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How was the myth of Lilith transformed by the Pre-Raphaelites in the period 1865-1895

Vica Germanova

Vica Germanova

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How was the myth of Lilith transformed by the Pre-Raphaelites in the period 1865-1895

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Vica Germanova

manipulated slow learner, continually going against the most explicit instructions offered to him by Mr.
Raven (i.e. Adam), self-confessedly “too stupid to listen to anything he said.” His very name is testament
to

22

his shortcomings, sounding like both “weather vane” (suggesting unsteadiness and lack of personal
agency or will, moving as the wind does) and “vain” (supported by his stubborn inability to enjoy and
explore the land for itself without searching for “beings like himself.” The latter meaning is particularly
relevant when we consider Rossetti's

Lady Lilith
in a similar vein, as a gesture towards and critique of our own inherent vices: “we, like Vane, must
acknowledge we are vain and that the unredeemed life is lived in vain; that we are in Lilith and Lilith is in
us.” Mr. Vane’s name is almost an anagram of Raven, establishing a common

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sharing of sin between the archetypal man and the everyday man in the same way that Eve’s sins are
shared both by all women and Lilith. Just like the primeval man, and the purveyor of Rossetti’s picture-
sonnet, “Vane desires to possess and control Lilith, the same goal Adam has for her, yet Lilith is
unyielding, transforming from angel to monster in order to maintain her Self.” And just like him, he fails.

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A similar degree of emasculation is effected in Robert Browning’s little-known poem ‘Adam, Lilith and
Eve.’ (Appendix A) Most interpretations of this heavily ambiguous poem concur that Adam is left the
idiot who “foolishly chooses not to believe [Lilith or Eve]” at the end of the poem. Indeed, over the
course of 24

25

lines his only contributions are to “s[i]t betwixt” the two women in his role as their lord and husband
and ‘reply’ to their synchronous response with an answer that provides the fundamental ambiguity of
the poem, obeying their imperative “Confess!” Again, as in ‘Eden Bower,’ the reader is aligned with the
only present male figure (Adam) as the final judgment on which woman is lying is left unresolved. The
topos of confession between lovers is one that Browning explores throughout the

Jocoseria

collection within which this poem was published. It forms the crux of

Cristina and Monaldeschi,

a long poem also delivered, like ‘Eden Bower,’ in the female voice, recounting the tale of the Marquis
Monaldelschi’s betrayal of Queen Cristina of Sweden. The poetic voice mocks reader and male
counterpart alike, empowering both herself and art generally, like

Lady Lilith,

with: “Silent, still? Why, pictures speak.” The maimed rites of confession

26

resurface towards the end, wherein Monaldeschi is “confess[ed]” and then “absolve[d] and bless[ed]”
with three “thick and fast” stab wounds. In the final stanza Cristina negates the very act of his
confession, his re-telling of the story which are denied to the reader in a jeering tone: “What one word
of his confession / Would you tell me? […] Love burst compression, / Fled free, finally confessed / All its
secrets to that breast / Whence… let Avon tell the rest!” Mockingly directing the curious reader via the
ellipsis to the symbolically

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inconstant, undefinable river, Cristina’s emasculation of the male in this passage centres on her denial of
his right to tell his own story; just as Adam, although aligned with the reader in ‘Adam, Lilith, and Eve,’ is
denied any active voice. This element of Lilith’s effect upon male presence that distinguishes her from
any other kind of rebellious female figure in Victorian literature, whilst at once promoting empathy from
her reader: her agency as story-teller. Rossetti has been described as "a dramatic imagist, a seeker of
meaning, a mythmaker.” Yet, arguably, in

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his and the other Pre-Raphaelite depictions of Lilith she ceases to

be

a myth and rather takes on the mantle of “mythmaker” in her own right, losing many of her magical
powers in the process. She retains her influence over men, but not her ability to bewitch young children;
she sucks their blood, yet she loses her mythical wings. ‘Eden Bower’ is an instance where her myth-
making capacity is made explicitly clear. In presenting the entire 42-stanza monologue via her voice, as
well as letting her invade and alter significantly perhaps the best-known narrative of the English-
speaking world, Rossetti liberates her from the constrained, supernatural depictions offered only by
rabbis, preachers and Faust and allows her to come into her own as a powerful,

George Macdonald,

Lilith: A Romance

(North Charleston: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015), p.

