Atkinson Grimshaw’s Sleeping Beauties: Objectifying the Female Corpse

by: Clémentine Guiol , March 25, 2026

‘A gleaming shape she floated by, Dead-pale between the houses high, Silent into Camelot.’^[1]

Introduction

The Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat are two immensely popular heroines in Victorian culture, both characterised by their death from lovesickness and by the carrying of their dead bodies in a barge to Camelot’s court. Due to their cultural ubiquity in the Victorian era, Elaine and the Lady of Shalott are more than women ‘victimized by tragic love’ (Kim 2004), they are ‘icons of cultural constructions of femininity’ (Howey 2020: 8) and reflect not only the place of Victorian women in society but also betray Victorian prejudices regarding gender.

Elaine and The Lady of Shalott were depicted multiple times by Leeds-based painter Grimshaw (1836-1893), who produced two versions of Elaine in 1877 and two renditions of The Lady of Shalott (1874 and 1878). Grimshaw’s main sources for his Elaine and The Lady of Shalott paintings were Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Arthurian poem ‘Elaine’, published in 1859—renamed ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ in 1870 (Howey 2020: 2)—as well as Tennyson’s influential poem ‘The Lady of Shalott’, first published in 1832 and revised in 1842. Tennyson drew on the much older literary tradition of the medieval court romance, inspired by Arthurian legend^[2]. Pictorially, Grimshaw’s main source of influence was the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which in turn had been deeply influenced by Tennyson’s Arthurian poetry. Within this interreferential matrix of representations, Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite painters were among ‘the chief producers of icons of such desirable deaths’ (Homans 1998: 178). Adopting Elisabeth Bronfen’s view that ‘narrative and visual representations of death, drawing their material from a common cultural image repertoire, can be read as symptoms of our culture’ (1992: xi), we must acknowledge that Arthuriana, both text and image, ‘endorse[d] a conservative view of relations between the sexes’ (Poulson 1999: xv). This paper specifically attempts to explain how John Atkinson Grimshaw’s paintings of Elaine and the Lady of Shalott objectify the women’s corpses, and how this objectification served the conservative ideological discourse.

Studying the pictorial representations of the dead female body is an opportunity to highlight ‘the complex relationship between violence and beauty, and among producer, consumer, and “subject”’ (Dickson and Romanets 2013: 1) of these artworks. Indeed, Grimshaw’s paintings are part of a centuries-old Western tradition that associates the female body with beauty, and womanhood with death (Homans 2015: 178). As the living feminine body is othered in the arts, it continues to be so in death. Therefore, in this world of ‘high cultural production … dominated by men’ (Homans 2015: 178), representations of the dead feminine body allow ‘culture to repress and articulate its unconscious knowledge of death which it fails to foreclose even as it cannot express it directly’ (Bronfen 1992: xi). In this respect, the cultural output of the Victorian era is unique in its plentiful and deliberate representations of dead women, depicted through very specific ‘aesthetic norms’ (Carol and Renaudet 2013). The most prevalent feature of these artworks is that Elaine and the Lady, though clearly dead when they leave for Camelot, seem to be sleeping. These pleasing representations of corpses—like other narrative paintings—were thus used to procure ‘aesthetic pleasures’ (Dijkstra 1986: 53) and moral edification for both the producers and the consumers of these images (Dijkstra 1986: 53).

Despite their sedateness, these images are inherently violent in the association they make between female death and beauty. This typically Victorian violence was already announced in Thomas Hood’s 1844 poem ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, in which the poet describes the drowned corpse of a young woman in striking terms. When Hood writes that ‘All that remains of her / Now is pure womanly’, he suggests that womanhood can express itself ideally without the need for a woman to breathe. Adding that ‘Death has left on her/ Only the beautiful’, the poet further implies that death only refines the dead woman to a form of perfect femininity. The reduction of a living, breathing woman to an inert, dead body naturally leads me to the concept of objectification. A central feature of feminist theory, objectification refers to treating and considering a person, usually a woman, as an object (Papadaki 2019). Objectification is intrinsically violent because it negates women’s subjectivities and agencies and values them only for their beauty. Although Grimshaw himself never employs the term ‘sleeping beauty’, Elaine and the Lady can be read as such because his stylistic choices imbricate them into another popular Victorian ‘myth’ (Laurent 2015: 20), that of the ‘beautiful reclining female sleeper’ which haunted the Victorian imagination and bristled with erotic potential. Sexual objectification, which plays an important role here, consists of reducing a woman to an object of desire for (male) sexual gratification. Coupled with death, objectification then appears especially violent. Because a corpse is utterly vulnerable, it can be objectified to the fullest and consumed without any hint of resistance. The issue at stake here is to understand why the Victorians equated these violent representations of death with the beautiful.

The art historian first faces a challenge: understanding Grimshaw’s artistic vision without primary sources. The painter’s motives will be deduced through analysis of his biography, style, and influences. I will focus on his four paintings of Elaine and The Lady of Shalott to show how they adopt several Victorian tropes that encouraged female passivity and dependence on a man to survive. I will then look at how idealisations of the medieval period and modern narratives of the city as a sexually threatening space for women came together to deny these women their agency. The contemporary attempts to restrain women’s desires for emancipation are further echoed by the cautionary tales of female transgression and punishment encoded in these paintings. Finally, and contradictorily, these moralistic paintings sexually objectify the characters by misrepresenting them as sleeping beauties, an especially desirable stock character of the Victorian art repertoire. This paradox will ultimately lead me to question Grimshaw’s legacy in our contemporary culture.

