Their names ring familiar, the famous women who modelled for and who associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in marriage, affairs, and artistic endeavors. Lizzie Siddall, Georgie Burne-Jones, Jane Morris, Fanny Cornforth, Mary Zambaco, Emma Maddox Brown, Annie Miller, Euphemia Millais, Edith Hunt. What qualified the "Pre-Raphaelite stunner," and what fantasies did these women fulfill for their male counterparts. Moreover, who were these women themselves?

Essential to the Pre-Raphaelite art is a woman's face, a beautiful visage with large, luminescent eyes set in a web of long hair. Powerful bodies, necks, or striking features usually make the "stunner," though Siddall represented a strong exception. Though tall and red-headed with a fine posture and lovely lidded eyes, she appears far plainer and more fragile in comparison to the dark-browed Jane Morris or the fleshy Fanny Cornforth.

In paintings, each of these women's expressions embody enigma and distance; oftentimes, their poses remain static versus active. Strange that these unearthly alluring women should sit so silently when their images literally infect the Pre-Raphaelites' body of work. Their likelinesses appear in poetry and their very faces stare out of numberless canvases. The voices and meaningful looks of these women, however, are actually the filtered versions of the men who adored and depicted them.

These women found themselves in a very difficult position. Agreeing to model for an artist already contained some risk to body and reputation, but to also shoulder expectations of some of these men's ideals of femme fatale, victim, or saint both in art and in life proved to be most hazardous. As Jan Marsh contends in The Pre-Raphaeilte Sisterhood, the romance and attention surrounding these women tended "both to glorify them, raising them like Hollywod film stars above the level of ordinary mortals into a mythic realm of tragic heroines and fatal sirens, and paradoxically to diminish them, reducing their real, complex, contradictory personalities and lives to flat figures in a fantasy landscape and taking away from them all sense of active life." In art and in life, some of the Pre-Raphaelite women felt the pressure to abandon humanity to become an archetype. They were dreams coming to life in paints, and it was this living dream which the artists could not help but fall in love with.

In Gay Daly's invesitgative text Pre-Raphaelites in Love, she places a great concern upon this "bridge to the mundane." What happened when Beatrice or the Beggar Maid stepped out of the canvas and became a real person with everyday worries and concerns. Marriage, as Daly sees it, presented the ideal resolution for the Pre-Raphaelites, who believed it offered the only way to bring the romance they fantasized about into their own lives. Daly points out that as the uncertain industrial world increasingly showed a menacing face, "the rewards and benisons of marriage were touted more loudly; the perfect wife was hailed as an 'angel in the house,' who could salve all her husband's wounds with a celestial balm." The Pre-Raphaelites, who sought to escape the confusing world around them, turned to history, legend, myth and the constructions of women who inspired such an age.

That women became their primary subject shows their belief that women can heal and guide -- but it also shows their concern in the contemporary lives of Victorian women: the victims, the old maids, and the prostitutes. These artists hated to see their ideal creatures so degraded and sought to rise them to the higher state they deserved.
 

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The Sleeping Beauty myth, a popular theme during the Victorian age, gave rise to many creations both literary and visual. A fascination with portraying a sleeping woman suggests a situation fraught with meaning. Reduced to inanimation, she is the ultimate object of femininity -- a beautiful unmoving thing. She sleeps in perfect peace and purity and can only be brought to her full potential -- that is, animation -- with the aid of a male.

In Nina Auerbach's Women and the Demon, she contends that this state could be a metamorphosis, from which she will awaken with greater power. However, the myth traditionally ends with the Princess awakening and marrying the prince, not asserting some newfound power. Marriage as a definitive closure in domestic bliss assigned each gender its part in upholding the order, and rare was the reader who found this dissatisfying. For most Victorians, that was ending enough.

Edward Burne-Jones provided an interesting departure when executed his series of Briar Rose paintings; he ended the story with the prince at the gates and the princess still asleep amongst the rest of the inhabitants. In outward appearances, it only seems that he did not need to go further, for his audience already knew the way the story ended. And yet, that he chose to focus on the moment while the princess sleeps and the prince moves alone is significant in that the male hero is active while the female heroine is merely decorative against all the gray sleeping figures. However, in this state she does have some inner pulsing glow which pulls the prince towards her, emboldens him to face the dangers in order to come to her aid. If this represents the source of awakened power, it is quickly nullified upon her waking and marriage -- a moment which Burne-Jones chooses to omit. 

