In this paper I am going to deal with the change women suffered between Romantic period and Victorian period, specifically in art. Although the author I will used, he represents the women in a very idealistic way.
        Firstly I will start the paper with a little introduction about what Victorian era was and why was produced the change of mind.
        I will continue with the role of women in this period, which changes were made in difference with other times favoring women: new laws, reforms, new opportunities, different points of view… and the way they appeared in art.
        Secondly I will analyze the way Dante Gabriel Rossetti though about women, which was his ideal of female and if this ideal was destroyed by the reality. Finally, I will do a deep analysis of the double work of this same author “The blessed Damozel” in which the main and the most important part of the painting is a girl, his ideal of woman.
        To finish the paper I will expose the conclusion I got with the analysis and my personal point of view.

        Accoding to Wikipedia, ‘The Victorian era of the United Kingdom marked the height of the British Industrial Revolution and the apex of the British Empire. Commonly used to refer to the period of Queen Victoria's rule, scholars debate whether the Victorian period actually begins with the passage of Reform Act 1832, although the cultural, political, economic, industrial and scientific changes that occurred during her reign were remarkable. Britain was primarily agrarian and rural; upon her death, the country was highly industrialized and connected by an expansive railway network.
        Prior to the Industrial Revolution, Britain had a very rigid social structure consisting of four distinct classes: the Church and aristocracy, the middle class, and the working class.
        The top class, known as the aristocracy, included the Church and nobility and had great power and wealth. This class consisted of about two percent of the population, who were born into nobility and who owned the majority of the land. It included the royal family, lords spiritual and temporal, the clergy, great officers of state, and those above the degree of baronet. These people were privileged and avoided taxes.
        The middle class or bourgeoisie was made up of factory owners, bankers, shopkeepers, merchants, lawyers, engineers, businessmen, traders, and other professionals. These people could be sometimes extremely rich, but in normal circumstances they were not privileged, and they especially resented this. There was a very large gap between the middle class and the lower class.
        The British lower class was divided into two sections: "the working class" (labourers), and "the poor". The lower class contained men, women, and children performing many types of labour, including factory work, seam stressing, chimney sweeping, mining, and other jobs. Both the poorer class and the middle class had to endure a large burden of tax. This third class consisted of about eighty-five percent of the population.
        Industrialisation changed the class structure dramatically in the late 18th century. Hostility was created between the upper and lower classes. As a result of industrialisation, there was a huge boost of the middle and working class. As the Industrial Revolution progressed there was further social division. Capitalists, for example, employed industrial workers, who were one component of the working classes, but beneath the industrial workers was a submerged "under class" sometimes referred to as the "sunken people," which lived in poverty. The under class were more susceptible to exploitation and were therefore exploited.’
        This situation changed radically after the revolution as I will explain in a bit, the paper of women, low classes and children was completely different.

        The situation of women in Victorian era suffered a big change, they started to have role in the society, they were not only considered as house wife but they had an education and were able to read and write. In Norton Anthology webpage we can find a very good explanation of these changes I spoke about: ‘Many of the historical changes that characterized the Victorian period motivated discussion and argument about the nature and role of woman. The extension of the franchise by the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867 stimulated discussion of women's political rights. Although women in England did not get the vote until 1918, petitions to Parliament advocating women's suffrage were introduced as early as the 1840s. Equally important was the agitation to allow married women to own and handle their own property, which culminated in the passing of the Married Women's Property Acts (1870–1908).
        The Industrial Revolution resulted in changes for women as well. The explosive growth of the textile industries brought hundreds of thousands of lower-class women into factory jobs with grueling working conditions. The new kinds of labor and poverty that arose with the Industrial Revolution presented a challenge to traditional ideas of woman's place. Middle-class voices also challenged conventional ideas about women.
        Even Queen Victoria herself represents a similar paradox. Though she was queen of the British Empire, paintings and photographs of her, such as Winterhalter's The Royal Family in 1846, represent her identity in conventional feminine postures and relationships.’
        Again, according to Wikipedia ‘The status of Women in the Victorian Era is often seen as an illustration of the striking discrepancy between England's national power and wealth and what many, then and now, consider its appalling social conditions. Also, they were seen as pure and clean. Because of this view, their bodies were seen as temples which should not be adorned with jewellery nor used for physical exertion or pleasurable sex. The role of women was to have children and tend to the house, in contrast to men, according to the concept of Victorian masculinity. They could not hold a job unless it was that of a teacher or a domestic servant, nor were they allowed to have their own checking accounts or savings accounts.’