Grimshaw: His Life, is Art Style, and his Historical Silence

Coming from an ‘extremely modest’ background (Robertson 1996: 11), Victorian painter John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893) was an autodidact who defied his parents to pursue an artistic career, and who achieved great success in his own lifetime. Grimshaw’s early works were heavily influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, but in his later years, he grew closer to the ‘Late Victorian Academy’ (Treuherz 1993: 159) and to Aestheticism. The artist left no correspondence or diaries for us to examine (Robertson 1996: 8), and academic readings of Grimshaw’s works, let alone of his representation of women, are few and far between. Without these crucial sources, we can only base our reading of his work on the direct pictorial analysis of his paintings and on his own influences, which have been largely analysed. Yet, Grimshaw’s prolific portrayal of women is arguably shaped by his own certainties on femininity. According to Alexander Robertson: ‘the place of women in Victorian society was never a direct concern of his, but as his pictures were of modern life, they often reflect the ambiguous position of contemporary women – placed on a pedestal as guardian of the home, and yet having no political and few legal rights’ (1996: 38). Similarly, Lady Jane Abdy considers that Grimshaw’s conventional upper-middle-class Victorian views can be deduced from his predilection for ‘a view of Victorian life which is respectable and comfortable’ (1970: 50).

Grimshaw’s signature style is a subtle variation on a theme. Changing his colour palette or his lighting effects, the artist was able to produce vast numbers of relatively similar works to sell to his bourgeois patrons from the industrial North of England. This serial production also reveals the painter’s ‘periodic obsessions’ (Robertson 1996: 90). If Grimshaw is most famous for his urban nocturnes, he also painted subjects drawn from life, and favoured genre subjects drawn from Antiquity, the Middle Ages or fiction. This demonstrates that Grimshaw was aware of the current trends in Victorian academic painting and that he followed these fashions assiduously. When he did paint figures, Grimshaw almost always depicted women according to the conventional artistic codes of the mid- to late-Victorian era, which were influenced by Victorian gender ideology, encouraging both domesticity and a pathological conception of womanhood. Victorian painters romanticised female illnesses too, and emaciation was presented as a criterion of female beauty and ‘virtue’ (Dijkstra 1986: 23). By idealising invalid women, these representations participated in a willing ‘marginalisation’ (Dijkstra 1986: 24) of middle-class women from public life, and in an othering of women in the collective psyche. Grimshaw’s bourgeois ideals shine through in scenes of domestic life, such as Dulce Domum (completed 1885), Summer (1875), or The Rector’s Garden, Queen of the Lilies (1877). These paintings drawn from life already feature a form of objectification of his female sitters, as the women are put on the same level—both ideologically and in terms of finish—as the ornate decor that surrounds them and signals their domesticity (Bromfield 1979: 20). The mood of the Tennysonian subjects was in keeping with Grimshaw’s other multiple mythological subjects—lost today—according to David Bromfield. These paintings respond[ed] directly to the dreams of the society which felt this loss” of the magical in the world (1979: 18). The sinister underlying sexual implications of the medievalist paintings were thus shared by Grimshaw’s other series featuring beautiful women. The goddesses paintings: Dame Autumn has a mournful face (1871), Spirit of the Night (1879) or Iris (1886), which were lauded for their appropriate nudity, already associated the female figure with ‘destruction and decay’ (Bromfield 1979: 18) and thus, with death, while beautiful reclining women pine away in Day Dreams, painted circa 1877 (Fig. 1) or in The Lotus Gatherers (1874). In these artworks, the women’s sexually alluring poses and their sleepiness are clearly erotic and mirror the composition of the Elaine and Lady paintings. Both series betray Grimshaw’s profound obsession with Tennyson’s Arthuriana^[3]. The Christie’s seller’s notice for the second version of The Lady of Shalott confirms that Grimshaw painted at least four versions of this subject during his career. Art critic Agnew exhibited a first version of The Lady of Shalott in Manchester in 1874. Grimshaw would then paint his two versions of Elaine in 1877, and he finally produced a larger version of The Lady of Shalott in 1878. Interestingly, Christine Poulson points out that Grimshaw was so enamoured with the Idylls that he produced his four paintings in the 1870s, which ‘saw a temporary falling off in Arthurian subjects at the Academy and elsewhere, probably in reaction to their enormous popularity in the 1860s’ (Poulson 1999: 68). But who exactly are Elaine and the nameless Lady?

 

Fig. 1: Day Dreams, oil on board, 37 x 67 cm (1877).

 

Upon closer inspection, Elaine and the Lady’s storylines are suspiciously similar. Despite their unclear genesis and their unstable identities, Ann F. Howey highlights three important features that dominate their representations: the two women are often ‘conflated’ (2020: 1), they remain ‘a cultural presence in the twenty-first century’ (2020: 1) and their shifting identities give way to ‘differing interpretations’ (2020: 1) of their sacrifice. The Lady of Shalott never actually encounters Sir Lancelot in the flesh. Victim of a strange curse, the young woman is locked up in a tower and sits at her loom all day. She is forbidden to directly look at the outside world and can only see it through an enchanted mirror. One day, she witnesses Lancelot in the mirror and falls passionately for him, prompting the curse to unleash itself. The Lady finds a boat but dies before she ever reaches Camelot, where the court finds her body. Elaine is more fleshed out in Tennyson’s poem. The daughter of one of King Arthur’s vassals, she nurses a wounded Lancelot and falls in love with him, but he does not reciprocate her love because of his adulterous relationship with Queen Guinevere. Heartbroken, Elaine wilfully dies of ‘lovesickness’ (Howey 2020: 63). As her last wishes, she demands that her corpse be waterborne to Camelot, guarded by a mute old servant, so that she may carry a posthumous letter to the Court.

Unsurprisingly, both maidens are described as beautiful: Elaine is ‘fair’ and ‘lovable’ according to Tennyson, and Lancelot, upon seeing the Lady of Shalott’s anonymous body, pronounces that her face is ‘lovely’, blissfully unaware of his own role in her downfall. Following Ann F. Howey’s reading, it seems that both women are not fully deprived of agency, but that the ‘apparent celebration’ of their passivity as dead bodies occurs after, and because of, an ‘active expression of [their] will and desire’ (2020: 3). Therefore, Elaine and the Lady appear as frustrated agents who still try to resist destiny, but who are both pitted against fateful forces which condemn them to death. Indeed, the Lady’s curse relegates her to an alienating form of domesticity. Secluded in her tower, sitting at her loom and ‘half-sick of shadows’, the poem suggests that she knows no one, that she has no one to talk to but herself, and as a corpse, she is condemned to stay forever mute. Yet she tries to safeguard herself from anonymity by engraving the words ‘Lady of Shalott’ on the prow of her boat. Like Elaine’s letter, only her written words reach Lancelot and the world of the living.

