Elizabeth Siddal's Hair: A Methodology for Queer Reading

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹This is reminiscent of Noreen Giffney's work on Monster's Inc. (Giffney 2009).

²I discuss this in full in my Ph.D. thesis ‘Reading Hair Queer’ (Tondeur 2007a). 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 2000), begins with Freud's 1922 essay ‘Medusa's Head’ (Freud 1981). See also Tondeur (2007b).

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 2005).

⁴Jan Marsh describes this ‘myth-making around the exhumation’ in The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal (Marsh 1992: 29).

⁵Galia Ofek's 2005 thesis, ‘Hair Mad’, has since been published as Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture (Ofek 2009).

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 1994). My guide also pointed me to Joann Fletcher's chapter, ‘Hair’, in Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology (Fletcher 2000).

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 2005: 77–9). Jan Marsh includes the picture in The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal (Marsh 1992).

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 1991: 35).

¹⁰See Jolly (2004: plates 35–7). I thank curator Penny Jolly for her hospitality.

¹¹See also Tiggemann and Kenyon (1998).

¹²I discuss this in more detail in the first chapter of my Ph.D. thesis (Tondeur 2007a).

¹³This is discussed in Marsh (1992: 12–15).

¹⁴The herb ‘meadowsweet’ looks similar to the ‘cow parsley’ Marsh sees in Highgate Cemetery (Marsh 1992: 1).