The WOMAN’S FIGURE IN THE Rossetti BROTHERS poetry.

As we see in the title, we are talking about the Pre-Raphaelites trend, but certainly we are going to focus in two of its most famous and remarkable poets. These poets are brothers and their names are Gabriel Dante Rossetti and Christina Rossetti. We can say that G. D. Rossetti is the most representative figure in Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood according to his poems and also with his paintings. Her sister, very influenced by her brother’s poetry is also one of the most important women poetry writers who show clearly the features that defines this trend. As we will see later in the paper, our main topic which we will explain through their poems is the women’s representation that each poet makes and also we will compare some issues that make them a bit different. These differences that we can find in their poetry, although they belong to the same trend, as I have said before, will be commented analyzing “The Blessed Damozel” (G. D. Rossetti, 1847) and “When I am dead, my dearest” (Christina Rossetti, 1849) poems.

Now we are going to explain briefly what the characteristics of this trend are and why these two brothers are the main representation of it.

The poetry of meditation and worry, though if often drew on the Wordsworthian cadence and the Tennysonian languor, could not be expected to develop the vein of rich pictorial poetry that was implicit in the Keats-Tennyson tradition. This vein was developed by Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, but in conjunction with other techniques and attitudes which make the whole situation complex and in some respects self-contradictory. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was originally a painter’s movement, founded in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), Holman Hunt, John Everet Millais, William Michael Rossetti, and others, in revolt against the eighteenth-century academicism which still prevailed in official artistic quarters where the achievements of, for example, Blake, Turner, Constable, and Samuel Palmer, were ignore. The movement believe in simplicity and accuracy of detail, in freshness and directness and precision, and it looked to medieval art to find them. We thus get the paradox that the Pre-Raphaelites began both as realists and as medievalists. In actual practice, many of the Pre-Raphaelites painters chose literary subjects, showing themselves influenced by Keats and Tennyson. (1)

Freshness and simplicity in the handling of detail went side by side with a deep sense of the significance of detail, the symbolic and sacramental meaning of objects, such as we find in the symbolism of medieval religion and painting. That was one link between the realistic and the medieval aspects of Pre-Raphaelitism. Further, the surface of Victorian life did not yield objects which seemed other than ludicrous or vulgar to the artists and poets of the time: trouser is notoriously intractable to the sculptor. Medieval artists used the fashions of their own day, but the Pre-Raphaelites, convinced with Ruskin of the ugliness of the Victorian surface, felt unable to use contemporary fashions (though Ruskin once admitted that theoretically this was desirable and “if it would not look well, the times are wrong and their modes must be altered”), and dressed their characters in “primitive” robes. One side of Pre-Raphaelite theory based the desire for naturalness and directness on the need for truth and the claims of science. But it was not really the interests of science that the Pre-Raphaelites were anxious to serve; the more interesting of them at least were concerned to give to things as well as to characters and situations the kind of symbolic reality they had to the medieval mind. In their desire to achieve this they were seduced by lilies and stars and roses to a vague neo-romanticism which achieved the opposite of what they professed, but they were not always so led astray.(1)

Rossetti turned to poetry from painting, his mind nourished on Dante and the early Italian poets, his Italian heredity and background strongly felt. His first poems appeared in the short-lived Pre-Raphaelite periodical The Germ (1850), and others in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856). It was Rossetti’s early study of Dante which familiarized him with the symbolizing and sacramentalizing aspect of the medieval mind, and his own temperament also encouraged a tendency to identify the concretely physical with the permanently spiritual. This habit of mind was not one which came easily to the Victorians, with the result that Pre-Raphaelite influence in poetry apart from Rossetti’s often led only to pseudo-medieval attitudinizing, coy archaisms, and pictorial lushness. Rossetti has a strength and vibrancy in his imagery that these others lack. In this way, “The Blessed Damozel,” in spite of an occasional false note, is a finely wrought poem in a mode that is not really either Keatsian or Swinburnian-nor truly Dantesque either, for that matter, for the disposition of the emotion is altogether too self-conscious.(1)