Howey notes that Elaine is not physically imprisoned like the Lady of Shalott, but that her voice is always mediated by the men around her. Elaine is like ‘a ghost without the power to speak’ and yet she believes that as a corpse: ‘[t]here surely I shall speak for mine own self, And none of you can speak for me so well’ (Tennyson 1859). Clearly expressing her last will, she dictates the posthumous letter to her brother, and Arthur reads it once her body reaches Camelot. These frustrated voices and agencies reveal that Elaine and the Lady are not truly at the centre of their own narratives, while Lancelot is. The ‘iconic feature’ (Howey 2020: 2) of their legend is effectively their unrequited love for Lancelot, their death from a broken heart, and the carrying of their remains to Camelot in a barge for the knight to find their body. Elaine especially offers him an opportunity to develop his own narrative arc, as her letter—a post-mortem claim that Lancelot should be hers—allows Lancelot to, in turn, address Guinevere and prove his fidelity (Howey 2020: 114). Furthermore, when Elaine is silenced by death and symbolically erased from the narrative by her literal burial in Tennyson’s original Idyll, the rest of the poem focuses on Lancelot’s feelings. Finally, neither woman has power over Lancelot, since he is not bound in any way by their sacrifice.

With this context in mind, I will now turn to Grimshaw’s adaptations of Tennyson. Artists who drew from The Idylls often had several favourite episodes they illustrated, and which distinctly fall into ‘four or five categories’ (Howey 2020: 152). Yet Grimshaw has returned over and over to the same moment, making it clear that this was the most significant episode of the legend to him. In doing so, he feeds on the cultural myth that ‘death is woman’s apotheosis’ (Bronfen 1992: 183). In all four paintings, the composition is similar: the foreground is occupied by the women reclining in their barges, while the background either features the banks of the river in the Lady of Shalott paintings or the spires of Camelot in the Elaine paintings (Figs 2 & 3). Grimshaw distinguishes himself from his contemporaries by depicting Elaine’s arrival at Camelot (Christie’s 1991), when she had usually been depicted in the wilderness like the Lady, but he still follows Tennyson’s portrayal of Elaine: ‘All but her face, and that clear-featured face / Was lovely, for she did not seem as dead, / But fast asleep, and lay as though she smiled’ (Tennyson 1859). Without Tennyson’s peritext, it is hard to know that these are dying or deceased women. Decay has not yet set in, and their beautiful appearance does not let in that they are corpses. They instead look asleep, with their closed eyes and serene features. Elaine and the Lady are both dressed in white, a first symbol of female virginity and purity, while Elaine holds a lily flower, another symbol of the Lily Maid of Astolat’s virginal purity. Although they occupy a central position in the paintings, the women’s features are uncharacteristic and vague. The genericity of their looks cannot be blamed on the scale of the paintings, as Grimshaw was a master of detail. I would instead contend that this is a conscious artistic choice, as his female portraits are often marked by indefinite features, averted eyes, or a weak personality. In both the Elaine paintings and in the second version of The Lady of Shalott, the women are surrounded by candles, which give the paintings a more funereal tone (Figs 2, 3 & 5). Some differences help distinguish the series. In the two Elaine paintings, the maiden’s corpse is accompanied by a fiendish servant, whose shadowy outline contrasts with the gleaming ivory of her skin, drawing the eye to her figure as the painting’s brightest element (Figs 2 and 3). The two Elaine paintings share similar cityscape backgrounds, whereas the Lady paintings differ more starkly in this regard. The first version offers the audience a bucolic scene (Fig. 4). The Lady lies with her eyes closed, her hand rests on her heart, and her upturned face is graced with a faint smile. The woman’s languid, almost ecstatic looks are more evocative of a dreamy encounter than of death, as she seems to experience a communion with the natural world surrounding her. This impression is strengthened by the soothing green shades employed by Grimshaw and by the lady’s pearly skin, which matches the serene waters and blends her into her surroundings. The common association in the Victorian arts of women with the natural world was once again loaded with gendered ideology. According to Sana Ayed Chebil, the analogy between women and Nature, especially flowers, served the cult of True Womanhood, as it ‘promoted the ideal image of Victorian womanhood as passive, submissive, and pious’ (Chebil 2021: 16). David Bromfield attests that Grimshaw had already used these associations in paintings like Iris, where ‘the natural principle is shown as female, unstable and metamorphic, a source of pathos. The pathos felt before nature has been extended to woman as the representative of natural principles’ (1979: 18-19).

The 1878 version of the Lady of Shalott is far less serene, however (Fig. 5). Grimshaw’s palette is dominated by vivid reds and oranges, while the sunset taints the whole natural world and turns the waters into a river of blood. The almost aggressive saturation of colours is a far cry from the three previous paintings’ subtle sepia and green tones, and they translate the young woman’s passionate suffering. Here, the atmosphere is much more ominous, hostile, and sinister. For Alexander Robertson Grimshaw’s literary paintings which ‘feature death, revenge, abandonment, disobedience and transformation’ (1988:59) always feature a main female protagonist whose loneliness in the picture reflects ‘the anomalous place of woman in contemporary society’ (1988: 59). This focus on alienated womanhood resonates with Victorian anxieties about ‘the insecurity before woman, made so much of by D. H. Lawrence and others as a consequence of industrial society’ (Bromfield 1979: 18). Like other Victorian renditions of the motif, Grimshaw’s paintings ‘both respond[ed] and contribute[d] to the popularity of these characters’ (Howey 2020: 129) in Victorian culture. This, in turn, explains how similar implicit moral messages could carry over from the literary sources into the artworks.

 

Fig. 2. John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893), Elaine, oil on canvas, 81.28 cm x 119.38 cm, 1877, private collection.

