Sugar, Salt and Curdled Milk: Millais

and the Synthetic Subject

Carol Jacobi
Tate Papers no.18

This article examines the sexual imagery of particular paintings by

the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. It argues that
criticism has overlooked the sophisticated poetry of the body in
Millais’s art, its synthetic approach to gender, and its precocious
place in a wider Aesthetic and symbolist visual and
literary tradition.
Fig.1

John Everett MillaisLorenzo and Isabella 1848–9

Oil paint on canvas
1030 x 1428 mm
Walker Art Gallery
© 2012 National Museums Liverpool
Fig.2
John Everett MillaisThe Bridesmaid 1851
Oil paint on panel
279 x 203 mm
© The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
On 2 May 1851, during a crisis point in his career, the twenty-one-year-old Pre-
Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais wrote to his friend Martha Combe: ‘One great
encouragement to me is the certainty of [a picture] having this one advantage … that it
is all at once put before the spectator without that trouble of realisation often lost in the
effort of reading.’1 This essay looks at a pattern of sexual images ‘lost in the effort of
reading’. Some, such as the phallic shadow projecting from the groin of the foreground
figure inLorenzo and Isabella 1848–9 (fig.1), appear to have been unseen, having
attracted no mention in critical commentaries of the work.2Others, such as the
‘unmistakably phallic’ horizontal leg in the same painting, are apparently visible only to
post-Freudian eyes. They have been assumed to have been accidental or repressed on
the part of the artist or other Victorian viewers.3 Occasionally humour or prurience is
admitted, something like the ‘penis rather better’ banded about by the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood as the secret meaning of their initials.4 Recent scholarship, however, has
questioned these assumptions. For example, the art historian Tim Barringer writes of
Millais’s The Bridesmaid 1851 (fig.2):
While the orange blossom pinned to her chest is a symbol of chastity, the woman is
contemplating with fear and fascination future sexual consummation. This is hinted at
by the phallic shape of the sugar caster, disrupting the work’s symmetrical composition,
a symbol (though presumably not a conscious one on Millais’s part) of the man whom
she is hoping to visualise.5

Fig.3

John Everett MillaisDetail of Lorenzo and Isabella 1848–9

Oil paint on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
© 2012 National Museums Liverpool
The salt cellar spilling its contents through the shadow on the white cloth in Lorenzo
and Isabella, dispels doubts about whether such sexual connotations were ‘conscious’
(fig.3).6 The evil omen of spilt salt derives from the German writer Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe’s description of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper1495–8 (Santa Maria
delle Grazie, Milan), an important source for the painting. However, bringing it together
with shadow and groin animates what might be dismissed as an unconscious or covert
visual innuendo with an unambiguous equivalent for ejaculation.7Millais based his
picture on John Keats’s poem Isabella or The Pot of Basil (1818); the repetition of the
shape of the shadow in the switch-blade kick of the foreground figure presages the
metaphorical castration and the darker spill of blood that takes place when he and his
brother behead lovelorn Lorenzo later in the poem. The fallen salt cellar informs, in
turn, the silver vessel placed on a white cloth in The Bridesmaid. Where the spilt
salt implies bitterness and incontinence, the upright sugar caster suggests containment,
swelling and sweetness. These are only hints of a serious sexual poetry in Millais’s
work, which, this essay will argue, was as deliberate, rich and innovative as any in the
writings of William Shakespeare, Keats or his contemporaries such as Alfred Lord
Tennyson.8 A full survey is a task for a longer text; the present study will focus on the
appearance of the caster and its associated imagery in a small group of works made
between 1849 and 1854.
The appearance of the sugar caster should first be put into the context of its
disappearance, the peculiarity that the salt and shadow, placed centrally in the picture,
have gone unremarked in modern criticism. Whether it was observed by the Victorians
themselves is uncertain. In 1908, the German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe singled
out Lorenzo and Isabella for his tirade against English art in his book Modern Art;
Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics. In Meier-Graefe’s eyes it
exemplified Pre-Raphaelite ‘barbarism’: Millais’s ‘pompous’ Florentines were
‘unpleasant to the point of indecency’, clowning dilettantes in fancy dress rather than
true Italians and contemporaries of Donatello.9In 1899, John Guille Millais’s reverent
two-volume monograph on his father presented the picture as a brief and misguided
result of the influence of the ‘perfervid imagination’ of Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante
Gabriel Rossetti.10 WhenLorenzo and Isabella was first exhibited fifty years before, the
critics were, as John Guille Millais noted, divided or silent. The verdict in
the Athenaeum is the most pertinent. It complained of ‘the utter want of rationality in
the action of the prominent figure’, but only cited specifically the ‘unwieldy leg’.11 The
public, John Guille Millais recorded, generally considered the picture a ‘prime joke’,
and greeted it with ‘laughter and supercilious smiles’.12
The best reason to believe that explicit imagery was visible to some Victorian viewers
of fine art comes from the continued popularity of the eighteenth-century painter and
printmaker William Hogarth. Engraved editions of his pictures were widely available
and consumed, and mid-nineteenth-century commentaries describing ‘a very exact
representation of what were then the nocturnal amusements of a brothel’ were far from
coy.13 Hogarth was a hero of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, although John Guille Millais
does not mention him.14 In a letter of 1855, the poet William Allingham asked Millais
to ‘be our better Hogarth’.15In this he echoed the words of Hogarth himself; a text well
known to the Brotherhood recorded the earlier painter’s hope that future ‘better hands’
would realise his search for a reconciliation of caricature and high art.16 In the case
of Lorenzo and Isabella, the Athenaeum connected the two in reverse, seeing it as high
art ‘almost’ reduced to ‘caricature’.
The Athenaeum reviewer, and Millais himself, may have been thinking of Hogarth’s
riotous feast scene in The Rake’s Progresscalled The Orgy 1733,and specifically the
rake’s white stockinged leg flung across the foreground (fig.4). Hogarth’s series of oils
had been on show in the Sir John Soane Museum for the benefit of students since 1810.
Engraved versions of The Orgy, called ‘The Tavern Scene’, reverse the painting to place
the rake, like Isabella’s brother, at the left of the composition (fig.5).17 The Orgy also
features a single shadow cast across the table in a nearly identical position to that
in Lorenzo and Isabella. It is created by a knife, thrust by a woman over the table and
echoed by the neck of a bottle, grasped by another woman under the table; the base of
the bottle nestles suggestively in a parting in her pink dress.18 Its angle is answered by
the rake’s foot. Phallic association of the shadow itself is strengthened in a similar way
to that in Lorenzo and Isabella by objects on the table: a pair of spherical containers (a
little bottle and a glass) makes an anatomical analogy to testicles.19

