(Spoilers) Rossetti (quote)

Choosing, George Frederic Watts

Much as I admire Ida Starr from The Unclassed by George Gissing, Maud Enderby has an interesting peculiarities. Maud has an inbred appreciation with aesthetic values which is inherited from her mother (her father was formerly a reverend before the downfall); but having been raised by her ascetic aunt (Miss Bygrave) since around the age of ten, she was taught about sins, sufferings, and denial of joyful spirit of Christmas. Gissing likens her pessimism to Schopenhauer. Growing up, Maud fought the battles between intrinsic pleasures and denial of feelings. It is with Rossetti’s poems that gives her the resonance within the feeling of solace and quietude. She might not be a religiously avid person but she is just trying to seek an equilibrium among the inner conflicts.

Each character in the novel is restless and strives to reconcile with his or her love of doing something or loving someone. Some think they have found their vocation but end up being misdirected by a flight of passion; some only deny a person whom they love based on the ground that passion does not suffice, but only find out that passion being a requisite of what makes love sustain.

After the feverish interval of those first weeks, she tried sometimes to distract her thoughts by reading, and got from a library a book which Waymark had recommended to her at their last meeting – Rossetti’s poems. These gave her much help in restoring her mind to quietness. Their perfect beauty entranced her, and the rapturous purity of ideal passion, the mystic delicacies of emotion, which made every verse gleam like a star, held her for the time high above that gloomy cloudland of her being, rife with weird shapes and muffled voices. That Beauty is solace of life, and Love the end of being, – this faith she would cling to in spite of all; she grasped it with the desperate force of one who dreaded lest it should fade and fail from her. Beauty alone would not suffice; too often it was perceived as a mere mask, veiling horrors; but in the passion and the worship of love was surely a never-failing fountain of growth and power; this the draught that would leave no bitter aftertaste, its enjoyment the final and all-sufficient answer to the riddle of life. Rossetti put into utterance for her so much that she had not dared to entrust even to the voice of thought. Her spirit and flesh became one and indivisible; the old antagonism seemed at an end for ever.

Chapter XXVI – Straying. The Unclassed, George Gissing

The Doll Factory by Elizabeth Macneal

I got to tell you, owning and reading this book is an unforgettable experience. I bought this book during my one-month trip in England from end of January to mid-February. While in Chatham wandering around in Waterstones, I found this book on the shelf and I told the lovely lady at the counter that I have been looking for this book for quite a while, and enquired if she had read it. She said she hadn’t but her other colleagues couldn’t praise it enough as some of them met the Author at a literary festival. Based on my choice she also recommended the Familiars by Stacey Halls. Wow. What a joy! While reading this book I kept recalling the conversation with the lovely lady and the kindness of strangers I met in this trip.

“She gazes at the canvas again, at the tenderness in her expression, the passivity of her unsmiling face. She feels a weight within her, a flattening. She starts to see it not as a celebration, but as a trap which has snapped around her. The woman in the painting has become her twin, like her and yet nothing like her. She has suffocated her, until Iris does not know where she ends and this image begins. She has escaped one half of herself for another.”

Indeed, this book is captivating and engrossing. Every character in this novel is trapped in his or her station, constraints and conventions, and they all somehow involuntarily conform to the public and societies’ values. Iris, the heroine and “fairer sex” of the novel, the “apprentice” of Mrs. Slater’s Doll Emporium on Regent Street, not only stigmatises and restrains herself because of her family’s inculcation but also society’s inbred values of the underpinning of gender. This is gradually empasised as she is “admitted” into the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s circle as a model of a medieval painting.

In reality, models in painting of the early Victorian period personally were not being appreciated and admired aesthetically in public but seen as unedifying and reputation being scandalised; their unique beauty were sensualised exaggeratedly and yet authentic personalities were flattened out in paintings. For instance, look at Portrait of a Young Lady by John Everett Millais, based on his wife’s younger’s sister, Sophy Gray (1843-1882). There is a whole chapter to explain her life in an excellent biography by Suzanne Fagence Cooper, Effie. When she was 14, Millais completed a portrait of her and was quickly sold to a friend of Rossetti at ￡63. Sophy Gray was very much sensationalised in the eyes of beholders of the painting. Red lips, a world-defying stare down on the beholders, an irresistible painting. But in reality she led a tragic life of self-denial and suffered from heartache and anorexia. Women, artists, readers of paintings like the ideas of grasping and transforming the ephemeral moment to eternal beauty.