22

60, 67 ibid, p. 101

23

John Pennington, ‘Of “Frustrate Desire”: Feminist Self-Postponement in George MacDonald’s Lilith’ in

North Wind:

24

Journal of the George Macdonald Society

21 (2002) p. 29 Kathryn Lee Seidel,

‘The Lilith Figure in Toni Morrison's Sula and Alice Walker's The Color Purple’,

Weber Studies:

25

An Interdisciplinary Humanities Journal

, 10, no. 2 (Spring-Summer 1993), p. 90 Robert Browning,

Jocoseria

(London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1883),

p. 41

26

ibid, p. 44

27

Joseph H. Gardner, ‘Rossetti as Wordsmith: The 'Newborn Death' Sonnets of 'The House of Life.’' in

Victorian

28

Poetry,

Volume 20 (West Virginia University, Autumn-Winter 1982), p. 1

of 515

Vica Germanova

transgressive and vocal agent of her own fate. She is “no longer contained within someone else’s
discourse. She speaks her own.” And with what a voice. The poem’s length has been attributed to “the
insistent sexual

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imagery between Lilith and the snake,” but this element is arguably just one part of the poem's
figurative

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language, rhetorical strength and intense, heroic metre marked by repetition of the choric ‘Eden
Bower!’ and ‘Alas the hour!’ Indeed, Lilith can be said to mythologise the story insofar as she makes it
her own — both literally, by inserting herself into a story she was hitherto not associated with, and
figuratively, as she confidently traverses back and forth in time, vividly describing the moment of the Fall
as if it had already happened, and even going so far as to take the word of God and shape it to her own
ends: “Fire shall cry from my heart that burneth,— / ‘Dust he is and to dust returneth!’” The poem ends
on a note which foreshadows the Old Testament, predicting accurately the fate of Cain and Abel,
imbuing her with authority over God’s own scripture. George Macdonald’s novel, too, interrogates the
concept of Lilith as the creator of her own story.

The Madwoman in the Attic

, one of the most prominent feminist literary critical works of the 20th century, uses a direct quote from
Lilith as its epigraph. It also associates her original mythological manifestation with the concept of
female authorship and authority: “

Excluded from the human community, even from the semidivine communal chronicles of the Bible, the
figure of Lilith represents the price women have been told they must pay for attempting to define
themselves. And it is a terrible price: cursed both because she is a character who “got away” and
because she dared to usurp the essentially literary authority implied by the act of naming, Lilith is locked
into a vengeance (child-killing) which can only bring her more suffering (the killing of her own children).

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Within Macdonald's text, there is certainly evidence of a tussle for both authority and authorship
between Lilith, Adam and the author himself. For the emasculated character of Mr. Vane, she is simply
unreadable: “My frame quivered with conflicting consciousnesses, to analyse which I had no power. I
was simultaneously attracted and repelled: each sensation seemed either.” Lilith quickly charms him
into

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submission, but the combined presence of the author and Adam, representing the moral and social
strictures of Christian patriarchy, is beyond even her strength. The most telling indicator of its
indomitability is the unsatisfactory ending of the play. McGillis sums it up well in his discussion of
femininity and freedom in MacDonald’s texts:

“In a sense, the Lilith myth is too expansive, too complex, too contradictory for MacDonald’s
imagination: Lilith’s “dividual self”—at once repulsive yet fascinating, dangerous yet enticing, horrific yet
erotic— overpowers the narrative space in such an aggressive way that MacDonald must eventually
silence the temptress by imprisoning her in his Christian myth of redemption.”

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Yet is she really ‘imprison[ed]’, in the end? The weapon which Adam, and the narrative, are finally able
to use to subdue her is nothing less than a poem purportedly written by herself, which lessens the
credibility of this exertion of masculine authority. In it, she in fact directly references the limitations on
form imposed upon her by men's imaginings of her true state: “Then should I clothe me in the likeness
true / Of that idea where his soul did cleave!” Perhaps this line reveals an authorial anxiety about the
over-simplified

34

categorisation of women into ‘angels’ or ‘monsters’ which Rossetti, too, challenged in his pairing of
‘Body’s Beauty’ and ‘Soul’s Beauty’,

Lady Lilith

and

Sibylla Palfimera.

(Appendix B) Undoubtedly Lilith’s complex, often unreadable, especially to Mr. Vane, character is foiled
by the discrete one-dimensionality of the other three main women in the novel: Eve the wife, Lona the
mother, and Mara, cryptically described as “one who suffers but does not repent,” the literal
manifestation of suffering and slavery in sin. In contrast to these passive figures, Lilith’s desperate
speeches asserting her autonomy gain an increased degree of potency: “I am what I am; no one can take
from me myself! […] What I choose to seem to myself makes me what I am

Changing Literary Representations of Lilith and the Evolution of a Mythical Heroine

29

ibid

30

The Madwoman in the Attic,

p. 35

31
Lilith

, p. 132

32

‘Of “Frustrate Desire”, p. 27

33

Lilith,

p. 60

34

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Vica Germanova

[…] I defy that Power to unmake me from a free woman!” Pennington elaborates on the gravity of this

35

passage, applying a reading which throws light upon not only the novel but the pattern of self-negation
inherent in the characterisation of many empowered female figures in literature in general:

“Vane is willing to abandon his very essence in this new world: he represents the path MacDonald’s
characters generally are to take—abandonment of self for the great good of redemption through death.
But Lilith veers off this path. She is Self, but she is also confined by MacDonald’s world view that
demands relinquishment of Self for the Spirit—which is reflected in Adam and God. Lilith is caught in the
process of “feminist self- postponement,” which Kathleen Blake defines as “the evasion of one pattern
of self-limitation [which] involves the imposition of another.””

