems. I believe in fact that good pictures never can be; they are always another poem, subordinate but wholly different from the poet’s conception, and serve chiefly to show the reader how variously the same verses may affect various minds (Ruskin in H. Tennyson 420).

Therefore, Tennyson’s poetic subject has acquired a life of its own. However, the question that any viewer of the paintings and illustrations cognizant of the poem needs to ask is to what extent the figure of the female protagonist – the embowered woman artist – and her life story, complete with the dilemmas she had to face and the tragic consequences of her choices are visible in these representations. After close examination of these works, it becomes apparent that the Lady of Shallot has become “a concept rather than even the narrative archetype; she is a romantic idiom, a quotable catch-phrase” (Pearce 71). With notable exceptions, the bulk of the poem’s renditions perform the occultation of the important motifs of Tennyson’s narrative. What is effaced in most of these works is the determination, despair, courage of the female protagonist, and her internal conflict between duty and desire. The crucial issues of artistic creativity and the place of the artist (particularly a female artist) in society also disappear. Few of the renderings give the Lady the privilege of agency and active decision-making (visible in Waterhouse’s, Shaw’s and Côté representations); only two (Siddall’s and Pyle’s visualisations) depict her as an engaged artist/weaver, devoted to her craft, while just a small number (Côté’s, Horvitz’s and possibly Keeping’s) offer a feminist revision of the poem. The majority of remaining renditions stress the idea of femininity as a spectacle, engage with the scopophilic drive and reinforce the unequal power relations based on sexual difference and gender. Crucially, all visual versions of the poem are highly indicative of the variant Victorian, twentieth- and twenty-first-century attitudes to femininity, and the roles and positions ascribed to women. Most nineteenth-century artists depict the Lady as a trespasser, yet their paintings still emphasise various ideas. Thus, while Hunt and Pyle both stress the protagonist’s flouting the convention which confines women to an existence that is restricted to the private sphere of her home, as much as they represent the ensuing punishment, Waterhouse in his 1888 rendition concentrates on the Lady’s tragic choice and paints her as an aesthetic icon of ravished femininity. Other representations underscore the theme of love and romantic yearnings (Egley, Harrison), at the same time presenting the female body as a source of visual pleasure for the (male) gaze of the observer (Meteyard, Waterhouse). Furthermore, a large number of renditions, from the nineteenth century and well beyond (Crane’s, Grimshaw’s, Barson’s,

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Giancola’s, Hughes’s, Robertson’s, Rossetti’s), focus on the connection between femininity, aesthetics and death. They support Poe’s (in)famous proposition that “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (Poe in Bronfen Over Her Dead Body 59) and capitalise on the thrill and cognitive dissonance awakened at the aesthetically pleasing, yet disturbing sight of the female corpse. Simultaneously, they explore and respond to the visual convention present in Western culture for centuries, according to which “men act and women appear. Men look at women” (Berger 47). In this way, they engage with the questions of voyeurism, exploitation and power. As far as Barson’s, Robertson’s, Rossetti’s and Giancola’s works are concerned, the ideology they reinforce indubitably clarifies sexual difference. They stress the Lady’s femininity, understood as physical weakness, immobility, frailty, distress, passivity and vulnerability to the gaze of others, and emphasise the manhood of her observers, rendered variously as control, physical strength and the superiority of position, and always as the right to an active gaze. These pictures uphold John Berger’s influential statement that: According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. […] The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual – but its object is always exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. His presence may be fabricated, in the sense that he pretends to be capable of what he is not. But the pretence is always towards a power which he exercises on others (Berger 45–46).

Finally, it is pertinent to note that three relatively modern renditions of “The Lady of Shalott” by Shelah Horvitz (1981), Charles Keeping (1986) and Geneviève Côté (2005) stand visibly apart from all the other representations. Horvitz’s drawing, also strongly engaging with the question of looking, represents what we may term the female gaze – this picture most sympathetically and realistically depicts the tension, the distress and the determination preceding the decision the Lady of Shalott is soon to take; this depiction achieves a commendable balance between female vulnerability and agency. Côté’s illustrations, in turn, may be seen as a feminist intervention in the pictorial tradition of representing Tennyson’s subject, as they refashion the ending of the narrative creating a space for a much more positive and hopeful outcome. Keeping’s picture book emphasises the violence of the gaze, power relations conditioned by gender and the Lady’s thwarted drive for freedom. Explaining reasons for the artistic craze of illustrating “The Lady of Shalott”, Elizabeth Nelson proposes that “[t]he poem’s popularity rests, more than anything else, on its embodiment of the highly complex Victorian conception of

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woman, and the correlative Victorian attitude toward the home” (6). Expanding on this contention, it is plausible to suggest that the essential societal, cultural, legal and economic changes in later part of the nineteenth century, which concern the roles, needs and position of women can also account for the poem’s unwavering popularity. These changes include the emergence of the New Woman and the founding of various women’s organizations and institutions supporting female education and independence. Hence, the drive to represent Tennyson’s poem coincided with the heated debates about sexual difference, gender roles, restrictions placed on women and female capabilities, and the text’s visual interpretations all concern these issues. Surprisingly, there are relatively few representations of “The Lady of Shalott” executed after 1918, when the First World War ended, and the vote was finally granted to women, as if political and economic concerns brought about by the war, as well as the fact that the suffrage campaign was finally won, resulted in the shifting of the public interest from the issues of gender to the more pressing contemporary concerns. The renewal of the trend to “come back to” and “reinterpret” Tennyson’s poem, visible from the mid-twentieth century onwards and still present today, coincides with the formation and the development of the modern feminist movement and the revival of interest in the concepts of gender and sexual differences, the findings of corporeal feminism as well as the new theories of spectatorship. All in all, “The Lady of Shalott” has aged remarkably well and it remains a resonant and stimulating poem, inviting discussion both inside and outside the modern classroom.

Chapter Four: Female empowerment/female submission. Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”

Rupturing boundaries: grotesque incongruity, female agency and excessive appetite in “Goblin Market” “Goblin Market”, the text to be the subject of the last chapter of the present study, comes last for a number of reasons. First, it is the only poem written by a woman poet, and this fact stimulates interesting questions about the relation between gender and cultural production and consumption, gender and sexuality, and finally, gender identity and the self. Secondly, chronologically it is the latest of the four texts discussed, as its composition dates to 1859. Last and foremost, it embraces and synthesises the problematics from each of the previous chapters: like “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”, Christina Rossetti’s poem engages with the grotesque as an aesthetic and literary category; similarly to “The Lady of Shalott” and The Book of Thel, it explores the theme of the constraints imposed upon a female heroine, her needs and ambitions; finally, like The Visions of the Daughters of Albion it is primarily a text about the female body – here presented as hungry, both consumed and consuming, in need of discipline when experiencing its drives, fears and urges. The critics generally agree that Rossetti’s text explores the theme of fall and regeneration, but explain the plot in diverse ways. “Goblin Market” becomes, alternatively, a Christian allegory of sin, penance and redemption, a tale of the dangers of sensual and sexual yearnings, a feminist manifesto of independence achieved through sisterhood, a commentary on the dangers of consumerism and the capitalist marketplace, or a rendering of the female experience of embodiment.81 In my reading, I intend to explore what I perceive to be the central con81 In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar read the poem as a story of sexual temptation and renunciation, pp. 564–575; Elizabeth Helsinger (“Consumer Power and the Utopia of Desire: Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’”, ELH 58.4 [Winter, 1991], pp. 903–933) sees the story of Lizzie and Laura as “specifically female experience of Victorian political economy” (904) while Mary Wilson Carpenter (“‘Eat

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tradiction of the poem: the tension between a didactic, moral and ultimately Christian signification which essentially advocates female submission, and a reading that stresses a univocally pronounced praise of female self-affirmation and empowerment. To examine this apparent incongruity, I will – for the second time in this book – resort to the aesthetic category of the grotesque, which effectively elucidates the inner tensions of “Goblin Market” concerning the themes of female agency, female consumption and female rebellion. The plot of “Goblin Market” is structured around three pivotal events, which at the same time create three powerful images in the poem: Laura gorging herself on the goblin fruit, Lizzie being attacked by the goblins, and the strongly homoerotic scene of the sister’s (comm)union. These three scenes are united by the fact that they all rupture boundaries between what is expected and unexpected, appropriate and purely shocking, funny and monstrous – thus creating tensions that problematize the poem’s meaning. Equally crucially, they all concern the human (here: female) body. Therefore, each of these scenes is best understood by the recourse to the notion of the grotesque, which provides a theoretical frame that holds my interpretation together. Me, Drink Me, Love Me’: The Consumable Female Body in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’”, Victorian Poetry 2.4 [Winter, 1991], pp. 415–434) suggests that the text constructs a different view on the female body and its appetites – the body as a commodity to be consumed, but also as “consumable” – i. e. as a regenerative and self-propagating fruit. Deborah Ann Thompson (“Anorexia as a Lived Trope: Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’”, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 24.3/4 [1991], pp. 89–106), Anthony Harrison (“Christina Rossetti: Illness and Ideology”, Victorian Poetry 45.4 [Winter 2007], pp. 415–447), Anna E. MacDonald (“Edible Women and Milk Markets: The Linguistic and Lactational Exchanges of ‘Goblin Market’”, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 11.3 [Winter 2015]) and Rebecca F. Stern (“‘Adulterations Detected”: Food and Fraud in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’”, Nineteenth-Century Literature 57.4 (March 2003), pp. 477–511) focus on the symbolic and literal readings of food, appetite and bodily imagery, while Helena Michie, Dolores Rosenblum and Dorothy Mermin celebrate female sisterhood (“‘There is no Friend Like a Sister’: Sisterhood as Sexual Difference”, ELH 56.2 (Summer, 1989), pp. 401–421, Christina Rossetti: Poetry of Endurance, Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1986, “Heroic Sisterhood in ‘Goblin Market”, Victorian Poetry 21 [1983], pp. 107–118). A large number of interpretations suggest Christian readings: Jerome McGann writes that “Everyone agrees that the poem contains the story of temptation, fall and redemption, and some go as far as to state that the work is fundamentally a Christian allegory” (“Christina Rossetti’s Poems: A New Edition and A Revaluation”, Victorian Studies 23 [Winter 1980], p. 247). For other Christian readings see Marylu Hill, “‘Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me’: Eucharist and the Erotic Body in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market”, Victorian Poetry 43.4 (2005), pp. 455–472 and Heather McAlpine, “‘Would Not Open Lip from Lip’ Sacred Orality and the Christian Grotesque in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’”, Victorian Review 36.1 (Spring 2010), pp. 114– 128. Some critics also offer biographical readings based on the fact that at the time of writing the poem, Christina Rossetti worked at the St. Mary Magdalene Home for Fallen Women at Highgate Hill and was very much concerned with the problem of prostitution (see, for instance, Jan Marsh, “Christina Rossetti’s Vocation: The Importance of ‘Goblin Market’”, Victorian Poetry 32.3/4, [1994], pp. 233–248).

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In her book The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play, Frances S. Connelly identifies mutability, metamorphosis and play as crucial elements of the grotesque mode. She writes: “to apprehend the grotesque, it is essential to understand it as being ‘in play’. It always represents a state of change, breaking open what we know and merging it with the unknown. As such, the one consistent visual attribute of the grotesque is that of flux” (5). Then, she goes on to add that “[a]n effective grotesque fixes our attention on an existing boundary, making the contours of the familiar and ‘normal’ visible to us, even as it intermingles with the alien and unexpected” (11). Her remarks are pertinent to “Goblin Market” in several ways. First of all, it is a poem which has metamorphosis and fluidity at its very heart; secondly, it operates on the boundary between the realistic and the fantastic, inviting both orders into play, and its power rests upon its “curious mixture of otherworldliness and acute materiality” (Menke 105). Thirdly, the idea of play understood both as playfulness and creating tensions which are difficult to resolve is central for this text. The first of the three major events of the poem – Laura succumbing to temptation and indulging herself in an orgiastic feast – comprises several grotesque motifs, the most important of which are the goblins, the fruit and bodily excess. Goblin merchants, the main vehicle of the fantastic in the poem, can be interpreted within the diablerie tradition of the grotesque, but they also resemble caricatures existing in the carnivalesque mode.82 They simultaneously provoke laughter and unease, incorporating elements of distortion and excess. Being funny, they are also deeply transgressive. Although they behave like people – they walk, talk and haggle – yet they are animals, and it is their animalistic nature that is most emphasised in their behaviour. Existing on the verge of the two realms, the realistic and the fantastic, they are powerfully liminal. Their descriptions stress their carnality, however, primarily they evoke the flesh in its uncomfortable, low, repulsive aspects, stimulating distaste and disgust: most of the animals the goblins are identified with are furry (wombat, rat), bristly (ratel), sleazy (snail), generally unpleasant to touch, and not really domestic. In culture, they are frequently associated with dirt, disease, manipulation and dishonesty. They have bristles, tails, fur, whiskers; they scuttle, purr, hobble, chuckle, clap, crow, fly and puff. While they are more individualised in the first part of the poem (“One had a cat’s face, / One whisked a tail”, ll. 71–72), nevertheless they speak in one

82 For a discussion of different strands within the grotesque mode see Frances S. Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2014). The carnivalesque mode is extensively discussed by M. Bakhtin in Rabelais and his World (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984).

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voice, “cooing all together” (l. 78). Towards the end, they become one collective goblin body, the embodiment of the monstrous.83 In his Monster Theory: Reading Culture Jeffrey Jerome Cohen states that the cultural role of the monstrous is to stimulate “fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy, giving them life and an uncanny independence. The monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically ‘that which reveals’, ‘that which warns’” (qtd in Connelly 116). In their grotesque monstrosity, Rossetti’s goblins also have to be read; they are a powerful warning for women against falling into desire and awakening their sensual appetites. They also reveal how patriarchal culture fashions the female appetite as monstrous, insatiate, uncontained, and ultimately lethal. The goblin fruit, the object of the unrestrained female appetite, is another collective grotesque element in the poem. Like the goblins, their fruits also straddle the boundaries between what is natural and unnatural, marvellous and devious. Traditionally emblems of nature, in Rossetti’s poetic tale they become profoundly unnatural, in their orgiastic excess of shapes, colours, textures and tastes; marvellously, they have blossomed and ripened together, despite the fact that they stem from different countries, climates and geographical latitudes. They are a curiosity, and they awaken the sense of wonder in the beholder, yet they are monstrous in their origin and defiance of nature. The question asked by Lizzie: “Who knows upon what soil they fed / Their hungry thirsty roots?” (ll. 44–45) encapsulates the chief binary opposition of the text, the juxtaposition of the natural and unnatural, which soon acquires a series of related meanings: safe and dangerous, proper and improper, virtuous and sinful.84 The fruit evokes beauty and corruption in one: irresistible once tasted, it cloys, wreaks havoc and destruction, and leads to an untimely death. To a large extent, the poem can be read as a story about maturation and growth, figured as the awakening of individual desire and cast within the familiar frame of the fall narrative. Lizzie and Laura, the two sisters, lead a repetitive and 83 Helena Michie argues for the individuality of the goblins: “the repetition of the initial ‘one’ sets each individual goblin man off from the others” (“‘There is no Friend Like a Sister’: Sisterhood as Sexual Difference”, ELH 56.2 [Summer 1989], p. 416); yet, in the later part of the text the goblins have the same function, behave in the same way and react identically. Moreover, the language of the poem similarly suggests their blending into one category – Rossetti addresses the goblin merchants as “they” (ll. 370, 390, 399, “the evil people” (l. 437), and, alternatively “some” (ll. 445, 446). 84 For the elucidation of the major binary oppositions in Rossetti’s poem, one of which is between gardens and antigardens, as well the natural and the unnatural, see Dolores Rosenblum, “Goblin Market: Dearth and Sufficiency” in her book Christina Rossetti: Poetry of Endurance. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986, pp. 63– 108.