It was to be expected that Rossetti should draw his images with a painter’s eye, but in fact, though he employs considerable pictorial detail, it is the element of thought and even abstraction, the attempt to reduce everything to an idea or an essence, that is more characteristic of his poetry. Rossetti attempts to wed characteristic in his poetry. In some respects it can be said that he tried to operate in a medieval made in the Victorian world, and that he could only achieve limited success because of the context of his operations. Rossetti remains an impressive, if in some respects a puzzling, poet, not to be explained altogether by reference to the Pre-Raphaelite Movement which he helped to found. He possessed energy, even a savagery that is very unlike anything we can find in the Pre-Raphaelite painters or in the other poets who contributed to The Germ. The line from Keats through Tennyson to Rossetti is a real one so far as the handling of certain kinds of pictorial imagery is concerned; but Rossetti’s place at the end of that line is almost accidental: he had other sources of strength, though he could not always assimilate them to the other aspects of his art. (1)

The poetry of Christina Rossetti (1830-94) has less complex sources than her brother’s. Her religious imagination and her steady Anglican piety dominate her poetry as they did her life, limiting her interests and even inhibiting parts of her nature, yet, in her best work, giving precisely that combination of strength and  simplicity without affliction or verbal posturing which the Pre-Raphaelites sought. There is nothing archaic or pseudo-medieval in her use of symbol and allegory: she had the kind of religious sensibility that naturally sought expression in that way. Her lyrical poems show at times a quietly luminous clarity that almost-but never quite-suggests the religious poetry of the metaphysical. (1)

The shorter poems, as for example: “When I am dead, my dearest”, which is the poem of our paper, are the most appealing. She published almost a dozen volumes of poetry, some purely devotional, and often her special gift of timeless clarity gives way to mere flatness. But at her best she could use simple rhythms and unpretentious imagery with sharpness and a concentrated inwardness of meaning that achieve considerable power. Her temper was hardly Victorian, and she availed herself of few of the Victorian poet’s professional tricks. She might have done better in the seventeenth  century, when her strong religious feeling might have found itself less at odds with the world she live in and less restrictive of total personality. (1)

Christina Rossetti’s devotional poetry derives much from the powerful influence of Dante which was shared by all the younger members of her Anglo-Italian family (her sister Maria is the author of the pioneer English analysis A Shadow of Dante (1872), and in 1861 Dante Gabriel Rossetti had published his study The Early Italian Poets, later revised as Dante and His Circle) but her piety is also distinctly English. Her own intense Anglo-Catholicism readily responded to Anglican precedents. In the shorter poems which deal with secular relationships she explores emotional evasion and the failure of human sympathy as human alternatives to religious consolation and heavenly consummation. In the short and even more ambiguous Song “When I am Dead my Dearest’ human love is treated with a take-it-or-leave-it quality which serves to qualify its Keatsian metaphors and suggestions. (2)

Talking about the personality of Rossetti as a writer, Pater (1839-1894) thinks that Rossetti is a writer whose study of Dante and his circle led him to develop an “unmistakably novel” style. The chief quality of this sweet new style is what Pater calls a “transparency in language” devoted to “the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth.” Stylistic limpidity is crucial in Rossetti's case because his subjects and meanings are “always personal and even recondite, in a certain sense learned and casuistical, sometimes complex or obscure.”(3). Furthermore, Pater's essay (1989) investigates the paradox of a writer seen as both limpid and obscure. He wants to show how Rossetti's poetic idealizations are (paradoxically) tied to often extreme forms of “particularization.” The work everywhere exhibits what Pater calls an “almost grotesque materialising of abstractions.” He covets these effects because his central subjects are Art and Love. All these features that Pater tells us about Rossetti’s poetry (4) are visible in his poem “The Blessed Damozel”. On one hand, as Pater says above, we can see that he is describing his Damozel in the first part of the poem. This description is what Pater says: “matter and spirit ... play inextricably into each other”, because the woman is died and what Rossetti is describing to the reader is her spirit, despite of he talks about she as a materialized person (entailing that materialized means: something that you can touch). Also, in her description he uses elements that are spirituals and maybe also a little mystical:

The blessed Damozel lean'd out
         From the gold bar of Heaven:
 Her blue grave eyes were deeper much          
         Than a deep water, even.
She had three lilies in her hand,
         And the stars in her hair were seven.

(Verse from 1 to 6)

Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,
         No wrought flowers did adorn,
But a white rose of Mary's gift
         On the neck meetly worn;
And her hair, lying down her back,
         Was yellow like ripe corn.

