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The Punishment of Lust painted in 1891 by Giovanni Segantini

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A Summer Night painted in 1887-1890 by Albert Joseph Moore

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The Walker Art Gallery is the national gallery of the North. Since 1877 it has housed Liverpool’s most outstanding art collection. Many of the gallery’s most important works have been on display in the city for nearly 200 years.

https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker-art-gallery/history-of-walker

My exhibition will be about Women as Muses, Makers and Myths. I have chosen to use the Walker Art Gallery to represent this topic through the History and English Literature lenses in female art.

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Introduction to a brief online history of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

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Echo and Narcissus, painted in 1903 by John William Waterhouse.

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Through a literary lens (Echo and Narcissus)

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Through a literary lens (Echo and Narcissus)

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Echo's curse has become a powerful metaphor in feminist literary criticism.

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) - women in literature tend to be reduced to passive figures like 'angels' or 'monster's and very rarely allowed narrative control. Echo fits into this so called mold as she is present in the story but, voiceless. She is reduced to the reflection of Narcissus' words and desires.

https://ia803202.us.archive.org/32/items/TheMadwomanInTheAttic/The%20Madwoman%20in%20the%20Attic.pdf

Similarly, Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of Medusa (1975) - women must 'write themselves' into language in order to 'reclaim the body that is her own and free herself from the shackles of patriarchy'.

http://www.collegiateedu.kerala.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Laugh-of-the-Medusa.pdf

Echo's voice - fragmented, stolen, and fading - embodies the litrary experience of female characters who exist only as extensions of male narratives. In classical and Victorian literture alike, women are trapped in roles of an emotional sacrifice or symbolise suffering. Their lives, stories, are told about them, rather than by them. An example of this is Lady Macbeth. She was ultimately silenced; reduced from a commanding female presence to a women who unravelled into madness. Her death was talked about rather than witnessed.

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In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Echo is a nymph cursed by Hera for helping Zeus hide his affair. Her voice was taken away and she could only repeat the words of others. This is a close link to the ancient symbol of silence women.

In contrast, Narcissus is consumed by his own image. Doomed to fall in love with his own reflection. This painting tragically captures unrequited love but also how women have historically been framed in both art and literature as passive, tragic figures. (muses rather than makers)

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Through a historical lens (Echo and Narcissus)

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Through a historical lens (Echo and Narcissus)

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The myth of Echo and Narcissus does more than just tell a tragic love story. It also points to the deep rooted patriarchal structures that have shaped how women were represented and remembered throughout history. In classical antiquity, women like Echo were often used symbolically to reinforce gender hierarchies.

Mary Beard, Women & Power (2017) - ancient culture frequently silenced women.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/22/women-and-power-a-manifesto-by-mary-beard-review

Echo's curse, limiting her to repetition, becomes a powerful metaphor for how women were denied their own voice.

Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference (1988) - the female figure in art often constructs to serve the male gaze i.e pattern of one breast shown. Women are depicted as 'timeless, decorative, and symbolic rather than historical, active or creative'.

https://archive.org/details/vision-and-difference-by-griselda-pollock/page/n10/mode/1up?q=female+figure+in+art+constructs+to+serve+the+male+gaze

Echo and Narcissus mirror this dynamic. Narcissus is the subject, self-obsessed and visible. Echo fades into the background, literally and metaphorically. She is not just a mythological figure- she stands as a representation for real historical women whose identities were defined in relation to men i.e the six wives of Henry VIII, and whose contributions were lost or unrecorded.

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Through a literary lens (The Punishment of Lust)

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Through a literary lens (The Punishment of Lust)

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Segantini's painting continues a long literary tradition in which women are punished, for their failure to conform; to motherhood, to chastity and to silence. They become dangling bodies of societal judgment.

The female body becomes the site of meaning, punishment and control.

Susan Bordo (1993) Unbearable Weight - "The body becomes a direct focus of social control'. In the painting, these women are held responsible for not adhering to social norms. http://www.gendermediatechnology.weebly.com/uploads/5/2/8/6/5286294/bordo.unbearable_weight-rsb.pdf

Literature has often used women's bodies in order to showcase societal worries about sexuality, reproduction or morality.

This painting resonates with the Gothic and Victorian literary tradition, where women are often made into moral examples. Characters like Tess in Tess of the d'Urbervilles or Bertha Mason in Jane eyre are often judges not only by their action but by how they threaten the moral and sexual codes of their time.

In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, women's bodies are central to the narrative but stripped of ownership. Atwood crafts a world where reproductive capacity is both power and curse, creating the idea that motherhood is either sacred or punishable. Segantini's floating figures can be viewed similarly; women condemned for existing outside motehrhood, purity, or passivity. https://ieas-szeged.hu/downtherabbithole/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Margaret-Atwood_-The-Handmaids-Tale-1.pdf

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Through a historical lens (The Punishment of Lust)

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Through a historical lens (The Punishment of Lust)

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In Victorian Britain, womanhood was narrowly defined by being domesticated, their chastisty and motherhood. Segantini reflects a wider historical narrative in which non-conforming women were not just excluded, they were institutionally punished.

