Her own pictorial and poetic production, on the other hand, was consigned to oblivion until the advent of Gender Studies and feminist Art History. The representations of her by male artists have been widely explored by art critics, while her biographers have insisted on her laudanum addiction and her alleged suicide. Keywords: Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Elizabeth Siddall, Pre-Raphaelite, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, representation of women, New Woman, Irish literature.Įlizabeth Siddal, icon of Pre-Raphaelite art, from Millais’ Ophelia to the countless portraits painted by Rossetti, was often represented in languid poses, with her eyes closed or in connection with sleep and death symbols such as the poppy. The essay will examine closely the nods to Elizabeth Siddall in The Picture of Dorian Gray and ultimately will propose that the Pre-Raphaelite musings in Wilde – whose engagement with feminism and with his native Ireland have always been complicated – effectively, if not intentionally, silence the figure of the fin-de-sie`cle New Woman as she appeared across the British and Irish Isles. Indeed, it is plausible that the Dublin-born Wilde was attracted to Siddall because of her resemblance to the aisling figure derived from the eighteenth-century Gaelic tradition and popular in turn-of-the-century Irish culture.
As such, Siddall -– who has not previously been read in a Celtic context – might serve as a signifier of the young, pale, passive, red-haired Irish maiden romanticised across popular culture as a symbol of the Irish nation. Although Siddall was not born of Irish parents, she served ‘as a model for “a fair Celt with red hair”’ for the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt, perhaps owing to the fact that she was copper-haired, ivory-skinned, Welsh, and working class. I want to suggest that Siddall, long dead by the 1890s, may have been coded as Celtic across turn-of-the-century Irish literature in ways not hitherto considered. The very name Sibyl echoes Siddall, who is best known as the model for John Everett Millais’s Ophelia and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix. I will specifically argue that the suicide of Dorian Gray’s lover Sibyl Vane was inspired by Elizabeth Siddall’s untimely overdose.
This essay will demonstrate that Wilde’s deep and abiding interest in Siddall reverberates across his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), to an extent that has not been considered. While Oscar Wilde’s attraction to Pre-Raphaelite art has been well documented, surprisingly little attention has been paid to his career-long fascination with Elizabeth Siddall (1829–62).
0 kommentar(er)
