White
Symphonies with Red Spots: Colour and the Representation of Women in Four Poems
by Oscar Wilde
Anja Müller
[This is the republication of the preprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in Women’s Studies 32 : 7 October-November 2003©2003 Copyright Taylor & Francis; Women’s Studies is available online at www.informaworld.com. THE OSCHOLARS thanks Dr Müller for kindly making this version available to us, and to Taylor & Francis for their co-operation.]
I.
Given the abundance of colour
terms in Oscar Wilde’s poems (a first collection was published in 1881), the
number of critical studies on the intermedial[1]
allusions to painting in general or to colour in particular in these poems is
surprisingly small. Apart from discussions within the scope of comprehensive
monographs on Wilde’s work (see, for example, Kohl), the two articles by Plett
and Wagner are the only recent studies which address the relationship of word
and image in Wilde’s poetry. Further articles by Borelius, Eichbaum and Fehr
are of a fairly early date. The latter three critics share a biographical
approach as they attempt to discover the sources of some of Wilde’s poems in
impressionist painting; most notably that of James McNeill Whistler, whose
personal relationship with Wilde provides the basis for their argument.[2]
Representing Wilde as a derivative artist they unanimously disclaim his
endeavour to emulate Whistler’s art and aesthetics as by far inferior to the
original. With regard to word and image relations, all three focus on the paragone
of visual and verbal art, reading Wilde’s poetry as an unsuccessful struggle to
translate Whistler’s painting into words – unsuccessful mainly for Wilde’s own
lack of originality. Although opinions differ as far as the painterly models
for the respective poems are concerned, neither Borelius, nor Eichbaum nor Fehr
doubt that painting can be translated into poetry; Fehr even classifies
different modes of such an intermedial translation (172ff). He thus
theoreticizes the paragone in a prescriptive manner, supporting Wilde’s
view of poetry as the supreme art while discarding Wilde’s own – in Fehr’s
opinion failed – attempts in the same breath. In each case, the visual model
itself remains unchallenged, whereas the poems which try to transport Whistler’s
idea of pure aesthetic form and material are considered to be, in effect,
defective copies of a superior original.
Plett’s article adds a new
perspective insofar as he focuses on the translation of the more general
categories of aesthetic perception and configuration instead of individual
paintings. He tries to evade a hierarchy of word and image by emphasizing the
idiosyncrasies of each medium in its own right; nevertheless, he also remains
within the translational paradigm of ut pictura poesis, even if the
translated elements are now abstract categories and the process is more loosely
described as a transformation.[3]
In his concluding paragraph, Plett argues that Wilde’s works are problematic
because of their ‘didactic heresy’, i.e. because, despite their professed
aesthetic ideal, they do not refrain from moralizing. Since the verbal medium
includes a message underneath, he suggests, it can never be a mere surface like
a painting, hence it can never achieve the aestheticist ideal of pure l’art
pour l’art (227).
The problem underlying the paragone
thus seems to be one of transforming a non-discursive art (painting) into a
discursive one (poetry). But what if painting is not at all non-discursive, but
always already full of virtual discourse as Jacques Derrida suggests (cf.
Brunette/Wills 13)? What if colour is not merely decorative, material,
superficial, but can be described semiotically and/or as a cultural construct
(cf. Melville 44)?[4]
This tentative discursive character of the visual is the pivot of Peter Wagner’s
reading of ‘Impression du Matin’ which goes beyond the scope of the articles
mentioned before. Applying Foucauldian discourse analysis in an ‘archeological
attempt to uncover ways of seeing, understanding, and representing as embedded
in Victorian art and literature’ (281), Wagner scrutinizes modes of looking and
the ambiguity of colours. In his approach, painting ceases to be a holistic
model to Wilde’s poems, instead it is treated as a knot of intersecting
discourses. It is by no means incidental that such an analysis does not eclipse
the more unsettling issues of the poem, such as the representation of women and
its underlying discourse of sexuality.[5]
My article sets out to explore
further the area mapped out by Wagner. For this purpose, I will look more
closely at the representation of women in order to ask how this representation
is underscored by a culturally encoded framework of colours, especially white
and red. This particular set is, admittedly, cliché ridden[6]
and may appear, at least at first sight, banal. My major concern, however, is
less with the symbolic value of the colours as such[7]
than with their strategic function. In the four poems to be discussed, these
colours, together with the representation of women, occur at the intersection
of two discourses – one on sexuality and gender or, in other words, one on the
body with its alleged depth and sexuality buried inside, the other one on art,
that is deemed most perfect when it is a mere surface consisting of design,
form and colour. The question at stake is, therefore, how the particular
distribution of the colours white and red in connection with the representation
of women forms part of a strategy that enables one to connect both discourses
as transformations of each other.
