‘Untie your folded thoughts, and let them dangle loose, as a bride’s hair’; untangling meaning from the complex art of women’s coiffure
Words by Maddie McClean
An insight into the styling process.
Act 5, Scene 1 of John Webster’s play ‘The White Devil’ begins as such, echoing the wedding of the previous scene whilst foreshadowing the matrimonial dramas of the scene to come. Yet, in being evocative of this thrilling secrecy between characters, this line reveals much about the nature of the image of unstyled hair and the sexuality implicit within it.
Empress Elisabeth with Loose Hair in a Negligée, 1865. Franz Xaver Winterhalter.
Webster’s specification that the hair is bridal alludes to the act of consummation, both of the marriage through sex and of the characters’ curiosity through the ‘untying’ of secrets. Linking hair with sex and secrecy in this way imbues it with a sense of the scandalous, reiterated in Leach’s 1958 sociological survey that equated long hair with unrestrained sexuality. So, to see it cascading down the foreground of Winterhalter’s portrait is still a bit, well – halting. We are struck dumb, first impressed by the sheer volume of the stuff and secondly enchanted by the serenity of the Romantic setting with its secretive mist and watchful trees. The Empress poses ‘a la figura serpentinata’ which lends the figure an alluring dynamism, drawing us in to her mystery. And yet in a way she has already told us the ultimate secret of her hair, and this painting is a contract of our silence in the matter, we promise to stay hushed on what we have seen. But this is to undermine the depth of Elisabeth’s character, inducing Beauvoirian frustration at the mythologisation of her femininity through the duality of a false narrative that at once distances us by her divine glow and intimately acquaints us.
‘To say that woman is a mystery is to say not she is silent but that her language is not heard; she is there, but hidden beneath veils; she exists beyond those uncertain appearances.’
We think we know the Empress by her hair, and with a smug smile we already know what is to be discovered despite being promised discovery, when really she lies far behind this ‘veil’. In this way, the masculine continues its offensive against the unknown, reining everything into its own particular rationale, as we are privy to Winterhalter’s perceptions but excluded from the sitter’s own insights through the symbology of hair.
John Collier, Lady Godiva, 1897.
John Collier’s depiction of Lady Godiva plays around with a similar subversion, exposing what should be couched in secrecy but this time even denying her the coverage of her hair. Godiva’s husband, Leofric the Early of Mercia, agreed to her plea for lower taxation of the people of Coventry on the terms she would first ride through the town square naked. Having heroically accepted the challenge, she issued an order that everyone was to stay inside with blinds shut the day of her ordeal to protect her modesty, but temptation shortly heralded the birth of the ‘Peeping Tom’. The sleazy tailor’s actions were avenged by the townspeople who either blinded him or outright killed him for this transgression, raising questions of voyeurism in art. Does the elevated form of painting excuse our gaze, or perversely does the image exist only to be ‘peeped’ at shamefully? Her long hair could have provided coverage and an eloquent expression of her ‘secret’, but Collier has effectively chosen to shout it across the town square of the exhibition room in which we stand. With the alarming, fertile reds and without the confrontation of being sharply stared back at, it is hard not to look.
Maison Margiela, Wig Coats, Spring/Summer 2009.
Haute couture’s tendency towards irony is here amplified beyond camp, into a realm in which we question the very ideals of beauty; here, ‘desire and disgust collide and collude into a single garment’. The mass of synthetic nylon is at once natural and highly unnatural, with its dyed roots but fur-like quality. Featuring in the 2008 Nick Knight film ‘Make up Your Mind’, we are made to question the nature of hair itself, and how where it grows affects our perception of it. On the head, it is a crown of glory, but on the body it makes us animal. Maybe that is why Collier shied away from adorning his heroine in it; the connotations of the wild would have made woman untameable to him. And maybe that is what underpins the extravagant curls of courtly ladies; ‘dompter l’animal qui est en nous’, according to the ongoing Paris exhibition ‘Des Cheveux et Des Poils’. [‘to tame the animal that is in us’] In the case of Lady Godiva, it could have taken on the quality of a shield against a sea of stares; hair can also be a weapon.
Marisol Suarez, Origine, 2010.
Hair has become just that in the hands of Marisol Suarez at that very exhibition. Solid braids flare out from the brooding face like an angered Amazonian creature rising up to ward off the hot breath of a predator. Antithetical to the portrait of the Empress, the background is no expansive dream but an impenetrable mass of white, with a shroud over any suggestion of a secret. The crumpled crinoline gives us no hint of the sitter’s figure, and we dare not ask for more; her features are hard set in a defiant ‘no’. If we want to get to know her, it will be on her own terms, talking and listening through every braid.
Henry Fuseli, Two courtesans in a theatre box, with fantastic hairstyles, 1790 -92.
The Courtauld Institute’s recent exhibition on ‘Fuseli and the Modern Woman; Fashion Fantasy and Fetishism’ brought light to the dark desires of this Swiss painter. Having first attended ‘Fussli, The Realm of the Dream and the Fantastic’ at the Jacquemart-Andre, it was something of a surprise to be confronted with portraits of a dominatrix instead of ‘Lady Macbeth, Seizing The Daggers’, though perhaps the clues were there from the start. Being herself a woman, so overpowering as to coerce her husband into murder, Fuseli demonstrates a preoccupation with the dynamics of female power even within his supposedly innocent works. This perhaps ties into his rendering of female hairstyles in such outlandish and frankly phallic shapes. The ‘Fetishism’ element of the exhibition may well tie into this Freudian interpretation, alluding to his essay theorising that a fetish could be traced back to castration anxiety and often took the form of the last thing witnessed before the revelation of ‘nothing’. In Fuseli’s case this may well have been hair, and his works are an exploration of this subconscious fixation. Yet they also seem to tie in to fixation with the empowered, to the extent of even being a masculine, ‘modern’ woman; yet can this be said to be true liberation if it is still painted through the male gaze? Nonetheless, this aesthetic choice equates complex coiffure with power, a thing itself synonymous with elite knowledge and secrecy.
The complexity of the latter hairstyles seems to lie in the honesty of the former. The motivation for this reclamation of mystery surely depends on the gender of the speaker; for the man it returns a level of titillation to hair, returning its secrets only to reclaim the thrill of re-telling them. For the woman, it can signify the attainment of a civilised femininity, well learned in the language of society and aesthetic, or it can be subverted into a suit of armour and battle-axe. Overall, power seems to correlate with elaborate curls and crimps, in part due to their expense, but also their defence against all-seeing eyes.
After all, in the words of Fleabag : ‘Hair is everything’.