The model for his painting was his eighteen year-old daughter Margaret, whose own sexual awakening had begun. Aware of the pulsing inner power which would draw suitors to Margaret just as Princes were drawn to Briar Rose, a distraught Burne-Jones placed in his paintings many obstacles for the hero to overcome before he may claim the lady. The thick, intimidating briars which fill each panel serve to hold off the seeking men but also as a threat to the princess herself. Gay Daly in Pre-Raphaelites in Love, notes that if she "awakes and begins to move, she will inevitably be pricked by a thorn, the significance of which is painfully obvious."

In declining to portray the moment when the Prince achieves his goal and awakes Briar Rose, Burne-Jones delays the surrender of his daughter to a husband. However, he does nothing to dilute the attracting power of a budding, beautiful young woman whose power over men is potent.
 
 

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Notice of a new book
The Fatal Hero: Diana, Deity of the Moon, as an Archetype of the Modern Hero in English Literature is the first study to identify the existence of a dynamic, new female hero in the novels of the last two centuries. The model for this new heroic type is the goddess Diana, and I have discovered that this type, the Diana-hero, exists in scores of works throughout the literature of the Romantic era to our day.

My analysis seeks to open new vistas on the novels of Charlotte Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Joyce, Henry James, George Eliot, and Edith Wharton, authors whose texts offer rich and complex models of the new Diana-hero. Under careful consideration is the unique line of metaphoric development that each author undertakes with his or her Diana-hero, and the manner in which each author's original creation becomes one in the kaleidoscopic Gestalt of Diana-heroes that comes to exist in English literature.

This study offers an entirely new, and slightly subversive, way of reading these texts, for it not only clarifies the existence of the new female hero in these texts, but it demonstrates the subtly radical manner in which each author re-imagined and re-shaped the traditional figure of the goddess Diana. Thus, this book can change the way we see modernism, its heroic characters and structures, its important themes and generic forms, its intricate language and images.

During the birth of the modern world that took place during the last two centuries, the revolution in gender ideology fuelled new interpretations of all goddesses and of the revived Greek deities, Diana was the most free-spirited and independent female. There was a singleness of being to her. She was the maverick, the huntress free in the green chase, and this energetic Diana was an excellent choice to be the archetype of a female hero who could rebel against and regenerate a stagnant, old world. Her figure was central to the revolutionary myth-making of 19th-century authors, and in so exploring their creation of this hero, I hope in this study to demonstrate the profound and hitherto unmade connection between women's studies and modernism in literature.

Modern literature came more and more to invoke this Diana-hero in the creation of new souls and new worlds. She possessed the will to and the power of action needed to herald the apocalypse, the destruction of the old to prepare for the new world. These powers had traditionally been assigned to male protagonists, and the Diana-hero's assuming them to herself was a revolutionary act. My work also analyzes the new relationship between the Diana-hero and the traditional, but now oftentimes displaced, male hero.

There came a radical new hero into our literature, and she persists today. This persistence of the Diana-hero indicates that many authors still need and desire to create heroic women to meet the demands and to cross the new frontiers opened by our on-going social revolutions. This challenged and challenging hero continues to struggle in her quest to be Diana Victrix.
 

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"This is a wonderful, fertile book, impeccable in its scholarship, sweeping in its scope, daring in its argument and entirely convincing. It will change the way we think about modern literature (and in modern I include the literature of the past two centuries), the structure of the modern novel, the role of myth in modern narrative, and the intricate relationship between fictional characterization and the parameters of gender." Felicia Bonaparte, Professor of English, The Graduate Center of The City University of New York 

" The Fatal Hero is a brilliant and original study that offers a new way of reading texts. Gil Haroian-Guerin demonstrates how the use of Diana is highly significant in the revolutionary myth-making of modern authors eager to recast our sense of the world. This creative scholarly book is a convincing example of how a feminist approach can lead to a rich world of new discoveries." Eve Sourian, Director of Women 's Studies, The City College of New York 

"The Fatal Hero documents the dynamics of the female hero with great verve and charm. This is a landmark study, a thought-provoking work which will change a reader's perception of women in literature." Diana Der Hovanessian, Board Member of P.S.A and winner of the Columbia/P.E.N. Translation Center Prize 

"Gil Haroian-Guerin explores the vital role that feminine images derived from the ancient archetypal moon goddesses play in refashioning the woman as hero in fiction from Charlotte Bronte to Edith Wharton. Her use of the Diana archetype provides a new and exciting feminine-centered basis for understanding these novels." Robert Gates, Professor of English, Syracuse University 

FEBRUARY 1996, 
6 X 9, 272 pp.,
ISBN 0-8204-3025-0

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Women who had given in to seduction, living a life in sin, received the name "fallen women" during the Victorian period. Though both a recognizable and sizable segment of the female population, it took some time before the fallen woman could be accepted as an allowable subject in art.

