Contradiction: Oberon and Titania

1854–58

There were new rooms.

He had been told that the better class of criminal patients would be moved from the ordinary wards, and that the new rooms were large and airy and had pictures and statues. He thought of the rooms while he was on the ward, keeping silence while others ranted along the dormitory cells. In his silence, that leafless forest, branches locked over his head, footfall soaked into the earth, smothered by sandy ground, he waited.

Seeing airy rooms, airy rooms.

On the day that he was moved, he was shown a book of his confinement. He had been quiet and amenable, lost in his inner landscape, head bowed under the imagined ceiling of branches, so that when they came to take him, he was calm.

He looked at the book, laid out on the great oak table. There was written the date of his admission, and the date of his trial, and his transfer from Maidstone jail.

He had leaned over the page, tracing the copperplate, fixated on the curvature of lettering and the neatness of the figures. He put his hand on the page to absorb its contours, its ridges and rises, its mountains and valleys. Inside the scroll of the downward strokes were rivers, their moisture coiling in warming drops on the fine tipping slant of the R, the expansive curve of the D.

These things were in his name: rivers and drops of oil and drops of paint and drops of blood. In his name and the dates of his life were continents and countries. Here he came on 22nd August 1844—he pressed his fingertips to the line—in strait-waistcoat and his blue cloak, and his hands shackled, and a dark beard and combed hair, a Christ in chains, driven by the Devil.

It was May. In the new rooms was a calendar. It was the first thing he saw. He didn’t care to view the country from the windows: the lost city, the distant gray edge of the Thames. He cared only to walk up and down the wall of the door that had admitted him.

He took a place in the corner, with his back to the light.

Edward Brigham, his new attendant, brought him his easel. Dadd drew a line on the floor to keep the other patients away. Behind the line, the Devil himself whispered and writhed, subdued by the changes, muttering in sleep.

He had begun this painting three years before. He thought that perhaps it would take him still another year. He marked out the picture in a grid, and worked from the bottom right-hand corner upward. It would have been easier to work in the opposite direction, downward from the left; that way he would not have to hold his arm and hand at such an impossible angle. But as his elbow and shoulder took the strain of the painting, they carried it, and he could feel himself crawling upward, inch by inch, slowly toward completion, like the snails and insects that inhabited his pictures, and took week upon week, month upon month, to illustrate.

Last year, in addition to Contradiction, he had painted the last of the Passions. Sketches for each torment: duplicity, and disappointment, and grief, and anger.

In Hatred he could not help himself. He painted The Duke of Gloster—“see how my sword weeps the poor King’s death”—but he didn’t paint Gloster’s face above the body; he painted his own, staring at the long blade.

Jealousy and Hatred were painted within days of each other. He couldn’t separate them; they were woven, knotted in his head. Murder was easy; his brush flowed. Cain standing above Abel, a club in his hand, the bodies almost indistinguishable from each other. This was what he could never tell others, not even Mr. Hood, who had been so understanding of his work. That he and his father were conjoined in the same way as the biblical brothers, sealed forever in the same terrible moment. He had stood above his father, connected to him by ties of blood in more than one sense. He would think about this often; the hand to the weapon, the weapon to the throat. Such were family ties: the constriction, the conjunction, the dispatch.

After it, his hand was shuddering. Brigham, with a kindness in his touch, took away the paints.

In the bottom of Contradiction, he had painted an archer. Grotesque, with his arm drawn back, he is aiming at the fairy queen herself. Fairy sprites struggle to save her life, though she remains obliviously unaware. So unaware, in fact, that she has crushed another tiny winged figure under the ball of her foot. She is cruel. Bulky, unappealing and cruel, dominating the painting while scenes of frantic defense unravel around her.

He couldn’t bring himself to love her. His Titania was rigid, static, swollen with greed, sated with bodily lust. She had changed since he last drew her twelve years earlier; grown huge, self-satisfied, bored, unflinching. She was the very embodiment of anger, the central core of the quarrel between fairy king and queen. He disliked her with an increasing passion, an increasing need to be free of her. And yet she grew there in the center of his mind, taking on a bright yellow gown and a robe that hung from her hand and trailed below her feet, representing all the distortions and details and objects that had come to possess him. He longed to be free of her. He longed to rush out into the daylight and breathe fresh air.

He longed for that air to blow through him, and make him clean.

He finished the painting at the end of the month.

When he stood up at last and looked out, the year had turned miraculously to summer.