Katja Sass

I used to think this was just a gorgeous Pre-Raphaelite painting. Then I learned what the woman is doing, and now it might be the loneliest thing I have ever looked at... The woman is Mariana, from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. She was engaged to be married, until her dowry was lost in a shipwreck and her fiancé abandoned her. Now she lives alone in a house on the edge of nowhere, still in love with the man who left her, waiting for him to come back. He never will. The painter was John Everett Millais, who took the subject from a poem by Tennyson and hung the picture at the Royal Academy in 1851 with the poet's line beneath it: "I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead." Look at what Millais does with the room. Mariana has been bent over her embroidery for hours, and she rises to stretch her back, hands pressed to her spine, in a pose of pure weariness. Autumn leaves have blown across the floor and settled on her table, marking the seasons passing while she waits. Through the stained glass glows the Annunciation, the Virgin receiving the news that will fulfil her whole life, set directly above a woman whose own life is going nowhere at all. That's the cruelty underneath all the beauty: this gorgeous room is a cage. Every lovely thing in it belongs to a woman who has been left to grow old at the window, waiting for a knock that is never going to come. The stained glass even carries a Latin motto: "In coelo quies," meaning "in heaven there is rest." The only escape she is promised is the one Tennyson named for her, when she said she would rather be dead. When the Pre-Raphaelites were attacked from every side, John Ruskin, the most powerful critic in England, rose to defend them and singled out this painting: of all the work in the Royal Academy, he wrote, nothing could compare "for perfect truth, power, and finish" with "the white draperies on the table in Mr. Millais' Mariana."