ANEXO RESOLUCIÓN N.° 164/MMGC/

Mirrors are instruments of universal magic that converts things into spectacle, spectacle into things, myself into other, and another into myself.

– Maurice Merleau-Ponty390

Lady Lilith - ‘typical of Rossetti’s personal and peculiar Preraphaelitism’391

During the time Hunt was painting the portrait of his wife Fanny in 1867-68, Rossetti was working on Lady Lilith (fig.114), a sensuous picture of his housekeeper and mistress Fanny Cornforth. Begun in 1864 and finished in 1868, Rossetti’s painting of Fanny as a mythical femme fatale can be juxtaposed with Hunt’s Portrait of Fanny Holman Hunt to read as a metaphor for the two artists’ contrasting use of mirrors and, in particular, Rossetti’s complexity of reflections. A gilt overmantel mirror oversees Hunt’s depiction of his late wife within the ordered materiality of a middle-class drawing room; Rossetti’s painting of his mistress, depicted as Adam’s wife before Eve, locates her in a confusing boudoir space in which interior runs into exterior and the toilet mirror complicates rather than clarifies the setting. Like Hunt, Rossetti’s mirrors represent a point of intersection between underlying magical associations, historical iconography, and modern glass products but while Hunt may have established a precedent for thinking about the structural and narrative function of the modern mirror with his iconic reinterpretation of Van Eyck’s image, Rossetti, through at least twenty mirrors over the course of his career (more than twice the number of mirror images that Hunt produced), explores a more complex, enigmatic interplay of reflections.

In his portrait of Fanny, Hunt portrays his wife posed before the overmantel mirror, that ubiquitous symbol of the middle-class home, and subverts any semblance of vanity in the familiar image of a woman with a mirror by posing Fanny with her back is to the glass, her hair neatly parted and pulled back, and her gaze modestly averted from the viewer. As discussed in the previous chapter, the overmantel is positioned to reflect another mirror in the viewer’s space, a dynamic that creates a somewhat disorienting progression of reflections that bounce between the interior of the work and the implied external world. By reflecting the viewer’s ‘real’ space, Hunt keeps within his own precedent dating from the 1850 drawing of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and in spite of the symbolic potential of the eternity of reflections in Fanny’s posthumous portrait,

390 _{Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’ in Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith (eds.), The}

Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University

Press, 1993), 130. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Eye and Mind’ essay was originally published in Art de France (1961) and considers painting as a form or act of vision, the mirror image an entity of ambiguity rather than a Lacanian place of identification.

391 _{Robert Ross, ‘Rossetti: An Observation,’ The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 13: 62 (May,} 1908), 116-119 + 123; 123.

the reflection remains a logical transcription of the space in front of it. Despite the absence of Fanny’s reflection in the glass, the painting itself is grounded in the structured world of middle- class respectability with the marble mantel and gilt-framed mirror (its height fashionably greater than its width) depicted behind the lady of the house. At no point in time does the viewer doubt the legitimacy of the world within the picture, and the potential for spatial confusion is reined in by the solidity of form and clarity of detail by which the multiple mirrors are portrayed.

Rossetti’s use of mirrors throughout his oeuvre, however, diverges from the more logical orientation of Hunt’s reflections, a critical distinction that can be read as a metaphor for their conflicting stylistic versions of Pre-Raphaelitism. Inspired by lines from Shelley’s translation of Goethe’s Faust,392 _{Lady Lilith exemplifies Rossetti’s brand of Pre-Raphaelite realism that} highlights the inner experience and employs a sense of the fantastical that coexists alongside, but is not subservient to, his observations drawn from real life. Lilith’s incoherent mirror reflection that subverts the viewer’s expectations of a rational virtual replica is both a metaphor and a facilitator for this stylistic trajectory.

