Closet Anorak & The Water Nymphs
Isn’t it funny how life comes in little clumps. You haven’t
seen a friend for month and then you bump into them three days in a row. You
discover a new favourite Instagram account, and a week later it becomes the
next big thing online. Sometimes it’s just because you start noticing something
more because you’re looking for it – like when a friend is having a baby, and
suddenly you see pregnant women everywhere – but sometimes it really is the
peculiar coincidence of a clumpy universe. Last month I gave a talk about the
renaissance reception of the story of Echo and Narcissus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Because talks are always
better with pictures, I illustrated mine with an image of JW Waterhouse’s Echo and Narcissus on the big screen. The
choice was anachronistic of course )I was talking about the 17th C,
and Waterhouse’s painting was executed in the early 20th C ) and
whimsical; I chose it because I like it. In the Q and A after my talk the
subject shifted to the painting itself and why I had chosen it. I explained
that the painting, like renaissance poetry, was full of literary allusions. I
also admitted that the choice had also been down to my long-standing love affair with
Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Waterhouse has been one of my favourite painters since
I was a child, because of his darkly languid ladies and chiselled knights, and I
can’t resist a good literary reference. I remember being taken to the Tate
gallery as a child and looking forward to seeing Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott (because I loved the
poem). Disastrously, the room that housed the painting was closed for some
reason. I was incredibly disappointed, until I found that the door to the
closed room had a glass window in it, so I spent rather a long time with my
nose pressed up against it until it was time to leave and I had to be dragged
away. That huge painting in a darkened room, glimpsed through a window, is a
stronger visual memory for me than the many subsequent times I have seen it
full frontal in proper lighting. My love of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and
Waterhouse in particular, has continued for a lot longer than it perhaps
should. It's a bit of a guilty secret. I did my A-Level art history project about a Waterhouse painting, and
have invested many hours since painting and sketching 'after' his distinctive style.
I didn’t admit to all of this anorak
behaviour in my Q and A, and I did mutter something non-committal about
Waterhouse’s depiction of women being problematic from a feminist perspective.
A week later, several of the people who had attended the talk emailed me news
articles about Machester Art Gallery’s decision to remove a Waterhouse painting
(Hylas and the Water Nymphs) from
display.
Photograph by Peter Marsh at ashmorevisuals |
Given all of this, do I think that these paintings should be
taken down, and hidden away? Of course not. For starters, to reduce a painting to its
contents is bizarre. It is also a material object, produced with great care. Whatever
the subject there are other things to appreciate, the beauty of line, for
example, or the delicate play of colour. I think we can appreciate these things
in the same way that we appreciate Shakespeare’s beautiful verse despite its
often misogynist and racist contents. I often comment in this blog on the
sexism rife in Shakespeare, and worry about the ways in which these plays can
be a Trojan Horse of pigheadedness, transporting misogyny into the modern day, excused
and disguised by the word “art”. However, I don’t think that means that the
plays lack value. Think of the moment in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream when Aegeus tells Duke Theseus about Lysander and
his daughter, Hermia.
This man hath bewitch'd the bosom of
my child;
Thou, thou, Lysander, thou hast given
her rhymes,
And interchanged love-tokens with my
child:
Thou hast by moonlight at her window
sung,
With feigning voice verses of
feigning love,
And stolen the impression of her
fantasy
With bracelets of thy hair, rings,
gawds, conceits,
Knacks, trifles, nosegays,
sweetmeats, messengers
Of strong prevailment in unharden'd
youth:
With cunning hast thou filch'd my
daughter's heart,
Turn'd her obedience, which is due to
me,
To stubborn harshness (Act 1, Scene
1)
Aegeus wants
his daughter to marry Demetrius, but she wants to marry Lysander. Despite the
mutual love of Lysander and Hermia, Aegeus has forbidden their marriage and has
come to ask the Duke to support him by enforcing the law that if Hermia
disobeys her father, she must either face death or a convent. While Shakespeare
presents Aegeus as a harsh father, the text does not undermine the idea that a
daughter is a father’s possession whom he may bestow as he wishes. The words “stolen”
and “filch’d” indicate that Hermia is a possession of her father’s. Ultimately
the play concludes in a series of marriages, and one marital reunion, that bolster
the idea that women should be controlled by men. In the extract above, although
Hermia is being defiant, she is still portrayed as passive. She is disobedient
because she is “bewitch’d” and bribed. Aegeus claims that Lysander has “stolen
the impression of her fantasy”. Similar to the image of women’s “waxen hearts”
from Twelfth Night,
after which this blog is named, this line suggests that women are mouldable and
their minds can literally be impressed by male ideas, like wax being stamped. But
on the other hand, isn’t the phrase “stolen the impression of her fantasy”
beautiful? There’s a whispering sibilance to it, which, combined with the
abstract nature of this image, captures something of the mystery of falling
in love. We can enjoy moonlit scene, and our ears tingle at the effect of the
chiastic line “With feigning voice verses of feigning love”. The literary among
us might be tickled by Shakespeare’s list of gifts, reminded of The Amorous Shepherd to his Love, and
all the replies it provoked. We might also admire the way the enjambment at the
end of that line emphasises the father’s rage. Few would deny the artistry of
Shakespeare’s writing, but even the most determined would find it difficult to defend the works from all charges of misogyny and racism.
If we hide
all the Waterhouses, we will have to hide almost all of Western art, and then, by the
same logic, throw Shakespeare and vast stores of literature into the dungeon too. And I
don’t just mean the dead white males! Think of the implicit racism in Jane Eyre. It would all have to go. We
would lose a lot if we denied our cultural heritage. Instead we should question
and contextualize it. We should certainly value art, but that doesn’t mean we
can’t interrogate it. And even if you find nothing of value in Shakespeare or
Waterhouse (you wouldn’t be alone on the Waterhouse, people are a bit sniffy
about my beloved Pre-Raphaelites), acknowledging a past we don’t like can help
us learn, but hiding it never can.
I love this -- but perhaps I would, because I agree!
ReplyDeleteI often comment in this blog on the sexism rife in Shakespeare, and worry about the ways in which these plays can be a Trojan Horse of pigheadedness, transporting misogyny into the modern day, excused and disguised by the word “art”.
And a great exit line: 'acknowledging a past we don’t like can help us learn, but hiding it never can.'