A lonely queen: the emotional widowhood of Queen Victoria, by Fay Bound Alberti

A lonely queen

Loneliness is a 21st-century problem; an epidemic of global proportions, linked variously to heart problems, mental health crises and dementia among the old. We are social animals, psychologists say; we are supposed to be around other people. Thanks to social media, cuts to social care and a growth in living alone, however, many of us are alone for vast swathes of time.

There are old people who only see another human being once a month, according to some recent studies, and an unknown multitude too shy, too depressed, too unwell or incapacitated to make meaningful social connections. That's the rub, you see: the connections have to be meaningful. Not in an abstract sense, and to other people, but to us, as individuals.

Loneliness has seldom been explored as a historical problem, but it is one. It's all very well to lament the rise of loneliness in the digital age - one of many themes I explore in my forthcoming book on the subject - but people have been lonely, in one sense or another, in earlier times and cultures. One of the chapters in my book describes the loneliness of widowhood and old age, with one of my case studies being Queen Victoria.

Why was Victoria lonely? There have been many literary and visual adaptations of her life, but few have addressed this problematic question. She was lonely because she lost Albert, the man she relied upon in so many aspects of her life, at a relatively young age. And suddenly.

The wedding day

Victoria and Albert had married young - just 21 and 20 respectively, though Victoria had inherited the throne at 18 years old. Together they had nine children, and became inseparable by all accounts; he developed a reputation for public causes such as educational reform and the abolition of slavery, though he had only the role of consort.

When Albert died, aged only 42, Victoria entered a deep state of mourning, and wore black for the rest of her life. It did not matter that due to her rank and status Victoria was one of the least alone women of her age, or that she was attended by a multitude of servants, family members and hangers-on. She missed that special connection she had enjoyed with Albert, the sense that the two of them were unified in their emotional, political, familial and practical lives. Maybe that's why Mr Brown was so important to her; a man she could confide in about anything at all, a man who didn't only see the queen but also a woman.

There is something very specific about losing a husband, Victoria complained when her daughters later married and moved on with their own lives. Nobody could understand it, until they have experienced it. I would extend that further by acknowledging there is something very particular about losing a partner, a perceived 'soul-mate' especially when one imagined growing old with that person; being able to look back on a life lived when one is old and worn.

A relaxed and domestic portrait 

Queen Victoria wrote in her journal on 20 June 1884: "The 47th (!!) anniversary of my accession. May God help me, in my ever increasing loneliness, & anxieties'.

Loneliness cares not for status. And it changes over time, depending on our age, networks, expectations, religious belief and health. Perceptions of loneliness have also changed, from the 18th century to the present day. So, too, have perceptions of grief, and an appropriate time to mourn.

Queen Victoria was the subject of considerable criticism in her day about the length of time she spent in mourning, her choice of black garb, her reluctance to be seen in public. She became known nationally and internationally as a sad and lonely figure, even though she regained some public affection in her later years. The loss she felt over Albert's death, as well as her palpable resentment, anxiety and depression about being abandoned, never ended, though Victoria lived to be 81 years old.

In part, Victoria's critics were right. She didn't move on from Albert's death, which was an understandable and conscious choice. For all intents and purposes, the rituals of the household continued as though Albert had not died: from his clothes being laid out each morning to the marble hand, a cold replica of the real thing, that sat on Victoria's bedside table.

On a regular basis, Victoria would get out all the photographs of Albert; the gifts he had given her, sentimentally recalling memories that made her sad and happy in equal measure. She would visit his mausoleum and statues and speak of him again and again to anyone who would listen. However painful it might have been, Victoria breathed in his absence every day. And perhaps that had a function; keeping the shadow of loneliness about her was the only way to keep Albert alive.

The mausoleum of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria 

A Biography of Loneliness will be published in 2018 by Oxford University Press. For more information on my work, please see my website.

Loneliness, Madrid and Dali's Great Masturbator by Fay Bound Alberti

Madrid 

This September, I gave a keynote at the annual conference of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions (EPSS), held in Madrid. It was my first time to Madrid, and also my first time to a philosophy conference, and both experiences were ones to remember.

I talked about loneliness and how we trace its history and meanings, across time and in different cultures. My talk was from a book I am writing on loneliness in the modern age - why so many of us are lonely when we are, in many ways, more connected than ever. And why studies say that Britain is one of the loneliest countries in Europe. (Soon to be lonelier, when Brexit takes hold.) In Madrid, I noted how different Spanish and British attitudes towards loneliness are, with Spanish people seeming to invest more in ‘neighbourliness’ than is the case in Britain. Yet as Olivia Laing writes in her study of The Lonely City, modernity has brought loneliness to many people, as suggested by the urban landscapes of Edward Hopper. 

Hopper: 'Automat' (1927).