If a young woman grows up being praised for her compliant attractiveness and docility, then she responds by pushing this self-denial to extremes. Looked at in this light, modelling for Everett’s paintings of idealised girlhood may have laid the foundations for Sophy’s illness….They stress the sufferer’s desire to remain childlike. Young women try to starve their bodies back into innocence, shedding the curves of adulthood. If they persist, they can interrupt their monthly cycles, making themselves infertile, unwomanly. (Effie, Suzanne Fagence Cooper, p.219)

Seeking individuality, hoping to be acknowledged and recognised by others in the extremity could be harmful, yet conforming the norm could be tragic.

In the novel, the artistic ambition in characters are also tainted and influenced by secular thoughts. Iris strives to be a painter but her passion in painting is at one point gradually given way to a passion and obsession for Louis that her talents she hopes to be recognized and acknowledged by him. Rose, her twin sister, is obsessed with her long gone beauty and regrets of a lost love. The novel also mentions the models like Lizzie Siddal as maidens and damsels being “rescued” by the artists. The concept of obsessing and relying on males’ amusement and kindness is heavily depicted in the novel in that female characters are often entrapped, disappointed by the outcomes of it.

The artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood besot and romanticise themselves with their themes of medieval paintings, when on the other hand, they despise the dishonesty in the artistic perspectives and techniques taught by the Academy. Another character is definitely illusionised himself by his idealised world and ideas. Silas Reed, the taxidermist who makes a living from selling his finishes as silent partners to painters is infatuated by Iris of her auburn hair and twisted clavicle. His imagined conversations of his courtly love to Iris without actually knowing her leads to a dangerous obsession. The distorted concept of idealisation and obsession of what they perceive of beauty could one way lead male characters to success or downfall in its extreme. To survive and not to destruct themselves, the only mean is to balance his/herself in the world of extremity and not to be fooled by it.

I must say the relationship between Louis and Iris is engrossing, and Iris’s escape and the ending is enlightening. Iris in the end is like she has found the point of equilibrium and balance to perceive the reality and reached the nirvana in the end while retaining her individuality. But the character who actually grabs my heart is Albie. The errand boy, the street kid. He is one of the most endearing child I have come across in books. He is obsessed with a new set of teeth, the idea of growing up to be resourceful to his sister. But he sacrifices to not have a new set of teeth and is the real martyr whose idea of love is not associated with any pretensions and values but enacting on what he knows on love with his heart.

Moreover, I like the idea of the author writing this historical fiction in present tense, which makes my reading so much easier and absorbing.

This is the Author’s debut novel. In the part of acknowledgements, she thanked her tutors who inspired and encouraged her in the writing journey. Her passion and gratitude to her mentors are in a way inspiring to me as well. This book is endearing to me.

Albie (Quote)

From The Doll Factory, Elizabeth MacNeal

(Picture: A Martyr or The Violette Merchant,  Fernand Pelez)

   A clunk, a grind of iron on iron, a splintering of wood. The horse screams.

   And in the moment of impact, as the hooves clatters his chest, as he is tossed like a rag doll under the churning wheels of the cart, in the quiet pause before the iron splits his skull as easily as an eggshell, before the little thread of his life is snipped short, he does not think of his sister. He does not think of love or his dream or even Iris, really. He just thinks of her finger, one day in the doll shop, sliding down the seam of a miniature skirt and cracking the back of a flea. It made such a sound – such a pop – and the bead of blood was so pretty.

