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Framing the Victorian Heroine: Representations of the Ideal Woman

in Art and Fiction

“That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf’s handsWorked busily a day, and there she stands.”

Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”

The representation of the Victorian woman as the idealized

“angel in the house” permeates both the art and writing of the

Victorian era. In Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess,” the Duke of

Ferrara points out a painting of his wife to the Count’s envoy.

She exists only inside the construct of the framed painting. The

Duke says “there she stands” (4), but actually she exists only as

a creation of the artist Fra Pandolf in the painting. The

painting of the Duchess becomes an object of the Duke’s

possession to be shown only to a select few. He asks the Count’s

envoy, “Will ‘t please you sit and look at her” (5) as if she is

an exhibition to be admired. However, in life, the Duchess was

not the “ideal” wife. The Duke says, “She had / A heart – how

shall I say? – too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed; she

liked whate’er / She looked on, and her looks went everywhere”

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(21-4). The portrait of the Duchess idealizes her as the perfect

picture of beauty, yet at the same time, fails to accurately

represent her “true” character. The Duke could not control her

coquettish actions when she was alive, and so he ended her life

and “all smiles stopped together” (46). She exists, now, “as if

alive” (47) inside the physical frame. This allows the male

artist, like the fictional Fra Pandolf, to enclose the Duchess

inside the physical frame of the painting, and the Duke to

control his wife as a possession that can be displayed as an

exhibition.

The Duke objectifies the portrait of his wife, and Victorian

women can also be objectified, collected, and confined by men

inside the space of the frame. In Charles West Cope’s 1876

painting The Council of the Royal Academy Selecting Pictures for Exhibition, there

is a group of councilmen deciding upon a painting for exhibition

in the Royal Academy. The painting shows the councilmen looking

at a painting of a beautiful, fair-haired woman, elegantly

dressed with a fan in her hand. Yet, her right shoulder is fully

exposed, suggesting sensuality in her form. The woman in the

painting appears to feel the gaze of the men in the room. Her

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arms are tightly closed against her chest and her gaze is

directed downward. The woman is on display for these men of the

Royal Academy, just as the Duchess’s portrait is on display in

Browning’s poem. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger argues, “Men look

at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This

determines not only most relations between men and women but also

the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in

herself is male; the surveyed female” (47). The councilmen’s

gaze is on the female form – they are the spectators, and she is

the spectacle. The woman becomes the exhibition.

The representation of Victorian women inside the physical

space of the frame is analogous to their confinement inside the

space of the household. Paintings such as George Elgar Hicks’s

Woman’s Mission: Companion of Manhood, The Duet: A Drawing Room Study, and

paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti portray women in the

idealized feminine role. The fictional Victorian heroine often

represents a struggle against this idealized confinement, and a

crisis of representation emerges. Inside the frame of the text

itself, paintings are representations of this image of the ideal

woman. When the heroines do not remain inside this frame, they

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pose a threat to society because they will inevitably disrupt the

order society has established. By focusing on the gallery scene

in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Lady Audley in Mary Elizabeth

Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, and Marian Halcombe in Wilkie

Collins’s The Woman in White, this paper will argue that art

becomes a metaphor for the artificial and unattainable

representation of the ideal woman.

Before analyzing the struggle of how fictional Victorian

heroines escape the frame of ideal woman, it is important to

define what the ideal woman was considered to be for middle class

women in Victorian society. In Coventry Patmore’s poem The Angel

in the House, the speaker sees the woman as someone who is “the

most excellent of all,” a perfection to be admired, with a crown

upon her head like an angel (II.28-32). By comparing the woman

to an angel, she is expected to be both physically and morally

perfect. He praises the woman’s role as wife and maid, saying:

Nay, might I utter my conceit,‘Twere after all a vulgar song,For she’s so simply, subtly sweet,My deepest rapture does her wrong.Yet is it now my chosen taskTo sing her worth as Maid and Wife;Nor happier post than this I ask,

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To live her laureate all my life. (II.33-40)

In comparison to the woman’s moral perfection, the poet sees his

words of praise as “vulgar” and incapable of doing her justice.