 

Fair Maidens and Noble Knights: The Gendered Violence of Victorian Medievalism

Larisa Grollemond and Bryan C. Keene point out that the pictorial and textual representations of Arthuriana are never neutral but were instead tailor-made to suit the tastes and ideologies of each period which fell in love with the legends^[4], with the consequence that: ‘Arthur stories always tell us much more about the social priorities, expectations, and values of the creators or historical moment in which they are made’ (2022: 5). Morality and didactic moralism were key elements in Tennyson’s approach, who wished to rework the medieval legends into a body of work that ‘would not offend contemporary moral values and, more, would actually contribute to their shoring up’ (Poulson 1999: 52), and morality was one of the main reasons Victorian male artists like Tennyson or the PRB idealised the Middle Ages. Their medieval vision was associated with a more solid Christian faith than that of their contemporaries. The chivalric organisation of medieval society also promoted an elite masculinity and clear-cut gender roles, which lauded ‘female purity’ (Chebil 2021: 12). This offered a stark contrast with ‘the chaos of the industrial world’ (Chebil 2021:12), which was ugly, materialistic and morally corrupt, and could be escaped, according to the PRB, by returning to ideals of naturalness and beauty (Chebil 2021:12).

For David Bromfield, ‘the incapacity and impotence of women was a major theme in Tennyson’ (1979: 19), and both the poet and the PRB were drawn to the subordinate status of medieval women, as ‘the heiresses of Eve and the lesser of the two sexes’ (Wilkinson 2019: 237). Glossing over the realities of elite women’s agencies during the actual Middle Ages, as possible chatelaines, or rulers in the stead of minors (Wilkinson 2019: 227), Tennyson and the PRB instead promoted an objectified modern womanhood which displayed the virtues of  ‘wifely obedience, self-sacrifice, and patience that also characterized medieval women’ (Chebil 2021: 14). David Bromfield deduces that Grimshaw’s fascination for Tennyson means the artist shared his views (1979: 18), and I believe that he also adopted Tennyson’s ‘conservatism’ (Poulson 1999: 202) as ‘he succumbed to the contemporary nostalgia for a mythical maedievalism’ (Abdy 1970: 34). Indeed, the two most popular portrayals of Elaine alive show her caring for Lancelot’s shield, and embroidering a case for it, while the Lady of Shalott spends her day weaving. Needlework and embroidery were the stereotypical feminine tasks used in many Pre-Raphaelite paintings to display how the domestic sphere was a woman’s proper place (Chebil 2021: 13), as these reimaginings of the Middle Ages valorised ‘the archetypal Victorian conception of the sexually pure woman … who was physically fragile, and in a permanent state of self-sacrifice’ (Chebil 2021:13). For Christine Poulson, it is highly significant that these nostalgic and conservative motifs became popular again between the 1880s to 1900s, as the behaviour of women in the real world challenged this patriarchal vision of womanhood through the ‘increasing debate about women’s rights, changes in the law and the suffragette movement which pushed women to occupy the public space (Poulson, 1999: xv). Poulson argues that, like several other Victorian revolutions, ‘debates centring on marriage, women’s rights, and sexual identity’ all ‘impinge[d] on the way the artists responded to the legend’ (1999: xii).

‘Narratives of Sexual Danger’: The Cityscape and the Fallen Woman

David Bromfield suggests that the Elaine and Lady of Shalott paintings ‘echo[ed] the experience of suburban loneliness and boredom that must have been common to many women at that time.’ (Bromfield 1979: 19). If Elaine and the Lady led very similar lives to those of Victorian middle-class domestic angels, I would argue that once dead, they are brought closer to another Victorian archetype: the fallen woman. Already in the 1870s, the Victorians were concerned with lonely women who did not fit into the social fabric. J. A. Grimshaw himself seemed especially preoccupied by this redundant womanhood, and, according to David Bromfield and Alexander Robertson, ‘the formula of setting a single figure in a solitary location is one which proved immensely successful for Grimshaw’ (1979: 32). These lonely figures appear in both urban and rural settings, and in pictures drawn from fiction as well as from life. The mysterious lady standing by the lake in Meditation (1879) is dressed in fashionable clothing, while the similar-looking artworks Evening Glow (ca. 1884), Autumn Scene, Leeds (1874) and Autumn sunshine, Stapleton Park, Pontefract (c.1880) which take place at dusk, and The Gossips, Bonchurch, Isle of Wight which is moonlit, feature domestic servants, their rank belied by their bonnets, aprons, and the baskets they sometimes carry. The lack of ‘individual importance’ of Grimshaw’s female figures (Abdy 1970: 28) in paintings like Evening Glow makes them unremarkable as they go through their assigned tasks. Unlike lower-class women, ‘respectable’ middle-class women were not supposed to be out on their own.

Grimshaw’s placement of lonely female figures in dusk or nighttime settings is effectively influenced by the Victorian symbolic gendering of space in separate spheres: the domestic sphere, where a respectable woman would be content to be, and the male public sphere, which could prove dangerous for women. Judith Walkowitz has extensively written on the association of the urban setting with female promiscuity and sexual vulnerability. In the Late Victorian Era, the campaigning for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts made sexuality a public matter, and the cityscape—theatre of ‘shifting sexual practices, sexual scandals, and political mobilizations’ (Walkowitz 1992: 5)—was constructed in the collective imagination as a ‘fitting imaginative landscape for sensational narratives of sexual danger’ (Walkowitz 1992: 10). Although Grimshaw’s two Elaine and Lady series predate the 1880s, Anna Clark pinpoints the 1850s as the historical moment when a mythical discourse of ‘rape as warning’ shifted the threat on women’s bodies outside the home and into the public space, and in the same movement, shifted the blame on women who would be imprudent enough to wander out alone. It was in fact ‘the notion that sexual violence [would occur that] made the streets unsafe for respectable women’ (Clark 1989, 117).

