9 - Lady in green with novel: the gendered economics of the visual arts and mid-Victorian women's writing

Summary

“‘A woman make an artist! Ridiculous! … Ha! don't come near my picture – the paint's wet. Get away!’ … [H]e stood, flourishing his mahl-stick and palette – looking very like a gigantic warrior guarding the shrine of Art with shield and spear.” As Michael Vanbrugh's outburst in this passage from Dinah Mulock's novel Olive demonstrates, professional women artists in nineteenth-century Britain were perceived by many to be a challenge to male hegemony. Michael's very suggestion that a defense of his authority is necessary, however, exposes the falsity of his own claim for the inherent superiority of men. A provoking counter-image to that of Michael's defense is Anne Brontë's heroine Helen Graham, in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, using her palette knife not only to finance her liberation from an abusive marriage but also, in one scene, to protect herself from a seducer. Mulock and Brontë's two images capture the economic and sexual conflicts which permeated Victorian conceptions of women's relation to the visual arts. The predominant conviction that men were both naturally and culturally better suited than women to artistic professions led society to configure women who attempted to infiltrate the hegemony as a sexually deviant, masculine threat. Conversely, the circumvention of the hegemony through forms of affectionate female–female interaction such as the gift-exchange of artworks was deemed trivial, and therefore sanctioned. As Terry Castle has argued, however, same-sex female attraction also contests men's economic and sexual authority over women.