Richard Redgrave first broached the topic with his Royal Academy exhibition of The Outcast in 1851. A melodramatic painting, it showed a father casting out his daughter and her illegitimate infant while the rest of the family weeps, pleads, or beats the wall with excessive emotion. The depiction of the girl, pretty and naive though she may be, serves to warn other young ladies to avoid temptation and ruin.

The married fallen woman receives even less sympathy, for no one will grant forgiveness to the the wife and mother who betrays her family. Augustus Egg makes such a woman his subject in the three part series Past and Present (1858), originally exhibited with the quotation, "August 4th - have just heard that B_ has been dead more than a fortnight, so his poor children have now lost both parents. I hear she was seen on Friday last near the Strand, evidently without a place to lay her head. What a fall hers has been!" The first panel depicts the moment of the husband's discovery. He sits in morbid shock, limply holding the condemning letter in hand as his wife lays at his feet, having thrown herself to the ground. The children, who were busy constructing a house of cards which has just fallen, cast anxious glances. The next two paintings show simultaneous moments in the present. In one, the now-adolescent daughters grieve the loss of their parents as one of the sisters gazes at the moon. In the other, their mother sits under an arch, holding her illegitimate child as she too looks up at the moon. No sympathy is forthcoming for the woman who destroys her own family; her punishment is death. Egg meant no coincidence in painting the mother's setting as the Adelphi arches under the Waterloo Bridge, the same scene of George Fredric Watts' Found Drowned. She will no doubt be driven to a watery suicide out of her guilt and remorse.

However, not every fallen woman was painted with such harsh criticism. The Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and Ford Madox Brown all recognized the complex emotions within the fallen woman and her situation. In Rossetti's Found, a drover discovers his former beloved, now a prostitute, slumped against a wall. The unfinished painting focuses in on the struggle between them as the man tries to lift her, but she seems both too ashamed and self-determined to go with him. The question of why she should resist him when his face is so contorted in pity and concern, forces the viewer to look at the drover's calf in the background, trapped and struggling within a web of restraints. It seems that either the woman is too entangled in her life of sin of else she refuses to be caught in the impositions of married life, represented in the net which holds the calf. At any rate, Rossetti problematizes the all-too-easy instant condemnation of the fallen woman and her motives. 

Holman Hunt pushes this idea even further with his Awakening Conscience (1854), in which he treated the popular Victorian theme of a sinner resolved to repent in a new light: that of the fallen woman. Victorian critics adored unraveling all the symbols and clues in Holman Hunt's depiction of his repentant sinner, a kept mistress, suddenly leaping up from her lover's lap as they were at the piano singing songs. He chooses to focus on the hope for redemption and the beauty of a once sinful life being saved, instead of a righteous sense of punishment for the straying woman.

Lastly, Brown calls attention to the man's role in the fallen woman's sin in his unfinished painting Take You Son, Sir. A woman in a saintly pose thrusts forward a naked child; a circular mirror behind her serves as a halo around her head and a window to show the accused man she faces. She demands shared responsibility for the child, who also gazes pointedly out of the canvas and towards the position of his father and the viewer. Both are charged with not admitting their role in the situation earlier. 

The fallen woman, though a potential destroyer of the family, did not lack advocates in the artistic world. Both artists and viewers learned to appreciate the complex issues surrounding her.
 

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In depictions of the femme fatale, there seems to be a reverent awe and fear of her power. It plays upon the concept of woman's hidden evil: her "Dark Continent," her sexuality.

When woman was at her worst, she was insatiable, stealing the vitality from her male lovers. Her sexual prowess allowed strength, immortality, influence, and most importantly, the ability to transcend to a trance-like state. Perhaps she could not be complete without a retinue of masculine servants, but they only provided the borrowed energy. The rest was carried out by her own internal machinery and capacity to wield power.