II.
Le Panneau
Under the rose-tree’s dancing shade
There stands a little ivory girl,
Pulling the leaves of pink and pearl
With pale green nails of polished jade.
The red leaves fall upon the mould,
The white leaves flutter, one by one,
Down to a blue bowl where the sun,
Like a great dragon, writhes in gold.
The white leaves float upon the air,
The red leaves flutter idly down,
Some fall upon her yellow gown,
And some upon her raven hair.
She takes an amber lute and sings,
And as she sings a silver crane
Begins his scarlet neck to strain,
And flap his burnished metal wings.
She takes a lute of amber bright,
And from the thicket where he lies
Her lover, with his almond eyes,
Watches her movements in delight.
And now she gives a cry of fear,
And tiny tears begin to start;
A thorn has wounded with its dart
The pink-veined sea-shell of her ear.
And now she laughs a merry note:
There has fallen a petal of the rose
Just where the yellow satin shows
The blue-veined flower of her throat.
With pale green nails of polished jade,
Pulling the leaves of pink and pearl,
There stands a little ivory girl
Under the rose-tree’s dancing shade.
‘Le Panneau’ was first published
in The Lady’s Pictorial in 1887, together with ‘Les Ballons’ as one of
two Fantaisies décoratives. The title can be read as a marked allusion
relating the poem to Japanese painted screens. This decorative art form had
been popularized in
Fehr and Eichbaum conclude that
the poem, in translating Japanese decorative art, becomes itself a specimen of
such an art form, and that its figures, above all the girl, are therefore
merely decorative, too (see, for instance, Eichbaum, ‘Die impressionistischen
Frühgedichte’ 403ff). To interpret the wide range of colour terms in the poem
as indicating a decorative character and preciousness corresponds to Ruskin’s
aesthetic judgement that colour is the most abstract quality of an object, and
that ‘all the ‘purest, most innocent, and most precious’ things [are] brightly
coloured’ (cf. ‘Of Turnerian Light’, qtd. in Smith 1-2). References to metals
or precious materials, as well as the use of Japanese paraphernalia (e.g.
crane, almond eyes, dragon) intensify the impression of artificiality.[9]
In what follows, I will investigate whether the poem is indeed merely
decorative and the girl an artificial puppet, or whether there may be something
lurking beneath this polished and bright surface.
The colour terms in ‘Le panneau’
span a large scale of hues derived from the colours white, yellow, red, blue,
green and black. Most of these hues also denote a metal or other precious
materials (e.g. ivory, silver, pearl, burnished metal, jade, amber, gold), thus
creating a notion of preciousness and delicacy. Whereas colour is thus poured,
as it were, over the landscape in the poem and the rose tree in its midst, the
greatest variety of colours is used with reference to the girl. Such an
abundance is not only typical of (would-be) Japanese art, it is also one of the
idiosyncrasies of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and of their representations of
highly sexualised women.[10]
Since this connection resulted in a sexualization of colour in
nineteenth-century art history and practice, the use of colour in the
representation of women became a problematic site where aesthetic criticism,
moral discourse and discourses on sexuality intersected. ‘Le Panneau’ (and, as
will be shown, the other poems to be discussed here) is located precisely at
this crossing. How, then, does this sensuality of colour surface in Wilde’s ‘merely
decorative’ poems?
In order to pursue this
question, let us have a look at the neat form of the piece: The eight stanzas
of ‘Le Panneau’ are composed in iambic tetrameter with some trochaic inversions
(for example in lines 1, 2 or 8), and with an envelope rhyme scheme. This
envelope pattern is structurally doubled by the verse palindrome created by
stanzas one and eight.[11]
The inverted sequence of lines in the first and last stanzas establishes a kind
of frame which further adds to the ‘pictorial’ character of the poem. Eichbaum
argues that this frame produces an impression of circularity supporting the
ornamental character of the poem, and contrasting it with realistic, imitative
art forms (‘Die impressionistischen Frühgedichte’ 404). However, if one
considers some of the functions of a picture frame, one can as well argue that
Wilde’s poetic framing technique in ‘Le Panneau’ fulfils the very work of a
frame in realistic painting, because it zooms the reader into the poem and out
again, as the verses gradually move from a general perspective to increasingly
detailed aspects – from the tree, to the girl, to her hands, to her
fingernails, and back again.[12]
The variety of colour terms helps to intensify the gradual focus on greater
detail. The effect of this polychromatic close-up is to create a certain
contrast to more monochromatic poems that rather use a panoramic or a bird’s
eye perspective (for example, in Wilde’s ‘Impression du Matin’, or ‘Symphony in
Yellow’) – and that are customarily aligned with impressionist painting,
especially Whistler’s.