Fig.4

William HogarthThe Rake's Progress: 3. The Orgy 1733

Oil on canvas
625 x 752 mm
Sir John Soane’s Museum
Fig.5

William HogarthA Rake's Progress (plate 3) 1735

Transferred from the reference collection 1973
View the main page for this artwork
There were, therefore, artistic precedents for Millais’s shadow and salt cellar and these
were reflected in the spirit, if not the detail, of contemporary criticism. It is unlikely that
such sexually explicit imagery went entirely unseen in his time, and certainly he saw
them himself, as did his Pre-Raphaelite colleagues. Why, then, has it been unseen in
ours? Several decades have passed since the exposés of 1960s Pre-Raphaelite
biographies gave way to the less light-hearted deconstructions of patriarchal power,
inspired by the theories of feminism and those of the philosopher Michel Foucault,
which followed in the 1970s.20 Indeed, the subject of sex might be thought to have been
exhausted. Instead it has become strangely denatured, whisked away into other
discourses. Sex in Victorian art became almost synonymous with gender; the sexual
body was framed in terms of codes that constructed masculine authority over a feminine
‘other’.21 So compelling were these important and far-reaching critical revisions that it
was difficult to view sex in any other way, so much so that the historians James Eli
Adams and Andrew Miller, in their bookSexualities in Victorian Britain (1996),
declared ‘the highly visible elusiveness of sex as a discursive production and historical
topic’.22
Foucault argued in his three-volume study The History of Sexuality (1976–8) that
nineteenth-century discourses of sex were displaced into discourses of power, an
argument that seemed to apply to the twentieth century too. Indeed Foucault
acknowledged this by asking, in the introduction to the first volume, ‘Was there really a
historical rupture between the age of repression and the critical analysis of
repression?’23 The text answers its question with a virtuoso exhibition of its own thesis.
The only direct reference to the sex act occurs early on, an account of an encounter in
1867 between a homeless simpleton and a child: ‘At the border of a field he had
obtained a few caresses from a little girl’, ‘the familiar game of “curdled milk”.’24 This
unhappy vignette is quickly superseded and obscured by specialist languages of power
and knowledge – law, medicine and technology – orientating around the politics of
gender. The text becomes, to use its own words: ‘a digression, a refinement, a tactical
diversion in the great process of transforming sex into discourse.’25 This screening of
the sexual anatomy, act (‘caresses’) and emissions (semen called ‘curdled milk’)
provides a telling parallel to their absence in critical commentaries onLorenzo and
Isabella and The Bridesmaid.26
In the twenty-first century Pre-Raphaelitism has been discussed as a movement that
challenged and changed the dominant conventions of its age.27 Most of the discussion
of explicit content has focused on the bohemian counter-culture, the circle of Dante
Gabriel Rossetti and the later Aesthetic Movement of the 1860s onwards,28 but art
historian Elizabeth Prettejohn has suggested that the sexuality in Millais’s work might
also be ‘difficult to reconcile with our conventional preoccupations with the
Victorian’.29 Empirical studies of Victorian sexual practices have also revealed a more
heterogeneous landscape, inconsistencies between ‘conventional preoccupations’ and a
range of actual ideas and behaviour.30 Nineteenth-century technical, historical and
social transformations in general are now understood to have produced ideologies that
were equally fluid and unstable.31 A series of monographic exhibitions including Tate
Britain’s Millais in 2007, have, moreover, re-introduced the particularity of the artist’s
vision into discussions of Victorian art.32 There is scope, therefore, for seeing Millais’s
sexual iconography through more mutable gender codes and other codes altogether.
The works in this essay depict single enclosed figures anticipating future fulfilment. For
each, an intense imaginative visualisation of a longed-for loved one brings about
physical realisation. Although the pictures can be read on many levels, two important
themes are the analysis of desire and the relationship between mind and body, art and
life. It will be argued that Millais did indeed ‘better’ Hogarth, evolving a language of
sexual anatomy and activity that transcended caricature to explore these existential
themes. All but one of the works fall between 1848 and 1854, experimental years that
coincided with Millais’s participation in the Pre-Raphaelite’s rebellion. Art historian Jan
Marsh has pointed out that as radicals, artists and very young men, the group was by no
means aligned with the mores of their middle class: ‘Both physical impulses and
romantic love were urgent and socially present issues.’33 1848 to 1854 happens to be
the period when Millais negotiated sexual maturity, love and marriage between the ages
of nineteen and twenty-five. As the perspective of this essay is not biographical, there is
no need to rehearse the well-trodden tale of Millais’s unusual courtship with Effie Gray
while she was married to his patron, the art criticJohn Ruskin, other than to draw
attention to its departure from convention.34
The pivotal image in this essay may at first be a surprising one, Millais’s neglected
drawing St Agnes’s Eve 1854 (fig.6), based on Alfred Lord Tennyson’s 1837 poem of
the same name. It is highly finished in pen and sepia ink with green wash, and shows a
nun looking through a window at a snowy landscape partitioned by walls and gates like
a medieval illumination.35 Beside her is an altar-like table covered with a white cloth
on which sits a candle and a crucifix. The object that appears as a caster in The
Bridesmaid plays the role of an incense burner or censer. The significance of the image
is underlined by the fact that Millais gave it to his future wife, Effie, during the most
difficult months between their emotional attachment and the annulment of her marriage
to Ruskin on the grounds of non-consummation.
Fig.6

John Everett MillaisSt Agnes’s Eve 1854

Pen and sepia ink and green wash
248 x 210 mm
Private collection
The nun is different from Millais’s other female figures. The particular interest of this
drawing is that there is good evidence that it is a self-portrait. Curator Malcolm Warner
relates the picture’s ‘mood of frustration and longing’ to Millais’s attraction to another
man’s wife.36 Effie went further in a letter to her mother: ‘[It] is the most touching
thing you ever beheld. Saint’s face looking out on the snow with the mouth opened and
dying-looking is exactly like Millais’ – which however, fortunately has not struck John
[Ruskin] who said the only part of the picture he didn’t like was the face which was
ugly … I think I see Millais reading the poem to me and talking about it with
me.’37 Effie’s words are confirmed by a comparison with William Holman Hunt’s
portrait of Millais painted a year earlier 38. Its aquiline profile and slightly elongated
chin are ‘exactly like’ those in St Agnes’s Eve.
Fig.7

John Everett MillaisIllustration for ‘St Agnes’ Eve’ 1857

Engraved by Dalziel Brothers
Reproduced in Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poems, London 1857
Effie’s letter stresses the discursive connection between Millais’s picture and
Tennyson’s poem, remembering Millais ‘talking about it with me’. As Ruskin wrote to
Tennyson in a letter about Pre-Raphaelite ‘illustrations’ for the 1857 Moxon editions of
his work, ‘good pictures never can be; they are always another poem’.
(fig.7)39 Scholarship has dispelled the myth that Millais rarely read and has traced
sophisticated responses to literature.40 The curators Jason Rosenfeld and Alison Smith,
in their catalogue for the 2007 Millais exhibition, analyse the artist’s absorbed figures as
explorations of broader themes and images of Romantic and post-Romantic
poetry.41 The figure of St Agnes unites several of these. She was, according to The
Golden Legend, a young Roman girl who was tortured and killed when she refused to
marry, sacrifice to pagan gods or submit to rape. Instead she chose to die and become a
bride of Christ.42 The night before her death, 20 January, became associated with
maiden rituals aimed at conjuring a vision of a husband. It was this folk custom, its mix
of a perceptual, emotional and sexual rite of passage, which caught the nineteenth-
century imagination. It synthesised transcendent experiences of eroticism, love
and vision.
St Agnes was famously combined with Shakespeare’s lovers from feuding families
in Romeo and Juliet to inspire Keats’s poem The Eve of St Agnes (1820). Here a young
girl called Madeleine leaves the feast day revelries to perform her prayers to the saint
and retire to bed. Madeleine’s lover, who her family have proscribed, has stolen into her
chamber. As she sleeps he enters her bed and her vision becomes flesh:
Ethereal, flush’d, and like a throbbing star.
Seen mid the sapphire heaven’s deep repose;
Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odour with the violet.43
Afterward the couple escape together. Seventeen years after Keats’s poem was
published, Tennyson’s wintry St Agnes’s Eve (1837) responded to the chilly setting of
the first verse. It synthesised physical and spiritual consummation in a different way. A
nun welcomes death and a longed for union with her bridegroom, Christ.
Keats’s The Eve of St Agnes was popular among Millais’s circle.44 In 1849, William
Holman Hunt’s first painting on Pre-Raphaelite principles was The Flight of Madeleine
and Porphyro During the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry 1848–9 (Guildhall Art
Gallery, London). In 1850, Elizabeth Siddall took up Tennyson’s nun in a
watercolour The Eve of St Agnes(Wightwick Manor, Wolverhampton). This work, along
with Millais’s 1854 drawing and his preparatory sketches and final engraving for the
1857 Moxon print concentrate on Tennyson’s lines:45
Deep on the convent-roof the snows
Are sparkling to the moon
My breath to heaven like vapour goes:
May my soul follow soon!
The shadows of the convent-towers
Slant down the snowy sward,
Still creeping with the creeping hours
That lead me to my Lord:
Make Thou my spirit pure and clear
As are the frosty skies,
Or this first snowdrop of the year
That in my bosom lies.46
Millais’s St Agnes’s Eve was therefore a continuation of a visual and literary
conversation with at least five other texts. It dwells on the dissolving of bodily
boundaries that Keats’s and Tennyson’s poems have in common. As the nun stands on
the threshold between shadow and light, misty breath links her form to the upward
sweep of snow and sky punctured by the synaesthetic black toll of the funeral bell. This
‘blending and flowing’ of forms is, as literary critic Elizabeth Wright has noted, a
feature of Millais’s work.47
Fig.8

John Everett MillaisThe Eve of St Agnes 1850

Oil on board
1841 x 1715 mm
The Maas Gallery, London
The centrality of the St Agnes theme to Millais’s artistic program between 1849 and
1854 is underlined by the frequency with which he reworked it. Two oil paintings return
to Keats’s version of the poem. These are both titled The Eve of St Agnes, one from
1850 (fig.8) and a later larger version from 1863.48 They show Madeleine undressing,
lost in reverie as she anticipates the dream of her future husband:
Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St Agnes in her bed.49
Madeleine takes on the shape of a mermaid or budding flowers that also populate
Keats’s poem. She rises, unsheathed as though from a cocoon, from her heavy robe.
Millais explores the visual and visionary aspects of the scene by washing the room in
the coloured shadows shed by the moon through the stained glass:
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damask’d wings;
And in the midst, ‘mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
A shielded scutcheon blush’d with blood of queens and kings.
Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint:
She seem’d a splendid angel, newly drest,
Save wings, for heaven: – Porphyro grew faint.50
Rosenfeld has commented on the way that Millais adapted watercolour techniques to oil
to achieve this newly ‘ethereal’, dissolving quality that became important to symbolist
artists and writers in Britain and France (Millais re-painted the 1863 version in
watercolour itself, now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).51
Fig.9

