Tragic damsels usually bring
their doom upon themselves by falling in love with rotters, incidentally
providing a fertile source of subjects for painters.
Look at
Princess Diana
~ When Nelson Shanks painted this portrait of her in 1994, she had three years
to live. Already the aura of Doomed Damsel was hanging over her: basely
betrayed by two rotters with whom she had misguidedly fallen in love, in
1997 she made the excellent career move of dying tragically. She was
instantly transformed from rather louche celebrity to sainthood and
totally upstaged Mother Teresa whose death five days later barely managed
a small paragraph on page sixteen in the world media.
*******
The art world abounds in Doomed Damsels, all young, all beautiful and
all extremely bad at choosing men. My favourites among these hapless
chicks are Ophelia, Isabella, Elaine (a.k.a. the Lady of Shallott), and
our very own Aussie Chloë.
We all know the story of
Ophelia: ~ in a nutshell, she fell in love with Hamlet, went mad and drowned
herself.
Why does Ophelia go mad? Imagine that you are a teenage girl in love
with an older man who returns your affections - Hamlet. Your father (who
is actually a big jerk) tells you that you should stop seeing the guy,
mostly because you might lose your virginity to him. You obediently avoid
Hamlet, until one day he comes to you, grabs you by the wrists and stares
unblinkingly at your face. You try to make civilised conversation, but
you're rejected coldly, and he screams: "get thee to a nunnery!" before
stomping out, leaving you a sobbing mess.
The next time you see him, he is cracking nasty jokes about you to his
mates. After all of this, you hear that Hamlet has killed your father.
What is a girl to do?
You throw yourself in the river wearing your most fetching gown, unlike
Virginia Woolf who wore an old tweed coat with stones stuffed in the
pockets. This is why we have fifty paintings of Ophelia by eminent artists and
none of Virginia Woolf.
*******
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In the case of
Isabella, an Italian lass, the rotter was not so much her lover as her two
brothers, but love was as usual the root cause of her doom. In a manner of
speaking.
Isabella fell in love with Lorenzo, a carpenter employed by her
brothers. Hoping to marry their sister off to a rich guy, the brothers hit
upon a cunning plan: they lured the carpenter into the forest, where they
killed and buried him. They told Isabella he had gone on a business trip,
but Lorenzo's ghost came to her in the night and told her everything,
including the location of his grave.
Isabella found the grave, but rather than put a posy on it and say a
little prayer, she chose to dig it up. The late Lorenzo was a strapping
lad - finding his body too heavy to carry, she hacked off his head and
tucked that under her arm to take home. Here she put it in a terracotta
pot, covered it with potting soil and sowed basil seeds on top.
The basil did rather well, as
you would expect. One wonders if she used bits of it in the pasta sauce
she cooked for the brothers. She watered it with her tears and spent hours
hugging the pot and talking to the plant. (She may have been an ancestress
of Prince Charles.) People started calling her batty (little did they know
just how batty!) and the brothers couldn't interest any rich guys in
marriage with a madwoman, however beautiful.
So they hit upon another cunning plan: they would steal the pot of basil
and with the object of her obsession removed, Isabella would return to
normal. Unfortunately they broke the pot, saw the head and realising the
game was up, they fled the jurisdiction. Isabella, bereft of Lorenzo,
Basil and all, pined away and died.
Keats wrote a poem about her; Holman Hunt, John Millais, John William
Waterhouse and John White Alexander painted her, but it seems the Italian
police ignored the whole thing. Melbourne's Finest would have sent
Forensics to check out the crime scene, arrested the whole boiling of them
and arranged counselling for Isabella.
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*******
Elaine, the fair
maid of Astolat, (a.k.a The Lady of Shallot), was another victim of
her passion for a rotter. She chose to fall in love with Sir Lancelot,
well-known adulterer and betrayer of his best friend, King Arthur.
This cad wore Elaine's sleeve
during a joust, as a token of his insincere affection. After he was
injured in the fight, she nursed him tenderly back to health, but as soon
as he was pronounced fit, Lancelot dropped her like a hot potato and he
was off to Camelot and Guinevere.
Elaine retreated to the tower
of Shalott, where she weaved upon a loom day and night, forbidden by a
curse to look out of her window. She had to catch her glimpses of the
world outside through shadows and reflections in a mirror on the wall. (It
didn't even have the decency to tell her she was the fairest of them all.)
She grew tired of living her
life through reflections saying she was "half-sick of shadows". The moment
she uttered these words her weary life was changed forever when she saw
Sir Lancelot ride past, clad in shining armour. Driven by love for
Lancelot the Lady of Shalott ran to the window, breaking her loom and her
tapestry. The mirror 'crack'd from side to side' as the curse wrought its
wrath upon her.
 |
She climbed down from the
tower to the water's edge, where she found a boat and wrote 'The Lady of
Shalott' upon its prow. She laid herself down and let the boat drift down
the river to Camelot, singing one last song before she died of a broken
heart. |
When her dead body drifted
ashore at Camelot, it created a bit of a stir and among the onlookers was
Lancelot. As if he had no idea who she is, he said piously:
"She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her
grace,
The Lady of Shalott."
Poets and painters from
Tennyson to the Pre-Raphaelites and beyond, had a field day with poor old
Elaine: we have pictures of her in her tower and in her boat, but no
explanations for several little mysteries that puzzle me:
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*******
Chloë
Closer to home, we come to
Chloë, who needs no introduction to Melburnians, but for the benefit of
outlanders, here is her sad story: ~
Chloé was painted in 1875 by
Jules Lefebvre. The painting won gold medals in the Paris
Salon in 1875, the
Sydney International Exhibition of 1879 and the Melbourne International
Exhibition of 1880.
In 1883, after three weeks of
exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, scandalised citizens
objected to this unseemly display of the naked female form and Chloe
disappeared from public view until 1908, when she was purchased by Henry
Figsby Young, an ex-digger turned hotel proprietor, for £800, a very large
sum in those days.
Henry took the painting back
to his home above Young and Jackson's Hotel and his outraged wife banished
it to the public bar, where it charms the patrons to this day. During
World War I it toured Australia to raise funds for the Red Cross and in
1995 it was loaned to the National Gallery of Victoria for a special
exhibition.
So far, so good, you may
think, where's the doom? … but Chloë, who was only 19 when the rotter
Lefebvre painted her, fell madly in love with him at the time. He didn't
knock her favours back either and we only have to look at the painting to
see why not!
He strung her along for a
while and then he dropped her and married her sister. The poor girl was
devastated, but she didn't do anything as lame as drowning herself or
pining away … no, she showed Jules and the new Mrs Lefebre! She boiled up
phosphorous match-heads, and drank the resultant poisonous brew. It must
have seemed like a good idea at the time.
