Amanda Dailey's Blog Post #2- Representations of Female Curiosity

Amanda Dailey – Blog Entry 2: Representations of Female Curiosity

            In her article, “Female Savants and the Erotics of Knowledge in Pre-Raphaelite Art,” Beverly Taylor describes a few of the many paintings depicting sorceresses, prophetesses, and wise women from the second half of the nineteenth century and discusses them in relation to the prevailing attitudes toward learned women in the Victorian era. She argues that despite a prevailing tradition of viewing intellectually voracious women as a type of femme fatale whose knowledge poses a threat, (alongside the stereotypes of studious women as being unattractive, unhealthy, and potentially barren,) the Pre-Raphaelites favored a more complex vision of female knowledge and united in their works the idea of feminine beauty with the dangerously seductive appeal of the unknown. Sandys’ Medea, Rossetti’s The Question, and Waterhouse’s The Sorceress can thus all be seen as containing a certain divergence from the norm - their mythological females have acquired knowledge and its subsequent power, but are also healthy and beautiful. Both they and their knowledge create the allure of mystery.

            For me, however, the figures represented in these works (Medea, the Sphinx, and Circe, respectively,) represent just one side of the coin. These women (or female “monsters” in the case of the Sphinx) have already acquired and are thus in the very process of exercising their knowledge. They are often associated with danger and even malevolence – but what about women who follow a slightly different, though intimately connected and equally familiar, tradition? What about the representation of woman as innocent, the figure whose curiosity and overwhelming desire to know potentially leads to wrongdoing? Taylor mentions, for example, Christianity’s Eve, who gave in to temptation and tasted the forbidden fruit. Turning to Greek mythology, one might think of women like Pandora or Psyche, who were similarly curious about what they did not know. John William Waterhouse represents both in a strikingly similar fashion, and I myself was curious – could one also use these works to support Taylor’s argument for the Pre-Raphaelites’ subversion of Victorian attitudes?

            In the paintings by Waterhouse, both women are seen opening the boxes from their respective myths. Pandora, the ancient Greek analogue to Eve, was the first human woman created by the gods and opens a jar (later mistranslated as a ‘box’) out of curiosity, only to release death and disease onto mankind. The story was thus meant to explain human life and its cycle as one of death and (re-)birth. Psyche, too, opens a box – this one thought to contain a bit of Persephone’s beauty, gained on an errand to the Underworld for the goddess Aphrodite. To her surprise, it contains only Sleep, and she falls into a deep slumber from which the god Eros (her husband) later awakens her. Waterhouse depicts the women in the act of opening, at the very moment of knowing. Just as one might imagine, their curiosity is evident in their peeking profiles, entirely absorbed in the mystery of the object before them. The shadowed woodland behind them and their seclusion creates a sense of secrecy. Both Pandora and Psyche are young and beautiful, and the drapery falling around exposed shoulders adds to their allure.

                    

                              Waterhouse, Pandora, 1896               Waterhouse, Psyche Opening the Golden Box, 1903

While these figures may stand as the naïve counterpart to such learned and experienced figures as Circe or Medea, I would argue that in many ways they also stand as further examples of Taylor’s argument regarding Pre-Raphaelite representations of female knowledge. With foci on both the box and the female figure, the paintings reflect a duality – a very literal representation of elusive and/or contained knowledge and the sexualized female. On the one hand, their actions have at times disastrous results, and thus may add to the idea of danger as being created by female curiosity and agency, yet in this way they also add to the Pre-Raphaelite ambiguity of a character’s intention and in a much broader sense depict the very search for truth and thirst for knowledge common to humanity as a whole, beyond restrictions of gender. Like the paintings mentioned by Taylor, these works by Waterhouse are “a recognition of the beauty, seductive appeal and simultaneous danger of the unknown, uncharted and uncontained” (Taylor, 134).

                                   

Sources:

Taylor, Beverly. “Female Savants and the Erotics of Knowledge in Pre-Raphaelite Art.” Collecting the Pre-

     Raphaelites, 1997: 121-135.

Images:

Pandora – http://www.johnwilliamwaterhouse.com/pictures/pandora-1896/?r=%2fpictures%2fsearch%2f%3fk%3dPandora

Psyche Opening the Golden Box – http://www.johnwilliamwaterhouse.com/pictures/psyche-golden-box-1903/?r=%2fpictures%2fsearch%2f%3fp%3d3%26pz%3d10%26d%3d190