Elizabeth Siddal's Hair: a Methodology for Queer Reading Louise Tondeur Available Online: 16 Dec 2011

This article was downloaded by: [Louise Tondeur] On: 19 December 2011, At: 07:41 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Women: A Cultural Review Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwcr20 Elizabeth Siddal's Hair: A Methodology for Queer Reading Louise Tondeur Available online: 16 Dec 2011 To cite this article: Louise Tondeur (2011): Elizabeth Siddal's Hair: A Methodology for Queer Reading, Women: A Cultural Review, 22:4, 370-386 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2011.618680 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. LOUISE TONDEUR w ....................................................................................................... Elizabeth Siddal’s Hair: A Methodology for Queer Reading What Is So Queer About Elizabeth Siddal? Thus, when Margaretta Jolly ...says ...‘I’m not talking about being happy, I’m talking about being changed. Thinking differently’ she is implicitly describing a new language of analysis that will allow people to think in different ways ...thinking differently remains an ongoing experiment. (Armstrong et al. 2010: 4) When I read the foreword to the twenty-first-anniversary issue of Women: A Cultural Review, I was struck by the ways in which ‘thinking differently’ arose from acts of writing and reading. This chimed strongly with my own thinking about how, far from being a passive act, reading acts on the text that is being read. ‘Desert Island Texts?’ was an example of this kind of reading in action, especially given the number of different Downloaded by [Louise Tondeur] at 07:41 19 December 2011 voices placed side by side*a vivid illustration of ‘writing [that] can generate forms of action it may not even predict’ (ibid.: 9), Further, ‘Desert Island Texts?’ illustrates that reading ‘can generate forms of action’ that the text ‘may not even predict’. Reading can do something to a text to make it odd, strange, unsettling, anti-normative. In other words, one can read a text queer. On Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Rachel Blau DuPlessis suggests that ‘a counter-hegemonic stance must ...give pleasure’ (Alex- ander et al. 2010: 10). Defamiliarization, seeming triviality and oddness .................................................................................................................................... Women: a cultural review Vol. 22. No. 4. ISSN 0957-4042 print/ISSN 1470-1367 online # 2011 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2011.618680 ELIZABETH SIDDAL’S HAIR × 371 ....................................................................................................... can all contribute to the ‘pleasure’ of ‘counter-hegemonic’ reading, something one witnesses, for example, in Judith Halberstam’s reading of the animation Chicken Run, where the animation is called, enjoyably, a ‘narrative of resistance, revolt and utopia’ (ibid.: 53).1 Plus, as Susan Sellers points out, describing the work of Cixous, ‘this insurgent women’s writing begins with the body’ (Armstrong et al. 2010: 4), and the particular part of the body I want to read queer is found at its boundaries.2 Hair could be read as queer in that it crosses the cultural boundaries of the body, because it embodies that which cannot be fixed, that which mismatches, defamiliarizes, destabilizes, disidentifies and decentres.3 A queering act or process such as this would be a process in which these effects are produced, creating a possibility for disjuncture. A queering effect could be creative, chaotic, unwieldy, disruptive and strange. Queer reading, one could say, is a way of discovering*digging up*such a disrupting influence. Reading hair as queer is to search for its disrupting 1 This is reminiscent of influence. One way of doing that is to investigate hair’s relationship with Noreen Giffney’s death. work on Monster’s Inc. (Giffney 2009). There are several cultural figures whose hair has been given special 2 I discuss this in full in significance*Sampson, Medusa, Lady Godiva, Mary Magdalene and my Ph.D. thesis Rapunzel, for example, often providing a figurative link between hair, ‘Reading Hair Queer’ (Tondeur 2007a). reading and death. Elizabeth Siddal was a poet and an artist, but is Specifically relevant to most famous as a model for many Pre-Raphaelite paintings. One could this essay, in my thesis take Shakespeare’s ‘So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’ and I look in more detail at hair on the borders apply it to Beata Beatrix, for example*an image that uses Siddal as of the body, model but which