Born of the Sea

elizabeth wears primarily greens and blues (vibrant like the colors of the insects that she loves), but always with a bright red cross necklace. she wears beautiful colors until her wedding when she wears white, white like her fiancée william, with that necklace on her throat. victor's bullet pierced her stomach on the night of her wedding before the marriage was even conducted let alone consummated, staining her core with violence in a bedroom, the place of consummation and the part of the body where life takes root.

two women, played by the same actress, both die at the hands of those who claim to love them, a father and son who were both performing masculinity (fatherhood as an act of imposition on a woman's bodily autonomy, and the importance of surgical greatness on the part of leopold, fatherhood as violence against one's child, and romantic love as a form of protection from percieved harm on the part of victor) and in the process staining pure white clothes blood red with waning life.

The Bathers (1853)