“MY WORLD MY WORK MY WOMAN ALL MY OWN” READING DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI IN HIS VISUAL AND TEXTUAL NARRATIVES

Dante Gabriel Rossetti marks a rare episode in English art and literature, not least of all as that profoundly elusive hybrid, the painter-poet. A literary and artistic multi-linguist, Rossetti presented to Victorian monistic phallocentrism a pluralistic narrative consolidation; surprisingly invocative of today’s interactive multi-media, he combined the mediums of word and image, in a ceaseless search for representation of his personified emotions; unifying ideas and forms into a readerly ‘discursive’ synthesis. A feminized egocentric projection infiltrates Rossetti’s literary, as well as pictorial art. To the “the love poet and love painter” the women whom he painted were his inamoratas - conversely material expression of his own idealism and vulnerability: images capable of awakening in him self-recognition, so that in painting them he metamorphosed onto canvas his own thoughts, needs and dejection. Mostly Rossetti was a ‘victorian’ Victorian: a subjugated and indoctrinated individual, who found redeeming expression in the other, so that self corresponded to the dualism inherent to his creative method: indeed a tangible polarity permeates both his art and life. The Rossettian other, the manifestation of his soul that subsequently materialized in his textual and visual narratives is ever the female entity. In a letter to a friend he refers to the manifestation of the self in the mediums of painting and poetry as “putting into action a complete dramatis personae of the soul”: his objectification of himself as a dramatic/fictional character is matched by his objectification of woman as physical sanctified emblem of said dramatis personae. Illustrating Irigray’s idea that social objectivism of the female become inversed and that “by submitting women’s bodies to a general equivalent to a transcendent, supernatural value, men have drawn the social structure into an even greater process of abstraction, to the point were they themselves are produced in it as pure concept.” The female extension is means to his expression as an artist and liberation as a man: the exigency and strain of such a personification, and the fact that he must resort to it is indication of the degrees to which he is victim of Victorian gender stipulation. The complexity of his situation arises from his being both agent and victim, indeed victim twice; as man with empathy for the feminine; as extra-patriarchal artist; although his defence of female autonym is largely indebted to an eager definition of self-identity and self-autonomy. Rossetti is not an easy man to pin down; not by stratagem but by personal insecurity his creative life is one promulgated by a search for self-definition; he is therefore an individual largely culminating of the instinctive and the conditioned; as are we all, one may reasonably interject, but in Rossetti these two aspects –that which he is and that which external conditioning demand he must be – are mutually exclusive and stand divided; refusing to jell by an act of mitigation into customary hypocritical reconciliation that besets the rest of us; painfully separate, neither one compromised by the other, ever conflicting, ever unstable. While the artistic outcome of this troubled state is conducive to images remarkably unique, in terms of being the life experience of an imaginative, sensual man of the period, they are by no means uncommon. One cannot but agree with Wood that “Rossetti, more than any of them [the Brotherhood] enjoyed the seamier side of Bohemian life in London”, that “he was not religious nor did he suffer from the moral inhibitions that so plagued most of his contemporaries.” Yet even a cursory perusal of his poetry and paintings reveal an agitated psyche. Equally he was untypical for being "far too complex, far too imaginative, far too intelligent and far too full of contradictions, ever to be forced into the constricting strait-jacket of the role of a conventional Victorian youth" − and there’s the rub. The ‘love poet and love painter’ focused upon the female form and strove to demolish the slavishly prescribed Victorian identity of woman. In so doing he conceptualised an ideology of life through this singular image; not only decrying the reduced and pacified situation of the nineteenth-century female, but demythologising also the psyche of the Victorian male. In The Blessed Damozel, for example, Rossetti first conceptualised and placed upon the archetypal ‘pedestal’ a woman of irreproachable credentials: devout, pure and for Victorian tastes, passive and mild to the extent of being dead! The pedestal is heaven: no higher accolade is possible and no greater detachment from active life achievable: this is his biting satire. Rossetti’s was “a troubled psyche working through dimly perceived distress... constantly processing a “world”, through joint venture of the visual and the textual, not only reflecting, but also formulating and “help[ing] shape the Victorian Age into the paradox-laden, hot mess of an era we know it as today.” Rossetti’s positive re-enforcement of the feminine icon was deeply and inextricably linked to his “complex relationship to hegemonic Victorian Masculinity”: a latent disassociation and distrust of a demonstrably ineffectual and impotent patriarchal authority, as he perceived his father as being; alongside a conversely capable, strong and inspiring example of feminine leadership, as depicted by his mother; while alienating him from the former, aligns him to appreciation, with life-long adoration, of the latter. The alienation from the father and subsequent issues of manhood and alienated social identity, are dilemmas never resolved; while the realisation that initial indoctrination is paradoxically administered in vulnerable childhood through the mother is a secondary complication that distorts his allegiance to the feminine with a half acknowledged sense of resentment. That Rossetti has a ‘love love’ relationship with “his women” that is also unassailably superficial without acknowledgement of their intrinsic identity, and an intense fixation that is as singularly egocentric and entirely self-centred: within the love there is in equal measure neediness and disregard. If in the beloved association with the mother is a tangible unmindfulness; so in the disdainful rejection of the father is a carefully devised association. Rossetti’s efforts to promote the feminine entity through what could be deemed a strenuously feminist argument, creates a subterfuge readily evident and voraciously political: given that in essence his treatment of the women in his life is closely akin to the patriarchal norm, how then do we explain this civic idealism? By deferring that it is civic in intention and referring to it instead as a bias towards the defence of ‘the subjugated individual’. Or it can plausibly be explained as a reference to the political tendencies of his father, Gabriele. He was a political refugee from Italy who gathered around him his fellow dispossessed, compatriots one and all, whom an amazed Hunt describes as “all escaped revolutionaries” passionate orators on political injustice and the abhorrent rule of the tyrant. It seems not unreasonable to assume that this was the one true passion and incentive Rossetti witnessed in his father and therein registered on some subconscious level at least that negligible aspect of his masculine heritage. Within the figure of the woman dwells Rossetti’s inner world – his ego, his fears and his aspirations. This fidelity to inner experience is a constant in Rossetti’s art; his work is marked by a pre-dominant proto-expressionism that culminates finally in the anxiety ridden images of the late works. The problem with Rossetti is that again and again he challenges social imperatives and deciphers them for the arbitrary statement they are, but is never willing to emerge from the myth completely, as if fearful that in unravelling it he will disastrously unravel himself.