Speak! Speak! 1895

Curator: Sir John Everett Millais, best known as one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, painted "Speak! Speak!" The canvas is quite large, over six feet tall. Editor: It has a ghostly quality. The man in bed looks startled by the woman at the curtains; is she even real? Curator: It’s thought to depict a scene from Wilkie Collins's "The Woman in White," a sensation novel that played with themes of identity, madness, and the precarious position of women. Editor: Note the sharp contrast between the pallid figure at the window and the darker, more physically present man; a potent visual symbol for Victorian anxieties about gender and class. Curator: Exactly. Millais uses the imagery of the spectral woman to represent the voicelessness of women within the patriarchal structures of the time. The title itself becomes a demand. Editor: It’s a powerful rendering of the uncanny, where societal tensions manifest as literal hauntings. I find myself thinking about how these power dynamics persist today. Curator: It is interesting to observe how the weight of history can still find a visual echo in the present. Editor: Indeed. I am left pondering what it means to find the past speaking to us through art.