Keep Your Lamps Lit: Elizabeth Siddall and Ophelia as Images of the Fallen Woman

Models who have bent, stretched and contorted their bodies into an assortment of poses, and held them for countless hours, have gone unappreciated for the majority of art history. Although, with the rise of feminist art history and the ‘feminist critique’, the fascinating lives of these women are being uncovered along with the artworks they produced while financially sustaining themselves through their artist’s-model employment. Highlighting these stories has led to many shocking revelations of the conditions endured by models too long ignored by history’s writers or justified by the art produced by gazing at them. But in many cases the model’s plight may not have been ignored at all, and may have added to the popularity of the work.

Figure 1: Millais, Ophelia (1851-52)

What is, perhaps, the most famous instance of this can be seen in the life and work of Elizabeth Siddall (1829-1862) who was both an artist and one of the favourite models of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. As such, she is woven into the fabric of the movement but, like many women, endured extreme conditions for the art she is depicted in, the most canonically celebrated of these being John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851-52). Depicting Act 5, Scene 7 from Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, wherein Ophelia is driven mad after her lover, the play’s namesake, murdered her father before meeting her inevitable demise either by falling into a stream where she drowned or by intentionally drowning herself. Beginning with the background in July 1851, Millais painted en plein air on the banks of the Hogsmill River in Surry, England, for five months before hiring Siddall as a model to complete the painting.1

In order to replicate the scene of Ophelia’s drowning, Millais had Siddall lie in a bathtub for the four-months between December and March while Millais completed the painting. With running hot water unavailable (it wouldn’t be invented until 1868), oil lamps were lit and placed beneath the bathtub in a futile attempt to keep the water warm after concerns were raised that she might suffer hypothermia from the frigid winter temperatures. These lamps didn’t always work, however, and, on one occasion, Siddall was forced to stay in the freezing water hours after the lamp had burnt out which resulted in her contracting pneumonia and she was subsequently given the drug laudanum (a tincture of opium) to relieve her pain.2 Predictably, her illness, and its recurrence throughout the remainder of her life, was reduced to a much more palatable and forgivable “severe cold” in the narrative of Millais’s work and Siddall’s life.3

Discussing the event in his publication of Millais’s journals, the artist’s son, John Guille Millais, stated that “the lamps went out unnoticed by the artist, who was so intensely absorbed in his work that he thought of nothing else, and the poor lady was kept floating in the cold water till she was quite benumbed.”4 Although, given that the artist’s eyes would have been constantly flicking back and forth between canvas and model in the bathtub, with a level of attention to detail only an artist can possess, it seems strange that the lack of light emitting from the oil lamp would go unnoticed at all let alone for the lengthy amount of time it would take for the water to become cold enough to justifiably describe her as “benumbed”.

Asserting that, “She herself never complained of this”, Guille Millais’s recount of the event (that he was not present for) reflects Pre-Raphaelite ideals of the feminine being passive, compliant and pure, and it absolves the artist of fault, instead assuring that the model simply accepted and endured her frigidity.5 This, too, is called into question when considering Siddall’s head-strong, self-determined nature, a world away from the passive victim documented by her male peers, leading to the question of whether Millais knew the lamp had burnt out and the bathtub was growing increasingly cold and uncomfortable, or if he simply didn’t care.

Emerging out of opposition to the Royal Academy’s insistence that the work of High Renaissance artists, particularly Raphael and also later artists who followed the classicism style, exemplified the human ideal and the height of artistic excellence, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood branded themselves revolutionaries in defiance of the status quo and refused the Academy’s instructions that students should imitate such artists in their work.6 Unlike artists promoted by the Academy, such as Sir Joshua Reynolds, or Sir ‘Sloshua’, as they referred to him, the Pre-Raphaelites favoured the intense colour pallets, classical posing and complex compositions seen in the work of artists preceding Raphael in the Italian Renaissance and High Renaissance periods. Predominantly, their works were grounded in historical literature, Christianity and mythology with images of women being a major theme through which they, like so many male artists before and after them, depicted the female as being passive, fragile and pure while remaining sexually attractive and appealing to the male viewer, which allowed the artists to apply “a convention of female representation,” through which the art historical canon views femininity and “epitomis[es] feminine identity”.7 In addition to Ophelia, the women often chosen to embody this ideal include Ariadne who betrays her father for her lover Theseus, Psyche who is punished for her beauty and Lilith who is banished from the Garden of Eden for disobeying Adam and is subsequently replaced with Eve in Christian and Jewish religion.

Figure 2: Edward Burne-Jones, Cupid and Psyche (c.1870)

Figure 3: John William Waterhouse, Psyche Entering Cupid's Garden (1903)

Millais’s Ophelia contributes to this convention through its use of Shakespeare’s Ophelia character from Hamlet, who, despite appearing in only 25 percent of the play, is abundant in visualisations of the story. Her character, like so many of Shakespeare’s women, is significantly less developed than his male characters and her arc is, essentially, that she is a potential wife for Hamlet but goes mad after he kills her father and drowns herself in a river. She exists only in relation to Hamlet, her father and her brother, her background is not mentioned beyond her relationship to these men, and she is bereft of any agency, remaining compliant and obedient to their control. As critic Lee Edwards has noted, it is easy to rewrite Hamlet’s story of revenge without Ophelia, but Ophelia cannot exist beyond the imagination without one of the three men, and especially without Hamlet.8 She is, therefore, perpetually linked to Hamlet. This makes her an ideal subject to venerate in a portrait, reinforcing the canonical narrative of passive, idealised femininity.