As early as the 1850s, several well-known paintings enshrined these associations between the hostile cityscape and the fallen woman and added a third trope: water^[5]. Valerie Meesen explains that death by drowning constituted yet another Victorian trope, wherein the drowned woman was deemed symbolically purified by water, in effect giving artists another opportunity to turn an otherwise abject, dead woman into ‘an object that could be idealized’ (2017: 35). Although not clearly enunciated, Victorian audiences who enjoyed moralistic narrative paintings would have picked up on this. If Elaine is accompanied by a male figure who acts as a sort of chaperone in Tennyson’s original poem, his monstrous appearance in Grinshaw’s painting counteracts his protective role. Indeed, the devilish oarsman, along with the dragon-headed prow on the left of the frame, conjures up the composition of Swiss artist Henry Fuseli’s 1781 oil painting The Nightmare. Fuseli’s painting is strongly erotic in the way it represents a sprawled, dreaming woman dominated by an incubus-like imp, while a ghoulish, horse-like creature voyeuristically peeps at the couple from behind a curtain on the left of the frame. It seems that once out in the world, women would always come to harm. This leads me to the ‘cautionary tale for women’ embedded in these narratives (Walkowitz 1992: 3), which warned them that ‘the city was a dangerous place when they transgressed the narrow boundary of home and hearth to enter public space’ (Walkowitz 1992: 3). These moralizing narratives also made women responsible for endangering themselves in public, for endangering men in public by encouraging them to take part in illicit sexual activity, and for blurring the boundaries between respectable women and prostitutes (Walkowitz 1992: 21). So strong were these Victorian prejudices, that a woman alone outside would quickly be suspected of being a prostitute, another incarnation of alienated femininity: ‘the lone streetwalker, a solitary figure in the urban landscape, outside home and hearth, [was] emblematic of urban alienation and the dehumanization of the cash nexus [for a Victorian audience]’ (Walkowitz 1999: 22).

‘The Problematic Relationship between Desire and Destruction’^[6]

Their generic closeness to fallen women is precisely what allows Grimshaw to sexually objectify his heroines^[7]. Victorian audiences would have considered Elaine and the Lady to be ‘romantic, tragic, somehow ideal representations of female passion, will, and fidelity’ (Howey 2020: 2). In Tennyson’s poem, Elaine willingly chooses death over Lancelot’s rejection, saying: ‘I have gone mad. I love you: let me die.’ In doing so, she explicitly becomes a ‘sacrificial heroine’ (Dijkstra 1986: 50). Yet, Elaine and the Lady fail at womanhood. First, their ‘physical deterioration’ (Kim 2004) from lovesickness serves to consolidate Victorian views on femininity, as these narratives of self-destruction hinge on the ‘insidious … male supposition’ that the ideal Victorian woman sought to dissolve her personhood into the man she loved (Gates 1988: 127). Coincidentally, Hae-In Kim underlines the centrality of ‘feminine weakness’ (2004) in these tales of consenting victimisation, as the young women symbolically bear the weight and responsibility of their love and destruction, since it is evident that Lancelot’s ignorance of their sacrifice expunges him of any responsibility or guilt. Their sacrifice is made even more necessary because they transgress Victorian moral codes by expressing physical desire for a man beyond their reach. Lancelot is outside of the Lady’s domestic sphere, while Elaine confuses Lancelot’s courtly politeness for love. In a sense, Elaine’s death saves her from herself by returning her to a state of passive femininity. Hence, these paintings fully integrate ‘patriarchal metanarratives that associate passivity and femininity’ (Howey 2020: 4). This corroborates Bronfen’s reading of Elaine / The Lady’s narrative as a ‘social sacrifice of the feminine body’, where the ‘death of the beautiful woman’ is required to preserve ‘existing cultural norms and values’ (Bronfen 1992: 181).

Moreover, in Victorian society, women existed through their relatives; they were destined for marriage and motherhood, and a woman on her own was not truly socially alive until married^[8]. Both Elaine and the Lady fail to secure male love and a durable union. That they would both forsake their comfortable, sheltered existence for unrequited love further links them with the fallen woman archetype, and the natural outcome for this marginalised and ‘anomalous’ femininity (Robertson 1996: 59) is death. Here, the paintings stray from the codes of the ‘good death’ (Jalland 1996: 17) dear to the Victorians by presenting their dead bodies in the hostile outside space where the remains of those who suffered bad deaths like suicides, paupers and the homeless were found in real life. Their marginality is also underlined by their vulnerable exposure within the landscape, as the water both carries and contains them, cutting them off from the world, and making them move—but not of their own accord. Thirdly, the skies and the liquid element blend into each other, and the desaturated sepia tones of the background in the two Elaine versions reinforce the impression of departed life. Grimshaw’s artistic choices thus produce a subtle feeling of alienation for the viewer.

A painting is usually structured by several axes. Sightlines, projected from the characters’ eyes, help orient the audience’s gaze toward the subject’s own object of sight, thereby understanding the storyline depicted by the narrative painting. But here, the women’s shut lids signify that their own gaze matters less than the way they themselves are looked upon as objects of desire: this is where the ‘painterly homage to feminine self-sacrifice’ slips into a ‘necrophiliac preoccupation with the erotic potential of a woman … in a state of virtually guaranteed passivity’ (Dijkstra 1986: 58).

 

Fig 3. John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893), Elaine, oil on canvas, 121.9 x 83.2 cm, 1877, private collection.

 

Indeed, the corpse is displayed here as an ‘object of sight’ (Bronfen 1992: 116). The oil painting is an intrinsically visual medium that articulates notions of spectatorship and voyeurism, and its study allows us to question the effects of the Victorian ‘male gaze’ (Bronfen 1992: 344) on both real and fictional women. To be an object of the gaze has been interpreted in gendered terms in feminist criticism, and cinema critic Laura Mulvey describes the power dynamic at work within these paintings in these words:

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female … In their traditionalist exhibitionist role, women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness (1989: 19).

In my corpus, the representations of female corpses effectively depend on a ‘collusion’ (Bronfen 1992:184) between the male painter’s point of view and the audience’s gaze, constructed as a default male. This solidarity in points of view is meant to ‘facilitate for the male viewer the voyeuristic process of objectification’ (Byecroft 2003). If living women’s appearances are ‘coded for strong visual and erotic impact’ (Mulvey 1989: 19), the erotic potential of dead feminine bodies is just as well-established in Western art. Indeed, ‘the ubiquity of the Eros-Thanatos pair in our erotic imagination runs through the history of artistic representations’ (Downing 2017: 135). The most evidently voyeuristic dimension of the Elaine and Lady’s portrayals is the way their bodies are ‘displayed’ (Mulvey 1989: 19) on the barges without being put in a coffin. Although this can be read as a refusal of their untimely death, the barge also conveniently showcases them to the court once they reach Camelot, and within Grimshaw’s paintings, it exposes them to the audience’s penetrating gaze. Poulson notes how ‘the [Lady’s] corpse is tilted towards the spectator, sometimes also with the adoption of a very close viewpoint, [increasing] the sense of the body being surrendered to the gaze, even to the possession, of the spectator’ (Poulson 1999: 194).