However, his “chosen task” is to attempt “to sing her worth” in

the lines of the poem. He asks nothing more of her than to serve

the role as “Maid and Wife,” and as long as she does this, he

will be her laureate. At the end of Canto II, the speaker says

that the greatest pleasure gained from a woman is when the “care

to please with pleasing comes” (II.96). This poem creates the

idealized image of middle class women in the Victorian era. A

woman was supposed to be an angel to be admired, a wife, and a

maid, and the man was to ask nothing else of her than this. The

problem with this representation for a Victorian woman is that

the image of the woman as the angel in the house is an

unrealistic and unattainable ideal, because a woman cannot assume

the role of an angel. However, this was the idealized role that

middle class Victorian women were expected to live up to.

Middle class Victorian women were educated to believe that

their duty was to maintain order inside the home and provide a

safe haven for their husbands when he returned from the “real

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world.” In Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood, Joan N.

Burstyn writes, “The ideal woman was to be responsible for

organizing the household, bringing up the children, and providing

tranquility to which men returned as to a haven of peace from the

turbulent world outside” (32). This image is depicted in George

Elgar Hicks’s 1863 painting Woman’s Mission: Companion of Manhood. A

gentleman is standing with his right hand covering his eyes,

clearly upset over a letter he has received, which he holds in

his left hand. In Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, Martha

Vicinus states, “The crumbled envelope on the floor suggests the

hurried anxiety with which he has torn open the letter” (48).

The letter has a black border around it, denoting someone’s

death. His wife is draped over his left arm, attempting to

provide comfort to him. She is elegantly dressed, and the table

is appropriately set for tea with a linen tablecloth and a china

tea set. The image Hicks has created reflects society’s view of

the woman’s role as one who provides tranquility in the home and

takes care of the household. “[The painting] shows the loving

wife in her subordinate role of consoler to her grief-stricken

husband” (48). The title of the painting represents the idea

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that a woman’s ideal mission is to take care of her husband’s

emotional needs. Nina Auerbach states in Woman and the Demon: The

Life of a Victorian Myth that “Most Victorian genre painting limits

woman’s role to that of adored caretaker of a spreading family”

(82). Therefore, Hicks has created his own image of the ideal

woman that he can manipulate and control inside the frame. In

John Ruskin’s essay “Of Queen’s Gardens,” Ruskin believes that

the woman’s intellect should be used “for sweet ordering,

arrangement, and decision,” and her great function in marriage is

to praise her husband (84). This statement mirrors both

Patmore’s image of the woman as the angel in the house whose

greatest pleasure is to please, as well as the woman in Hicks’s

painting who is trying to retain order in the home by comforting

her distraught husband.

Aside from being an ideal wife and mother, the Victorian

woman was expected to maintain the perfect appearance, and as a

result, conduct manuals became a popular genre of literature

during the Victorian era. According to Ruskin, a woman’s

beautiful appearance was necessary so she might act as “the

beautiful adornment of the state” (Ruskin 103). One such manual,

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the Marquise De Fontenoy’s 1 manual entitled Eve’s Glossary published

in 1906, was written for women “whose wish it is to become home’s

greatest treasure, a good, pure, healthy, and handsome woman”

(4). The Marquise establishes “the principal lines of the

scaffolding meant to uphold ‘the beauty of woman’” (7).

According to the Marquise, the woman should behave with tact, and

she uses the French dictionary’s definition to define tact as

“delicacy, or delicacy of judgment” (278). The Marquise

continues, “She may be beautiful, graceful, highly educated,

talented, but if she lacks this eminently feminine virtue, her

moral conduct is not pleasant” (279). This type of conduct

manual creates the illusion of what the ideal woman should be by

reinforcing how women were supposed to behave in society.

Ideally, women should not only be beautiful in their appearance,

but also delicate in their behavior.

