The Queer Mermaids of Edward Burne-Jones
Cecilia Rose (she/her)
In 1880, eminent Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones purchased a house in Rottingdean, near Brighton in East Sussex. It was meant to be a peaceful retreat for his wife and three children where the family could recuperate from bustling London life over the summer, and a ‘fresh start’ following the ending of Burne-Jones’s scandalous high profile affair with his model and muse, Maria Zambaco. Over the next decade the house became the family home for most of the year, and both Burne-Jones and his wife Georgiana have fond memories of their early years there. Its proximity to the sea seems to have inspired a host of mermaid imagery: initially the pictures appear to be exploring the idea of motherhood and family, perhaps reflecting the comparative domestic bliss Burne-Jones was experiencing at this time, and the shifting focus onto his wife and children. However, his last – and largest – mermaid study, The Depths of the Sea, possesses darker undertones and suggests a more sinister side being applied to the queer mermaid figure.
In Mermaid with Children (1880) [see Fig. 1], The Mermaid Family (1882)[See Fig. 2] or The Mermaid (1882) [See Fig. 3], we can see that a sense of innocence is attributed to the mermaid figure, akin to loveable figures from popular children’s stories The Little Mermaid (1837) or The Water Babies (1862).The feminine mother figure is caressing her cherub-like offspring in a loving and protective manner whilst they frolic playfully among the waves. Both mother and child in The Mermaid are even reminiscent of the widespread iconography of the Virgin Mary cradling the infant Jesus: here we see mermaids being raised to an almost divine status, as models of love and domestic harmony. It is curious that no father figure is present in any of these images. This supports the Victorian reproductive theories applied to the mermaid figure, inspired by Darwinian thinking, which proclaim that mermaids are ‘hermaphrodite’ creatures who breed through pathogenesis and therefore do not require a spouse. However, this absence also reflects the artist’s conviction that the women’s place is in the home, and that they should be left to excel in the domestic sphere rather than attempt to compete with their male counterparts for a voice or a career. Whilst the images are delightful and warming in their own way, they hark back to the artist’s disparaging remarks about women gaining the vote, and his bitterness against women like fellow artist Evelyn De Morgan and model Maria Zambaco, who, through their actions, threaten to disrupt the Victorian nuclear family.
However, in the latter half of the 1880s his depiction of the mermaid began to change. She shifted from being the Madonna-like ‘angel in the house’ to the seductive femme fatale, merging with the Greek sirens. He began to work towards a large-scale oil painting to be exhibited at the Royal Academy, of which he had recently been persuaded to become an associate. He toyed with the idea of a mermaid coming across a drowned man, and in 1885 produced a study [See Fig. 4] which Georgiana published in The Flower Book (a series of small watercolours painted in Rottingdean) in 1905 after his death. We can already see in this study that, though the mermaid has not become actively evil and is merely a passive observer, she is no longer the feminine, maternal figure of his earlier studies. She is more rectangular in shape, with any curves or breasts now almost completely absent, possessing a more masculine torso – and her cherub-like babies are nowhere to be seen. The presence of a man is another key difference: he is not flourishing in his own separate realm, but is instead limp and helpless, and in a far weaker position than the marine entity placed physically and metaphorically above him. His delicate features, full nudity and lack of muscle emasculate him and make him appear almost ridiculous to a spectator. Like the sailors of The Sirens, he is trapped in a world that is not his own. The mermaid’s expression seems to be one of uncertainty: she is not sure what to do with her find, but regards him with a cold curiosity.