Unlike Grimshaw’s fairy paintings, these four artworks do not need to feature nudity to be erotic. Once these women have been ‘reduced to a corpse’ (Dijkstra 1986: 37), they conform to the social order. And yet their death cumulates sexual tensions, as their quiet agony can be cross-read as a state of sexual hyper receptivity to male advances. These dead women are, in fact, meant to embody the qualities that were expected of living Victorian women: passivity, silence, languidness, and submissiveness, to which we can quite literally add horizontality as an analogy for sexual availability, all without signalling their own sexual desire. Finally, because Elaine and the Lady must be visually pleasing, Grimshaw offers us an idealized vision of their death, so that their reified body can ‘become art’ (Howey 2020: 6). This is why the objectification of female corpses in Grimshaw’s genre paintings is primarily achieved through their ‘misrepresentation’ (Bronfen 1992: x) as sleeping beauties.

Sleeping Beauties: The erotic Potential of the ‘Sleep-death Equation’^[9]

Unsurprisingly, profound links exist between dying women and sleeping women in the Victorian arts, both in terms of symbolism and purpose, as sleeping women, too, were depicted for their erotic potential. This popular play on the ‘sleep-death’ equation (Dijkstra 1986:62) can be traced back to historical associations between death, sleep, and sex in the Western arts. On the one hand, death is often euphemised as ‘eternal sleep’; on the other, sleep, being a state of irrationality, of return to nature and of intimacy, is strongly associated with sexuality. Due to this cultural proximity, the same ‘iconographic representation’ came to be used by 19^th century painters to depict ‘beautiful wom[e]n safely dead’ and ‘women sleeping’ (Dijkstra 1986: 63). In Tennyson, Elaine is first mistaken for asleep when her bier reaches Camelot (Tennyson 1859), and in Grimshaw’s paintings, nothing clearly indicates that Elaine or the Lady are dead either. The dead women have supple limbs, and their fresh corpses show no lividities nor signs of putrefaction. They could be asleep, and only our knowledge of Tennyson’s poems tells us otherwise. Grimshaw, like many other nineteenth-century painters, wilfully muddies the waters, and it is hard to tell Elaine / the Lady apart from the beautiful ‘Sleeping Beauty’ (Lanigan 2021) in Edward Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose painting completed in 1874.

In normal conditions, a corpse undergoes five main steps of decomposition: ‘fresh corpse’^[10], autolysis, putrefaction, advanced decomposition and skeletonisation. While the Victorian high arts would readily feature female corpses, they did so through idealised representations that would not shock audiences. Indeed, when the previous centuries had sought to explore the body’s interiority, the Victorian era would instead ‘aestheticize female corpses to an excessive degree, negating putrefaction and shaping women’s dead bodies as one would mold wax dolls.’^[11] Since Victorian painters would not represent the other stages of the corpse’s life, representations of female corpses relied on a ‘process of abstraction’ (Théron 2013: 44). To avoid the radical unfamiliarity and abject horror of the decomposing corpse (Carol and Renaudet 2013: 20), death becomes signified through symbols. I consider that Elaine and the Lady of Shalott are systematically unaccomplished and unnatural corpses because this concealment of their physical deliquescence does more than negate their death, it also perfectly symbolises their truncated story lines and lack of agency, as the two women, frozen in ‘perpetual liminality’ (Howey 2020: 62), are protected from the sexual consequences of their own desires. Their virginity goes beyond physical virginity; it functions as a tabula rasa so that ‘the determining male gaze [may] project its fantasy onto the female figure’ (Mulvey 1989: 19), without the vexation of a counter-narrative they would construct themselves. In the words of Carl Plasa, these women must be ‘submissive and virginal, desired not desiring’ (1992: 259). As sleeping beauties, the Lady and Elaine can be silenced and suspended out of time.