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uneventful life at the beginning of the poem, limited to the household chores of kneading cakes, sweeping floors, and milking cows, yet they seem to enjoy it. Interestingly, from the start they are represented as virtually identical. Both have golden hair (“Golden head by golden head” l. 184), fair, almost white complexion (‘Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow” l. 189), are delicate and dainty (“Like two blossoms on one stem”, “Like two wands of ivory” ll. 188, 190). A string of images stressing identicality also underlines their sameness: they are compared to two snowflakes, two flowers, two wands and two pigeons. Even at the initial stage of the poem when they are for the first time confronted with the goblins, to a certain moment they behave in a very similar way, both lying “With clasping arms and cautioning lips, / With tingling cheeks and finger tips” (ll. 38–39), their curiosity obviously piqued by the goblin cries. Similarly, they both admonish each other not to expose themselves to temptation. Laura cautions Lizzie: “We must not look at goblin men / We must not buy their fruits;” (ll. 42–43) while Lizzie warns her sister “Laura, Laura / You should not peep at goblin men” (ll. 48–49). The problem in the text starts when their apparent identicality begins to crumble; sameness becomes transformed into difference as they answer the call of desire in two different ways. Laura, stretching her “gleaming neck” (l. 81) to see better both the goblin men and what they have on offer, in consequence becomes an Eve figure, falling into desire fuelled by her curiosity to know and to experience. Serena Trowbridge notes that “Laura’s succumbing to temptation creates a grotesque figure of excess” (120–121). Moreover, Laura’s excessive indulgence is pertinent to Mikhail Bakhtin’s attention to representations of distorted, outsized or undersized, deformed or obscene human figures as characteristic for the grotesque. In particular, the image of “the gaping mouth” is relevant here. According to Bakhtin, grotesque representations of the body are dominated by this image, because “it is within [the mouth] that the confines between bodies and between the body and the world are overcome: there is an interchange and an interorientation” (317). Laura’s hunger, her greedy openness towards what goblins have on offer, is a variation of this very image. Her appetite, once unleashed, becomes an elemental force not to be stopped or contained. It is not only excessive but also unnatural: she is still hungry despite having consumed a large amount of food. She devours the fruit in spite of the physical pain it causes her, sucking “until her lips [are] sore” (l. 136), losing the sense of time and place. Describing this experience, she confesses: “I ate and ate my fill, / Yet my mouth waters still” (ll. 165–6) and promises herself more indulgence the following day. She seems to celebrate the awakening of her appetite as much as the taste of the fruit. The excess of her craving is expressed by her fascination with the variety of fruit, whose juice is sweeter than honey, stronger than wine, clearer than water (ll. 129–131) and whose abundance is overwhelming (“melons icy–cold / Piled on a dish of gold /

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Too huge for me to hold” ll. 175–177). Therefore, goblin food becomes a powerful symbol of the forbidden fruit which women like Laura crave, if only they can come to terms with their yearning. In this way, the goblins are revelatory in one more sense – they are the impulse to understand one’s own intense desire. However, the goblin fruit is also, or maybe primarily, an antithesis of the kind of food which a virtuous woman would want. The proper food for maidens, as Heather McAlpine claims, are the “cakes of whitest wheat” (l. 205), suitable for “dainty mouths” (l. 206) of “modest maidens” (l. 209). In this way, the goblin fruit is set against the cakes which do not taint the maidens’ spiritual purity (121). The whiteness of cakes for ladies is contrasted with the orgy of colours, tastes, odours and textures of the forbidden fruit. Also, the way in which the “good food” would be consumed by well-behaved girls dramatically differs from Laura’s unrestrained devouring. In the section “Habits and Manners Which Indicate Gentility When Eating” from his manual on Victorian etiquette, Thomas E. Hill includes specific rules and regulations referring to table manners, some of which include statements like “Never fill the mouth very full”, “Never eat very fast”, “Never use anything but a fork or spoon in feeding yourself” or “Never carry away fruits or confectionary from the table” (158). Proper food consumption is linked to both class and gentility and indicates social propriety. In Rossetti’s text, it is analogous with not looking at the goblins and the compliance to fulfil numerous household chores and talk “as modest maidens should” (l.209). Thus, conforming to the etiquette relates directly not only to appropriate, socially expected behaviour but also to morality. We remember that those “cakes of whitest wheat” result from the girls’ labour at home, their appropriately feminine conduct: they knead the pastry after preparing the flour and completing other household tasks. Therefore, as various historians of gender have shown, the readiness to embrace such a set of norms translated into the ideal of true womanhood and indicated respectability, moral purity, chastity, submission and obedience. On the other hand, Laura’s overindulgence signifies physical, moral and social transgression. It is a grotesque outburst of the monstrous appetite, the dance of the unruly, a sharp contrast to good manners and feminine restraint advocated by etiquette and conduct guidebooks. As a result, the message of the first half of Rossetti’s poem is as straightforward as it is conservative: to look at the goblins, to want and try their food is deeply transgressive as it leads to the abandoning of what is regarded as appropriate womanly behaviour; it signals a severe lapse and results in moral and physical decay. Therefore, in “Goblin Market” the fruit/food (and the urge to consume it) generates a number of meaningful metaphors. Metonymically linked to appetite, metaphorically it can be understood as a set of things and prospects beyond the reach of Laura, or, in more general terms, beyond the grasp of women living in Rossetti’s times. It signals consumer desire – conceptualised as the urge to

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choose, spend, possess – which merges with Laura’s sexual desire fuelled by her subjective positioning as an active chooser rather than a chosen object. Hence, from this perspective the fruit acquires a positive meaning: it may be read as an expression of the craving for freedom and the right of choice in relation to the way of life, education, occupation, sexual choices and marriage; it stresses the results of the ideology of separate spheres, which excludes women from active buying, understood as consumption, but also as independent decision-making. Moreover, writing as long ago as in 1979, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar note that through its profound artificiality, the fruit functions in opposition to nature, therefore it may denote art: it is “the unnatural but honey-sweet fruit of art, fruit that is analogous to (or identical with) the luscious fruit of self-gratifying sensual pleasure” (570). Therefore, Laura’s going to the market is a significant action not only in that she breaks the taboo of looking at the goblins and in this way exposes herself to temptation; it is an attempt to reclaim the market for women as active and independent consumers and/or producers of art and culture, equal participants in the exchange.85 Promptly, Rossetti’s text unveils the first of its tensions: while Laura wants to be seen as an independent consumer, she cannot be one because she is not economically prepared to enter into an exchange with the goblins on equal terms: she has no money. As a result, caught between the force of her hunger for the fruit – the immediacy of her urgent desire, and her lack of means to satisfy it in a way that does not violate the rules of propriety, she decides to buy the fruit using the only currency she possesses: her golden lock. Rossetti stresses the correlation between female virtue and hair in materialistic terms, equating golden lock with gold as a precious metal. Doing this, she comments upon the practice of the trade in women, in the form of prostitution as much as in treating marriages as business deals. We may also read this correlation as a comment on how women were an object of consumption for artists – including the Pre-Raphaelite circle – who used their faces, hair and bodies to produce meanings whose signification is located not in the portrayed model, but rather in a set of other concepts (the power, dominance, social position, genius, the money of the artist who produced it or the owner who bought it).86 Moreover, through the depiction of the ani85 In her chapter “Tasting the ‘Fruit Forbidden’: Gender, Intertextuality and Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market”, Catherine Maxwell proposes a reading of “Goblin Market” as a commentary on “women’s dangerous yet necessary relation to the male literary tradition” (85). She sees the poem as an allegory of a woman writer’s engagement with texts of her male predecessors and shows how Lizzie, in a daring attempt, stole the male juice, transformed and integrated it into what may be seen as a female literary tradition. The Culture of Christina Rossetti, edited by Mary Arsenau, Anthony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999). 86 This reading rests upon the idea of woman as sign, developed in 1978 by Elizabeth Cowie in her essay which appeared under such a title in the first edition of M/F; the concept was next

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malistic goblins, Rossetti identifies men’s sexual exploitation of women with “beastliness” (Maxwell “Tasting the ‘Fruit Forbidden’” 95). A number of critics noticed the fact that the exchange of hair for fruit has undeniable sexual undertones. In The Erotic World of A Faery Maureen Duffy claims that the precious golden lock can be seen as pubic hair (Duffy 272). Moreover, the story of Jeanie (recalling Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s dramatic monologue about prostitution, Jenny) that both parallels and functions as a foil to Laura’s adventure also clearly locates the meaning of both in the sexual sphere. By drawing an explicit parallel between Laura’s dwindling and Jeanie’s fall and untimely death (she perished after having tasted the joys that “brides hope to have” l. 314), Rossetti unequivocally suggests the metaphorical meaning of the fruit feast to be sexual. Anthony Harrison suggests, “[i]n cultural context, this poem may be read as a monitory exemplum and thus an extreme instance of Victorian sexual repression: it reflects a profound fear of female sexuality and its potential consequences” (“Illness and Ideology” 416). However, this straightforward interpretation is problematized by the story’s explicit correlation between the fall seen as a sexual transgression and the equally important Christian context of the disobedience and fall of man, with its primarily moral implications.87 At this moment in the narrative, the text’s chief incongruity reveals itself: despite its seemingly positive associations with freedom, agency, independence and sensuality, the fruit proves treacherous and almost lethal. Laura is not only unable to satiate her appetite, but also, deprived of the food she became addicted to, she dwindles at an alarming pace. The changes that befell her remind us of Mary Russo’s analysis of the grotesque, which – like Bakhtin’s – locates the grotesque in the human body, suggesting that while the “classical body is transcendent and monumental, closed, static, self-contained, symmetrical, and sleek”, by contrast, the grotesque body is “open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple, and changing” (Russo 8). Laura’s alternate secretive binging and fasting as well as the mysterious metamorphosis of her ageing, in its rapidity and unpredictability, are as grotesque as her earlier lack of restraint. She becomes deployed by feminist critics Pollock and Cherry when they wrote an influential text “Woman as sign in Pre-Raphaelite literature: the representation of Elizabeth Siddall”. As they suggest, “[t]he feminine is located by the textual strategies and ideological formations of art history as the passive, beautiful or erotic object of a creativity exclusively tied to the masculine”. Vision and Difference. Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge), p. 91. The essay “Woman as sign in Pre-Raphaelite literature: the representation of Elizabeth Siddall”, written in collaboration with Deborah Cherry, is included as a chapter in Pollock’s book. 87 Serena Trowbridge notes: “The fall of Laura is indeed described in sexual terms, but the fact that she is tempted by luscious fruit offered by subhuman species clearly allies her temptation to that of Eve. In succumbing, Laura’s fall is moral, not sexual” (123).

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consumed by her own insatiable appetite. Moreover, her startling bodily transformation – “sunk eyes and faded mouth” (l. 288) – is correlated with the fact that she no more finds her everyday existence satisfactory. While Lizzie still fulfils all her household tasks “with an open heart”, Laura follows “in an absent dream”, “sick in part” (ll. 210–12). Her sickness is thus both bodily and spiritual. Finally, she stops doing anything at all. Desperate, she “sat up in a passionate yearning, / And gnash’d her teeth for baulk’d desire, and wept / As if her heart would break” (ll. 266–268). Physically, she gets old almost overnight and cannot recover; her hair grows grey, her body dries up and withers. This is followed by her final abstaining from all household chores: She no more swept the house, Tended the fowls or cows, Fetch’d honey, kneaded cakes of wheat, Brought water from the brook: But sat down listless in the chimney-nook And would not eat. (ll. 293–298)

Consistent with the text’s ambivalent play of meanings, Laura’s fading away and her inability to engage in any productive activity may be read as a physical demonstration of her spiritual sickness resulting from her fall/sin or as a result of her realisation – as a consequence of her initial brave and daring venture into the market – that the placid and conventional role of a housewife which she is supposed to fulfil because of her gender is not sufficient anymore. Her behaviour can easily be identified with the symptoms of depression: the lack of interest in the outside world, renunciation of duties, neglecting hygiene and one’s appearance, turning down food. Her refusal to eat, in particular, may denote both depression and protest. Having tasted, for a brief moment, of the food of a different kind, she finds the return to her existence from “before the fall” impossible; but since the imaginative, creative and independent life is not a plausible option, death seems imminent. In order to save her sister, Lizzie decides to act. Despite her firm conviction that the goblin fruit is as treacherous as it is dangerous, she nevertheless ventures to the market. Interestingly, despite her reservations, the poem seems to stress a positive change in Lizzie as she gets out of the house and nears the goblin sphere. Her senses grow more acute and the journey stimulates her interest in her surroundings: “for the first time in her life” she “[b]egan to listen and look” (ll. 327– 328). Metaphorically, she grows more aware, and possibly critical, of the limitations that constrain the female sphere. Moreover, her interest in the outer world may also denote a budding need for questions concerning its organization, and slowly emerging doubt as to whether the social rules imposed on her gender are

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as natural as they are claimed to be. The positive aspect of Lizzie’s awakening has been noted by Dolores Rosenblum, who states that she began to act “without the benefit of unreflective communal wisdom. No longer a Greek chorus, Lizzie becomes more like a tragic protagonist or a heroic quester who must risk her life to prevail over evil forces, and who must draw upon her own resources, including guile as well as strength of will” (79). Crucially, unlike Laura, Lizzie can see and meet the goblins: she has not been tempted yet and therefore is the prey the goblins desire. Also unlike Laura, her sister comes financially prepared, having taken a silver penny to pay for the fruit. Elizabeth Helsinger links Lizzie’s sudden alertness to her surroundings to the fact that for the first time in her life she has power as a consumer (923). Nevertheless, even now she learns that, with money or without, she is not an equal partner in economic exchange. The goblins do not want to sell Laura their fruit: they want her to consume it on the spot. If she eats, she will become addicted to the forbidden food, wither like Laura, and ultimately die like Jeanie. However, Lizzie tries to negotiate a middle ground and take the fruit home, with a hope that instead of killing, it will revive her sister. For the goblin merchants, such an option is out of the question: they want to dispose of their produce on their own terms and get profit different than money for what they jealously guard. The scene of Lizzie’s encounter with the goblins is the second pivotal moment in the narrative, and again the grotesque is at its very centre. At this moment, the grotesque appears in the elements of distortion and excess, the emphasis on carnality and (denied) orality, and the combination of the high and low, comic and tragically serious. While we can discern an undeniably comic potential in the image of the goblins “Chattering like magpies, / Fluttering like pigeons, / Gliding like fishes” (ll. 345–347) who rush to meet Lizzie, Flying, running, leaping, Puffing and blowing, Chuckling, clapping, crowing, Clucking and gobbling, Mopping and mowing, Full of airs and graces, Pulling wry faces, (ll. 332–338)

the encounter turns out to be not comic but traumatically brutal, a scene of abuse and an attempted rape. When she declines the feast, she is pushed, pinched, jostled, scratched and partially stripped of her clothes; the goblins smear the fruit all over her face and body, imprinting her with their mark, trying to force her to swallow. Throughout the ordeal and despite her physical suffering, Lizzie in-

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wardly rejoices, as she knows that she has won: she obtained the food her sister needs to survive. The description of Lizzie, “[w]hite and golden” (l. 408), who is Like a lily in a flood,– Like a rock of blue-vein’d stone Lash’d by tides obstreperously,– Like a beacon left alone In a hoary roaring sea, Sending up a golden fire […] (ll. 409–414)

stresses her self-possession, determination, purity and steadfastness, and thus, in many readings, Lizzie becomes a type of a female Christ, through her sacrifice bringing new life to those who have sinned and therefore live in darkness threatened by eternal death.88 Dolores Rosenblum suggests that Lizzie “achieves her highest self-realization in being for another” (82). However, even if she recognizes in Rossetti’s heroine an image of “resplendent female power”, she suggests that this power stems from renunciation, endurance and, at times, humility (79). Her reading is contested by Deborah Ann Thompson, who sees in Lizzie’s attitude an extreme, obsessive fear of (goblin) food, and in a radically different vein asks: “Yet are Lizzie’s resistance and vigilance really affirmative, alternative forms of power, as Rosenblum would have them, or are they internalizations of patriarchal surveillance, or even new ways of producing self-discipline?” (94). Despite this critical controversy, the assault scene, being deeply transgressive, is also acutely grotesque in that it mingles high and low; Lizzie, a beacon of moral guidance, a Christ-like figure, is being accosted by a group of furry, snarling, scuttling, chuckling and grunting animal-like little men. Her modestly pursed lips are a direct contrast to the “gaping mouth” of hungry Laura; yet, both carnality and orality, even if immediately denied, are deeply implicated in this scene, since goblin pulp derived from this collective-almost-rape is smeared all over Lizzie’s body for one ultimate purpose only: to be consumed by her sister. The description of Lizzie’s sacrifice is rendered in the sexually suggestive language. The goblins encourage Lizzie to “[l]ook at [their] apples”, “[b]ob at [their] cherries”, “[b]ite at [their] peaches” (ll. 352, 354–355), ask her to “[p]luck them and suck them” (l. 361), which, accompanied by the fact that Lizzie immediately thinks of the fallen Jeanie, once again firmly locates the significance of the goblins and their fruit in the sexual sphere. Also, as has already been noted, Lizzie’s resistance is rendered in images accentuating her moral steadfastness: she is “a royal virgin town / Topp’d with gilded dome and spire” (ll. 418–419) and “a fruit-crown’d orange-tree” (l. 416) while her foes are “[m]ad to tug her 88 Cf. Marylu Hill, op.cit., Heather McAlpine, op.cit., and Janet Galligani Casey, “The Potential of Sisterhood: Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’”, Victorian Poetry 29 (1991), pp. 63–78.