Sir John Everett Millais, BtMariana 1851

View the main page for this artwork
Fig.10

John Everett MillaisIllustration for ‘Mariana’ 1857

Engraved by Dalziel Brothers
Reproduced in Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poems, London 1857
Fig.11

John Everett MillaisStudy for Mariana 1850

Pen and ink
Victoria and Albert Museum
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Fig.12
John Everett MillaisVirtue and Vice 1853
Pen and ink
Photograph George P. Landow
Malcolm Warner has suggested that The Eve of St Agnes from 1850 was part of a plan
to pair it with Lorenzo and Isabella.52Millais’s realisations of the St Agnes poems have,
as Alison Smith has pointed out, close compositional and thematic affinities to other
contemporary representations of yearning figures at windows and mirrors including The
Bridesmaid and an oil painting, an engraving and several studies all
entitled Mariana (figs.9, 10 and 11).53These relate to three Tennyson
poems: Mariana (1830), Mariana in the South (1833) and The Princess (1847). The
Mariana of the first two poems refers to the abandoned bride-to-be in Shakespeare’s
play Measure for Measure (c.1603–4). Tennyson focuses on her longing and ennui by
placing her in a similar but more drawn-out seclusion to Keats’s Madeleine, reiterating
the contrast between chilly outer world and intimate interior. Mariana in the
Southdescribes the same heroine praying, and includes Keats’s sacramental accessories
and stained glass. Tears, Idle Tears, a popular song based on lines from canto IV of The
Princess, added regret to loss and longing:
In looking on the happy autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
… The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
… Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!54
These related pictures are connected by the silver vessel. The object itself was probably
an eighteenth-century caster used for sugar, salt or spices.55 It first appeared as the phial
of poison inThe Last Scene from Romeo and Juliet 1848 (Manchester Art Gallery) and
recurs in 1851 as a sugar caster in The Bridesmaidand as a censer or incense burner in
the Mariana oil painting, as well as a censer in the St Agnes’s Eve self-portrait. In each
case the object is presented on an altar, or altar-like table, with a white cloth. The 1863
oil The Eve of St Agnes replaces it with a gleaming silver box.
Whether or not this set of works constituted a deliberate decision to produce images in a
series, it suggests a concentrated enquiry into the Romantic notion of the sexual subject
in a later mid-century context. Feminist and Foucauldian readings of these cloistered
figures characterise them as masculine fantasies of a feminine other excluded from the
active world. For art historian Marcia Pointon, ‘the bridesmaid, hopeful of sexual union,
Mariana, wearily and hopelessly awaiting it, and the nun having abandoned it’ are all
incapacitated by their virginity, unmarried status and inability to procreate.56 Their
sexuality is thus symbolic expression of gender polarity: ‘boundaries between marriage
and non-marriage, celibacy and sexuality, woman and girl, are repeatedly invoked. Here
the phallic law is at its most powerful … depictions of women defined by the invisible
or symbolically present male, the other.’57 Pointon identifies the casters in each picture
as unconscious, abstract symbols of ‘phallic authority’.58 The contained chastity of the
figures – romantic fidelity in the case of Mariana and Madeleine and religious fidelity in
the case of the nun – can be interpreted as a response to social worries about the
unwed.59 The occupation of seamstress, for example, identified by journalist and social
reformer Henry Mayhew as the last defence of the unmarried and unsupported women,
was the standard trope for feminine labour, popularised by Thomas Hood’s The Song of
the Shirt (1843).60Mariana recalls a range of seamstresses in Victorian art and literature
that responded to anxieties about women who worked.61 Her embroidery would have
been recognised as different from the industrial-scale stitching depicted in the many
poems and pictures on this theme, such as Millais’s own Virtue and Vice 1853 (fig.12),
where a woman at a window is shown choosing between sewing and sex work.
Mariana’s more genteel pastime reinstates the reassuring convention that had
naturalised male economic activity in the outside world as different to female
domestic practice.
However, such readings are limited by their unitary nature. Different women and men
produce identical definitions of womanhood and manhood. The autumnal setting
of Mariana and the frozen landscapes of both versions of St Agnes’s Eve tend, for
example, to be uniformly read as references to virginal sterility.62The orange blossom
in The Bridesmaid, the snowdrops in the stained glass in Mariana and St Agnes’s
Eve and on the nun’s breast are correspondingly interpreted, like St Agnes herself, as
signs of virginal chastity.63 Other commentators, for example the art historian Paul
Barlow, have detected a less definitive ‘tension between emotional intimacy and
physical restraint’ in these works.64 Orange blossom can also stand for marriage and
fertility.65 Mariana’s snowdrop is, unlike the nun’s, broken.66The autumnal decay of
her setting is not the same as the wintry death of St Agnes’s Eve; her over-ripe curves
are distinct from the empty, tented drapery of the nun.67 Millais’s multiplication and
subtle variation of similar figures, themselves revisions of imagery found in many texts
by others, suggests that their content is restless.
Most restless, of course, is the ambiguous artist/nun of St Agnes’s Eve. S/he blurs male
and female purity and suggests other sexual models. In 1995, James Eli Adams’s
book Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood demonstrated a
nineteenth-century ideal of masculine sexual continence that developed alongside
female chastity. As the economic unit transferred from land to people, the struggle for
autonomy created a ‘technology of the self’, one aspect of which was gender.68 In the
wake of the political scholar Thomas Malthus’s warnings about population, male
continence answered middleclass anxieties about the need to defer procreation until it
could be accommodated within the secure financial setting of marriage.69These
concerns would have been pertinent to a young artist who chose to gamble with his
career and status first by joining the Pre-Raphaelite rebels and then by falling in love
with the wife of a better established man (not to mention a leading art critic). Historian
Herbert Sussman’s book Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in
Early Victorian Literature and Art (1995) presented Millais’s later academic career as
just such a project of professional self-fashioning. Sussman sees his Pre-Raphaelite
period as an enactment of a reclusive model: a ‘Carlylean belief that the sexually
repressed life figured by the cloister could bring order and health to the psyche’, as
opposed to the heterosexual exchange, commercial industry and domestic
responsibilities of the Victorian norm.70
These ideas inform Lorenzo and Isabella and St Agnes’s Eve. Keats’s
poem Isabella or The Pot of Basil was a condemnation of nineteenth-century class
division and mercenary capitalism.71 In it the brothers treat bodies, even their
marriageable sister’s, as commodities. Millais’s painting was exhibited with verses 1
and 21, concluding:
When ‘twas their plan to coax her by degrees
To some high noble and his olive trees.72
Isabella’s affection for their employee Lorenzo is intolerable. Victorian association of,
and anxieties about, fiscal and sexual continence provide a context for the impatient
spill of salt. The brother’s grip on the nut-cracker that casts the shadow, and the position
of his other hand cupped below it (failing to catch the fragments of nut), recalls the
gesture of masturbation (fig.3).73Both motifs draw on a growing popular discourse
during the nineteenth century about onanism and the resultant dangers of involuntary
ejaculation, described in popular and specialist medical textbooks as
‘spermatorrhea’.74 The implication that Isabella’s brother is ungoverned, impetuous,
driven by his appetites, adds a sly, pictorial twist to the poem’s critique of the middle-
class marriage conventions that set gain above love. It picks up on Keats’s ‘ironic’
critique of romance through autoerotic imagery.75 Isabella exhibits equivalent
tendencies to her brothers. Her autoerotic obsession with Lorenzo’s decapitated head,
loved ‘more fervently than misers can’, provides a second conflation of unbridled
economic and sexual lust.76
Adams and Sussman were part of a broader trend to reject ideas of a single normative
manhood in favour of more nuanced and multiple masculinities.77 Queer theory is
another example; Pointon recoups the masculinity of Millais’s ambiguous figures by
raising the possibility of homosexual relations between him and William Holman
Hunt.78 With this multiplicity, however, comes uncertainty. Sussman asserts that
Millais’s depictions of doomed, effeminate, monastic types, are evidence of discomfort
with the monastic role. This reading implies that the St Agnes’s Eve self-portrait
constructs its critique of heterosexual norms of Victorian manhood as itself
unmanly.79 Adams concurs and makes the point that as identities became more fluid
they also became more contested: ‘momentous transformation of economic possibility
… incited increasingly complicated and anxious efforts to claim new forms of status
and to construct new hierarchies of authority.’80 He goes on to note, moreover, that
ascetic models depended on a performance of self-integrity and suffering that was
paradoxically theatrical, self-conscious and possibly artificial. He terms this ‘virtuoso
asceticism’. Millais’s ‘dressing up’ in St Agnes’s Eve chimes with Adams’s idea of the
‘dandy saint’. Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) displayed similarly paradoxical
‘parades of pain’ and also adopted a female voice to do it – ‘his culture’s most powerful
emblem of emotional integrity’, as Adams puts it.81
This insistent presence of the masculine in depictions of the feminine and the feminine
in constructions of the masculine suggests that there is potential to think beyond the
binary altogether. Even writers who admit a repertoire of gender models continue to
define them in a binary way, however, perpetuating the nineteenth-century ‘images of
male power and the norms of manliness’ that they critique.82 In the case of Victorian art
the phenomenon is compounded by a kind of anti-canon, a set of works regularly
presented for the purpose of demonstrating an ‘other’ set of gender rules.83 As
Elizabeth Prettejohn observes, detecting sexual codes in works of Victorian art may
‘substitute contempt for approbation’, but the practice leaves the polarities themselves –
victim/oppressor, scandalous/respectable, artist/model – intact.84 The ease with which
such meanings in Pre-Raphaelite paintings are able to be decoded ‘seems to prove that
misogyny is their problem not ours’, but in fact suggests otherwise.85
St Agnes’s Eve brilliantly exposes the critical parallax implicit in discussions of gender
based on this binary model. The option of designating Millais’s nun as either a man or a
woman unmasks the prerequisite that it has to be designated at all. Every discussion of
sexuality is launched by a nomination of gender. While Foucault and others demonstrate
that, in theory, gender is not essential but a product of history and discourse, St Agnes’s
Eve shows that, in practice, narratives of sexuality involve a gender assumption that is
privileged as ahistorical and outside the discourse. The possibility of applying two
genders to St Agnes demonstrates how each renders one set of meanings visible and
another set invisible. Effie’s letter, for example, reveals that her evaluation of the
painting as a male was different from Ruskin’s, who saw the figure as female.
Furthermore, a sexual polarisation (the exclusion of masculine characteristics in order to
read the figure as female or vice versa) is easily displaced into other oppositions such as
victim/oppressor or passive/active, which shy away from sex itself.
A relaxation of notions of difference in favour of a more elastic approach to gender and
subjectivity might preserve the insights of existing criticism but undo the ideological
closures, the sexual turning away, that it has bought about.86 Pointon and Adams
provide a basis for this in their exploration of multivalent identities within genders.
Pointon, for example, offers a kind of composite: ‘the idea of the nun is’, she says, ‘not
in opposition to matrimony but inscribed within it. The nun enables concepts of virginal
timelessness to survive within the ideal of marriage’.87 St Agnes’s Eve, for example,
combines Millais’s ‘image and that of Effie in a representation of frozen chastity, a sort
of negative union’.88 A glance at the series of pen drawings made by Millais in 1853
dramatises this. Their lighter play on gender pre-empts the more serious self- portrait.
One shows Effie in the same pose as the nun looking through a window onto a
landscape.89 In another, it is Millais that is enclosed in a bedroom, displaying his
Vitruvian proportions.90 A more finished drawing of Millais and a fellow artist
smoking to keep away midges provides a surprising source for the misty exhaled breath
of the nun (Awful Protection Against Midges 1853, Yale Center for British Art, New
Haven). The most unexpected depicts Effie and Millais in a chamber together. As well
as the window, a closed door signifies privacy. She stands, cutting his hair. He sits
modestly clutching a cloth about his shoulders. His other hand bandaged and a plaster
across his wounded nose.
Literary historian Kate Flint sees the unstable and performative nature of nineteenth-
century sexual identities as a possibility rather than a problem. She modifies
conventional characterisation of the Romantic and post-Romantic creator as a kind of
‘super subject’ and describes instead a flexibly gendered voice: ‘[The nineteenth-
century women poet is] not primarily concerned to draw on some stable sense of self
out of which to write, but uses her verse as a means of exploring the fact that identity
may be something imaginatively, generously, experimentally dispersed.’91 Millais’s
figures can be seen as similar experiments with multi-gendered, subjective models, a
pictorial equivalent of ‘writing and reading which can stretch both writer and reader
well beyond the bounds of personal experience’.92 This important idea of gender as
device rather than definition – as a means of exploring, extending and sharing
subjectivity – blurs the binary model. It allows St Agnes’s Eve to become an instance
not of problematic masculinity or of femininity, but a play on and from all of these.
These experiments in synthetic subjectivity reflect, as Flint suggests, on the painter’s
gaze. The figure at a window is a motif par excellence for an artist negotiating
exchanges between inner and outer, imaginative and real vision, which are central to the
poems by Keats and Tennyson that inspired the pictures.93 Economic, class and gender
struggle are evaded through an exploration of absorbed, agile, self-sufficient, outsider
vision informed by desire, love, memory and superstition or faith. The male nun in
Millais’s St Agnes’s Eve and the contemporary curate in his Married for Love 1853
(British Museum, London), no less than the female Madeleine, Mariana and the
bridesmaid, examine aspects of agency that are socially disengaged. The repetitive,
industrial quality (‘Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!’) 94 of the sewing in Virtue and Vice, for
example, contrasts with the individual nature of Mariana’s embroidery to make a
distinction between creative and non-creative work without the gender difference
usually associated with these two categories.95 The trope of tapestry as feminine
creativity can be understood as an analogy for a painting technique usually seen as male
labour.96 Millais’s prismatic paint strokes imitate the accumulation of coloured threads
(Millais and his associates sewed props for their medieval settings).97 Female
imprisonment also explores the practice of the male artist – his quiet occupation
transcribing each fold and floorboard. The Pre-Raphaelite method of working on
location andsur le motif placed the artist alone for long periods in the very spaces in
which they depicted their solitary figures. Millais shared his characters’ fixation on
ordinary domestic objects and framed views, and their sensitivity to waning light.

