The Metamorphic Mermaid in Fairy Tales and Feminism

Chapter 7 explores Evelyn’s series of Symbolist paintings based on Hans Christian Andersen’s popular fairytale ‘The Little Mermaid’ in relation to early and more recent feminism, and shows how she employed the metamorphic mermaid as a model for socio-political transformation from captivity to liberty. Her paintings are compared with contemporary literary and visual texts in order to show how her work, often positioned in relation to male Pre-Raphaelite artists, dialogised with early feminist iconography. Chapters 6 and 7 reveal George Watts’s and Evelyn De Morgan’s statuses as suffragist poet-painters and/or narrative painters who re-presented women to promote socio-political reform.

Self/Portraits

Chapter 3 presents alternative visions of these neglected Victorian figures – the Wattses and the De Morgans – through an analysis of their self/portraits. It explores the Wattses’ and the De Morgans’ self-portraits and portraits of each other as well as of their famous contemporaries in order to examine the construction of artistic identities, the gender-role inversion within creative partnerships, and the self-fashioning of suffragists. It explores public and private self/portraits (that is, self-portraits and/or portraits) in the form of neglected paintings, sketches and photographs in which images and perceptions of these figures as individuals and as couples are built. It also compares the Wattses’ and the De Morgans’ self/portraits with those of their contemporaries, placing them in a wider context to reveal their standpoints and focuses. It explores the gender politics of portraiture and shows how their self/portraits fit into the tradition of Victorian portraiture.

Inscribing the Female Body

Chapter 5 develops a discussion of the Wattses’ and the De Morgans’ writings in which they explore women-centred issues. Drawing on extensive archival research, this chapter studies various neglected writings – private and published – by the Wattses and the De Morgans. Exploring questions of authorship and authority, it analyses collaborative and individual writings that focus on and inscribe the female body: Evelyn’s unpublished juvenilia, William’s neglected novels, and their anonymously published automatic writing; George’s anti-corsetry article, Mary’s private experimentation with poetry, and her published guide to her symbolic decoration The Word in the Pattern. With the exception of William, who embarked on a second career as a novelist, these figures have never before been appraised as literary as well as artistic figures, and their writings are largely unexplored. The author analyses and compares the representation of women in their writings, showing how they explored women’s place, engaged with contentious early feminist debates, and supported or promoted women’s liberation in both their literary and visual works.

Evelyn and William De Morgan

Chapter 2 focuses on Evelyn and William De Morgan. It explores the feminist dynamics of the couple’s conjugal creative partnership, their professional creative practices, and the ways in which they supported the women’s suffrage movement and women’s liberation more generally. Evelyn De Morgan signed women’s suffrage petitions, and William De Morgan wrote impassioned letters in support of women’s suffrage. Chapters 1 and 2 show how, for both Mary Watts and Evelyn De Morgan, professional creative practices and partnerships were liberatory strategies through which they achieved and promoted greater female emancipation and empowerment. The Wattses and the De Morgans had a shared agenda for greater gender equality and women’s liberation, which they advocated in their visual and literary work. They can thus be reclaimed as early feminists with coinciding socio-political and aesthetic aims.

Conclusion

This book identifies and rectifies important omissions in the existing public material on the Wattses and the De Morgans in its focus on the historically neglected female figures, its exploration and comparison of their largely unexplored creative partnerships, and its feminist analysis of their understudied works. It shows how Victorian women repositioned themselves in relation to men as successful professional writers and artists as well as creative partners and ‘significant others’ rather than servile wives, secretaries or muses. It thus challenges ideologically dominant images, ideals and stereotypes of Victorian women – and specifically, longstanding misperceptions of Mary and Evelyn – as submissive or subordinate. These women achieved and promoted greater social, political and economic freedom, empowerment and equality through their professional creative practices and anti-patriarchal partnerships, transgressing, subverting and deconstructing oppressive masculinist binary structures which served to sustain sexual difference through separate spheres and gendered activities. This book shows women – traditionally the ‘repressed of culture’ (...