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standard down” (l.421). Yet, similar to what we have witnessed when Laura approached the goblins, the poem’s language betrays a deep fascination with what is seen as dangerous and evil; this danger is powerfully seductive. This is the chief ambivalence in Christina Rossetti’s text: the prospects offered by evil men are actually captivating and very difficult to resist, and their significance is not stable and univocal. At once morally problematic, at the same time they offer a set of positive meanings – self-fulfilment and gratification, self-sufficiency, independence, agency. The prospects stimulate fear as well as desire; their attaining comes at the cost of active rebellion against established standards and therefore is profoundly ambiguous. This is also why neither the interpretation that sees the consumption of the fruit as a Christian story of the fall from paradise nor the reading that interprets the fruit as positive and liberating on its own is sufficient by itself, without consideration of the other perspective. Cora Kaplan identifies these tensions when she claims that the collective rape scene is pivotal in “Goblin Market” since it marks “the site of contradiction within a poem that struggles to represent female sexual fantasy while being constrained nevertheless by the guilt inherent in even the most displaced expression of such fantasy” (qtd in Thompson 95). Similarly, psychoanalysts like Karen Horney and Wilhelm Reich have suggested that female rape fantasies “function as a means to diminish women’s guilt feelings in regard to their sexual desires and practices” (Silke 72). Lizzie’s heroic resistance to the goblin assault, then, may also be read as a displacement of her repressed need – possibly embodied in her sister – of selfaffirmation and gratification of female pleasure. Once released, Lizzie runs home to Laura and the poem hurtles towards its (literal and metaphorical) climax. In words resounding of ecstatic abandon, she offers herself to her sister: 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; (ll. 466–472)

Now, food is sex and sex is life; what was deemed poisonous and dangerous, now appears life-sustaining and benevolent. At this moment, many of the grotesque elements present earlier are synthesised: the bizarre reversal of roles, in which Lizzie assumes a position of an active lover, culturally attributed to men, therefore relating to the carnivalesque “woman on top” imagery; the “gaping mouth” image; excessive and distorted representation of both bodily pleasure and bodily

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pain. Critical consensus regarding this crucial scene is usually reached through an assumption that goblin fruit has been transformed through Lizzie’s sacrifice. Heather McAlpine claims that “[Lizzie’s] display of virtue brought to the very brink of ruin transforms the value of the fruit juice: once it has been squeezed out of the fruits and smeared on Lizzie’s body, it symbolizes resistance to temptation precisely because it is on – and, therefore, importantly, not in – her closed body” (124). As a result, Laura’s consumption of Lizzie’s body is a type of transformative Holy Communion, an antidote to the poison, which renders the previously craved fruit loathsome and bitter. Lizzie is heralded as a female Christ, her sister’s saviour. In one of the interpretations strongly relying on the religious potential of this scene, Marylu Hill states that “Rossetti’s use of the term antidote and her emphasis on the transformative power of Lizzie’s sacrifice replicate accurately an image that is central to Eucharist doctrine, and one which the Tractarians found particularly compelling to explain the ‘realness’ of the Eucharistic actions of eating and drinking” (463). In a similar vein, Serena Trowbridge remarks that Lizzie’s assault and the consequent salvation scene can be conceptualised as a “spectacle of the helpless woman” and “sacrifice of female flesh” as a “retribution for ‘fallenness’” (140). A crucial element in all the interpretations that stress Laura’s spiritual salvation is that once she consumes the fruit pulp off Lizzie’s body, she discovers that she does not want it anymore: renunciation is placed firmly at the centre of this rejuvenating scene. Nevertheless, even if the fruit tastes bitter, there is a sense of victorious, wild abandon in its consumption, in which both women participate. This feature has been noticed by critics, among them by Mary Wilson Carpenter, who writes that “[t]hough the juice is ‘wormwood’ to her tongue, and she ‘loathes’ the feast, she appears to experience a masochistic orgy – writhing like one possessed, leaping and singing, and beating her breast. Lizzie appears to have restored her sister by recirculating the erotic energies first set into motion by the goblin market” (430). One may wonder, however, whether the magical change in the fruit’s properties can be fully explained by Lizzie’s Christ-like self-sacrifice? Perhaps once brought home – to the female private sphere, the goblin food becomes accessible, and thus it radically changes women’s lives? If the fruit stands for what is denied to women – economic freedom, sensual gratification, self-sufficiency, access to market, art and culture – and if Laura is dying from a sense of deprivation, then when Lizzie brings the fruit home, i. e. makes it available, her sister’s craving is finally satiated. In this reading, Lizzie saves Laura, but not necessarily in the religious and spiritual sense. In its essentially feminist message, it is a tempting explanation: it would allow us to resolve the tensions between the fruit’s harmful and liberating properties. Nevertheless, the idea of Laura’s metamorphosis still remains problematic, since it ultimately leads her to renounce what the goblins

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have on offer. As a result, Laura is restored to both health and innocence, laughing “in the innocent old way” (l. 538), her hair once again golden and shiny. Her rejuvenation is regression to the stage from before the formative experience – she behaves happily and carelessly, resumes her household duties, becomes almost identical to Lizzie, one of “two pigeons” (l. 185), “two wands of ivory” (l. 190) and “two flakes of new-fall’n snow” (l. 189). Her progress towards individuation is thus thwarted, and Christina Rossetti’s sexual politics discloses itself as ultimately conservative, despite the promise the poem seemed to offer.

Ruskin, the grotesque and “Goblin Market” The puzzling outcome of the story which reinstates both Lizzie and Laura at home, but purged of the desire for what the goblin fruit represented, can perhaps be elucidated by recourse to the critical writings of Christina Rossetti’s contemporary, John Ruskin, and his theory of the grotesque in particular. As for Ruskin, so for Christina Rossetti the grotesque possesses not only aesthetic but primarily moral significance. In her book Christina Rossetti’s Gothic, Serena Trowbridge argues that Rossetti’s grotesque figures in poetry owe much to Ruskin, particularly in the relation of aesthetics to morality (89), and this comment proves a fruitful inspiration for my reading of “Goblin Market”. Ruskin discusses the grotesque in two of his pivotal works, Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice. In his understanding of the term, it denotes two different ideas, one positive (true or symbolic grotesque), and the other strongly pejorative (false or ignoble grotesque). Ruskin historicizes them: as Lucy Hartley explains, “[i]n qualitative terms the grotesque is doubleedged: it is fine, noble, true when applied to Gothic art and architecture and yet terrible, ignoble, false when applied to Renaissance art and architecture” (83). In one of his better-known chapters of the third volume of The Stones of Venice, “Grotesque Renaissance”, Ruskin talks about the grotesque as a moral as well as aesthetic degradation: in these terms he discusses the “corruption” of the fine architecture of Venice, which in his view corresponds to the wider downfall of Christian and social values, resulting from the fall “from pride to infidelity, and from infidelity to the unscrupulous pursuit of pleasure (3:124). Ruskin starts his discussion of the degrading grotesque mode of the Renaissance Venetian architecture by a description of an ornamental mouth on the church of Santa Maria Formosa. The ornament is “a head, – huge, inhuman, and monstrous – leering in bestial degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described, or to be beheld for more than an instant […]”. Such heads, which “disgrace” the walls of the buildings of Venice, “in their expression of sneering mockery, in most cases enhanced by thrusting out the tongue” are “evidences of a delight in the con-

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templation of bestial vice, and the expression of low sarcasm, which is, I believe, the most hopeless state into which the human mind can fall” (3:134). This false or ignoble grotesque is a testimony to disintegration and moral downfall, reflected in “a spirit of brutal mockery and insolent jest”, finding expression in “most deformed and monstrous” forms of art (3:124). The false grotesque is the degradation of what used to be sacred; it is contamination, perversion and moral sickness. Ruskin reminds us to differentiate it from the noble grotesque, “that magnificent condition of fantastic imagination”, which he attributes to “the Northern Gothic mind” (3:135). In this way he alludes to his earlier “The Nature of Gothic”, a text from the second volume of The Stones of Venice which discusses the chief characteristics of the Gothic style: savageness, changefulness, naturalism, grotesqueness, rigidity and redundance (2:169). He repeats the same argument in “Grotesque Renaissance” when in the relevant passage he states that the grotesque is composed of two elements: the ludicrous and the fearful (The Stones of Venice 3:139).89 His definition anticipates modern theories that see the grotesque as a combination of the playful and the serious, or of the comic and the terrible. Ruskin treats this second – noble or true – type of the grotesque in greater detail in his third volume of Modern Painters, where he explicitly links it to creative imagination and the use of symbols. There, he defines the grotesque as “the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connection, of truths which it would have taken a long way to express in any verbal way and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character” (3:103). The “fearless connection” indirectly evokes grotesque incongruity. Because of its deeply paradoxical nature, the purpose of this grotesque mode is revelatory: it is in the tension between unresolved and contradictory elements where the viewer/reader finds what Ruskin calls “truths”. At this point, it is informative to note that in his theory of art Ruskin consistently links truth to art, nature and morality. In the first volume of Modern Painters, he states that: “[n]othing can atone for the want of truth, not the most brilliant imagination, the most playful fancy, the most pure feeling […] because Nature is so immeasurably superior to all that the human mind can conceive, that every departure from her is a fall beneath her. All falsehood must be a blot as well as a sin, an injury as well as a deception” (Modern Painters 1:48). Thus, the aesthetic and the moral are intricately combined. Moreover, the noble – symbolic – grotesque is necessary, simply because human nature is imperfect and 89 Cf. a passage from Ruskin’s chapter The Nature of Gothic, where he defines the sense of the grotesque as the “tendency to delight in fantastic and ludicrous, as well as sublime, images” (The Stones of Venice 2:223).

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cannot otherwise discern the vaster, spiritual, sublime truths without their grotesque guise. In “Grotesque Renaissance” from The Stones of Venice Ruskin writes: the fallen human soul, at its best, must be as a diminishing glass, and that a broken one, to the mighty truths of the universe round it; and the wider the scope of its glance, and the vaster the truths into which it obtains an insight, the more fantastic their distortion is likely to be, as the winds and the vapours trouble the field of the telescope most when it reaches farthest (3:169).

Ruskin explains the difference between the two grotesque contradictory modes comparing two statues: a medieval sculpture of a griffin from a cathedral in Verona (a true grotesque) and a frieze in Rome in the temple of Antoninus and Faustina (a false or ignoble grotesque) (Modern Painters 3:111). The classical griffin, though exquisite in execution, is just a composition of the body parts of an eagle and a lion, produced by “piecing together” of “incongruent elements of the world [the artist] knows” (Edwards and Graulund 18) and Ruskin finds it lacking in expression, while the “true” griffin is the expression of the powerful imagination of the artist. Correlations between the grotesque mode as employed by Christina Rossetti and its understanding by Ruskin are palpably detectable in “Goblin Market”. First of all, we must once again note deformity and monstrosity, but not without playfulness, to be the basic characteristics of Rossetti’s goblins. In Ruskin’s view, the ludicrous element of the grotesque provokes laughter, but because of its fearful component, it is always tinged with anxiety. The goblins, therefore, are funny in their exaggerated beastly nature, but also threatening in their malice. What is more, like the frieze, they also manifest “piecing together” of various incongruous, human and animal, features and ways of behaviour. In like manner, when Ruskin describes the ornament on the church of Santa Maria Formosa as an example of the typical grotesque, he concentrates on the protruding tongue as an expression of “sneering mockery”. His phrasing brings us quite close to the language Christina Rossetti uses describing the goblins’ attitudes and behaviour: they are “leering” (l. 93) “[p]ulling wry faces, / [d]emure grimaces (ll. 338–339) “[g]runting and snarling” (l. 393). Being half-men, half-animals, they are deformed and debased, and their moral and spiritual dwarfing manifests in their outer, visible forms. By extension, their deformity and monstrosity, this time understood as a perversion of nature’s truth, is epitomised in the collective body of the goblin’s fruit, which, when read within the Christian frame of the fall, in itself connotes degradation, debasement and moral danger. The goblins epitomise the ignoble or false grotesque. Secondly, like the Venetian descent from the Gothic grace and spirituality to the debasement and perversion of the grotesque forms of Renaissance art and

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architecture, Laura’s fall into the bodily excess and desire represented by her gorging on the goblin fruit is, as already suggested, likewise a fall into immorality and sin. Similarly, Ruskin notes, the fall of the Venetians was “from pride to infidelity, and from infidelity to the unscrupulous pursuit of pleasure” and “the attainment of the means of self-indulgence (The Stones of Venice 3:124). Laura’s conduct is unnatural, perverse and transgressive, and results in her moral and physical disintegration. Her metamorphosis, rendered as the extremity of desire, physical dwindling, depression, inexplicable ageing, and immoderate behaviour, is grotesque in the way it becomes excessive and ruptures the categories of age, propriety, sanity and moderation. It becomes an outer, visibly discernible manifestation of spiritual corruption. In this way Christina Rossetti’s use of the grotesque relates to that of Ruskin, particularly regarding his ideas about the relationship between internal truths and external appearances in architecture and art: just as the nobility and spiritual purity are communicated by visual harmony, beauty and dignity, so their perversion finds its expression in the impropriety of behaviour and bizarre, hideous, unnatural and incongruous forms. Likewise, Ruskin “sees in the instability of the grotesque form the means of a moral education of the English nation” (Hartley 87), which is not incompatible with Rossetti’s didactic ending of the poem. Laura’s grotesque fall – epitomised by her unappeased, voluptuous desire – may be corrected by the sisterly bond of Christian love. Ignoble grotesque may be redeemed by the almost sublime, noble one, which operates, as Ruskin would have it, through gaps that reveal eternal truths, through a bold and fierce juxtaposition of opposites. Following Ruskin’s ideas, we may discern the noble grotesque in the scene of Laura’s restoration to the world of the sane and living. Serena Trowbridge contends that Rossetti’s use of the grotesque in her poetry has much in common with that described by Ruskin. For both writers, the grotesque may provide access to the sublime, thus connecting the natural and supernatural, human and divine (95–98). In “Goblin Market”, the grotesque scene of the sisters’ physical union – which is openly excessive and transgressive in its clearly (lesbian) sexual nature, in the fact that it straddles the categories of propriety, pain and pleasure, as well as in its emphasis on carnality and orality – leads to the sublime purification and spiritual ascent. The sisters’ physical union transforms into spiritual communion, Lizzie becomes a redeemer figure, while sin, transgression and ugliness are no longer desirable and thus discarded. Through surprising gaps (What is going on in this scene? What does the fruit stand for? What, in fact, is Laura’s illness? What is its relation to female sexuality?) moral and spiritual truths about female virtue and necessary restraint are conveyed. Laura, discarding her animalistic, primitive impulses that marked her fall and allied her with the goblins, rehabilitates her humanity and even experiences spiritual rebirth as she consumes the restorative and ennobling pulp from her

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sister’s body. The grotesque base orality, in Ruskin typified by the lolling tongue protruding from the ornamental head, and in “Goblin Market” by the first goblin feast, gets redeemed in the image of the second, transfigurative consumption. Christina Rossetti’s noble grotesque, like Ruskin’s, is revelatory. As George Landow explains in his book Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin, “although the vision of truth is sublime, men, in their present state, rarely encounter any truth not too great for their capacities, so that almost all truths of the spirit appear to man in the form of grotesques” (372).

