On a cold September evening in the year 1779 a young woman, a mantua-maker, left the Covent Garden theatre after seeing the ballad opera ‘Love in a Village.’ Martha Reay felt an overwhelming sense of drowning as she saw the fine lines of Mr Hackman’s peculiar smug face looming through the window next to the exit, waiting for her to depart. Desperate to escape before he grasped her, she meandered through the buzzing streets wishing to be camouflaged amidst a sea of theatre fanatics. With an urgency to transform her identity, she unravelled her golden hair to hang below her waist. Perhaps he would mistake her for another, but she knew this was not true. In his presence, she longed to disappear. Martha wished she could walk the streets with no one gazing at her, to metamorphose into a liberated invisible woman. The terror induced by Mr Hackman’s inescapable penetrating presence permeated her sensitive soul. For Mr Hackman, this terror enhanced her beauty, and she had never seemed so angelic than when she was frightened like a little lamb. It was at times like this when her femininity felt unbearable. 

Martha trembled everywhere she went after she stopped replying to his letters. His omnipresent gaze ironically making her feel more alone than ever. She looked for Mr Hackman’s eyes in every stranger she walked past, her paranoia fuelled by her instincts. When she did meet his gaze it was as if his pupils turned into an army of ants seeking refuge in every crevice of her body, trying to devour her. Mr Hackman’s letters were growing evermore sinister, his previous announced that he would massacre all of mankind sooner than lose Martha. His love was smothering, suffocating, and reminded her of her own mortality; plunging her into ontological shock. 

The young woman, so deeply troubled by the horror of her follower, sought relief in her beloved rose garden which provided a view of the city. From that vantage point, she momentarily masqueraded as her watcher. Miss Reay found solitude amongst a blood-red carpet of roses; for she was no longer lonely when accompanied by the comfort of beautiful flowers. She cusped the heads of the roses with both of her lithe hands, but the layers of petals curled and shrivelled to protect their centre as if repulsed by human touch. 

It had begun to rain with a mist that loomed over the horizon, heavy with the vaporised souls of those who had lost their lives in the lonely city. Martha headed to the pavilion located at the edge of the garden, where she lay in the right corner of a seated arched window. Her voluminous dress draped across the window ledge wrapped around her body, like a blanket supporting her as she descended into her slumber. Her hair became a part of that cover, with her innocent and vulnerable face exposed as the moonlight hit her from the top of the arch. With each exhale of breath she became closer to the ghosts of the deceased who waited impatiently for her to join them outside the open window, dragging her heart to decay. 

Mr Hackman watched from the opposite side of the pavilion as the laudanum he poisoned her with consumed her. He was almost jealous of the way the laudanum devoured her, he wanted to be under her skin, to be the blood slowly seeping through her arteries. Her rejection was too much for Hackman to bear. It was easier to love her this way. 

The night sky became bright as a new angel dropped from the sky, and Miss Reay was left lifeless at so young when life had just begun. 

Inspiration

I have written a short story as a response to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illustration of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘The Sleeper.’ 

I was inspired to write about Rossetti’s ‘The Sleeper’ after being captivated by the piece at the Rossetti exhibition at the Tate Britain earlier this year. The haunting image is of a young woman who has died and sits unconscious by an open window. Through the window, the viewer sees a cityscape and several ghosts watching the woman. The juxtaposition it presents of a beautiful girl seemingly peacefully unconscious but dead was interesting to me, considering the popularity of the femme-enfant figure in romanticism. Rossetti bordered his drawing with a rose-pink wash, I think that the delicacy and softness of the pink encapsulates the innocence of the girl he depicts. With this information, I knew that I wanted to incorporate roses into my writing as a way to reflect the fragility and beauty, and consequent destruction, of the young woman. 

After reading Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, I noticed that Rossetti had changed the location from a moonlit valley to a city; this city view was something I wanted to retain in my work. Also, the poem is about transcendental love that extends to the afterlife as the speaker visits her grave after she has died. In his personal life, Poe experienced an abundance of personal grief as his mother died from tuberculosis when she was twenty-four and he was two years old. Also, his foster mother Frances Allan died from an unknown illness when Poe was twenty. Because of this, themes of young women dying at a young age are highly prevalent in his work. Additionally, in the poem ‘The Sleeper’  alliteration plays an important role in creating rhythm and musicality as well as manifesting drama. The dramatic effect of alliteration in the poem is something I incorporated into my story in order to conceive the same reaction. 

Utilising my understanding of both works of ‘The Sleeper’, I synthesised Poe’s and Rossetti’s works with various other artistic and literary influences. The dramatic mode of writing I adopted was not just influenced by Poe, but also by Balzac’s Le Chef d’Oeuvre Inconnu. I employed his romantic language but integrated it into the darker context of the narrative that I shaped. Balzac’s influence can especially be seen in the first line of my writing as it is very similar to the first sentence of Le Chef d’Oeuvre Inconnu. Another key influence was the story of Mr. James Hackman and Miss Martha Reay, from which I loosely based the narrative. I stumbled upon a non-fiction epistolary book in the British Library published in 1895, showing the letter exchanges between the pair from 1775-1779. In 1779 Mr. Hackman shot Miss Reay, a mantua-maker, outside of the Covent Garden theatre after seeing the performance of Love in a Village. They had a brief affair, but when she cut things off he murdered her. The story gained popularity towards the end of the 19th century, probably because it aligned with the cultural sensationalism of dead beautiful young women displayed in art and literature exemplified by creatives like Poe, Rossetti, Millais and Byron. Instead of beautifying the death of a young woman I wanted to subvert this narrative to show how frightened a woman, like Miss Reay, might have felt before her death. Also, I refer to Martha in my text using her first and last name but only use Hackman’s last name and title to show the power dynamic between the two, where Martha feels inferior and controlled by Mr. Hackman. 

Lastly, It was important to me to represent the violence placed upon young women in contemporary society in my ekphrastic narrative because of how poignant and disturbing cases like Sarah Everard’s, and the recent murder of a 15-year-old girl stabbed in Croydon, are on a young woman’s psyche. Although Miss Reay’s murder happened in 1779, the story still correlates to modern news narratives. Specifically, I wanted to encapsulate the harassment women can feel when walking through the city, always feeling watched. 

Overall my story intends to be the last part of a triptych, with the same theme as Poe and Rosetti’s works but exists as its own deleuzian fold. It is supposed to convey the violence faced by young women at the hands of patriarchal control, told through a fictional dramatised representation of the story of Mr Hackman and Miss Reay.