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Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience

© A. Wilson

To account for and excuse the tyranny of man, many ingenious arguments have been brought forward to prove, that the two sexes, in the acquirement of virtue, our aim at attaining a very different character; or, to speak explicitly, women are not allowed to have sufficient strength of mind to acquire what really deserves the name of virtue...If then women are not then a swarm of ephemerian triflers, why should they be kept in ignorance?...Milton describes our first frail mother; though when he tells us that women are formed for softness and sweet attractive grace, I cannot comprehend his meaning, unless, in the true Mahotmetan strain, he meant to deprive us our souls, and insinuate that we were beings only designed by sweet attractive grace, and docile blind obedience, to gratify the senses of man when he can no longer soar on the wings of contemplation.1

Mary Wollstonecraft penned her anger at the unfair and unjust morality that was imposed upon women by a vocal male majority in an attempt to redress this balance. A women's role in life in the nineteenth century was decidedly placed within a male context; both sexes were to be seen acting within different realms with the men occupying what was to be known as the public sphere whilst the women were to be found in the domestic sphere.2 Perhaps this splitting of realms, within the working and lower middling classes at least, into their respective roles was by-product of increasing industrialisation and its resultant hazards such as long working hours and poor working conditions imposed upon the family unit.3

By the mid-eighteenth century, the public sphere was undoubtedly male dominated and there is a conspicuous absence of women within the professions and parliament; the roles of women were strictly confined to that of wives, mothers, domestic servants and maiden aunts.4 Portraiture was an art form which by its very nature helped to subvert the splitting of these two spheres. Portraiture, as defined by Marcia Pointon, includes '...those practices connected with the depiction of human subjects and the theorisation's conceptualisation.. portraiture is question of the relationship between the self as art and the self in art.5 William Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience represents not only a contemporary life subject of a "fallen Magdelen" but can be loosely interpreted as an example of portraiture by Pointon's definition in which we can see that the woman became as symbolically objectified as her image.6 As most of what we know historically of women comes from primarily male sources, such as conduct books, sermons and diaries all of which are morality texts in themselves, we can see how women were perpetuated a second class citizens who were considered entirely dependant upon their male counterparts. Through a thorough investigation of William Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience, we are able to see the emergence of patterns that decidedly place women within the domestic sphere and within a male construct, both compositionally and thematically.

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