The Victorian Lady’s Domestic Threat: The Good, the Bad and the Indifferent Female Adversary in Contemporary Art

Abstract

The Victorian woman of religious faith and commitment was challenged by both real and fictional ‘adversaries’ in life, literature and art, among them the formidable foes of the aesthetic female and the decadent modern or New Woman during the last quarter of the century. In the realm of art, all three simultaneously coexisted, although it was the Victorian lady who triumphed in typology, popularity and sheer numbers. The apex of this ideal female was the ‘modern Madonna’, who reigned supreme in the iconology of Victorian womanhood in narrative or genre paintings such as Charles West Cope’s ‘Prayer Time’ (Fig. 1) of c.1860, also a portrait of the artist’s wife and daughter Florence. Cope chooses as his subject — and interestingly casts his own spouse as — the perfect wife, shown here as the ‘guardian of the hearth’ in a microcosm of domesticity and socially endorsed femininity. Isolated in a handsome room, she and her surroundings personify the Victorian home, the primary seat of power where female spirituality and moral superiority both resided.¹ The art on the wall, the furnishings, the flowers on the mantel and the bourgeois decor are all aesthetically pleasing and attractive, without any extremes of fashion. Similarly, the inhabitants’ dresses and accessories are likewise tastefully appointed, conventional rather than bohemian.