Sleeping Beauties in Victorian Britain: Cultural, Literary and Artistic Explorations of a Myth (Cultural Interactions: Studies in the Relationship between the Arts)

Artists, scientists and the wider public of the Victorian era all seem to have shared a common interest in the myth of the Briar Rose and its contemporary implications, from the Pre-Raphaelites and late Victorian aesthetes to the fascinated crowds who visited Ellen Sadler, the real-life ‘Sleeping Maid’ who is reported to have slept from 1871 to 1880. The figure of the beautiful reclining female sleeper is a recurring theme in the Victorian imagination, invoking visual, literary and erotic connotations that contribute to a complex range of readings involving aesthetics, gender definitions and contemporary medical opinion. This book compiles and examines a corpus of Sleeping Beauties drawn from Victorian medical reports, literature and the arts and explores the significance of the enduring revival of the myth. Cover Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction (Béatrice Laurent) What Did Victorian Sleeping Beauties Dream of? About the Great Number of Representations of Sleep in the Late Nineteenth Century (Muriel Adrien) The Strange Case of Victorian Sleeping Maid (Béatrice Laurent) The ‘ghastly waxwork at the fair’: Charles Dickens’s Sleeping Beauty in "Great Expectations" (Laurence Talairach-Vielmas) Engendering Creative Negativity: Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood" (1866) (Manuela D’Amore) Sleep and Liberation: The Opiate World of Elizabeth Siddal (Stefania Arcara) Immortal and Deadly Icons:Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Sleeping Beauties (Laurence Roussillon-Constanty) Aesthetics of Desire: Ruskin, Burne-Jones and Their Sleeping Beauties (Cristina Pascu-Tulbure) Nuptial Dreams and Toxic Fantasies: Visions of Feminine Desire in John Anster Fitzgerald’s Fairy Paintings "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made of" (1858) (Anne Chassagnol) Julia Margaret Cameron’s Sleeping Beauties (Marie Cordié-Levy) Beneath the Surface: Sleeping Beauties in Representations of Antiquity and theirReception (1860–1900) (Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada) Notes on Contributors Index