The body of the poem can be
divided into three pairs of stanzas, each focussing on a different aspect of
the picture, thus guiding the reader’s gaze in an ekphrasis across the screen.[13]
In each pair, further framing devices can be discerned. In stanzas two and
three, for instance, the focus on the white petals is framed by another focus
on the red ones, juxtaposing red and white as contrasting colours. The red
petals flutter idly until they touch the girl’s dress and hair, whereas the
white petals float, almost aloof, in a slow downward movement without ever coming
into contact with the girl’s body. Such a distribution recalls a morally
encoded colour symbolism which contrasts pure virginal whiteness with sensual,
sexual, bodily redness. However, it also seems as if both colours cannot exist
without each other, because it is eventually the view of the red petals which
provides the frame for the focus on the white ones.
Stanzas four and five bring the
viewer’s[14]
eye to a temporal halt by a parallel repetition of their first lines. At this
moment in the very centre of the poem, the process of looking itself is
foregrounded. First, the eye is guided from the girl to the crane, attention is
then drawn to the hidden lover, who serves as a focalizer re-turning the gaze
to the girl. Looking is thus intensified, the gaze is doubled by the internal
focalizer – and the viewer is suddenly in trouble: On the one hand, he may now
allow himself to be completely absorbed into the picture, and, consequently,
his desire can be aroused. Apart from desire, however, this particular focalization
strategy creates an awareness of looking, which – according to Mieke Bal or
Norman Bryson – interferes with our being drawn in and evokes the
self-conscious glance rather than the gaze.[15]
Quite remarkably, colour suddenly makes itself scarce at the very moment when
looking is staged in the middle of the poem, as if to support the glance and to
fend off curiosity. At this central moment in the poem, therefore, the gaze and
the glance co-exist in an unresolved tension.
Although this moment is very
brief, the harmonious scene remains somehow disturbed afterwards. In the
following two stanzas, the girl’s painful outcry disrupts the idyll of the gaze
with a disharmonious sound – another defensive reaction against the gaze and
against desire in the very moment when they threaten to penetrate the surface
of the girl(‘s skin)? The ensuing laughter has some reconciliatory quality, for
this time, the zoom on the girl exposes her skin, but leaves it unscathed. The
last stanza, finally, offers a retreat out of the painting; the palindrome
helps the reader to withdraw from a stimulating but dangerous proximity to a
safe distance which enables him once more to take in the poetic picture as a
whole – and as a decorative piece of art.
The multiple layers of internal
and external frames in ‘Le Panneau’ indeed fulfil, as Eichbaum suggested, to a
great extent the functions of a frame in realistic painting: drawing the viewer
into the painting while obliterating itself at the same time, it invites the
gaze and voyeurism. On the other hand, its presence also establishes the
awareness of looking.[16]
As for colours, the wide-ranging palette of hues creates proximity between the
objects to be looked at and the perceiver – with one exception: white. If the ‘ivory
girl’ also belongs to this realm of whiteness, the colour suggests her
aloofness and the girl is therefore to be looked at from a distance. Since
looking can create desire and thus the trespassing of distances, the poem also
indicates the danger inherent in the gaze. The girl, who is placed in the
centre of this intersection of looks and colours, far from being merely
decorative and harmless, comes to incorporate this dangerous potential. Even as
a girl, she is not innocent but represented with a natural affinity to transgression:
she is touched by the red petals, she is not devoid of feeling, and if one
dares to come close enough, one can see the blood in her veins shimmering
through her delicate, translucent skin.