The ending – contradictions resolved or reinstated? The poem ends with a vision of both sisters as they mature into women, have families and live happily ever after. The goblin experience is evoked in the form of a cautionary tale for their children, this time, however, with a firm, unambiguous conclusion: “The wicked, quaint fruit-merchant men / Their fruits like honey to the throat / But poison in the blood” (ll. 553–555), which highlights the unchanging value of sisterhood: “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.” (ll. 562–567)

Thus, this moralistic ending offers a corrective to Laura’s straining and restores her into innocence. This entails relegating her to her proper feminine sphere, that of a mother and a wife. In this re-evaluation, her unspecified longings which made her venture into the market become illusory, youthful chimeric dreams, promptly dismissed after she attains maturity. Still, the notes of nostalgia for “Those pleasant days long gone / Of not-returning time” (ll. 550–551) betray the fact that the chief ambiguity of the text – what really happens to Laura and whether the experience is sinful or liberating – has not been successfully resolved. Serena Trowbridge reads the poem’s ending as “trivializing the troubling story” and notes that “[t]his closure seems so final, as if the past can be easily dispelled and even laughed at” (l. 132). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar also register the uneasy, contradictory tones of the poem’s conclusion, stating that: “a note of nostalgia steals into Rossetti’s verse as she describes Laura’s reminiscences” and that “[l]ike Lizzie, Laura has become a true Victorian angel-in-the-house – selfless and smiling […]” (567).

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Thus, even if, as Rosenblum would have it, “Goblin Market” represents a rediscovery of true female origins and a rejection of the patriarchal quest myth, or rather “a reappropriation of it as a female myth” because “Laura and Lizzie narrate their story within a world where mothers educate children, passing on a mother’s version of res gestae” (83), the eventual resolution of the poem forces a different reading. Serena Trowbridge daringly calls it “the loss or suppression of […] desire”, moreover “figured as a politics of redemption and salvation” (137). Equally importantly, if Laura, in opening up to her yearnings and wishes, underwent a process of individualisation in which she became a separate self and not a clone of Lizzie, in the end she is restored to the state of the initial oneness with her sister. She unites with her in the act of consuming her body, as well as in sharing, from then on, Lizzie’s worldview, which helps her find fulfilment in marriage and motherhood and forget her unspecified, burning desire, awakened as a result of the goblin experience. Laura’s predicament may thus be compared to a path from innocence to experience, but ends with the rejection of this experience altogether. There is no inkling as to what extent the ordeal has changed Laura. Rather, Rossetti stresses the reversal of this process as something essentially good, thus negating the “self-formation” outcome of her experience. This perspective on “Goblin Market” locates the poem’s narrative not too far from the plot of William Blake’s The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, but with a completely different outcome. Coming back to the Vales of Har, Thel rejects the prospects offered to her in the world of experience not because they are sinful and morally wrong, but because they are not what she wants in life – they clash with her hopes for self-fulfilment. Moreover, although the youngest of her sisters, Thel is clearly the most experienced of them, and her maturity reveals in her decline to fulfil the traditional duties of a young woman/ shepherdess poetically imagined as leading “round [her] sunny flocks” (1:1). Oothoon, in turn, is a voice of protest and resistance to the sanctioned vision of femininity as selfless, obedient and devoid of needs and ambitions. In stark contrast, Laura’s self-formation, figured by her willingness to taste the forbidden fruit and experience the desire for a different life, is both halted and declared as unnatural and unhealthy. Christina Rossetti makes Laura reject these prospects altogether, as she reclaims the apparently blissful existence in the private sphere of domestic life. What Laura rejects, then, is what both Thel and Oothoon go on trying to achieve. Laura ends up in the place where her journey started, and she accepts the view of her desires as dangerous, impious and improper. While Blake unmasks the patriarchal structure of society as unjust and harmful to women, in Rossetti’s poem two female heroines, united by their love (even when we are aware of the transgressive overtones of a potentially lesbian relationship) reach a different conclusion. They find out that to transgress the gender divide and actively seek to venture into the masculine sphere – to taste and want the mas-

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culine fruit – is indecorous and clearly not meant for them; still, they can be forgiven for their “sin” if they are willing to reform by discarding their desires. Thus, “Goblin Market” audibly advocates the perpetuation of gender and sexual difference as natural and ultimately good, at the same time affirming female companionship and female solidarity. Even Lizzie’s heroic resistance to the goblins is both a scene of female empowerment and female victimisation. Unfortunately, it does not lead to any radical reformulation of the roles, competencies and needs of women, but perpetuates the existing order, showing that any trespassing (always improper, even if apparently alluring) can only be redeemed due to the “natural” feminine virtue of selflessness and self-sacrifice. Eventually, although Christina Rossetti celebrates the female sphere and sexual difference, she is much less radical in reference to the “woman question” than William Blake. Her heroines end up in a deeply traditional place: home, not market, marriage, not a single life, and the poem celebrates submission, not independence. To legitimise this outcome, Rossetti resorts to the teachings of Christianity in their emphasis on renunciation and self-offering: Lizzie, sacrificing her body for her sister’s salvation brings her back to life, thus becoming her spiritual and actual saviour and redeemer. A partial explanation for such ideological discrepancies may be found in differences in the dominant intellectual and political climate surrounding Blake and Rossetti at the time when they wrote their texts. As Helen Bruder persuasively argues, Blake was engaged with the Bluestocking circle of Mrs Mathews (43) and placed the liberation of women at the top of his own ‘feminist’ agenda” (57). Besides, as an acquaintance of Mary Wollstonecraft, he was open and supportive towards her ideas of gender equality; he even both designed and engraved six plates of Wollstonecraft’s earlier text, Original Stories From Real Life (Welch 4). At that time Blake was employed as an engraver by Joseph Johnson, an influential London bookseller and publisher. Johnson published works of radical authors, such as William Godwin and Tom Paine, with whom Blake was also associated. Finally, the fact which cannot be overlooked here is that Blake, as a man, was in a privileged position and therefore less directly impacted by potential negative responses to his ideas relating to gender. His bold claims were, regardless of their radical progressiveness, a theory only. In contrast, in her Victorian Feminists, Barbara Caine argues that progressively thinking women of the Victorian era were deeply dependent on the social and ideological context which they shared (15). Thus, they were profoundly concerned about women’s moral and social duties, their need to preserve a moral order and create social harmony (15). As a result, although they read Mary Wollstonecraft, they remained cautious both of her and her ideas, because of the radicalism of her life; as a result, they were more eager to embrace the standpoint of John Stuart Mill, since in The Subjection of Women he made it clear that the “normal” lot of women is marriage and do-

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mesticity, even though he criticised the existent status quo of it (32–36). Such views successfully excluded women from the public sphere and perpetuated the existing organization of society, based on the glorification of moral and ethical influence of women who were landed, still, as guardians wielding moral and spiritual power over their household. Therefore, to quote Caine: for all their emphasis on the possibilities of changing the circumstances of women, Victorian feminists adhered strongly to the view that there were fundamental, significant and unalterable differences between women and men. What is most noticeable about feminist discussions of sexual difference in the nineteenth century is the emphasis placed on women’s bodies and on the connection between the physical and the social and moral qualities of women. Like eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientists, feminists emphasised the reproductive capacities of women and the centrality of potential or actual maternity in the formation of their personalities (52).

Hence, “Goblin Market” makes a similar statement: while it glorifies female solidarity, female nurturing and life-sustaining qualities, at the same time it claims that women’s power lies in the creation of and participation in a distinctly female environment; within their feminine sphere women remain potent and partially independent from men. As transpires from the last lines of “Goblin Market”, the male role is reduced to procreation: when they have fathered the sisters’ children, their husbands do not require any further mention. To conclude, although the ending of the poem strongly accentuates the reinstated female virtue and the need for the sublimation of desires, its implication that the past is safely contained beyond the closed doors of the domestic cottage is not very convincing. The readers intuitively feel that to read the text in this way would mean trivializing the experience of maturation and transformation, which is one of the most important of the poem’s meanings. Moreover, the powerfully and effectively seducing appeal of the text’s sensual aspects is almost impossible to disregard. The infatuation with the sensual experience, the affirmation of life, variety, abundance and appetite are as characteristic for “Goblin Market” as the poem’s other, symbolic or allegorical aspects. Thus, the ideology of Rossetti’s poem is essentially contradictory: it oscillates between the fascination with female power and appetite for what life has in store on the one hand, and praise of self-renunciation on the other; its ending advocates the return to the traditional, self-effacing position of women within the patriarchal society. Moreover, the poem’s ambiguities also relate to its form. Rossetti draws on various genres and conventions: “Goblin Market” is partly a children’s tale, partly an example of gothic, fantasy and allegorical literature. The vividness of imagery, the richness of symbolism, a well-developed plot with elements of suspense and crisis, the movement from the temptation to danger and deliverance, and the moralistic ending, which characterise children’s literature in Christina Rossetti’s

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text become a vehicle for expressing adult content. As a result, the poem addresses a diverse audience – its intended readers are both children and adults. As Lorraine Janzen Kooistra remarks: “Goblin Market crossed all these boundaries from the outset: it was written for adults; it used the form of the children’s fairy tale; and it was about sex” (“Cross-Audienced Poem” 183). Consequently, while the form signals playfulness and lightness, the content disturbs and provokes reflection. The fact that Rossetti’s text is so persistently difficult to classify and interpret coincides with the idea that, as I hope to have demonstrated, its major aesthetic principle is the grotesque. Thus, grotesque jarring incongruities, at the same time playful and serious, comic and distasteful have proved an apt vehicle to express the conflicting attitudes and ideas hidden beyond the fairy-tale surface of “Goblin Market”. Finally, Rossetti’s poem is, perhaps primarily, about female sexuality and a fear of female desire. A sexually open and active woman negated the norm of respectable femininity, but she also embodied the threat of everything that is deviant, abnormal, and potentially disrupting. The well-being of the British nation and Britain’s dominant position as an empire were believed to derive from the moral standards of women (Nead 92). As a result, “prostitution and public immorality [were] seen to be corrupting the very fabric and structure of British society” (Nead 85). This is why social, medical and religious discourses spoke in one voice regarding the excess of female sexuality. The era’s medical writings produced a vision of an excitable woman – particularly a female masturbator – presented as pallid, sickened, drowsy, inactive and withering, with dark circles around her eyes, at times feverish (Cooke 99). Female vice was unequivocally linked to female sexuality, and it was perceived as perilous also in the sense of a disease which can spread and infect the respectable members of society, thus causing chaos, fall and disruption, not only of an individual, but of a family, and ultimately of the nation.90 Laura, unabashedly showing her all-consuming desire and subsequently withering as a result of her unappeased hunger, epitomises everything that, in the nineteenth century, was associated with female sexuality – disease, danger and abnormal/excessive passion.91 Therefore, the conclusion to the poem provides a strategy of channelling dangerous, disruptive and potentially fatal female appetite, containing and transfiguring it in the guise of Christian mysticism, however strongly sensual: Lizzie, becoming a Christ figure, 90 Lynda Nead discusses the connection between excessive female sexuality, prostitution, disease, dirt and social downfall in Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain, pp. 110–137 in particular. 91 See, for instance, Linda Nochlin, “Lost and Found: Once More the Fallen Woman”, Art Bulletin 60 (March 1978): 139–153 and Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature”, Critical Enquiry 12.1 (Autumn 1985) p. 221.

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offers herself to Laura in the act of communion, thus becoming the agent of Laura’s salvation. Even if this resolution may not seem decorous enough because of its strong lesbian and sexual overtones, it nevertheless suggests that female sexual nature may become sublimated and contained within the long-standing tradition of erotic discourse of Christian mysticism and mystical poetry.92

Illustrating “Goblin Market”: indulgence, violence and aestheticism Early days: a fairy story of sin or pleasure? Reviewing “Goblin Market” for Macmillan’s Magazine in September 1863, Caroline Norton wondered: “Is it a fable – or a mere fairy story – or an allegory against the pleasures of sinful love – or what is it? Let us not too rigorously enquire, but accept it in all its quaint and pleasant mystery, and quick and musical rhythm – a ballad which children will con with delight, and riper minds may ponder over (…)” (qtd in Trowbridge 113). These words are informative, as they establish two principal assumptions about Rossetti’s poem: that it may be addressed to two different types of audience, and that it “defies criticism”. The visual history of the text is a record of both of these ideas: first, the poem’s generic and representational indeterminacy invited experiments in the visual field which can be seen, for instance, in the endeavours to turn it into a comic, a picture book, a play or a sculptural illustration. Secondly, over the two centuries, the poem’s editions capitalised on its potential to attract different groups of readers. Although the poem’s first known audience were not children, but working men’s society in Cambridge to whom Alexander Macmillan – Rossetti’s publisher – read the story aloud (Marsh 243), its fairy-tale elements and rhythmical properties brought to mind nursery rhymes and tales for the young generation, which led to numerous attempts to sell the poem as a children’s classic.93 At the same time, its adult content advertised itself as attractive nourishment for adult imagination. “Goblin Market” first appeared in print in 1862, as a part of the collection Goblin Market and Other Poems. The volume, published by Macmillan and Company, is an effect of the artistic collaboration of Christina Rossetti and her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who not only agreed to produce two illustrations 92 Anthony Harrison makes a similar point: “As for so many medieval Christian mystics, for Rossetti extreme religious devotion became a surrogate and, within her cultural milieu, acceptable channel for the expression and fulfilment of desires fundamentally sexual in origin” (“Illness and Ideology” 424). 93 Lorraine Janzen Kooistra meticulously traces the journey of the poem in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture and how it was notoriously refashioned and sold as a children’s tale. “The Children’s Rossetti”, Christina Rossetti and Illustration, pp. 189–220.