Unlike Hunt’s depiction of his wife, Rossetti’s Lilith lounges in a white undergarment that slips from her shoulder as she idly runs a comb through her glowing, abundant hair while she gazes at herself in a hand mirror, a characterisation that is far more Titian-esque courtesan or sensuous embodiment of Venus than a Victorian middle-class angel of the house. Traditional emblems of Venus (the mirrors, roses, flowing hair and toilet accoutrements) fill the boudoir space while her characterisation as an evil witch suggests a lethal quality to her seductive beauty. William Sharp noted that the subject was well-known at the time Rossetti painted it reads the picture as a metaphor for the femme fatale inherent in the modern woman, praising in particular Rossetti’s creativity in portraying Lilith is a contemporary woman rather than as the legendary serpent-Lilith.393 The shallow depth of space almost tilts the ancient character into the viewer’s surroundings and the nineteenth-century details of the [‘ordinary’ and ‘modern’394_] mirror, bureau, and chair reinforce the modernity of the picture. Stephens describes Lilith ‘seated as if she lived now, and reclining back in a modern robe,’395 and Rossetti himself wrote that the woman depicted in Lady Lilith represents ‘a modern Lilith’. Upon seeing the original

392 _{F.G. Stephens, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Record and a Study (London: Seeley & Co., Limited, 1905),} 68; also Henry Treffry Dunn and Gale Pedrick (ed.), Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his

Circle: Cheyne Walk Life, (London: Elkin Matthews, 1904), 20.

393 _{William Sharp, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Record and a Study (London: MacMillan and Co., 1882),} 208. Rossetti did create a sketch of Lilith with a snake coiled around her body (fig.), a more explicit characterisation he uses in the poem ‘Eden Bower’ (1869). The Rossetti Archive dates this c.1863-64 or c.1869. See Jerome McGann (ed.), The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A

Hypermedia Research Archive http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/f30.rap.html

394

would overtly convey the sitter’s identity,one should not forget Lilith’s identity as an evil and destructive witch.

work at the Royal Academy in 1868, A.C. Swinburne’s writes of her timelessness as ‘a living Lilith [. . .] she will sit to all time, passive and perfect’.396 _{With these recognisable signifiers of} the nineteenth-century dressing room, the shallow depth, and the mirror that reflects the viewer’s space, Rossetti reinforces her contemporaneity and the immediate threat, or exhilaration, of danger.

One of Rossetti’s ‘double works’ of art that incorporate both poetry and picture, Lilith is intended to be inseparable from its accompanying sonnet (first published in 1870 under the title ‘Lady Lilith’ and again in 1881 in The House of Life, retitled ‘Body’s Beauty’). Rossetti designed the original frame for Lilith to include the verses so that the two might be viewed simultaneously, summing up his concept of Lilith as a double work of art in a letter to Thomas Hake in which he refers to the two jointly as a ‘Picture-sonnet’.397

‘Body’s Beauty’

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.

And still she sits, young while the earth is old. And, subtly of herself contemplative,

Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave, Till heart and body and life are in its hold.

The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent And soft kisses and soft sleep shall snare?

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.398

In Lady Lilith, as with the accompanying sonnet ‘Body’s Beauty’ and the later ballad ‘Eden Bower,’ Rossetti responds to Goethe’s nineteenth-century literary re-imagining of a character from ancient legend, similar to Hunt reworking Tennyson’s medieval narrative of ‘The Lady of

396 _{W.M. Rossetti and A.C. Swinburne, Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 (London: John} Campden Hotten, 1868), 46-47.

397 _{D.G.R. to Thomas Gordon Hake, 21 April 1870, reproduced in Roger C. Lewis (ed.), The House of}

Life: A Sonnet- Sequence by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 182.

398 _{‘Body’s Beauty’ Sonnet 78 in The House of Life. Quoted here from Roger C. Lewis (ed.) The House of}

Shalott’; both the Lady of Shalott and Lilith are literary figures of legend reinterpreted in a contemporary nineteenth-century response. The nineteenth-century toilet mirror, however, differs from Hunt’s reflection that fills in narrative gaps; Rossetti’s glass undermines a logical interpretation of space or time.

The most prominent indication in the scene of the uncanny or the supernatural is the

mirror’s reflection. Conveying that this is not an ordinary woman in her boudoir, the mirror does not reflect a nineteenth-century interior as would be expected but a sunlit woodland glade, throwing the setting into confusion as well as the viewer’s position in relation to the witch- Venus-modern woman. The subtlety with which Rossetti suggests supernatural qualities, located in the mirror’s reflection rather than by a more overt illustration of Lilith’s mythology, heightens the role of the mirror in the picture as well as the underlying uneasiness of the image. The modern toilet glass that reflects a sunlit exterior, or a lost Eden as suggested by William Sharp in 1882,399 is reminiscent of Hunt’s Awakening Conscience but aside from the subject’s resolutely un-awakened conscience (Sharp calls her ‘soulless’400 _{and Swinburne observes ‘there is no life} but of the body; with the spirit . . she can dispense’401), Rossetti’s ambiguous setting blurs the lines between interior and exterior. Hunt’s large modern mirror in The Awakening Conscience might cause a moment of displacement before the viewer works out that the reflection is of a garden seen through an open window but Rossetti’s mirror in this instance rejects any attempt at clarification and instead suggests displacement and isolation (see the mirrors compared,

figs.115-116).