For all these dangers lurking
beneath the girl’s surface, the poem needs to employ defence strategies to make
representation less dangerous – and I would argue that the much-deplored
conventionalism of the poem is nothing but part of this strategy.[17]
The decorative elements do not constitute the character of the girl as Eichbaum
suggests, but are representational attributes that render the girl artificial
in order to keep her representation under control – perhaps the critics who
emphasize the decorative character of the poem have paid less attention to the power
behind/beyond this decoration. The girl’s body is subjected to a similar
treatment: synecdochal representation dissects the body into fetishized parts,
such as hands, hair, earlobes, throat and translucent skin.[18]
If the girl’s body is depicted as a mere surface phenomenon, it is equally
essential that this surface remain unspoiled in order not to release the danger
underneath. A safe way to escape this danger is to look at the girl from a
distance as if it were a piece of art. Both framing technique and colour
terminology support such an attitude in ‘Le Panneau’. The decorative character
of the poem is thus not simply an imitation or a translation of a particular
painting style, it is part of an encompassing strategy, a discourse of
sexuality which informs the poem as well as the respective paintings – and
their representations of women.[19]
III.
In the Gold Room
A Harmony
Her ivory hands on the ivory keys
Strayed in a fitful fantasy,
Like the silver gleam when the poplar trees
Rustle their pale leaves listlessly,
Or the drifting foam of a restless sea
When the waves show their teeth in the flying breeze.
Her gold hair fell on the wall of gold
Like the delicate gossamer tangles spun
On the burnished disk of the marigold,
Or the sunflower turning to meet the sun
When the gloom of the jealous night is done,
And the spear of the lily is aureoled.
And her sweet red lips on these lips of mine
Burned like the ruby fire set
In the swinging lamp of a crimson shrine,
Or the bleeding wounds of the pomegranate,
Or the heart of the lotus drenched and wet
With the spilt-out blood of the rose-red wine.
‘In the Gold Room,’ too, is a ‘colourful’
poem of sorts, with its palette containing different shades of white,
gold/yellow and red. These colours structure the three sestets rhyming ababba,
with lines of four feet alternating between dactylic and iambic patterns with
occasional trochaic inversions. Each stanza develops around one particular
impression which is then illustrated with the help of two (in the final stanza
three) similes. The increase in similes is matched by a simultaneous increase
in colour terms: Whereas the first two stanzas contain five colour items each
(either adjectives or nouns with a particular association with colour), their
number almost doubles in the last stanza, where red hues and objects abound.[20]
Apart from its prominence of
colour, ‘In the Gold Room’ shares with ‘Le Panneau’ its representation of a
female figure and its possible allusion to painting. Critics who have tried to
identify a particular model to the poem unanimously have turned to Whistler,
but there is no agreement as to which of his paintings prefigures Wilde’s ‘Gold
Room’. In suggesting The Gold Girl: A Harmony in Yellow and Gold,
Whistler’s portrait of Connie Gilchrist of 1879, Fehr is probably guided by the
title of the painting rather than by its iconography (169). Eichbaum’s and
Plett’s proposal, At the Piano (1858-1859), appears to me more likely,
if one absolutely insists on finding one particular model for Wilde’s poem.
Whistler’s ‘piano picture’ is also structured, almost geometrically, along a
colour pattern juxtaposing a woman in black dress playing a black piano while a
girl in white is listening to her music; additional horizontal lines in dark
green complete the composition. The representation of music is echoed in the
first stanza of Wilde’s poem as well as in its subtitle ‘A Harmony,’ but this
is already about all the painting and the poem share – at least at first sight.
I would argue that the
intermedial relations between Whistler’s painting and Wilde’s poem do not
consist in a translation of a visual model into a poem. What is far more
intriguing to me is how both pieces of art represent a woman in relation to a
particular distribution of colour. Much could be said about the black and white
female shapes in Whistler’s painting, the choices of dresses, the hair style,
the age distinctions, or the nexus between woman and music. The limited scope
of this paper, however, forces me to restrict myself to Wilde’s poem.[21]
As in ‘Le Panneau,’ the poem deploys conventional tropes and strategies in its
representation of a female figure. The individual stanzas are not only marked
by characteristic colours, but also by particular body parts towards which the
speaker’s attention is drawn: hands, hair and lips. According to Plett, the
comparisons neither symbolize the bodily details nor endow them with
psychological depth, they merely try to intensify perception with the help of
colour analogies. Besides, he finds that the use of colour further distances
the woman, embedding her into a web of visual allusions. The effect, so Plett
concludes, is one of bodily and spatial artificiality[22]
– the woman becomes an ‘icon of aestheticism’ (222). ‘Zurück bleibt eine
erinnerte Sequenz von Farbimpressionen – ein polychromes Gedankenportrait aus
Weiß, Gold und Rot, hineinversetzt in einen goldenen Raum der Memoria; kein
identifizierbares Individuum, wie in Whistlers Portät der Artistin, wohl aber
[...] eine ‘Harmonie’, d.h. eine Struktur von Farbimpressionen’ (ibid.)[23].