Fig.13
Dante Gabriel RossettiIllustration for ‘Mariana of the South’ 1857
Engraved by Dalziel Brothers
Reproduced in Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poems, London 1857
Once Millais’s waiting figures are accepted as synthetic subjects, their sexuality can be
understood as a vehicle for facets of artistic experience other than gender. Literary
historian Isobel Armstrong argues that creative vision is explored in the Pre-
Raphaelites’ writings through an intersection of the ‘sexual and the visionary’, which
she expresses as ‘sacramental eroticism’.98 The Maryan accessories of Mariana, her
blue robe and the stained glass as well as her oratory, or ‘idolatrous toilet table’ as John
Ruskin called it, parallel this tendency.99 They draw on the ritual imagery of
Tennyson’s more overtly religious and sexual sequel to Mariana,Mariana in the South,
who is described praying at an altar.100Mariana in the South is more focused on vision
and desire thanMariana and reprises both the intensely sensed medieval setting of
Keats’s The Eve of St Agnes and its imaginative summoning of a vision. Rossetti, rather
than Millais, illustrated the poem for Moxon (fig.13). Millais’s The Bridesmaid,
however, anticipates both Rossetti’s depiction of the heroine praying at the altar and the
intimate loose-haired format that would become the hallmark of his later
Aesthetic work.