In The Subjection of Women, John Stuart Mill argues that women

are raised early on to believe in this predefined ideal because

the ideal is a construct created by the society in

which they live. He writes:

1 Pseudonym for American writer Frederick Cunliffe-Owen or Mrs. Marguerite Cunliffe-Owen

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All women are brought up from the very earliest years

in the belief that their ideal of character is the very

opposite to that of men; not self-will and government

by self-control, but submission and yielding to the

control of others. All the moralities tell them that

it is the duty of women, and all the current

sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for

others, to make complete abnegation of themselves, and

to have no life but in their affections. (15)

Therefore, Victorian women had to be submissive “because of the

laws of nature and society” (Burstyn 40). These laws, then,

establishing how a woman should act are not only laws established

by the society in which she lives, but also laws that are

believed to be deeply engrained in nature itself. If a woman

acts out against these laws imposed upon her, she disrupts both

society and the natural order of things. The patriarchal society

views women as wives and mothers, and this is the “natural” order

of society and to react against this is to be “unnatural” (Ruskin

21). Joan N. Burstyn writes:

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Women spent their time organizing the household,

overseeing the care of their children, shopping for

necessities and luxuries, practicing philanthropy, and

nurturing friendships, while their male relatives left

home each day to earn money for these activities. This

way of life became the ideal for the whole society.

(30)

These various definitions of the middle class Victorian woman

became the ideal representation that women were supposed to

adhere to, and the Victorian heroine often represents this

struggle against the idealized confinement. Inside the frame of

the text itself, art uses women as the subject for the ideal and

becomes a metaphor for the artificial and unattainable

representation of the ideal woman.

The gallery scene in Villette mirrors this predefined image of

women, both in the way women are portrayed in painting, as well

as the way in which the woman is being observed by society,

specifically men. Lucy Snowe visits a gallery one afternoon and

sees a painting of the Cleopatra. She observes, “She ought

likewise to have worn decent garments; a gown covering her

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properly, which was not the case” (Bronte 191). Similar to the

woman in Cope’s painting, the Cleopatra reveals a more sensual

image of the female form. Lucy does not agree with this image of

the woman as a sensual being to be on display for a public

exhibition. However, in her article “How Do I Look? Villette and

Looking Different(ly),” Ruth Robbins argues that “as an

unchaperoned figure, as [Lucy] looks at the art on the walls, she

is also available to be looked at with all the dangerous and erotic

potential that opens up for making her into a sexualized

spectacle” (218). Lucy, therefore, is looking at the Cleopatra

as a sensual being, just as the spectators in the gallery are

observing Lucy herself. In fact, M. Paul later points out to

Lucy that she should not be there on her own.

Lucy continues to criticize the image of the Cleopatra. She

sees the “pots and pans . . . rolled here and there on the

foreground; a perfect rubbish of flowers was mixed amongst them,

and an absurd and disorderly mass of curtain upholstery smothered

the couch and cumbered the floor” (191). Lucy notices the

disorderly appearance of Cleopatra’s surroundings. Middle class

Victorian women were educated to believe that their duty was to

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maintain order inside the home. “The ideal woman was to be

responsible for organizing the household, bringing up the

children, and providing tranquility to which men returned as to a

haven of peace from the turbulent world outside” (Burstyn 32).

Lucy understands this representation depicts “an improperly

socialized Victorian woman” (Ciolkowski 3). The Cleopatra fails

to define for Lucy what it means to be a woman, both in her

sensual form and in her failure as a woman of society. Later,

however, the definition of what a Victorian woman should be as

defined by their society will also be unacceptable to Lucy.

When M. Paul sees Lucy, he redirects her gaze, even though

Lucy has already turned her attention to the still life

paintings. M. Paul is astonished to see her looking at the

Cleopatra and turns her gaze to a series of paintings called “A

Woman’s Life.” These images represent “proper images of

appropriate and domesticated femininity” (Robbins 218). M. Paul

says it is acceptable for married women to view the painting, but

it is not acceptable for Lucy. He tells her, “Turn to the wall

and study your four pictures of a woman’s life,” but Lucy finds

them to be “hideous” (195). Lucy is being forced by a man to

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fit inside the predefined frame of female identity. However,

Lucy sees these paintings as “flat, dead, pale and formal . . .

