Elizabeth Siddal's Hair: A Methodology for Queer Reading

Sampson, Medusa, Lady Godiva, Mary Magdalene and Rapunzel are all examples of cultural figures whose hair has been given particular importance. Elizabeth Siddal, the model for many Pre-Raphaelite paintings, is another cultural phenomenon whose hair is given special cultural significance, particularly in death. When Rossetti's agent retrieved the poems buried with her, he apparently claimed that her beauty was preserved and her hair had filled her coffin. Hair could be read as queer in that it crosses the cultural boundaries of the body, because it embodies that which cannot be fixed, that which mismatches, defamiliarizes, destabilizes, disidentifies and decentres, and queer reading, one could say, is a way of discovering-digging up-such a disrupting influence. Reading hair as queer is to search for its disrupting influence. One way of doing that is to investigate hair's relationship with death. In this essay, Louise Tondeur looks at specific poems such as Shakespeare's 'Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?' and Kathleen Jamie's 'Meadowsweet' to discover a methodology for queer reading using Elizabeth Siddal's irrepressible hair.