Fig.14

John Everett MillaisStudy for Mariana 1850

The Bridesmaid stands in similar relation to Millais’s earlierMariana as
Tennyson’s Mariana in the South stands to his poemMariana. A symmetrical Study for
Mariana 1850 very like The Bridesmaid confirms that she is a variation of the Mariana
theme (figs.14, 2). The bridesmaid is a modern figure, but like Mariana in the South and
Madeleine, she is absorbed in a ritual aimed at apprehending her lover. Her activity –
passing a piece of the wedding cake through the wedding ring nine times on St Agnes’s
Eve – connects her to Millais’s The Eve of St Agnes and St Agnes’s Eve.101 The silver
caster on the table at which the bridesmaid enacts her ritual occupies the position of the
censer (the same object) on Mariana’s altar, so it is as though we are looking at Mariana
as she prays.
Like Madeleine, Tennyson’s Mariana in the South succeeds in summoning a vision of
her saint, in this case the Virgin Mary. Where Madeleine’s dream saint blends into her
actual lover, however, Mariana’s is superimposed onto her own body, her reflection
seen in a mirror as she worships. It recalls the earlier moment in Keats’s poem when
Madeleine’s body is superimposed with the figures cast by the stained glass.
Tennyson’s description of this mirror image fits the intimate frontality of both
Millais’s Study for Mariana and The Bridesmaid:
She, as her carol sadder grew,
From brow and bosom slowly down
Thro’ rosy taper fingers drew
Her streaming curls of deepest brown
To left and right, and made appear,
Still-lighted in a secret shrine,
Her melancholy eyes divine …
And on the liquid mirror glow’d.
The clear perfection of her face.
‘Is this the form’, she made her moan,
‘That won his praises night and morn?’102
The shining, glassy surfaces of the hair, fruit, ceramic, silk and skin of The
Bridesmaid give the sense that she is a reflection. This ‘liquid mirror’, as Tennyson
called it, complicates and layers vision like tears. The poem combines the two in the
same way as the shining eyes of the bridesmaid hint at both their moisture and the glass
surface in which they are reflected, lending it similar levels of reality and dream. In
addition to this, the bridesmaid comes in and out of focus as we see her as figure and as
reflection on a glass surface. As this happens, so the viewer wavers from sharing the
point of view of the male lover to sharing that of the reflected bridesmaid herself. This
finds its corollary in the mixing of the real and imagined face. It looks forward to
Millais studying his own reflection in a mirror as he re-imagines it as the nun in St
Agnes’s Eve. This synthesis of female and male, real and imagined bodies images the
synthetic subjectivity of the artist. Elizabeth Wright’s sense of the instability and
permeability of objects in Millais’s paintings ‘blending and flowing’ extends to
subjects too.
The effect of ‘blending and flowing’ also expresses the operations of desire.103 The
arid desert setting of Mariana in the Southarticulates sterility without the decay of
autumn in Mariana or the frigidity of the snow in St Agnes’s Eve. In the poem, hot, dry
claustrophobia is haunted by liquid day dreams such as the one above, imaged in the
rapt expression, moist eyes, lips and skin of The Bridesmaid. These are realised in a
release of tears in the climax of Tennyson’s poem, a sultrier restaging of the conclusion
of his earlier St Agnes’s Eve:
At eve a dry cicada sung,
There came a sound as of the sea;
Backward the lattice-blind she flung,
And lean’d upon the balcony.
There all in spaces rosy-bright
Large Hesper glitter’d on her tears,
And deepening thro’ the silent spheres
Heaven over Heaven rose the night.
And weeping then she made her moan,
‘The night comes on that knows not morn,
When I shall cease to be all alone,
To live forgotten, and love forlorn.’104
The visual and sexual climax of Tennyson’s heroine is different from Keats’s
Madeleine’s. There is no real male lover, she sees only herself. This autoerotic
encounter fits the activity of The Bridesmaid placing the cake within the ring, and Study
for Marianabiting the drapery, and again looks forward to later Aesthetic imagery.105
Rossetti’s description of the artist Chiaro’s autoerotic encounter with his own soul in
‘Hand and Soul’, published in the Pre-Raphaelite journal in 1850 just before The
Bridesmaid was painted, is like Mariana in the South’s encounter with her saint/face. It
intensifies Tennyson’s deliquescent imagery through a similarly sensual device to the
one found in Millais’s picture. Rossetti dissolves the boundaries between figure and
viewer, bringing him/her close enough to touch and taste the enveloping hair: ‘And
Chiaro held silence, and wept into her hair which covered his face; and the salt tears that
he shed ran through her hair upon his lips; and he tasted the bitterness of
shame.’106This bringing near again reiterates Pre-Raphaelite artistic practice, the
singularly long, close and restricted focus on each individual object and body part. The
interchangeability of Tennyson’s and Rossetti’s salt tears with other bodily fluids alerts
us to one of the outcomes of this intimate partitioning, the tendency for surfaces and
objects to become detached from their surroundings and transposable, to suggest other
surfaces and objects, as in the case of skin and glass.
The ‘bending and flowing’ from one image to another of phial/caster/censer with its
contents of poison/salt/sugar/smoke is a pictorial equivalent of Rossetti’s poetic device.
The dissolving quality complements Millais’s variation on Pre-Raphaelite technique in
the paintings under consideration, applying oils like watercolours in veils of transparent
colour, seen in the hair of the bridesmaid and in the even more ephemeral, underwater
effect in both paintings of The Eve of St Agnes. The sex obscured by binary gender
models and cultural assumptions becomes more conspicuous without them. New
contexts are created for the silver vessels. The shiny metal of the salt cellar and the
caster have generally been associated with masculine power and ‘violence’.107 The
association of anxieties about sexual and financial incontinence, explored by Adams,
brings into better, bitter view the phallic shadow and the spilt salt in Lorenzo and
Isabella. They in turn make visible the seminiferous imagery of the contents of the other
silver vessels in The Bridesmaid, Mariana and St Agnes’s Eve. Each of these varies to
add further resonances.
Millais’s glittering caster cannot fail to evoke Keats’s strange image of the ‘throbbing
star’ that brings Porphyro into Madeleine’s dream. The sharply three-dimensional
rendering of the metal in The Bridesmaid, almost alive in the pronounced upward twist
provided by the pattern, enacts a visual interruption of the soft hair that matches the
bridesmaid’s rapt gaze as she passes the cake back and forth through the ring. It echoes
the allusions to semen in hair that occur in Rossetti’s poetry, both in Hand and Soul,
mentioned above, and in Jenny (1847).108 The vessel’s phallic presence as censer
in Mariana (fig.9) transforms salt and sugar into smoke, associating sexual longing with
the more abstract sensual experience of scent and the more ephemeral dreams and
recollections that are the subject of the picture. Art historian Christina Bradstreet has
shown that scent was associated, in the Victorian period, with the power of memory and
its physical effects on the body.109 The candle above the altar burns steadily, softening
the sharpness of the container into a swelling rather than a penetrating chiaroscuro. The
modelling of the silver vessel is modified again in St Agnes’s Eve (fig.6). Here the
candle gutters so the object is smaller and emaciated into fewer linear shadows. These
match the thin figures of the nun and Christ on the little crucifix. The earlier
associations are not lost, as Warner notes, but developed from a metaphor of luxurious
longing to one of ascetic lack. Salt, sugar and smoke are substituted with pristine mist
and snow.
The crucial point here is that ‘sacramental eroticism’ does not simply twin or oppose
earthly and spiritual love, transgression and purity, incontinence and continence.
Millais’s variations suggest a wealth of multivalent exchanges between all of
these.110 As Elizabeth Wright explains in her perceptive reading of Millais’s Return of
the Dove to the Ark 1851 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), objects in Millais’s paintings
of this period ‘flow into and out of each other’s edges’ in the same way as they do in
surrealist art.111 Salt, sugar and smoke and their silver containers evade oversimplified
discourses of gender difference and instead enact an open-ended ‘play’, as Wright puts
it.112
The sugar caster’s qualities of sharpness in The Bridesmaid are transferred, in Mariana,
to the upright silver needle that she has jammed into the white flower in her embroidery
in front of her, a subtle translation of Hogarth’s ‘mangled fowl, with a fork stuck in its
breast’, remarked upon in contemporary texts about his painting The Orgy.113 The
suggestive juxtaposition of the petals and the pin, with its trail of white thread, is even
more pronounced in the more finished drawing Study for Mariana (fig.11) where a
larger needle is plunged into corrugations of cloth. This labial form is reiterated in the