What women to live with! Insincere, ill-humored, bloodless,

brainless nonentities! As bad in their way as the indolent

gypsy-giantess, the Cleopatra, in hers” (193). Lucy does not

relate to either the sensual image of woman, or the more

“traditional” image of women. Laura E. Ciolkowski argues that

“Lucy destroys any illusions of M. Paul’s ability to hold her

vision hostage when she informs him . . . ‘But I have looked at

[Cleopatra] a great many times while Monsieur has been talking: I

can see her quite well from this corner’” (4). Sandra Gilbert

and Susan Gubar argue that the paintings “parody Lucy’s inner

conflict between assertive sensuality and ascetic submission, the

Cleopatra and ‘La vie d’une femme’ perpetuate the fallacy that

one of these extremes can – or should - become an identity”

(421). Lucy’s resistance to M. Paul’s attempt to control her

gaze suggests that Lucy does not want to remain inside the

predefined frame of what it means to be a Victorian woman. The

gallery only offers Lucy two definitions of womanhood – the

sensual, and the domestic – and Lucy does not associate herself

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with either. She is asserting her own free will by choosing for

herself where her gaze will fall and therefore fighting society’s

expectations of her. However, society’s predefined role of women

does not allow her to do so without consequences, particularly in

a male-dominated society.

In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novel Lady Audley’s Secret, Lady

Audley is also forced to fit inside the predefined frame of

female identity. As long as she remains inside of the frame

created by society’s expectations of her as the ideal woman, she

does not pose a threat to society. Like the woman at the piano

in The Duet: A Drawing Room Study, Lady Audley seems to maintain the

appearance of refinement, but this appearance is artificially

manipulated, just as the painting’s and Lady Audley’s portrait by

the painter are artificial representations themselves. In the

1872 painting The Duet: A Drawing-room Study, a well-dressed woman is

playing the piano, and she is affectionately looking at a young

girl whose left arm is resting on the side of the piano. By

playing the piano, the woman is fulfilling one of her duties as

an ideal woman, and at the same time she is educating the little

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girl by showing her what roles an ideal woman should fulfill.

Joan N. Burstyn writes:

Faced with an increase in leisure and the need to

behave with elegance in order to make the best possible

marriage, many young women in the early nineteenth

century sought an education in accomplishments not

household skills. They learned to dance, to play

piano, and they mastered the fine details of drawing-

room etiquette. (36)

There are two objects on top of the piano: a vase (representative

of the female form) and a candlestick (representative of the male

anatomy), and there are two pictures on the wall, one on either

side of the piano. In the center of the wall, a mirror shows the

objects in the rest of the room. The mirror reflects the

appearance of a well-maintained drawing room, with curtains on

the window, a chair beneath the same window, and a fireplace.

The drawing room itself “must at a glance reveal the taste and

refinement possessed by the mistress of the house” (Marquise De

Fontenoy 185). The walls in the drawing room should be adorned

with either expensive paintings, or if the mistress of the house

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cannot afford these, should be replaced by etchings or

watercolors (188-9), and there are two paintings in this room,

even though the viewer cannot see what the paintings are.

Keeping her home in order was important for the ideal woman,

because the appearance of a well-maintained home reflected a

woman who herself was well-maintained.

Similarly, Lady Audley’s chamber is described as having

“every evidence of womanly refinement.” Her piano is open, her

“easel bears witness” to her artistic talent,” and her

embroideries “littered the luxurious apartment” (291). On the

surface, these items suggest that Lady Audley is refined and

adhering to society’s expectations of her as an upper class

Victorian woman. Yet, the narrator continues, “while the

looking-glasses, cunningly placed at angles and opposite corners

by an artistic upholsterer, multiplied my lady’s image, and in

that image reflected the most beautiful object in the enchanted

chamber” (291). Although she appears to adhere to the woman’s

role of being refined by playing piano, painting, and

embroidering, Lady Audley is being seen through a manipulated

reflection, a mirror, cunningly placed by an artist. Therefore,

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this is not a realistic representation of who she really is, just

as the woman in The Duet: A Drawing Room Study is only an artistic

representation of the woman at the piano.

The narrator continues to suggest that Mr. Holman Hunt could

have reproduced this perfect image of Lady Audley in a painting

with “her perfect chin supported by her hand” and “the gorgeous

surroundings which adorn the shrine of her loveliness” (292).

Pamela Didlake Brewer suggests, “I believe that it was not Mr.

