Observing the Dead in Michael Field’s Ekphrastic Poetry Janis McLarren Caldwell (bio) In the summer of 1891, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the pair of British women who wrote under the pseudonym Michael Field, arrived in Paris to begin their grand tour of European art. They were preparing to compose their ekphrastic volume, Sight and Song, which would “translate,” as they put it, selected European paintings into poetry.1 Having recovered from a rough crossing of the English Channel, the women set out, refreshed, to start their tour by inspecting a few corpses at the morgue. In their coauthored journal Works and Days, Edith writes, Sunday June 8th The Morgue To the morgue this morning quite early in the glowing sunshine. It has been our worship; that temple of death, to us the temple of the living God. Liberte, egalite, fraternite—true there—realised—the gray marred faces within laid brotherlike freed from the mesh of life & equal at last in their destiny—bound all these voyagers for God. I saw first an old man lying very calm—the whites of his eyes giving the appearance of spectacles—so that he looked like time lying dead in glasses—then a deeply bronzed face, full one would say of sin & experience, finally a rather kindly, commonplace fellow, gentle enough in his fixity. It is Michael’s church that little morgue & he found it quite impossible to remain after-wards in Notre Dame, amide [sic] the mumbling & the lights. God has provided for worship in the facts of life. If we will but look deep into birth & death—unflinchingly—accepting all the physical re-pulsion & read on through the letter of the indwelling mystery, we shall learn how to conduct ourselves between—under the tri-colour, & with the triune Gospel written on our hearts.2 This is a peculiar entry, even for this admittedly eccentric pair.3 Why begin an art tour with a visit to the local morgue? Perhaps they were rehearsing the old link between anatomy and art or seeking the body in its cold, gray materiality before seeking art that celebrated the human form. Maybe they were attending [End Page 189] a sort of “death” studio instead of a “life” modeling class. But the journal entry focuses both on artistic and on ethical questions, of how to regard the corpses, and finally what lessons to take away about the Fields’s own “conduct,” about how to live “between” the bare, material “facts” of birth and death. Their aesthetic adventure is grounded in a meditation on their own behavior, derived from their observations of human remains. They commit to unflinching observation under the banner of French materialism and to “reading” the text of the psyche, which they figure as a form of mystical worship. Of course, Victorian tourists had a history of visiting the Paris morgue. The morgue displayed unclaimed corpses ostensibly for purposes of identification by friends and relatives, but it drew crowds of onlookers. Featured in middle-class tour guides and essays by the likes of Frances Trollope and Charles Dickens, the morgue attracted Victorian Britons anxious to witness—and to condemn—the evidence of French decadence. Accounts by Victorian travelers typically register anxiety about the ethics of viewing dead bodies; viewers are magnetically attracted to the morgue, almost involuntarily, but wish to deny any cheap fascination with the spectacle, a motive that is usually then attributed to French observers. Thus Dickens in his account is “dragged by invisible force into the Morgue” but hurries away—he cannot bear it; the sight “costs” him.4 Similarly, in Walter Hartwright’s fictional visit to the morgue in The Woman in White, he reluctantly joins a crowd of “chattering Frenchwomen” to view Count Fosco’s body. Drawn irresistibly in amid the crowd, Hartwright reports, “for a few moments, but not for longer, I forced myself to see,” but then, painfully, he can describe “at no greater length”: “for I saw no more.”5 The French, in many British accounts, seem unequivocally to enjoy the spectacle, while the British visitor bravely overcomes his qualms only to hurry away.6 But the Fields, as they were sometimes called, seem neither shocked...
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