Rossetti’s Stunners, The Bull
What links the pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Rossetti to Wanstead?
Anyone? Well firstly, he was a good friend of William Morris and spend a lot of his time at Water House in Walthamstow (now the William Morris museum) and as everyone should be know - this is only a short 257 bus ride away. What else you may ask? His muses or ‘stunners’ as he called them, have for long been the object of Wanstead local Elaine Britten’s obsession.
Mingling the formality and scholastic merit of a lecture with theatrics and some comic relief, ‘Rossetti’s Stunners’ currently playing at our Fringe venue The Bull, relates the personal histories of the women whose visages inspired some of the most famous works of art of the Victorian era. For the 1 hour run time, Britten uses clever inter-disciplinary methods to weave together a cohesive tale about the relationships and power dynamics between Rossetti and his stunners, Victorian societal attitudes towards women and of course to forge a feminist re-interpretation into the artworks created at this time. Her performance and writing here duly grants these young women ‘lives apart from the men’ to whom they were dutifully bound throughout their lives.
After an introduction to the Pre-Raphaelite set, and some context on the Stunners, Elaine quite literally embodies a selection of these women, exploring them as multi-dimensional characters as oppose to the 2D versions of them that appear in the frames.
The first is Jane Morris, wife of William Morris who secretly had an affair with Rossetti. Spending her early years as a Domestic in Oxford, she is described as ‘not even backstreet Oxford [but] back-alley!’ Undergoing a form of schooling before being deemed fit to marry Morris, she later became the inspiration for the character of Eliza Dolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s ‘My Fair Lady’. Whilst Britten casually mocks the do-little nature of Jane, a woman often remarked as being silent and content with lounging on the chaise-lounge, there is a definite sympathy here. Speaking slowly and deliberately to mask her rough natural vocality, she reflects on the ‘air of possibility’ in Oxford that she misses. Having been swept up in the lives of Morris and Rossetti, she is now certainly of a different class and yet is no further from being a Domestic - the union is, simply put, just another reincarnation of domesticity.
Britten’s next impression is of the more ‘colourful’ Fanny Cornforth, Rossetti’s housekeeper and companion after his wife passed. A devoted carer, she managed the household in exchange for her own quarters and ‘insurance’ - some of Rossetti’s paintings that she could sell after his death. Nicknamed ‘elephant’ by the other Stunners, she is portrayed as the least refined and docile of the bunch. Fanny, as it happens, occasionally acted as a spiritual medium, sometimes becoming the conduit between Rossetti and his late wife. This is joyfully revealed in a segment in which Elaine brings up an audience member to conduct a seance with her. Although most of us view the Victorian era as a time of superstition and gothic fascination, is rather eye-opening to discover how close these matters could be to the domestic sphere of everyday life.
Finally, we meet Alexa Wilding, at first vain and self-absorbed, she is a woman rather exhausted by her duties as a muse. With a dour Northern accent, her approach to life is rather surmised by her line ‘I’ll be there when I’m ready’. Here, however, is a woman who again invokes our pity. Taken from a life of poverty and transported into a different form of servitude, her devil-may-care attitude could in fact be a defence against the ‘snooty’ Rossetti family. Although she revels in the fact she has even been introduced to his family, unlike Fanny, she is apparently depressed at her rendering into a vessel to further the needs and desires of a man.
This is an exciting new piece of writing with the potential to stimulate a desire to learn more about the lives of these Stunners long after the curtain has fallen. Britten confronts Rossetti for posing as a ‘saviour for the women in his life’. Epitomised in his 1854 painting ‘Found’, in which he is depicting rescuing an urchin off the streets, his fascination with low born, working class women may say more about his attitude than previously understood. Elaine discloses the circumstances in which Rossetti finds these muses, from pubs, to Hatton Gardens, to London Parks where, rumour has it, they were chewing nuts and spitting them at passing gentlemen. To her, this is evidence of a morbid fascination in the power dynamics between himself as an upper-class man from a wealthy family and these supposed ‘wild-childs’. Whilst yes they had been saved from a ‘life of toil’, they were then forced to partake in the whims of Rossetti and Morris, given little autonomy and transformed into aesthetic objects rather than fleshed out beings.
Here is a victorious uncovering of the lives of these women apart from the men whom surrounded them. Recently, more research has been dedicated to the lives of these women, and even a blue plaque dedicated to Fanny. There is still much left to be done, sees Britten, by way of giving a voice to the characters who for so long have been reduced to ‘idealised versions of femininity’.
Although this is a piece packed with excellent writing, a quote from Rossetti’s own sister lingers in the mind and captures the spirit of the play as a whole: ‘one face looks out from all [Rossetti’s] canvases, not as she is but as she fills his dreams’.