Sexuality In Dante Rossetti's Paintings

“Gender and Sexuality” The intricate nature of female sexuality within Dante Rossetti’s composition has inspired a rich tradition on the topic of gender and sexuality. In general, there are two major theoretical focuses on which scholars have concentrated: Rossetti’s engagement with discursive regulation of female sexuality in Lost and Found, and the typology and striking sensuality of Rossetti’s paintings. Linda Nochlin’s essay examines Rossetti’s painting Found from three major angles: through Victorian erotic regulation of sexuality, in comparison with William Holman Hunt’s painting The Awakening Conscience, and through the lens of Rossetti’s personal biography. Nochlin proposes that Found prescribes to the contemporary artistic conventions
Women, Art, and Power and Other Essay. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 58.
2 Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art. (London:Routledge, 1988), 172. sign securing the privileged status for Rossetti in and through such polarizing formulations as male/female, artist/model, tutor/pupil, age/youth and so forth. In Pollack’s second essay, “Woman as Sign: Psychoanalytic Readings,” Freudian theory is applied to Rossetti’s paintings. Specifically, Pollock claims that Rossetti’s femmes fatales incite fear of castration in the male viewer, producing an anxiety about loss of the mother3. Pollock also suggests that the viewer attains delight in viewing Rossetti’s femme fatale paintings through the constant alternation between a sense of threat and a sense of desire.
The essay is greatly grateful to the above mentioned historiography associated with discursive regulation of female sexuality in Found and contemporary moral paintings, Pre-Raphaelite typologies of women4, and the implications of the sensuality of Rossetti’s stunners. This essay seeks to understand how Rossetti’s broader work prescribed to and participated in the Victorian discursive regulation of sex; how desire operated within the paintings of his paintings, and how paintings work to frame and control female
The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites. (London: Tate Publishing, in conjunction with Harry N. Abrams, 2000), 211. prostitute: a bridge in the background hints at her likely fate of suicide, while the ensnared white calf represents the helplessness and endangered purity of the woman in the flesh market of the city. Rossetti did not often paint morality scenes that specifically addressed issues of prostitution, chastity, and sexual ethics. The limited instances in which Rossetti painted in this manner, however, imply that it may be helpful to instead turn our attention to the artist’s more subtle engagement with the Victorian dichotomous model of female sexuality.
Rossetti’s paintings of mistress or harlot-type stunners also indirectly arranged the pattern of Victorian female sexuality into a dual opposition between the chaste ideal and the immoral deviant. In formal terms, the mistress is often brought up close to the foreground of the canvas and painted on a larger scale than were the other figures. The bare neck, chest, and arms of the mistress figure plays prominently into her depiction, and she is often very richly adorned with flowers, jewelry, combs, feathers, and lavish fabrics. In descriptive terms, the mistress often contains direct allusions to adultery, promiscuity, and sexual maturity in the painting’s title and symbolism, serving thus as a obvious offense of the Victorian female sexual