Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "My Sister Sleep"
Asmaa Altahhan
Asst. Prof. Dr. Goksen Aras
ELIT 521 Romantic and 19th Century Poetry
Dante Gabriel Rossetti‟s “My Sister‟s Sleep”
Dante Gabriel Rossetti has been known as a poet and a painter of exceptional power. In both genres, he was of extraordinary mastery. He was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood (with Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais) in 1848. The Victorian poets experienced transitional age. According to Gilmour, they were anxious inheritances of
Romanticism. They felt that their ancestors lived in simpler world. Their problem was to create artistic sense of the materialism in human history. They tried to represent the lucidity of the past
[medieval literature] in their present works. Gilmour also argued that first and foremost, it was a movement of young men. When it was formed in Millais‟s house, Millais himself was only nineteen years old. The movement first was associated with religious subjects. But religion was not really the central Pre- Raphaelite concern, there was a thread running through painters‟ choice of literary texts and contemporary subjects that were linking Millais‟s Ophelia to Rossetti‟s obsessive portraits of Jane Morris, it was love. Their art associated later with aesthetic values.
Women in Pre-Raphaelite paintings had a great power. The Pre-Raphaelites differed from earlier painters in the extent to which they were prepared to depart from the conventional studio model and they sought out the beautiful young women they called „stunners‟ ( Gilmour 213). They were considered to exhibit much genius for color. The painters were young and idealistic, they rejected materialism, and traditional middle-class assumption about what constituted respectability in a women. Their attraction was to the natural beauty, freshness, vitality, and erotic power of their lower-class models (214). Greenblatt argued that the beauty that Rossetti admired in the faces of women was of distinctive earthly kind. In
Asst. Prof. Dr. Goksen Aras
ELIT 521 Romantic and 19th Century Poetry
Dante Gabriel Rossetti‟s “My Sister‟s Sleep”
Dante Gabriel Rossetti has been known as a poet and a painter of exceptional power. In both genres, he was of extraordinary mastery. He was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood (with Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais) in 1848. The Victorian poets experienced transitional age. According to Gilmour, they were anxious inheritances of
Romanticism. They felt that their ancestors lived in simpler world. Their problem was to create artistic sense of the materialism in human history. They tried to represent the lucidity of the past
[medieval literature] in their present works. Gilmour also argued that first and foremost, it was a movement of young men. When it was formed in Millais‟s house, Millais himself was only nineteen years old. The movement first was associated with religious subjects. But religion was not really the central Pre- Raphaelite concern, there was a thread running through painters‟ choice of literary texts and contemporary subjects that were linking Millais‟s Ophelia to Rossetti‟s obsessive portraits of Jane Morris, it was love. Their art associated later with aesthetic values.
Women in Pre-Raphaelite paintings had a great power. The Pre-Raphaelites differed from earlier painters in the extent to which they were prepared to depart from the conventional studio model and they sought out the beautiful young women they called „stunners‟ ( Gilmour 213). They were considered to exhibit much genius for color. The painters were young and idealistic, they rejected materialism, and traditional middle-class assumption about what constituted respectability in a women. Their attraction was to the natural beauty, freshness, vitality, and erotic power of their lower-class models (214). Greenblatt argued that the beauty that Rossetti admired in the faces of women was of distinctive earthly kind. In