Holman Hunt but rather Dante Gabriel Rossetti” who peeped into

Lady Audley’ boudoir and found “the perfect model for his

painting Lady Lilith” (8). Brewer argues, “Lucy Audley is certainly

the perfect Lilith” because “she [Lilith] would not submit to his

[Adam’s] authority and so was rejected” (8). The painting Lady

Lilith shows a beautiful woman mechanically brushing out her long,

blonde hair. She is holding a mirror in her hand, but she is not

looking directly into the mirror. Her expression is cold and

disinterested; she appears to be rejecting the image of her own

beauty. Lady Lilith “portrays bodily beauty as destructive”

(Sonstroem 115). Lady Audley is ideal in the portrait, but this

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portrait is not who she is as a “person,” and she also rejects

the idealized image of beauty.

As long as Lady Audley stays within the confines of the

frame she is placed inside of, she will continue to remain a

symbol of the ideal woman. Susan Jones writes, “[Braddon’s]

female protagonist is often ‘presented’ theatrically, ‘enframed’

in a window space or doorway, visually enclosed by the

architectural limits of the house or garden, as if contained by a

proscenium arch” (310). Lady Audley is enclosed inside the

physical frame of the painting. Mark Wigley argues:

Women are to be confined deep within a sequence of

spaces at the greatest distance from the outside world

while men are to be exposed to that outside. The house

is literally understood as a mechanism for the

domestication of (delicately minded and pathologically

embodied) women. (qtd in Langland 7)

Lady Audley, then, is not only confined inside the space of the

household, but she is also confined inside the space of the

frame.

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However, once her thoughts are expressed, she removes

herself from this artificial representation, and this is where

the problem occurs in the novel. The narrator says, “The

Benvenuto Cellini carvings and the Sevres porcelain could not

give her happiness because she had passed out of their region.

She was no longer innocent, and the pleasure we take in art and

loveliness, being an innocent pleasure, and passed beyond her

reach” (Braddon 292). She is no longer innocent because she does

not associate herself with artistic representations of beauty and

innocent pleasures, and therefore, she becomes “a problematic

representation of female identity” (Jones 308). Lady Audley

stepped outside of this innocent pleasure of being observed only

as an object of desire and admiration when she attempted to

murder George Talboys in order to maintain her status as an upper

class woman. David Sonstroem describes a similar relationship

between Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal. He writes,

“As long as Elizabeth Siddal sat like a picture, graceful and

silent, meeting Rossetti’s fantasy half-way, his imagination

would do the rest; but when she acted and spoke her mind she

betrayed a personality that must have troubled his dreams” (43).

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Lady Audley is denied her place as an ideal woman because she

does speak her mind and uses intellect and manipulation to get

what she wants, but she does so because she has suffered as a

woman who was threatened with a life of poverty. “The narrator

finally condemns the destructive power of the heroine, her

potential ‘madness’ (the secret of the novel), controlled by her

confinement to a private asylum . . . The heroine is left

isolated, an outcast of society, the predominant role of the male

prevails” (Jones 311). Therefore, because the frame of the

household could not contain Lady Audley, she is confined inside

the walls of the asylum.

Many of the Pre-Raphaelites, such as the aforementioned

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, used idealized representations of women

in their paintings. In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1899 painting

The Merciless Lady, a man is sitting in between two women. He is

holding the hand of a dark-haired woman on his left, but his

attention is drawn to the fair-haired woman on his right. “The

blonde lady – the merciless one – plays her lute, holding the

man’s undivided attention from the second, dark-haired lady, who

tries unsuccessfully and jealously to catch his heart” (Sonstroem

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118). David Sonstroem writes, “The fair lady serves as the basic

definition of the Pre-Raphaelite woman” (4). She is

characterized as having golden, bright hair and a bright face,

spacious forehead, white teeth, a shapely nose, and “she is

graceful when she walks,” similar to the conventional medieval

beauty (18-9). The blonde lady in this painting represents

Coventry Patmore’s angel in the house ideal who draws the

attention of the man to her with her flawless beauty of fair hair

and fair complexion. For Rossetti, fair ladies were thought of

“as heavenly creatures” (20). The man in the middle of these two

women is holding the hand of the dark-haired woman, but his gaze

is fixed upon the more angelic, idealized woman. This same

relationship exists inside the frame of Wilkie Collins’s novel

The Woman in White with Walter Hartright in the middle, holding the

hand of the Marian Halcombe, but gazing in her sister Laura

Fairlie’s direction. Laura is a representation of the fair,

idealized angel in the house because of her beauty, and Marian is

denied this role because of her more masculinized personality and

appearance.