Some of the conference themes were universal, including worries about the relationship between feeling and expression, and the fear of being misunderstood. When we compose an email to a lover, a boss, a friend, how often do we agonise over what we really want to say, and what we worry they might hear?  We find the same uncertainty in a range of historical sources, including early modern love letters: the hesitating pen of the suitor, the formulaic declaration of love that is followed by the coy reticence of the intended. I have spent many months in record offices, analysing love letters used in 17^th century court cases, usually submitted by women who claimed they had married their beloved, and rejected by men who denied any ceremony had taken place.  

Romantic communication is like a duet, each of the players taking their part, contributing to the harmony of the whole. The role of music in bridging the gap between feeling and communication was central to several conference papers, and is a growing theme in the history of emotions too. Music speaks to the body rather than the mind. And it has a range of different effects.  Put on a CD or flip through Spotify, find a favourite piece of rock music and experience what happens to your body. A raised heartbeat perhaps, a sense of urgency; it is unsurprising that people lift heavier weights, run further, when the rhythm of the music flushes through their system like testosterone. Compare this to a classical piece, and the calming waves that decrease our heartrate and make us breathe more slowly.

Emotions, like music, involve the body as well as the mind. Trying to invoke those experiences in prose, poem, song or art, raises challenges for the creator as well as the listener. During my visit to Madrid’s famous art galleries, I thought about these challenges, and the ways emotion crosses over between the pictorial and the physical, merging the intent of the artist with the interpretation of the beholder.

Painting is filled with the physicality of the artist, in the stroke of the brush, the thickness of the paint, the movement of the arm, the synergy between what is in the mind of the artist and what appears on the canvas. Consider The Great Masturbator, one of Salvador Dali’s early masterpieces. Dali completed the painting in 1929 and it was bequeathed to Spain in 1989. Now it hangs alongside a wonderful collection of surrealist art at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. For 26 euros you can buy a Paseo del Arte Card that allows you to visit the Museo Reina Sofia as well as the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Museo Nacional del Prado. 

Museo Nacional Centro de Art Reina Sofia

Let us return to The Great Masturbator, this large oil painting that is instantly recognisable, with its melting lines and figures and faces. The emotional turmoil of the canvas practically leaps out of the canvas; a dream-world full of inner battles. The face that dominates the painting is said to be a self-portrait of the artist, his eyes closed in contemplation of the female figure, perhaps, that rises from the face. She is believed to represent Dali’s great love, Gala, a woman of Russian descent who was married to the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard when she and Dali embarked on a relationship. Gala appeared in many paintings, including The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1959).

Salvador Dali's The Great Masturbator

The phallic imagery and the suggestion of sexual ecstasy sits alongside more complex emotional ideas about sex, masturbation and genitalia, with the grasshopper fixed on the face and an ant colony suggesting emotional anxieties and discomfort. There is to me to be something lonely about the discordances found in the painting, a sense of the tormented feelings of the artist. It is certainly a canvas one could look at for hours and yet still wonder at the shifting emotional world it represents.  

Amongst the other treasures of the gallery is Guernica - Picasso’s vast black and white response of the bombing of a Basque Country village in Northern Spain by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italian warplanes, in which most of those killed were women and children. Having seen Guernica in print many times, it was still extraordinary to see the work close up. The crowds that were gathered around it testify to its status as one of the most moving, mesmerising anti-war murals of all time.

Picasso, Guernica

After Guernica, to the Museo del Prado, which offered more and more unexpected treasures: Rubens, Durer, Goya and Bosch. There I saw the glorious Garden of Earthly Delights  a modern title given to a triptych by the Early Netherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch. It dates between 1490 and 1510, and was painted as a warning against fleshly desires  in a world still ruled by fear of the afterlife. The painting always takes me back to my childhood, when I rifled through my father’s art books, horrified and entranced by the upside down world of debauchery and excess.

Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights

The left panel depicts Eden, the middle panel, a world of earthly delights and the right a surreal version of hell, in which participants of pleasure must pay for their sins. It was the bizarre and tumultuous cruelty of the final panel that stunned me as a child, and as an adult: the ‘Tree Man’ whose truncated torso seemed to be formed of a broken egg-shell, interrupted only by arms like tree trunks. Beside him, a bird-headed monster swallows a naked man whole, defecating bodies into a pit of trapped faces while animals torture people. The spectacular scene of hell and damnation reads like a contorted allegory of the Seven Deadly Sins. 

The Tree-Man, detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, third panel

After the galleries, my friend and I walked down the Gran Via (or ‘Great Way’), an upscale shopping street that leads from Calle de Alcalá, close to Plaza de Cibeles, to Plaza de España. This street is a showcase of early 20^th century architecture from Vienna Secession to Art Deco, with buildings like the Metropolis Building (1911), topped with the mythical Phoenix.

The Metropolis Building

Finally, we walked to the Plaza Mayor (built during Philip III’s reign (1598 – 1621), where we drank Spanish wine, talked late into the night and ate tapas. I concluded, as the sun set, that Madrid is the perfect place to experience history, and a difficult place to feel lonely. 