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for the book but also designed its cover and binding, advised on its format and choice of colours and paper (Kooistra Christina Rossetti and Illustration 60), thus making the volume a unified, coherent artistic project. It is covered in deep blue linen with gold decoration; the thread of the cloth is prominent, which “may point to the texture of the covers of Japanese books of prints as inspiration” (Grieve 79). The frontispiece for the poem, a full-page design, makes a series of statements about the story it prefaces. If we read it the way suggested by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, as “the primordial struggle between the sensuous and the spiritual” (Christina Rossetti and Illustration 70) we must nevertheless note that the spiritual is in retreat, being pushed out of the central scene by the sensual. While Rossetti’s illustration constructs a well-known dichotomy of the good/virtuous sister versus the bad/fallen/sinful one, simultaneously it grants Laura, the fallen sister at its centre, much more prominence than is given to Lizzie, who is relegated to the upper corner. In this way, the design directly interprets the poem as a text about temptation, sensual excess and transgression (the depiction of Laura in the act of cutting off her lock of hair makes it explicit and defines the fall in sexual terms). According to this reading, Laura’s immersion in sensual pleasure (symbolised by the fruit) is seen as the chief meaning of the poem. At the same time, Lizzie’s sacrifice and the subsequent salvation of one sister by the other become less conspicuous, which is visually suggested by the unnatural proportions within the picture – the figure of Lizzie is dwarfed, possibly by her distance from the scene, but the goblins and the fruit appear huge. Secondly, the illustration constructs a visual triangle, the base of which is the plate with the goblin fruit, while Laura and the goblins create its sides. Such triangulation successfully excludes Lizzie from the centre of the picture, although the fact that she is looking back at the beckoning goblin prefigures the second encounter with the goblin men within the poem. Laura, then, is the central focus of the illustration. She embodies sensual excess, the luxurious pleasure of self-abandon. Her preoccupation with pleasureto-be-had is signalled by the visual density of the picture, its play of textures and forms, as well as by the exaggerated size of the goblin fruit. Kathy Alexis Psomiades reads “Goblin Market” as an aestheticist poem (Beauty’s Body 45); in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illustration, Laura becomes a figure of decadence. The illustration freezes in time a key aestheticist moment, the fleeting second just before the craving can (or, in the case of this text, cannot) be satisfied. In this way, the design is a glorification of desire and the deferral of pleasure, which brings to mind the figures on Keats’s Grecian Urn, almost, but never quite, kissing. The third side of the triangle, formed by the goblins, opens up to the grotesque play of meanings the most. The goblins are not animalistic men but bizarre male figures with human bodies and hands, but with animal heads on their torsos. The

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jumbling of their body parts already qualifies them as grotesque figures, but this quality is intensified by their partly comic, partly menacing expressions which signal their sleazy, salacious and altogether duplicitous nature, while they try to appear friendly and good-natured. Frances S. Connelly writes: Aberration, combination, and metamorphosis represent the visual attributes of the grotesque, but they are not sufficient in themselves to make an image grotesque. For example, interference might scramble our television signal, and with it the familiar features of a news anchor, but this moment of ambiguity is not in itself grotesque. It would turn grotesque, however, if this intermittent and partial image of the familiar face suddenly began to bark and snarl, merging with another, alien reality (8).

With the decision to trade her lock of hair for their goods, Laura enters this completely unknown, dreamlike, alien reality, filled with colours, textures, sounds, flavours and sensations. However, the idea that this experience will not be innocent or unequivocally pleasant is suggested by the goblins’ eyes, watching Laura with suppressed impatience, interest, or undisguised appetite. While she longs to consume the goblin fruit, they see her as their prize to be consumed. Rossetti’s second illustration – the title page of the collection, Golden head by golden head – touches upon the subject of the bond between the sisters, and is another aestheticist design. Kooistra notes: “While appearing to offer the viewer an ‘innocent’ scene, the title-page vignette simultaneously suggests that the real subject is female sexuality” (Christina Rossetti and Illustration 75). Rossetti depicts the sisters sleeping in one bed, relaxed in the mutual embrace. Although the moment in the story which the title page references is after Laura has tasted the fruit but before Lizzie’s encounter with the goblins and the homoerotic moment of the fruit/body consumption, the image of the two heroines in bed together, sensuously wrapped in each other’s arms, directly refers to what happens later in the narrative. At the same time, the bubble with the goblins on the right (possibly Laura’s dream vision) speaks of unsatisfied craving. The picture’s aestheticist qualities are pronounced in the stillness of the moment, in its themes of yearning and desire as well as in the attempt to fuse its form (beautifully designed page) with its content (beautiful, fleshy, languorous women); finally, in the fact that it is the female body that figures desire. The design itself is enclosed within the borders and decorations of the title page, many of which are the flowers – (azaleas?) while one of the decorative motifs – perhaps incidentally – resembles the Chinese yin-yang symbol of interconnected and complementary, yet dualistic, forces. As a result, Rossetti’s two illustrations shift the emphasis of the poem from its ultimately moralistic outcome to the flirtation with excess, sensuality and desire, embedding the poem’s meaning in the bodily rather than the spiritual realm (the move to be even more accentuated in later twentieth-century repre-

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sentations of the sisters together, which frequently focus on the idea of lesbian sex). In 1893 Rossetti’s poem appeared as an illustrated reprint, with Laurence Housman’s twelve full-page illustrations and numerous textual decorations. Housman, a successful book designer, illustrator, playwright and novelist, also designed the binding of the volume and its long, narrow format, as Kooistra shows, to accord specifically with the short lines of Rossetti’s poem (Christina Rossetti and Illustration 84). With its fine gold interlace cover design on olive green cloth, the book was most often described as close in feeling to the PreRaphaelites, and certainly Housman’s masterpiece (Houfe 23). It was a project on a grand scale: in total, there are thirty-three text drawings, four full-page, four double-page illustrations, a cover, half-title and title page designs. The doublespread illustrations face each other, creating a unified artistic design, and the binding was shown at the Arts and Crafts exhibition in October 1893 (Engen 51). Like the first edition with Rossetti’s illustrations, this volume too must be seen as a unified work of art, where text, design as well as the book’s formal properties such as paper, shape, binding and cover together create the final effect of aesthetic coherence, an object which the Aesthetes would call “the Ideal Book” or “the Book Beautiful” (Doussot 141). Even though Christina Rossetti wanted Housman to look back to her brother’s frontispiece to see what the goblins should look like (Kooistra Christina Rossetti and Illustration 86), the artistic effect and interpretation suggested by Housman’s volume are radically different. While D.G. Rossetti’s two illustrations highlighted the appeal of sensual delights, Housman’s designs ultimately relate more to the question of the nature of evil and temptation, and indirectly to the story’s moralistic ending: the goblins are monstrous, sin is ugly and transgression is dangerous. It is hard to agree with Rodney Engen that Housman “retained his mentor’s [Rossetti’s] cuddly, childish vision of the goblins as lovable creatures of the woods”, yet his comment that the sinister motives of the goblins were suggested by “their wide blank eyes intent on luring the unsuspecting sisters in the story” (51) proves pertinent. Housman’s goblins are perfect grotesques: deformed, perverse, at times devilish and mocking, at times comic. As animals, they are unnatural; as men, they are deformed – with humpbacks, contorted bodies, without necks, with disfigured, non-human, grinning or terrified faces, sometimes shaded from view by their wide-brimmed hats. Sometimes they create one grotesque body: their shapes fuse into one, making it hard to distinguish individual figures; they draw the sisters into their alien, perverse world. In some designs, their pulling of the girls into the surreal realm of vice is metaphorical, like in the double-page spread that shows Laura stretching her neck towards the prospects offered by the goblin men. This illustration is placed opposite another one, which features goblins looking in the direction of Laura. As a result of this

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manoeuvre, Laura as if directly faces the temptation. In contrast, in the illustration showing Lizzie’s victimisation, Lizzie is pulled and dragged by the goblins against her will. Kooistra reads this design in allegorical and typological sense, suggesting that the woman, the tempters, and the tree unite in a richly allusive symbolism simultaneously pointing backward to the Fall and forward to Redemption. The goblins who pull and tug at Lizzie are both a demon crew wishing to bring about Eve’s certain death by forcing her to eat the fruit and, at the same time, a host of revilers abusing the patiently suffering Christ (Christina Rossetti and Illustration 89–90).

On the whole, Housman carves a sinister world of monstrosity and eccentricity, bordering on the surreal, on the grotesque and the uncanny. Interestingly, the fruit appears only marginally in the full-page designs, while in the textual decorations it features mostly as embellishment. This fact differentiates Housman’s volume from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s version, where it appeared prominently in the frontispiece. Its absence shifts the accents of the story – if there is no direct allure of the fruit, then there is no plausible, rational explanation of why Laura succumbs to temptation. Her fall, therefore, is explained by the outer, not inner, cause – the wickedness of the goblins rather than unfulfilled, unspecified desires. This reading is supported by the fact that the textual decorations presenting Laura and Lizzie together in the first half of the poem stress their vulnerability and innocence – the girls are depicted as white doves in their nest, or a garland of flowers encircles their faces. Moreover, in the title-page the goblins literally become the fruit, hunched on the tree branches, while some of the textual decorations show them inside the fruit, like kernels. Who consumes the fruit, then, becomes prey to its goblin, poisonous pulp. As a result, the fall into temptation is a perversion of innate goodness and innocence, brought together by the workings of an evil force.

At the start of the twentieth century: “Goblin Market” as a cautionary tale The first two decades of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of illustrated editions of “Goblin Market” aimed at a different reading public altogether – young children. This phenomenon may be accounted for by the fact that, as Lorraine Janzen Kooistra shows, “Goblin Market” was included in children’s textbooks in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century (“‘Goblin Market’ as a Cross-Audienced Poem” 184), which initiated the twentieth-century appropriation of the poem as a children’s classic. In 1906 T.C & E.C Jack published a single-issue edition of “Goblin Market” with illustrations by Dion Clayton Calthrop. Although the book’s cover and binding are still within the

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“Book Beautiful” tradition, with lavish gold lettering and decoration on red cloth, the inside of the volume is a different matter altogether. Calthrop’s illustrations, in colour, transform the poem into a chaste fairy tale. Lizzie and Laura are both dressed in white, demure gowns, with tidily arranged hair. Even the frontispiece, which shows the sisters kissing, depicts Lizzie with pursed lips, standing rigidly, not betraying any signs of emotion or excitement. In this illustration, just as in all designs that follow, goblins are depicted as diminished dwarfs, with stick-like arms and legs, colourful, comic and utterly not menacing. Like in D.G. Rossetti’s version, they have animal heads on human torsos, but the sketchy, childlike manner of drawings creates a light-hearted atmosphere and suppresses the more troubling, violent tones. In the picture presenting the change in Laura after her fruit feast, the sisters are polarised only by their occupation; otherwise, they are virtually identical. While Lizzie, surrounded by hens and chickens, is bringing home a cake she has presumably baked herself, Laura stares absently into the distance, and her fixation on the fruit is suggested only by a trail of little goblins visible across her dress, the element repeated in the frontispiece. However, the censoring of violence is nowhere better visible than in the assault scene, which is turned into a bizarre dream. Lizzie, dosing off, with long, golden hair, an immaculate white dress and a serene expression is an icon of innocence, but instead of being brutally accosted by the goblin men, she is an object of tricks played upon by a group of comic, childish, anthropomorphic animals, who make a playground out of her white dress and try to feed her while she is asleep. The illustration contrasts oddly with the text printed below it: “They trod and hustled her, / Elbowed and jostled her, / Clawed with their nails”. In turn, Alice Ross’s illustrations for the edition published in Edinburgh by W.P. Nimmo, Hay and Mitchell in 1910 transformed the text into a nostalgic fairy tale, thus upholding the tendency to view the poem as a children’s classic. Ross’s frontispiece shows the sisters – both in white dresses, with golden hair, in almost the same posture – spying on the goblins. Nevertheless, the differences between them are noticeable and preview the unfolding of the plot. Lizzie is taller and kneels in a more upright manner, with her hair in a demure bun, which makes her appear older than Laura, whose loose hair suggests a more relaxed, less unyielding attitude. The vibrant colours of the illustration as well as the presentation of the tiny figures of the goblins immersed in their work turn the scene into a moment of exciting discovery, suppressing the question of impropriety or potential danger. In the illustrations that follow Lizzie is a great absentee – the two remaining pictures concentrate solely on Laura. The first one depicts temptation, and the scene becomes a visual cross between the Red Riding Hood and the Snow White stories: we notice the presence of a small, but sinisterlooking wolf on the left, while the dwarf-like goblins, with long beards and colourful hats, offer Laura the dishes laden with decorative looking fruit. Apart

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from the wolf, Ross includes other animals too – a cat, and (most probably) a bear and a lynx too, but the goblins remain miniature humans. The last illustration shows Laura pining after the fruit, as she sits alone in the chimney-nook, neglecting her household duties (which is suggested by the discarded jug and broom on her left). Even though in Ross’s version Laura seems more open to new experience than Lizzie (as indicated by small, but noticeable differences between the sisters in the frontispiece), yet ultimately she is very far from being a trespasser or a rebel flouting conventions. Rather, she is still an innocent, modest virgin, a distressed, unhappy beautiful girl. Even when she offers her hair to the goblins, her face does not register craving, curiosity or impatience, only a resigned, nostalgic and slightly detached look. In this presentation, Laura resembles female martyrs, suffering without any fault of their own. Soon after World War I, Rossetti’s poem once again made an appearance on the children’s market, but this time as a prose story. In 1919 Christine Chaundler published a collection My Book of Stories from the Poets (Cassell & Company, London), accompanied by twelve colour illustrations by A.C. Michael. She adopted famous poems by British and American writers (including Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden”, Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as well as Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”) as prose texts, allegedly to make them easier for children to read and understand. She added an introduction to children by means of direct address (e. g. “The first story to be published in ordinary language was “Robinson Crusoe”, which I expect you have read” IX), explaining why “so much poetry was written in the olden days” (XI) and introducing some of the texts. “Goblin Market” is the first title in the collection. In Chaundler’s version, the goblin fruit is unequivocally evil: “For the goblin fruit was poisonous and brought terrible grief and harm to the unwary person who ate of it” (2). She first brings out the story of Jeanie, adding details and descriptions of her own invention, but closely based on what happened to Lizzie (e. g. how “she longed and longed to taste the fruit again, but though she had searched for the little goblin men by day and night, she had never seen nor heard them any more” [2]). Her sisters are the most beautiful girls in the village, with “dancing eyes” “rosy cheeks” and “dimpled mouths” (2). The fruit has magical properties: it is a “magic juice” which brings about “the dreadful spell” (7). Surprisingly, the violence of Lizzie’s encounter with the goblins is not censored, yet all erotic overtones are absent from the scene of the sisters’ reunion. The story ends with a triumphant proclamation that “[b]y her bravery and devotion Lizzie had won her sister back to life – the goblins’ wicked spell was broken” (10). Hence, the rewritten “Goblin Market” is an engaging, though simplistic, cautionary tale which wipes off any ambiguity concerning the nature of the fruit or the motivation behind Laura’s fall and efficiently elides all shades of doubt, loss or uncertainty which appeal to Rossetti’s readers. A.C. Michael’s accompanying illustration

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endorses the direction introduced by Alice Ross of refashioning the temptation scene into a fairy tale encounter between the beauty and the dwarves. Laura, a nubile yet modest maiden with long, golden hair in a tight bodice and obligatorily a white blouse, uncertainly reaches for her golden lock with a gesture which might as well communicate surprise and anxiety. The goblins are literally “little men”, their fantastic character emphasised by their size as well as by their unnaturally elongated feet. The poem, converted into a prose tale, univocally settled as a single-layered, non-threatening, didactic fable. Simultaneously with single-volume editions aimed at young readers, “Goblin Market” was reissued in a lavish collection of Christina Rossetti’s poems as a gift book, published in 1910 by Blackie and Son. The volume was daunting in size, with gilt titles on white vellum cloth tied up with silk ribbon, art nouveau design in gilt to spine and covers, and with coloured as well as black and white plates by Florence Harrison. As such, it fully complied with William Morris’s idea of a book as an object of beauty. The volume was received more than favourably: the Times described it as a “luxurious edition with drawings in colour and line, of great interest” (Kooistra Christina Rossetti and Illustration 234). Harrison produced four full-page illustrations for “Goblin Market”, two coloured and two black and white. Her decision as to which passages in the story to illustrate already surprises: she chooses the moments of Laura tasting the fruit and Lizzie coming home to save Laura for the colour plates, the scene when Laura looks for the goblins but cannot find them and the goblin’s assault on Lizzie for the black and white illustrations. Of those four choices, only the last one is conventional; and, most importantly, no other artist till Harrison’s time decided to portray the exact moment of Laura’s transgression. The lavish plate merits attention, both in an aesthetic and interpretative sense. In a figurative reading, Harrison depicts the fall by showing Laura consuming the fruit which a skinny hand of one goblin places in her palm. However, instead of victorious, carefree abandon she looks detached and almost otherworldly, with her non-seeing eyes fixed in the distance. The sloping line of the hillside in the background forms a visual parallel to the downhill course the story is to take. In this interpretation, the transgression does not bring joy, even for a brief moment, and the fruit does not delight but is addictive from the start. Harrison is also the first illustrator to give justice to Lizzie’s encounter with the goblins as a moment of violence and abuse. In her black and white plate Lizzie turns her head away from the hands that try to cram the fruit into her mouth; her assailers stamp at her feet, tug at her dress, pull her arms. The goblins – some of them with animal, some with human heads – are snarling or grinning, their faces contorted in savage grimaces. The picture also impresses with its dynamism and density – the eye wanders up and down in a hectic pace, trying to make sense of patterns, crisscrossing lines, intricate shapes of limbs and bodies. Its density

