Lilith, Snow White, and male images of women in the 19th century
Lady Lilith, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
“And the lady of the house was seen only as she appeared in each room, according to the nature of the lord of the room. None saw the whole of her, none but herself. For the light which she was was both her mirror and her body.” —Laura Riding
In the first chapter of the classic feminist text The Madwoman in the Attic, “The Queen’s Looking Glass: Female Creativity, Male Images of Women, and the Metaphor of Literary Paternity”, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar analyze the legend of Lilith and the story of Snow White. Reading their analysis reminded me of the Dante Gabriel Rossetti painting above. Considering the painting after reading the chapter made me realize just how omnipresent the Lilith figure was during the 19th century.
Lilith was the original woman, according to apocryphal Judaic scripture. Created at the same time as Adam (which helps explain the two creation accounts in Genesis, the first being “Man and Woman he created them”), she refused to submit to Adam’s sexual authority, fled the Garden, and became the mother of monsters and the devourer of newborn children.
We can see her archetype appearing quite often in 19th century literature, which was, not coincidentally, when the movement for women’s liberation began. Lilith was a central figure in Goethe’s Faust. In poetry she appears as Coleridge’s Christabel (a succubi-like creature), as both Keat’s Lamia (a serpent woman) and his “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, the Lady without Mercy; in theater as Wilde’s Salome (the merciliess temptress); as Morgan Le Fey in the Arthurian Romances, which enjoyed renewed popularity at the time; and explicitly in George Macdonald’s novel Lilith. She haunts Baudelaire in his drug haze, she comes back to the dead as Ligeia in the story of that title by Poe (a beautiful woman’s death, Poe said, “is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world”). Wherever we look we find her. In every genre of literature, and in art, male authors at the time were creating pale-skinned, narcissistic succubi.
“Lamia and the Soldier”, by John William Waterhouse. What seems to be a cloth behind her knees and on the ground is her snake skin.
Freud’s image of the neurotic female, secretly wishing to castrate her male counterpart, is also disturbingly reminiscent of Lilith. As Freud noted, what is repressed becomes monstrous. If Freud seemed to think everything was actually about sex, it was perhaps because everything to do with sex was repressed. For cis men of course that meant everything to do with women.
Franz van Stuck’s “Sensuality”, from 1898, just as Freud was beginning to publish his works.
I did not immediately notice the detail of the background mirror in Rossetti’s Lady Lilith. I assumed it was a window to a day-lit forest. Then I saw the reflection of the two candles and the white rose. The self-obsessed Lilith can see even the natural world as merely a reflection of herself.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Continuum to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.