In his final oil painting, The Depths of the Sea (1886) [See Fig. 5], the mermaid is no longer a passive onlooker, but an active perpetrator. She is a strange hybrid between a mermaid and a siren: physically, a mermaid, but behaviourally, a murderous siren, dragging a corpse to the bottom of the ocean with a compelling satisfied smirk that is, as Kestner observes, ‘enough to make anyone feel nervous’ (Kestner, 103). The implication is that, unlike the curious witness in Grave of the Sea, she has been the active cause of his death, and is proudly claiming her prize for her underwater lair. Burne-Jones planned the piece meticulously, and borrowed a large tank from his friend Henry Holiday, which he filled with water and various objects, so that he could study the effect of weight and light on the underwater scene. He consulted Royal Academy president Frederick Leighton on achieving the most authentic marine environment: it was Leighton who suggested that he add the small shoal of fish in the top right hand corner. Critics, though mixed in their reviews of the somewhat troubling picture, acknowledged the time and dedication required to produce such a piece on such a large scale: F.G. Stevens, for example, noted that it was ‘finished with extraordinary care’ (McCarthy, 369). Why he chose to take such pains with this piece was partly due to the fact that it was to be his first exhibit at The Royal Academy, displayed at the renowned Summer Exhibition. It had to appeal to the masses and establish his popularity, but also profess his worthiness to be among the elite in the art world. The theme and title was engineered to appeal to the Victorian imagination: the name may have been inspired by an expedition of 1872, on board the ship The Challenger, which sought to discover and identify new sea life and publish it in a book. The Scientific Director of the expedition, Charles Wyville Thomson, published this book in 1873, and it was called The Depths of the Sea. Most of the educated clientele visiting the Academy would have been aware of this work: it was instantly a best seller, as people were fascinated by the possibility of the strange and wonderful creatures that could be found in our oceans. It prompted a belief in the potential existence of all kinds of forms of life – perhaps even mermaids – and stimulated a curiosity about the deep sea which Burne-Jones tapped into with his arresting oil painting. It also would have reminded spectators of the Greek Siren legends, adding to the mass of siren and mermaid iconography displayed at the academy – including that of the president Frederick Leighton himself.
However, though the parallels with Greek sirens are evident, there are many respects in which this painting diverges from the myth. Firstly, she is depicted with a fish tail, perhaps partly to accommodate the fact that she is in her underwater lair and needs to be well adapted for retrieving her capture; the merging of physical and behavioural features of mermaid and siren figures was not uncommon in the art of the period, particularly among Pre-Raphaelites. It would seem that many Victorian artists had not studied the legends in enough depth to honour the differences between the two, but the same cannot be said for Burne-Jones: he had produced many studies fairly faithful to the Greek, and during the 1880s his closest friend William Morris was working on a translation of the Odyssey, upon which they almost certainly would have conferred. The decision to make this siren fish-tailed was therefore not one borne of ignorance, but, I believe, a stylistic and aesthetic choice to make her appear less feminine, and instead more of a threatening, androgynous entity. The presence of a tail removes the vagina and replaces it with a phallic object – one which makes her stronger and more agile than her male counterparts in the realm of the deep. Her torso is very muscular, in comparison to the limp and bony figures she carries, and her breasts are small, muscular and only partially visible. Her arms completely obscure his genitalia, which Linda Austern describes as a ‘double castration’: he is stripped of his masculinity both metaphorically and physically (Austern, 195). There is no doubt as to who is the dominant party here. Thus, whilst the painting embodies the desires of the Victorian public to engage with the possibilities of the deep sea, it also embodies their fears as well: the fear of women in positions of power, of them gaining the vote, and of them eventually dragging down the patriarchy. The fatal mermaid could also be symbolic of the venereal disease crisis faced by Victorian Britain at the time. Syphilis had wiped out a third of the armed forces, and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases led to a campaign to deter men from visited prostitutes who may be carrying them. The idea of a siren/mermaid figure seducing a man to his death is reminiscent of the warnings of the government – if we take the mermaid to be symbolic of a prostitute, the message is a clear warning to steer clear upon pain of death.
The figure upon which the mermaid is based has been the subject of much speculation. She has of course been perceived by several critics as a ‘throwback to Maria Zambaco’, as a seductive siren symbolically dragging down her male lover into a dark abyss (MacCarthy, 367). Beatrice Laurent suggests that it specifically relates to her attempt to drown herself in the Regent’s Canal, and to bring him down with her in her plans for a suicide pact: she is essentially triumphantly claiming him for his own and taking him away from his earthly existence, including his wife and family (Laurent, 181). Maria could certainly have contributed to this marine femme fatale – the parallels with her double suicide plans, and the likelihood that he still dwelt upon what was a seminal turning point in his life, make it highly plausible. However, the sly and victorious face, which ‘recalls, and is as ambiguous as, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa’, is very different to Zambaco’s, who possessed distinctive Greek chiselled features and wide brown eyes (Harrison, 143). This more delicate, small-featured visage has been identified as one belonging to family friend Laura Tennant (later Laura Lyttleton):
“Half-child, half-Kelpie,” an admirer, Donn Liddell, had described the daughter of the wealthy Scottish industrialist and Liberal MP Sir Charles Tennant. At The Grange [London residence of Edward and Georgiana Burne-Jones], where they all loved her, she was known as ‘the Siren’. Burne-Jones was enthralled by her sexual precocity: “With so much fuel and fire as she has in her, she can surely make something splendid of her life” (Christian, 265).