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In Wilkie Collins’s novel, it appears that Marian Halcombe’s

assertive personality and independent thoughts will defy this

stereotype of woman as the angel in the house. Marian’s strength

in both outward expression and conversation is uncommon for a

Victorian woman. She rejects her assumed role in society as

simply a woman confined to the household with no opinions of her

own. In a conversation with Laura, Marian says, “Men! They are

the enemies of our innocence and our peace . . . they take us

body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to

theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel . . . I’m mad when I

think of it” (181)! Marian is not willing to accept the role of

wife, because she sees the treatment of women as similar to the

treatment of a chained dog at its master’s command. Marian is

not afraid to express her opinion in conversations with men

either. In the conversation at the lake, Count Fosco turns to

his wife to get her opinion about the detection of crime. The

Countess says, “I wait to be instructed . . . before I venture on

giving my opinion in the presence of well-informed men” (232).

This is a more typical response of an idealized Victorian, upper

class woman in Victorian literature. However, Marian’s response

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to the Countess’s remark is, “Do you indeed? . . . I remember a

time, Countess, when you advocated the Rights of Women – and

freedom of opinion was one of them” (232). Marian is not afraid

to express her opinions not only of the subject at hand, but also

on the rights of women themselves.

However, Collins denies Marian the role of ideal woman when

her appearance and behavior is stripped of any feminine

characteristics, and it is Laura, not Marian, who becomes a

representation of this ideal. Walter Hartright describes Laura

as the perfect image of the ideal woman, and his watercolor

drawing of her becomes a metaphor for this unattainable and

unrealistic representation of the ideal. In fact, the drawing of

Laura sits on Hartright’s desk as he is writing his description

of her. He describes Laura as having hair “so faint and pale a

brown – not flaxen, and yet almost as light; not golden, and yet

almost as glossy – that it nearly melts, here and there, into the

shadow of the hat” (51). He continues to describe her eyes

“beautiful above all things in the clear truthfulness of look

that swells in their inmost depths, and shines through all their

changes of expression with the light of a purer and a better

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world” (51). Sophia Andres writes, “Drawn in brushstrokes of

light and shadow, Laura instantaneously becomes for Walter the

ideal Victorian angel” (29). She is also ideal to Hartright

because of her “vivid impression produced by the charm on her

fair face and head, her sweet expression, and her winning

simplicity of manner” (Collins 53). Marian, however, fails to

achieve the role of ideal woman when her appearance and behavior

is stripped of any feminine characteristics.

Walter Hartright first introduces Marian to the reader when

he enters Limmeridge House. Hartright says he is “struck by the

rare beauty of her form,” and observes “the easy elegance of

every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to

advance from the far end of the room [which] set me [Hartright]

in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly” (Collins

34). According to Nina Auerbach, our first introduction to

Marian is “startling,” because “we greet her as a being familiar

in life, but painfully rare in Victorian fiction – a truly sexy

woman” (136). At first, it appears that Marian is being

introduced to the reader as the idealized angel in the house with

her rare beauty and graceful movements. “In this promising

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introduction Marian’s physical appearance acts on us as a

Rossetti or a Whistler portrait” (Auerbach 136). When Marian

turns around, however, Hartright exclaims, “the lady is ugly”

(Collins 34). Marian no longer fulfills the role of the

idealized woman because she is ugly in her physical appearance.

“At a stroke, Walter transforms Marian’s abandonment of stays

from a defiant assertion of new space and scope for herself to a

humble admission that her ugliness puts her beyond the pale

womanly accessories” (Auerbach 136). He goes on to say, “her

expression – bright, frank, and intelligent – appeared, while she

was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine

attractions of gentleness and pliability” (Collins 35). Marian

is not ideal because of her frank expression and unappealing

facial features. Count Fosco later describes Marian as having

the “foresight and the resolution of a man” (324). Marian is

masculinized because of her strength in character and her lack of

beauty.

