Depoliticizing Victorian Aestheticism and Masculine Desire
In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Jenny”, the encounter between a male intellectual and the passive, sleeping figure of a prostitute, Jenny, foregrounds a gendered space upon which the masculine figure imposes his own subjectivities and assumptions. The asymmetry in power—as evidenced in the passivity of Jenny that is juxtaposed by the active voyeuristic act by the masculine speaker—seems to indicate the silencing of a potential feminine voice. By extension, the curtailment of feminine self-definition and assertion betrays a fragile status in the constitution of masculine subjectivity. In Psomaides’s article “She Has a Lovely Face”, she posits a reconciliation of contradictions that form the basis of Victorian aestheticism through iconic images of femininity as treated and presented by male artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In fact, it is the duplicity inherent in the representation of feminine figures that “allows for the coincidence of institution and content without evoking the sel...
