Is the Painting a Grave?John Everett Millais and the Queer Refusals of Victorian Art

Abstract

How is queer eroticism figured in artworks that might also deny it? This article attends to John Everett Millais’s ambivalent proximity to lesbian desire through an analysis of The Vale of Rest (1859) and other works. It concludes that death is the thematic device by which Millais both cultivates and eschews queer eroticism. And, in the convent, death’s relationship to celibacy draws parallels with queer theory’s emphasis on death, promiscuity, and ascetism.