In Liverpool, women's morality was a public concern. Those who were unmarried, childless by choice or deemed 'fallen' were frequently institutionalised. Facilities such as the 'Liverpool Female Refuge' operated as moral correction centres, (Cox and Marland 2019) which offered 'shelter' on the condition of being shameful as well as strict control. (Frost 2008, pg 102). These practices mirror the floating figure in Segantini's painting; isolated in grey, moral landscape. Eternally punished for being deviant.

https://socialhistoryblog.com/the-great-disgrace-to-our-age-desperate-women-crime-drink-and-mental-disorder-in-liverpool-borough-prison-by-catherine-cox-hilary-marland/

https://archive.org/details/vision-and-difference-by-griselda-pollock/page/n10/mode/1up?q=female+figure+in+art+constructs+to+serve+the+male+gaze

Segantini's visual metaphor captures the social death imposed on women who defined their expected roles. He uses his art to portray how morality was used as a weapon in order to shape the lives and legacies of women in Liverpool.

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Segantini presents a haunting, symbolic landscape where the nude bodies of women float suspended in a muted, wintry void. They hang limp, their expressions vacant as if caught between life and death; purgatory, which draws in a religious allegory and envokes the idea that these women are being punished for failing to fufill their 'natural' maternal role.

This is based on the 12th century poem, Nirvana by Luigi Illica which describe the progress of a neglectful mother through a Buddihst purgatory. The tree is a symbol for the tree of life whilst the mothers soul is floating in order to eventually achieve Nirvana, a Buddihst heaven which is represented by the mountains.

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Through a literary lens (A Summer Night)

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Through a literary lens (A Summer Night)

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Moore's painting shows a parallel between art and literary as it shows the literary depictions of idealised feminine muse seen in Victorian Poetry. Women were often seen as objects of beauty, silence and ldoomed for stepping outside their 'place'.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson The Lady of Shalott (1832) - "Hear a song that echoes cheerly" suggest The Lady is not seen, only heard, like a distant echo. Her presence is mythical, ethereal. I.e not real. much like Moore's A Summer Night, the women are silent.

"Four Gray walls, and four gray towers...Overlook a space of flower" suggests The Lady's confinement is softened by beauty, much like Moore's women are surrounded by beautiful drapery and calm see. Their trap is disguised as beauty and a dream.

"She left the web, she left the loom" suggests the moment she dares to act, to see directly, the curse strikes. In Victorian literature, desiring a female, sexual or not, ended up in destruction.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45359/the-lady-of-shalott-1832

A Summer Night showcases women who have bodies, but no individuality. They are simply objects to gaze upon.

Gilbert and Gubar (1979, pg.17) The Madwoman in the Attic - 19th century literature trapped women between being angels or monsters. Silent muses or punished rebels. Moore's painting shows a clear side. Silent Muses. Obervatory beauty idealised into a myth, they are preserved and therefore hold no power.

https://ia803202.us.archive.org/32/items/TheMadwomanInTheAttic/The%20Madwoman%20in%20the%20Attic.pdf

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Through a historical lens (A Summer Night)

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Through a historical lens (A Summer Night)

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Moore's painting speaks to late 19th century Brittain where art and culture often fetishised women. In Liverpool, working class women experienced significant difficulty on their social status as well as economic opportunities. Strict gender norms had led the way WC women were seen morally and visually.

Eroticied paintings like Moore's were mostly produced for the upper middle class male audiences. Moore's women are sensual, but, in a way that also suggests ownership without the legality and other 'complications' that come with women.

On the other hand, women in Liverpool who publicly embodied sexuality i.e dancers, sex workers, were often criminalised and excluded.

The contrast between these shows a double standard. There is second hand eroticism, idealised in art but in reality, punishment was the ultimate consequence.

Dyhouse 2013 (pg 35-37) - the era was seemingly obsessed with regulating female behaviour. All the way from fashion to how they moved. Paintings like Moore's created the idea that a 'good' woman was one who was beautiful, silent and still. Whereas, Liverpool institutions 'treated' women who didn't fit this idea.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=h8FPEAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=Dyhouse,+C.+(2013)+Girl+Trouble:+Panic+and+Progress+in+the+History+of+Young+Women.+pdf&ots=X6Xi4G2zqY&sig=HBoIhPe5ouBc3by-RV8LKqGHlks&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

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Group of young women are lounging in classical drapery by the sea. Their poses are languid, sensual and erotic. Their expressions are unreadable which might suggest that this is an academic study of the female figure. As the girls are going to bed, it's clear that this is erotic and suggestive. There is no direct narrative. Instead, the viewer is invited by Moore to simply gaze upon the female body for aesthetics.

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In conclusion, this exhibition has explored how women have been represented, and often restricted, in both art, literature and history.

Liverpool's own social history has contributed to examining these portraits. By revisiting these paintings and relearning about them, even in a different view, we create more space for women's stories to be told as not just reflections but as truths. We give them identities, learn their complecity and most of all, power.

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