Title: ‘Vanity (Frailty), Thy Name Is Woman’ - How Women Look For Power In All The Wrong Places|Uncle Guido's Facts
Headings: ‘Vanity (Frailty), Thy Name Is Woman’ - How Women Look For Power In All The Wrong Places
Sunday, July 5, 2015
‘Vanity (Frailty), Thy Name Is Woman’ - How Women Look For Power In All The Wrong Places

Content: Lady Lilith sensuously reclines in a luxuriant, though decidedly ambiguous, environment. Rossetti's placement of a mirror behind Lilith, reflecting a lush tree in the exterior, complicates the scene both visually and symbolically as the viewer struggles to discern between interiority and exteriority. Yet the focus of the painting is most certainly Lady Lilith herself. She is the consummate image of sensuality and beauty. With heavy-lidded eyes she gazes at herself in the mirror, completely absorbed in her own image ( www.victorianweb.org)
Why Lilith so many centuries after Shakespeare? The more plausible explanation is a psycho-social one. Men have always mistrusted women with good reason. For courtier and commoner alike paternity in Elizabethan times was serious business. Kings were concerned about lineage, heritage, and succession; and peasants refused to work hard hours for offspring that weren’t theirs.