The moral concerns of Victorians were triggered by this interior, where new furnishings raised eyebrows.
William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1853, oil on canvas, 76.2 x 55.9 cm (Tate Britain, London). Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:03] We now live in a culture where the new is sought after, where the new is something that we want. But in Victorian culture, the new was something that was not always trusted.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:14] Ruskin referred to all the new furnishings in the painting that we’re looking at, William Holman Hunt’s “Awakening Conscience,” as having a “fatal newness.”
Dr. Zucker: [0:23] The newness of the piano. The newness of the table. The newness of the rug. All of this was meant to suggest a kind of falseness, actually. It’s a perfect example of the concerns of Victorian culture in this fabulous Pre-Raphaelite image.
Dr. Harris: [0:39] We’re looking at a kept woman, and we see her with her lover. We’re in a space that is her apartment, filled with brand-new furniture and new wallpaper and prints on the wall.
Dr. Zucker: [0:50] That he’s bought for her in order to create a pied-à-terre, a place that he can escape to.
Dr. Harris: [0:55] She’s probably of lowly origin. This is all standard narrative that Victorians knew and that had been repeated over and over again, of a girl who came from the countryside and became a fallen woman, or a kept woman, in the city.
Dr. Zucker: [1:09] Who’s compromised by a class above her.
Dr. Harris: [1:11] She’s been sitting on the lap of her lover, who’s been playing the piano. But unbeknownst to him, he plays a song that reminds her of her childhood. In that moment, she remembers her past innocence and experiences a spiritual awakening, an awakening of her conscience.
[1:31] She is a subject that we see often in Victorian painting. She’s a fallen woman, but at a moment of redemption.
Dr. Zucker: [1:37] Look at the way that Hunt, the artist, has organized the painting. We’re looking at her and we’re looking at her ensconced in all of this luxury of the home that he’s created for her, but this artificial place that’s not real.
Dr. Harris: [1:49] Where nothing is worn. Where nothing is used. Where nothing has been transformed by the life of a real family.
Dr. Zucker: [1:55] She’s facing almost towards us. We can see her reflection in the mirror in back of her and we can see that she’s looking towards the outside. Here nature and light take on the role of the spiritual, take on the role of the moral, that she needs to now move towards.
Dr. Harris: [2:11] That’s right, and that’s what interested Holman Hunt, who was a very religious man, and is using this modern-life subject to speak to a bigger issue of spiritual transformation and how God can come to us at unexpected moments.
Dr. Zucker: [2:26] Look how Hunt plays one figure against the next. She’s standing up, her posture is straightening as she is awakening her moral conscience. She’s contrasted against the man, who is the source of corruption, who is the source of her moral fall, and he is reclining. All of this is an entrapment. In fact, he holds her back. She’s going to have to literally break past that.
Dr. Harris: [2:49] I think one of the points that Hunt is trying to make is that the same person that can be the source of your sinfulness can be the same person who, unwittingly, provides the inspiration for your redemption, for your awakening. We have this inscription on the frame, “As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, so is he that singeth songs to a heavy heart.”
Dr. Zucker: [3:11] So here are weighty moral issues that are really spiritual. Yet what the artist is doing is placing these in his contemporary world, and, in a sense, not showing biblical stories, but showing stories that resonate as social problems in his immediate world.
Dr. Harris: [3:24] And making it all very material and real in that typical Pre-Raphaelite way, painting the furnishings of the room with incredible exactitude, and making everything in the room have symbolic value.
Dr. Zucker: [3:37] We know that the artists were looking back not to the Baroque, not to the Renaissance, but to artists immediately before that. Specifically, this is an artist who is probably looking at somebody like Jan van Eyck — perhaps the “Arnolfini Wedding Portrait,” which is in the National Gallery in London — and was understanding that objects within a room can have a secondary symbolic meaning.
Dr. Harris: [3:56] This painting would need to be read by its viewers. Hunt is asking us to look closely at all of the elements in the room and to think about what they mean in terms of the narrative that he’s telling of this woman’s spiritual awakening.
