John Everett Millais - Mariana

John Everett Millais, Mariana, 1851, oil on mahogany panel, Tate Britain, London

A young woman stretches her aching back languorously having just risen from her stool where she has spent a lengthy time sitting, working on a piece of decorative needlework. This is a painting about feeling. Standing in profile as if unobserved by us the viewers, we recognise and can share in the sensuous pleasure of that delicious relief that spine elongation delivers – we’ve all felt it ourselves. With her hands placed at the small of her back, she presses not just on her bodily frame, straightening from her just-now hunched position but also feels the velvety fabric of her full-length blue dress under her fingers while simultaneously experiencing the sunlight from outside caressing her face. Meanwhile a candle burns hotly in the corner’s darkness and illuminates a devotional altar, complete with icon, mini-triptych and some reflective silverware including an incense burner. A little pool of orange light is focused beside it onto the altar top, and another spot of it catches the side of the censer. The clear message is that Mariana is keeping the flame of her faith alight, but it is forlorn and meagre, while her inner passion is fired by feeling a different warmth.

Imagined sensation is everywhere, from the frangibility of the real leaves that model for her tapestry, some of which have wafted to the floor, to the softness of the cotton workpiece itself, to the coolness of the window glass and the autumnal weather outside. There is materiality not just to that dress but to the brocaded screen, the stool’s still-warm upholstered fabric, the floorboards, and the bed curtain. Even Mariana’s coppery hair glistening at her crown, conjures the swishing feel and susurrating sound of its brushing.

Millais’ subject here was the character of Mariana to whom Tennyson gave voice in his eponymous poem published in 1830. She in turn was inspired by Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure in which Mariana appears as the rejected lover of Angelo, a villainous hypocrite who promptly dumps her when her fortune was lost in a shipwreck. She is effectively abandoned, still pining for him and living alone with her mournful thoughts. Tennyson dials up Mariana’s loneliness and the sense that time, in the seclusion of her moated grange, drags intolerably, and her mind is tormented, haunted by ghosts real or imagined:

All day within the dreamy house,

The doors upon their hinges creak'd;

The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse

Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,

Or from the crevice peer'd about.

Old faces glimmer'd thro' the doors

Old footsteps trod the upper floors,

Old voices called her from without.

She only said, "My life is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!"

Millais reimagines the cloistered setting not as the play’s outlandish seventeenth century Vienna but as hidebound Victorian England, albeit that Mariana’s dress has something of the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood medievalism about it with the decorative girdle lending emphasis to the shapeliness surrounding her pelvic arch. This depiction of Mariana violates Victorian propriety with the clear sensuality and even eroticism to her pose, her arched back thrusting her breasts into prominence and her stance speaking of longing and a desire to be done with ‘feminine’ pursuits such as embroidery. This painting puts a contemporary and provocative spin on ‘serious’ literature.

One of the Gothically arched windows shows a coat of arms bearing a visored metal helmet and a raised armoured forearm and fist holding up what looks like a lance. Could this escutcheon represent an alarum, a call to arms, an allusion to the need for resistance to the tyranny of decorous subordination? Below it hangs a white snowdrop, an emblem not just of purity but of hope, a harbinger of spring and so an anticipation of a new beginning when outside the window autumn leaves speak of loss and decay. The motto reads ‘in coelo quies’ – in heaven there is peace. But Mariana prays not for the deliverance of the afterlife, but for an earthlier, corporeal fulfilment, so this stained glass is like a taunt, an unwished-for consolation. The windows admit light and the possibility of enlightenment from the world outside, but they also occlude the view; they help to reinforce an incarceration from which she must escape or die. The two windows directly facing Mariana show the Virgin Mary and the Archangel Gabriel, spitefully enacting the Annunciation for her. These windows mock her predicament - they may remind her of her own virginity (and its sought-after loss), but they also draw attention to her own childlessness. The poem spoke of ‘old faces’ and ‘old voices’ that Mariana sees and hears, as if spectres have come to bedevil her imagination and the figures in the windows function as embodiments of these morbid hallucinations.

In both the Annunciation image and the depiction of a prie-dieu in the background, Millais introduces a distinctly devotional, even Marian tone to his portrayal of Mariana. The Oxford Movement or Tractarianism as it was known, enjoyed wide currency in mid-century religious discourse, in which ‘Romish’ tropes including veneration of The Virgin, regained a degree of ascendency; ceremonialism and liturgical ritual were promoted as a rejection of ascetic non-conformism and as a return to quasi-mystical spiritual practice. In this painting, the Catholic iconography and the sacramental altar suggest a nunnery-like sequestration that is relieved by the vivid polychromatism of the scene. These valences are held in opposition, much as the figure herself strains between the physicality of her back-breaking sewing and prayerful genuflections and the psychic yearning for her beloved. Her stretch is a representation of the tension between colour-saturated religiosity and sacrilegious sensation.

In particular, it is the orange triangulation network, the incidence of the hot ochres, siennas and umbers that lead the encompassing eye around the painting; from the robes worn by the figures in the painting to Mariana’s auburn hair, to the girdle, the russet leaf at her foot and back up to the stool, lantern lights and icon, that characterise an ambient atmosphere of sublimated fervour.

The mouse scurrying away towards the bottom right of the painting and as referenced in the poem, is like another uncalled-for visitor whose verminous presence goes unnoticed by Mariana in the painting. Her unfocused gaze and the beautiful, unfurrowed luminescence of her brow and the unselfconsciousness of her posture all denote a sense of her interiority. Like the leaves, the mouse belongs outside in nature but has made itself at home to further trouble her consciousness when we imagine her awakening from her erotomaniacal reverie. The outside world represented here is complicated; an entanglement of tree branches threatens to press in on the window while a mossy stone parapet outside it affords little protection against the intrusion.

Mariana is trapped indoors by her commitment to her needlework, by her faith and by her psychological agony. Outside seems no less oppressive as nature, in flora and forna form, has made its way in. Millais shows her rarefying the living world through art, rationalising both its beauty and its threats in her tapestry as a kind of therapy but with which she has now become impatient. Meanwhile the artist redirects his view of her carnality by suffusing the work with haptic sensation, a rendering of tactility that make associative thoughts and feelings palpable.