Victorian Visual Culture

From the political cartoons in Punch magazine depicting Irish resistance to British colonial power, a few things are extremely clear: an inclination to portray the Irish as savage, violent, and pretty much exclusively male, and to show the nations of Britain and Ireland as female entities, separate from the people who inhabit them, create the sense of a sternly powerful Britain protecting the innocent Ireland from the “less evolved” men who need to accept British wisdom and control. There are obviously interesting dynamics at play here with the use of imagery of gender and strength, but what immediately jumped out at me about the depiction of “Britannia” was her strong visual echo of the Greek/Roman goddess Athena/Minerva, which adds a dimension to the rhetoric at play.

Generally, the depiction of Britain as both a woman and a strong, authoritative figure within these images might seem confusing or contradictory to the ways one would expect images of women to read to Victorian audiences. However, there would still have been a preexisting reference point for this kind of image in visual representations of Minerva. Britannia’s clearly Roman helmet, weapon, strong, muscular physique, and militaristic but feminine dress in a classical style give her many of the iconic physical indicators of a depiction of Minerva, and Victorian audiences would have recognized the similarity. This has the benefit of positioning Britannia as a goddess, rather than simply a strong human woman, and places her above the other figures in the images while simultaneously allowing her the space to break slightly from gender norms since she is drawn from a preexisting and well known cultural source. Her status as a goddess legitimates both her protective power over Hibernia and her punitive power over the Irish people; if Britain is godly, then it is natural and unquestionable for it to have imperial control.

Additionally, this ties Britain to the Roman Empire, allowing it to claim a place in a lineage of empire that would have been very desirable. The particular associations of Minerva, the goddess of war, allows for the complex depiction of her that is in every way beneficial to being a symbol of “justified” colonial violence. Minerva is strong, powerful, and skilled at carrying out violence, but she is also a woman, specifically a virgin, and thus can also embody purity and moral clarity to the Victorian eye in a way that a male Britain would not. Hibernia, the personification of the country of Ireland being terrorized by its people, also benefits from the latter feminine associations, but not the former masculine ones that Britannia gains from the Minerva parallel, which sets her up as an innocent victim who Britannia can protect. 

This context helps to potentially explain the choice to depict these countries as women, which might seem strange otherwise given the social circumstances of Victorian England. Drawing on ancient Rome as an exemplary past empire and one of its deities for the perfect mixture of virtue and power lends these images a lot of their weight in attacking any anti-colonial resistance against Britain.