(Verse from 7 to 12)

Although Pater does not pursue the thought, these are also subjects that can only be taken up as activities, in performative and, finally, in interactive ways. The blending of the material and the spiritual, of soul and body, of idea and act, defines Rossetti's poetry as much as it does his pictorial work. As we know, Rossetti is also a painter and as a painter, we also can see this poem in his art collection. The art representation that Rossetti does of this poem is very interesting, because with both in hands, the reader can appreciate the correspondence to one other. In a first view, we can think that the poem is a simple description of the image, but later, in a deeper view, we discover some errors that make think that the picture is not a realistic and literal representation of it. The image is a “guide” of the poem materialized which tries to help us to understand better what the poet wants to transmit. Pater astutely calls Rossetti's poetry “sacramental”—despite its resolute “fleshliness”—exactly because of its performative character its extreme idealizations emerge in and through acts of writing, much as the meaning of prayer is the instantiated act of (textual) devotion itself. (4)

Rossetti's juvenilia comprise a moderate corpus of poems, dramas, prose tales, and translations written in the 1830s and early 1840s. All of this work shows a thorough commitment to romantic, not to say gothic, preoccupations. Much has not survived, and while little of the work before 1845 possesses any intrinsic value, it is important for what it shows about certain tendencies in his writing.

The mature and finished character of Rossetti's poetry, not least in this early period of its flowering, was achieved because of the discipline he acquired translating Dante and the poets of the early stil novisti circle. These translations (probably begun as early as 1845)plunged him into a deep involvement with Europe's most significant body of love poetry. They also put him through a rigorous course in writing technique. Finally, they involved him with a group of writers (Dante and Cavalcanti being just the two most eminent (who had established unsurpassed models for a poetry addressing itself to what Shelley would later call Intellectual Beauty. We can rightly think of Rossetti as a poet of love and physical passion. Nonetheless, he is also (like Dante) an intellectual writer pursuing a definite set of ideas. (4)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's struggle to accept the tenants of his religious upbringing left a space in his life that he filled with his art. He turned to the Fair Lady (whether as Blessed Damozel, femme fatale, or victim) as a source of salvation. In the poem his heaven was a heaven of earthly pleasure. His God smiled approvingly on the lovers' embrace. The creation of art was an act of devotion and the appreciation of female beauty a form of prayer. Rossetti's devotion to female beauty in his work reflects a similar obsession in his personal life. In his poetry and painting, Rossetti used the theme of feminine beauty to explore his own fantasies and conceptions of heaven, salvation, and the dichotomy between earthly and spiritual love (5). These topics are the essence of the poem that we are commenting because we find the beauty of the blessed damozel reflected in the entire poem, but certainly in the two first quatrains of the poems, where Rossetti is describing her, as we have already mentioned before. Talking about his own fantasies, as this poem seems to be, we believe that because the poem as well as the painting, shows us the poem like a dream. Reading the poem we can think that he is laying on the floor dreaming with her lover, who is watching him from the Heaven saying all the things that we read in the poem. However, all these descriptions about her beauty and her stance in the Heaven, and also the appearance of be a fantasy, etc. are more perceived in the painting, because the painting shows much better the three states that the poem wants to represent: the earth, where he is laying on the floor thinking about her; the second state, where appears a big image of her trying to represent the whole of her beauty and the third state is the Heaven, where we can see the angels representing the spirituality, God, her angelical appearance, etc. For this reason, in this case (I think) we cannot talk about the poem on one hand and on the other hand about the painting. They must be closely together. With the representation of the three stages, is where we find the dichotomy between earthly and spiritual love. According to David Sonstroem (1894), who wrote Rossetti and the Fair Lady (1970),” 95% of his poems and 98% of his paintings were in some way about feminine beauty”(6). Some of Rossetti's paintings were portraits, but most were allegorical, mythical, literary, or historical figures with some conceptual significance beyond the readily apparent physical representation. Rossetti drew inspiration for all of his work from personal experience. Even if he was portraying mythological or historical figures like King Arthur and Guinevere, his own relationships colored the work. In fact, there was no clear distinction between his life and his art. The two were in constant dialogue, mirroring each other, informing each other, and providing solutions to the problems of each area, as Sonstroem tells us.(6)

“Rossetti concentrated on spiritual and conceptual meaning in his work instead of literal and physical meaning. He started with a spiritual concept and then found physical and visual representations that would make that concept palpable for his audience. The spiritual concept behind the work was more important than the need to describe the subject visually or with words”, as the writer Eben says (7).