was painted after her death. According to Angela performativity and the Dunstan: fetish in relation to death, and discuss the scope of the ‘academic study’ of hair which, Elizabeth Siddal left more of an artistic legacy than her fifteen according to Ingrid complete poems and one hundred drawings and paintings. Her life Downloaded by [Louise Tondeur] at 07:41 19 December 2011 Banks’s Hair Matters story has engendered a remarkable number of texts which offer (Banks 2000), begins insight not only into the cumulative process of myth creation, but to with Freud’s 1922 essay ‘Medusa’s Head’ the ongoing cultural obsession with this relatively unknown though (Freud 1981). See also highly recognizable figure. (Dunstan 2009: 26) Tondeur (2007b). 3 I use ‘mismatches’ and ‘decentres’ in my I should be clear that I am discussing the cultural phenomenon Elizabeth thesis to refer to Siddal, what Angela Dunstan calls ‘the Siddal sensation’ (ibid.: 25). The Derrida’s 1967 essay ‘Structure, Sign and beginning of Dunstan’s essay provides a precis of the life of ‘the historical Play in the Discourse woman distinct from the sensation’ (ibid.: 25Á6), but that is not what I of the Human am examining here. The reason I find Elizabeth Siddal fascinating is this: Sciences’ (Derrida 2005). according to Rossetti’s agent Charles Howell, when he retrieved the 372 × WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ....................................................................................................... poems buried with her, her beauty was preserved and her hair had filled her coffin.4 Galia Ofek discusses Elizabeth Siddal’s exhumation in relation to Victorian culture and, noting that Bram Stoker was Rossetti’s neigh- bour, cites his story ‘The Secret of Growing Gold’, where hair grows through cracks in the floor and kills the husband and new wife. Ofek suggests that the ‘visualization of Elizabeth’s tress as an overflowing, uncontrollable power testifies to Victorian concerns that all the discursive cultural efforts to contain and tame hair could not restrain women’s energy’ (Ofek 2005: 6). Thus, it seems that one way to ‘think differently’, to find ‘pleasure’ in ‘counter-hegemonic’ reading, one way to ‘begin with the body’ is to read the hair of the dead poet that apparently could not be contained by the grave. In this essay, I look at the cultural significance attributed to Elizabeth Siddal’s hair and, as a way of reading queer, I examine the link between hair, reading and death, where hair is a returning, insistent force, Fury-like and reiterative.5 4 Jan Marsh describes Broken Textual Promises this ‘myth-making around the exhumation’ in The Legend of Elizabeth Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade, Siddal (Marsh 1992: When in eternal lines to time thou growest; 29). 5 Galia Ofek’s 2005 So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, thesis, ‘Hair Mad’, has So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (Shakespeare 1961) since been published as Representations of Hair in Victorian Hair is fragile, but hair is also that which endures after death: if hair is Literature and Culture fragile, it is also tough. (As Joann Fletcher has shown, hair is one of (Ofek 2009). the most enduring materials found in ancient Egyptian tombs.)6 In 6 I was shown some Downloaded by [Louise Tondeur] at 07:41 19 December 2011 ancient Egyptian hair other words, one can read hair, via its relationship with death, as both artefacts in the British fragile and tough. It is this binary that operates at the heart of the Museum, including myth of the endurance, beauty and proliferation of Elizabeth Siddal’s the 3000-year-old wig hair after her death. Further, in the myth of Elizabeth Siddal’s hair, in pictured in Joann Fletcher’s ‘A Tale of its fragility and its toughness, one finds a deeper paradox, beyond what Hair, Wigs and Lice’ Karı´n Lesnik-Oberstein calls the apparent ‘ridiculous triviality’ of hair (Fletcher 1994). My (Lesnik-Oberstein 2007: 2). As is often the case in stories about hair, guide also pointed me to Joann Fletcher’s one finds underneath a story about death. chapter, ‘Hair’, in Famously, Shakespeare’s Sonnet XVIII, ‘Shall I Compare Thee to a Ancient Egyptian Summer’s Day?’, reiterates the fragility of both beauty and life, Materials and Technology (Fletcher specifically the beauty and life of the lover. In the final line, ‘So 2000). long lives this, and this gives life to thee’, one experiences a ELIZABETH SIDDAL’S HAIR × 373 ......................................................................................................

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