The Plaza Mayor

Facing the Future as Someone Else: A History of Face Transplants by Fay Bound Alberti

Faces matter. They tell the world who we are and where we come from. They reveal our individuality, our genetics, emotions and ethnicity. But faces are also 'matter,' a composite of tissues, muscles and nerves that can be changed by cosmetics, art and surgery.  Face transplants are no longer science fiction, which they were in 1997 when Face/Off hit the cinemas, starring John Travolta and Nicholas Cage and directed by John Woo. Since 2005, it has been possible to perform face transplants, in which the face of a dead donor is overlaid on the body of a recipient. That recipient will more than likely have undergone some traumatic event or accident, and multiple reconstructive surgeries before receiving a new face. What must it be like to wake up as someone else? To have to learn to speak, eat, smile and inhabit a totally different visage? What would it be like for your family? Or for the family of the donor, constantly looking for and hoping to find (or not to find) an essence of their loved one. 

I have been thinking a lot about these kinds of questions. I'm writing a history of face transplants from the 1950s to the present, focusing especially on post 2005, when the 38-year old French woman Isabelle Dinoire became the first face transplant recipient. Hers was a partial transplant; her nose, chin and lips had been lost when she was savaged by her pet dog. Isabelle was unconscious at the time, having argued with her daughter and taken an overdose of sleeping tablets. Whether or not it was a deliberate overdose has proved contentious: could she have given true, informed consent for a face transplant when she was depressed enough to commit suicide? When she couldn't possibly have known what the world had in store for her? 

As it turned out, the world was very interested. The hospital that treated her released pre- and post- operative photos. The media immediately picked up the story: they wanted details from her neighbours, her friends. They wanted to know what it was like to have someone else's face; what it was like for her family and the family of the donor. They discussed whether she would be able to kiss, to have a new relationship, to return to her old existence. Life was never the same again for Isabelle. She remained dependent on her doctors and did not return to full time work. She constantly watched her skin for signs of tissue rejection. She lived with a face that she described as half her own and half somebody else's. When Isabelle died of cancer in 2016, her doctors denied it was in any way connected to the cocktail of immunosuppressant drugs she had been taking - though those drugs are known to increase the risk of cancer. I have written in detail about Dinoire elsewhere. Her case is important - not just because of her own experiences as a female patient undertaking a cutting-edge technique, but also because it draws attention to the limits and obligations of what has been called 'Frankenstein science'. Where do we draw the line in medical experimentation? What can and can't be transplanted? Who decides?

I have not included images of Isabelle Dinoire in this blog post, since some readers might find them upsetting. But they are widely available online. So, too, are images of her surgeons, Bernard Devauchelle and Jean-Michel Dubernard, who also performed the first hand transplant. The hand transplant was not ultimately a success, because Clint Hallam, the recipient, could not bear living with it or dealing with the possibility of tissue rejection that occurred. For transplants to hold, massive amounts of immunosuppressants must be taken. Doctors are experimenting with alternative methods, but to date these have been unsuccessful. 

The history of face transplants is a history of experimentation, of trying to master the complexities of the different tissues making up the face. People with transplanted faces do not gain full facial mobility, so in addition to belonging to the realms of both the living and the dead, they are both healed and not healed. Isabelle Dinoire said that she felt like a 'monster' before her operation, when her wounds were visible and like a 'circus freak' afterwards, when everybody knew that she was the first face transplant recipient. Other people's responses to disfigurement and transplantation are hugely important. Face transplant surgery can be traced back to World War I and to the development of plastic and reconstructive techniques as a consequence of soldiers being wounded in ways and numbers never before seen. 

Another History Girl, Louisa Young, has written beautifully on questions of facial reconstructive surgery and social rehabilitation in My dear I wanted to tell you and the follow-up novels, The Heroes' Welcome and Devotion. I first met Louisa in 2006, when we were both contributing to the Wellcome Trust's first public exhibition, which was on hearts. Louisa had written her glorious Book of the Heart and I was working on a history monograph, Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, Emotion. Eleven years later, by a wonderful serendipity, I find myself working on the history of face transplants soon after the publication of My Dear, I have something to tell you.  

Maybe that isn't such a coincidence as it might appear. After all, hearts and faces have a lot in common. I became interested in the history of transplants because of what they tell us about our bodies - and how we feel about them. Heart transplant patients often claim they have received more than a stranger's heart; stories abound of people's personality or even their cravings and abilities changing as a result. Transplants are gifts, from one person to another (at least in the UK where donors are not paid). They provoke a range of emotional responses: fear of having a new organ, disgust that organ is assimilated into their own bodies, gratitude to the donor, guilt that s/he has died while the recipient lives on, and so on. Isabelle expressed both revulsion that her tongue touched the dead lips of her donor as well as gratitude for her new face. There is an added poignancy to the fact that Dinoire's donor was a young woman who committed suicide. In life as in death, the two were linked together forever.