Rossetti began the poem while he was translating Dante's Vita Nuova in which Beatrice in heaven is the earthbound Dante's savior. For this reason, similarly, in "The Blessed Damozel" a deceased woman looks down at her beloved from heaven and longs for him. The poem, in the same way that we had talking about the three stages or states, we can say that also has three voices: a disembodied narrator describing the relationship, the thoughts and desires of the woman in heaven, and the voice of the still living beloved. As the poem progresses, however, we soon realize that the text represents a projection on the part of the beloved of what he wishes were true of his deceased lover. Heaven is filled with embracing couples. The activity of heaven is actually earthly, corporeal love. This love has become spiritual, though, because it’s based in the love and desire for the union of two souls and two bodies, not just a lust after the physical. In Rossetti's fantastical code, anyway, true love is spiritual and smiled upon by God. (5) The damozel’s earthbound lover primarily desires union with her spirit rather than with her body sexually. The fact that the damozel is in heaven and gives no concern for God or salvation is obviously blasphemous. The poem centers entirely on the part of the lover on earth projecting onto his deceased counterpart. It’s unlikely that the damozel would look down from Paradise and long for the life she had on earth. Therefore, the Earthly lover still living must be dreaming that his lover in heaven is also thinking of him. He puts words in her mouth and desires in her heart. This blending of physical beauty and sensuousness with the idea of heaven and salvation is exactly Rossetti's fantasy, as we have mentioned above. She will be his savior and she has not forgotten him for a moment, though she's been dead for ten years. There is no mention of judgment, sin, or atonement in this depiction of heaven. Rossetti released that doctrine when he released his Christian upbringing. Rossetti doesn’t give religiously symbolic meaning to elements of the painting such as the seven stars in the damozel's hair (verse 6) or the three lilies (verse 5) that she holds. These elements are purely aesthetic. (1) The three lilies in the hand and the seven stars in the hair of Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel might be mere literary properties, but the verses:

            Until her bosom must have made - 57

            The bar she leaned on warm,- 58

Represent a new kind of bringing together of the spiritual and the almost embarrassingly physical. (1)

Now, focusing in Christina Rossetti works, she is best known for her ballads and her mystic religious lyrics. Her poetry is marked by symbolism and intense feeling. Also we can underline her technique refined within the forms established in her time. (8) As we can see, the intensity of feeling is common in both brothers and in their poems.

Christina Rossetti is increasingly being reconsidered a major Victorian poet. She has been compared to Emily Dickinson but the similarity is more in the choice of spiritual topics than in poetic approach. (8)

Although Christina Rossetti, was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite inner circle and wrote poems about the brethren and their works, her poetry seems to have little in common with the hard-edge realism of early works by Collinson, Hunt, Millais, and her brother, for unlike Tennyson, she writes with little visual detail or word-painting. Her religious poetry draws on a long line of medieval and later tradition (from Dante through Milton and beyond) in its use of biblical language and symbolism.

Nonetheless, "Goblin Market"(1859) and her poetry about love does not use such symbolism, and her work often resembles that of seventeenth-century poets in being more dependent upon analogy and non-visual conceits than upon visual imagery. Themes of frustrated love and an understated tension between desire and renunciation characterize her more serious work. Separated lovers often appear in her poems, and regret for life unfulfilled alternates with what one critic calls a death wish. But there is another strain in some of her poetry that can be called Gothic or even macabre--goblins, serpents, wombats, rates, and lizards turn up in her verses. (5) Knowing more about Cristina’s poetry, these are aspects that we are going to compare between The Blessed Damozel and The Song of Christina Rossetti. We find that the topics mentioned before are present in both poems, but each poet takes them and express them in a different way.

