Channels, Spring 2017

Channels • 2017 • Volume 1 • Number 2 Page 5 aesthetic beauty, in religious matters, they opposed the lavish ornamentation and sacraments of the Catholic Church. One critic of Etty’s Magdalens asserted that “chastity and simplicity . . . are not reconcilable with jewels, lace, variegated cloths, and embroidery which are better fitted for the gorgeous pageantry of the church of Rome” (290). In addition to Victorian’s distaste for icons, the Gothic sensationalism of the eighteenth century “had popularized images of Catholics as being obsessed with sex and death” (279). Victorians suspected that the Catholic rite of confession involved a “perverse eroticism” related to the dirty details of confession (289). In her article, “Perverts to Rome: Protestant Gender Roles and the Abjection of Catholicism,” Monika Mazurek notes that nineteenth century anti-papist pamphlets warned readers against the licentious intentions of priests during the rite of confession. These pamphlets register “the terror caused by the potential invasion of the English hearth by priests, acting as the third person in the marriage” (695). Anti-papists used the invasion-of-the-hearth argument against English Tractarians and Ritualists, who “tried to revive certain devotional practices, including confession” (695). Etty’s combination of overt eroticism and iconography in his Magdalen paintings addresses the hypocrisy of Victorian anti-Catholic sentiment head-on. While Etty’s Victorian audience mocked Catholic devotion to dead icons and rituals, they themselves overlooked the sacredness of material reality, even of human life, choosing instead to worship the immaterial, idealized Raphaelite body. Etty’s Magdalen paintings can be interpreted as living icons since they refer to the real, ordinary bodies of Etty’s models. They are the antithesis of Raphael’s larger-than-life bodies, which have no real correspondent. Additionally, by making the bodies of real Victorian prostitutes visible, Etty subtly hints at the inauthenticity of Victorian fashion and propriety. Though Victorians conflated licentiousness and perversion with Catholicism, Victorian society had its own secret sins. British journalist William T. Stead exposed the “widespread existence of juvenile prostitution in London and the presence of an organized traffic in young English girls that supplied brothels on the continent” in his 1885 news series titled, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” (Gorham 353). In “‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ Re-examined: Child Prostitution and the Idea of Childhood in Late- Victorian England,” Deborah Gorham notes that in Victorian reform, rhetoric figured child prostitutes as “sexually innocent, passive victims of individual evil men” (355). Reformers failed to recognize that many young working-class girls became prostitutes because they had no other way to earn a living—“the causes of juvenile prostitution were to be found in [the] exploitative economic structure” (355). Etty, Browning, and the Pre-Raphaelites recognized the dire spiritual bankruptcy hidden beneath the veneer of Victorian propriety and Raphaelite aesthetics. Cheeke notes that the Pre-Raphaelite artists overlapped with the Anglo-Catholic movement, which “emphasized the devotional employment of images and celebrated the simplicity and clarity of iconographical traditions” (438). Perhaps they thought it was high time for Victorian society to confess and repent. In the areas of aesthetics and religious worship, the Pre-Raphaelites chose the ordinary material world— not the idealized world of Raphael or the inauthentic masks of Victorian fashion and propriety—as the true path to sacred reality and spiritual life.