by Paula Joneková
It is somewhat surprising not to encounter the name Elizabeth Siddal while exploring the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. As a sought-after model captured in works such as John Everett Millais’s Ophelia and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, she became one of the most prominent faces of the movement. Moreover, her turbulent relationship with Rossetti, which ended in her early death caused by an overdose of opiates, elevated her almost to the level of the myth. However, the ardent interest in her as a bewitching muse, a possessive and whimsical lover, and, ultimately, the tragic figure of a depressed and invalid wife, managed to divert attention from her artistic endeavour and the distinctive qualities of her works. As Jan Marsh argued, while the faces of women were central to the Pre-Raphaelite art and a great deal of scholarly and popular attention has been dedicated to their engagement with the male artists, “their voices [were] never heard” (Marsh 1).
This essay intends to argue that Siddal’s works and her artistic style are worthy of scholarly attention. Through the analysis of her poem “A Silent Wood” from the perspective of British Japonisme, this study will present distinctive qualities and wider implications of art created by a woman who, despite her frequent appearance in anecdotes and works describing the revolutionary influence of Pre-Raphaelites, remains elusive, inhabiting the blurry liminal space between fantasy and reality.
Far from being solely a passive object of admiration, Siddal fostered her artistic ambitions and worked tirelessly to perfect her skills. Her relationship with Rossetti seemed to be professional as much as romantic, with him supporting her artistic endeavours (Marsh 44). Her paintings proved alluring even for such critics as John Ruskin, who expressed his particular admiration of her sketches, despite his later patronising remarks (Marsh 73), and Harvard professor Charles E. Norton who decided to buy the watercolour Clerk Saunders at her first public exhibition (Marsh 114). She also wrote several poems even though none were published during her lifetime. The desire to create and cultivate her artistic expression seems to have accompanied Siddal throughout her whole life.
Japonisme, a term coined by Philippe Burty in 1872, describes “the influence of Japan on late 19th-century European art and life” (Chiba 1). Following the forced opening of Japanese harbours to Western merchants in 1853, a vibrant cultural exchange between Europe and Japan was established, resulting in widespread fascination with Japanese art and culture (Xiaoyi 1). Artists such as Oscar Wilde, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeal Whistler, and Aubrey Beardsley even tried to incorporate Japanese artistic techniques into their creative processes. However, many of them soon became objects of criticism by scholars such as Ernest Fenollosa, who campaigned against “Japanese art … being misrepresented by Japonistes at the expense of the still unknown wealth of the earlier authentic art objects” (Chiba 9). Among these “authentic art objects” (9) were for example kan-ga paintings based on Chinese tradition preserved by Zen artists or works of the Kano School of Painting based in Kyoto (Nute 26).
Although Siddal wrote “A Silent Wood” only five to seven years after the end of Japanese isolation, and there is no arguable evidence she was a part of the subsequent wave of obsession with Japanese culture and art, her poem bears a striking resemblance to works of Japanese Zen painters. Contrary to the artists mentioned earlier who were mesmerised by colourful, two-dimensional ukiyo-e prints by Hokusai or Utamaro representing thrills of urban life or natural wonders, “A Silent Wood” recalls minimalistic ink paintings by Sesshu or Kano Motonobu, in which the human element is almost negligible in comparison to the vastness of strange, yet benign nature. The impression of meditative solitude and melancholia is also frequently attributed to Zen artworks.
“A Silent Wood” manages to convey a striking monochromaticity, drawing the reader into a world composed of shades of grey and black. The poem’s distressed speaker seeks shelter in the wood‘s “darkest shadow” (Siddal, line 5), with “grey owls” (6) flying swiftly around. The wood itself is devoid of any closer description except for its darkness and stillness. Even the speaker sits stiff, “frozen like a thing of stone” (11). This subdued atmosphere corresponds with the minimalism of Zen art, whose authors often used the medium of ink monochrome painting, as it accurately reflected the simplicity and avoidance of ostentatious display of skills that belonged to their main tenets (Munsterberg 199).
Moreover, the simplicity and lack of narrative power of “A Silent Wood” make it comparable to Zen landscapes such as “Winter Landscape” by Toyo Sesshu, featuring nature frozen into a united whole, devoid of any sign of movement or action. Siddal provides an austere description of the wood as it receives the desolate woman and then lets the reader catch a glimpse of a tragic love affair in the final couplet “Can God bring back the day when we two stood/Beneath the clinging trees in that dark wood?” (Siddal, lines 13-14). The poem, rather than being an account of complex events or feelings, offers the reader a glimpse into the enchanted world, a frozen image of a woman embraced by dark woods, who is hiding her sorrow deep within, instead of releasing it in visible action. Japanese art “seems largely to have avoided depicting the disturbing, awesome, powerful and chaotic forces of Nature – attributes that, in the West, provide material for the depiction of the Sublime in art” (Pryer 7), just as “A Silent Wood” cannot be compared to the sublime and complex poems by the Romantic poets published only a few decades before.