Feminist Readings and Poetic Paintings

Chapters 6 and 7 are linked in their exploration of artists’ readings, literary sources and subjects, and in their focus on paintings of women and water: from the drowned ‘fallen woman’ in George’s work to the empowered mermaids in Evelyn’s work. Chapter 6 explores the Wattses’ private library, their conjugal reading practice, and Mary’s engagement with contemporary feminist writers and writings, before discussing George’s series of female-focused social-realist paintings inspired by poetry, in order to show how the couple engaged with, were inspired by, and contributed to early feminist literary and visual culture. It focuses specifically on Mary Watts’s readings of early feminist writings and on George Watts’s paintings provoked by articles and contemporary debates on ‘fallen women’, female suicide and the exploitation of women. The author aims to show how the Wattses were influenced by writers engaging with issues at the heart of Victorian feminism, and to reveal Mary’s interactions with writers of New Woman fiction. This further reveals the Wattses’ progressive socio-political positions, and especially Mary’s keen – if largely private – interest in early feminist writing and culture during her marital years, to which she more actively contributed in widowhood.

Women Artists’ Diaries

Chapter 4 considers the diaries of Mary Watts and Evelyn De Morgan in conjunction and in relation to their emerging political positions. It includes an analysis of the author’s transcriptions of Mary’s diaries and of Evelyn’s diary, bringing to light previously unseen archival material in order to assist the recovery and revival of women’s marginalised life writing. A reading of Mary’s multiple, detailed diaries informs a reading of Evelyn’s relatively short, single diary, and the significance of the latter is highlighted through comparison with the former. The author aims to show how these women artists’ narratives, views and voices relate to each other and to other women’s diaries and life writing of the period, challenging traditional assumptions about these women as well as ideological assumptions about Victorian women writers.

Mary and George Watts

Chapters 1 and 2 explore the Wattses’ and the De Morgans’ progressive socio-political positions as suffragist artists who actively supported and promoted the women’s suffrage movement that gained momentum over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It shows how they achieved this through their anti-patriarchal conjugal creative partnerships; their professional creative practices; their involvement in suffrage societies and women’s culture; and their works privileging female struggle, power and freedom. Chapter 1 focuses on Mary and George Watts. It explores the feminist dynamics of the couple’s conjugal creative partnership, their professional creative practices, and the ways in which they supported the women’s suffrage movement and women’s liberation more generally. Most notably, Mary Watts convened suffrage meetings at the Wattses’ Surrey studio-home, while George Watts was close friends with – and his art was a source of inspiration for – early feminists.

‘Woman is Now Beginning to Take Her Place’

‘The hope of the future lies greatly in the fact that woman is now beginning to take her place’, wrote Mary Watts in her diary (1893: 4 April). A year later, feminist writer Sarah Grand coined the term ‘New Woman’ and wrote, ‘women generally are becoming conscious that some great change is taking place in their position’ (Grand 1894: 707). An increasing preoccupation with woman’s place – and specifically, the evolving role and shifting socio-political position of women – is perceptible in much art and literature of the later nineteenth century, the period that engendered active feminism in the form of the women’s suffrage movement. Woman’s place was a primary focus of Victorian–Edwardian feminist discourse, and remains central to present-day feminism. This book shows how neglected nineteenth-century women writers and artists transgressed traditional female spheres and restrictive feminine norms in their professional creative practices and unconventional creative partnerships with men, and how their literary and visual texts can be read as sites of struggle against – rather than submission to – patriarchy. These marginalised Victorian women, traditionally defined as subordinate gender ‘others’ in relation to their famous husbands, can be seen as ‘significant others’ who were not passive and peripheral but rather active and influential in their creative partnerships as well as in contemporary debates, through which they achieved and promoted greater personal and political empowerment and freedom.