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Mirror Mirror: Conference
papers
Different but equal? Victorian women's
sense of self
Dr Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Senior Lecturer in History of Art at
the School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury in Christchurch,
New Zealand
The female artist in
19th-century Britain knew herself to be a curiosity, especially
after the mid-point of the century when feminism had (deliberately)
made both Woman and women an object of controversy. The Victorian
woman's self-portraits were thus, more than anything else, currency
in a contemporary debate. Lara Perry is corrrect when she writes,
in relation to the establishment in this period of the National
Portrait Gallery collection, "Gender was among the important
categories through which spectators were positioned in relation
to different forms of portrait interpretation..." (Corbett
and Perry eds 2000, p. 116). Mid-Victorian feminism posited that
patriarchy had forged a false Woman - that, in John Stuart Mill's
and Harriet Taylor's words, women "had always hitherto been
kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural
a state, that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted
and disguised..." (Subjection of Women, p. 305) - so that
in the present day a true or authentic woman was to be revealed.
And in their knowing fashioning of Woman and women the images
of self which I am going to examine seem collectively to conjure
Patricia Meyer Spacks observation on 20th-century women's self-portraits
of "A self which has no self, a being of uncertainty and
mystery" (Joyce Tenneson Cohen 1979, p. 111). They range
from depictions of the specific individual self such as Cecilia
Harrison: 1890 to the now well-known Osborn: Nameless
and Friendless 1857 which may be called a generic self-portrait,
from the self isolated to the self situated.
It is important to note that
any image of a female artist of this period entered into circulation
in an already crowded field in which women/Woman were much discussed
and open to competing definition. Self-portraiture must be embedded
in this discourse, contextualised by different types of representation
of the artistic woman.
There was an already established image of the female artist which
stood as a benchmark or given, an image which was clung to, elaborated
on and persisted in as women's own images of themselves entered
the discourse, and this can be examined before we go any further.
This received image of the female artist was sentimental and
domestic and of great importance to the ideology of femininity
but of little consequence in the idea of art. Despite the certitude
of Mary Ellen Best's portraits of herself at the age of
30 (c.1839), coming out of the pre-Victorian identity of the
female amateur, suggesting that amateurism could be embraced
as a positive space for the creative woman, the negative amateur
kept coming through the 50s, 60s and 70s Punch, Baldwin, Oakley,
Solomon and Haynes......:This amateurism was useful to posit
as an opposite pole to the increasingly commercialised professional
male, presenting an image of the female artist defined by weakness
or lack. Thus a portrait such as that of Trevelyan by Dilke
1863, wherein a famously strong-minded woman amateur of the
period depicts her friend, also defined by her economic position
as non-professional, in a portrait which is strong in every respect
- colour, form, message of creative energy - provoked confusion
in the middle of the century because it failed to place the female
artist as either the weak amateur and the strong professional.
New images, then, made by their subjects, could not avoid a relationship
with these: they must have acquiesced in, confirmed, counteracted
or attempted to subvert, displace, or overcome these established
images.In this light it is interesting to note the desire of
those close to women artists to represent them. To speak on behalf
of them, as it were. The resulting pictures cannot be disentangled
from patriarchy's traditional desire to define women: thus for
instance and somewhat typically Joanna Mary Boyce's husband,
portraitist Henry Wells, depicted her more than once JMB1
1861-2: the maker of these images is the same person who
wanted his heroine to let him finish her paintings for her, since
she seemed to be having difficulty getting the effect that she
wanted...! Anna Alma-Tadema can be cited here also, depicted
sensitively by herself in a little-publicised painting reproduced
in 1905 but proably painted a little earlier, and by her oppressively
well-known father on more than one occasion and especially in
a canvas of 1883 which he repeatedly exhibited over the
years, demonstrating the tradition of male artists defining 'their'
women - daughters, wives, sisters, mothers - as satellites of
themselves. Her image of herself then must have competed with
his. Elizabeth Siddal could be mentioned here too: her
self-portrait 1853-4 shows both the attempt at
taking herself seriously that was needed for professional success
but also the technical limtations by which women were held back
from effective practice in the open market. It was made in unwilling
concert, so to speak, with the numerous portraits of her made
by her companion Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1853, notoriously
unstable representations of their ostensible subject and yet
sometimes showing her more explicitly as an artist than her own
picture of hereself does. These depictions and the desires they
reveal should be borne in mind when we note that DGR's brother,
WMR, called Siddal's painting "an absolute likeness ...
an excellent and graceful likeness ... it is her very self"
(1895 and 1903), expressing the idea that the best self-portrait
is the truest, and of the self empowered above all others to
tell the truth through being the expert, the final authority
on the self (ownership of the self conferring knowledge of the
self, knowledge informs the likeness). This kind of judgment
could only be entertained by those who respected women enough
to believe them capable of self-knowledge, of course.
