Fatality Of Femininity: The Femme Fatale And The Fallen Woman
By Megan Shaw. Art History 202: Mid 19th Century Art in France and Britain, Semester Two 2017. Grade: A+, 91/100.
Discuss the portrayal of female sexuality in mid 19th Century paintings through the themes of the ‘femme fatale’ and ‘fallen woman.’
“Of Adam’s first wife, Lilith, it is told
(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve),
That, ere the snake’s, her sweet tongue could deceive,
And her enchanted hair was the first gold…
Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold…
Lo! As that youth’s eyes burned at thine, so went
Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent
And round his heart one strangling golden hair.”
If Helen of Troy, the face that launched one thousand ships, was the original femme fatale, then Lady Lilith embodied a devious and equally dangerous sexuality. The demise of men at the female hand of beauty, sexuality and undeniable distraction was a well-established concept before the turn of the 19th Century. The Victorians, however, with their conservative, moralising ideologies, harnessed the imagery of the fatal female in their creative mentality. This essay will discuss how femininity and ‘fatal women’ caused the metaphoric downfall of men, and how fallen women were destroyed by the inherent immorality of their sex and sexuality.
The regulation of sexuality navigated across Victorian boundaries of gender and class; however, female transgression was perceived as the primacy factor that broke ideological gender functions. The core paradox in this discourse is the visual representation of women as opposing ideals: the pure and the impure. The fantasy female, and to an extent real subjugated women, defined their sexual appetite by the gratification of their lover.[1] Marital sexuality functioned for the reproduction of legitimate children and in the capitalist environment of 19th Century Britain, legitimate children of bourgeois families would become the heirs and inheritors of capital, land and enterprise.[2] For aristocratic men, poor women and prostitutes were considered accessible resources for pleasure and exploitation, and respectable women of any class were sex objects for their husbands as part of wifely duty. Fallen women, whether poverty struck or in prostitution, were objects of and for sex, because of their position in society. Female sexuality then, was inextricably linked to the sexuality of her male counterpart and to patriarchal ideology.[3] All women, even women in artistic representations, were bound to men.
Glorification and an expectation of motherhood was well ingrained in Madonna and Child iconography. The moral and sexual transgressions of women undermined this position, or future role, as mothers. Misbehaviour, including childbirth out of wedlock, led to female demise, and was a source of embarrassment for both the woman and child, as well as her male partner. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and painters of the 19th Century, explored themes of the fallen woman and femme fatale almost obsessively. Much of their noted oeuvre, particularly in the case of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, depicts the female form. The concept of falling was applied differently between the sexes: for men, to fall was an act of war, whereas for women it was the notion of succumbing to vice and the subsequent consequences of an immoral breakdown.[4] Inherent sensuousness and hypersexuality were attractive concepts for artists, often portraying women in mythological or allegorical scenes for the viewership and fascination of Victorian men. This perversion of viewing the dangerous and immoral, in a society which condemned it, considers whether the artworks in question are portraiture or pornography.
Figure 1. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith (oil on canvas), 38 x 33.5 inches, 1866-68, Delaware Art Museum.
The sexually disobedient woman was depicted in many different forms, and Rossetti described female sexuality as the “perilous principle.”[5] A temptress and demon from Jewish mythology, the character of Lilith epitomised the femme fatale. Rossetti painted her as a dangerous woman- a creature of beauty and vanity (see figure 1). The colouristic and textural resplendence within the composition emphasises floral forms and exaggerates the physiognomy of Lilith. The language of poppies and roses here, alongside a dual appearance of mirrors, signals the glorification of death and sexual voracity which are fatally attractive to men.[6]Her long, loose and flowing hair, associated with loose morals, was characteristic of femme fatale imagery, and this reflected her open status.[7] Lilith’s neck and shoulders are on display, again a source of openness and immorality. The depiction of elongated and exposed necks, combined with a luxurious head of hair was fetishised in Pre-Raphaelite painting, with great attention paid to the brushwork that aimed to perfect a sensual curtain and facial frame for the painted female.