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mirrors the pace, tension and dramatic character of the action. Harrison emphasises Lizzie’s sacrifice, but she does not turn the scene (or Lizzie’s body) into a visually appealing spectacle, which marks her approach as exceptional, particularly when compared with later representations of the same scene by other artists. The second colour plate addresses the moment when Lizzie flies home to save her sister. The picture communicates urgency and elation. The tilting of both figures to the left emphasises the drama of the moment: Laura is on the verge of dying, Lizzie has just escaped rape. Their reunion has a highly emotional aspect; the sisters cling to each other, clutch each other’s arms, and look at each other’s faces with the expression of disbelief. As the assault scene was not turned into a visual spectacle for the male gaze, so Harrison’s rendering of the reunion moment similarly elides any sexual or erotic subtexts. As one of the leading figures during the Golden Age of British book illustration, Arthur Rackham accepted a commission to illustrate Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” as another single-text edition in 1933. Rackham was known for pen and ink fantasy pictures in richly illustrated gift books, many of them for children. In his illustrations, he created a fantastic fairyland of gnomes, dwarves, goblins and fairies with powerfully humanoid qualities. “Goblin Market” with Rackham’s illustrations appealed to two different types of audience: both children and adult readers would find this volume equally appealing, though for entirely different reasons. As Fred Gettings concludes, the poem, “which might easily have become an exercise in grotesquerie, has been infused with a delicacy of feeling and humour which touches upon the poem’s own qualities very well” (162). Also, unlike the visual renderings by Alice Ross, Dion Calthrop or A.C. Michael which eliminated the violent and disturbing overtones of the text, Rackham’s illustrations make Rossetti’s poem a fascinating venture into a grotesque, but simultaneously visually appealing, fantasy land. The best-known image of the volume is undoubtedly White and golden Lizzie stood, by now the expected illustrator’s choice. The illustration is anchored upon Lizzie, whose posture visually matches Rossetti’s verbal description of her steadfastness and unwavering moral stance, in the poem communicated through a number of similes: “a beacon […] [s]ending up a golden fire”, “a fruit-crown’d orange-tree”, “a royal virgin town” (ll. 412–418). As in the poem, she is beset by the goblins and turns away from them, but unlike in Harrison’s illustration, her expression here is calm, almost languorous, and her body, with naked shoulders, is well visible. The fact that she is vulnerable, exposed, presented frontally and passive alludes to a set of conventions of portraying other chained maidens, “combining exhibitionism with modesty, erotic pleasure with torment” (Munich 28). Rackham’s illustration bows to the tradition according to which female victimisation is depicted in a way which should result in the visual pleasure of the

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viewer; Adrienne Munich shows that this convention has its roots in the nineteenth-century pictures of damsels in distress, ranging from John Everett Millais’s The Knight Errant to various representations of the Andromeda myth.94 Lizzie looks modestly to one side, raising her eyes to heaven in a manner of female martyrs, but her expression is serene and unruffled, her cheeks are rosy, and her dress is clean and untorn. Though more pronounced than in the case of Alice Ross’s or Dion Calthrop’s images, violence still gets deflected and aestheticised to find its appearance indirectly in the disconcerting grotesqueness of the goblins. As Leslie Atzmon argues, Rackham’s goblins are best characterised by their inbetween features, which make them a cross between humans and animals: Rackham goes to all lengths to blur boundaries between animal and human. Some goblins are mostly animal with subtle human nuances. Two goblins at the bottom right resemble a cat and a rat, respectively. However, the cat’s sneer is more human than feline, the rat’s long nose and beady eyes are exaggerations of the nose and eyes of the other, more human, goblins in the image (72).

Atzmon goes on to argue that Rackham’s goblins owe much to the phrenological theories popular in the nineteenth century. According to the pseudoscience of phrenology human brain was made up of different individual organs that determined personality, and certain physical features signalled personality traits – for instance, skulls widening near ears (which both the rats and the cat in the illustration possess) indicated destructiveness and secretiveness; additionally, the bird-like goblin exhibits physical characteristics attributed to lustful, gluttonous types (Atzmon 77). Certainly, these observations help to view Rackham’s goblins from the perspective of the grotesque – not only are they hybrid and incongruous, partly comic, partly threatening, but their facial expressions – snarls, grins, frowns – are similarly located in-between human and animal behaviour. Rackham’s biographer, Fred Gettings, notes “[t]he peculiar secret of Rackham’s success in seizing upon the essence of the human and portraying it in animal form” (83) as well as in the fact that “[t]o imagination he adds a heavy dose of hard visual reality” (84). In White and golden Lizzie stood Rackham defamiliarises the threat by showing Lizzie unharmed and by making his goblins animals. Still, although he reduces their size to that of fairy creatures, at the same time he retains their powerfully anthropomorphic qualities. In this guise his fantasy tale becomes even more grotesque: the viewer recognizes human gestures, grimaces and behaviours in the humanoid goblins and can see through the 94 For a detailed overview of this tradition as well as the conventions of portraying female victimisation, see the chapter “The Poetics of Rescue, The Politics of Bondage” in Andromeda’s Chains: Gender and Representation in Victorian Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 8–37.

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tale’s allegorical surface. While this particular scene is not threatening, a similar one, but happening in realistic circumstances, could very well be. Thanks to the grotesque, violence actualises itself in the viewer’s imagination. Unlike White and golden Lizzie stood, the remaining three colour plates and various doddle-like drawings and vignettes that punctuate the text of the poem are addressed specifically to children. In the frontispiece, Lizzie cuts off her lock of hair, with her eyes fixed on the fruit presented to her. Her partly open lips suggest her craving, while her blushes parallel the red colour of the fruit. The goblins are more animalistic than in the previously described plate. In Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie / Down the glen tramp little men the sisters kneel together but are differentiated by their reactions to the appearance of the goblins – the concept employed already by D.G. Rossetti and Laurence Housman. The fantasy world is suggested by the huge, gnarled tree trunks and the tiny figures of the goblins in the distance, two of which look like gnomes, three like animals. The last of the colour plates, Laura would call the little ones, relates to the poem’s ending, and recasts the story as a fable with a moral. Its setting is, finally, home. Laura’s appearance is different than in any of the previous plates: at last, she is dressed in darker, not white, clothes with a bonnet and an apron, with her hair in a modest bun. Equipped with her sewing basket and a white cloth, she tells her story to the children. She seems to specifically address a girl who sits directly opposite and listens intently. The girl is a future Laura, with a similarly patterned skirt and a similar bonnet. The illustration, thus, concentrates on the moral message of the story as a warning for young maidens and becomes a course in female selfformation. Interestingly, this picture might have been an apt illustration for Rossetti’s later volume for children Speaking Likenesses (1874), which opens in the way “Goblin Market” finishes: “Come round me, my dear little girls, and I will tell you a story. Each of you bring her sewing, and let Ella take pencils and colourbox, and try to finish some one drawing of the many she has begun” (1). Although Rackham’s illustrations of “Goblin Market” are undeniably a children’s classic, it was Ellen Raskin’s adaptation that successfully converted Rossetti’s poem into juvenile literature. In 1970 E.P. Dutton issued the poem as a picture book with illustrations by Raskin; the text was also adapted to suit the very young readers – in her afterword Raskin confesses that she “eliminated 197 lines, mostly self-contained units consisting of two minor themes: the death of Jeanie and the planting of the kernel stone” (32). The decision to censor the poem considerably by toning down its harsh and violent motifs stands in obvious contrast to Victorian picture books for young readers, where “children were reminded that life could be nasty, brutish and short” (Vaughan 620)95 As a result, 95 For instance, in Christina Rossetti collection of nursery rhymes Sing-Song, meant specifically for children, references to death and pain are overt, numerous and scattered throughout the

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we are confronted with a multi-coloured, detailed, dense, and purposefully infantile version of the poem, with the colour palette enfolding harmoniously through the pages. At the beginning of the text, the picture accompanying it spreads over two pages, presenting the abundant variety of fruit with different shapes and colours, though not realistically rendered (strawberries are as big as plums, there is almost no colour shading). Strikingly, the fruit is integrated into Laura’s flowing golden hair; a visually enticing image certain to catch the young readers’ attention. As far as the goblins are concerned, in the afterword, Raskin explains that while they “had always been drawn as frightening creatures” she tried “to make them appealing (rendering Laura’s temptation more plausible), while still complying to Christina’s descriptions”. Raskin’s goblins are small, fat, amicable and utterly non-threatening. Their smiling, chubby, benign faces do not change their expression much even in the assault scene. The illustrations also stress the didactic content of the poem. Michael Howarth notes that “Raskin also uses green and blue backgrounds to differentiate between safe and unsafe spaces. Green, which often symbolizes life and growth, surrounds Lizzie because she behaves and makes positive choices; blue, which often symbolizes coldness and death, surrounds Laura because she misbehaves and makes negative choices” (30) Thus, the polarity of the sisters’ behaviour and the moral message drawn from their adventure are utterly unproblematic: good is obedience and conformity, evil is searching for the experience outside the boundaries of familiarity and decorum. However, in a children’s story, the punishment cannot be too threatening: when the sisters are depicted together during the rescue scene, the only indication that Laura is dwindling can be found in the change in colours, as her hair mutates from sunny blond to grey, and her body grows entirely colourless. Notably, she is revived through the juice that drips from Lizzie’s face; hence, the episode with potentially sexual overtones is transformed into a scene of sisterly, or even motherly affection: Lizzie tenderly nurses Laura in the crook of her arm, her embrace resembling the cradle hold breastfeeding position. The order has been reinstated, the fairy tale receives a happy ending, and no ambiguities that might trouble the reader are emphasised.

volume. Some of the examples include: “A baby’s cradle with no baby in it, / A baby’s grave where autumn leaves drop sere” (15), “Dead in the cold, a song-singing thrush” (10), “A motherless soft lambkin / Alone upon a hill” (61).

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“Goblin Market” for adult readers Since the 1970s “Goblin Market” has enjoyed enormous popularity as a text specifically geared at adult readers, even packaged as adult erotica. Two important twentieth-century editions that exploited the poem’s erotic potential are a Playboy “Ribald Classic” issue (1973) and a Pacific Comic book (1983). As a “Ribald Classic”, the text appeared with illustrations by Kinuko Craft. The series is previewed on its covers as “Adult Tales of Love and Laughter for Readers of Sophisticated Taste”, which suggests that the featured “classic” text will naturally focus on erotic love, but the topic will be treated with humour and distance, appealing to worldly, chic, cultivated readers. Pacific Comic books, in turn, were “destined at comic books specialty market stores” and were “more luxurious and pricey than typical comic books, but which also allowed the popular artists of the day to freely express themselves while retaining ownership of their work […]” (Gabilliet 88). The 1983 Pacific Comic edition of “Goblin Market” was illustrated by John Bolton. Both Kinuko Craft’s and John Bolton’s illustrations are sexually explicit, and capitalise on the poem’s erotic potential; particularly the cross-section of sex and violence and the lesbian overtones of the scenes between the sisters are audibly pronounced. In Kinuko Craft’s visualisations, the moment when Laura tastes the fruit becomes an orgy in which devilish, animalistic and gnomish creatures crawl over, bite, suck and lick her body, while she lies in a pose of sexual abandon, and the scattered fruits assume the shapes of both male and female sexual organs. The image playfully engages with the tradition of portraying sleeping maidens dreaming about sexual encounters, in their dreams enacting their repressed sexual desires; the picture brings to mind Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (with the head of a horse in the left bottom corner being the almost direct citation). Craft’s pictures represent Lizzie’s encounter with the goblins as a female rape fantasy, and the sisters’ reunion as lesbian cunnilingus. In a fascinating way, the first of these images also “plays with centuries of sexual imagery”, both parodying Rackham’s illustration of the same scene and creating an underworld image that alludes to the fantasies of Hieronymus Bosch. Finally, it also becomes a pastiche of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus through the depiction of Lizzie’s hair and posture (Kooistra “Visualising the Fantastic Subject” 150). The elements of pastiche, coupled with the pornographic qualities of the illustration, single this image out as a sophisticated dialogue with the visual tradition of presenting the female body in art, at the same time showing awareness of the demands and expectations of the readers of the publication for whom the image was intended. In turn, John Bolton’s illustrations for “Goblin Market” as a comic book return to the beginning-of-the-century tendency to see the goblins as dwarfs and Laura as the Snow White, but these dwarfs are visibly malicious, no longer with animal,

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but with human faces. The attention to detail, the capturing of facial expressions and bodily postures, as well as a clearly delineated background, locate the illustrations within the genre of magical realism. Like Kinuko Craft, Bolton capitalises on the assault scene, and both of these representations walk a tightrope between art and pornography in the way they depict violence and rape as pleasurable to women. As McNall proposes, “[r]ape and other forms of sexual violence act to strip victims of their will to resist and make them passive and submissive to the will of the rapist. Female passivity, the fact that women have things done to them, is a theme repeated over and over in contemporary pornography (McNall in Collins 263). In Bolton’s rendition, Lizzie becomes the focus of the story, which is communicated by the fact that while previous pages consisted of two to four different pictures accompanied by the text of the poem in boxes, at this moment the whole spread is devoted to the scene of Lizzie’s surrender to the goblins. Interestingly, the previous page previews this focus: the middle illustration on this spread shows Lizzie accosted by three goblin figures, but she does not seem perturbed by what they are doing to her, instead, searching direct eye contact with the viewer, she makes sure we see and notice her. A really threatening scene in the narrative here becomes a masquerade and a play enacted for the spectator’s enjoyment. Depicted frontally, the figure of Lizzie complies with the typical convention of presenting the female body in art: “a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her” (Berger 46). Lizzie’s expression, like the expression of countless other female figures presented for the pleasure of the surveyor, is, to quote John Berger again, “of a woman responding with calculated charm to the man she imagines looking at her – although she doesn’t know him” (55). Lizzie is inviting the viewer to watch and have pleasure in watching, and in her invitation, this scene, as well as the previous one, play on their pornographic potential. Bolton’s final picture also nears pornography in that it explicitly portrays a passionate sexual encounter between women; provocatively, his image is addressed to both genders, and it resembles lesbian soft porn movies, spiced up by explicit images of orality. Lorraine Kooistra aptly notes that “[a]lthough “Goblin Market” was first reproduced as male fantasy material, it proved to be an equally potent source for women’s erotic imagination in both popular culture and academic productions” (245). Independent from the production of “Goblin Market” as adult erotica, another edition of the poem appeared in the same period, illustrated with Martin Ware’s etchings (Victor Gollancz, 1980). While this edition was nominally addressed to young readers (Merchant 77), the style of illustrations as well as their themes identify it as a picture book for adults, which makes it similar to Charles Keeping’s work. In this appearance, the poem makes a different reading alto-

