‘She’s only a bird in a gilded cage, a beautiful sight to see. You may think she’s happy and free from care; she’s not though she seems to be.’
When the British lyricist Arthur J. Lamb first offered the lyrics of ‘A Bird in a Gilded Cage’ to the Tin Pan Alley tunesmith Harry Von Tilzer, he was told to go back home and clean them up. Lamb had made the subject of his song a rich man’s mistress; for mass-market appeal she needed to be married.
In its revised version ‘A Bird in a Gilded Cage’ shot to the top of the 1900 sheet-music charts. For some strange reason the idea of the kept woman, married or unmarried, continues to exert a fascination on both sexes. How else to explain the undiminished popularity of Victorian images of captive women in opulent interiors?
Distance may lend enchantment to the view, but post-#MeToo some justification is needed. Our art galleries are stuffed to bursting with Victorian paintings of closeted women waiting, longing or grieving for men. ‘“My life is dreary, he cometh not,” she said.’ How do you solve a problem like Mariana? Four years ago, before the #MeToo movement erupted, the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle made the brave decision to take the bull by the horns — or the cage by the bars — and explode the Victorian myth by confronting it with the modern reality seen through the eyes of contemporary women artists.
The resulting exhibition, The Enchanted Interior, is a positive aviary of caged birds, among them Evelyn de Morgan’s ‘The Gilded Cage’ (1900–19) inspired, perhaps, by Lamb and Von Tilzer’s song. Millais’s ‘Mariana’ is absent but Holman Hunt’s Isabella is there with her pot of basil, and there’s a trio of ladies of Shalott including a daringly expressionistic oil sketch by John William Waterhouse with broken brushstrokes mimicking shattered glass (see p31).
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