As a fetish then, the figure and history of Lady Lilith as a femme fatale stems from Jewish folklore. Lilith was the first wife of Adam, before Eve, who became demonic with inability to have children. This is reminiscent of Medea, another mythological femme fatale, who smites her husband Jason for having an affair, and leaves a trail of destruction including the vengeful murder of their children. These women do not conform to the motherly ideal, and paintings depicting unconventional women, especially those who refused to defer to men, were rightfully feared by male viewers. These works were however, produced for and by men as objects to be looked at, as sources of delectation. Griselda Pollock coined this as the ‘sexual hierarchy of looking,’ a structure of objectification through the gaze.[8] Although Lilith is powerful and seductive without meeting the viewers’ eyes, the male spectator remains ‘sovereign’ because of his viewership.[9] This exterior position gave men the “power to look, to fear [and] to subordinate women,” defining and limiting the power of a woman who was capable of fatal seduction.[10]
Figure 2. William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1853, Tate Britain. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T02075
The sexual hierarchy was determined by the patriarchal structure, which delineated separate spaces for men and women. The ‘cult of domesticity’ outlined gender roles in and outside the home; women were ‘naturally’ suited to duties in the latter, while men functioned in the public sphere. The domestic ideal and smooth running of a household demarcated status and the respectability of the husband and wife. The public and private personas of relationships were often intertwined, however many upper-class men had mistresses, labelled as kept women. William Holman Hunt’s the Awakening Conscience, illustrates a moral epiphany: disdain for an immoral lifestyle (see figure 2). The figures occupy a dense space, as though clutched between the narrow frame. The encapsulated and kept woman rises from the lap of her lover, as though remembering her childhood innocence, perhaps with a sense of paranoia at being with child herself. This intervention of conscience is a refusal to accept instability and the ‘natural’ female progression from kept to fallen. One must consider the repercussions of refusing a patriarch, and the dynamic role reversal of a female desiring to desert a man. F.G Stephens described the entanglement of characters in Holman Hunt’s work as a man with “patrician arms surround[ing] the victim of his passions.”[11] Blame for initial seduction could be placed upon the male; however, it was a blend of a woman’s’ ‘weakness’ and inability to decline a dominating figure, combined with suppression of personal desire and subsequent sexual transgression, that began the process of a woman’s ‘fall.’ The interior decoration of the painting, already described as dense, is indicative of vulgar commodification and ‘newness.’ There is a lack of permanence in a setting which should be the centre of stability, in turn indicating the impermanence of the couple’s relationship. The family and home could be the instigator of destruction for fallen women or a means of rehabilitation.[12] According to W. Lecky in 1869, the home and its familial order was the archetype of the modern state, and transgression within it was understood in terms of a wider social crisis.[13]
Figure 3. Alfred Elmore, On the Brink, 1856, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. http://www.artuk.org/artworks/on-the-brink-4941
National stability in the 19th Century was dependent on public morality. Social fears of instability, displacement and dislocation were deflected into concerns of moral standard.[14] Prostitutes were understood to be ‘agents of chaos’, with Henry Mayhew in his London Labour and the London Poor of 1862 defining prostitution as a “pestiferous influence exercised on society by one single, fallen woman…woman waylaid, tempted, deceived…the downward trend of all that is pure and holy in life.”[15] Prostitution was deemed a threat because of its visibility. It was both a common, public and private vice that occupied industrialising cities. Alfred Elmore’s On the Brink depicts a choice between morality and vice, and has a moral purpose in forcing the viewer to consider their own choices and standards (see figure 3).[16] Here, the vice is not yet sex or prostitution, but gambling. The activity defeminises the woman and participation with a negative outcome would be sufficient in pushing her into a downward spiral.[17] The male gamblers in the background of the composition may lose their money and property, however the foreground figure is likely to sacrifice her honour too.[18] William Acton’s 1865 publication ‘Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs’ describes women as “ignorant and averse to any sexual indulgence.”[19] If women then, were characters devoid of any sexual desire, especially members of the bourgeoisie, prostitution was a consequence of the ‘fall’ and rarely a voluntary or conscious decision of immorality. A man, the “seducer and betrayer,” could be blamed for a woman’s initial fall from virtue and purity.[20] However, the ingrained mythology of ‘fallen women’ left little room for her recovery or repentance in an “inevitable” path from seduction to selling oneself on the city streets.[21]
Sexual regulation was a common factor across all genders and classes, however women were considered more susceptible to moral misgiving, especially without the presence or protection of a patriarch. Elmore’s protagonist is alone and outside of her domestic space, and represents the fall of the solitary upper-class woman. The dark colour palette and deep shadows obscure sections of her costume and countenance, and the devilish figure behind her is difficult to discern in the darkness. The rich red interior is indicative of sin and debauchery, and the woman, painted with yellow and white, is sallow and lifeless by comparison. The protagonist is joining an inevitable chain to take her from seduction to prostitution: victims of vice and fallen women had no option other than to prostitute themselves for survival.[22] Survival for fallen women was however, considered almost impossible, and Elmore’s woman was described by the 1865 Art Journal as having “sustained fatal loss…found on the brink of certain ruin and possible suicide.”[23]
Figure 4. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Found, 1854-55, 1859-81 (unfinished), Delaware Art Museum.
