Letteratura inglese - Appunti

BRITAIN THROUGH SOME PAINTINGS BY G.E.HICKS, C.COPE, A.SOLOMON

Nineteenth-Century England is characterized by the growth of an urban industrial economy and a rise of a dominant and powerful middle-class. The representation of the female figure is linked to the concept of "respectability" that during the 19th century was a complex combination of moral, religious, economic and cultural systems. All these values belong to this public world of bourgeois culture. "Woman" has become a popular subject for historians of Victorian art and literature and above all during Victoria age moral and cultural values were continually drawn together.

George Edgar Hicks' Triptych called "Woman's Mission" was exhibited in 1863 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Hicks' picture is divided into 3 separate compartments each of which is devoted to one of the roles performed by the Feminine Ideal. The woman is always portrayed in the sphere of her domestic daily-life.

The 3 scenes represent woman as mother, woman as wife and woman as daughter. The 1 picture of the series depicts motherhood and is called "Woman's Mission: Guide to Childhood". In this image, the woman is shown tending and leading her child along a thickly wooded path. She is defined as both physical and spiritual guide to childhood and her arms encircling him protectively. The central picture is called "Woman's Mission: Companion of Manhood" and represents woman as wife. This painting shows the same woman comforting her husband, who has just received bad news, holding a black-edged letter in his hand. They are located in a comfortable, well-furnished middle-class parlour. The woman's respectability is signified through her appearance; her hair is carefully arranged and she wears a neat modest brown dress. The woman's posture signifies a mixture of support and dependency. She offers her support but at the same time confirms her subordination to him. In

The final compartment, entitled "Woman's Mission: Comfort of Old Age", depicts a woman attending to her sick father. The old man is seated in a high-backed armchair, with his head resting on a pillow and covered with a blanket. The woman is shown giving her father a glass of water, while her left hand holds onto a book, which she may have been reading aloud to him. The old man looks up weakly at his daughter as she attends to him.

The three images show the same woman with three different men - her son, her husband, and her father. While the woman remains fixed at the same stage of her life in all three images, an optimum age when she can fulfill all three roles of a young mother, dutiful wife, and caring daughter, the man is shown in his life-cycle from childhood to old age.

"Woman's Mission" analyzes familiar moral values and social relationships, confirming bourgeois definitions of respectable femininity. The Times Newspaper described the works as representing "Woman in 3."

In the passage, Hicks' paintings are described as vulgar, populist, and unrealistic. They are dismissed as effeminate and only able to produce "attractive" art, rather than great art. The danger of Hicks' vulgar form of art is emphasized by its popularity with the public.

In the Victorian Age, motherhood was regarded as the most valuable and natural component of a woman's mission. It was seen as the main reason for a woman's existence and her chief source of pleasure. The image of Madonna and Child was a paradigm of maternal devotion and purity in the 19th century. The painter C.W. Cole specialized in pictures on this subject. In "Mother and Child," 1852, the mother stands holding a sleeping baby whose head rests on her shoulder. The mother/child relationship is defined through tenderness, gentleness, and care.

The 2 figures. This painting represents the celebration of the bourgeois Ideal of Motherhood. Cope's picture "The Young Mother" which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1846, reflects on and contributes to contemporary attitudes concerning childcare and motherhood. The youth of 4 mother is stressed both in the title and in the visual representation. The Woman is shown in the act of breast-feeding her baby. The image positions the spectator at the same level as the seated mother, watching the feeding. This look from the child to the mother emphasizes the sense of intimacy which is produced in this picture. Motherhood is defined as natural and private. This is another contribute to the Woman's "respectability" in the Victorian Age. The last picture called "A Contrast" painted by Abraham Solomon was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1855. In this picture Female dependency was reproduced and guaranteed by the belief that respectable women were weak and delicate,

and in a perpetual state of sickness. This representation of middle-class Femininity was set up in opposition to an image of working-class women who were defined as healthy, hardy and robust. Physical frailty was a sign of respectable femininity and by the mid-19th century a morbid cult of "Female Invalidism" had developed. This myth of female frailty also reserved the interests of the medical profession; The middle-5