Before, we have said that Rossetti does not use the spirituality in his works. Well is here, where we can establish the first difference between their poetry. Having considered the treatment of Heaven in these poems, we can account the Christina Rossetti's conception of the relation between matter and spirit. She does not attempt to fuse and blend the material and spiritual. Spirit alone is what is important; Heaven is prior to Earth and human experience both in time and in being (as, for instance, Plato saw the material world as only a reflection of a higher world of forms).(5) Heaven alone, with all matter cast away, is Christina’s desire.  We find that Christina’s poem is simpler than Rossetti’s poem talking about the description of Heaven, because she does not describe it like her brother as something very beautiful using the aesthetic resources as he also does with the figure of women. However, as long as she is alive as a human, she can only experience that which her human body and faculties allow her to. As have probably said before, the poems of Christina Rossetti are also based on their own experience. This poem refers to her husband, in which she says him her real desires (remember me or forget me when I am dead), not as her brother’s poem, in which the desires of the blessed damozel are idealized. Human experience may be nothing but fog, shadow, vanity, or a dream, but it is the only forms of experience we can possible have in this life. She does not exalt the power of poetry to manifest the spiritual by means of the material, but uses the material because it is all she has access to. If, however, the speaker is truly limited to the material in her experience, she would not even be able to form the notion of Heaven. Therefore, she introduces the concepts of hope and of the half seen promises and glories given by God; we might say, furthermore, that the whole dream vision of "Paradise" may be an example of the glories. Because these glimpses of the divine exist in human experience, they cannot truly express the nature of the divine, and therefore tend to be devoid of explicit content, yet they instill a sense of purpose and direction into otherwise aimless lives. They direct the person to "send their hearts before them" to Heaven and to renounce the world, although they will still have to live in the world and will still be denied experience of the divine. Thus, Christina Rossetti presents the material and the spiritual realms as radically separate, even incommensurable, but provides a limited mechanism by which, in life, we can look forward to crossing the gap, and in death, we can escape our "fleshly bands."(5)

In the Christina’s poem the most important is what the woman says to his husband. Here, is where we find the second difference between them. This point that we are going to comment, is may be the most important topic referring to the difference between their poems. We find that the poem of G.D. Rossetti is maybe too long and his words or style are more complex than in the Christina’s poem. However, Christina’s poem is more direct, simple and she not uses aesthetic elements to describe the women, the Heaven, the husband, etc. because this not exists in her poem. What are very shocking to the reader are the sincerity and maybe the meaning that these words have. Our question here could be why a man (G.D. Rossetti) writes as a romantic lover and a woman writes as a no-lover woman? Answering this question and also explaining the difference among each other, we can say that a rapt and dreaming damozel in heaven, a young girl crying silently, etc. such are the images of passivity and subservience that often characterize the female in Victorian literature. In addition to projecting all their desires onto a female object, male speakers in Victorian poetry sometimes use their narrative voice to suppress the female point of view and enforce codes of patriarchal domination. There are typically three ways in which male speakers objectify women. Sometimes speakers literally ventriloquize the female subject by putting words in her mouth. This would be that case of the “The Blessed Damozel” poem. Rossetti acts as a ventriloquist putting words into the damozel’s mouth, but really she only says what the dreamer wants to hear. In other, more subtle instances of females being objectified, speakers endow women with a quality, assign a value to them, or impose their views on them. In Victorian poetry there is a noticeable pattern of women being reduced to a fixed meaning as opposed to being treated as complex human beings. (5)

In most elegiac poetry, the male speaker has been either unable to get the female to succumb to him or the female has died, as we find in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's “The Blessed Damozel.” In the poem the male speaker has a vision that his dead beloved is grieving for him in heaven. It is perhaps surprising that Rossetti perpetuates the notion of the rapt and dreaming woman at a time when women were working to claim their rights and the domestic sphere. The poem presents a situation from a male point of view. Rossetti’s speaker, who acts on his grief by trying to commune with his love and overcome the distance that separates them, in "The Blessed Damozel" the female, is portrayed as a deified and desired object reflecting  Rossetti’s adherence to etherealized and spiritualized Petrarchan love conventions. Following in this tradition, he often creates abstractions where love is not presented as a force but instead becomes personified as well as gendered. For this reason, the poem is set within an almost allegorical dream of love: (5)

The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.

(Verse from 1 to 6)

However, Rossetti was criticized for images such as "the gold bar of Heaven"(verse 2) which makes heaven appear overly materialistic. Images describing the "blessed damozel" such as her hair being "yellow like ripe corn"(verse 12) convey an incredible materiality. This poem and its corresponding painting refer not to reality, but to an imaginary world where female bodies are representations of the speaker's own subjective needs and desires. Not until an interspersed parenthetical statement in the poem does it become evident that a man is speaking and that the descriptions are actually projections of the speaker's daydream. (5)

(To one, it is ten years of years.
. . . Yet now, and in this place,
Surely she leaned o'er me — her hair
Fell about my face. . .
Nothing: the autumn-fall of leaves.
The whole year sets apace.)