The idea that the salvation of the fallen woman was only possible through religious intervention was morally convenient for Victorian men, as responsibility for both their ‘fall’ and wellbeing was removed.[24] Rossetti painted numerous works of fallen women, most notably a prostitute in his unfinished Found from 1854-1881 (see figure 4). Nochlin describes Found as a “palimpsest of motifs and motivations” and an iconographical image that has developed over time.[25] Prostitutes were regarded as less evolved members of society, and Victorian anthropologists viewed these contemporary ‘primitives’ as hypersexual, virile and wantonly promiscuous.[26] The fall of the prostitute was considered a metaphysical absolute, rather than an issue of social ethics that could be altered by societal intervention or human compassion.[27] Young women, such as in Found, were prisoners of sex in an structure characterized by public virtue and practice of private iniquity.[28]
In 1850, William Rathbone Greg of the Westminster Review wrote that poverty was the principle cause that forced women into prostitution.[29] In the domestic sphere, women had ‘sacred security’, however the growth and corruption of cities provided no such shelter for fallen women. For some, a life of poverty and consequent falling was a fate worse than death. Rossetti’s Found explores mythic associations of lost innocence (likened to the Awakening Conscience), shame and an inevitable downward progress towards suicide. The young woman is thin, especially in Rossetti’s preliminary drawings, and is dressed in “showy but seedy” attire.[30] Her hair is exposed underneath an unfastened bonnet, and her costume has a gaudiness that connotes corruption, deviancy and artificiality.[31] She is somewhat of a personification of the city. Her ex-lover and male counterpart in his traditional smock, represents the health and unchanging lifestyle of the countryside. The woman’s end is indicated by the bridge in the background, driven to her fate without free will.[32] We can look to George Frederick Watts’ Found Drowned as another example of this final fall (see figure 5).
George Frederick Watts, Found Drowned (oil on canvas), c. 1848-50, Watts Gallery, Surrey.
Rossetti has been described in feminist discourse as being misogynistic in his depictions of women and their sexuality. Nochlin argues that in the context of Found, it would be a ‘mistake’ to define Rossetti’s attitude toward women by his depictions of the fallen prostitute. In a letter to Ford Maddox Brown in 1873, Rossetti draws an analogy between artists and prostitutes, “I have often said that to be an artist is just the same thing as to be a whore, as far as dependence on the whims and fancies of individuals is concerned.”[33] Are his works then, a reflection of self-despair and criticism of his context? Found, and to a lesser extent Lady Lilith, are not representative of Rossetti’s “ultimate” opinions on sexuality, subjugation of women, and the salvation of the ‘fallen woman’ but more on the complex web of contradictions concerning them.[34]
Edward Burne Jones, Sidonia von Bork, (watercolour and gouache on paper), 1860, Tate Collection.
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N05877
Rossetti described his mythological Lilith as a witch with enchanted hair. One should note that facial and bodily conformity was paramount, and the visage of Fanny Conforth, the original model, was painted over at the will of the patron. His depiction of Lady Lilith, now Alexa Wilding, with a cold face, strong jaw and deadness in the eye is driven by that conditioned and unconscious misogynistic tendency and paranoia. In turn, Edward Burne-Jone’s depiction of Sidonia von Bork suggests a preoccupation with the dangerous female and sorceress (see figure 6). The black web of Sidonia’s costume communicates themes of deviancy and danger. Her turned head and strong side profile invoke an air of infallibility, although Sidonia von Bork was indeed tried and executed for the crime of witchcraft in 1620. The Early Modern perception of black magic was very real; however, the Victorian reconditioning of witch imagery suggests fear not of the medieval, but of the ‘New Woman’.
Griselda Pollock references Victoria Allen’s study, acknowledging that a feminist reading of ‘femme fatale’ images incorporates a fearful response to contemporary Victorian feminism, where the unconventional female was perceived as a modern destroyer of men.[35] Male concern over female agency was inextricable from the growth of the women’s suffrage movement. The ‘woman question’ was widely discussed and criticised in the Athenaeum, which was a favoured periodical of the Pre-Raphaelites. Mythologised and historic ‘femme fatales’ were channelled in the perception of contemporary Suffragettes and activists. Although Lilith and Sidonia can be likened to dangerous and alternative women in Victorian England, they were not feminist icons for Rossetti, nor for the artist’s patrons, in the contemporary context. The works are determined by their social context as much as personal motivation, and a feminist lens has the potential to aggrandise the agency of 19th Century women and painted allegories of them.