An artist who might have been expected through self-consciousness
to have produced self-portraits is Anna Mary Howitt, whom
we also know depicted by DGR 1853 but not in fact by her
self. Even Deborah Cherry hasn't been able to discover a visual
self-portrait by Howitt, though her written one in An Art
Student in Munich was clearly meant to and indeed does achieve
a vivid group portrait of herself and her close friends.
As Lara Perry comments in an observation steeped in John Berger's
famous assertion of the early 70s that women understand themselves
as objects of the other's gaze even when they themselves occupy
the role of viewer: "Any portrait is a documentation of
at least two historical events: the presence of the sitter, and
the work of the artist... If the agency of the sitter is privileged,
the significance of the work appears to be invested in its content;
if the agency of the artist is privileged, the work's significance
appears to be invested in the form and manner of its representation"
(p. 117) Used to being the sitter, it was clearly a challenge
for women to transform themselves into the artist: perhaps being
the artist and the sitter was not, as it might seem, the easieest
step towards effecting that change of identity, but the most
difficult sophistication to achieve.
And in so many Victorian women's self-portaits the fundamental
quality does seem to be ambiguity - often an ambiguity between
amateurism and professionalism. After all, while the creative
woman as amateur or dilettante was well-known, what did a professional
female artist look like?.
She might have looked like this:
Margaret Carpenter by William Carpenter 1846. since Carpenter,
the best established woman artist at the beginning of the controversial
period of questioning about Woman which I am identifying the
Victorian era as being, specialised in portraiture. But her image
as an acknowledged professional comes not from her own hand but
her husband's (exh RA). Her own self-portrait is of a girlish
24-year-old, dating from 1817, not depicted as an image-maker
herself and not presented in exhibition (though she did show
at the Aacademy, her chief forum, a portrait of fellow artist
Susan Durant as well as generic pieces such as 'A lady sketching'
- and portraits of her husband). Again, the move from the sitter
to the artist, from amateur to porfessional, was evidently a
diificult one for the Victorian woman artist to articulate. In
the self-portraits of Victorian women artists, we may expect
to find a catalogue of the ways in which these women wished Woman
to be seen and known, whether they spoke specifically of themselves
or generally of their kind, but also a revelation, if they weren't
sure of this, of their uncertainty regarding it. And it is uncertainty
which turns out to be the common factor in these works.
As Meyer Spacks' further observes, "A self-portrait, by
its very subject matter, obviously reveals the gender of its
maker; its way of presenting that subject matter might plausibly
[be said to] suggest what gender means to the maker" (p.
113). And ambivalence seems to have been what all these artists
had in common when it came to making their own images.
An example of the ambivalence
that failed to distinguish catgeorically between the amateur
and the professional, Jemima Blackburn shows herself in
the situation which society offered to define her by JB 1844:
the lady whose interest in art functions as a social factor.
Here she shows herself, the Clark family, Sir Robert Peel and
Lord Brougham looking at pictures in the house of Samuel Rogers.
Here the maker of the image records a social occasion as in the
20th century one of us might do by means of a snapshot. this
artistic identity inflects certain occasions or provokes certain
events or activities rather than primarily generating works of
art. In a later drawing, the artist is identified much mor emphatically:
she shows herself here primarily as a maker rather than as an
observer of art, but as an artist of a certain sort JB undated:
the garden setting and the presence of others convey a domestic
artist such as was readily identifed, when women enacted it,
as classic amateurism. This is in contrast to the formal solitary
figure depicted by Alinari 1852, who could be accommodated
much more readily into the prevailing definition of a 'proper'
or 'real' artist . Her class position identified her as an amateur
but her talent and her commitment to its exercise seemed to many
to confound that identification: Spectator 1858 on her publication
Scenes of Animal Life and Character, "whatever she has done
in her own special line attests very rare powers for a lady and
an amateur - or we might say for a designer of any class - and
a rare superiority to slightness and self-display" (4.12.58,
p. 1276). This, though seen as a problem by those interested
for various reasons in fixing women's position in the arts, did
not exercise her enough to provoke her to present the public
with a self-definition, and her persona was still perplexingly
ambiguous when Ellen Clayton write in 1876 (English Female Artists,
vol. 2, p. 394): " It seems almost a misnomer to term Mrs
Blackburn an Amateur, for no professional artist has worked more
unremittingly, or studied nature and the means of translating
its subtle mysteries more deeply. Not only has she obtained admiration
from the general public but well-nigh unqualified praise from
the most severe judges.".
