social-realist canvases to the active, powerful and even omnipotent women in his later paintings of the mid-to-late 1880s. This traceable movement from his early portrayals of disempowered or powerless female figures to his later portrayals of empowered or powerful female figures – elevating dead, dying or destitute woman to mysterious, omniscient, powerful personifications of death – can be seen to reflect the socio-political progression of women towards female empowerment and emancipation over the second half of the nineteenth century. While Victorian culture was pervaded by images of women made more beautiful and more ‘perfectly feminine’ by death, the Death Triptych focuses on the power, rather than the passivity, of women in conjunction with death. Thus the Wattses worked within the Victorian tradition of associating femininity and death to create strikingly unconventional images of women that can be seen (in hindsight, from a historicist-feminist perspective) to dialogise with early feminist iconography. However, as both female symbol of transcendence and subversive female symbol, the women in the Death Triptych stand ‘both under and over (but really simply outside of) the sphere of culture’s hegemony’; the comprising images could be seen to reiterate the marginalisation of the gender Other on the plane of art by aligning her with an unknown ‘other’ world after life or beyond death. The female figure or Angel of Death in George’s art arguably becomes an embodiment of ‘those extremes of mysterious and intransigent Otherness which culture confronts with worship or fear, love or loathing [...] she mediates between the male artist and the Unknown’. The presentation of women as ethereal (non)entities and abstract concepts is somewhat problematic from a feminist perspective. Yet the female figures of the Death Triptych are not ineffectual, etherealised spirits or vaporous female presences, but rather strong, central, solid manifestations of death who interact with and influence the material world – particularly in The Messenger. The historically oppressed and marginalised gender Other is placed in a position of power as a personification of death,
practice, Mary can be seen to make a subversive statement about gender specifically through the arts. Despite seeming conventional in its prioritisation of craft, the ambiguous and arguably androgynous or hermaphroditic nature of Mary’s creative practice fusing art and craft can be seen as a kind of progressive ‘practice of bisexuality’ with its ‘refusal to be imprisoned in fixity’, undermining sexual difference; in Cixous’s terms, woman ‘benefits from and opens up within this bisexuality’ as opposed to man’s ‘phallic monosexuality’. The painted angel faces encircling the interior of the chapel – which Mary painted onto smooth gesso as though onto a flat canvas, unlike the high relief of their modelled bodies and the moulding used on the exterior terracotta decoration – parallel the angel in George’s painting ‘The All-Pervading’ which serves as the chapel’s altarpiece; this figure, surrounded by Mary’s larger figures, seems to connect Mary’s panels (two and three) and complete the wall of angels (‘the encircling group of winged messengers’), symbolising the Wattses’ creative partnership. As Melanie Unwin argues, Mary’s approach to her professional creative practice, ‘to marriage, […] and to her husband’s practice, position and reputation’ can be seen to ‘converge on [the site of] the Watts Chapel.’ Yet Mary’s large-scale, life-sized angels dominate the chapel walls and dwarf George’s much smaller altarpiece (subsequently added in which is set back below the window of the East Buttress rather than foregrounded, giving the impression that Mary’s ‘winged giantesses’ encircling the interior walls are striding forward or approaching the viewer standing at the entrance or centre of the chapel. These apparently androgynous ‘Angel messengers’ – whose widening hips, slender arms and feminine faces support an interpretation of them as female on closer inspection – ‘carry the symbols of Freedom and Limit; of Union and Conflict; of Stability and Change’. Through her creation of these female figures in conjunction with such socio-politically-charged binary structures, Mary can be seen to enter into and engage with the feminist discourse of her day which foregrounded these
George’s painting of a ‘rather androgynous’ figure on such a large scale can be read in relation to Judith Butler’s gender theory as a subtly yet radically subversive statement about traditional concepts of sex and gender. The figure is an ‘amalgamation of binary opposites, a particular configuration and conflation of male and female’, deconstructing distinctions between the sexes and defying the strongly polarised sex/gender system of the Victorian period. The figure, conceived ‘outside the confines of socialized, rigidified sexual difference’, seems to expose the fictitious ‘univocity’ of that binary system; it confuses and even transcends sex, arguably representing ‘“the person” freed from the shackles of sex’. This figure can thus be seen to transcend the ‘limits and regulatory aims’ of the ‘matrix of intelligibility’ and to ‘open up [...] subversive matrices of gender disorder’. The claim that George’s art ‘eschews the undertones of sexual entrapment, misogyny and androgyny which pervade much symbolist art’ seems to align androgyny with misogyny and sexual entrapment, and yet the androgyny of the figure in ‘The All-Pervading’ defies the traditional gender binary which has historically been used to legitimise and enforce misogyny and sexual entrapment. The painting portrays a vision of gender and sexuality that surpasses heteronormativity and subverts male hegemony. The blurring and breaking down of the apparently rigid and impermeable sex/gender binary boundaries forces viewers of the painting into a radical reassessment of traditional notions of God, man and woman, because, as Butler argues, ‘one’s staid and usual cultural perceptions fail, when one cannot with surety read the body that one sees […] when one is no longer sure whether the body encountered is that of a man or a woman.’ This illuminates the subversive implications of George’s painting that calls categories into question. Indeed, Butler suggests that a radical shift in one’s perception and notion of the ‘real’ always precedes political revolution. George’s artwork which induces this shift partly demonstrates Butler’s theory in the sense that it prompts (and reflects) a radical rethinking of basic