‘Of ladies most deject and wretched’: lovesickness and femininity in Victorian visual culture

My dissertation examines representations of women suffering from disappointed love in British visual culture from the 1830s to the 1870s, an era wrought with political, ideological, and social change. I examine the theories surrounding the mental and emotional dangers of romantic love on Victorian women, and how those ideas were further emphasized in British visual culture from the 1830s to the 1870s. Societal beliefs directed women to highly value romantic love as a necessary aspect of their lives and society but also warned them against the perils of feeling too much, a problem believed to be inherent to their sex. Nineteenth-century British society heartily believed, or at least purported to believe, that men were more rational and intellectual, less affected by tender sensibilities than women, whose soft hearts reflected their emotionality. For the average Victorian, a woman’s death due to disappointed love was not a far-fetched fantasy but a believable truth.

My study reconsiders the negotiation between ideal love, dangerous love, and the reality of love and marriage through a careful analysis of visual material as diverse as Richard Redgrave’s tragic painting Ophelia Weaving her Garlands (1842), the printed broadside of “The Dreadful Death of Margaret Moyes” (1839), Henry Peach Robinson’s photograph Fading Away (1858), and George Frederic Watts sculptural bust of Clytie (ca. 1867-1868), arguing that depictions of disappointed love were conceived as cautionary tales for young ladies, representations of male fantasy, and reinforcements of feminine dependence on masculine strength. By evaluating the topic through literary, medical, and visual sources, my dissertation explores the place of disappointed love and how it relates to issues of male power, female identity, and gender inequality in Victorian visual culture.