        In sexual part, wikipedia web page said ‘The Victorian society preferred to avoid talking about sex. Although difficult, sexual activities have been highly regulated in Europe by church and state law. Sexuality, viewed by the doctrines of medieval church, was considered as a gift from God; they followed the teachings of St. Paul and encouraged a life of chastity over a life of sexual desire. St. Paul taught that Christians should try to remain virgins but only should they marry if this could not be done. This allowed both men and women to be sexually active without being sinful by fornicating. Church law also ruled out sexual activities between the same genders and placed sexual limitations on married couples, for example: sexual relations at times of penance and on religious days were forbidden. Sexual relations were solely for the purpose of reproduction; therefore the church opposed sexual relations for the intentions of solely obtaining pleasure. As far as adultery, the courts treated women versus men unjustly. They typically granted more severe consequences to women adulterers than men. The courts argued that women jeopardized becoming pregnant with another man's child which could allow the child to inherit the property of the wrong father; thus their laws set standards for the sexual behaviour of women higher than that of men.’
        However we find the contradiction when we speak about prostitution in Victorian era, in Wikipedia we see that ‘beginning in the late 1840s, major news organisations, clergymen and single women became increasingly interested in prostitution, which came to be known as "The Great Social Evil." Although estimates of the number of prostitutes in London by the 1850s vary widely, it is enough to say that the number of women working the streets became increasingly difficult to ignore.
        When the 1851 census publicly revealed a 4% demographic imbalance in favour of women, the problem of prostitution began to shift from a moral/religious cause to a socio-economic one. The 1851 census showed that the population of Great Britain was roughly 18 million; this meant that roughly 750,000 women would remain unmarried simply because there were not enough men. These women came to be referred to as "superfluous women" or "redundant women," and many essays were published discussing what, precisely, ought to be done with them.
        While the Magdalene Hospital had been "reforming" prostitutes since the mid-18th century, the years between 1848 and 1870 saw a veritable explosion in the number of institutions working to "reclaim" these "fallen women" from the streets and retrain them for entry into respectable society so prostitution began to be seen as a social problem, rather than just a fact of urban life.
        Prostitutes were often presented as victims in sentimental literature.
        This emphasis on female purity was allied to the stress on the homemaking role of women, who helped to create a space free from the pollution and corruption of the city. In this respect the prostitute came to have symbolic significance as the embodiment of the violation of that divide. The double standard remained in force. Divorce legislation introduced in 1857 allowed for a man to divorce his wife for adultery, but a woman could only divorce if adultery was accompanied by cruelty. The anonymity of the city led to a large increase in prostitution and unsanctioned sexual relationships.’
        But, when this “work” started to be an scandal for the citizens appeared a law against prostitution which reform it saying that ‘The situation of prostitutes was actually worsened through the 'First Contagious Diseases Prevention Act' in 1864. In towns with a large military population, women suspected of being prostitutes had to subject themselves to an involuntary periodic genital examination. If they were diagnosed with an illness they were confined to hospitals until they were cured. This law applied to women only since military doctors believed that these shameful examinations would destroy a man's self-respect, another indication of the double standard of Victorian society. Because the decision about who was a prostitute was left to the judgment of police officers, far more women than those who were really prostitutes were examined. After two extensions of the law in 1866 and 1869 the unjust acts were finally repealed in 1886.’
        Not only was taken that reform, women were considered differently little by little so they did not depend as much as the husband as they did it years ago, therefore divorce law was developed: ‘Great changes in the situation of women took place in the 19th century, especially concerning marriage laws and the legal status of women. The situation that fathers always received custody of their children, leaving the mother completely without any rights, slowly started to change. The Custody of Infants Act in 1839 gave mothers of unblemished character access to their children in the event of separation or divorce, and the Matrimonial Causes Act in 1857 gave women limited access to divorce. But while the husband only had to prove his wife's adultery, a woman had to prove her husband had not only committed adultery but also incest, bigamy, cruelty or desertion. In 1873 the Custody of Infants Act extended access to children to all women in the event of separation or divorce. In 1878, after an amendment to the Matrimonial Causes Act, women could secure a separation on the grounds of cruelty and claim custody of their children. Magistrates even authorized protection orders to wives whose husbands have been convicted of aggravated assault. An important change was caused by an amendment to the Married Women's Property Act in 1884 that made a woman no longer a 'chattel' but an independent and separate person. Through the Guardianship of Infants Act in 1886 women could be made the sole guardian of their children if their husband died.’

