Re-Presentations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Portrayals in Fiction, Drama, Music, and Film
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Re-Presentations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Portrayals in Fiction ...

Chapter 1:  Introduction
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who were “notable for their freedom from the overbearing chauvinism of their time” (Marsh 358). The Pre-Raphaelite women, including Siddal, were offered opportunities denied to most members of their sex and class and were liberated from what would have been far more oppressive positions, whether as working women or as idle wives in high bourgeois households:

In the atmosphere of the artistic world they were freed from some restricting conventions imposed on their less fortunate sisters. They also shared in the material benefits so successfully earned by Pre-Raphaelite art. Additionally, they, themselves, were successful. They were not simply the passive recipients of benefits conferred on them by virtue of their connection with the artists. Nor were they merely “discovered” by the men and molded into Pre-Raphaelite shape. They were, in short, very different from the soulful, static images of Pre-Raphaelite painting. They were active, positive agents in the choice and definition of their own futures. (Marsh, The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood 358–359)

This work will place Marsh’s interpretation of Siddal—and other less positive views—alongside representations of Rossetti. Placing these selected works about Rossetti in categories allows them to be discussed not only with reference to the categorical representations but also from biographical, feminist, and new historicist perspectives. This will produce new views of Rossetti and help to answer the question of why he and his work appear as a recurring theme across genres and in successive decades. Additionally, it will examine the representations of Rossetti as post-Victorian phenomena—as sites for the exploration of the present.

Despite Lizzie’s importance both to Rossetti himself and his interpreters, it must be remembered that she was only one of three women who dominated his life at different periods. Legend has it that Rossetti met Fanny Cornforth in 1856, several years before Lizzie’s death, while she was cracking nuts with her teeth in the Strand (Scott 316–317). Again, Rossetti was attracted to her hair. William Michael Rossetti describes her as a “pre-eminently fine woman, with regular and sweet features, and a mass of the most lovely blonde hair—light golden or ‘yellow-harvest’ ” (qtd. in Sonstroem 63). She was a prostitute who