(Verse from 13 to 18)

In the time of the dying year, the speaker fantasizes about how desperate his “blessed damozel” “surely” is for him. The desiring male figure finds his self-image confirmed by the beloved that pines for him. This poem exemplifies distortion of beliefs in the afterlife for the sake of one’s own obsessive fantasies and egotism. Rossetti’s speaker imagines the woman saying exactly what he wants to hear:

He shall fear, haply, and be dumb;
Then will I lay my cheek
To his, and tell about our love,
Not once abashed or weak:
And the dear Mother will approve
My pride, and let me speak.

(Verse from 115 to 120)

Not only does the male speaker ventriloquize his beloved, he is also convinced that the holy "Mother" in heaven approves of their earthly lust and desire for each other. In the last line of the poem, the speaker says that he "heard her tears"(verse 150) when in fact he is hearing only his projected fantasy of the woman grieving for him. Rossetti is interested in artificial Petrarchan conceptions of love and constructed moods rather than situations where people are actually making contact. (5)

In contrast, in "Song," Christina Rossetti is both working through and against the Italian male poetic tradition so important to her brother. As we have said before, the female speaker in "Song" does what Dante Gabriel's idealized and objectified woman in "The Blessed Damozel" is never able to do. As George P. Landow discusses in "The Dead Woman Talks Back: “Christina Rossetti's Ironic Intonation of the dead woman, literally addresses her beloved from the grave and for once is allowed to "talk back" and be heard. The obvious impossibility of this situation occurring under normal circumstances suggests the extent to which the female voice was suppressed in society” (8). Landow also points out that the speaker’s unwillingness to let her beloved grieve over her absence is reminiscent of Dante Gabriel's notion of the selfless female:

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me. . .
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

(Verse from 1 to 4)

What initially appears to be a typical self-sacrificing female speaker turns out to be a complete rejection of this Victorian stereotype. In contrast to "The Blessed Damozel" poem, in which the male speaker imagines his dead beloved desperately longing for him in heaven, the female speaker in Christina Rossetti’s "Song" has an attitude of total indifference to the male figure (5):

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

(Verse from 9 to 16)

By the end of the poem, Christina Rossetti has reversed Dante Gabriel’s projections about erotic, romantic love. The female speaker is in a state of quiet contentment devoid of all sensory pleasure and experience, a far cry from Dante Gabriel's physical, materialistic view of heaven. The male speaker in "The Blessed Damozel," hopes for some form of communication across death, and the possibility of being reunited in heaven. For the speaker in "Song," communication is not possible, and she has no intention of clinging to the memory of her beloved. Thus, Christina Rossetti reconfigures the male poetic tradition from a new female point of view. (5)

Having explained the main issue between these two poems, we can talk briefly about another topic which may be is also important to comment here, because it can be a reaction of the male representation of women in poetry. This reaction is the movement of feminism, in which Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Browning are the most important figures talking about the Victorian period. Referring to Barrett Browning’s poem “Aurora Leigh” (1857), which we can say that is the first sign of feminist wok, it employs a contemporary setting and contemporary social issues as a context for an inquiry into the relation between gender and genre. The poem, which explores the Woman Question, as it was called by contemporaries, dramatizes the modern woman’s severe need for mothers, for that is, nurturing political and literary female ancestors. In examining the growth and development of a woman poet, Aurora Leigh shows that women cripple themselves by internalizing patriarchal or andocentric conceptions of them. When Aurora Leigh first rejects her arrogant beloved, her rejection does not free her from the grip of interiorized male constructions of women, for she merely displaces Romney (the male character) from the center of power, speaks about herself with images of male power, and feminizes him. Only when both can break free from the conceptual structures that oppress them can she fully become the woman, wife, and poet she wants to be. (5)

Finally, from the 1970s on, most feminist critics reject the genderless mind, finding that the "imagination" cannot evade the conscious or unconscious structures of gender. Gender, it could be said, is part of that culture-determination which serves as inspiration. Such a position emphasizes “the impossibility of separating the imagination from a socially, sexually, and historically positioned self.” As Oates (1938) thinks, this movement of thought allowed for a feminist critique as critics attacked the meaning of sexual difference in a patriarchal society/ideology. Images of male-wrought representations of women (stereotypes and exclusions) came under fire, as was the division, oppression, inequality, and interiorized inferiority for women.

