(piano music playing) Steven: We now live in
a culture where the new is sought after or the new
is something that we want, but in Victorian culture,
the new was something that was not always trusted. Beth: Ruskin referred to
all the new furnishings in the painting that we're looking at, William Holman Hunt's
Awakening Conscience is, having a fatal newness. Steven: The newness of
the piano, the newness of the table, the newness of
the rug, all of this was meant to suggest a kind of
falseness, actually, and it's a perfect example of the
concerns of Victorian culture in this fabulous pre-Raphaelite image. Beth: So we're looking at a kept woman and we see her with her lover.
We're in a space that is her apartment filled with
brand new furniture and new wallpaper and prints on the wall. Steven: That he's bought for
her, in order to create a [unintelligible] place
that he can escape to. Beth: She's probably of lowly
origin. I mean, this is all standard narrative that
Victorians knew and that had been repeated over and over again
of a girl who came from the countryside and became a fallen woman or a kept woman in the city. Steven: Who is compromised
by a class above her. Beth: She's been sitting
on the lap of her lover, who's been playing the piano,
but unbeknownst to him, he plays a song that
reminds her of her childhood and at that moment, she remembers her past innocence and experiences
of spiritual awakening, an awakening of her
conscience. So she is a subject that we see often in Victorian
paintings. She's a fallen woman, but at a moment of redemption. Steven: Look at the way
that Hunt, the artist, has organized the painting.
We're looking at her and we're looking at her ensconced
in all of this luxury of the home that he's created for her, but this artificial place that's not real. Beth: Where nothing is
worn, nothing is used, where nothing has been transformed
by the life of a real family. Steven: But she's facing almost
towards us and we can see her reflection in the
mirror in back of her and we can see that she's
looking towards the outside and so, here, nature and
light take on the role of the spiritual take on the role of the moral that she needs to now move towards. Beth: That's right and
that's really what interested Holman Hunt, who was a very religious man and is using this modern life subject to speak to a bigger issue
of spiritual transformation and how God can come to
us at unexpected moments. Steven: And look how Hunt plays one figure against the next. She's
standing up, her posture is straightening as she is
awakening her moral conscience. But she's contrasted
against the man who is the source of corruption, who is
the source of her moral fall and he is reclining. All of
this is an entrapment. In fact, he holds her back. She's
going to have to, literally, break past that. Beth: I think one of the points
that Hunt is trying to make is that the same person that
can be the source of your sinfulness can be the same
person who unwittingly provides the inspiration
for your redemption, for your awakening and so
we have this inscription on the frame "As he that taketh
away a garment in cold weather," "so is he that singeth
songs to an heavy heart." Steven: So here are weighty
moral issues that are really spiritual and, yet, what the
artist is doing is placing these in his contemporary world
and in a sense not showing Biblical stories, but showing
stories that resonate a social problems in his immediate world. Beth: And making it all very
material and real in that typical pre-Raphaelite way,
painting the furnishings of the room with incredible
exactitude and making everything in the room
have symbolic value. Steven: Well, we know that
the artist were actually looking back, not to the
Baroque, not to the Rennaisance, but to artists immediately
before that and specifically, this is an artist who is
probably looking at something like Jan van Eyck, perhaps the
Arnolfini Wedding Portrait, which is in the national
gallery in London and was understanding that objects within a room can have a secondary symbolic meaning. Beth: This painting would
really need to be read by its viewers. Hunt is
asking us to look closely at all the elements in the
room and to think about what they mean, in terms of the narrative that he's telling of this
woman's spiritual awakening. Steven: And so, for instance,
if we look under the table on the left, you can see
a cat and if you look very closely, you can see that
that cat has caught a bird and this is clearly an analogy
to the man and the woman. He has kept her. He has caught her. Beth: The pre-Raphaelites
were concerned with, as you said, these very
serious, moral subjects and modern life's problems
and taking those on. Steven: So an artist who is
using Art History in order to really explicate contemporary subjects, contemporary moral dilemmas, some of the driving issues of the day. (piano music playing)