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ARTICLES

Elizabeth Siddal's Hair: A Methodology for Queer Reading

Pages 370-386 | Published online: 16 Dec 2011
 

Notes

1This is reminiscent of Noreen Giffney's work on Monster's Inc. (Giffney Citation2009).

2I discuss this in full in my Ph.D. thesis ‘Reading Hair Queer’ (Tondeur Citation2007a). Specifically relevant to this essay, in my thesis I look in more detail at hair on the borders of the body, performativity and the fetish in relation to death, and discuss the scope of the ‘academic study’ of hair which, according to Ingrid Banks's Hair Matters (Banks Citation2000), begins with Freud's 1922 essay ‘Medusa's Head’ (Freud Citation1981). See also Tondeur (Citation2007b).

3I use ‘mismatches’ and ‘decentres’ in my thesis to refer to Derrida's 1967 essay ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ (Derrida Citation2005).

4Jan Marsh describes this ‘myth-making around the exhumation’ in The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal (Marsh Citation1992: 29).

5Galia Ofek's 2005 thesis, ‘Hair Mad’, has since been published as Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture (Ofek Citation2009).

6I was shown some ancient Egyptian hair artefacts in the British Museum, including the 3000-year-old wig pictured in Joann Fletcher's ‘A Tale of Hair, Wigs and Lice’ (Fletcher Citation1994). My guide also pointed me to Joann Fletcher's chapter, ‘Hair’, in Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology (Fletcher Citation2000).

7Ludwig Jansen discusses how the ‘known sinner’ who washed Jesus's feet with her hair in the biblical story in Luke 7 was assumed to be Mary Magdalen. In works of art, she is often given stock attributes: flowing hair, a hair veil or a hair-covered body, ointment in a jar and items of vanity/repentance.

8In her thesis on Victorian hair, Galia Ofek discusses illustrations of the Lady of Shalott and links the motif of weaving to the Lady of Shalott's wild hair in such drawings (Ofek Citation2005: 77–9). Jan Marsh includes the picture in The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal (Marsh Citation1992).

9Elizabeth Siddal's poem ‘Early Death’ is also cited in Elizabeth Siddal: Pre-Raphaelite Artist 1829–1862, which formed a catalogue to the exhibition of the same name at the Ruskin Gallery, Sheffield, in 1991 (Marsh Citation1991: 35).

10See Jolly (Citation2004: plates 35–7). I thank curator Penny Jolly for her hospitality.

11See also Tiggemann and Kenyon (Citation1998).

12I discuss this in more detail in the first chapter of my Ph.D. thesis (Tondeur Citation2007a).

13This is discussed in Marsh (Citation1992: 12–15).

14The herb ‘meadowsweet’ looks similar to the ‘cow parsley’ Marsh sees in Highgate Cemetery (Marsh Citation1992: 1).

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