Mary Severn's case is instructive in this regard: she began to
practise as a professional but her husband drew her back into
amateurism - a role which her drawings suggest she saw clearly
as undermining of her ambition and as leading her away from the
goals she had set herself before marriage in 1861. Her self-portrait
1863 seems to emanate the resulting confusion, expressed
so poignantly by Elinor Wylie as "I, a stranger and afraid/In
a world I never made", the anxiety accumulating perhaps
because the artist is insisting on that identity of artist to
which she feels hersefl entitled yet of which circumstances and
opinion bode to deprive her. Laconic comment in the DNB entry
on Severn: 'After her marriage Mrs Newton devoted most of her
time to making drawings of the antiquities at the British Museum
for her husband's books and lectures, a task which an early study
of the Elgin Marbles and a considerable literary and historical
training rendered congenial to her. She showed in these drawings
a refined and intelligent appreciation of the highest qualities
in Greek art. She also painted a few portraits in oil and figure
subjects, one of which she exhibited at the Royal Academy, and
made many skecthes when travelling with her husband in Greece
and Asia Minor.' This self-portrait dates from 1863, a year or
so after her marriage. Its combination of qualities make me think
of Erica Jong's reflections on the peculiar phenomenon of the
woman artist: 'The problems of becoming an artist are the problems
of selfhood. The reason a woman has greater problems becoming
an artist is because she has greater problems becoming a self.
She can't believe in her existence past thirty. She can't believe
her own voice. She can't see herself as a grown-up human being...[A]n
artist takes orders only from her inner voice and is accountable
only to herself for finishing things. Well, what if you have
no inner voice, or none you can distinguish? Or what if you have
three inner voices and all three of them are saying conflicting
things? Or what if the only inner voice you can conjure up is
male?' (The Artist as Housewife, 1972).
The self-deprecation informing the presentation of herself is
interleaved with an awareness - not so much of self but of others
i.e. society, made clear in her drawings of herself and
the male authority figures who came her way. These were Newton
and Ruskin. The latter - whose anxiety to place women according
to his own ideology was later to be famous - regarded himself
as an amateur even though he expected the authority of the professional
to accrue to him. He knew MS all her life, being a friend of
her father Joseph Severn, and these drawings date from September
1860, before she married his great friend Charles Newton: MS
1860 'JR works at Bacchus' nose - MS dashes impudently at
Titian's blue hills'.: MS 1862? Mary says to Newton after
their marriage: 'Do look Charles, haven't I got on well?' Newton
replies: 'A very tolerable mud pie is produced, that's all.'
Severn's was one of the very
few female self-portraits to appear in the regular public domain
- the mainstream - in the period and It shouldn't be surprising
if in this crucible of making and meaning women's self-poraiture
was unevenly produced and circulated, generated as if it were
a dangerous and an uncertain commodity. Perhaps Victorian women
hesitated to plunge into self-portraiture precisely because there
was more riding on a woman's self-definition in this period of
challenge and change. It may have seemed to many of them that
women was over-defined and they may have held back from contributing
to the public welter of images of woman because of the responsibility
of entering that discourse. We must not then equate the making
of self-portraiture with self-confidence or ambition. Severn's
portrait and its reception suggests that self-portraiture can
express the absence of self-confidence rather than proof of its
presence.
An artist who seems never to have depicted herself privately
or publicly was Rosa Brett. She has been represented by
her brother John , himself an artist and much better known than
she - more successful than she we could say - ,who bore her,
from the evidence, a deep affection and some respect. Even so
his portraits of her never show her at work but always as a woman
as middleclass Victorian society defined it: a reader, a member
of the family: whether the image-maker's sister JB 1867
or his children's aunt JB 1880.
These images of Brett bring up an important aspect of the image-making
situation in 19th-century Britain: the fact that photography
appeared to be able to depict an individual reliably and faithfully
with its mechanical, scientific - impersonal process giving the
results an objective character which gave photography a temporary
authority denied to other image-making media - rendering portraiture
in other media and self-portraiture potentially redundant: as
Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to a friend in the first flush
of enthusiasm that surrounded the advent of photography, "I
would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than
the noblest Artist's work ever produced" (to Miss Mitford,
cited Heron and Williams, 1996, p. 2). But the most famous female
artist in this medium in the Victorian period, though revelling
in the portrayal of her fellow human beings, signally abstained
from portraying herself, though she allowed herself to be represented
by others: Cameron by Watts 1850-2, Cameron by Carroll 1859
(and by her son on more than one occasion). It is indicative
that it was not only out of modesty, self-deprecation or self-consciousness
at her reputation for lack of physical beauty that she declined
to make her own likeness that in portraying another female artist
of the time Marie Spartali later Stillman 1872,
one of several that make the point , , she obscured her creative
identity, which Spartali herself also does in her self-portrait
drawing from the same time MS 1871. Spartali's experience
of herself as a model - the sitter, rather than the artist -
surely informs what she proceeds to portray herself as: not an
artist but a beautful woman.