        As huntfor.com says ‘When most people think of the Victorian era, high fashion, gilded age, rich with elegance, splendour, and romance, strict etiquette, and plush or eclectic decorating styles come to mind - but it was so much more than that. Victorian era covers Classicism, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism. Classicism, with the accurate and apparently objective description of the ordinary, observable world, was specially viewed as the opposite of Romanticism. Paintings of the Romantic school were focused on spontaneous expression of emotion over reason and often depicted dramatic events in brilliant colour. Impressionism, a school of painting that developed in the late 19th century, was characterized by transitory visual expressions that focused on the changing effects of light and colour. Post-Impressionism was developed as a reaction to the limitations of Impressionism. Victorian art was shown in the full range of artistic developments, from the development of photography to the application of new technologies in architecture.’
        Also according to wikipedia ‘This inescapable sense of newness resulted in a deep interest in the relationship between modernity and cultural continuities. Gothic Revival architecture became increasingly significant in the period, leading to the Battle of the Styles between Gothic and Classical ideals.’
        Again in huntfor.com we find that ‘In the midst of these artistic movements, painters Dante Rossetti and William Holman Hunt formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. The avant-garde artists banded together with the common vision of recapturing the style of painting that preceded Raphael, famed artist of the Italian Renaissance. The brotherhood rejected the conventions of industrialized England, especially the creative principles of art instruction at the Royal Academy. Rather, the artists focused on painting directly from nature, thereby producing colourful, detailed, and almost photographic representations. The painters sought to transform Realism with typological symbolism, by drawing on the poetry and literature of William Shakespeare and their own contemporaries.’
        ‘The emergence of photography resulted in significant changes in Victorian art. It later became associated with the Impressionistic and Social Realist techniques that would dominate the later years of the period in the work of artists such as Walter Sickert and Frank Holl.’ Says wikipedia.

        According to victorianweb, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti, perhaps the most famous of the Pre-Raphaelites and the central mind of the movement, is often accused of empty aestheticism, perverse fleshly ideas of art and religion, and the objectifying of women.
        The concept of his fair lady arose early in Rossetti's life, he began formulating a woman-image type: a blond, slender, round-armed, straight-nosed, gray-eyed, white-skinned, red-lipped, bright-faced, white-teethed, small and firmly breasted, slim-waisted female who also embodied grace, stateliness and chastity. His concept of woman as a heavenly creature.
        However, Rossetti soon moved beyond the unreachable saintly figure of Mary. His heavenly lady soon became a saviour of man, whose beauty reached religious proportions as did love with such a woman. Manifestations of this type occur in Rossetti's Blessed Damozel wherein he began equating earthly love with heavenly bliss -- a union of spirit and body. Therefore, Rossetti increasingly turned to artwork to make his ideals have more tangibility.
        He began to struggle with the inconsistencies of his portrayals of women -- for instance, how could the prostitute or siren lead him to divine inspiration if his fantasy relied upon the purity and integrity of woman? He began to differentiate between love and lust, body and soul -- his whole ideal began to fragment, because real women turned out to be far more complicated.
        By the time of Rossetti's death, his life-long struggle to fuse the spiritual with the sensual, to discover the nature of woman -- or rather, the confirm his ideals of woman in art and in life -- did not quite come together. His body of work, so often quoted from his own life experiences, shows the great conflicts within his fantasy and the inconsistencies of human emotion. He searched and toiled to bring his dreams into reality, so he could not be called an escapist in the classical sense. Nor could his fascination with women be so easily dismissed as fleshy aestheticism or objectification.’

        Victorianweb affirms that ‘Rossetti's characteristic style is well suited to his most famous pair of subjects, Art and Love, where "matter and spirit... play inextricably into each other". The blending of the material and the spiritual, of soul and body, of idea and act, defines Rossetti's pictorial work as much as it does his verse. Its extreme idealizations emerge in and through acts of writing, much as the meaning of prayer is an instantiated act of devotion.
        His most important aesthetic contribution was that remarkable generic form known as "the double work of art." This is an amalgam of literary and pictorial works on a single subject. That is to say, Rossetti usually "doubles" a pictorial work with a text or a set of texts. The picture may be his own or someone else's.