Considering the welter of
feminist studies on nineteenth-century paintings of women, most notably in
Pre-Raphaelite and fin de siècle art, one’s perception of the poem,
however, may differ somewhat from Plett’s account. The bodily details of the
individual stanzas can, under such a far-from-innocent scrutiny, be identified
as synecdochal fetishes, in that the dissecting look fragments the female body
into distinct parts without allowing it to combine into a full, coherent
impression. This technique creates an effect similar to the black Victorian
dress of Whistler’s woman at the piano, and to the white frock of the girl in
the painting, because both eclipse the body, veiling it from sight and thus
creating a certain distance to it. A similar distancing device is the use of
metatrope[24]
which inscribes the woman into a discursive framework. This device is provided
by the connection between woman and music on the one hand and the tentative
allusion to Whistler’s painting on the other. In the painting, this metatrope
is constituted via the musical allusions marked by the piano and the encased
musical instruments on the floor.[25]
The woman in Wilde’s poem is thus framed in various ways. She is confined
within an enclosed space – a golden cage as it were[26]
– maybe the ‘gold room’ also owes something to the obtrusive golden frames
around Pre-Raphaelite paintings.[27]
The similes, linking the artificial interior world of the woman to nature
outside, reside within the conventional framework of the nature-culture
dichotomy in which woman traditionally is aligned with uncivilized nature.
Finally, the metatrope is enhanced by the allusion to music via the piano; both
music and painting thus establish a discursive backdrop for the representation
of the woman in the ‘Gold Room’.
The various framing devices at
work all help to create the impression of harmony as suggested in the subtitle.
Effective as they are, these strategies nevertheless cannot fully suppress the
tension in the poem that is ‘colourfully’ constructed around yet another
polarization of whiteness and redness. The first, white stanza portrays a most
conventional, idealized female figure: whiteness, music and self-absorption
recall the idea of purity, of a highly aestheticized being who is passively
exposed to the (male) viewer’s gaze. In view of Bram Dijkstra’s account of what
she calls Victorian ‘idols of perversity’ (so the title of her illuminating
monograph), it is, however, treacherous to assume mere innocence behind such a
representation. Instead, Dijkstra elaborates on the latent eroticism in these
representations as witnessed, for example, by Whistler’s white girls, or in the
numerous marble-like, statuesque women on the canvases of Albert Moore or
Frederic Lord Leighton (70-82). Even whiteness itself, this apparent blank, is
not exempt from sexuality and desire. In Wilde’s ‘Gold Room’, desire daringly
steps into the foreground, as the second, golden or yellow stanza introduces
the hues that were to symbolize decadent aesthetics. Unlike the neat woman in
black at Whistler’s Piano, Wilde’s pianist is gradually set loose. Yet
as soon as the woman lets down her hair, signifying her growing sexual
appetite,[28]
the speaker has recourse to traditional tropes – such as woman as a flower,
woman merging with the room she inhabits – in order to keep her desire in
check.
In the final stanza, this
control is at least temporarily overcome as the woman encroaches on the speaker’s
territory, throwing herself onto the speaker and thus establishing physical and
intimate contact by kissing his lips. The speaker, in turn, literally begins to
‘see red’, trying to escape behind a wall of similes, as it were. His phobia is
expressed in terms of pain and vulnerability, the similes no longer
aestheticize an aloof female body, but come to signify a rupture of harmony, a
sudden outbreak of desire, and, ultimately, consummation. What Eichbaum calls a
‘Ton schwüler Erotik’[29]
(‘Die impressionistischen Frühgedichte’ 402) is in fact an accumulation of
highly explicit, sexually charged colour symbols: the ‘bleeding wounds of the
pomegranate’, the ‘heart of lotus drenched and wet’ and the ‘spilt-out blood of
the rose-red wine’ do not demand much of the reader’s imagination to be read as
symbols of sexual congress and penetration. The last stanza also reveals the
strategy that has, if less obviously, already informed the preceding ones. As
soon as the gaze excites desire, the focus is shifted from the woman’s body to
colourful symbolic projections – a technique that is very similar to the camera
pan in mainstream movies when the focus turns away from two lovers to some
cliché-ridden visual symbol of passion or sexual consummation; think, for
instance, of the odd fireplace...
