Dearest Em,
Commonplace, aristocrat, Queen, it was all the same to Mrs Cameron. Maids became Madonna's- example in this case- Mary Hillier- her maid- known locally as Mary Madonna- along with local fisherman's son Freddy Gould.
This 'coloring-in' Em, taken from a photograph Julia entitled Cupid and Psyche' depicts two of her favourite victims dated 1866. Around this time- and referenced by her, was a popular poem by friend and Freshwater Circle compatriot- Coventry Patmore;
Man must be pleased; but him to please
Is woman's pleasure; down the gulf
Of his condoled necessities
She casts her best, she flings herself.
How often flings for nought, and yokes
Her heart to an icicle or whim,
Whose each impatient word provokes
Another, not from her, but him;
While she, too gentle even to force
His penitence by kind replies,
Waits by, expecting his remorse,
With pardon in her pitying eyes;
And if he once, by shame oppress'd,
A comfortable word confers,
She leans and weeps against his breast,
And seems to think the sin was hers;
Or any eye to see her charms,
At any time, she's still his wife,
Dearly devoted to his arms;
She loves with love that cannot tire;
And when, ah woe, she loves alone,
Through passionate duty love springs higher,
As grass grows taller round a stone.
First published without much acclaim in 1854- its revision in 1862 became a hit- and for us females is difficult reading today, post-Suffragette, 60's feminism, and the Virginia Woolf-ness reaction in-between- but remember for now Em, how these submissive principles were the Establishment. Economically Women didn't exist without men to support them, socially they were often ruined without them- unless they died which they often did.
Virginia Woolf reacted against these principles- even to the extent in writing in 1931 that "killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer."
However, my precious, how much was this priveledged doyenne of the Bloomsbury Set- inspired by the very generation she rebelled against?
On the Isle of Wight, nineteenth-century England's equivalent of Martha's Vineyard, where artists lived to get away from bustle and ended up bringing bustle in their wake, Julia Margaret Cameron, in one of the greatest outpourings of creativity in the history of art, went about for a decade discovering beauty in her family and friends and the working men and women around her, hauling people into her "studio," a converted hen coop, and making of their bodily forms immortal images.
It was the immortal within them she responded to. She had little interest in sociological data, details of clothing, tools of trades. When she looked at a domestic servant with a mop and bucket, her imagination erased the mop and bucket, covered the homespun clothing with swaths of drapery, and saw the woman as the current exemplar of some timeless, enduring type - a youthful May Queen or noble Madonna, a suffering Ophelia, a sinning Guinevere, a sainted wife, devoted daughter, grieving mother, or wild spirited wood-nymph.
For her mental store of archetypal personae she drew on eclectic sources: the Old Testament, the New Testament, Greek mythology Renaissance painting, and the classics of English literature - Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Coleridge. She had the words of the Romantic poets in her head as we might have the lyrics of songs by the Beatles. Many of the most popular writers of the day were her friends, including Coventry Patmore, who, in singing the praises of "The Angel in the House," codified the Victorian ideal of domesticity, and Alfred Tennyson, who, among other achievements, gave new life to the heroines of Arthurian legend.
She had received no formal education, which was typical for women of her time. Yet she was better read than many of us with graduate degrees. If we cannot reproduce her literary culture, if our minds' mansions are furnished, instead of with stanzas by Milton and Shakespeare, with episodes of favorite television shows, can we understand or fully respond to her photographs?
Every now and then a creative artist is inspired by other art which may be unfamiliar to readers or viewers. James Joyce, for example, based the structure and many episodes of Ulysses on Homer's Odyssey. An acquaintance with the story of Odysseus's wanderings may or may not enrich a reading of Ulysses, but the older work's greatest contribution to Joyce's epic, I would suggest, lies in enabling him to write it in the first place. It powered his imagination. It allowed him to see the life of ordinary people like Leopold Bloom, in an ignoble time like the turn of the century, in a provincial city like Dublin, as connected to enduring patterns of human life and therefore as material for art.
Cameron's response to beauty, eradicating class as it did, was so extreme as to constitute an almost political statement. Her tableaux are parables of radical democracy, or, seen from a slightly different angle, real-life fairy tales: in Cameron's glass house, Cinderella is always becoming a princess. Her parlor maid, Mary Hillier, was so often released from household drudgery to pose as the Virgin that she was known locally as Mary Madonna.
Like other artists of the early twentieth century, Woolf was in creative rebellion against a parental culture which to her seemed stuffy and stifling. But if we look with unprejudiced eyes at the literary culture of Julia Margaret Cameron, it hardly looks stifling. Quite the opposite. The rich, eclectic, thoroughly Victorian mixture of literary and pictorial images stored in Cameron's mind stimulated her to dense achievement, hundreds of works in a career of little over ten years, as the Madonnas and May Queens, the Wise Virgins and Foolish Virgins, the wood nymphs and angels in her mind were brought forth through darkness and light onto paper. And if we look, as this exhibition asks us to do, at the photographs of the fair women without the famous men, what we see is how splendidly the women stand on their own.
And my dear Emily, as a visual case-en-pointe- here is a 'colouring-in' of Julia's son's fiancee. No Angel-in-the-House here as a muse- more a poetical androgyny- or even pilgrim as muse...
Lucky Virginia- both blessed and cursed by her own nature and her anscestry- owes more than she or history has credited to her life's work, and it's impact on life as we know it- that Great Aunt Julia played a central role!
Looking forwards to Annabel's Christening in a few weeks time. She has a cheeky smile Em- and lovely giggle. Your Dad used to display the same sort of appreciation of what went on around him!
Your ever-loving Grand-Mother,
GiGi xxxx
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