Title: Regarding Christina Rossetti's "Reflection"
Abstract: Recent work by Alison Chapman on biographical representations of Christina Rossetti has demonstrated an intriguing proclivity on the part of virtually every Rossetti biographer to visually "frame" the poet at a window, in a manner "highly suggestive of . . . a portrait, as if Rossetti was herself a living 'framed' picture, for she both looks out and is seen." 1 While such aestheticizations of Rossetti may be linked, as Chapman suggests, to specific biographical incidents, they also signal the absorption and reinscription of a more generalized trope in Romantic and Victorian poetry and art: the recurrence of the "woman at the window." 2 In this regard, of course, the biographical construction of Rossetti herself as a "model" of the woman poet-cum-painterly object is also inevitably informed by key texts within Rossetti's own oeuvre, texts which focus precisely on such "framed" moments of fetishistic aestheticization. "In An Artist's Studio" springs to mind immediately in this context, as perhaps Rossetti's most famous, and most famously trenchant, reflection on the obstacles posed for the nineteenth-century woman artist by her overdetermined role as object and muse in the field of artistic and cultural production. I want to suggest, however, that it is to one of Rossetti's much less widely known poems, the simple-sounding but intricately structured lyric, "'Reflection,'" that we should look, not only for a challenging opportunity to re-think the interrelated questions of subjectivity, gender ideology, and epistemology raised by the gaze of the "framed" woman, but also for an opportunity to re-think Lacan's concept of "the gaze" itself, in terms of its potential historical significance for a devout Victorian poet.
Publication Year: 2001
Publication Date: 2001-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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