Sharp suggests that aside from the mirror’s reflection revealing ‘that primal paradise,’ it may also symbolically represent the ‘intense self-contemplation and true spiritual loneliness of this modern Lady Lilith.’402 _{In this reading, Lilith’s mirror is the inverse of the mirror of spiritual} revelation in Hunt’s Awakening Conscience, the glimmer of sunlit trees in the reflection framed by unlit candles is indicative of loss rather than renewal, what Sharp identifies as spiritual loneliness rather than redemption. Rossetti’s mirror responds to Hunt’s reflection of Eden but immediately inverts the implication of paradise. In the legend, Lilith flees Eden rather than be subservient to Adam, and the mirror’s reflection creates further ambiguity in terms of

temporality – is this a reflection of the present or a memory of paradise lost; is Lilith recalling a lost Eden or is she poised to fall? Does the mirror reflect her inner psychological state or the ‘true spiritual loneliness’ of present time? Unlike Hunt’s scene of redemption caught in glass, Rossetti’s mirror does not reflect orderly walled garden of a London townhouse framed by clearly delineated markers separating interior from exterior (the gilt mirror frame, the window

399 _{Sharp, 210.} 400 _{Sharp, 208-209.}

401 _{W.M. Rossetti and A.C. Swinburne, Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868, 46.} 402 _{Sharp, 210.}

panes, awning and curtains) but a wilder setting with darker colours located within a pictorial space jars between indoor and outdoor settings.

Rather than melting into a haze of sunlight, as the natural depiction seen in Hunt’s Awakening Conscience, Rossetti’s ‘fervent foliage’ seems to press in and crowd the mirror’s space. Swinburne notes the rich colours of the foliage seen in the reflection creates a focal point in the piece,403 _{emphasising the importance of the reflection as an integral, yet autonomous,} component. The reflection of the two candles and the roses that hover across the mirror frame establish the object is in fact a plate-glass mirror rather than a window and that it functions, as one would expect, by providing a straightforward reflection of what is directly in front of it. The confusion is conveyed, however, in the reflected foliage as well as its depth of field for rather than receding and diminishing in space, the windblown woodland scene is crammed into one plane and the reflected candles are just as close in the mirror as the greenery, a spatial dynamic that creates a claustrophobic effect. If we understand the viewer’s space as reflected in the mirror, the greenery should be seen in the foreground alongside and in front of the candles, but the leaves and branches are missing, an abnormality and dislocation that establishes a reflection and a ‘reality’ that do not spatially coincide. Where is she located? Is she inside, as the furniture suggests, or outside as the array of floating white roses and mirror’s reflection indicate? Is the viewer watching her from this woodland exterior? The toilet glass as an object anchors the picture in time (the present) while the reflection simultaneously distorts any concrete sense of space, location, or temporality.

Jerome McGann echoes Sharp’s reading when he writes of the mirror in Lady Lilith, ‘It is as if the mirror in Lilith’s enclosed and fantastic realm (or room) magically preserved a memory of the Edenic garden which she fled’ and points out that the mirror’s position in the work ‘suggests that if we are to imagine it reflecting anything actual, it would have to be the world inhabited by the spectator of the painting.404 _{The mirror’s reflection, however, is too self-referential to its own} mythology that exists solely in the world of the picture to establish a rational connection with the viewer beyond a reinforcement of supernatural ambiguity. The viewer’s ‘space’ reflected in the contemporary mirror is not a reassuring one: if it is a reflection of that lost ‘primal paradise,’ just where are we located? The inner construct of the ‘real’ and reflected space within the picture must exist like the mirror world in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), illogical and impossible outside of its own internal construct of an

independent reality.

