February 2012

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Last weekend Manchester Art Gallery unveiled the first international exhibition in over 40 years about the life and work of the Pre-Raphaelite master William Holman Hunt. Writing for Apollo Muse, curator Jan Marsh discusses The Awakening Conscience, one of the highlights of the exhibition.

According to the critics, it was ‘an utterly disagreeable picture’, illustrating ‘a very dark and repulsive side of modern domestic life’. Yet today’s viewers find The Awakening Conscience the most fascinating of all Holman Hunt’s paintings (above).

It shows a young woman dallying with her lover – they are playing popular music in the middle of the day – who is suddenly aroused to the sinfulness of her state. It may seem rather comical in our time, but it was a bold topic in 1854.

Defending the picture against the hostile reviews, John Ruskin itemised the showy furniture of the depicted love-nest, insisting that ‘if rightly read’ all combined powerfully ‘to meet full in the front the moral evil of the age.’

Victorians understood that the phrase: ‘the moral evil’ was that of ‘fallen women’ who indulged in extra-marital sex. No distinctions were made; pregnant servant girls, professional streetwalkers, adulterous wives or kept women as in Hunt’s painting – all were guilty. ‘No language is too severe … they are outcasts, pariahs, lepers’, wrote one commentator. ‘It is discreditable to a woman even to be supposed to know of their existence.’

But if this was a taboo topic in the home, it was much discussed among men, including the young artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Hunt, Millais, Rossetti and their friends, influenced by the High Church promotion of chastity, were also excited by ‘sinful’ women. Generally they shared the prevailing wisdom that, once fallen, a woman was doomed to prostitution, disease and death, often by drowning.

Holman Hunt, however, saw past the abuse heaped on the women. ‘I think with you that it is an artificial lie that a woman should suffer and lose all, while he who led her encounters no share of evil from his acts’, wrote his friend Edward Lear. In several paintings Hunt attacked the double standard, stressing the greater culpability of men. His Two Gentlemen of Verona (‘one gentleman and a half’, quipped the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) shows Valentine rescuing Silvia from Proteus’s sexual assault. His scene from Measure for Measure shows Claudio asking his sister to sacrifice her virginity to save his life.

Showing a contemporary seducer, The Awakening Conscience came closer to home. It was also more personal, thanks to Hunt’s pretty young model, Annie Miller, whom he plucked from the slums, and could so easily have used and abandoned. Instead, on departing for the Holy Land, he left her in the care of fellow-artists, with strict instructions that Annie should ‘be a good girl’ until his return.

The painting was ‘heaped with all sorts of abuse in a most unfeeling and uncharitable manner.’ The best verdict was that it was both ugly and incomprehensible. But this was masculine obfuscation, as Punch’s reviewer explained. ‘I see a courageous determination to face one of the rifest evils of our time and to read all of us youth a terrible lesson,’ he wrote. ‘Some tell me he has not succeeded – that his moral is obscure and his story unintelligible. I can only answer, that for my part I wish both were more of a riddle to me.’ He added, in words addressed to male viewers: ‘Tell us more home truths. Set us face to face with our great sins again and again.’

If rightly read, The Awakening Conscience was a major intervention into mid-Victorian debate. If a remorseful fallen woman was to be damned, the man responsible should also be outcast.

Jan Marsh is a curator and author of Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. She has contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision.

'Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision' is at Manchester Art Gallery until 11 January 2009.

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