wall-paper behind the figure where the pattern of roses gives way to a single orchid or
iris-like bloom. Although the caster itself is absent, prominent in the window is the
poplar tree described by Tennyson as standing out against the flat landscape. It troubled
Mariana with a shadow cast ‘‘pon her bed, across her brow’, and is usually read by
critics as a phallic presence.114
The sugar caster in The Bridesmaid is one of a series of upward curves beginning with
the red rim of the plate and culminating in the profile of the girl. ‘Fear and fascination’,
as observed by Barringer, reverberates through the entire scene. The rounded shape of
the censer in Mariana echoes the rising, rounded figure of Mariana herself, sheathed in
her glossy velvet robe. Concentric loops of hair weigh down and loosen their binding,
rhyming with the not-quite-elliptical outline of the circular mirror seen on the wall from
the side, rounded off into another phallic form. Mariana reprises the elongated profiles
of Study for Mariana (fig.11) and of Madeleine in both oils of The Eve of St Agnes. All
of these, like the bridesmaid, look forward to the concentric rhythms and phallic profiles
of Edvard Munch’s solitary figures.
The two Madeleines in Millais’s The Eve of St Agnes are different from Mariana in that
they burst out of the blue robes fallen at their feet. Protruding from the drapery like the
needle from the cloth, they resemble both vulvic flower and growing phallus.115Their
hybridity expresses the mixed subjectivity of The Eve of St Agnes poem, the merging of
Madeleine’s desiring gaze with that of Porphyro/the viewer who watches her, and the
closer ‘blending’ that will take place in her bed. Male and female sexual anatomy is
overtly united in the centrally tucked and pleated drapery of the frontal figure of Study
for Mariana (fig.11). Its compositional affinity with The Bridesmaid adds a further
layer to its simultaneity of male viewer/female reflection. In the 1863 version of The
Eve of St Agnes, the silvered fabric of Madeleine’s dress condenses the body and the
caster into one. This may explain why the vessel does not haunt the margins of this
picture.116
To conclude, Foucault’s The History of Sexuality disseminated its themes throughout
many disciplines and engendered an astonishing array of productive analysis. The
turning away from the anatomy and act of sex itself, ‘caresses’ and ‘curdled milk’,
made by polarised discourses of power and gender has, however, made it hard to see the
exquisite poetry of the body in Millais’s art, or its precocious place in a wider post-
Romantic, Aesthetic and symbolist visual and literary tradition.117 But it was not
hidden. Armstrong stresses the intentionality of the disturbing, even ‘embarrassing’
content of Pre-Raphaelite writings and there is no doubt that the sexual imagery in
earlier Pre-Raphaelite paintings is equally deliberate.118 Millais’s sophisticatedly inter-
textual responses to the St Agnes story move on from Romantic eroticism and
Hogarthian caricature. His nuanced variations explore restless, synthetic subjects, which
are dialectical not binary. More importantly, they show a sexual imagery with
implications beyond pornography, prurience or gender, expressing artistic and
existential debates about individual and society, desire and dislocation, sight
and insight.
 1.John Everett Millais, letter to Martha Combe, 28 May 1852, quoted in John
Guille Millais, The Life and Letters of John Everett Millais, President of the
Royal Academy, vol.1, New York 1899, p.105.
 2.The kernel of this essay was a paper ‘Millais, Sex and the Synthetic Subject’,
presented at the AAH Annual Conference, Contents, Discontents, Malcontents,
University of Leeds, 7 April 2006; this was, to the best of my knowledge, the first
time that the shadow appeared in an academic context. The paper is referred to in
Franny Moyle, Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives of the Pre-
Raphaelites,London 2009, p.44.
 3.See Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-
Century Culture, Cambridge 2006, p.88. Art historian Julie Codell explores
broader sexual themes in Millais’s Lorenzo and Isabella and other Pre-Raphaelite
interpretations of Keats’s poetry in her article ‘Painting Keats: Pre-Raphaelite
Artists Between Social Transgressions and Painterly Conventions’, Victorian
Poetry, Word and Image, vol.33, nos.3–4, Autumn–Winter 1995, pp.341–70.
Codell identifies a ‘phallic’ belt in William Holman Hunt’s The Flight of
Madeleine and Porphyro During the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry1848–9
(Guildhall Art Gallery) (p.352).
 4.Synaesthetic effects – ‘complex but perfect and as it were unconscious fusion
binds together taste, sound, and sight’ – are a distinctive feature of
Keats’s Isabella (1818), on which Millais’s painting was based. See Richard
 Fogle, ‘Synaesthetic Imagery in Keats’, in Walter Bate (ed.), Keats: A Collection
of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs 1964, p.47.
 5.Tim Barringer, The Pre-Raphaelites, London 1998, p.92.
 6.Rachel Barnes, The Pre-Raphaelites and their World, London 1998, p.24.
 7.‘Judas … leans over the table … as if alarmed and by this motion overturns a
salt-cellar’. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,Observations on Leonardo da Vinci’s
Celebrated Picture of the Last Supper, trans. by G.H. Noehden, London 1821,
p.10.
 8.For an analysis of eroticism in Keats’s Isabella and The Eve of St Agnes see
Jeffrey Cox, ‘Lamia, Isabella and the Eve of St Agnes’, in Susan Wolfson
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Keats, Cambridge 2001, pp.53–68.
 9.Julius Meier-Graefe, Modern Art; Being a Contribution to a New System of
Aesthetics, London 1908, pp.188–91. This volume is an expanded translation
of Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, published in 1905.
 10.John Guille Millais, vol.1, 1899, pp.55–6.
 11.Anon., Athenaeum,2 June 1849, p.545.
 12.John Guille Millais, vol.1, 1899, pp.73–4.
 13.See The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings With
Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency, vol.1, London 1833,
pl.3. Another widely available edition was Hogarth Moralized: A Complete
Edition of All the Most Capital and Admired Works of William Hogarth,
Accompanied By Concise and Comprehensive Explanations of Their Moral
Tendency by Rev. Dr. Trusler, London 1844.
 14.Hogarth was included on the ‘List of Immortals’, reproduced William Holman
Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, vol.1, London
1905, p.159. See also George Landow, ‘The Influence of William Hogarth on
Pre-Raphaelite Integrated Symbolism’, Victorian Web, 11 September
2004, http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/whh/replete/hogarth.html, accessed
19 October 2012
 15.William Allingham, letter to John Everett Millais, 10 November 1855, in John
Guille Millais 1899, vol.1, p.257.
 16.William Hogarth, Anecdotes of William Hogarth, Written by Himself: With
Essays on His Life and Genius, and Criticism of his Work, ed. by John Nichols,
 London 1833, pp.11–12; claimed to be compiled from ‘memoranda’ by his
biographer John Ireland, first published as ‘Anecdotes of the Celebrated William
Hogarth: With an Explanatory Description of his Works’, in Thomas Cooke
(ed.), The Genuine Graphic Works of William Hogarth: Consisting of One
Hundred and Sixty Engravings, Faithfully Copied from the Originals, London
1813.
 17.The Works of William Hogarth, vol.1, 1833, pl.3.
 18.This conceit appears in the labia-like position and representation of the red
pocket of the female figure, echoed in the split tree behind, of William Holman
Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd 1852 (Manchester Art Gallery).
 19.Art historian Kenneth Bendiner has observed a similarly poetic incorporation
of Hogarthian humour in the career of Ford Madox Brown. See Kenneth
Bendiner, ‘Ford Madox Brown’s Humour’, in Julian Treuherz (ed.), Ford Madox
Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer, exhibition catalogue, Manchester Art Gallery
2011, pp.37–46.
 20.See William James, The Order of Release: The Story of John Ruskin, Effie
Gray and John Everett Millais Told for the First Time in Their Unpublished
Letters, London 1947, and Mary Lutyens, Millais and the Ruskins, London 1967.
These were read against the background context of Seven Marcus, The Other
Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century
England, New York 1964. See Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 3 vols,
Paris 1976–8, The History of Sexuality, trans. by Robert Hurley, London 1978–
82.
 21.Important texts pertaining to Millais include Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality,
Oxford 1987 and Marcia Pointon (ed.), Pre-Raphaelites Re-Viewed, Manchester
1989. Pointon applies a feminist reading to the caster in The Bridesmaid in her
article ‘Histories of Matrimony: J.E. Millais’, pp.115–16. Art historian Jan Marsh
applies it to the ‘phallic thrust’ of the leg in Isabella and Lorenzo, in her
book Pre-Raphaelite Women: Images of Femininity in Pre-Raphaelite Art,
London 1987, p.48.
 22.Andrew Miller and James Eli Adams, ‘Introduction’, in Andrew Miller and
James Eli Adams (eds.), Sexualities in Victorian Britain, Bloomington 1996, p.13.