However, Marian’s beauty is only unconventional in the eyes

of Walter Hartright, and Collins controls the reader’s

perspective of Marian by first describing her through Hartright’s

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eyes. Auerbach compares Marian’s physical appearance to the

portrait of Jane Morris by Rossetti. She writes:

Marian’s ‘coal-black hair, growing unusually low down

on her forehead,’ her large mouth, and her prominent

jaw, all evoke Jane Morris’ un-English and unorthodox

magnetism, though this similarly uncorseted Pre-

Raphaelite idol would no doubt appall a drawing master

like Walter, who sees and works by the rules. (137)

Walter Hartright is attracted to the more conventional fair-

haired, fair-skinned beauty of Laura, and that is why he

considers her, not Marian, to be the idealized representation of

beauty. Hartright also describes Marian as having what appears

to be a moustache. He says, “The lady’s complexion was almost

swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a

moustache” (Collins 35). Auerbach continues to argue that

“cosmopolitan Victorians might . . . have linked it [Marian’s

moustache] to Marian’s swarthy complexion as a further sign of

French or Italian womanly beauty,” and this is why Count Fosco,

an Italian, is attracted to Marian’s beauty (137). If Count

Fosco had described Marian’s physical appearance first, the

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reader may have been given a different perspective of her beauty

altogether. However, Collins controls the reader’s perspective

of Marian through the eyes of Walter Hartright.

As the novel progresses, Marian begins to lose her sense of

independence. She describes her powerlessness to help Laura in

her journal when she writes, “Who else is left to you? No

father, no brother – no living creature but the helpless, useless

woman who writes these sad lines” (194). This is the same woman

who rejects the necessity for men earlier in then novel because

of the restraints that they place on women. Her lack of self-

assurance continues in an argument with Sir Percival. Marian

claims, “If I had been a man, I would have knocked him down on

the threshold of his own door, and have left the house, never on

any earthly consideration to enter it again. But I was only a

woman” (245). She later describes her courage as “only a woman’s

courage” (319). Marian accepts her role as a submissive woman

who is lacking in both power and inner strength. Towards the end

of the novel, Marian’s role is reduced to that of a domestic when

she begins to take care of Laura and the household. Marian

claims, “What a woman’s hands are fit for . . . early and late,

28

these hands of mine shall do” (432-3). Auerbach writes, “the

novel never allows her to stray one inch from the old maid’s

prescribed self-sacrificing role as Laura’s solicitous protector”

(136). In the end, Marian is even stripped of her own words when

Walter Hartright says, “Marian was the good angel of our lives –

let Marian end our Story” (627). Hartright has held on to Marian

because he needed her to help him find Laura, but in the end, he

chose Laura over Marian as his wife. By the end of the novel,

Marian is reduced to her role as guardian over Laura, reduced to

the life of a woman stripped of independent thoughts, and denied

the narrative voice that ends the novel itself. Therefore,

Collins is suggesting that the woman’s role should remain as the

idealized angel in the house, absent of a strong will and an

independent personality.

The ideal woman during the Victorian era was compared to an

angel, perfect both physically and morally, and Victorian art and

fiction perpetuate this ideal. Society should ask nothing else

of her than to be the perfect wife and mother and to take care of

her husband’s and the household’s needs. She should be

comforting and compassionate and provide a safe haven from a

29

turbulent outside world. If the woman failed in these duties,

she posed a threat to society, because she would inevitably

disrupt the order society had established. Any other behavior

from a woman was considered “unnatural.” In Villette and Lady Audley’s

Secret, art becomes a metaphor for this unattainable and

unrealistic representation of the ideal woman. Lucy Snowe and

Lady Audley both struggle to escape the frame of the ideal woman,

each in their own way. However, the fictional heroines are

forced to remain inside their individual frames: the frame of the

home, the physical frame of a portrait, or the walls of an

asylum. “And there she stands.”

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