Re-Presentations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Portrayals in Fiction ...

in the canon of nineteenth-century British arts and literature is arguably secure. But the problem is a complicated one because the life of Rossetti provides so many intriguing biographical facts. Fredeman asserts that “[n]o novelist commissioned to compose a parodic life to serve as the copy text for biographical exegeticism could improve on the paradigm provided by Rossetti” (xvii). This paradigm has produced biographies, novels, plays, television productions, and dozens of articles of biographical interest that overshadow critical assessment. Fredeman asks with evident frustration, “What is wrong with Rossetti’s pictures and poems that they appear less important and less interesting than his life?” (xvi). As worthy and provocative a question as this is, it tends to minimize the reality that, for the current observer or reader, Rossetti’s life and works are all of a piece. The biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his paintings, poetry, and prose works comprise a single subject that, for better or worse, has attracted the attention of filmmakers and novelists as well as that of biographers and critics. This work, then, does not propose to respond to the question of Waugh and Fredeman—What is wrong with Rossetti?—but rather a different one: What is right with him? Explained more fully, this is the question of what it is about the life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his work as a whole that has commanded the attention of the creators of fiction, and what their representations of him reveal about them and their own times. It is interesting that each generation has reinterpreted Rossetti and that successive generations have used him as a container for their own desires, anxieties, and issues. The result has been a robust collection of works, but the diverse interpretations they contain have remained largely unexamined. Understanding the various interpretations of Rossetti will lead to a clearer knowledge of this important poet and painter as well as his interpreters—and, perhaps most importantly, ourselves. For as Lisa Tinker observes in a small volume published by London’s Tate Gallery, “Each age gets—or makes—the Rossetti it desires” (72).

In one sense, Tinker undoubtedly means that each successive era will inevitably think about Rossetti in its own way. Her observation is in line