See, for example, the difficulty encountered by Rachel Maines during this period
 in publishing her book The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria’, the Vibrator, and
Women’s Sexual Satisfaction, Baltimore 2001.The critical turning away from
genital imagery is explored by Leo Steinberg, ‘The Sexuality of Christ in
Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion’, October, no.25, Summer 1983, pp.1–
222.
 23.Foucault, vol.1, 1978, p.10.
 24.Ibid., p.31. The episode is based on a case-study discussed by Foucault in his
lecture at the Collège de France on 19 March 1975, which included another
serious assault on the child that is not mentioned in the book, translated and
reproduced in Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France
1974–1975, New York 2003, pp.292–5.
 25.Ibid., p.22.
 26.It is no coincidence that Foucault chose a sex act that is also a criminal act.
 27.See Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Introduction’, in Elizabeth Prettejohn
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites, Cambridge 2012, p.9.
Compare, for example, the title and thesis of Tate Britain’s exhibition, Pre-
Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde, 12 September 2012 – 13 January 2013,
curated by Tim Barringer, Jason Rosenfeld and Alison Smith, with an earlier
exhibition at the same gallery, The Pre-Raphaelites, 7 March – 28 May 1984,
curated by Alan Bowness and Leslie Parris.
 28.For example, see Barringer 1998, pp.155–9; J.B. Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite
Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry, and Criticism, Oxford 1998, sections
2–4.
 29.Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Pre-Raphaelites, London 2000, p.12.
 30.A key text on this subject is Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian
Sexuality, Oxford 1994. See also Roy Porter, The Facts of Life, New Haven and
London 1995, pp.11–12.
 31.Prettejohn 2000, p.207. Readings of Millais’s work were opened out in Paul
Barlow, Time Present And Time Past: The Art Of John Everett Millais, Aldershot
2005, and in Debra Mancoff (ed.), John Everett Millais: Beyond the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood, London 2001. For an analysis of another member of the
Brotherhood’s romantic sexual relations see Carol Jacobi, ‘Women: Portraits and
Passion’, in Carol Jacobi and Katherine Lochnan (eds.), William Holman Hunt
 and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of Ontario,
Toronto 2008, pp.84–94.
 32.Millais, Tate Britain, London, 26 September 2007 – 13 January 2008; Van
Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 15 February – 18 May 2008; Kitakyushu Municipal
Museum of Art, 7 June – 17 August 2008; The Bunkamura Museum of Art,
Tokyo, 30 August – 26 October 2008.
 33.Jan Marsh, ‘Men: Virtue and Valour’, in Jacobi and Lochnan 2008, p.98.
 34.A narrative of Millais’s relationship with Effie Ruskin is set out in
James 1947.
 35.So similar is this landscape to February in the Limbourg brothers’ Très Riches
Heures du Duc de Berry 1412–16 (Chateau de Chantilly). The feast scene
in Lorenzo and Isabella is also comparable to January, prompting speculation as
to whether the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s interest in medieval art extended to
looking at reproductions of these, known through Comte Jean-Frangois-Auguste
Bastard D’Estang, Librairie de Jean de France, duc de Berry, frire du roi Charles
V , Paris 1824, in the collection of Henri d’Orleans at Orleans House,
Twickenham, from 1848. See Michael Camille, ‘The “Très Riches Heures”: An
Illuminated Manuscript in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Critical Inquiry,
vol.17, no.1, Autumn 1990, p.75. Interestingly, the two scenes were discussed in
an essay by Margaret Carroll regarding their overlooked genital iconography. See
Margaret Carroll, ‘Peasant Festivity and Political Identity in the Sixteenth
Century’, Art History, vol.10, no.3, September 1987, pp.289–95.
 36.Malcolm Warner, The Drawings of John Everett Millais, exhibition catalogue,
Bolton Museum and Art Gallery, Bolton 1979, p.24.
 37.Euphemia Millais née Gray, letter to Mrs Gray, 2 March 1854, in Lutyens
1967, p.148.
 38.William Holman Hunt, Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Bt 1853 (National Portrait
Gallery,
London),http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw04408/Sir-
John-...OConly=true&role=sit&rNo=1, accessed 15 November 2012.
 39.John Ruskin, letter to Alfred Lord Tennyson, 24 July 1857, in The Works of
John Ruskin, ed. by E. Cook and A. Wedderburn, vol.36, London 1903–12, p.165.
For the Moxon edition of Tennyson’s poems see Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poems,
 engraved by Dalziel Brothers, London 1857, Tate Library V 820 TEN. This
volume includes Millais’s illustrations for St Agnes’s Eve andMariana and Dante
Gabriel Rossetti’s illustration for Mariana in the South.
 40.See Marcia Werner, Pre-Raphaelite Painting and Nineteenth-Century Realism,
Cambridge 2005, which provides a detailed account of the group’s intellectual
and literary activities. Art historian Andrew Leng defends Millais’s literary
awareness with particular respect to Mariana, in Andrew Leng, ‘Millais’s
Mariana: Literary Painting, the Pre-Raphaelite Gothic, and the Iconography of the
Marian Artist’, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, vol.1, Spring 1988, pp.63–4.
 41.Jason Rosenfeld and Alison Smith (eds.), Millais, exhibition catalogue, Tate
Britain, London 2007.
 42.Jean de Voragine, Legenda sanctorum, c.1260, The Golden Legend, trans. by
C. Stace, Harmondsworth 1998, pp.55–7.
 43.John Keats, The Eve of St Agnes, 1820, verse
36, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173735, accessed 19 October 2012.
 44.James Najarian, ‘The Theme of “The Eve of St Agnes” in the Pre-Raphaelite
Movement’, Victorian Web, December
2004,www.victorianweb.org/painting/prb/ringel12.html, accessed 19 October
2012. A nice example is to be found in the poet William Allingham’s diary where
he mocks the essayist Thomas Carlyle’s opinion: ‘One day I was talking of Keats,
and Carlyle’s opinion of him, to Mrs. Carlyle; she asked me to lend her something
of Keats’s, and I brought her Isabella and The Eve of St. Agnes (I was too
knowing to try her with Endymion). She wrote me a letter – “Almost any young
gentleman with a sweet tooth might be expected to write such things. Isabella
might have been written by a seamstress who had eaten something too rich for
supper and slept upon her back”.’ William Allingham, A Diary, ed. by H.
Allingham and D. Radford, London 1907, p.310.
 45.See, for example, the bent figure in Tennyson’s St Agnes Eve – Sketch of St
Agnes Stooping to Climb the Convent Staircase c.1855 (Birmingham Museum
and Art Gallery).
 46.Alfred Lord Tennyson, St Agnes’s Eve, 1837, verse
1, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174655, accessed 19 October 2012.
 47.Elizabeth Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal, New York
1998, p.87.
 48.John Everett Millais The Eve of St Agnes 1863 (Royal
Collection), http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/eGallery/object.asp?searchText=E
ve+of+..., accessed 8 November 2012
 49.Keats 1820, verse 26. These lines are quoted in connection with the picture in
John Guille Millais, vol.1, 1899, p.372.
 50.Keats 1820, verses 24–5.
 51.Jason Rosenfeld, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, in Rosenfeld and Smith 2007, p.142.
 52.Malcolm Warner, ‘The Professional Career of John Everett Millais to 1863,
with a Catalogue of Works to the Same Date’, unpublished PhD thesis, Courtauld
Institute of Art, University of London 1985, p.200.
 53.Alison Smith in Rosenfeld and Smith 2007, p.52. Malcolm Warner lists seven
preparatory drawings with the name ‘Mariana’ in Leslie Parris (ed.), The Pre-
Raphaelites, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1984, p.90. See also
Millais’s illustration of Mariana in the Moxon edition of Tennyson’s poems;
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poems, engraved by Dalziel Brothers, London 1857, Tate
Library V 820 TEN.
 54.Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Princess, 1847,
canto IV,http://diamond.boisestate.edu/gas/gilbert/plays/princess/tennyson/teniv.h
tm, accessed 19 October 2012.
 55.A similar one made by John Delmestre, seventeen and a half centimetres high
and six and a half wide, is held in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
See http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O78458/sugar-caster-delmestre-john/,
accessed 26 October 2012.
 56.Pointon 1989, pp.115–16. See also Lynn Pearce, Woman, Image,
Text: Readings in Pre-Raphaelite Art and Literature, Toronto 1991, p.65; Herbert
Sussman, ‘The Pre-Raphaelites and the “Mood of the Cloister”’, Browning
Institute Studies, no.8, 1980, pp.47–9.
 57.Pointon 1989, pp.115–16.
 58.Ibid.
 59.See W.R. Greg, ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’, National Review, no.14,
April 1862, p.436.
 60.Thomas Hood, ‘The Song of the Shirt’, Punch, or the London Charivari, 16
December 1843. Henry Mayhew, ‘Interview’, The Morning Chronicle, 13
November 1849, pp.4–5.
 61.Millais’s composition is borrowed in turn from Richard
Redgrave’s Seamstress 1846 (original lost, Forbes Collection). SeeW.R. Greg,
