Queering Aqua and Flora in John Everett Millais & John William Waterhouse

by: Margaryta Golovchenko , March 26, 2026

John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1851-2, Fig. 1) and John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott (1888, Fig. 2) are among the most well-known works from the Pre-Raphaelite movement. At the centre of both these paintings are archetypal ‘fallen’ women—or as J.B. Bullen alternatively calls them, ‘sexualised women’, arguing that the latter term is more versatile, ‘able to incorporate both the negative concept of ‘fallenness’ and a positive condition of sexual attractiveness which is much more vital and positive’ (1998: 49-50)—and existing art historical scholarship have predominantly engaged with this trope. In her study of this typology, with a focus on Pre-Raphaelite works, art historian Linda Nochlin defines ‘falling’ as a sexual activity that only women are considered capable of because men do not fall. Specifying that need and greed were considered the primary causes for ‘fallen women’ in the 19^th century, Nochlin notes that the primary way these women could redeem themselves was ‘through repentance and subsequent reintegration into the family’ (1978: 141). Yet, to focus only on the female subjects in Millais and Waterhouse’s paintings, however, is to overlook an equally important aspect in both works: the landscape itself or, more broadly, nature.

Whenever the relationship between women and nature has been discussed in such works, the discussion has more often remained superficial, as evidenced in Nic Peeters’ review of the 2009 exhibition Enchanted by Women: John William Waterhouse (1849-1917). Peeters’ observation that Waterhouse was attracted to water, given its prominent presence in his oeuvre, focuses on the skill with which he depicts the element and on how carefully he populates such scenes with specific types of vegetation to make them look more naturalistic. Peeters’ recognition that water is a source of both life and death is overpowered by his more lighthearted remark preceding it: ‘[p]robably to a certain degree inspired by his name [Waterhouse] represented streams, rivers, lakes and oceans so many times that I got the feeling water was actually flowing through the halls of the Groninger Museum’ (2009: 89).

In the case of Millais’ Ophelia and Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shallot, water is not merely a curiosity. Both women die ‘in nature’, physically ‘going into nature’ in a way that can be read as a rejection of male-dominated ‘culture’. I put ‘in nature’ and ‘go into nature’ in quotations as a way of acknowledging the trope of escaping into nature that scholars within the environmental humanities have critiqued. A notable example is William Cronon’s problematisation of wilderness as a form of untouched nature that one can lose themselves in with the intention of getting away from urban life while also ‘finding themselves’, ‘the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilisation that has lost its soul’ and ‘the ultimate landscape of authenticity’ (1996: 16). Cronon also notes that the wilderness is a bastion reserved for men because of the connotation of ruggedness and vitality that the wilderness carries, making it a place for men to go and be renewed (1996:14).

Similarly, what appears to be an unkept and unruly nature that has either consumed (in the case of Millais) or is about to consume (in the case of Waterhouse) the female body should be treated as more than simply an uncontrollable force reasserting its power. In this paper, I aim to unsettle anthropocentric readings of Millais and Waterhouse’s paintings. I do not intend to foreground an analysis of the women and retroactively bring in the surrounding environment to reinforce or complicate the physical and emotional happenings of the human body. Rather, I focus on nature within Millais and Waterhouse’s paintings, treating it with the same care that is often afforded to ‘pure’ landscapes—scenes of nature that contain little evidence of human life—in recognising that the environments that surround Ophelia and the Lady of Shalott are more than simply the backdrops of their final moments. Looking at Ophelia and The Lady of Shalott, it is necessary to remember that nature is pivotal to the deaths of both women.

Not only are the two women situated between land and water, life and death, but they are also removed from nature by their impending deaths, which breaks from the trope that aligned women with nature. In Millais and Waterhouse’s paintings, I argue, nature can be considered an agential entity, as understood within the frameworks of queer ecology and new materialism because it is water that claims both women, whether directly or by facilitating their journey towards death, both Millais and Waterhouse can be said to situate water as a force that mediates life, rather than simply giving or taking it, to return to the binaristic narrative à la Peeters. Water embodies lifecycles, from the macrocosmic seasons to the microcosmic lives of individual organisms, each living out its life on varying levels. These cycles do not stop at the death of either woman, suggesting that human death writ large is not significant enough to interfere with or bring these cycles to a halt.

