‘Ah, Poor Jenny's Case’: Rossetti and the Fallen Woman/Flower

D.M.R. BENTLEY 'Ah, Poor Jenny's Case': Rossetti and the Fallen Woman/Flower I Although the period of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848-53) was one of the most productive in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's creative career, painting pictures such as Ecce Ancilla Domini! and writing poems such as 'Dante at Verona' did not occupy all his time and energy in the late forties and early fifties. In the spring of 1850 he met Elizabeth Siddai, a milliner's assistant whose effect on him was apparently so immediate and pronounced that, as he told Ford Madox Brown later, 'when he first met her, he felt his destiny was defined." Within a very short time Rossetti was deeply in love with this ingenuously beautiful girl, probably seeing in her his own personal version of the Beatrice whose fIesh-and-blood reality he had always professed. In 1851 Miss Siddal sat for Beatrice in the water- :olour illustration of Beatrice, Meeting Dante at aMarriage Feast, Denies him ler Salutation; but, as G.H. Fleming remarks, 'in real life she .. . was ;omewhat less ethereal than Dante's Beatrice, and probably was denying 'ler lover nothing." There is, of course, an element of speculation in Fleming's remark. Nevertheless, if the lovers' relationship, particularly ,fter Rossetti moved in 1852 from his parents' house on Charlotte Street :0 a studio in Chatham Place, near Blackfriars Bridge, was somewhat lther than 'Dantesque: it is plaUSible to speculate that there was a liographical basis for the 'great concern for female purity') which, as )avid Sonstroem, among others, has pointed out, enters Rossetti's work n 1853 and does not leave it for many years thereafter. To a man such as Rossetti, with his intense attraction to such figures as he Blessed Virgin, the virginal Beatrice, and the Blessed Damozei, a lremarital sexual relationship, however desirable, was bound to bring vith it certain recriminations, certain moral and religiOUS 'self-quesionings and all-questionings." Oswald Doughty argues that Rossetti's hought and conversation were, by the summer of 1853, dominated by ,is search for a 'moral justification of free love:' and offers a Freudian nterpretation of the (phallic) tree imagery in 'A Young Fir-Wood' (1850) nd 'Love's Nocturn' (1854) as proof of the poet-painter's preoccupation vith sexual matters in the early fifties. Of this preoccupation there can be 10 doubt, but against Doughty's contention there may be adduced two nportant pieces of evidence: a letter of July or August 1853 to William UNrvERSIn' OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 50, NUMBER 2, WINTER 198011 1J042-Q247/81/01ClO-0177$o1 .50/0 Cl UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 178 D.M.R. BENTLEY Bell Scott, and a lyric of 1853, 'The Honeysuckle: which Doughty himself discusses in some detail but as a simulacrum ofloving freely. In his letter to Scott Rossetti informed his friend that, besides Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, which he was then reading, the only other book he had read 'for more than a year [was] St. Augustine's Confessions.'" Evidently ' Rossetti was far from sympathetic in the summer of 1853 towards Augustine 's youthful indulgence in the 'splendid vices.' He condemns both the 'self-appeasement of the Saint and the self-culture' of Goethe's hero as manifestations of the reprehensible 'doctrine that scoundrelism is a sacred probation of the soul.' But it is Rossetti's concern for the women - 'no doubt they are nascent for hell: he says - who were unfortunate enough to be used by these 'self-cultivators' which is, for the present I argument, the most significant aspect of this letter. For here we have speaking, not a man in search of a 'moral justification of free love: but a man concerned, in a highly moral way, with the consequences of woman's fall from virtue - we have, in fact, the artist of Hesterna Rosa and Found and the author of 'Jenny' and 'Rose Mary.' The same artist-author is also present, albeit in a somewhat different way, in 'The Honeysuckle: the intriguing short lyric of 1853 that provides the first instance in Rossetti 's poetry of the image of the fallen or plucked flower which is central to...