Channels, Spring 2017

Page 4 Werneburg • Encountering the Phantasmagoria countered the dominant Protestant discourse, which espoused dispassionate, ‘reasonable’ forms of worship and denied, or at least deemphasized, the spiritual efficacy of the sacraments. In his book Browning: Background and Conflict, F. R. G. Duckworth tells of the stiff restrictions that artists faced in the Victorian era: “it is clear that the majority of Englishmen were ready to be angered with any writer who depreciated the material prosperity of the time or cast its progress in doubt” (19). The Pre-Raphaelites, however, often highlighted social realities that Victorian dandies wanted to conceal and forget— realities including, but not limited to, the brutal lives of Victorian England’s working class. Additionally, Duckworth notes that, due to the Victorian’s Raphaelite dandyism, “[if] the business, the thoughts, the manner of everyday life were to be handled by the poet, it would be on the condition that he avoided ‘the slightest jar of vulgarity and laughableness’” (22). Indeed, artists who deviated from these expectations were promptly rejected by critics. In the introduction to the Victorian Age in the Longman Anthology of British Literature, Heather Henderson and William Sharpe note that “anything that might bring ‘a blush to the cheek of the Young Person’—as Dickens warily satirized the trend—was aggressively ferreted out by publishers and libraries. Even revered poets such as Tennyson and [Robert Browning’s wife, Elizabeth] Barrett Browning found themselves edited by squeamish publishers” (1067). William Etty, another artist who gained the derision of the Victorian establishment, created a series of penitent Magdalen paintings that constituted an erotic subversion of Victorian prudishness, decadence, and anti-Catholic sentiment. In “William Etty’s Magdalens: Sexual Desire and Spirituality in Early Victorian England,” author Dominic Janes observes that Etty’s nudes seemed, to Victorian critics, specifically designed to evoke viewers’ libidinous passions. The press noted of one of Etty’s nudes that it had, “‘for a Magdalen, too much colour in the cheeks,’ and a bosom too luxuriant” (287). In 1822, The Times remarked, in regards to one of Etty’s Magdalens, “nakedness without purity is offensive and indecent,” to which Janes adds, “Part of the problem was that Etty’s female nudes looked like working- class girls play-acting as classical goddesses” (278). And, in fact, they were! Rather than the privileged body of a classical goddess or the Virgin Mary, Etty chose for his artistic subject the “degraded body, all too clearly composed of flesh and blood,” of the repentant prostitute Mary Magdalen (278). Etty hired prostitutes off the streets of London to be his models. He writes of one model, “I am endeavouring to persuade her to get money in a way more artistical” (296). In direct opposition to the idealism and prudishness of Victorian art, Etty brought the dark, prurient netherworld of Victorian England into the spotlight, exposing the hypocrisy of the Victorian notion of a pure, dignified British culture. Etty’s Magdalens also activated Protestant anti-Catholic stereotypes and anxieties about Anglo-Catholic ritualism, a topic that Browning also addresses. Etty’s use of Catholic iconography—crucifixes, illuminated Bibles, skulls, and embroidered cloths—raised the eyebrows of some critics. His Magdalens have rapturous expressions on their faces, their cheeks aglow as they gaze at a crucifix or an illuminated Bible. Ironically, while Victorians emphasized the importance of external appearances in matters of social propriety and