The Magdalen in Modern Times: The Mythology of the Fallen Woman in Pre-Raphaelite Painting

Abstract

It is a simple point but a crucial one, and provides the framework for my discussion. In this paper2 I want to establish the way in which paintings and other forms of cultural representation participated in the definition of sexual behaviour and respectability during the nineteenth century. The fallen woman has long been recognised as a popular theme for artists and writers during the nineteenth century. Indeed, this recognition has been built into the monolithic edifice of morality. It is a well-established and familiar concept: those repressive and hypocritical Victorians, publicly advocating strict codes of chastity whilst privately endorsing a massive system of prostitution and pornography. Art historians have been content to notice the proliferation of the fallen woman in Victorian art and to confine themselves to narrow questions of artistic influence and iconographic development. They have struggled to identify the literary and pictorial sources of particular paintings and to establish the first artist in the nineteenth century to depict a modern fallen woman.3 Whilst these questions have a limited local interest, the answers they provide have nothing to do with history. The works of art have been successfully kept in a social and political vacuum penetrated only by art or artists. This paper seeks to relocate images of women in Victorian high art within a specific history, that is, the history of sexuality; and to demonstrate that these paintings actively constructed meanings, values and morals. The discussion will not be confined to Pre-Raphaelite painting but will examine a range of images produced during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It is a commonly-held belief that sexuality is an overpowering natural force, that it is instinctive and innate. It is believed to be biologically determined and is regarded as the most basic and fundamental drive in the human animal. This understanding of sexuality is known as essentialism. The concept of essentialism has been fundamentally challenged by the theory that sexuality is historically constructed, that it has historical conditions of existence and is socioculturally determined. Using this theory it is possible to identify the particular construction of sexuality in Victorian society and to understand the meaning and significance given to the sexual at this time. In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault rejected the notion that the history of sexuality in the nineteenth century could be seen in terms of repression and suggested instead that sexual behaviour is organised through mechanisms of definition and regulation.4 Thus in the nineteenth century sexuality is organised through the definition of a norm of social and sexual behaviour and of forms of deviancy the categorization of respectable and non-respectable practices and the differentiation between licit and illicit sex. Rather than seeing the Victorian age, therefore, as a period of silence and suppression regarding sex, we must begin to understand the nineteenth century in terms of a constant and persistent definition and re-definition of acceptable sexual behaviour. The most central form of sexual categorization is along lines of gender. Sexuality has been constructed for men and women in terms of difference. The male sexual urge is thought of as active, aggressive and spontaneous whilst female sexuality is defined in relation to the male, it is understood as weak, passive and responsive. The categories masculine and feminine have been defined on the basis of biological differences but are reinforced through medical, legal and other social practices. In the nineteenth century, with the establishment of the new medical profession, a whole field of inquiry into sexuality was opened up, a field which carried the status of a science. The new medical specialists asserted that women were entirely dominated by their reproductive systems.5 There were many competing and conflicting ideas concerning the question of female sexual desire, but many experts agreed that the respectable woman did not experience sexual drives and that her pleasure and desire for sex (if at all) was for the pleasure of reproduction and satisfying her partner.6 The man, on the other hand, was seen to have a natural and healthy desire for sex. It was a double standard of morality sexual desire was regarded in the man as normal and unavoidable, but was seen in the woman as deviant and pathological. Female sexuality was thus defined in terms of a central opposition between the pure and the