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gether. Some of the colour pictures have a more childlike character (i. e. the tree covered with schematic, almost identical plum-like fruits), but other colour images, as well as the black and white etchings, impress with their unsettling, disturbing contents. Ware appears to underscore the relationship between man and nature, and his pictures comment on the perversion of this relationship. This is noticeable already in the illustration of a goblin head carrying a dish overloaded with various kinds of fruit. Ware emphasises mood and symbolism over representational accuracy since the fruit seems to hang in the air with gravity suspended; the picture stresses abundance and variety as well as the unnatural qualities of the fruit. However, what is equally striking is that the trees, represented on the same plane as the goblin head, are devoid of both leaves and fruits, poignantly bare. This motif reappears in several following illustrations. Goblin trade seems to exploit nature and appropriate its nurturing, sustaining qualities for sheer profit; this is evident in the illustration of a hand sprouting below the ground’s level, its top converted into a tree bearing multiple, colourful berries and gourds. The picture is a delayed confirmation of the legitimacy of Lizzie’s concern: “Who knows upon what soil they fed / Their hungry thirsty roots?” (ll. 44–45). The consumption of the unnatural fruit brings sickness and threatens with death (a very explicit picture of Laura on her deathbed is pertinent here); its production results in the withering of the environment and its seeming destruction. However, this harm is not irreparable: once Laura rejects the allure of the goblin feast and the goblin men disappear thanks to Lizzie’s fortitude, the natural order can be restored: fields of grain need harvesting, the tree is covered with leaves and bears fruit. In three of his black and white etchings Martin Ware uses an unusual format, dividing the picture into four, and in one case, six blocks of separate, rectangular images, in a manner resembling jumbled puzzles. As he reveals in private email correspondence, “using four images gives another dimension and I like the idea of a serious comic strip”. The result is unsettling; the illustrations produce the effect of anxiety, disorientation and tension, and the reader has to scrutinize and ponder them again and again in an attempt to make sense of what is depicted. The first of these pages represents the goblins. Each of the six pictures depicts a part of a goblin figure, and each of these forms is a hybrid structure, partly human, partly animal. We see human torsos with added tails, cat or rat heads on men’s shoulders, the lower part of a human head attached to the body of a furry animal. In this way, the goblins cease to be separate individuals and become parts of one, monstrous and grotesque goblin body, analogous to one collective body of the fruit. The next two jumbled pictures represent the two most dramatic moments of the story, and the unusual format works to relate the sequence of events. In one of these illustrations, we watch Lizzie being attacked. Unlike any of the previous illustrations of this scene, Ware’s etching does not draw on this

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moment’s erotic potential nor does it represent Lizzie’s figure in full. Instead, we see a sequence of violent assaults in subsequent disjointed images: the goblins touch her naked shoulders, strip her of clothes, tug at her hair, and scratch her skin. The fragmentariness of these images corresponds with the dramatic tension this episode is redolent of; the sequence possibly also registers the way Lizzie’s consciousness processes, in incoherent fragments, the trauma of this attack. The scene of the sisters’ reunion is similarly retold through the comic strip of four seemingly unrelated images: an empty chair suggests that Laura has leapt to her feet to meet Lizzie; her shock and disbelief is recorded in the dramatic gesture with which she raises her arms to her head (the gesture is repeated in the depiction of Laura’s shadow on the wall). The next image renders the sisters embracing, but their sexual union is prefigured only in the last picture that shows Laura kissing Lizzie, with a hand suggestively positioned on her breast. In the two remaining etchings (separate pictures, not a comic strip anymore) the natural world appears restored to its initial condition. As the first image in the book is a living tree, so the motif comes back at the end of the volume – the corn waits for the harvest, the tree, not overburdened, is with fruit. Thus, Ware’s unconventional and daring illustrations pick up on distinctly twentieth- and twenty-first-century themes: the environmental concern relating to the human exploitation of the natural world, human greed, and excessive hunger for the earth’s resources. Additionally, they hint at the notion of trauma and the way human consciousness reacts when confronted with reality too overwhelming and painful to bear. On the other hand, however, the reading suggested by these pictures unequivocally brands the goblin fruit as evil and champions the restoration of the order of things from before Laura’s experience. In this way, it occludes a number of other motifs present in the story – the ambivalence of the fruit, the nature of Laura’s hunger, the potentially revolutionary consequences of the sisters’ relationship – and remains true to the poem’s surprisingly simplistic ending. The advent of the twenty-first century failed to note the waning of interest in Christina Rossetti’s poetic tale. In 2003 the poem was published with wood engravings by Hilary Paynter (London, Artists’ Choice Edition). Paynter wrote a foreword to the volume, “On illustrating “Goblin Market””, and her words testify best to the fact that she, as an artist, saw illustration as integral in producing the poem’s meaning(s): I was startled in my first readings of the poem by the lurid and seemingly erotic scenes it conjured up. Not trusting solely in my instincts, I sought the help of Dr Tom Mason, a friend who teaches English Literature at Bristol University. We talked the poem through and the process of discussing a range of interpretations helped clarify and steady my own (Preface).

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Paynter’s goblins are surrealistic human grotesques, with exaggerated facial features, partly droll, partly disturbing in their strangeness: they are all too human to be dismissed as fairy tale creatures, even if, sometimes, they are also equipped with animal attributes (tails, mane-like spiky hair). They are the agents of temptation and punishment for succumbing to it.96 The pictures neither concentrate on the erotic aspects of the story, nor do they stress its moralistic ending. Instead, the dense, emotionally laden engravings seem to underline the intensity of sensual appeal of the fruit and the power of the tempters. The first of the images shows an observant goblin face, partly obscured by thick, luxuriant bush of leaves and brambles. The illustration communicates a sense of foreboding and danger lurking around, a quality absent from all the earlier visual renditions. The goblins are both sinister and fascinating: “although oppressive, the goblins are seductive too and almost impossible to resist – hence the exhortation not to wander down the lanes as darkness falls and risk meeting them” (Preface). The second engraving shows them looking straight at the viewer, and their faces register an impressive diversity of expressions, from strange grimaces to appealing smiles – their different strategies of persuasion. This is the moment of temptation, and Paynter seems to have concentrated on representing the sensual, tangible appeal of the fruit through its shape and texture – there are halved citruses displaying their juicy inside, firm, sturdy gourds as well as plump berries; the goblins demonstrate the fruit’s appeal through squeezing, licking and touching it. In the scene of Lizzie’s assault, the two pictures on opposite pages act as a double-spread: facing each other, the images have to be read as unity. As Nikolajeva and Scott point out: “In a good picturebook, the creator uses the tension between verso and recto to imply movement as well as temporal and causal relations” (151). On the verso goblin faces appear, now menacing, with unsettling grimaces; they squeeze the fruit till it bursts. The violent handling of the fruit – the obtaining of “[g]oblin pulp and goblin dew” (l. 470) – is a prefiguration of their equally violent handling of Lizzie, presented on the recto (see figure 19). Goblin nails claw into her flesh, multiple hands tug, squeeze, grasp and pull her. Lizzie’s closed eyes with tightly shut eyelids, her pained expression and the visible tension of her muscles show this encounter as abuse and assault; there is no hint of erotic pleasure that can be detected in so many other visual interpretations of this moment. Similarly, the scene when Lizzie rescues Laura is also devoid of eroticism; the sisters’ embrace becomes a delicate and tender kiss of life, brimming with emotions but not with erotic tension. The only engraving which hints at the poem’s sexual overtones presents the sisters in bed together. 96 Hilary Paynter writes: “However, for those who fall to temptation, there is only brief joy. This one night of ecstasy will be followed be an inexorable sense of loss, deterioration of physical beauty and health and even death” (Preface).

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Naturally, the scene corresponds to the “Golden head by golden head” passage, but, unlike any other artist depicting this moment, Paynter presents Laura and Lizzie in the act of lovemaking. Kissing and embracing, they are seen from behind a partly lifted curtain. Their entangled bodies visually become one entity, and Paynter stresses that they can be seen as doubles by creating a mirror-like image of their heads resting on two identical pillows, facing each other. The addition of the curtain casts the viewer in the position of an intruder, glimpsing an intimate, private moment.

Figure 19: Hilary Paynter Goblin Market, a wood engraving, 2003, reprinted with the artist’s permission

It seems pertinent to finish this overview of the visual fortunes of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” with at least a cursory mention of the most recent work I have managed to encounter – and the most unusual too, because of its medium. Carrianne Hendrickson, an American ceramic artist living and working in Buffalo, New York, is a sculptor and craft artist who produces drawings, sculptures, clay and ceramic works; her art has been included in various exhibitions and publications.97 As Michael J. Beam, curator of exhibitions and collections at the Castellani Art Museum, explains Rich in symbolism and lush with color, Hendrickson’s ceramic works reflect a sense of private devotion and personal exploration into mystical fairytale ephemera (…) Although her works have a storybook/nursery-rhyme context, they often have dark undertones – suggestive of the dualities of human nature. Good and evil, naivete and jaded aspects of human nature find themselves played out in Hendrickson’s work. These narrative works, predominately sculptural teapots, are superbly gestural and often suggestive in content (…)” (“Carrianne Hendrickson”).

Hendrickson has produced many variants of ceramic sculptures – including functional and non-functional tea-pots and other sculptural ceramic pieces – inspired by Christina Rossetti’s poem. Her goblin merchants take on many 97 The artist’s bio, available on her website (https://carriannehendrickson.com/news.html), offers a list of her exhibitions and publications which feature or mention Hendrickson’s work.

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guises: sometimes they are devilish creatures with horns, sometimes they resemble ravenous birds with sharp, elongated beaks growing out of human bodies; at other times they are human. Often they wear masks (reminiscent of Venetian masks like the Medico della peste, the Plague Doctor or the Zanni, the Trickster) and strange, polka-dotted costumes; in this way, the artwork underscores the theatricality and artificiality of the depicted scenes. Because of their three-dimensional character, the ceramic pieces might have tangibly emphasised the menacing aspects of Christina Rossetti’s narrative, but they successfully convert it into an erotic spectacle and play instead. The works draw on the notions of scopophilia, nudity and sexual fantasy. In many of them, goblins are covertly or overtly watching naked female figures, who are not – or pretend not to be – conscious of being the object of the gaze. In Temptation of Laura, Laura sits naked but for a wreath of flowers covering her most intimate parts, while two goblins with bird-like heads and sharp beaks flank her on both sides and offer their fruit to her. Laura’s impression is transfixed, her gaze directed upwards and into the distance. Rapt in a sexual trance, she dreamily reaches for the fruit. In Hendrickson’s second Temptation of Laura, Laura and one of the goblins face each other, kneeling, while he offers her an enormous basket of fruit of diverse kinds, colours and shapes. The idea that the temptation is sexual in nature is underscored by the lack of distance between the figures, by Laura’s hand, almost – but not yet – touching the fruit, and by her nakedness. All these elements together make the scene both an intimate encounter and a staged, elaborate erotic game. Here, as well as in other pieces, unequal power relations are univocally spelled out, but sanctioned: men do the watching and they are clothed, women tacitly consent to being watched and remain naked. The tactile character of the works as well as their vivid physical presence seem to be the perfect vehicle for a story that operates in an in-between land of fantasy and reality, dreaming and waking states. Interestingly, by making many of her sculptural illustrations homely objects – teapots, Hendrickson relegates the narrative back to home.98 In this way the threat, so pronounced in the poem, here is contained and successfully deflected. Abuse becomes a fantasy, and violence is turned into an erotic game; there is no question of propriety or sin, and moral choice ceases to be an issue. We enter a different territory, where unconditional commitment to passion rules, and so we are left to wonder about the different paths and turns that desire can follow when left exclusively to its own direction. To conclude, “Goblin Market”, from its inception in 1859 till today has tantalised artists and illustrators alike. It may be suggested that its allure stems from its places of indeterminacy, which have proven fertile for generating diverse interpretations. Nevertheless, the fact that Christina Rossetti produced the poem 98 I am grateful to the students in my doctoral class for this suggestion.

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that spoke as much through its content as through its form (we may say an aestheticist poem) might also have posed a challenge for the artists working in the visual field: is it possible to retain this sensory and sensual aspect of the text when it is drawn/engraved/sculpted? While it might be true that the unheard melodies are sweeter than the heard ones, and the images from the poem that we conjure up in our mind will often supersede the realisation of the artistic vision on a canvas or a page, the list of illustrations discussed in this chapter speaks of unwavering enthusiasm of artists, publishers and readers alike for word made flesh, for the visible and even tangible (in the case of sculptural illustrations) experience of “Goblin Market” as a work of art. Some of the illustrators resorted to the use of allegory as the primary form of expression (Housman); some employed the concept of iterability, making a picture mean through the way it cites other works of art (Kinuko Craft) or tried to construct a dramatic visual narrative through the use of symbol, metaphor and metonymy (Ware, Paynter). In turn, others relied upon the diverse use of brushwork, on colours and textures, endeavouring to reproduce tangibility by the workings of perspective, light, tone, and medium to render the poem’s aesthetic, sensual qualities (Rossetti, Rackham, Bolton, Hendrickson). Inevitably, the visual renderings accentuate a polarity in attitudes to the text. The emphasis is frequently laid on the sensual, aesthetic or erotic properties of the story; otherwise, the poem is illustrated as a moral lesson, sometimes problematized by the questions of the origin and nature of evil or the presence of defamiliarised violence. In other cases, “Goblin Market” becomes a rather straightforward didactic story (as in editions illustrated by Dion Calthrop, Alice Ross, A. C. Michael and Ellen Raskin). Thus, there are two conflicting viewpoints that battle in visual renderings of “Goblin Market”: the aesthetic engagement with the sensuous and the transgressive, and the preoccupation with the questions of social propriety and moral choice. The other major polarity that surfaces in the poem’s illustrated editions concerns the text’s double readership. The editions intended for young readers simplify the poem considerably and occlude several important motifs and implications. Instead, they concentrate on the thrilling but straightforward plot, unambiguous distinctions between virtue and vice, and underscore the poem’s happy ending. On the other hand, the editions and illustrations of “Goblin Market” which address it specifically to adults seem to follow two paths. The more expected one is exemplified by the works of John Bolton and Kinuko Craft that oscillate between art and pornography, capitalising on and even exaggerating the poem’s erotic dimension. While the artists locate the text’s appeal in its playfulness, and in a pleasure derived from watching the apparent torment of a beautiful woman, their renderings masquerade Lizzie’s anguish as Lizzie’s pleasure and thus suggest that nothing really frightening is going on. On the other

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hand, the text’s auditory imagery, onomatopoeic sounds, alliteration, and assonance that accompany Lizzie’s violation have conspired to create an overall grim and frightening picture of the impending rape. In visual interpretations that treat the poem as adult erotica the threat is altogether deflected – a logical manoeuvre if the primary aim of these editions is visual (and other) pleasure. In contrast, other contemporary artists like Martin Ware, Hilary Paynter and Carrianne Hendrickson seized upon the opportunity to make the poem voice very contemporary concerns: the ecological questions of exploitation of the natural environment and its consequences; issues relating to gender, power, and the dynamics of spectatorship; the irresistibility of the allure of the forbidden fruit – the dark side of sensual pleasure. In these interpretations, it seems that “Goblin Market” has gone full circle and retained its charm which derives from its generic indeterminacy and its polysemy of meaning. While the poem’s early editions – with illustrations by D. G. Rossetti, Housman and Rackham – preserve its ambiguity, most of the twentieth-century renditions pronounced “Goblin Market” either an unthreatening fairy tale or an overtly erotic text. The last three attempts at visualising the poem discussed in this chapter refrain from passing judgement as to the poem’s course of events, but rather emphasise the interpretative directions that contemporary readers may follow in their attempts to unravel the mystery of the poem’s significance. And it is in the poem’s visual interpretations that preserve those spaces of indeterminacy that the aesthetics of the grotesque operates the most; it manifests itself in the inclusion of the bizarre, uncanny and/or menacing elements, in hybridity, fragmentariness, tension and play which negate homogeneity, completion and closure. Without any doubt, “Goblin Market” is very much alive in today’s culture. Apart from the ongoing interest in giving the work a visual form in illustration and sculpture, it has also entered the world of the theatre, addressing audiences of various tastes in a number of stage adaptations (Kooistra Christina Rossetti and Illustration 262–273). Therefore, we may safely state that the text which started as a poem read to a group of working men in Cambridge turned out to be Christina Rossetti’s greatest triumph.