‘Prostitution’, Westminster Review, no.23, July 1850, pp.448–506.
 62.Leng 1988, pp.63–74. See also Pearce 1991, p.65.
 63.See Barringer 1998, p.92, and Warner in Parris 1984, p.89.
 64.See Barlow 2005, p.39, and Rosenfeld and Smith 2007, p.52. Julie Codell sees
‘libidinal desires’ but mainly in transgressive contradiction to social convention
and ‘economic order’; Codell 1995, p.342.
 65.Debra Mancoff , Flora Symbolica: Flowers in Pre-Raphaelite Art, London
2003, p.26.
 66.U.C. Knoepflmacher, Nature and the Victorian Imagination, Berkeley 1977,
p.328.
 67.Art historian Rozsika Parker links the creative associations of embroidery to
childbearing in her book The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of
the Feminine, London 1984, p.22.
 68.James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood,
Ithaca 1995, p.5. See also Paul Stearns, Be a Man! Males in Modern Society, New
York 1990, p.134.
 69.Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the
Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin,
M. Condorcet, and Other Writers, London 1798.
 70.Herbert Sussman, ‘Artistic Manhood: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’, in
Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in
Early Victorian Literature and Art, Cambridge 1995, pp.112–21, 134, 140–5.
This is further discussed in Jason Rosenfeld, ‘The Pre-Raphaelite ‘Otherhood’
and Group Identity in Victorian Britain’, in Laura Morowitz and William
Vaughan (eds.), Artistic Brotherhoods in the Nineteenth Century, Aldershot 2000,
pp.67–81. James Eli Adams applies Thomas Carlyle’s ideal of asceticism – ‘a
distinctly masculine attribute’ – to professions as diverse as ‘the gentleman,
prophet, dandy, priest, and soldier’. See Adams 1995, p.212.
 71.Codell 1995, pp.347–8.
 72.John Keats, Isabella or The Pot of Basil, 1818, verse 21, http://www.john-
keats.com/gedichte/isabella.htm, accessed 19 October 2012.
 73.Similar fragments clutter the table and floor in William Hogarth’s The
Orgy 1733.
 74.Porter 1995, p.139.
 75.Jeffrey Cox, ‘Lamia, Isabella and the The Eve of St Agnes’, in Susan Wolfson
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Keats, Cambridge 2001, pp.53–68.
 76.Keats 1818, verse 46.
 77.See also Joseph Kestner, Masculinities in Victorian Painting, Cambridge 1995,
p.23.
 78.Pointon 1989, p.119.
 79.Sussman 1995, p.150.
 80.Adams 1995, p.5.
 81.Ibid., p.45. Literary historian Carol Christ outlines the origins of the
feminisation of a literature of sensibility and subjectivity and relates these to
Tennyson’s Mariana in her article ‘The Feminine Subject in Victorian
Poetry’, English Literary History, vol.54, no.2, Summer 1987, p.385.
 82.Andrew Stephenson, ‘Introduction’, in Andrew Stephenson, Visualising
Masculinities, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1992, unpaginated. See
also Kestner 1995, pp.4, 9; Codell 1995, p.348.
 83.For example Millais’s A Child’s World 1886 (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port
Sunlight). Alison Smith’s analysis of this painting is in marked contrast to popular
discussions of it as Bubbles; Rosenfeld and Smith 2007, p.184.
 84.Prettejohn 2000, pp.207–10.
 85.Ibid.
 86.Nicola Bown has suggested another mixing of masculine and feminine
subjectivities through the theme of divination in The Bridesmaid and related
paintings by Millais; Nicola Brown, ‘Will he, won’t he? Will she, won’t she?’
Fortune-telling and Female Subjectivity in John Everett Millais’s The
Bridesmaid’, Women: A Cultural Review, vol.13, no.1, 2002, pp.73–83.
 87.Pointon 1989, p.115.
 88.Ibid.
 89.John Everitt Millais, Sketch of Effie Ruskin 1853 (Birmingham Museum and
Art Gallery).
 90.John Everitt Millais, My Feet Ought to Be Against the Wall 1853, Geoffrey
Millais collection.
 91.Kate Flint ‘… As a Rule, I Does Not Mean I: Personal Identity and the
Victorian Woman Poet’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self, Histories from
the Renaissance to the Present, London 1997, pp.158–9.
 92.Ibid.
 93.Christ 1987, pp.385–40. Also Linda H. Peterson, ‘Sappho and the Making of
Tennysonian Lyric’, English Literary History, vol.61, no.1, Spring 1994, pp.121–
37.
 94.Hood 1843.
 95.Rozsika Parker comments on another distinction between sewing and
embroidery, the latter being associated with nunneries; Parker 1984, p.22.
 96.Sussman 1995, p.164. See also Julie Codell, ‘The Artist Colonised: Holman
Hunt’s ‘Bio-History’, Masculinity, Nationalism and the English School’, in
Elizabeth Harding (ed.), Re-Framing the Pre-Raphaelites: Historical and
Theoretical Essays, Aldershot 1996, pp.211–30.
 97.A similar blurring of male and female roles has been explored in the case of
George Frederic Watts’s ‘angel in the studio’, in Shelagh Wilson, ‘Watts,
Women, Philanthropy and the Home Arts’,in Colin Trodd and Stephanie Brown
(eds.),Representations of G.F. Watts, Art Making in Victorian Culture, Aldershot
2004, p.183. Art historian Christine Poulson makes a tangential connection
between another Tennysonian embroiderer and artistic vocation, but comes back
round to a reading of feminine repression; Christine Poulson, ‘Death and the
Maiden: The Lady of Shalott and the Pre-Raphaelites’, in Harding 1996, pp.173–
94.
 98.Isobel Armstrong, ‘The Pre-Raphaelites and Literature’, in Prettejohn 2012,
p.25.
 99.John Ruskin, letter to The Times, 13 May 1851, in John Guille Millais, vol.1,
1899, p.106.
 100.Leng 1988, p.65.
 101.Jennifer Phegley, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England, Santa
Barbara 2011, p.12.
 102.Alfred Lord Tennyson, Mariana in the South, 1833, verses 2–
3, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174633, accessed 19 October 2012.
 103.Wright 1998, p.87.
 104.Tennyson 1833, verse 8.
 105.For an extended analysis see J.B. Bullen, ‘The Solitary Vice’, in Bullen
1998, pp.207–16.
 106.Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘Hand and Soul’, The Germ, no.1, January 1850,
p.31. Rossetti’s imagery looks forward to the interchange of salty tears, semen
and blood in the poetry of Algernon Swinburne, for example ‘Dolores’. See
Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, London 1866.
 107.Pearce 1991, p.95.
 108.For this established reading see Robin Sheets, ‘Pornography and Art: The
Case of “Jenny”’, Critical Inquiry, vol.14, no.2, Winter 1988, p.323.
 109.Christina Bradstreet, ‘“Wicked with Roses”: Floral Femininity and the
Erotics of Scent’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, vol.6, no.1, Spring 2007.
 110.Nicholas Tromans finds similarly unstable significances in references to
sodomy in William Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat1854–5 (Walker Art Gallery).
See Nicholas Tromans, ‘Palestine: Picture of Prophecy’, in Jacobi and Lochnan
2008, pp.151–2. The vast plain of Dead Sea salt standing for Biblical Sodom
perhaps complements this.
 111.For Wright, the dove held to the mouth in Return of the Dove to the Ark can
also ‘be seen as a breast, kissing as suckling’; Wright 1998, p.87.
 112.Ibid., p.87.
 113.The Works of William Hogarth, vol.1, 1833, p.16.
 114.Monica Young-Zook, ‘Sons and Lovers: Tennyson’s Fraternal
Paternity’, Victorian Literature and Culture, vol.33, no.2, 2005, p.455. See
also G.O. Gunter, ‘Association Life and Death Symbols in Tennyson’s
“Mariana”’, South Atlantic Bulletin, vol.36, no.3, May 1971, p.65.
 115.The literary critic Claudette Sartiliot comments on the gender instability of
flowers in nineteenth century art in her bookHerbarium Verbarium: The
Discourse of Flowers, Lincoln, Nebraska 1993, p.17.
 116.It is tempting to connect this change to its date after Millais’s marriage to
Effie and his real experience of Porphyro’s point of view as she posed for the
painting in their bedroom, foregrounded in his son’s biography. See John Guille
Millais, vol.1, 1899, pp.372–3. The fabric of the dress was probably based on the
coverlet of King James I’s bed in the bedroom at Knole where the picture was
begun, ‘a mass of gold thread and silver appliqué gimp and lace’, as
Effie recalled.
 117.For Millais’s treatment of Ophelia’s mad scene see Kimberly Rhodes,
‘Degenerate Detail: John Everett Millais and Ophelia’s “Muddy Death”’, in
Mancoff 2001, p.43. Rhode’s interpretation of the painting’s transgressive
imagery along conventional poles of feminine transgression and respectability is
contradicted by Millais’s reprisal of the phallic flower imagery of Ophelia’s
speech in the fox gloves draped in Effie’s hair in Effie Ruskin. I am grateful to
Amanda Harrison for pointing out this floral connection.
 118.Armstrong, in Prettejohn 2012, pp.24–5.
Acknowledgements
A version of this paper was originally presented at the Annual Conference of the
Association of Art Historians, Contents, Discontents, Malcontents, at the University of
Leeds on 7 April 2006. I would like to thank Elizabeth Prettejohn and Alison Smith for
their advice and encouragement.
Carol Jacobi is Curator 1850–1915, Tate Britain.
Tate Papers Autumn 2012 © Carol Jacobi
How to cite
Carol Jacobi, 'Sugar, Salt and Curdled Milk: Millais and the Synthetic Subject', Tate
Papers, no.18, Autumn 2012, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-
papers/18/sugar-salt-and-curdled-milk-millais-and-the-synthetic-subject, accessed 2
October 2015.

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