Abstract
In the prologue to Episode 1 of the BBC’s neo-Victorian drama, Desperate Romantics (2009), a comedy charting the lives and loves of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the fictional narrator reflects that, “an artist is nothing at all without a subject, a model, a muse.” Of all the women associated with the revolutionary painters, it is Elizabeth Siddal who has been persistently represented in popular culture as the Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel, as well as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s muse and as tragic victim. Despite recent scholarship which makes a convincing case for recovering Siddal as both an artist and a poet in her own right, her incarnation in neo-Victorian texts remains problematic, and continues to deny her agency. Focusing on the representation of the Pre-Raphaelites and their muses in neo-Victorianism, this chapter explores questions about the ethics of appropriation and gendered mythologising in neo-Victorian biofiction and adaptation. Through the specific case study of Desperate Romantics (2009), the chapter discusses how “Lizzie” is represented in ways which perpetuate traditional passive feminine tropes. It also considers the representation of other female characters in the series, primarily Annie Miller and Effie Gray. The mythologising of Siddal and her female peers arguably contributes to the habitual tendency to reduce female artistic production to their biography, remembered for what their looks and loves, while male artists are celebrated for their creative outputs.
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Notes
- 1.
Elizabeth Siddal, “Love and Hate” (Trowbridge 2018, 83). Note that Trowbridge lists this poem by its first line—“Ope not thy lips thou foolish one”—rather than the better-known title we have given here.
- 2.
The term “supermodel,” as applied to Siddal, was popularised by Lucinda Hawksley’s biography, Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel (London: Wellbeck, 2017).
- 3.
Ironically, Russell stated that his film was an attempt “to take them [the Pre-Raphaelites] out of the museum and try to bring them to life” (GaySearch 1967, n.p.).
- 4.
See Marsh for her discussion of the possibility that Siddal and Deverell may have been romantically involved, even formally engaged, before his early death in 1854 (2010, 166).
- 5.
The rumour that Rossetti murdered Siddal also circulated in the aftermath of her death.
- 6.
This detail echoes instances of historical fact, such as when D. G. Rossetti painted over Fanny Cornforth’s face, replacing it with the apparently more refined face of Alexa Wilding in the painting Lady Lilith (1864–1868).
- 7.
Siddal’s poetry is steadily gaining due critical attention. Dinah Roe’s anthology, The Pre-Raphaelites: From Rossetti to Ruskin (2010) includes all fifteen of Siddal’s poems, only two fewer than the selection from Christina Rossetti and far more than some of the male poets included. More recently, Serena Trowbridge published a complete and authoritative anthology of Siddal’s work with Victorian Secrets. Similarly, the artwork of Siddal and other Pre-Raphaelite women artists is steadily garnering interest through academic recovery work and exhibitions such as “The Pre-Raphaelite Sisters” held at the National Portrait Gallery, London between October 17, 2019 and January 26, 2020. In the traditional neglect of these aspects of Siddal’s contribution, it is often overlooked that, in her own lifetime, Siddal was included in the exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite paintings at Fitzroy Square, London in 1857. She is unique as a female Pre-Raphaelite in this respect. Nevertheless, even into the twenty-first century, much creative and biographical work on Siddal remains fixated on her peripheral status and her embodiment of the tragic muse. Even the titles of such books gesture to the narratives they are intent on constructing; for example, see Lucinda Hawksley’s Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel (2017).
- 8.
Charles Augustus Howell was John Ruskin’s secretary and became Rossetti’s agent. Rossetti’s mother was actually the legal owner of the grave, since Siddal had been buried in a family plot. Nevertheless, Howell was able to obtain the necessary permissions to open the grave, without Mrs. Rossetti’s knowledge. Present at the exhumation, in addition to Howell, were Henry Vertue Tebbs (as a legal witness) and Dr Llewellyn Williams, who apparently disinfected the retrieved book of poems. See Matthews (2004, 19–21).
- 9.
Desperate Romantics draws on many characteristics of the “lad culture” of the previous decade, the 1990s. As Imelda Whelehan wrote in her critique of the phenomenon, “lad culture is militantly conservative about women, as well as defensive about the traditional qualities of the male. In the case of lad mags there is not only nostalgia for the images of women in the mode of Playboy at its heyday, but also the desire to utter all the offences known to man” (2000, 65). The PRB epitomise the “men behaving badly” trope of the era, with their raucous drinking sessions and objectification of women, rendering the opposing impulse to a feminist treatment of the character of Lizzie contradictory. For more on the use of “lad culture” in neo-Victorianism, see Claire O’Callaghan (2017).
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Beller, AM., O’Callaghan, C. (2024). “The Unclosed Coffin”: The Neo-Victorian Afterlives of Elizabeth Siddal. In: Ayres, B., Maier, S.E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Neo-Victorianism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32160-3_13
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