Instead of Conclusions

This project, which originated as a series of separate readings of my favourite nineteenth-century poems – both inside and outside of the classroom – soon grew to unexpected proportions. In the course of collecting primary and secondary material, I realised how capacious my book was becoming. The interaction of the written and the visual, representations of women in poetry and art; poetry, painting, book illustration from the nineteenth century onwards; the grotesque, trauma, corporeal feminism and the reception of literature through art – all of these issues intertwine on the preceding pages. And yet, by no means do I believe that this accumulation of themes and perspectives is either accidental or unrelated. Indeed, there is a number of leading motifs which neatly tie the project together. All the poems which I have discussed in this volume are about women’s stories and women’s concerns. From William Blake to Christina Rossetti, all literary material which is the source of so many critical readings and interpretations and continues to be present in the visual culture of not one, but of three centuries, revolves around the narratives of women’s plights. In various readings, the female characters frequently become literary and cultural tropes – of the sexualised woman (Oothoon, Laura), female melancholia (Isabella), the woman artist or the aestheticised dead female body (the Lady of Shalott), and finally, of the virtuous woman (Lizzie). In my interpretations of the chosen literary texts and their visualisations, I have tried to determine if and to what extent the poets and artists remain content with these stereotypes or try to negate, subvert or adapt them to suit their own artistic visions. Secondly, a motif that connects all of these texts and pictures is female transgression which arises from, I believe, an acute need to define one’s purpose and mode of existence. Thel poses inquisitive questions and declines to take her prescribed place in the patriarchal society, deciding not to become a self-effacing wife and mother, while Oothoon actively asserts her emotional, sexual and spiritual needs and rebels against those who castigate her. In turn, Isabella remains mute throughout of the poem, but her transgressive behaviour becomes an act of

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defiance and turns out to voice the trauma of her fiancé’s murder. “The Lady of Shalott” is primarily a poem about female submission and female transgression – the Lady moves from the position of passive acceptance of her role as a woman and as an artist to active and performative rebellion after which nothing will be the same. Finally, Laura’s transgression – figured as a fall into sexuality and sin – is an attempt to overstep the Victorian gender divide and to satisfy the female appetite for the possibilities and choices denied to women. Moreover, the material discussed and explored in this book relates to what Lorraine Janzen Kooistra calls “the pleasures and transgressions of looking” (“Visualising Fantastic Subject” 138). It does so in several ways: some of the poems openly engage with the question of looking, and all illustrations naturally invite visual contemplation. In poetry, the act of looking – presented as furtive glancing or prolonged contemplation – foregrounds the tropes of exploration or quest; frequently, it also figures desire. Both exploration and the awakening of desire, in turn, become crucial indicators in the process of shaping the subjectivity of the female characters. Oothoon looks for her lover, Theotormon; Thel contemplates the vision of her own grave; the Lady of Shalott looks out at the outside world at the turning point of her story. The narrative of “Goblin Market” spins around the taboo of looking at the goblins and their produce (interestingly, the poem was originally called “The Peep at the Goblins”). While looking is not an overt theme in “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil”, Keats’s heroine herself becomes the focal point of the story, as she remains passive and immobile when nursing her basil plant. Unsurprisingly, this is precisely the position which the artists who paint or illustrate Keats’s poem usually choose. Finally, the politics of looking also surfaces in the attitudes which the viewer is encouraged to assume approaching the poems’ visualisations. These works foster multiple viewing positions. Some invite active engagement in the interpretation of the rendered scenes and encourage our sympathetic response; other play with the firmly established conventions of presenting the female body in art and try to subvert or change them, sometimes even bordering on parody or pastiche; some representations inevitably serve the male gaze. Last but not least, the relationship between the written and the visual is a paramount theme in each of my chapters. As I hope to have demonstrated, this relationship is both complex and problematic. From apparent complementarity through active contestation, syncopation and redundancy, the interaction of the verbal and the visual is always ridden with considerable tension. Illustration itself is interpretation, which then becomes the subject of interpretation again when readers confront their response to the text with the pictures that accompany it. Perry Nodelman asserts that “[o]ur simultaneous or almost-simultaneous experience of both words and pictures allows us to use each to correct our understanding of the other” (Nodelman 218–219). The pictures create our ex-

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pectations about the meaning of a story, but sometimes they introduce or emphasise motifs and ideas which might not surface otherwise. At other times, the inevitable contrast between how readers imagine a narrative with which they were familiar before encountering an illustrated edition forces them to revise their established assumptions about the text. Sometimes this interaction is deeply ironic: where one medium is discreet or silent, the other speaks aloud.99 “By limiting each other, words and pictures together take on a meaning that neither possesses without the other – perform the completion of each other that Barthes calls ‘relying’”, Perry Nodelman so asserts (221). Frequently, the meanings that texts acquire in their visualisations are more alarming and unsettling than readers commonly expect. The ending of “The Lady of Shalott” becomes a statement about the exploitative and abusive ways of looking, “Goblin Market” loses its fairytale quality and transforms into an adult erotic fantasy, and The Book of Thel, thanks to the clash between its verbal and visual meaning, invites critical scrutiny of the workings of patriarchy. However, it also happens that the visual interpretations occlude, or even pervert, the most evident meanings of the text. “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” is a case in point: the poem – a grotesque narrative about trauma and madness – in visual culture primarily functions as a painterly exercise in melodrama. This may be due to the fact that in its concerns and aesthetics, “Isabella” reads like a surrealist work, while its visual renditions remain persistently romantic and conventional. Finally, as W.J.T. Mitchell declares, “the tensions between visual and verbal representations are inseparable from struggles in cultural politics and political culture” (Picture Theory 3). The different twists and turns in the visual history of “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”, “The Lady of Shalott” and “Goblin Market”, as well as the diversity of their creative renderings, relate to the pressing social and ideological issues which were important at different times in which these visualisations were created. Most of the illustrations from the second half of the nineteenth century up to the First World War speak about the matters relating to the position and role of women in society (this naturally coincides with the growing awareness of women’s rights and the attempts to secure them, in education, politics as well as in the private sphere). The later, twenty- and twentyfirst-century works embrace other modern concerns: the politics of looking, the 99 Perry Nodelman proposes a similar conclusion in his analysis of the relationship between pictures and words in picture books for children, although he stresses contradiction as the main characteristics of this relation: “Because they communicate different kinds of information, and because they work together by limiting each other’s meanings, words and pictures necessarily have a combative relationship; their complementarity is a matter of opposites completing each other by virtue of their differences. As a result, the relationships between pictures and texts in picture books tend to be ironic: each speaks about matters on which the other is silent” (221).

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articulation of power relations inherent in visual representations of the gendered body, the questions about sexual orientation and sexual identity, the issues relating to ecology and the natural world. Thus, the readings and interpretations these texts have generated testify to their timelessness and modernity, but they also act as a reminder of the strength of the literary and cultural traditions of the Romantic and Victorian periods, which ultimately infiltrated and merged with the spirit of our times.

Bibliography

Primary Sources: Poems and Editions of Poetry Blake, William. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. Edited by Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1979. –. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Edited by David Erdman. New York: Doubleday, 1988. –. The Book of Thel. Copy H, 1789, The Library of Congress. www.loc.gov/resource/rbc 0001.2005rosen1798/?st=gallery. Accessed 12 February 2008. –. Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Copy J, 1793, The Library of Congress. www.loc.gov /resource/rbc0001.2003rosen1803/?st=gallery. Accessed 12 February 2008. –. “Infant Joy.” Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1789, 1794, Copy C, The Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbc0001.2003rosen1801/?sp=7. Accessed 12 February 2008. –. “Infant Sorrow.” Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1789, 1794, Copy C, The Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbc0001.2003rosen1801/?sp=22. Accessed 12 February 2008. Keats, John. The Poetical Works of John Keats. With A Memoir by Richard Mockton Milnes. Illustrated by 120 designs, original and from the antique, drawn on wood by George Scharf, Jun. London: Edward Moxon, 1854. –. Poems by John Keats. With illustrations by Robert Anning Bell & Introduction by Walter Raleigh. London: George Bell & Sons, 1897. –. Isabella or the Pot of Basil. Illustrated and decorated by W.B. Mcdougall. London: Kegan Paul, 1898. –. Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil. With illustrations by Paul Henry. London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1906. –. Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil: A Story From Boccaccio. With illustrations by Jessie M. King. Edinburgh and London: T. N. Foulis, 1907. –. The Complete Poems. Edited by Miriam Allott. London: Longman, 1970. –. Selected Letters of John Keats. Revised Edition. Edited by Grant F. Scott. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002. Rossetti, Christina. Goblin Market and Other Poems. Illustrated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: Macmillan an Co., 1862. –. Goblin Market. Illustrated by Laurence Housman. London: Macmillan and Co., 1893.

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–. Goblin Market. Illustrated by Dion Clayton Calthrop. London: T.C. and E.C. Jack, 1906. –. Goblin Market and Other Poems. Illustrated by Alice Ross. London: W.P. Ninno, Hay and Mitchell, 1910. –. Goblin Market and Other Poems. Illustrated by Florence Harrison. Beautiful Poems Series. London: Blackie and Sons, 1923. –. Goblin Market. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. London: George G. Harrap and Co., 1933. –. Goblin Market. Illustrated and adapted by Ellen Raskin. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1970. –. Goblin Market: Ribald Classic. Illustrated by Kinuko Craft. Playboy 20.9, 1973, pp. 115– 119. –. Goblin Market. Illustrated with etchings by Martin Ware. London: Victor Gollancz, 1980. –. Goblin Market. Illustrated by John Bolton. Pacific Comics: Pathway to Fantasy 1.1, 1984, pp. 9–18. –. Goblin Market. With wood engravings by Hilary Paynter. London: Artists’ Choice Edition, 2003. –. Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book. Illustrated By Arthur Hughes. London: Routledge, 1872. –. Speaking Likenesses. Illustrated by Arthur Hughes. London: Macmillan, 1874. Tennyson, Alfred. Poems. London: E. Moxon, 1857. –. Tennyson: A Selected Edition. Edited by Christopher Ricks. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Berkeley University Press, 1989. –. Tennyson’s Dream of Fair Women and Other Poems. Illustrated by Florence Harrison. London: Blackie and Son, 1923. –. The Lady of Shalott. Illustrated by Howard Pyle. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1881. –. The Lady of Shalott. Illustrated by Charles Keeping. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. –. The Lady of Shalott. With illustrations by Geneviève Côté. Visions in Poetry Series. Toronto: Kids Can Press, 2005. –. The Lady of Shalott. Illustrated by Bernadette Watts. London: Dobson, 1966.

Primary Sources: Paintings and drawings Alexander, John White. Isabella and the Pot of Basil. 1897. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Barson, Jeff. The Lady of Shalott. Date unknown, private collection. Brickdale-Fortescue, Eleanor. Isabella and the Pot of Basil. The Studio 13, London, 1898, p. 106. Christie, Fyffe. The Lady of Shalott. 1857, in the artist’s possession until 1979; thence with his wife Eleanor Christie-Chatterley until 2012. Crane, Walter. The Lady of Shalott. 1862, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund. Egley, William Maw. The Lady of Shalott. 1858, City Museum, Sheffield. Frampton, Edward Reginald. Isabella and the Pot of Basil. 1912, The Maas Gallery.

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Index

Alexander, John White 106, 107n

7, 84, 88, 92–94,

Bakhtin, Mikhail 66, 70f., 165n, 167, 170 Barthes, Roland 116, 150, 209 Bataille, Georges 71f. Beardsley, Aubrey 94, 96, 100 Beauvoir, Simone de 17f. Bell, Robert Anning 84, 87n, 94–97, 107 Berger, John 122, 140n, 160, 198 Blake, William 7, 13–15, 17–61, 181, 182, 207 – The Book of Thel 7, 13, 17–38, 40, 60f., 163, 181, 209 – Visions of the Daughters of Albion 7, 13, 17, 19, 21, 31n, 38–61, 163, 181 – The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 21n, 24, 50, 60 – Songs of Innocence 23, 36 – Songs of Innocence and of Experience 35, 61 – “Infant Joy” 35–37 – “Infant Sorrow” 35–37 – A Vision of the Last Judgment 49 Boccaccio 63, 67f., 79n, 104 Bolton, John 197, 198, 204 Calthrop, Dion Clayton 189f., 193, 194, 204 Caruth, Cathy 48, 74, 81f. Chaundler, Christine 191 Christie, Fyffe 111, 129, 134, 135 Côté, Geneviève 111, 129, 153, 157–160 Craft, Kinuko 197f., 204

Crane, Walter 152, 159

7, 94, 111, 131, 142, 145f.,

Egley, William Maw

111, 136f., 141, 159

Fortescue-Brickdale, Eleanor 84, 88, 95, 100, 111 Foucault, Michel 44f., 47 Frampton, Edward Reginald 84, 88, 99f., 106, 107 Frank, Hannah 7, 84, 100–106, 108 Freud, Sigmund 81f., 125, 145 Giancola, Donato 111, 129, 142, 145, 148, 150–152, 160 Gloag, Isobel 84, 91, 107, 108 Grimshaw, John Atkinson 7, 111, 145–147, 159 Harrison, Florence 111, 129, 141f., 144, 159, 192f. Hazlitt, William 63 Hendrickson, Carrianne 9, 202f., 204, 205 Henry, Paul 84, 98f., 104 Herman, Judith 75, 77n, 80, 82 Hicks, Elgar 113 Horvitz, Shelah 9, 111, 129f., 135f., 159f. Housman, Laurence 188f., 195, 204f. Hughes, Arthur 111, 144–149, 160 Hunt, William Holman 15, 83, 84, 87–92, 95, 99f., 106f., 111, 129, 137–143, 148, 159

228

Index

Kayser, Wolfgang 66, 69, 82 Keats, John 9, 13, 15, 61, 63–85, 87–92, 94– 98, 100f., 103f., 106–108, 129, 186, 191, 208 – “Lamia” 82 – Endymion 68, 82f. – “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” 82f., 191 – “The Eve of Saint Agnes” 82f. – “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” 9, 13, 15, 63–108, 163, 208, 209 King, Jessie Marion 84, 88, 96–98, 100, 107f., 108 LaCapra, Dominick Lifton, Robert 75

78, 82

Manton, George Henry Grenville 84, 88, 100, 106f. Meteyard, Sidney Harold 111, 129f., 132f., 144, 159 Mill, John Stuart 12, 182 Millais, John Everett 15, 83–89, 92, 106, 142, 147, 194 Mulvey, Laura 140 Paynter, Hilary 7, 9, 200–202, 204f. Pyle, Howard 111, 130, 131f., 137, 141, 159 Rackham, Arthur 193–195, 197, 204f. Rae, Henrietta 84, 88, 91f., 106–108 Raskin, Ellen 195f., 204 Robertson, George E. 111, 142, 145, 148, 150, 160

Ross, Alice 190f., 192–194, 204 Rossetti, Christina 13, 15n, 142n, 163–189, 191–193, 195, 196n, 197–200, 202–205, 207 – “Goblin Market” 13, 163–205, 208f. – Sing-Song 195n – Speaking Likenesses 195 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 26, 61, 83, 90, 111, 129, 132, 142, 145, 148–150, 160, 170, 185–190, 195, 204f. Ruskin, John 12, 147, 159, 176–180 Scharf, George 84, 87f., 107 Shaw, Byam 111, 142, 144, 159 Siddall, Elizabeth 111, 129–131, 132, 136, 159, 170n Strudwick, John Melhuish 84, 87, 89–91, 92, 104, 106, 107n Swedenborg, Emmanuel 21 Tennyson, Alfred 13, 15, 109–134, 136– 144, 148, 150, 152–156, 158–161, 191 – “The Lady of Shalott” 13, 15, 109–161, 163, 208, 209 – “The Princess” 110, 116n Ware, Martin 9, 198–200, 204f. Waterhouse, William 84, 88, 99f., 106f., 111, 129f., 132–134, 137, 139–144, 159 Young, Marion

18f., 60, 122