‘In the Gold Room’ thus deploys
a strategy of looking and averting the gaze which is similar to that in ‘Le
Panneau’ and which is linked with a particular polarization of the colours
white and red. Its theme, however, is more unsettling because eroticism and
sexuality are on the brink of disrupting the surface and can only be suppressed
by a veritable tour de force in conventionality. While the poem basks in
traditional tropes and metatrope, it is perhaps even more interesting to
examine the critics’ reactions to it, because I would argue that comparable
strategies are employed by most critics in order to keep the unsettling erotic
subtext at bay. I have already mentioned Plett’s and Eichbaum’s comments; Fehr
completely omits the woman’s role, exclusively concentrating on Wilde’s alleged
debts to Whistler. Is it coincidence that these critics focus on the structural
and decorative elements only, almost desperately seeking to confine and erase
the poem’s inherent eroticism? Supporters of the repressive hypothesis
concerning Victorian discourses on sexuality may find fuel to their argument
here. Plett’s misreading, for instance, exemplifies how the poetic framing
devices are transformed into a critical rhetoric. Falling into the trap of the
immediacy of the visual sign, Plett refrains from unravelling the visual codes of
the poem and the discourses inherent in the painting he supposes to be Wilde’s
model. His ekphrastic reading therefore mute-ilates (cf. Wolf 28) not only the
painting, but the poem as well. The critics’ attempts to write sexuality out of
Wilde’s poem(s) partake in the very same discourse from which these poems have
sprung. Conventionality and subjection to discourse is thus not only a matter
of literature, but also resides within criticism and determines its writings.
IV.
Madonna Mia
A lily-girl, not made for this world’s pain,
With brown, soft hair close braided by her ears,
And longing eyes half veiled by slumberous tears
Like bluest water seen through mists of rain:
Pale cheeks whereon no love hath left its stain,
Red underlip drawn in for fear of love,
And white throat, whiter than the silvered dove,
Through whose wan marble creeps one purple vein.
Yet, though my lips shall praise her without cease,
Even to kiss her feet I am not bold,
Being o’ershadowed by the wings of awe,
Like Dante, when he stood with Beatrice
Beneath the flaming Lion’s breast, and saw
The seventh Crystal, and the Stair of Gold.
Conventionality also
reverberates through ‘Madonna Mia’, a sonnet of almost pure Petrarchan form.
The title’s reference to the Virgin Mary inscribes Wilde’s poem into the
cultural tradition of Victorian Mariolatry which found its secularized
expression in the ideals of female purity and virginity. In the poem, the
association of this ideal with the colour white is iconographically rendered in
the lily. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings The Girlhood of Mary Virgin
(1849) and Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850) are perhaps the most impressive
visual representations of this iconography. I would argue that Wilde’s ‘lily
girl’ not only invokes the virginal type of femininity of Pre-Raphaelite
painting (so Cruise 180), but that its intermedial allusion comprises a whole
cultural tradition of representing women as madonnas – including the
concomitant representational strategies and shifting gender connotations.
Idealizing the ‘lily girl’ as a representation of Mary Virgin foregrounds a
spirituality to which the girl’s body seems to be an impediment, therefore it
appears to be completely obfuscated in the sonnet. Synecdoche cuts the girl’s
head off her obliterated body, dissecting it, as it were, into fetishized hair,
eyes, cheeks, lips/mouth and throat;[30]
cloaked in cliché and dead metaphor, the girl’s body is safely confined (see
Michie 86). Unlike the woman in the ‘Gold Room’, however, the girl in ‘Madonna
Mia’ remains inside her frame; her hair, for instance, is closely tucked to her
head in neat plaids. Her half-slumbering appearance evokes the topos of the
collapsing woman, or the many sleeping female figure in nineteenth-century
painting, who mingle invalidism, stylish boredom and erotic languor.[31]
The second quatrain solidly preserves the ideal of a pure, yet also sterile
virginity. The asexual ideal represented in the girl is not defiled, she can
therefore resemble a marble statue with a polished, unspoilt surface, i.e. with
a fetishized delicate, translucent skin that was also proliferated in the
painting of the time.[32]
In an excellent article on the
shifting significance of the lily in Wilde’s self-fashioning and in his
writings, Colin Cruise argues that the iconography of whiteness, epitomized in
the lily, is a multi-layered cultural construct which had undergone significant
shifts in nineteenth-century visual culture. Rossetti’s two paintings of the
Virgin Mary, for instance, borrow ‘a gendered use of the lily from Renaissance
depictions of the Annunciation, where the lily is only one of the defining
signs of a femininity in a state of change, at the precise moment of change,
from ‘girlhood’ into ‘womanhood’. It represents the mystical moment of loss
of virginity’ (Cruise 172; my italics). The red embroidery with the white lily
motif in Rossetti’s paintings (still in the make in The Girlhood, yet
fully completed in the Annunciation scene) encodes this tension of purity and
loss of virginity in a red-and-white dichotomy. The same colours reverberate in
Wilde’s poem: The pure surface of the girl’s exquisite white skin contrasts
with her red lips that represent her sexual appetite. The drawn-in lip even may
signal a degenerate woman (see Bullen 206). As in ‘Le Panneau’, the speaker is
also fascinated by the purple veins underneath the white skin; in terms of
poetic rhetoric, one may read this feature as the titillating danger of the
animal underneath the layer of tropes and rhetoric heaved upon the woman’s body
(cf. Dijkstra 237). While metatrope is employed as a distancing device, colour
underscores this metatrope by means of the central distribution of white and
red as a contrastive pair with regard to their moral implications of chastity
and erotic desire.