Unfortunately, his ambitions for her were never realised as, tragically, at the age of 23, Laura died in childbirth in the very same year that Burne-Jones began work on the painting. He reportedly felt ‘bitter despair at the death of Laura’, and ‘never quite got over it’: such sentiments, as well as her comparisons to sea-dwelling mythical creatures, lend strong support to the idea that The Depths of the Sea was produced as a posthumous tribute to Laura – ‘the Siren’ (MacCarthy, 339). Georgiana supported this interpretation, stating that “the face of the mermaid had some likeness to her strange charm of expression” (Kestner, 116). Perhaps she merely said this partially to detract viewers away from the association with Maria Zambaco, but the fact that Burne-Jones produced a memorial to Laura in 1887 and told friends that he was ‘nigh unto despair’ whilst he worked on the piece, in the aftermath of her death, adds further credence to the theory (Christian, 265). However, the mystery deepens with the knowledge that connoisseurs assessing the preparatory sketches made for the head of the mermaid claim that they have ‘all the appearance of having been made from a professional model’ – in which case it could not have been Laura, for she had died by the time these sketches were made (Christian, 265). Perhaps she was therefore an unknown art model hired in London or Sussex to sit for this piece alone. Other more outlandish theories regarding the mermaid’s inspiration range from the Mona Lisa herself to a nixie the artist encountered in a woodland well (Christian, 265). Due to the mystery surrounding her, Burne-Jones’s 1886 mermaid has acquired almost mythical status, but I believe she is likely to be a result of a range of influences, including Maria Zambaco, Laura Tennant, an unidentified professional model, and his imagined concept of the androgynous femme fatale.
Though the painting has been the subject of critical interest in more recent years, from the likes of Alison Smith (2018), Ludovic Le Saux (2019) and Beatrice Laurent (2022) - generally pertaining to its gender role reversal, which we celebrate today – at the time the painting was lost among the crowded multitude of works displayed at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Nineteenth century critic Malcolm Bell, having attended the show, reflected that the painting was ‘not seen to advantage in the glare and confusion of the academy walls, and the artist later wisely refrained from submitting his productions to so undesirable an ordeal’ (Bell, 63). Burne-Jones himself corroborated this, stating that the painting was ‘entirely lost’, whilst The Times criticised the Academy’s decision to surround The Depths of the Sea with portraits of ladies in red, demonstrating a failure ‘to provide Mr Burne-Jones’s mermaid with proper neighbours’ (MacCarthy, 367). Around two thousand paintings were hung in close proximity, with the abutting images of bright coloured dresses detracting from the dark and mysterious mermaid. After The Depths of the Sea, he never exhibited there again, making it his one and only Academy appearance, and resigned his Associateship: in a private letter to his friend May Gaskell, he confessed, with regards to the sixty members of the Academy, that, ‘It is an honour to be associated with about six of them – and nothing at all to associated with about a dozen of them – and a positive disgrace to be allied with the rest’ (MacCarthy, 370). It therefore seems fitting that his sole submission should be of a man dragged down into obscurity by a powerful, fearsome entity; retrospectively, it could be regarded as symbolic of his own fate at the hands of the Academy itself. Thus, the mermaid of The Depths of the Sea represents contextual male anxieties concerning the role of women in society, prostitution and perceived emasculation, but also more personal vendettas that Burne-Jones may have had against both the academy and the seductive sirens of his own life.
Works Cited
Bell, Malcolm, Sir Edward Burne-Jones – A Record and Review (London: George Bell & Sons, 1898).
Christian, John, Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998).
Harrison, Martin, and Waters, Bill, Burne-Jones (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1973).
Kestner, Joseph, ‘Edward Burne-Jones and the Nineteenth Century Fear of Women’ in Biography, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring, 1984).
Laurent, Beatrice, ‘Monster or Missing Link? The Mermaid and the Victorian Imagination’ in Cahiers victoriens et édouardians, Vol. 85, No. 1 (2017).
Laurent, Beatrice, Women and Water in the Victorian Imagination (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021).
McCarthy, Fiona, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (London: Faber & Faber, 2011).
The Music of the Sirens ed. by Inna Naroditskaya, Linda Austern and Linda Phyllis Austern (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2006).
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