A Rose a Day No.44
Perhaps the greatest paintings of seductively dangerous roses from the Victorian period were created by the Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones: his series called ‘The Legend of the Briar Rose’ (1885-1890), which has been carefully integrated into the décor of the Salon in Buscot House, Oxfordshire, through the extension of the frames and the filling of the intervals with joining panels that continue the rose motif. Under each of the paintings there is written a verse from a poem by William Morris.
The first in the series, called ‘The Briar Wood’ [Illustration], shows the Prince standing on the far left, and the sleeping retinue sprawled amongst the Briars. Morris’ poem is as follows: The fateful slumber floats and flows / About the tangle of the rose; / But lo! the fated hand and heart / To rend the slumberous curse apart!
We know the story of the Briar Rose best as ‘Sleeping Beauty’. A curse means the princess will prick her finger on a rose, and then she and everyone around her will immediately falls into a deep sleep for a hundred years, until she is kissed by a prince. The original ‘Sleeping Beauty’ story is by Charles Perrault, and makes no mention of roses, just ‘’brambles and thorns’. But in the Brothers Grimm’s re-telling the story, called ‘Briar-Rose,’ the princess herself is called the ‘Beautiful Briar-Rose’, or the rose on the thorny briar. It seems likely that the Brothers Grimm chose to develop the theme in relation to the medieval allegory of the Roman de la Rose . But in fact, the story of sleeping beauty goes all the way back to The Book of the 1001 Nights, where it is more obviously about the relationship between sexual desire, violence, and death. This theme is still subliminally there in Perrault’s story, in which the Prince must ‘penetrate’ the enclosing thicket. After ‘awakening’, the princess has two children, and is then tormented by any angry mother-in-law. In the Grimm’s narrative the emphasis is also on the necessity of penetration, but the tale ends when the prince weds ‘Beautiful Briar-Rose’.
Burne-Jones also includes other references to the rose – petals painted on a knight’s shield, and four heraldic ‘Tudor’ roses on a tapestry in Sleeping Beauty's bower:
The star of the suite is definitely the Briar itself – a real rambler. But which species rose is it? Definitely Rosa canina. Burne-Jones shows them as pink buds, then whitish pink fading to white blooms. His specimens are extremely sinuous, and have very aggressive-looking prickles. Although certainly painted from life, this is like no rose one is ever likely to see in reality. It seems to be enveloping the whole world, a primeval rose from the time of the dinosaurs, a huge spiky serpent, although spotted everywhere with lovely small, delicate five-petal white flowers.
There is, in fact, a very personal dimension to Burne-Jones’ painting. The model for the beautiful sleeping princess is the artist’s own eighteen-year-old daughter, Margaret. Her father, evidently feeling ambivalent about her awakening sexuality, made sure the Briar was especially thick and impenetrable so as to prevent any suitor from coming to steal her ‘innocence’ – her ‘rosebud’ – or to ‘de-flower’ her. Tellingly, Burne-Jones doesn’t depict the moment when the Prince achieves his goal, and Briar-Rose is awakened. Instead, he has delayed the moment of ‘surrender’ indefinitely. As long as his daughter/Sleeping Beauty remains asleep, protected by the wildness of the Briar rose, she will never be fully alive, but as soon as she moves she will inevitably be ‘pricked’ and feel pain. The rose symbolizes here the wounding danger of sexuality, particularly young female sexuality, and the social prohibitions that hem it in like the Briar surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s castle. In this sense, one could say the rose in this painting is playing the role of chastity belt. So there is no evidence of penetration, nor any likelihood of it, in Burne-Jones’ paintings. An overwhelming soporific, death-like air pervades all of the works. Everybody except the Prince is fast asleep, and he looks no more than decorous.
Pictures courtesy of Riger Vlitos, Curator of the Farringdon Collection at Buscot Park.