In this context, their isolation within the composition can be read as a preservation of their innocence through a death-like sleep, a major trope in traditional fairy tales such as Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. Dying while they are still beautiful, these archetypes are protected from human ageing and from the decay of death, but they are also deprived of human experience, particularly sexual. Condemned to an ‘in-betweenness’ or ‘lifelessness that is not death’ (Adrien 2015: 22), these women display a form of ‘gendered vulnerability’ (D’Cruze 2004: 495) in their eternal state of sleep that conjugates endless virginity and endless sexual availability (Poulson 1996: 191). Indeed, although they themselves cannot choose when they may be awakened—both literally and sexually—the men who desire them may intervene at any time. Consequently, the space left for the male gaze recalls the ‘male rescuer archetype’ (Fernandez Rodriguez 2002: 51) of classic fairy-tale narratives, whose absolute desire may ‘violate’ (Papadaki 2019) the sleeping beauties without consequences since it is the only way to bring them back to life. This, in turn, reveals that the women’s deathbeds double as their marriage beds, as the virgin Elaine and Lady await Lancelot, and an awakening that can never come. If we consider the underlying implications of the ‘sleeping beauty’ narrative within Grimshaw’s paintings, we can go as far as saying that these women are socially wasted without ever truly becoming alive, as the Victorians believed a woman who died a virgin would glide from the sleep of innocence to the eternal sleep of death (Dijkstra 1986: 61). While their demise ‘contains the threat of [their] potential corruption through desire and sexual knowledge’ (Howey 2020: 5), the women can only be awakened and ‘be brought to [their] full potential — that is, animation — with the aid of a male’ (Lee 2004). Grimshaw’s representations of ‘sleeping beauties’ thus illustrate a gendered death, as these women sacrifice themselves for unrequited male love, wait for male validation even beyond death, and leave their corpses as tributes to these men. I argue that the female corpse constitutes an ultimate form of female objectification because the woman’s subjectivity has disappeared, and a corpse has no volition or movement of its own. This is precisely why it represents the ultimate erotic Victorian object in its inability to resist, reject, or act dissonantly according to its own desire and needs, making it the ‘ideal Victorian woman’ (Mulhall 2017: 2). According to Bram Dijkstra, the ‘sleep-death equation’ clearly offered the male with ‘at least the fantasy of conquest without battle, of a life of power without constraints. The less demanding his mate, then, the greater his conquest’ (Dijkstra 1986: 61), and it is striking to see that to the women, death seems enough sexual fulfilment. The attitude of the Lady in the 1874 version is quite remarkable in this respect, as Grimshaw aptly illustrates ‘the moment of rapture as akin to self-annihilation’ (Downing 2017: 134) of the lady’s death throes. Moreover, death desexualises the woman, because she loses both her own agentive freedom and her sexual pleasure, and becomes an object entirely devoted to the fulfilment of the other’s desire. This need to make women ‘safely dead’ (Dijkstra 1986:63) stemmed from a fear of active female sexuality, and this theoretically non-violent death, akin to a ‘gradual and unprotesting “deanimation”’ (Bronfen 1992: 170), would offer Victorian men the opportunity to fulfil an erotic fantasy without running the risk of it resulting in a real sexual confrontation with a woman (Dijkstra 1986: 68). Ultimately, the objectification of the woman’s corpse serves to dominate the woman, as this motif implies the man will survive her death. Indeed, Barbara Gates tells us that ‘when the female atomises into the male, there is simply no longer any “other” to contend with’ (1988: 127). Behind these objectifying paintings, we may discern a male desire for absolute power over death, cast as a beautiful woman.

 

Fig. 4. John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893), The Lady of Shalott, oil on canvas,
61x 91.4 cm, 1875.

 

Although the paintings are named after Elaine and the Lady of Shalott and do not feature Lancelot, it is now evident that these dead women serve a purpose beyond themselves. Grimshaw is not looking to represent the realistic death of a woman, centred on her experience and feelings, and the lack of personality of these female characters underlines how they function as a nineteenth century ‘stock character’ (Meessen 2017: 61). Elaine’s subjectivity is effectively absent from Grimshaw’s paintings, as in Tennyson, she is displayed ‘as though she smiled’, signifying her peaceful passing, her retreat into fantasy. Yet the poet’s wording underscores that, once again, Elaine’s looks and feelings are interpreted by an outsider, and that we may never access her internal monologue, as her voice is lost in death. Their image is instead used as an ‘allegorical vehicle’ (Bronfen 1992: 10) so that the artist may communicate his intent to the audience. In this perspective, Bronfen’s choice of title for Over Her Dead Body is arresting. The female corpse is used as a medium upon which to project one’s own message, which occults the woman’s identity and intent. This is seen as a cultural fatality since ‘[w]oman as culture’s other must bear the burden of embodying death so that men, repressing their knowledge of death, can go on creating’ (Homans 1998: 178). In this context, several men take over Elaine and the Lady. On the narrative level, though it is involuntary on the part of Lancelot, he effectively consumes them. But on the meta pictorial level, there is also a second man in the person of Grimshaw, the painter, whose creativity feeds off the beauty of the dead women; this attitude is another ‘Victorian topos’, as male grief is transubstantiated into ‘new heights of accomplishment’ (Homans 2015: 177). The Victorian audience constitutes a final masculine figure, as Grimshaw’s own ‘male gaze’(Bronfen 1992: 344) produced works that would please other bourgeois Victorian male buyers.

Bronfen goes even further when she theorises that these paintings of female corpses function as self-portraits of the painters at least as much as representations of female corpses. In the shape of a deceased woman, the painter recognises the potentiality of his own demise. The dying woman is a ‘mediatrix’ (Bronfen 1992: 49), but her own reaction in the face of her death, her lived experience, is quite literally out of the picture. What is sacrificed in the aesthetic gesture is the woman’s subjectivity. In her objectification, the woman pictured reaches her apotheosis by serving to testify to the virtuosity of the male artist, and her body becomes nothing more than an object among other objects within the composition.

 

Fig. 5. John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893), The Lady of Shalott, oil on canvas, 82.5 x 122cm, 1878, private collection.

 

Grimshaw’s Contemporary Legacy

As the Victorians fell out of favour in the first half of the twentieth century, Grimshaw was overlooked for several decades until his work garnered new interest from the 1960s onwards. Lady Jane Abdy organised two exhibitions of Grimshaw’s work^[12] in 1964 at the Ferrers Gallery and with Christopher Wood at the Alexander Gallery in 1976. These were followed by a travelling exhibition, organised by David Bromfield and Alexander Robertson, which toured England between 1979 and 1980. More recently, in 2011, a retrospective exhibition titled ‘Atkinson Grimshaw – Painter of Moonlight’ was organised in Harrogate and London, but his nocturnes were the sole focus, and his contributions to the myth of Elaine and the Lady of Shalott are still unproblematized. Additionally, modern portrayals or reproductions of Grimshaw’s works, which are disseminated all over the Internet, seem to completely overlook that the Lady and Elaine are corpses. Because we are not familiar with Tennyson’s works as the Victorians were, we have lost their valuable context to understand the full meaning of these paintings. Instead of seeing dead women, we see something much less sinister, sleeping beauties sailing in the moonlight. Hence, the women’s corpses are not only objectified, but they are also made doubly invisible. First, because the conventions used to depict dead and sleeping women blur the lines between these two vulnerable states. Secondly, because these 19th-century artworks still make up an important part of our cultural repertoire today, we are ‘culturally blinded’ (Bronfen 1992: 3) to the omnipresence of these dead women, and we do not question what we see. Despite this desensitisation, it is impossible to ignore that the ubiquity of female corpses in nineteenth-century art is indissociable from a culture of ‘virulent misogyny’ (Dijkstra 1986: viii). Ultimately, we can consider that the toxicity of these representations is not completely neutralised. According to Dijkstra, these images had a ‘fundamental influence on the development of our preconceptions regarding the nature of women’ in the twentieth century, and they produced a thriving legacy, from the world of the cinema to advertising (1986: ix).

