Lady in Green with Novel: Demonizing Artists and Female Authors

Abstract

‘“Pshaw — A woman make an artist! Ridiculous! … Ha! take the rubbish away — don’t come near my picture — the paint’s wet. Get away!” … And he stood, flourishing his mahl-stick and palette — looking very like a gigantic warrior, guarding the shrine of Art with shield and spear’.¹ Michael Vanbrugh’s outburst in this passage from Dinah Mulock Craik’s novel Olive (1850) demonstrates just what a dangerous threat some people saw women artists in nineteenth-century Britain to be. In this example, both the misogynist Vanbrugh and Craik’s narrator, who is sympathetic to the difficulties facing women painters, suggest that something more than just a manly image is at risk. The intensity of the character’s tirade has the situation come across as both comic and dangerously volatile. Not only Michael’s hyper-protestation, but even his very suggestion that a defense of his authority is necessary exposes a doubt regarding the claim for men’s inherent superiority in the field. In Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Helen Graham offers a provoking counter-image to that of Michael’s war-like defense of his notion of the profession’s gender. In Brontë’s novel, we find the heroine using her palette knife not only to finance her liberation from an abusive marriage but also, in one scene, to protect herself physically from a male seducer. These images of combat suggest that the boundary marking whom can be allowed to produce Victorian society’s visuality was under severe contestation.