The colours thus endow the
spiritual image of Wilde’s Madonna-like girl with a sensuality that borrows
from representations of the fallen woman or the femme fatale. Massive
dark or auburn hair, pale skin, shaded eyes and sensual red lips were
characteristic of the ideal female type of Pre-Raphaelite painters. Although
decried by contemporaries as ugly, this beauty ideal became fashionable in
artistic and avant-garde circles (Casteras 30-32). According to John Dixon
Hunt, this popularization drained the Pre-Raphaelite woman of its sensual and
emotional underpinnings, rendering her a ‘stock-property, a second-hand,
decorative device with some slight guarantee of suggestive power’ (Hunt 196).
Invoking all these cultural traditions – the allusion to the Madonna and the
significance of colours – the speaker of the sonnet strikes a pose which
combines affected spirituality with heightened sensuality. The final tercet
summons a further trope on this behalf, as it draws on the typical conflation
of Mary and Beatrice. A ‘secular variant of ‘Mary Virgin’’ (Pearce 46),
Beatrice is deployed in D.G. Rossetti’s paintings[33]
as well as in Wilde’s poem, creating the impression of virginity, asexuality
and purity safeguarded by a premature death. The allusion to Beatrice and Mary
Virgin occurs in form of a symbolic pose endowing the superficial
representation of love with increased notions of artificiality (cf.
Hönnighausen 303). The fear of the body, which also featured as an important
subtext in the poems I have discussed before, is expressed in a female figure
who displays submerged sensuality beneath a controlled, artificial surface. The
idealized and idolized Madonna with the femme fatale lurking underneath
are but two sides of the same coin, namely the fear of the female body (see
also Hönnighausen 299). Why then, one may ask, bother at all with yet another
conventional, trite poem? Because, I would argue, this poem has a ‘twin’ of
sorts which enhances the gendered implications of the previous poems. ‘Madonna
Mia’ is a reworking of the Wilde’s earlier sonnet ‘Wasted Days’:
V.
Wasted Days
(From a picture painted by Miss V. T.)
A fair slim boy not made for this world’s pain,
With hair of gold thick clustering round his ears,
And longing eyes half veiled by foolish tears
Like bluest water seen through mists of rain;
Pale cheeks whereon no kiss hath left its stain,
Red under-lip drawn in for fear of Love,
And white throat whiter than the breast of dove –
Alas! alas! if all should be in vain.
Corn-fields behind, and reapers all a-row
In weariest labour, toiling wearily,
To no sweet sound of laughter, or of lute;
And careless of the crimson sunset-glow,
The boy still dreams; nor knows that night is night,
And in the night-time no man gathers fruit.