 

 

CONCLUSION

As a conclusion of this paper, we can say that using the poems cited before, we have tried to explain the fact that suggests the misogyny that seems to exist in Rossetti’s poem and also the way that male authors describe the female figures in their poems in connection to men. Moreover, we have show how the masculine voice of the author frequently dominates the poems and thus distances the reader from the women in these poems. To do this possible, we have also compared the Christina Rossetti’s poem, “The Song”, to see much better the contrast of voices and feelings that each woman represent. In addition, in our paper, we have talk about the personality of our two poets, because they have a very particular personality as well as their personal experiences and beliefs are so influents in their poetry.

 

REFERENCES:

1-      Daiches, David. The Romantics to the present day: A Critical History of English Literature. Volume IV.  The Ronald Press Company, 1960. Second edition, 1969: 1017- 1022.

 

2-      Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English literature. Oxford University Press, 1964. Second edition, 2000: 431-432.

 

3-      Pater, Walter. Dante Gabriel Rossetti versus his Aesthetic poetry, 1989. From: the Victorian Web, University Scholar program, National University of Singapore. Last modified 9th October 2007. Last visit 16th January 2008.   <http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/index.html >

 

4-        McGann, J. Geremy. The complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Last modified: December 2007. Last visit: 16th January 2008. <http://www.rossettiarchive.org/about/index.html>

 

5-         Byecroft, Breanna. Representations of the Female Voice in Victorian Poetry. University of Brown. Last modified: 17th December 2003. Last visit: 16th January 2008. < http://victorianweb.org/authors/ebb/byecroft14.html#damozel>

 

6-      Sonstroem, David. Rossetti and Fair Lady. Middletown: Weslayan University Press, 1970. From:< http://www.victorianweb.org >

 

7-      Bass, E. Eben. Critical essays of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1990: 319. <http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/dgrosset.htm >

 

8-      Landow, P. George. The Dead Woman Talks Back. Shaw Professor of English and Digital Culture, National University of Singapore. Last modified: 23rd      October 2002. Last visit: 16th January 2008. From: <http://www.victorianweb.org >

 

RELATED SOURCES

-          Web sources:

-          Bass, E. Eben. Critical essays of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1990: 319. <http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/dgrosset.htm >

-          Bovee, K. Timothy. The DayPoems web site, 2001-2005. Last visit: 16th January 2008. < www.daypoems.net>

-          Byecroft, Breanna. Representations of the Female Voice in Victorian Poetry. University of Brown. Last modified: 17th December 2003. Last visit: 16th January 2008.

<http://victorianweb.org/authors/ebb/byecroft14.html#damozel>

-          Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts. From: <http://www.artchive.com > Last visit: 16th January 2008.

-          Institute of Historical Research,Spring 2001. <http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Victorians/index.html > Last visit: 16th January 2008.

-          Landow, P. George. The Dead Woman Talks Back. Shaw Professor of English and Digital Culture, National University of Singapore. Last modified: 23rd      October 2002. Last visit: 16th January 2008. From: <http://www.victorianweb.org >

 

-          Lewis, Jone Jhonson. The Home Book of Verse, 1999. Last modified: 2002. <http://www.womenhistory.about.com >

-            McGann, J. Geremy. The complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Last modified: December 2007. Last visit: 16th January 2008. <http://www.rossettiarchive.org/about/index.html>

 

-          Oxford Journals. Oxford university press, 2008. From: <http://www.res.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/57/231/553 > Last visit: 16th January 2008.

-          Pater, Walter. Dante Gabriel Rossetti versus his Aesthetic poetry, 1989. From: the Victorian Web, University Scholar program, National University of Singapore. Last modified 9th October 2007. Last visit 16th January 2008.   <http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/index.html >

 

-          Sonstroem, David. Rossetti and Fair Lady. Middletown: Weslayan University Press, 1970. From:< http://www.victorianweb.org >

 

 

-          The Academy of American Poets, 1997-2008. From: <http://www.poets.org> Last visit: 16th January 2008.

 

-          Weston, Pauline Thomas and Thomas, Guy. The Fashion Era, 2001-2008. From: < http://www.fashion-era.com/the_vistorian_era.html> Last visit: 16th January 2008.

Book Sources:

 

-          Daiches, David. The Romantics to the present day: A Critical History of English Literature. Volume IV.  The Ronald Press Company, 1960. Second edition, 1969: 1017- 1022.

 

-          Coote, Stephen. The Penguin Short History of English Literature. Penguin Books, 1993.

 

-          Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English literature. Oxford University Press, 1964. Second edition, 2000: 431-432.