Lilith’s mirror that obeys its own laws, rules of logic that exist only within the painting instead of the world of the viewer, corresponds to the concept I mentioned briefly in the

403 _{W.M. Rossetti and Swinburne, 47.}

404 _{Jerome McGann, Rossetti and the Game that Must be Lost (London and New Haven: Yale University} Press, 2000), 18.

introductory chapter, what Rossetti refers to as the ‘inner standing-point,’405 _{a re-orientation of a} picture’s meaning. Writing in The Athenaeum in 1871 Rossetti explained,

the motive powers of art reverse the requirement of science, and demand first of all an inner standing-point. The heart of such a mystery as this must be plucked from the very world in which it beats or bleeds; and the beauty and the pity, the self-questionings and all-questionings which it brings with it, can come with full force only from the mouth of one alive to its whole appeal406_.

Reversing or disregarding ‘the requirement of science,’ Rossetti’s mirrors not only have to be seen from an inner standing-point but can also be read as the inner standing-point, the thread on which the imagined world of the picture hangs, the spectator’s point of entry to the interior structure of the picture. Rossetti rejects a ‘treatment from without,’407 and just as the internal narrator establishes the inner standing-point in the poem ‘Jenny’ through dramatic monologue, and his mirrors function in a similar manner.

McGann expands upon the theory of Rossetti’s inner standing-point and argues that the concept is critical to understanding his works, for, ‘according to Rossetti, art always adopts an inner standing point towards itself.’408 Referring to the French philosopher Maurice Merleau- Ponty’s 1961 essay ‘Eye and Mind,’ McGann elaborates on Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the mirror as symbolic of an artistic view of reality, summing up his theory of vision and reflection in such a way that it corresponds to Rossetti’s inner standing-point, for ‘Any meaning situated Elsewhere is merely conceptual meaning, dead on arrival’.409 Central to grasping Rossetti’s work is this concept, best accessed by the viewer entering the artwork through the mirror, as Carroll’s Alice climbs through the overmantel in Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There. Pivotal to visually establishing an inner standing-point, Prettejohn suggests that

Rossetti’s use of space in his works from the 1860s contributes to the construction of a point of entry, for

405 _{D.G. Rossetti, ‘The Stealthy School of Criticism,’ The Athenaeum, 2303 (December 16, 1871), 792-} 794; 793.

406 _{D.G. Rossetti, 793. Rossetti uses the concept of the inner standing point in an explanation of his poem} ‘Jenny,’ responding to Robert Buchanan’s attack on the work in his famous ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry,’ The Contemporary Review, 17 (October, 1871), 334-351. Buchanan also derided the subject of Lilith in Rossetti’s ballad ‘Eden Bower’ as ‘affected rubbish,’ declaring ‘No good poet would have wrought into a poem the absurd tradition about Lilith’ and that ‘poems of this unnatural and morbid kind are only tolerable when they embody a profound meaning’ (Buchanan, 349).

407 _{D.G. Rossetti, 793. Rossetti writes he did consider an external approach to ‘Jenny’ but proceeds to} explain he took an internal approach instead, elaborating on his position of the inner standing point, as quoted above.

408 _{McGann, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must be Lost, 202. Also see McGann, ‘D.G.} Rossetti and the Art of the Inner Standing-Point,’ David Clifford and Laurence Roussillon (eds.),

Outsiders Looking In: The Rossetti’s Then and Now (London: Anthem Press, 2004).

by cancelling traditional perspective distance they bring the viewer into too close an intimacy with the figure to permit dispassionate contemplation [. . .] Rossetti is obliterating the I-thou relationship that had characterized western painting since the Renaissance [. . .] The effect is particularly unsettling in Lady Lilith, in which the background roses and the bright foliage reflected in the rear mirror seem no more distant than the arm of the chair and the vase of the foreground.410

Lilith’s toilet glass establishes a point of entry for considering the work in which spatial planes and colours tilt and crowd in such a way that Hunt’s reflections of multiple mirrors in The Awakening Conscience and Portrait of Fanny Holman Hunt seem the epitome of sane, ordered structure derived from close empirical observation.411

Similar to Hunt’s portrait of Fanny and her lack of reflection in the overmantel mirror, Rossetti’s mirrors in Lilith also do not reveal her reflection; her hand mirror is turned away from us and she reclines just past the reach of the toilet glass. The spatial dynamic of her hair, body, and glass do not make sense from a perspective standpoint, however, and as the different picture planes seem to converge and tilt slightly at subtly inconceivable angles, it becomes apparent that at least some of her hair should be seen in the glass, if not also the foxgloves and perfume bottle. If we consider the possibility that Fanny’s absent reflection is suggestive of the portrait as posthumous and that the subject has no reflection because she no longer physically exists, the