36

This concept of “feminist self-postponement” is a necessary qualifier for the proposition put forward in
this dissertation: that Lilith is empowered and autonomous in the art and literature of the late Pre-
Raphaelite period, but only to a specific degree delineated by the Christian patriarchy of the time. This
emendation helps to explain the renaming of the ‘Lilith’ sonnet by Rossetti to ‘Body’s Beauty’ in order to
contrast it to ‘Soul’s Beauty’ and ‘Sibylla Palfimera.’ It also reconciles the opposing critical viewpoints
that there is “no
direct

evidence of the title character’s power or malevolence in the image [of

Lady Lilith

],” even though the

37

complicated symbolism in the work suggests otherwise. “Feminist self-postponement” furthermore

justifies the bathos prevalent in much writing about strong female figures in this period, as in Browning’s
poem wherein both Lilith and Eve are still forced to rescind their confessions and lapse back into
unresolved ambiguity — their brief interlude of liberation from disingenuousness is nonetheless
subsumed by their dependence on Adam for safety. In particular, however, it explains the ending of
Macdonald’s novel, the ’Endless Ending,’ wherein Lilith is forced to acknowledge her inferiority and
make a half-hearted attempt at repentance. Interestingly, this only occurs when she herself becomes a
spectator of her own image, comparing her real self to an idealised version:

“Before her, cast from unseen heavenly mirror, stood the reflection of herself, and beside it a form of
splendent beauty. She trembled, and sank again on the floor helpless. She knew the one what God had
intended her to be, the other what she had made herself.”

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In effect, what devastates her is the ironising contrast of ‘Soul's Beauty’ and ‘Body's Beauty’ made by
Rossetti two decades earlier. Despite her power to self-create, Lilith is still limited by these rigid
Victorian structures for female presentation in art. Not only is this ending unsatisfactory, however, but it
is also not complete: the hand which has been speculated to

represent creative feminist power at odds with patriarchal power” is chopped off, but she refused to

open

it; “the monstrous hand can no longer hold the monstrous pen,” her refusal to give away this ending,
denying the reader that resolution, permits her to retain a degree of authority and throws her entire
repentance into potential disrepute.

39

Similarly, Rossetti’s picture-sonnets refer to a kind of

inter
mediary meaning which neither part can contain on its own. For instance the poem accompanying ‘Lady
Lilith’ works via contrast to assert Lilith’s dominance and autonomy over men and the reader even
without giving her a voice, a presentation which chimes with the necessarily frozen and inactive state
she occupies in her portrait. Lilith-as-myth is established by the tone of the sonnet’s first line: “Of
Adam's first wife, Lilith, it is told.” However this omniscient and distant storyteller voice quickly
disappears as the poem gives way to an enactment of Lilith’s ensnaring abilities via its incantatory,
serpentine rhythm, enjambement and language: “for where / Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed
scent / And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?” In comparison to ‘Soul’s Beauty,’ the sonnet
which precedes it and is placed on the opposite page in

House of Life

(published 1881), it’s mythopoeic expanse becomes even more pronounced. ‘Soul’s Beauty’ is
meandering, aimless and incomplete, lacking the narrative unity of the Lilith poem,which starts with the
opening to a legend and follows a specific youth through to his death. In contrast, the former poem ends
thus:

Lilith

p. 84-5

35

‘Of “Frustrate Desire”, p. 29; quoting Kathleen Blake,

Love and the Woman Question in Victorian Literature: The Art

36

of Self-Postponement

(Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1983) p. ix Isobel Armstrong, ‘Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott”: Victorian
Mythography and the Politics of Narcissism’, in

The Sun

37

is God: Painting, Literature and Mythology

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 126

Lilith,

p. 86-7

38
‘Of “Frustrate Desire”, p. 33

39

of 715

Vica Germanova“Following her daily of thy heart and feet, How passionately and irretrievably, In what
fond flight, how many ways and days!”