Narratives of the fallen woman have been rewritten throughout history and reconceptualised as Judith/Judy, the Femme Fatale, the New Woman, the Feminazi, etc., all of which have been employed as an agent of control and suppression, especially of women’s sexuality, and are rewritten by subsequent generations to demean women who dare to challenge patriarchal social structures.9 Regardless of the social movement they aim to vilify, reincarnations of the fallen woman are all born from the same myth of creation – that of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.10 Eve, who gives into the serpent’s temptation, falls from the Garden of Eden and it is women who therefore receives perpetual blame, with her disobedience (eating the forbidden fruit, being sexually liberated, pursuing education, claiming political rights or wanting to be treated as an equal) being the sign of weakness and inherent inferiority. Of course, an opposite was constructed to reward women who made no objection to their subjugation – Ruth, Madonna, Ophelia, the Angel of the House, all of whom represent the perfect woman who is passive, chaste and submissive to the will of men.

Figure 4: John Collier, Lilith (1887)

Figure 5: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith (1866-68, 1872-73)

The binary of opposition between propriety and immorality allowed Victorian men to easily classify women as either pure or prostitute, although, as J.B. Bullen notes, “the fallen woman had a double and powerful hold on the mid-Victorian imagination, simultaneously repellent and exciting, engendering both pity and loathing”.11 Siddall’s plight as Millais’s Ophelia embodies this gender dichotomy as the artist both degrades and empathises with her as she suffers and grows increasingly ill in front of his eyes while remaining beautiful and silent. Additionally, Shakespeare’s Ophelia character can, too, be seen as a fallen woman who is at first submissive to her father and brother’s control but her weakness causes her to descend into madness. In both Hamlet and Millais’s painting, Ophelia, young and innocent, drifts in the water, offering herself to death in a final act of total passivity. Her death is, therefore, the ultimate submission and for a Victorian reader the image of Ophelia is fixed to the male construction of femininity where she is an ideal of submission or of a woman fallen in consequence to her own weakness.

It should also come as no surprise that an image depicting a suffering woman, especially one who cannot exist without the presence of a man and one who has fallen, is also highly sexualised and eroticised in her death. To the modern viewer, there is little in Ophelia that can be termed ‘sexual’, but, for a Victorian viewer like Millais and his Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood friends, the open arms, spread legs, pale skin, half-closed eyes and open mouth all invited erotic readings conjuring the moment of a woman’s orgasm, and was thought to set a bad example for women who, like Ophelia and Siddall, had their value inextricably linked to their chastity.12 Furthermore, images of “dead and dying women were notoriously seductive for nineteenth century men”, Lawrence Kramer notes in his study of how culture promotes and rationalises sexual violence against women, explaining, “The bodies of such women, imaginary ones anyway, were felt to combine the pliancy of flesh with the perfection of a sculpture, making the death of women at once a form of art and form of sex”.13

Figure 6: Millais, The Artist Attending the Mourning of a Young Girl (c.1847)

Understanding the erotic excitement Ophelia’s death offered the Victorian viewer thus leads to the question: did Millais not know the lamp had gone out, or did he simply like watching Siddall edge closer to her death for his own viewing pleasure?

1. Tate, “The Story of Ophelia”, Tate, 2019 (publication), https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-ophelia-n01506/story-ophelia

2. Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock, “Woman as Sign in Pre-Raphaelite Literature” in Art History, 7 no.2 (June 1984).

3. John Guille Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (London: Methuen & Co, 1899).

4. Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais.

5. Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais.

6. Marcia Werner, Pre-Raphaelite Painting and Nineteenth-Century Realism (United States: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

7. Tülay Dağoğlu, Images of Woman in Pre-Raphaelite Visual and Textual Narratives (Istanbul: Nobel Publishing, 2023).

8. Dağoğlu, Images of Woman in Pre-Raphaelite Visual and Textual Narratives, 194.

9. Margarita Stocker, Judith Sexual Warrior: Women and Power in Western Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 135-49.

10. Stocker, Judith Sexual Warrior, 234.

11. J.B. Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry, and Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), quoted in Dağoğlu, Images of Woman in Pre-Raphaelite Visual and Textual Narratives.

12. Ibid, 220.

13. Lawrence Kramer, After the Lovedeath: Sexual Violence and the Making of Culture, (California, University of California Press, 1997), quoted in Dağoğlu, Images of Woman in Pre-Raphaelite Visual and Textual Narratives.

Image credits:

Figure 1: John Everett Millais, Ophelia (1851-52). Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 111.8 cm. Tate, U.K.

Figure 2: Edward Burne-Jones, Cupid and Psyche (c.1870). Watercolour, gouache and pastel on paper, 70.2 x 48.3 cm. Yale Center for British Art, U.S.A.

Figure 3: John William Waterhouse, Psyche Entering Cupid's Garden (1903). Oil on canvas, 143 x 105 cm. Harris Museum & Art Gallery, U.K.

Figure 4: John Collier, Lilith (1887). Oil on canvas, 194 x 104 cm. Atkinson Art Gallery, U.K.

Figure 5: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith (1866-68, altered 1872-73). Oil on canvas, 96.5 x 85.1 cm. Delaware Art Museum, U.S.A.

Figure 6: John Everett Millais, The Artist Attending the Mourning of a Young Girl (c.1847). Oil on board, 18.7 x 25.7 cm. Tate, U.K.