As Elaine Hedges and Ingrid Wendt have written, "becoming
an artist, like becoming a mature adult, requires that one know
onself: know the difference between what others see and what
the self sees, and act on that knowledge" (Hedges and Wendt
1980, p. 75-6). Louise Jopling LJ 1871? had that self-consciousness
even as she knew that her circumstances and her abiltities obliged
her to exploit them as well as she could to maximise their potential
benefits, even though her autobiography (published in 1925, but
written about 1867-87, when she was 24-44) LJ 1877 opens
with the words, "I have the feeling that I am describing
the life and adventures of someone else. I am like the old woman
in the nursery legend, who did not know if she were herself,
or someobody else, after her petticoats were cut..." (Jopling,1925,
p. 1) Jopling, one feels, knew the score. If charm was required
to recruit public opinion, she would give the public charm. If
modesty was required to disarm critical opinion, she would give
the critics modesty. She writes of an excursion to the country
when she was still in her early career: "Oh why do I not
paint landscapes instead of being a portrait painter?" I
exclaimed inwardly. But one cannot choose one's way in life:
circumstances are our master. I had to follow along the path
that gave me the wherewithal to pay the grocer, the butcher,
and the baker..." (Jopling, p. 26). She knew that the female
artist had to have the right image: and her male friends' Millais
1879 and Whistler 1888 depictions were signal
ways to circulate her image: what matters here is not the likeness
but the presence, and the authoritry these two men had as definers
of Woman/women. The difference between them could be a positive
factor insofar as it could be read as indicating Jopling's depths,
her numerous dimensions, her vivacity and mercuriality - Jopling
would surely have relished the effect that she/Woman could not
be pinned down.
Accordingly she lent herself to the media for representations
which are frank publicity or propaganda in a genre which became
more and more conspicuous during the last two decades of the
century: LJ 1881, LJ 1898, LJ 1902.
The struggle was not just to
make the female artist visible, but to define her on her own
terms and the battle was between men's interests and women's
interests in this issue. This conflict - while not universal
in people's personal lives but fundamental in their civic existence
- was as vivid and explicit at the end of the Victorian period
as it ever was, as the suffrage question and the tangled issues
of marriage and sexual behaviour loomed large in public debate.
It is hard to see as anything other than symptomatic of this
time Gwen John's 1900 self-portrait which is, as Alicia
Foster has argued, a highly self-conscious representation. (Foster
in Corbett and Perry, 2000). It appropriates a sense of self
which women such as the artist and her contemporaries knew to
be challenging to traditional norms, because approximating to
that sense of self which was traditionally only men's to possess.
The qualities it emanates, identifiable as artistic - coming
from van Dyck, Whistler, Rembrandt - show the peculiar combination
of elements that the female artist had to play with: "the
forceful artist and the sometimes forceless subject sharing a
single human identity" as Meyer Spacks has put it. (p. 112).
John's use of masculinity in a self-evidently female figure obliges
the viewer to consider that the self-portrait of the self-conscious
female artist - such as John undoubtedly was - asserts not only
an idea of femaleness but an idea of humanity, as Joyce Tenneson
Cohen has discussed with regard to 20th-century women's work
(p. vii): this is not a case of the woman pretending/aspiring
to be a man, but rather, an attempt to say that if you put man
and woman together, you get humankind.
In their recent book on women's self-portraits (2000), American
art historians Faxon, Cheney and Russo assert: "Female self-portraits
are as complex as the society in which the artists lived"
(p. xxiii). Phoebe Traquair 1909-11 (though she
was born in 1852). Thus these portrtaits tell us about their
milieu as much as they tell us about themselves. Still in them
we see Meyer Spacks' formulation that "we reveal ourselves
to know ourselves; acts of expression and communication help
define us" (p. 110). And as Phoebe Traquair's painting of
herself, made at the end of the first decade of the 20th century
when she had lived over half a century and had to work out how
to function in a society which had changed quite extraordinarily
from the one in which she had already struggled to orient herself
as a woman and an artist, seems to be nutely telling us, this
burden, this challenge, this puzzle continued to importune the
Victorian woman artist.
Her/their expressions of self were very diverse yet sprang from
a common situation; they communicate varying images of woman
- that in the end do not define Woman so much as women - as significant
individuals in a great debate about crucial universals.
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