Without the control of a figure like Lilith to give its narrative cohesion, the sonnet founders, in the same
way that the portrait of its muse lacks the unsettling ambiguity and subversion of norms which

Lady Lilith

offers. These paired picture-sonnets stand aside from the rest of Rossetti’s ‘stunner’ portraiture of this
period insofar as it resists the otherwise purely sensuous gratification of

Bocca Bacciata

and

Monna Vanna,

for instance, by virtue of combination of two kinds of media:

“The picture-sonnets return a primarily decorative, aesthetic art to portraiture: the visionary portrayals
of psychic and moral states. These belong less to the female figure that induces and represents such
states than to the viewer.”

40

In combination with its sonnet, then,

Lady Lilith

is remarkable for its “distillation of the female figure in a drama above any overriding moral or literary
message,” or, at least, overriding any moral judgement of

herself

but rather projecting its ‘message’ outwards, to force its viewer to re-evaluate his own consumption of
female images, and the patterns of limitation that they depend on.

41
Mixed messages and ambiguous symbols within texts as well as between them are in fact at the core of
the late Pre-Raphaelite style. Rossetti's development of a “visual language around the aura of the
symbol” was taken up by Burne-Jones and developed through him into European Symbolism. Naturally,
the symbol in

42

its very nature of latent meaning and ambiguity lent itself well to the Pre-Raphaelite discourse on
femininity, and manifested itself particular in their treatment of women’s hair. Victorians were obsessed
with hair as a symbol fraught with complex and contradictory meanings.

“When the powerful woman of the Victorian imagination was an angel, her shining hair was her aureole
or bower; when she was demonic, it became a glittering snare, web, or noose. Silent, the larger-than-
life woman who dominated the literature and art of the period used her hair to weave her discourse;
immobile, she used her hair at times to shelter her lovers, at times to strangle them.”

43

Within the work of the Pre-Raphaelites specifically, the gold hair characteristic of Lilith has been variably
associated with wealth in Tennyson (‘Ringlet’); wealth

and

sex in Christina Rossetti (‘Goblin Market’); ensnarement and death in Rossetti and Waterhouse’s
illustrations of of ‘La belle dame sans merci’ (1855 and 1893 respectively). Nowhere in Pre-Raphaelite
art is this complex interplay of the symbolic meaning of female hair expressed better than in ‘The Lady
of Shallott’ by William Holman Hunt — one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
— painted towards the end of the century. In keeping with early Symbolism, this painting is fraught with
complex symbols and preoccupied with the figure’s internal psychological state far more so than her
aesthetic qualities. Its unusual focus on the ‘moment of crisis’ in the hackneyed subject (between 1850
and 1915 at least 54 works of art were based on Tennyson’s

Lady of Shallott

, not including book illustrations) as opposed to the subsequent, and far oft presented scene

44

of the Lady lying prone on her death-boat enable Hunt to capture “the frank expression of the lady’s
sexual desire for Lancelot [which] contravened the powerful ideological demand that women’s sexuality
should be passive and related solely to reproduction.” Like Lilith the Lady of Shalott has been read as a
proto-

45

Elizabeth K. Helsinger,
Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti & William Morris

(Michigan:

40

Sheridan Books, 2008), p. 161

Pre-Raphaelites: The Victorian Avant-Garde

, p. 206

41

ibid, p. 207

42

Elisabeth G. Gitter, The Power of Women's Hair in the Victorian Imagination (1984) PMLA, 99(5), p. 939
[http://

43

doi.org/10.2307/462145] Christine Poulson, ‘Arthurian Legend in 19th and early 20th century fine and
applied art: A catalogue of subjects’ in

44

Arthurian Literature,

X, ed. Richard Barber (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1991) p. 112

Pre-Raphaelites: The Victorian Avant-Garde

, p. 224

45

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Vica Germanova

feminist figure of female authority, her “escape from her tower … an act of defiance, a symbol of female
empowerment.” This is supported in the stanza from Tennyson’s poem exhibited alongside Hunt’s
painting:
46

"She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces through the room, She saw the water-lily
bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She look'd down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated
wide; The mirror crack'd from side to side; 'The curse is come upon me,' cried The Lady of Shalott.

The anaphora of ‘She’ followed by active verb in the first five lines underlines her autonomy and stresses
her active

choice

to use Camelot as the instrument to end her own life. There is also a lack of emotional bias in the final
couple of lines; the choice of the word ‘cried’ and her neutral utterance make it unclear whether the

Christine Poulson, ‘Death and the Maiden: The Lady of Shalott and the Pre-Raphaelites’ in Harding, Ellen,
ed.,

46

Reframing the Pre-Raphaelites: Historical and Theoretical Essays

(Bournemouth: Scholar Press, 1996) p. 181

of 915

Fig. 3 ‘The Lady of Shalott’ — William H. Hunt (1886-1905)

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