In anticipation of the charge that such an approach is too contemporary for paintings executed in a different century, with different ideologies and levels of scientific knowledge and philosophical discourses, I situate my approach within the field of reception theory, according to which texts have an afterlife that extends beyond the initial meanings instilled into them by their creators.[1] Even if we were to maintain the nineteenth century extractivist and patriarchal reading of nature as feminine, we would still be left with a paradox that makes the kind of posthuman inquiry I engage with below difficult to overlook: if water consumes the female bodies in their death but also acts as a source of life in a maternal way, do these images not function as depictions of rebirth, of two women’s escape from the clutches of patriarchal capitalist society? Is the breaking down of the physical boundaries of the human body truly an end, where no other alternative is possible? I treat Ophelia and The Lady of Shalott as two visual texts that continue to be part of a world that is constantly changing and now finds itself plagued with fears about the climate crisis and calls to engage in posthumanist reimaginings of human and more-than-human relations. In recognising that art’s meaning and significance change with time, I take up the call of thinkers like Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing to move away from an anthropocentric lens and engage in ‘speculative fabulations’ that seek ways of seeing historical art as stories, if not warnings, that can be looked to when charting pathways into a different future.[2] I break my analysis of nature in these two paintings into discussions of water and vegetation, recognising that the water-land divide in both canvases functions as a crucial boundary between several modes of being, including life and death, as well as innocence and knowledge, control and release.

Empirical and Affective Nature

Ophelia and The Lady of Shalott were produced at a time of changing perceptions about nature and women, a growing awareness of how multifaceted both entities are. The nineteenth century witnessed new, critical ways of thinking about the environment. Wendy Parkins and Peter Adkins have argued for the existence of Victorian ecology, pointing to the works of Ernst Haeckel and Charles Darwin as sites that advanced understanding of the connectivity among humans, non-human life (flora and fauna), and the environment (2018). The field of ecofeminism has sought to highlight the historical connection between women and nature and, in so doing, to critique the gendering of Nature, itself a construct, as female. According to Greta Gaard, ‘[a]n early impetus for the ecofeminist movement was the realisation that the liberation of women […] cannot be fully effected without the liberation of nature; and conversely, the liberation of nature so ardently desired by environmentalists will not be fully effected without the liberation of women’ (1997: 114-115). The gendering of nature as a feminine space and as a feminine, quasi-anthropomorphised entity is detailed in Carolyn Merchant’s seminal book The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. Merchant examines how conceptions of nature evolved from ancient times, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, to the framing of nature as an organism that persisted until the sixteenth century. The movement away from this model was partly due to recognition of nature’s capacity for violence and destruction. This, in turn, complicated the longstanding image of nature as a nurturing mother, the former gradually disappearing with the rise of the Scientific Revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Merchant 1990 [1980]: 2). The result was the growing desire to control nature in addition to the establishment of nature as a space where categories of exclusion could be relegated. This applied both to non-human forms of life and to human groups that were Othered on the basis of sexual, racial, and ethnic differences. Further, the binary of nature/culture served as the foundation for consolidating other binaristic categories as belonging either to the masculine and ‘rational’ world of culture or the ‘passive’ and feminine world of nature (Plumwood 1993: 22-25). If nature, and all those who were considered to ‘belong’ there, could not be controlled, then it became a dangerous place and posed a threat to white heteronormative masculinity. Both Millais and Waterhouse were likely familiar with discussions of nature and women’s roles in society, given that the discourse had been ongoing for at least a century.

