Beyond Despair: the Drowned Woman in Victorian Literature and Art

Beyond Despair: The Drowned Woman in Victorian Literature and Art
The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world ―Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition”

Suicide is often portrayed as the ultimate form of despair; an action relinquishing all hope of reconciliation or salvation. Yet it was a subject that fascinated Victorians. Indeed, Philippe Aires notes that the staging of death as an aesthetic event was a nineteenth-century invention (466). Often mentioned in passing but rarely explored is the larger Victorian preoccupation with women and death by drowning. The mixture of literary and visual representations of the drowned woman reached all strata of Victorian society and formed a cohesive iconographic system with which Victorian society, as a whole, could identify and to which it could respond. As T.J. Edelstein explains, an image, such as that of the drowned woman, could become "the embodiment of a Victorian mythology . . . one example of how a new iconographic vocabulary was established in the nineteenth century."1 Further, such classification is necessary, since "an immediately identifiable character or symbol helps to create a predicable response" (184). For example when William Scott Bell closes “Rosabell”2 with the lines And hearts as innocent as hers As blindly shall succeed, shall take Leap after leap into the dark, Blaspheming soul and sense at once, And every lamp on every street Shall light their wet feet down to death Victorian readers accept without explanation beyond the chronically of her slide into prostitution that the young woman commits suicide, drowning herself following a life of shame, nor do they doubt that many others “shall take / leap after leap into the dark” because of their transgression.
1 2

Edelstein here is speaking of any iconographic system, not the drowned woman in particular. “Rosabell” was revised and re-titled “Maryanne” before it was reprinted in Scott’s Autobiographical Notes.

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