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Page 128 clasped in a rubbing motion in front of her, eyes staring, not at us but at some internal vision. Meadows lights the figure dramatically from below with the oil-lamp on the table, creating a large looming shadow behind Lady Macbeth and over the upper part of her body, and leaving the bottom of her face only partly lit. Her continued association with the shadow of evil is thus brought to a dramatic climax. Meadows’s Lady Macbeth is woman as Other, as Demon, the dark side of womanhood that, as Nina Auerbach (1982) and Bram Dijkstra (1986) have shown, both fascinated and frightened the mid-and late-nineteenth century. The culmination of the iconography begun by Meadows is the serpent-woman of the turn of the century —the Lilith, Lamia, Salammbô figures—who are threatening and emasculating, as was the New Woman.12 Sargent’s portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (1889) grows out of this tradition. Terry wears her hair in long auburn braids entwined with ribbons that spill down over her shoulders. Her floor-length dress, made for the Henry Irving production of 1888, is slinky and shiny in shades of blue-green, and the long sleeves flow back off her elbows, catching sparks of light as she holds the crown triumphantly over her head. Terry herself wrote: It seems strange to me that anyone can think of Lady Macbeth as a sort of monster, abnormally hard, abnormally cruel, or visualize her as a woman of powerful physique, with the muscles of a prize fighter! … I conceive Lady Macbeth as a small, slight woman of acute nervous sensibility…on the terms of equals [with her husband]. (1932:160–61) Sargent nevertheless paints Terry as a commanding figure who holds the crown aloft with defiant pleasure in a moment that we never see in the play. She becomes, as Auerbach cogently notes, the ‘‘icon of divine-demonic woman” (1982:207).13 Terry’s costume designer, Alice Comyns-Carr, wrote that she “‘was anxious to make this particular dress look as much like soft chain armour as I could, and yet have something that would give the appearance of the scales of a serpent’” (cited in Ashton 1980:66). Beetle wings were sewn over the material to make it look even more shiny and scale-like, creating an imposing Eve-serpent figure who gleams out of the half-twilight of the painting. The portrait of Ellen Terry marks the culmination of the lengthy |
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