In fact, the Pre-Raphaelites did engage with nature in their own time. The artists’ motto of maintaining ‘truth to nature’ was directly informed by the development of the sciences in the nineteenth century. Merill Lynn makes a case that the Pre-Raphaelites’ scientific mindedness was more aligned with ‘the discourse of natural history’—the study of flora and fauna by venturing outside, sometimes with a notebook, sketchbook, or even tools for gathering specimens—as opposed to the hard sciences like biology (1989: 165). Yet to suggest that there is a direct correlation between specific artists or artworks and particular fields of science would be a faulty approach, according to John Holmes, who asserts that ‘[f]or the Pre-Raphaelites, ‘science’ meant first of all an ethic of strict honesty in observation’ (2018: 20). Holmes echoes the sentiments laid out almost two decades earlier by Elizabeth Prettejohn, one of the pre-eminent scholars on the Pre-Raphaelites. Prettejohn writes that ‘[t]he unit of ‘truth’ in Pre-Raphaelite painting is the detail, the smallest element that can be given its own distinctive entity’ (2000: 171). For this reason, Prettejohn considers Pre-Raphaelite paintings to have much in common with botanical illustrations. By comparison, Christopher Newall notes that while Pre-Raphaelite artists took up the call for close analysis and empirical fact-based depictions by beginning their works with observations of the chosen subject matter, they were less interested in thinking about nature as the product of monumental forces like glaciers or erosion by water, which was the concern of the emerging field now known as geology (2004: 133-134). Close analysis as a way of shifting the balance of what is considered important in a work of art was coupled with what Alison Smith described as the disruption of the hierarchy of vision, which the Pre-Raphaelites enacted by creating the background first, in great detail, before adding figure to it and thus ensuring that the surroundings were never relegated to the status of mere background (2004: 14-15). For the Pre-Raphaelites, depicting nature required studying it, knowing it through close examination, and therefore one’s presence in nature.

Both Tim Barringer and Holmes note that Millais went to the riverbank in Ewell, Surrey, to capture the flora seen in Ophelia (2012: 63-65 and 2018: 24). Yet such anecdotal information appears unavailable for Waterhouse. Both Prettejohn and Robert Upstone note that Millais’ Ophelia would have served as a source of inspiration for Waterhouse, pointing to the reeds in the bottom-left corner of the painting as the most prominent piece of evidence (2000: 228-229 and 2008: 38-41). Additionally, Upstone observes that some details in Waterhouse’s painting, namely the candles on the prow of the Lady’s boat, are not mentioned in the poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which it is based on. Upstone suggests that an engraving based on a design by Dante Gabriel Rossetti for the Moxon edition of Tennyson’s poems may have served as the inspiration for Waterhouse’s painting and led him to embellish the scene with additional details (2008: 45). Interestingly, despite the prominence of the river in both paintings, neither Millais nor Waterhouse depicts an easily recognisable landscape.

To the trained eye, whether it belongs to a scientist or an enthusiast, the vegetation in Millais and Waterhouse’s paintings will likely be recognisable, informed, in part, by the literary texts the paintings draw from. Ophelia’s death is unseen in Hamlet. Instead, the setting of her death is described by Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother and Queen of Denmark, who speaks of ‘a willow grow[ing] askant the brook/ That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream’ and of the ‘fantastic garlands’ Ophelia made ‘of crow-flowers [buttercups], nettles, daisies, and long purples [wild orchids known as dead men’s fingers]/ That liberal shepherds give a grosser name’ (Shakespeare 4.7 165-168). Noting Millais’ commitment to staying true to Shakespeare’s play, Barringer observes that the painter added flowers that Victorian viewers would have recognised for their significance based on the ‘language of flowers’, a way of communicating one’s emotions and intentions through the gifting of flowers that soared in popularity in the nineteenth century. Barringer specifically points to the fritillary in the bottom right corner of the painting, a flower signifying sorrow, to the poppy symbolising death, and to the forget-me-nots representing remembrance in Ophelia’s arm and floating just below her neck (2012: 64). Jumping into the ‘weeping brook’, Ophelia lies with ‘[h]er clothes spread wide, and mermaid-like awhile they bore her up,/ which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,/ As one incapable of her own distress,/ Or like a creature native and indued/ Unto that element’ (Shakespeare 4.7 174-179). Gertrude’s monologue gives the impression that Ophelia is a being that never truly belonged to this world; her descriptions evoke connotations of nymphs and other fae-adjacent creatures who inhabit the woods. By comparison, Tennyson’s description of Shalott, a town upriver from Camelot, is foregrounded in Waterhouse’s painting. The Lady of Shalott captures the river as having, on either side, ‘[l]ong fields of barley and of rye,/ That clothe the wold and meet the sky’, while in the river itself grow ‘[t]he yellow-leaved waterlily’ and ‘[t]he green-shathed daffodil’ (Tennyson 1832). The clustering of green near the boat’s stern in Waterhouse’s painting is likely to be water lilies, but they are so small and close together that it is difficult to say with certainty. Curiously, the most distinct part of the plant—its beautiful flower—is absent. There are no signs of daffodils. The vegetation in the two paintings, in conjunction with the bodies of water, plays the most important role of non-human entities.