In addition, Siddal’s poem manages to convey a balanced and animated relationship between the human and the natural world, which is parallel to the Japanese notion of humans seen as “embedded into the cycles of the natural world and as non-privileged partners of its unfolding events” (Pryer 7) rooted in the original Shinto religion. Not only does the speaker directly and intimately appeal to the woods, asking for a “boon, / That [she] may not faint or die or swoon.” (Siddal, lines 7-8), but she is also being spoken to in return through “voices from the trees” (3) and “ferns clinging to her knees” (4). Human and natural language are intertwined, with mutual understanding achieved. The wood is not presented as a mystical, eerie place, populated with spirits and ghosts such as Keats’s merciless fairy queen in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” or Christina Rossetti’s goblins in “The Goblin Market”. Instead, it presents the speaker with a quiet shelter, where she can face her emotional turmoil and seek understanding.
It is important, however, to note that despite its closeness to the speaker, nature maintains a certain air of ambiguity and wildness. Oscar Wilde saw the use of natural elements by Japanese artists mainly through the lenses of design and aesthetic pleasure, employing this tamed, harmonically organised version of the natural world in his descriptions of “the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitt[ing] across the long tussore-silk curtains … producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect” (Picture 7) or himself in Japan, “sitting under an almond tree in white blossom … looking at the landscape without perspective” (Essays 120).
In contrast, “A Silent Wood” portrays nature which, alongside the power to soothe, can also evoke unsettling feelings and unlock the suppressed passions in an individual. This ambiguity is contained in the discrepancy in the description of the wood which is silent and benevolent, allowing the speaker to rest in its “darkest shadow” (Siddal, line 5) but at the same time communicate through “the voices from the trees” (3), which brings back painful memories of the lost love (12-14).
Similarly, the Japanese mythological view of nature comprises two oppositions ̶ “though it looks beautiful, it is also the realm of change [and] decay” (Grapard). This vision is the basis for the perception of a restless, frustrating existence before the achievement of enlightenment, which Zen followers desire to overcome “by achieving a holistic and nondualistic perspective in cognition” (Nagatomo). The poemʼs speaker yearns for fulfilment but associates it mainly with complementary unity between herself and her loved one, mirrored by the trees clinging together, creating a single whole (Siddal, line 14). Fixation on the point already lost in the passage of time paralyses her with gloom and imprisons her in a volatile, bleak reality in opposition to the all-embracing, serenity of universal wisdom that is the ultimate stage of Zen.
In this case, writing a poem may be potentially regarded as a purgatorial process aimed at exorcising the old, deadening attachments that imprison the disappointed lover in the past. Many of the poems by Siddal tend to be regarded as reactions to the disappointing development of her relationship with Rossetti (Marsh 135); she thus may have tried to use her art as a coping mechanism and a way of detachment from the pain caused by her lover’s infidelity. This perception of the creation of art as a liberating process is shared by Zen artists who largely avoided concentration on the perfect execution or the development of the characteristic features of their work but preferred to view painting as one of the possible rituals leading to the spiritual Enlightenment (Munsterberg 198). This goal supposes the merging of the individual mind burdened with concerns and superficialities with the calm and balanced, universal ̶ Buddha ̶ mind (Nagatomo).
In conclusion, even though Elizabeth Siddal cannot be considered a part of the wave of Japonisme, there are many overlapping features between her poem “A Silent Wood” and Japanese artworks that escaped the attention of European artists. The minimalism and simplicity of the form, absence of dramatic factors, and idiosyncratic relationship between the human and natural world are significant aspects of both the poem and Zen paintings. Siddal’s work is an intimate testimony of the human desire for fulfilment and companionship to which Zen responds with a distinctive set of beliefs and practices. Both Zen paintings and the poem thus unite in conveying the mixture of eagerness and wistfulness of a being trying to escape the tedious reality. It renders the works unique senses of poignancy and humanity, which elevates them beyond mere artistic expressions. Their comparison encourages one to appreciate the universality of human experience with its search for meaning and relief from the toils of existence and highlights the uniqueness of Siddal’s artistic genius, which makes her works distinctive and worthy of appreciation.
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