Monday, May 17, 2010

Norming the Female Body: Discourses of Sexuality in Dante Gabriel Rossetti (First Part) by Lai Sai Acon Chan

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s rendering of the fallen woman is the product of faithfully adhering to the tenets of the nineteenth-century ideology of literary creation. In the fashion of a “proudly masculine cosmic Author”—in the words of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar—Rossetti poured the patriarchal ink into the passive female body, the blank page, patiently waiting to be shaped as either an angel or a monster. And in so doing, Rossetti was merely reproducing a normative view about sex. In fact, his sonnet sequence, The House of Life, can be interpreted as a metaphor of a dichotomous female body fatefully caught between the two poles of feminine behavior imposed by patriarchy. On one hand, Rossetti depicts sensuous and captivating women who only live to fulfill respectable roles as brides, wives, or mothers. These are the kind of women who know what it means “To be a sweetness more desired than Spring; / A bodily beauty more acceptable” (“True Woman”). The descriptions of the women in the sonnets are indicative of the gender norms of the era, “High grace,” “sweet simplicity,” “thrilling pallor of cheeks,” “a mouth whose passionate forms imply / All music and all silence held thereby,” “soft-stirred feet” (“Her Gifts”), “Sweet dimness of her loosened hair,” “sweet hands,” tremulous smiles,” “murmuring sighs,” “The confident heart’s still fervour,” “the swift beat/ And soft subsidence of the spirit’s wing” (“Love-Sweetness”). However, the women’s intellectual traits are never praised. To give the women the illusion that they are the ones with power in the relationship, the male speakers resort to royal treatment: “My lady’s absolute queendom” (“The Moonstar”), “lady, beams thy sovereign grace,/ When the drear soul desires thee” (“Gracious Moonlight”). On the other hand, a fallen woman like Lilith represents the darker side of the mid-Victorian woman. And yet, she has this irresistible power to allure men, which rather than threatening the ideological apparatus supports it. In “Body’s Beauty” Lilith’s sexuality can be described as mature and intoxicating, but sweet and, therefore, desirable to Adam. She does not destabilize normative sexual practices but embodies male fantasies of women who sensuously take over their bodies with a “sweet tongue [that] could deceive” and “strangling golden hair” (3,14). Adam’s weakness lies not in her power to emasculate him, but in his own willingness to let her engulf him with her wealth of hair and enrapture him to the point of ecstasy. So The House of Life is Rossetti’s figurative rendering of the female body regulated by the dominant, mid-Victorian sexual politics; it is also a metaphor of the repressive house that encloses that body.

The lily is the ideal type of woman who submits to every patriarchal whim and never replies impertinently or belligerently. In this respect, Gilbert and Gubar point out that, “There is a long and crowded road from The Booke of Curtesye (1477) to the columns of ‘Dear Abby,’ but social historians have fully explored [the conduct book’s] part in the creation of those ‘eternal feminine’ virtues of modesty, gracefulness, purity, delicacy, civility, compliancy, reticence, chastity, affability, politeness [. . .] (23). Rossetti certainly has a penchant for representations of demure women. Thus, one of the techniques he employs in his poems is that of imposing the male speaker’s thoughts and feelings on the women’s, that is, imposing phallocentric language on the women. In “The Blessed Damozel,” the lover is described as an omniscient being, while the damozel has a limited apprehension of her world. While he seems to know her every thought and movement, what she wears and what she says, she spends her time in heaven longing for her beloved and wondering when he will be able to join her. Like the proverbial angel in the house (Coventry Patmore’s “Angel in the House”), she is restricted to the domestic sphere—heaven—and patiently awaits his arrival as a dutiful wife would wait for her husband’s. In the meantime, she smiles, looks sweet and innocent with her lilies in her hand, the stars in her hair, and makes endless plans for their life together in paradise. This, however, is the lover’s version since the damozel is represented in the poem as he pictures her in heaven.

In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s artistic works, the rose is, on the other hand, the type of woman who refuses those traditionally submissive roles but still pleases men with her deviant sexuality, a perverse sexuality that can only pertain to the fallen woman. The overt sexuality of women like Jenny, the woman in “The Orchard Pit,” and Lilith is not abhorred, but rather desired by men. Although a fallen woman, Jenny is akin to the angel in the house. She embodies the perfect mix of lily and rose, which is even more attractive than the devout angel in the house. With her “wealth of loosened hair,” “silk ungirdled and unlac’d” and “warm sweets open to the waist,” Jenny represents an all-but-innocent and virginal woman; but rather than adopting an overly forward attitude that one would expect from a harlot, she submissively puts her head on the male speaker’s knees. To further romanticize the fallen woman figure, like the sexual politics of his time dictated, Rossetti devotes a whole stanza to soften, even condone, Jenny’s profession. She is then compared to “a rose shut in a book / In which pure women may not look” (253-254), and to a “rose / Puddled with shameful knowledge” whose blood “flows / Through leaves no chaste hand may unclose” (264-66). Both images evoke an inner beauty that cannot be tarnished by such a shameful practice since the rose “still keeps such faded show / Of when t’was gathered long ago, / That the crushed petals’ lovely grain, / The sweetness of the sanguine stain” (267-270).

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