Queer Wetlands

Queering nature, as understood within queer ecology, encapsulates a desire to challenge the dominant understanding of human relationships with nature.[3] Because queer ecology lacks a single mandate and approach, I want to specify that I am drawing specifically on the articulations of Catriona Sandilands and Bruce Erickson. In the introduction to Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, Sandilands and Erickson note how the discourse of nature informs the discourse of sexuality because the former is often used to construct the arbitrary notion of what constitutes an ‘unnatural’ form of sexuality and how such forms can be ‘naturalised’ through nature (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010: 2-3). For Sandilands and Erickson, queer ecology is a way to interrogate human-nature relationships and the various socio-political, economic, scientific, and institutional frameworks that shape them. Elsewhere, Sandilands addresses queering as both a theoretical and an ethical process. She suggests that to “queer” nature constitutes an intervention into how we think about and discuss it in a cultural context. The first step in doing so is by challenging the central role afforded to heteronormativity, since queerness is not just about self-identity but also about systems of power and understanding that are privileged and treated as the ‘default’ (2008: 458-459).

I take as a model Jeremy Chow’s queer intervention into eighteenth-century British literature, where he reads scenes of ‘aqueous violence’ as a form of resistance. When detailing his methodological approach, Chow specifies that ‘the queer ecologies that motivate my work here are not strictly identitarian. In other words, water doesn’t out, it’s not born this way, and it doesn’t maintain an inherent queerness’ (2023: 8). The false notion of animate and inanimate non-human life having inherent gender and agency is a common accusation—and general misreading—directed towards new materialism, an interdisciplinary field interested in matter’s role in human life and its ability to disrupt established anthropocentric power relations.[4] For Chow, queerness is a way of challenging stability and unsettling singularity more than it is about condensing networks of disruptive forms of relationality down to a single, fixed body with definitive boundaries, something that water resists from the outset. Neither Ophelia nor the Lady of Shallot is depicted in the open waters of the ocean, as land remains visually and ideologically close. Yet, the visualisation of land and water in the two paintings signals a refusal of stability dictated by societal expectations for both women. Reeds, which are present in both paintings, capture this hybridity while also, I argue, carrying the disruptive potential of queer ecology.

Reeds are a common plant in wetlands, an in-between space that accentuates the transitional theme in both paintings as the two women move physically from land to water, from life into death. In his study of the cultural constructions of wetlands, Rod Giblet notes that wetlands were looked down on and feared, considered the home of the Other in both racial and reptilian ways (1996: 3-4). Wetlands were also gendered female, imagined as a femme fatale who lured men to their death (Giblet 1996: 130-131). Perhaps most importantly, Giblet adds that the only way a wetland could become picturesque is if it became ecologically valuable, and vice versa: its usefulness is the only way a wetland could ever be seen as aesthetically pleasing (1996: 9-12). The wetland’s ontological flexibility, its connotation adjusted to match the narrative based on the teller, is reflective of what Jill Casid describes as:

movement between noun and verb [that] has vital consequences for how we understand landscape, its action and process, for feminist thought and practice: from landscape as a settled place or fixed point we instead encounter landscape in the performative, landscaping the relations of ground to figure, the potential of bodies, and the interrelations of humans, animals, plants, and what we call the ‘environment’. (2011: 98)