If we can trust Ellmann’s
account of the origins of this poem (Ellmann 59), it is an outright ekphrasis,
composed in response to a painting of the same title by Violet Troubridge.[34]
The octet is repeated almost verbatim in the later ‘Madonna Mia’, and we can
discern the same tropes and the same strategies – with the ‘slight’ difference
that the earlier version is addressed to a boy. Of course, it is
possible to evade any slippery pitfall by claiming that the boy in the sonnet
simply reproduces the boy in the picture, indulging perhaps in the Victorian worship
of child figures. It is equally tempting, though, to read the poem as an
expression of homoerotic (or paedophile[35])
desire – with the result that this desire almost automatically entails the same
confining strategies as heterosexual longing. The confinement of sexuality
therefore not only affects the representation of women, its targets are more
generally the body and sexual desire.[36]
The stock devices, synecdoche and metatrope are the same. A further dimension
is added by the androgynous appearance of the boy whose cluster of gold hair as
well as his reclining posture rather remind one of the depiction of highly
sexualized women. Bullen explains how the discourse of androgyny can be
regarded as a protest against nineteenth-century ideas of masculinity and how
androgynous figures amalgamated and annihilated
the tenets of the binary sex model (186).[37]
In view of these ideas, how to
read the transformation of ‘Wasted Days’ into ‘Madonna Mia’? Does the
transformation give in to conventionalism on the level of gender discourse, by
yielding to heterosexuality and excluding androgyny, not to speak of
homosexuality? Is the androgynous youth yet another conceit, another convention
that is far from having the unsettling implications one is tempted to bestow on
it with regard to the tragic life-story of the poet himself? I do not intend to
answer these questions, because I do not think they can be answered. One must
acknowledge, however, that the compositional coupling of the two poems may give
birth to yet another androgynous character on another level – i.e. if one reads
the poem-couple as one ambiguous picture with indefinite sexual orientation. At
any rate, however, a latent fear of the body, be it male or female, would still
reside within the lines of the two sonnets.
VI.
‘‘Colour’, so D.G. Rossetti in a
letter to Frances MacCraken in 1854, ‘is the physiognomy of a picture; and like
the shape of the human forehead, it cannot be perfectly beautiful, without
proving goodness and greatness. Other qualities are its life exercised, but
this is the body of its life, by which we know and love it at first sight.’’
(qtd. in Bullen 94). Rossetti metaphorically links colour and the body,
endowing colour with the status of a distinctive bodily feature. Through this
connection, colour is associated with flesh – a dangerous connection that was
heavily contested in nineteenth-century aesthetic debates. Harry Quilter, a
Victorian art critic, for instance, deeply resented that Rossetti’s paintings
tended ‘‘to suffuse the whole body in a mist of colour’’ (‘The Art of Rossetti’
qtd. in Casteras 30). A fellow artist, William Holman Hunt, objected against
Rossetti’s treatment of colour as a mere surface phenomenon which was inferior
to line and design and only appealed – if at all – to the animal within man
(cf. ibid.). John Ruskin, on the other hand, critically emphasised the ‘cleansing
effect (of colour) which may redeem even ‘unchaste’ motifs’ in order to
overcome his ‘anxiety about the misuse of colour’ (according to Bullen 100-101).
Ruskin even added a moral dimension to his aesthetics of colour, by classifying
purity, innocence, and preciousness as brightly coloured whereas he believed
malignant things to be signalled by an absence of colour (see Smith 2).
Nevertheless, the conjunction of ‘fleshly colour’, temptation, sex and birth
eventually became idiosyncratic in both fin de siècle painting and
poetry, the association of colour with the naked female body being the most
widely proliferated version.
With their particular use of colour
in their representations of women, the four poems by Oscar Wilde discussed in
this paper are situated precisely at this intersection of aesthetic and sexual
discourse that is already inhabited by the paintings they allude to. The
metatropic use of the intermedial link further tightens this knot. Unlike
Wagner, however, I do not think it is fully appropriate to accuse the author
for being subject to misogynist discourse. For one thing, although the focus of
his poems is certainly on women, their uneasiness rather lies with sexuality
and the body as such, including male bodies, whose absence is another curious
issue worth discussing. Besides, the notion of Victorian misogyny forms part
and parcel of the repressive hypothesis that has been challenged so powerfully
by Michel Foucault. In this respect, it is striking to realize how critical
interpretations of Wilde’s poetry appear to reverberate precisely this
repressive hypothesis. For example, since the poems deploy colour and
sensuality as they occur in the painting of the time, they meet with similar
criticism and rejection, as the women represented in these poems are treated as
merely decorative figures (see, for instance, Kohl 15). Following Foucault’s
traces as outlined in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, I
would instead suggest that Oscar Wilde’s poems, despite all their anxieties,
nevertheless proliferate discourses on the body and on sexuality rather than
marginalize women. Especially the use of colour as a marker of (dangerous)
corporeality and sexuality is part of a complex discursive strategy, because it
offers a strategy of defence not only for the speaker but also for the reader,
by reducing representation to seemingly pure decoration.
·
Anja Müller teaches at the Otto-Friedrich-Universität
Bamberg, Germany
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