Effie

Effie: The Passionate Lives of Effie Gray, John Ruskin and John Everett Millais by Suzanne Fagence Cooper is an impressive research about this fascinating and legendary “love triangle” of the contemporaries. I would like to accumulate more information as regards the concept and idea of the Pre-Raphaelite art beforehand; apart from that, this is a satisfying read being ample to resonate and interconnect with themes and ideas on some novels I have read by Wilkie Collins alongside other Victorian social novels, and non-fiction on notable lives of Caroline Norton, and Josephine Butler in these years. I found that these authors and activists were definitely the vanguard in expressing state and welfare of Victorian women. This biography makes the concerns for women in the nineteenth century alive on paper, and elaborates the state of females according to their domestic and social spheres. Particularly, I could sense the ideologies and perception shaped by both sexes of the time that contributed to the birth of passive and vulnerable Victorian women in real life.

Passivity of body and mind of a married Victorian women

I watched Effie Gray the movie around a year ago. I thought the court case and content of the annulment in 1854 was not detailed enough. The movie also deliberately makes John Ruskin such a villain and put Effie into the incarceration that trod her life and youth for the whole six years, with Effie saying that “he never touched me“. Not until I read this biography do I realize the brevity of this procedure was due to the fact that Ruskin never argued and vindicated his case. Nevertheless, I find the essence of passivity is underlined in this sentence in the movie as well as the book regarding the “weaker sex”.

“I often think I would be a much happier, better, person if I was more like the rest of my sex in this respect.” – Effie Gray

First of all, I don’t want to say who it was to blame, and suspecting that “there is hardly a girl’s school in this Christian kingdom where the children’s courage or sincerity would be thought of half so much importance as their way of coming in at a door; and when the whole system of society, as respects the mode of establishing them in life, is one rotten plague of cowardice and imposture…” – lines from Of Queen’s Gardens, written in the 1860s, was implicitly stating the flaws of girls including his former wife. Effie might be marrying Ruskin for his fame and intellect, she could be as frivolous as that of what her father-in-law had stated; on the other hand, Ruskin, who was full of idealized thoughts and ideology, could be so frustrated that Effie did not live up to his expectations of fulfilling wifely duties. Whether it was because of (a) Sexual impotence, (b) married during Lent term, (c) avoiding intercourse to get prepared for travelling through the continent, or (d) Ruskin’s disappointment of the desire of female body that actually underlined the reasons for the unconsummated marriage, the reason was uncertain.

However, it should be noted that in the case of Effie’s side, her mother kept being confined fifteen times (only eight survived childhood) until she was 47, and with her life being in a state of indisposition (she was even contracted cholera once) reflected the heavy occupancy and poignancy of domestic duties, or the maternal martyrdom, that women need to assume of the time. As in many case, including the marriage of Dickens’s family, fulfilling maternal love and duties constitutes a Victorian marriage. (It reminds me of the views of Margaret Sanger that “endless childbearing was ‘tyranny'”, that women should have a say to control her own body so as to lay the “key to the temple of liberty”). In this case, the courageous and monumental act of Effie to seek for an annulment provided additionally on the ground of her publicity. A married women should be traditionally regarded as unassuming and submissive to her husband, but it involved her initiation to undergo procedures to prove her virginity in this marriage on both the women’s moral and physical aspects, and it was rare in this case of women to seek a separation from the husband even in the case of violence and adultery (even in 1857).

Apart from that, the resentment endured by both families as being told from the correspondence throughout these six years of their in-law son and daughter echoes the clinging relationship of Mrs Thornton towards John in North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell – her son ended up being her only ownership under the entity of the feme covert of the marriage. He was her only expectations of accomplishment and hopes. (Child Custody Act, Caroline Norton)

Embarking on the journey of reading Effie Gray’s biography!

To get prepared for embracing myself in the world of Effie Gray in reading a biography named Effie: The Passionate Lives of Effie Gray, John Ruskin and John Everett Millais by Suzanne Fagence Cooper, which focuses on the most notable love triangle in Pre-Raphaelite era, I’m putting some paintings of Sophy Gray, Effie younger sister, up on the post! This one below was painted by Effie Gray’s second husband Millais when she was at around the age of 14. Actually Sophy had appeared as models on Millais’s painting quite a number of times.

While I researched more information about her on the internet, I have also found that Charles Edward Perugini, Kate Dickens husband after the death of the former one Charles Allston Collins (Wilkie Collins’s myounger brother, also an artist), portrayed this muse as in painting; though date is not known with certainty (found this information on the internet, will check out on the biography for further information and anecdotes).