Casid speaks of the process of meaning-making that is constantly underway and how the landscape, as a noun, entails solidifying a very particular aspect of nature, imposing a meaning onto it that, historically, has benefited a masculine and heterosexual orientation. The fact that it is difficult to label the setting of Millais and Waterhouse’s paintings as wetlands because they do not correspond to several of the connotations associated with the term—the openness and relatively bright colour scheme, the absence of any kind of mist or other substance in the air that might invoke the image of miasma—results in a more unstable kind of nature-as-landscape than might be initially expected just from looking at the paintings.

Moreover, wetlands, one of the most hospitable environments for reeds, have long been thought of as spaces where danger and the unknown lurk. Because the common reed, Phragmites australis, is considered a weed, we can think of it as another layer of the unruliness of this hybrid space that seemed to have historically escaped full human control. Although writing about weeds in the context of eighteenth-century British gardens, Joe Crowdy’s classification of weeds and other undergrowth as “the armpits and pubic hair of the garden, the parts that get plucked out, shaved off, or covered up” (2017: 423-424) remains pertinent given that wetlands were framed as a space for dangerous sexual encounter. This deviancy results from the combination of the possibility that sexually deviant (i.e., non-heteronormative) activity can occur in public but away from the direct gaze of prying eyes, as well as the fact that weeds connote being unwanted and wild, with the possibility of becoming violent and reproducing at a rapid pace (Crowdy 2017: 425). If their location at the boundary between land and water signals a shift across socially (in)acceptable categories of gender, then the bent reeds in Ophelia and The Lady of Shalott take on a new meaning, namely, a patriarchal conception of female chastity and propriety. By moving past the reeds, the space of sexual deviancy, and entering the water, one might read Ophelia and the Lady of Shalott’s actions as a form of ‘playing by the rules’. Ophelia’s extreme emotional state towards the end of the play and the suggestion that the Lady of Shalott lost her chastity exemplify undesirable behaviour that is accentuated as they pass through the reeds into the water and inflict a punishment upon themselves that, while reprehensible from the perspective of Christian doctrine, is ironically counterbalanced by their recognition of committing a supposed wrong. The deviancy, then, lies not in a specific gender identity but in sexual behaviours that are considered out of line.

Waters of Life, Waters of Death
Millais and Waterhouse’s depictions of death, then, are key to both paintings, in part because Ophelia’s death is hidden from the viewer in the textual representation. Visual representations literally bring the unseen into the foreground while also allowing the artist the freedom to choose which specific moment within the timeline of Ophelia’s final moments to single out and permanently freeze on the canvas. Given the pallor of her skin, art historians like Holmes argue that Ophelia is dead. Millais deliberately sought this effect by painting the model, fellow Pre-Raphaelite artist Elizabeth Siddal, when she was submerged in a cold bath for hours on end, which resulted in her getting sick, all to ensure that Ophelia’s facial expression reflects the circumstances in the scene (2018: 26). The Lady of Shalott, on the other hand, is moving towards her impending death. Both women seek water in their last moments, and while the Lady of Shalott needs it because she must travel to Camelot by boat, there is no definitive reason why Ophelia is drawn to the water. Given the fact that death occurs in nature, more specifically in water, one might be inclined to suggest that nature is a space of death.

