We see something similar as a more minor strand of the narrative
in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White
(1860-1) where Laura Fairlie’s artistic efforts are repeatedly undermined and,
importantly, the works she does produce are landscapes – excluded as she is
from the world of portraiture, where men paint and women are portrayed.
Laura’s paintings are never described and Walter, her drawing
master and later husband refuses to assess her work:
‘All serious criticism on the drawings, even if I had been
disposed to volunteer it, was rendered impossible by Miss Halcombe's lively
resolution to see nothing but the ridiculous side of the Fine Arts, as
practised by herself, her sister, and ladies in general.’
The ‘masculine’ Marian (Miss Halcombe) derides Laura’s
artistic skill (and that of all women) from the outset, and draws attention to
the fact that what they sketch is landscape, rather than people:
‘After lunch, Miss
Fairlie and I shoulder our sketch-books, and go out to misrepresent Nature,
under your directions. Drawing is her favourite whim, mind, not mine. Women
can't draw—their minds are too flighty, and their eyes are too inattentive. No
matter—my sister likes it; so I waste paint and spoil paper, for her sake, as
composedly as any woman in England.’
Women are shown to be frivolous and childlike in their engagement
with art here – the very way in which Romney views Aurora’s poetic ambitions. Later,
Laura is tricked into believing that her art is supporting the family, when in
fact her production of watercolour landscapes is part of her infantilisation
and protection from the truth, even though she begs ‘Oh, don't, don't, don't
treat me like a child!’.
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| Laura Fairlie and Walter Hartwright in John McLenan's illustration |
Marian on the other hand is referred to repeatedly as
masculine and, perhaps because of this, a large section of the novel can be
written in her voice, giving her the opportunity to portray in words if not in
paint. Count Fosco describes her diary as a species of portraiture, in which he
(a ‘feminine’ man) becomes are object:
‘I feel how vivid an impression I must have produced to have
been painted in such strong, such rich, such massive colours as these.’
For Walter however, Laura is an object not an artist, and
her decline into almost madness and regression into childhood seems to
intensify his desire. During their initial period together he writes:
‘At one time it seemed like something [was] wanting in HER:
at another, like something [was] wanting in myself, which hindered me from
understanding her as I ought.’
And, over the course of plot, Walter is made more stereotypically masculine by adventuring abroad, while Laura is made more feminine by her incarceration
and loss of subjectivity.
Walter is the portrait painter not Laura – she only produces
poorly imitated landscapes. And although Walter expresses dissatisfaction with
his own art it is for very different reasons. He writes:
‘Does my poor portrait of her, my fond, patient labour of
long and happy days, show me these things? Ah, how few of them are in the dim
mechanical drawing, and how many in the mind with which I regard it!’
We might expect that the failure of portraiture suggests an interiority
for the sitter which art fails to capture, but the dichotomy which is actually created
is between the drawing of Laura and Walter’s own conception of her – not how
she is in herself. Laura fails as an artist – she is simply a producer of
mediocre landscapes – but she important as an art object because of the
reaction she provokes in men:
‘Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for
thoughts, are touched, at such times, by [her] charms.’
What should be M in my Victorian Alphabet? Let me know here,
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Interesting post, thanks. Incidentally, as a character, Laura is a faint and pale as her feeble sketches and Walter refers more frequently to a painted image of her than to his actual memories of her. It's Marian that colours the family in and allows them to live as the idealised family portrait at the end of the novel.
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