By Keri O’Shea
When we, at least we in the modern West, think about the physical embodiment of death, perhaps the first thing which comes to mind is the figure of the Grim Reaper – a cowled, skeletal character, and one who is typically either straightforwardly masculine, or possibly ambiguous, but certainly not feminine. And yet, throughout the history of the arts in Europe, ‘Death’ has manifested in both male and female form. When I think about the relationship between death and femininity, I always first think of the ubiquity, thanks to the advent of the Gutenberg Press no doubt, of the Danse Macabre (see above) – a popular motif which depicts Death as the Great Leveller, calling to rich and poor, male and female, but not feminine per se. There’s also a strong later tradition of depicting the figure of Death as a menace to (often feminine) youth and beauty, such as in Hans Baldung Grien’s Death and a Woman – a motif which has endured from Nosferatu to the present in horror cinema – but still Death itself does not appear as female here, and although there are instances in literature and painting during the Medieval period, it generally seems much harder to call these to mind. That is, until we come to the Nineteenth Century.
Nosferatu followed hot upon the heels of a fascinating century indeed, one which brought a wave of depictions of Death as distinctly feminine. Massive population increase, devastating epidemics, changing attitudes to the relationships between men and women and an upsurge in the types and availability of the arts, to name just a few factors, fuelled some interesting, and deeply loaded Lady Deaths – in fact, femininity became conflated with death itself in ways which had never been quite so overt. The Nineteenth Century was a time where art, poetry, literature and music was stitched to current cultural attitudes to death in a way it never had been before; this also helped to form the bedrock of the modern horror tradition which we now know and love. A maelstrom of Penny Dreadfuls, true crime, pulp fiction, new monsters and femmes fatales combined in this era, helping to forge a large number more than the three pieces of art I’ve selected below. However, those in the selection have been chosen because they each conflate femininity and death in different, compelling ways.
Félicien Rops – Parodie Humaine (1878)
Belgian artist Rops has strong associations with the Symbolist art movement, but for me he is always the chronicler of the Parisian demi-monde. His drawings and paintings are teeming with the people of the darkest streets; the debased, the fallen, the desperate. His representations of the women who formed part of this world are particularly striking: for evidence of this, compare and contrast contemporary advertisements for Parisian absinthe, which was a massively popular tipple at the time, and then look at Rops’ own absinthe-drinkers; the women of the adverts are all rude health and vigour, whilst the absintheuses are invariably sickly, skinny and predatory. The painting I have chosen goes even further than showing the woman at the street corner as predatory, however; in what has come to be known as La Parodie Humaine (Rops wasn’t too hot on titling his works) the woman is in fact the figure of death, a leering skull hidden behind a mask of beauty and grace. For the somewhat faceless man approaching her, whom she may try to engage as a client, she is the promise of his own demise.
Rops was working at a time when poverty, addiction and also, for at least some of these women, the power to shake off the confining world of marriage and children, sent thousands of women onto the streets. Even for those women who had other ways to feed themselves, they could still find themselves supplementing their earnings by occasionally working as prostitutes; those who were settled at home could yet find their circumstances changed overnight. In an age where there was no concept of State support, there was little other option for many women, and thus the proliferation of venereal disease was inevitable where population growth, destitution and sex as commerce reigned. What Rops has represented symbolically here simply reflects the beliefs of the times – that it was the street-walkers who bore the blame for the spread of diseases like syphilis. As incorrect and unfair as we might see that now, there was definitely much to fear from these infections, and the anxiety at the heart of La Parodie Humaine was that a beautiful woman was in fact the route to illnesses which ultimately promised deformity, madness, and death.
Thomas Cooper Gotch – Death The Bride (1895)
Gotch’s Bride, painted around twenty years after Rops completed La Parodie Humaine, actually, at least ostensibly, has more in common with the radiant women of the old absinthe adverts, with her even complexion, regular features and blithe smile. As she looks directly at us, she is symbolically moving aside her bridal veil, signifying perhaps that the marriage rites are complete – but oddly her veil is jet black, and together with the dark fabric of her dress is far more reminiscent of Victorian mourning garb than a bridal outfit. Gotch’s image of Death as a beautiful young bride is one of the better-known paintings on this theme from the time for the way in which it conflates marriage with dying, Eros with Thanatos, in a way which strongly resonated with the Victorian era.