From the perspective of queer ecology, such an equation returns us to the problematic framing of nature as a space of wildness where the laws of human society cannot reach, as Cronon argues, functioning as the untamed frontier critiqued by Plumwood. Gaston Bachelard discusses the pervasiveness of the journey narrative in association with water, particularly rivers. He uses the term ‘Ophelia complex’ to refer to the way water is the ideal element for suicide because it facilitates the desire for imagining and romanticising death. The implication, of course, is that such a death is gendered female, like the element of water in which it takes place. Bachelard justifies this by saying: ‘Water is the element of young and beautiful death, of flowery death … the element of death with neither pride nor vengeance—of masochistic suicide. Water is the profound organic symbol of a woman who can only weep about her pain and whose eyes are easily ‘drowned in tears’ (1983: 82). To see water this way, however, is to imply that the only outlet for young women who ‘disobey’ and go against the patriarchal system is to remove themselves from it permanently. In a sense, such an approach to death can be considered another form of repentance that Nochlin does not mention, as drowning comes to signify a woman’s removal from masculine society (culture and land).

Rather than limiting the readings of both paintings to a ‘return to nature’ narrative, where nature is a fixed entity and a destination to be reached, I propose seeing the movement towards water as merely the next stage of a longer cycle that does not end at death. Doing so embraces the instability Chow advocates, as it disrupts the linear, anthropocentric idea of time rooted in narratives in which water acts as a life-altering, transformative space. Additionally, water is not a contained form. In discussing seepage and leakage, Steven Mentz proposes the term ‘seep ecology’ to emphasise that ‘the process of seeping ensures that the two bodies end up less separate than they began’ (2017: 286). Keeping in mind that the other version of Tennyson’s poem had the Lady of Shalott drown herself in the river, we can describe Ophelia and the Lady as becoming part of the water. Water fills up the body through the orifices, joining the other water that already composes so much of the human organism. For bodies that are not retrieved from the water and eventually sink to the bottom, there is a chance they will decompose, either quickly in warm, shallow water or more slowly due to bacteria and other inhabitants. In other words, as Stacy Alaimo famously argues, we can think of ‘human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world’, always moving between and with more-than-human bodily natures (2010: 2).

Astrida Neimanis contests the idea that the water of the human body and the water of rivers, lakes, oceans, and other natural sources are markedly different, seeing such a distinction as the persistence of humanist ideology. Specifically, Neimanis considers water’s cyclicality to be inherently queer: ‘water is evidently both finite and inexhaustible; both the same and always becoming different, too’ (2017: 66). Neimanis recognises that water can still be differentiated based on its function, giving the examples of gestational waters in the amniotic sac versus water that comes out as tears, but function does not negate the fact that water carries traces of places and other beings that it came into contact with and moved through. Similarly, Ophelia and the Lady of Shalott are passing through water. It may be the final destination of their human bodies, but it is a stopover point in which the waters of their bodies and of the rivers themselves, both individually already mixed, will recombine further, a part of which will disappear through evaporation, ingestion, or some other process. Neimanis’ engagement with wateriness as a multi-species descriptor is a manifestation of the key tenets of posthuman feminist thought as outlined by Rosi Braidotti. According to Braidotti, ‘at stake for posthuman feminism is how to produce other ways of thinking about the basic units of reference to define the human, what thinking means, how knowledge is produced, and to develop new forms of ethical engagement’ (2022: 42). With Millais and Waterhouse’s paintings, this means asking how the context of the paintings would differ if they are no longer assumed to depict women in nature within the specific trope of the femme fatale who meets a tragic end. Part of the task, then, is to shift the relationship between the two rivers from vehicles through which Ophelia and the Lady of Shalott achieve their goals, to recognise how water has been reduced to a plot device whose presence is more important than its form.