Though the femme fatale embodies and exposes these qualities, she only gives light to underlying fears placed upon all women. Newcoming sexologists and even everyday Victorian husbands could attest that the common conception of woman's sexual innocence and frigidity could not be upheld as a biological fact. Women were no less susceptible to sexual appetites than men, which opened the floodgates for all sorts of paranoid conjectures. The fear emerged from the questioning of which gender commanded sexual dominance, if women indeed had just as much inclination as men. Men no longer held a monopoly over sensuality and, therefore, aggression.

Though this may reflect the heart of the controversy, most theoreticians, including Freud, sought to define female sexuality in terms of a digestible patterned behavior. Freud never found the exact answers he sought, admitting that psychology will never "solve the riddle of femininity." He coined her sexuality as the obscure "Dark Continent," presumably never to be conquered.
 

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  Femme Fatale Overview 

We are well-accustomed to the ideas of the prudish, sexually-repressed Victorians, who cautiously guarded themselves against any temptation, no matter how slight. Critics and reader have largely and successfully questioned this conception and proven it inaccurate. For during this period, even in seeking any man or woman's ultimate goal in achieving the apparently conservative happy ending of marriage, Victorians were inevitably led to the consummation of their love and the creation one's own home and family. Sex and sexuality, then, were unavoidable issues for the Victorians.

As Jill Conway reminds her readers, that since it wasn't until the early 1900's that scientists connected sex chromosomes to sex-linked characteristics or that they discovered the workings of hormones -- "we [begin] to see why for some forty years the exact nature of sex-differentiation and its psychic accompaniment was a subject of intense, though inconclusive debate."

What exactly differentiated men from women and why the species evolved into the two sexes, then, unsurprisingly confounded Victorian theorists such as Herbert Spencer and Patrick Geddes. Thus, they and other specialists constructed a stereotypical dyadic model. Other than the different sex organs and physical differences, men were considered the active agents, who expended energy while women were sedentary, storing and conserving energy. Victorian theories of evolution believed that these feminine and masculine attributes traced back to the lowest forms of life. A dichotomy of temperaments defined feminine and masculine: an anabolic nature which nurtured versus a katabolic nature which released energy respectively.

Such beliefs laid the groundwork for, or rather arose from, the separation of spheres for men and women. According to the model, since men only concerned themselves with fertilization, they could also spend energies in other arenas, allowing as Spencer says "the male capacity for abstract reason... along with an attachment to the idea of abstract justice...[which] was a sign of highly-evolved life." On the other hand, woman's heavy role in pregnancy, menstruation (considered a time of illness, debilitation, and temporary insanity), and child-rearing left very little energy left for other pursuits. As a result, women's position in society came from biological evolution -- she had to stay at home in order to conserve her energy, while the man could and needed to go out and hunt or forage.

Moreover, this evolutionary reasoning provided justification for the emotional and mental differences between men and women. Conway shows how the logic led Geddes to believe that
 

Male intelligence was greater than female, men had greater independence and courage than women, and men were able to expend energy in sustained bursts of physical or cerebral activity... Women on the other hand... were superior to men in constancy of affection and sympathetic imagination... [they had] 'greater patience, more open-mindedness, greater appreciation of subtle details, and consequently what we call more rapid intuition.'"

The roles of men and women understood as thus, the Victorians still had to deal with the actual sexual act, wherein the bipolar model still held. Earlier on in the century, women were considered the weaker, more innocent sex. She had little to no sexual appetite, often capturing all the sympathy and none of the blame over indiscretions. Men represented the fallen, sinful, and lustful creatures, wrongfully taking advantage of the fragility of women. However, this situation switched in the later half of the period; women had to be held accountable, while the men, slaves to their katabolic purposes and sexual appetites, could not really be blamed. Therefore, women were portrayed either frigid or else insatiable. A young lady was only worth as much as her chastity and appearance of complete innocence, for women were time bombs just waiting to be set off. Once led astray, she was the fallen woman, and nothing could reconcile that till she died.

Many artists and writers of the period did not accept such strict roles for men and women in either their sexualities or their contributions to sexual intercourse. The dyadic model set up for men and women permeated the age, but only served to try to encourage an ideal. In real situations and in fictional agendas, Victorians could recognize the complexities and areas of gray.
 

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