Sex at this time was synonymous with death, and not just in the way in which Rops represented above, with the implication of disease: the first task undertaken by many newly-married women in the era would be to alter their wedding-clothes into their own shrouds, so expected was a premature demise – but not necessarily through venereal illness. Complications in childbirth killed millions of women during the century; marriage and children may have been socially sanctified and codified, but married women were really no better protected against bleeding to death or dying of infections than the lowliest prostitutes. And yet, for all of this, the Victorians romanticised death in a way which has never been seen before. It was the conventional way of coming to terms with the proximity of death, and the sheer number of deaths which it was commonplace for average families to bear. A new industry of death sprang up, ranging from sentimental verse, commemorative cartes des visites, postmortem photography, memorial jewellery, funeral services and mourning clothing. The clothes which it was permissible for women in mourning to wear was dictated (at least for literate middle class women) by a series of thorough rules: if not followed correctly, these could result in social stigma. Yet, the black crepe dresses and veils were also subject to fashion, expected to show off the waist and the figure just like any other clothing. Gotch’s bride could be seen as symbolic of the way in which young brides balanced sex, or sexuality, with death.
However, her significance broadens when you consider the flowers which both surround her and adorn her. Poppies, with their association with the god Morpheus, the God of Sleep, provided a chemical agent which was the drug of choice during the Nineteenth Century: morphine, more usually rendered into opium or the alcohol-tincture laudanum, served multiple purposes, forming the bedrock of everything from from teething agents for babies to depression medication. It was also used, if not recreationally at least habitually, by millions seeking relief from the industrial drudgery or domestic boredom of their everyday lives, and it was commonplace in accidental deaths, suicides, and murder. Morphine, put simply, offered multiple ways for the people of the century to die. It was necessary, relied upon – and it was dangerous too. Coincidentally, one of the most recognisable women of the century, the Pre-Raphaelite model Lizzie Siddall, used the drug to kill herself; her lover Rossetti eulogised her in his painting Beata Beatrix, where she appears, traced posthumously from his sketches, descending into the eternal sleep, with ephemeral poppy-flowers hovering above her folded hands. To return to Gotch, surrounding his beautiful woman with flowers for whom the symbolism would be obvious to all who looked upon her renders her more of an ambiguous figure than she may at first seem to modern viewers; perhaps that gentle smile threatens harm as well as repose, perhaps that wedding outfit is as symbolic of grief as love. The Bride is in many ways the model Victorian.
Alfred Kubin – The Best Doctor (1901-02)
At the close of the century, Kubin – the ‘Austrian Goya’ – established himself as an artist by illustrating some important and oft-macabre literature of the preceding century, working on texts by Edgar Allan Poe and Fyodor Dostoevsky, to name just two. His work was eventually declared ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis (a compliment if ever there was one) at the point in history where the nascent horror genre was forced into exile, leaving Germany for the safety of the States. As well as his work as an illustrator however, he worked frenetically on works of his own imagination, of which ‘The Best Doctor’ is one.
Of all of the paintings or drawings I’ve included here, this one for me is the most genuinely horrific. A man lies, dying or dead, his hands clasped in prayer – as a female Death lowers over him, dressed in what looks like evening dress, but laughingly closing his eyes like a medic or a priest would, or even smothering him with her hand. Her stance is matter-of-fact, and her face – partially skeletal, with hanging locks of hair, is truly repellent. There’s none of the beauty of Gotch’s Bride and not even any of the artifice of Goya’s street-walker, who at least hides her true ugliness. Kubin’s depiction of Death has more in common with the ghouls and zombies we might recognise in horror today than with the other versions of same here. It could be said that Kubin is, in this respect, looking forward into the Twentieth Century.
But what of the painting’s significance? The title seems to ironically suggest that the ghastly woman can do what the best physician cannot. Yet, in closing the man’s eyes, it suggests that he is already dead. Whether Kubin is implying that all the advances in medicine are ultimately meaningless, or whether he is suggesting that the monstrous woman, in her fashionable evening clothes but with her decaying body, is perhaps emblematic of the inherent danger of women as seen by the artist, is to the best of my knowledge, unknown. There certainly seems to be some cruelty in the actions of this Lady Death which is missing in the other pieces of art, which helps to establish Kubin’s work as a disturbing one, and to my mind far more menacing than the Grim Reapers with which we’re so familiar today.
After a night of bruise-inducing sex which is refracted through a trippy, psychedelic array of filters and colours, we meet our nameless female protagonist (played by Kayden Rose) and find her fairly nonchalant about her injuries. She seems fairly unresponsive to most things, actually – her activity partner’s attitude towards her, her shitty landlord, her friend who seems desperate to become a slightly more considerate friend-with-benefits…that is, until her injuries, rather than healing, begin to mysteriously worsen. Soon her fingernails are dropping off, her hair is shedding – in fact, she seems to be decomposing. At first, she’s terrified – but soon enough she seems to being finding it all quite liberating. The worse she looks, the better she feels, and the more able she seems to feel to put things in her life order once and for all.