        These double works are translation forms. The dialectic of the forms is once again performative rather than conceptual. One might judge from this process that Rossetti is pursuing an unmediated form of knowing, but the truth is otherwise. What these double works want to avoid is precisely the transformation of artistic acts into ideated terms, as if thinking were an abstract process of reflection. For Rossetti, on the contrary, the practice of art is a practice of thought more penetrating than expository explanation.
        The writing features an "almost grotesque materialising of abstractions" and stylistic "particularisation". On one hand Rossetti covets a "transparency in language" devoted to "the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth". On the other he is "always personal and even recondite, in a certain sense learned and casuistically, sometimes complex or obscure".
        The combination of Rossetti's favorite English poets and his Italian verse inheritance lies behind that astonishing signature work of Rossetti's late teens, "The Blessed Damozel," with its paradoxical combinations — rhythmical as well as figurative.
        The Blessed Damozel is perhaps Rossetti's signature work. It was executed well after he wrote his poem on the same title.’
        After this little explanation of Rossetti’s way of working, I am going to analyze the poem and the picture all together.
        Description Victorianweb gives us about the picture is the next one: ‘Behind the Damozel, beneath spreading branches, groups of lovers embrace against a pink sky; below her a pink flame outlines three angel heads. In the predella the earthly lover rests beside a river in a wooded landscape’. With this description we have a superficial explanation but in a deeper way we can find lots of things and relate them with the text of the poem so, seeing the picture, first of all we can clearly distinguish two parts, the painting is divided in two like two different worlds: in the top of the painting, where the four women are placed, we can consider it as the heaven; on the contrary, the lowest part would be the earth.
        Analyzing the first stanza and contrasting it with the picture, we see the damozel is looking at the earth from the heaven like if she was in a balcony but her expression is sad, her face is serious. With this feeling we can imagine something is going wrong and also because in the poem the author says ‘the stars in her hair were seven’ and if we check the picture only appear six stars so the seventh probably will be the man in the earth, her lover. So, here we have the clue for he sadness, she would like to be with the man she loves that is her first love and she is waiting for him with purity, chastity, and innocence, that is what the lilies symbolize.
        The second stanza deals with damozel virginity again because as the poem says ‘a white rose of Mary's gift’ and if we see the picture, any rose appears in her robe; therefore it is not a real rose, it is symbolizing virginity because Mary’s virginity is represented with a white rose.
        The third stanza has nothing to do with the other two, now it is dealing with her death. She is in the heaven because she dead but she is still as pretty as she was alive. The metaphor of ‘had been a day one of God's choristers’ is used instead of saying she died, as if God wished she was part of her choir and that is why she dead. For these reasons she is in silence and although ten years have passed she will be eternally beautiful.
        The fourth stanza, the last one seems to be the thoughts of her lover. He still loves her because ten years have passed but he remembers her as the first day, what she did when she was alive, her hair fallen over his face… and he compares the autumn and the fall of leaves with the time when she left him alone.
        After the analysis of the poem with the picture, I will analyze only the picture dealing with the characteristics of Rossetti.
        In the main part of the picture (the heaven) we can see the biggest and showy thing is the girl, the light of the image focuses over her therefore she is important for the author. The way she is painted also shows us author’s thoughts; she is a very beautiful girl, with blond-long hair, light skin, red lips, straight nose… she is the woman image type I spoke before, the perfect woman under Rossetti’s point of view; but, as we also have seen before, Rossetti discovered that woman does not exist and this is the reason why she is placed in the heaven.
        Behind the girl we see falling in love couples so the perfect spouse only will be find when you die and go to heaven or the other possibility, maybe more reasonable for this picture, is that you will meet your couple and you will be happy when both of you had dead and meet again in the eternal life. Now we understand why she is waiting so sad for her love, she wants to be happy.
        On the other hand we have three angels under the main girl but maybe, they are not angels because their wings are blacks, these three women represent the real women which Rossetti found in the earth, the position they have is like blocking the pass using a kind of palm leave, similar to guardians. With these three women DGR also express his point of view of the earthly women, they seem angels, their surface is angelical but really they have a dark side hidden (the black wings). The way they are painted is not the same as the main girl. Those three are painted with darker colours and their expressions transmit wickedness.
        Finally, the man who appears in the earth is laying quietly, thinking about something so after this analysis I would dare to say the man is the author and he is dreaming that his perfect woman will wait him in the heaven and the three “black” angels are the difficulties he will find in the way to reach her.