Conclusion

If Jacques Lynn Foltyn has put forward that the twenty-first century is ‘the corpse’s cultural moment’ (Foltyn 2008: 165), the seeds of this cultural moment were sown in the Victorian era, a period remarkable for its prolific representation of highly aestheticised dead feminine bodies, and for its significant codification of the meaning behind these dead women’s images. Due to the lacunary sources, uncovering the meaning behind Grimshaw’s portrayal of female corpses can only be an imperfect exercise, but after analysing his Elaine and The Lady of Shalott paintings, it is still possible to conclude that Grimshaw fully conformed to Victorian artistic tropes about beautiful dead women. These tropes worked hand in glove with the conservative moral messages embedded in Victorian medievalism and the imaginative depictions of the sexually threatening cityscape to objectify Elaine and the Lady of Shalott. Their objectification is actually essential in making these truly gendered deaths. Glorifying a Victorian mythos of sacrificial womanhood, Elaine and the Lady’s bodies are meant to be turned into objects of unconstrained male desire and into media for the male painter’s message. Grimshaw’s four paintings thus feed into a cultural matrix that sought to construct a new ideal, ‘the ultimate object of femininity — a beautiful unmoving thing’ (Lee 2004) under the guise of a woman’s corpse. This objectification, in turn, leaves no space for the expression of the subjectivity or the personhood of the departed woman.

Though the patriarchal structures which conditioned the production and spectatorship of such popular paintings need to be acknowledged, feminist reimaginings offer new forms of resistance. In her study of Victorian erotic photography, Rachel Teukolsky argues that these ‘conservative visual tropes of erotic femininity surprisingly opened onto new sites of female cultural power’ (Teukolsky 2020: 3). Grimshaw’s paintings were undeniably constructed through a Late Victorian artist’s male gaze, informed by conservative views on gender. But despite the destructive link they create between a woman’s demise and her erotic potential, these paintings are also dependent on their audience to be meaningful.      Today, our own reinterpretations of Arthuriana offer an opportunity to read Elaine and the Lady differently, especially since they both remain a strong ‘cultural presence in the twenty-first century’ (Howey 2020: 1). Their current display allows female or non-binary audiences to apply new meaning to these figures. This is coeval with a broader movement of ‘feminist revisions’ (Fernandez Rodriguez 2002: 52) that seeks to re-examine and offer alternatives to heteronormative sleeping beauty storylines, as modern portrayals of these tragic heroines significantly attempt to avoid the objectifying male gaze, and instead seek out Elaine and the Lady’s subjectivities, offering new reinterpretations of their lives and ‘afterlives’ (Howey 2020: 1).

Notes

[1] Alfred Lord Tennyson (1842), ‘The Lady of Shalott’ in Poems, London: Edward Moxon.

[2]      The name Lady of Shalott originates from a 13th-century Italian prose poem titled La Damigella di Scalot, or Donna di Scalotta.

[3] Grimshaw was indeed obsessed with Arthuriana to the point that he named five of his fifteen children after characters from the Idylls of the King (Robertson 1996: 59), and—quite incongruously—christened his twins born in 1877 Elaine and Lancelot.

[4] Indeed, Tennyson’s Idylls are not historical poems. As Grollemond and Keene explain: ‘these [are] works of fantasy, sometimes referred to as medievalisms, [which] blend historical source material to create worlds with legendary or magical elements in their characters, creatures, costumes, and cultures’ (2022: 2).

[5] A large number of Victorian artists chose to represent suicide by drowning as the natural fate of fallen women, often inspired by Thomas Hood’s 1844 poem The Bridge of Sighs. Notable examples include George Frederic Watts’ painting Found Drowned (c. 1850), the third picture in Augustus Egg’s Past and Present triptych (1858), or Abraham Solomon’s painting Drowned! Drowned! (1868).

[6] Lisa Downing (2017), ‘Eros and Thanatos’ in Joanna Ebenstein (ed.), Death: A Graveside Companion, London: Thames and Hudson, 135.

[7] The Lady fits closer to the fallen woman archetype because she exists entirely outside of social relationships, and thus escapes masculine control, making her more sexually dangerous than Elaine. The Lady symbolically experiences a loss of virginity through the breaking of the web, and once she ventures out of her sphere, her storyline mirrors the morality tales of transgression punished by death that usually frame representations of Victorian fallen women.

[8] This idea is powerfully embedded in Ariadne at Naxos (1877). Abandoned by Theseus, Ariadne stands alone on the shore of a ‘barren island’ before she is saved by ‘the arrival of Bacchus who took her as his wife’ (Bromfield 1979: 40).

[9] Bram Dijkstra (1986), Idols of Perversity Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 62.

[10] ‘Cadavre frais.’ Our translation. Thanatofrance (2019), ‘Décomposition d’un corps – Etapes de la décomposition d’un corps – Médecine légale’, Thanatofrance Écoles et préparation au diplôme de thanatopracteur, 17 février 2019, https://thanatofrance.wordpress.com/2017/02/19/decomposition-dun-corps-etapes-de-la-decomposition-dun-corps-medecinelegale/ (last accessed 20 April 2023).

[11] ‘À l’époque victorienne, les arts esthétisent à l’excès les cadavres féminins, niant la putréfaction et façonnant les corps morts de ces dames comme l’on moulerait des poupées de cire.’ Our translation. Laurence Talairach-Vielmas (2013), ‘Le rôle du corps mort chez Wilkie Collins’ in Anne Carol and Isabelle Renaudet (eds), La Mort à l’œuvre. Usages et statut du cadavre dans l’art, Aix-en-Provence : Presses Universitaires de Provence, 219.

[12] Abdy, Jane (1970), Atkinson Grimshaw, 1836-1893, London: The Stellar Press, Ltd, Hatfield for Ferrers Gallery Ltd. This catalogue accompanied the 1970 exhibition organised by collector Lady Jane Abdy at the Ferrers Gallery.