Paula Rego: Visions of English Literature Castle Museum Norwich 18 October 2025-18 January 2026

Paula Rego: Visions of English Literature showcases three series of prints by the Portuguese-English artist: Nursery Rhymes, Peter Pan and Jane Eyre. My understanding of visual art is fairly rudimentary. However, I feel justified in venturing into the territory in this case as the subject matter is explicitly literary (my home turf) and obviously of interest to psychoanalysis.

In The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim offers a Freudian reading of fairytales – this is what he has to say about Beauty and the Beast:

…all is gentleness and loving devotion to one another on the part of three main characters […] a child’s oedipal attachment to a parent is natural … and has the most positive consequences for all, if during the process of maturation it is transferred and transformed as it becomes detached from the parent and concentrated on the lover. (Bettelheim 1977: 307)

Rego’s work offers a furious corrective to this vision of sweetness and light. The depictions of childhood and early adolescence in these prints, present a world of knowing sexuality and violence. There are no neat transformations, but rather abrupt disjunctions, violent upheavals. Furthermore, the images I want to pay particular attention to seem angrily to envision a world beyond the ‘natural’ oedipal attachments Bettelheim blithely describes, to an inhuman nature that is sexual but also red in tooth and claw.

Her print that accompanies Baa Baa Black Sheep is among the most disturbing and arresting images in the exhibition. (Paula Rego, Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, 1989 | Cristea Roberts Gallery) We may be reminded of Iago’s racist warning to Brabantio at the start of Othello: ‘An old black ram is tupping your white ewe.’ The black sheep of the nursery rhyme, in Rego’s vision, is obviously a figure of masculine – though not necessarily human – sexuality, rising head and shoulders above the young girl he embraces and looking down on her complacently. But there is no fear in the attitude we can discern in the girl, though her face is turned from the viewer; one hand tenderly sits beneath his foreleg, the other is raised ready to cast a spell, or grasp his neck. The most telling detail is the small human male figure who is bizarrely crammed into a space at the ram’s back – in a cave or perhaps a rip in the fabric of the picture. His body seems to be craning to see what is going on, his face, though obscure, could be expressing anger, jealousy. He is cartoonish, while the two main figures are lovingly detailed. The whole image is full of danger and desire. It is a sexuality that seems to threaten the human oedipal world of the tiny man, and it is in no way simply benign. It brings to mind Angela’s Carter’s rewriting of Beauty and the Beast, ‘The Tyger’s Bride’, in which it is not the beast who becomes human, but beauty who becomes animal.

A companion to this image comes from the set Rego made for Jane Eyre. This novel has been a major location for feminist and psychoanalytic criticism, certainly since Gilbert and Gubar’s groundbreaking The Madwoman in the Attic. Rego says that she came to Jane Eyre after having read Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s prequel which gives the shadowy figure incarcerated in Rochester’s oubliette a vivid independent life. Nevertheless, the prints Rego makes are not in this more mainstream feminist tradition. They mostly focus on Jane’s early life – her experiences in the house of her cruel aunt and at the miserable Lowood School, or seem concerned with Jane’s ward, Adele. The image I want to focus on takes an oneiric swerve from the material of the book (Loving Bewick From 'Jane Eyre - The Guardians' - Hornseys Gallery - Ripon, North Yorkshire) . At the novel’s start, Jane has sequestered herself behind a curtain on a windowsill, avoiding the noisy petulance of her cousins, and is immersed in the world of a book,

Bewick’s History of British Birds: the letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of “the solitary rocks and promontories” by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape. (Jane Eyre, Chapter 1)

But Rego, in the vividly named ‘Loving Bewick’, does not imagine Bewick as a book, but an outsized pelican, and the Jane of the image is not a child but an adult. Jane is seated and the bird stands on her knees with its bill suggestively about to enter Jane’s mouth. Her eyes are closed, her face strained and frowning. The ‘loving’ of this book, which the child Jane so clearly presents in the novel, becomes a sexualised feeding. It is only looking today that I realise the picture could well be a self-portrait; the lines of Jane’s face decidedly remind us of a young Rego. Once again, I see the image as a vision of a sexuality that defies the oedipal masculine world; infant Jane’s escape of her adoptive family becomes adult Jane’s escape from Rochester into an imaginative and enigmatic realm of desire.

The final images I want to discuss are from the series on J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, a book Rego adored as a child. There are four prints of ‘Sewing on the Shadow’ in the exhibition. It is a moment that clearly fascinated Rego and one she envisioned in different ways. They have common features but are subtly different. In all of them, Wendy sits patiently and diligently doing her work of repair. In three Peter is prone and in one he stands, offering Wendy his ankle. In two he smiles, in one he seems impassive and in one, her first, his face is half turned away and there seems to be a sullen rage. To my mind, this is the most interesting of the four images. (Roseberys London | Paula Rego, British 1935-2022-   Sewing on) Wendy’s eyes are black holes in this print and the only shadow cast is hers, not Peter’s. The shadow is perhaps the most striking element of the image. It picks out her ponytail, high on the back of her head, but what is projected is slender, bringing to my mind some Egyptian image of an Ibis or Thoth. What does it mean to sew on the shadow? In this image there is a grim acceptance of something dark and mythic, the sewing is a lonely ritual held by the bright moon which dominates the night window. If in Barrie’s tale, the shadow is capricious and playful, here it is a frightening and enigmatic figure. It is closer to Jung’s conception of the shadow – that which we deny about ourselves and hastily project onto others; to have it sewn back on is a process whose presence in the nursery is troubling. All the same, the other images challenge this reading; in the three alternative prints there is something matter of fact and domestic about the scene, perhaps suggesting that an accommodation with the shadow is best achieved through play.

What I describe here only touches the surface; the exhibition offers hours of fascination to the viewer. If you are unable to make it, the Hayward Gallery have printed an accompanying book with excellent essays by Marco Livingstone, Rosanna McLaughlin and Marina Warner.

Paula Rego: Visions of English Literature - John Sandoe Books