Frederick Sandys, Helen of Troy, 1867, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. 2017 Installation View. Image Credit: The Author.
In conclusion, double standards of morality defined female sexuality as deviant and pathological. There was a strong preoccupation to depict women as creatures of fantasy, and masculine desire for these pictures was heightened by a sense of danger and mythology. The femme fatale, beginning with Helen of Troy (see figure 7), brought pleasure, pain and destruction into mythology and Victorian viewership, and these fantasies were structured within discourse on social and gender relations.[36] Women, whether fallen or fatal, were defined by their beauty and body in both reality and art. The Victorian era was a period of sexual hypocrisy, and painting accentuated that eternal paradox of the pure and impure: respectability and perversion.
[1] Griselda Pollock, “Woman as sign: psychoanalytic readings” in Vision and Difference, 1989, pp. 142-3.
[2] Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock, ‘PATRIARCHAL POWER AND THE PRE‐RAPHAELITES’, Art History, 7, 4, 1984.p. 492.
[3] ibid.
[4] Linda Nochlin, ‘Lost and Found: Once More the Fallen Woman’, The Art Bulletin, 60, 1, 1978, p. 139.
[5] Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1870 in Virginia M. Allen, ‘“One Strangling Golden Hair”: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith’, The Art Bulletin, 66, 2, 1984, p. 286.
[6] Cherry and Pollock, p. 492.
[7] Lynn Nead, ‘The Magdalen in Modern Times: The Mythology of the Fallen Woman in Pre-Raphaelite Painting’, Oxford Art Journal, 7, 1, 1984, p. 28.
[8] Pollock, p. 144.
[9] Cherry and Pollock, p. 492. Figure One.
[10] ibid.
[11] Nead, 1984, p. 36.
[12] Nochlin, p. 141.
[13] Nead, 1984, p. 27.
[14] Nead, 1982, p. 308.
[15] Henry Mayhew, 1862 in Lynn Nead, ‘The Magdalen in Modern Times,’1984, p. 31.
[16] Nead, 1982, p. 315.
[17] ibid. p. 317.
[18] ibid. p. 314.
[19] William Acton, Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, 1865, in Nead, 1982, p. 311.
[20] Nead, 1982, p. 319.
[21] ibid.
[22] Art Journal, June 1865, p. 166 in Nead, 1982, p. 320.
[23] ibid.
[24] Nochlin p. 152.
[25] Nochlin p. 152.
[26] Pollock, p. 144
[27] Nochlin p. 152.
[28] Cherry and Pollock, p. 493.
[29] Nochlin p. 143.
[30] Nead p. 34.
[31] ibid.
[32] Nochlin p. 143.
[33] Nochlin p. 152.
[34] ibid.
[35] Pollock, p. 126.
[36] ibid.
Bibliography:
Allen, Virginia M., ‘“One Strangling Golden Hair”: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith’, The Art Bulletin, 66, 2, 1984, pp. 285–294.
Auerbach, Nina, ‘The Rise of the Fallen Woman’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35, 1, 1980, pp. 29–52.
Cherry, Deborah, and Griselda Pollock, ‘PATRIARCHAL POWER AND THE PRE‐RAPHAELITES’, Art History, 7, 4, 1984, pp. 480–495.
Nead, Lynda, ‘SEDUCTION, PROSTITUTION, SUICIDE: ON THE BRINK BY ALFRED ELMORE’, Art History, 5, 3, 1982, pp. 310–322.
Nead, Lynn, ‘The Magdalen in Modern Times: The Mythology of the Fallen Woman in Pre-Raphaelite Painting’, Oxford Art Journal, 7, 1, 1984, pp. 26–37.
Nochlin, Linda, ‘Lost and Found: Once More the Fallen Woman’, The Art Bulletin, 60, 1, 1978, pp. 139–153.
Pollock, Griselda, “Woman as sign: psychoanalytic readings” in Vision & Difference, 1989, ch. 6, pp. 120-154.
About the Author:
Megan Shaw is a current BA (Hons) student in Art History with a keen interest in Gender History. She is an Early Modernist at heart and is writing her dissertation on Katherine Villiers, the Duchess of Buckingham (d.1649). She was the President of the Art History Society from its beginning in 2017 until 2019. She currently works for the Chartwell Trust.