Dr. Zucker: [4:10] For instance, if we look under the table on the left, you can see a cat, and if you look very closely, you can see that that cat has caught a bird, and this is clearly an analogy to the man and the woman. He has kept her. He has caught her.
Dr. Harris: [4:22] The Pre-Raphaelites were concerned with, as you said, these very serious moral subjects, and modern life’s problems, and taking those on.
Dr. Zucker: [4:30] So an artist who’s using art history in order to explicate contemporary subjects, contemporary moral dilemmas, some of the driving issues of the day.
[4:38] [music]
William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1853, oil on canvas, 76.2 x 55.9 cm (Tate Britain, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
A fallen woman (with a new twist)
William Holman Hunt’s painting, The Awakening Conscience, addresses the common Victorian narrative of the fallen woman (for more about this subject, see Stanhope’s Thoughts of the Past). Trapped in a newly decorated interior, Hunt’s heroine at first appears to be a stereotype of the age, a young unmarried woman engaged in an illicit liaison with her lover. This is made clear by the fact that she is partially undressed in the presence of a clothed man and wears no wedding ring.
Couple (detail), William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1853, oil on canvas, 76.2 x 55.9 cm (Tate Britain, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
However, Hunt offers a new twist on this story. The young woman springs up from her lover’s lap. She is reminded of her country roots by the music the man plays (the sheet music to Thomas Moore’s Oft in the Stilly Night sits on the piano), causing her to have an awakening prick of conscience.
The symbolism of the picture makes her situation—as a woman who is financially supported by her lover—clear. The enclosed interior, the cat playing with a bird under the chair, and the man’s one discarded glove on the floor all speak to the precarious position the woman has found herself in. However, as she stands up, a ray of light illuminates her from behind, almost like a halo, offering the viewer hope that she may yet find the strength to redeem herself.
Cat, bird, and glove (detail), William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1853, oil on canvas, 76.2 x 55.9 cm (Tate Britain, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The theme of the fallen woman was popular in Victorian art, echoing the prevalence of sex work in Victorian society. Hunt’s redemptive message is unusual when compared to other examples of this theme. For example, Richard Redgrave’s The Outcast, which shows a young unwed mother and her baby being cast out into the snow by her disgraced father, while the rest of her family pleads for mercy. Countless other paintings of the period emphasize the perils of stepping outside the bounds of acceptable morality with the typical conclusion to the story being that the woman is ostracized, and inevitably, suffers a premature death. By contrast, Hunt offers the viewer the hope that the young woman in his painting is truly repentant and can ultimately reclaim her life.
Woman and reflection in the mirror (detail), William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1853, oil on canvas, 76.2 x 55.9 cm (Tate Britain, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Pre-Raphaelite in style
The Awakening Conscience is one of the few Pre-Raphaelite paintings to deal with a subject from contemporary life, but it still retains the truth to nature and attention to detail common to the style. The texture of the carpet, the reflection in the mirror behind the girl and the carvings of the furniture all speak to to Hunt’s unwavering belief that the artist should recreate the scene as closely as possible, and paint from direct observation. To do that, he hired a room in the neighborhood of St. John’s Wood. The picture was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1854, and unfortunately for Hunt, met with a mixed reception. While art critic John Ruskin praised the attention to detail, many critics disliked the subject of the painting and ignored the more positive spiritual message.
A deeply religious man
For Hunt, the moral of the story was an important element in any of his subjects. He was a deeply religious man and committed to the principles of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and John Ruskin. In fact, shortly after this painting was completed, Hunt embarked on a journey to the Holy Land, convinced that in order to paint religious subjects, he had to go to the actual source for inspiration. The fact that a trip to the Holy Land was a difficult, expensive and dangerous journey at the time was immaterial to him.
The Awakening Conscience is an unconventional approach to a common subject. Hunt’s work reflects the ideal of Christian charity espoused in theory by many Victorians, but not exactly put into practice when dealing with the issue of the fallen woman. While others emphasized the consequences of one’s actions as a way of discouraging inappropriate behavior, Hunt maintained that the truly repentant can change their lives.