Concluding Remarks, or Water as an Entity

Nature, consisting of the terrestrial and aqueous realms, never existed as simply the material realm devoid of any sort of semiotic meaning or function. Water in particular has received increased attention with the growth of ‘blue ecologies’/‘blue cultural studies’/’blue humanities’/‘oceanic ecologies’ and other adjacent terms. In art history, water, as a space riddled with political and social meaning, has been most strongly articulated by Trica Cusack as a kind of unwilling participant in the colonial project. Cusack proposes a shift from thinking of the ocean as an ‘empty space’ to thinking of it as a ‘social space’, in part to emphasise that it is not ‘an environment free of human intervention’ (2014: 1). From Ruskin’s suggestion that even an accurate representation of nature belies a trace of the artist’s hand and individual artistic vision, to the conception of nature as female and as inferior to culture-as-man, even to queer ecology and new materialism’s commitment to combating the notion of nature as an inert space that surrounds but never takes center stage, nature has served much like the ground or the primer in painting. By selecting specific plant types or even a geographic location, nature can lend emotional weight and context to a work of art before any humans or human-adjacent signs of life are added to the image. Nature adds the emotional weight to Ophelia and The Lady of Shalott, doubly so because the paintings are visualisations of texts that do not go into as much detail when describing the precise moment at which both women die. The connotations of death by water, combined with the gendering of water as feminine, suggest a degree of desperation and inevitability. At the same time, this suggests that even a viewer familiar with the source texts can feel a measured amount of sympathy for the two women. Their deaths are textually vital, whether to further the depths of Hamlet’s madness or to serve as the central plot device around which the entire text is written, as is the case with the Lady of Shalott.

With this in mind, I contest Bachelard’s declaration that ‘it is not infinity that I find in waters but depth’ (1983: 8). Granted, Bachelard here is referring to his experience growing up in a part of Champagne that had many streams, so following the stream from the village in which he lived to a neighbouring one was to arrive ‘elsewhere’, an ‘elsewhere’ that was markedly different that the kind one arrived at by way of the sea. Infinity is a concept often taken literally. With regard to water, various Indigenous rights and Land Back movements have gained traction in the last decade, contesting capitalism’s insistence on treating water as an endless resource rather than recognising that bodies of water have rights and that water’s constant transformations constitute a form of livingness.[5] To think of water’s infinity in posthuman terms is to recognise the various kinds of relationships we have with it on a daily basis, from the water we take into our bodies and later expel, to the water we let flow over our bodies as we clean ourselves. I do not propose that Millais and Waterhouse had any such concerns in mind when executing their paintings, particularly at a time when the economic benefits of industrialisation were slowly coming to fruition, with the growing realisation of its impact on the environment and on people’s relationships with the land. I am, however, proposing that Ophelia and The Lady of Shalott are not averse or even ‘immune’ to such readings, that there is no foundation upon which such thoughts could be placed. Posthuman inquiry will not overwrite and improve the past, but when brought into contact with materials deemed untouchable because of their historical nature, it may help raise awareness of where our engagement with nature has gone physically, culturally, and ethically.

Notes

[1] For more on this challenge to media stability, see Stuart Hall (1973), Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse, Birmingham: Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham. Equally helpful is James Procter’s synthesis of Hall’s ideas, particularly Hall’s three key ideas that ‘(i) meaning is not simply fixed or determined by the sender; (ii) the message is never transparent; and (iii) the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning’. See James Procter (2004), ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in Stuart Hall, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 57-73.

[2] See Donna Haraway (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulhucene, Durham: Duke University Press and Anna Tsing et al. (2017) (eds), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

[3] It should be noted that there is scholarship that takes a more literal approach to exploring the relationship between queerness and nature, in which scholars examine nature as a coded system of meaning that conveys information about the sexual identity and desires of human individuals. One such art historical text is Alison Syme (2010), A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siècle Art, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

[4] In my commitment to work towards decolonising academic scholarship and discourse, I want to acknowledge the privileged place that new materialism and its offshoots have been afforded, often appropriating ideas that have existed within various Indigenous cultures for centuries. A good starting point for better understanding this ongoing systemic issue is Zoe Todd (2016), “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ is Just Another Word for Colonialism”, Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 4-22 and Jessica Horton and Janet Berlo (2013), “Beyond the Mirror: Indigenous Ecologies and ‘New Materialisms’ in Contemporary Art”, Third Text No. 27, Vol. 1, pp. 17-28.

[5] For more on the topic, see Macarena Gómez-Barris (2017), The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, Durham: Duke University Press (particularly her concept of the “fish-eye episteme” in Ch. 4) and Elizabeth A. Povinelli (2016), Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, Durham: Duke University Press (particularly her engagement with the story of the coastal creek Tjipel in Australia in Ch. 4).