An Uneasy Beauty: Pre-Raphaelites and the Feminine Ideal
By: Remy Dean
Tags: Art History, Painting, History, Mythology, Art

The flowers that Millais includes are chosen for their symbolic meanings. The violets at Ophelia’s throat represent faithfulness, chastity, dying young and unrequited love. The pink rose at the hem of her skirts suggests the transient beauty of youth and fleeting exhilaration of first love. The white of the daisies represents unsullied innocence. Pansies derive their name from the French word pensée — the same word from which ‘pensive’ is derived. Nettles indicate pain, both physical and ‘of the heart’. The prominent poppy-like red flower has been identified as wild pheasant’s-eye, which represents unbearable sorrow.

The Pre-Rapaelites revelled in the idealisation of beauty, both feminine and botanical, but the surface was nearly always subservient to the symbolic. Millais painted studies of the flowers along one stretch of the Hogsmill river through spring and summer, a period of about five months. So each plant would never naturally be in bloom at the same time, as depicted.

Apart from becoming a composite nature study, this also served the symbolic narrative of beauty halted in its passing. This was a common subject in the Romantic art of the period. Though many Pre-Raphaelite works bear a resemblance to works of their Romantic contemporaries, their ideologies couldn’t have been more different and hint at a sinister side.

Women portrayed whilst still alive, tended to be archetypes from the classics. They’re either manipulators of men or vampiric temptresses. Women who were pure and chaste, such as Ophelia, are often portrayed after death, when their chastity is assured for evermore and their beauty exists in memory alone, unspoiled by the ravages of time. It seems there’s an underlying message that the only ‘good woman’ was a dead one!

Here’s another a woman, this time alive and dangerous…

‘Lady Lillith’ (1868) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti [view license]

Lady Lillith, in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1868 painting, is an icon of the Pre-Raphaelite woman. The model was Alexa Wilding and, for a while, Rossetti monopolised her beauty by contracting her to sit exclusively for him. She’s also a notable exception in that he did not take the relationship beyond the professional as he tended to with his models…

Although the attitudes expressed by many Pre-Raphaelite works fall neatly within the sexist, male-dominated norms of Victorian Britain, some images also exalt the power of women and although the Pre-Raphaelites were a ‘Brotherhood’ there were some influential women artists associated with them. On the whole, though, they lived by the privileged double-standards that so aggravated the Decadents.

The Pre-Raphaelite scene was rife with tumultuous affairs and love triangles resulting in much angst and emotional highs and lows. The portrayal of women was often ambiguous. They could be interpreted as chaste and unobtainable objects of beauty, or as manipulative femmes fatale.

The woman in this painting is intended to appear self-obsessed, vainly brushing her luscious locks, clearly aware of the power she may wield with her physical charms. The flowers again provide a commentary. The white roses are the first to assert themselves upon the viewer and represent pure love. The poppy in the foreground is a symbol of oblivion, of abandoning ones senses.

The common name for the digitalis laid on her dresser is ‘foxglove’, derived from its association with the fairy folk — originating as ‘folk’s gloves’. It’s associated with magical deception and trickery. It was known to be deadly poisonous. Yet also used medicinally. So, ‘just like a woman’, it could harm or heal.

According to the ancient tale, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the mythical Lillith was either a magical Sumerian queen or a witch-queen of demons. In later Hebrew myths, she becomes the first wife of Adam in the Garden of Eden and appears in early Biblical texts, surviving into some medieval Latin reprints.

She’s generally associated with fleshy pleasures, sin and death, and probably wasn’t too happy when God gifted a new ‘good’ girl to Adam in the form of Eve. Lillith, sometimes translated as ‘Lamia’, became associated with the serpent and was also said to have been a wife of Samael, the archangel of Evil and Death, often confused with Satan.

By contrast, Rossetti painted The Blessed Damozel in 1878 as a paradigm of feminine perfection. A grand, two panel painting based on a poem he’d written when he was a teenager.

The lower panel shows a man reclining and looking skyward. His gaze leads us into the top panel where we see a woman (Wilding was once again the model) leaning forward to look down upon him. These are two young lovers, who in the poem are separated by death.

‘The Blessed Damozel’ (1878) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti [view license]

Here, the gold dividing frame and the three red-haired angels visually separate the dead girl in heaven from the living man on earth. They look longingly to each other, awaiting the day when death will reunite them. This desired outcome is suggested by the reunited lovers crowding the top of the composition. These heavenly lovers are shown in a garden of red roses, denoting passionate love, and appear almost like a thought bubble.

This is an almost definitive Pre-Raphaelite work in theme, symbolism and overall appearance. The woman has the typical pale skin, ruby lips and abundant red hair, in which shine the stars of the Pleiades constellation. There should be seven, so the implication is that the girl’s spirit has joined them, becoming the seventh.

Like flowers, stars are rich in symbolism and the Pleiades are generally signifiers of feminine beauty, though in Western astrology they can mean grief and the burden of sorrow because of their association with the Hyades. In Greek mythology, the Pleiades and the Hyades were all sisters and each lend their name to faint clusters of stars in the constellation of Taurus. The Hyades are said to weep with grief and it’s their tears that eventually reach the earth as rain.

The pink roses of pure love surround her. She holds three white lilies, symbols of death and of the Aesthetic movement, which overlaps with the ‘gothic graveyard school’ style of Victorian art. The love between the two is chaste, pure and eternal. Although that love has temporarily been defeated by death, it is death that will also bring the eventual triumph of their love.

Love and death…

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848 by seven artists: William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner. The number seven was significant to them, perhaps because of its numerological association with God and creation. They were a reactionary group formed in opposition to the inevitable changes happening around them and published The Germ, an illustrated journal of essays, poems and sketches to proclaim their stance.