| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Rossetti’s life has generated many “myths” in the sense of that term as “a sophisticated social representation: a complex relationship between history, reality, culture, imagination and identity” (Howells 37). Rossetti’s myths can be examined using the ideas from biography, Cultural Studies, New Historicism, and Marxist feminism. This study is an attempt to elucidate the process of myth-making and to theorize the revisions of Rossetti’s persona. The making of the story can be easily traced from the efforts of William Michael Rossetti, beginning shortly after his brother’s death, to those of Violet Hunt and Evelyn Waugh in 1930, just after the centenary of Rossetti’s birth. Then, with the exception of John Masefield’s 1946 tribute, Rossetti as painter, and more importantly as poet, disappeared from the biographical radar screen. By then, the fictional portrayals of him were more or less fixed. What Graham McCann showed in his study of Marilyn Monroe may be equally true for Rossetti: reactions to her and her biographies may not tell as much about the actual Marilyn as they reveal the “cultural praxis alive in each interpretation” (325). McCann says, “One might not find out ‘all about Marilyn’ but the meta-biography can provide (at least) a proper appreciation for her fictions” (325). This leads to the question, what do we learn from a meta-biography of the representations of Rossetti and his work? In the 1990s and 2000s a resurgence in exhibits of his work and new scholarship, including the ongoing publication of his complete collected letters, presented a new instance of the process of representation requiring particular attention. Specifically, I will analyze how these myths are interpreted in twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century fiction, film, drama, and music by looking at the artifacts themselves.
According to Lisa Tinker, Dante Gabriel Rossetti fell from favor, along with other Victorians, around 1910 and was not seriously considered again until the Pre-Raphaelite revival in 1961, when the Jeremy Maas Gallery began putting on a series of exhibitions (71). The press release from the Royal Academy of Arts on press day, January 11, 1973, describes the exhibit Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet that was due to open January 13 as “the first large-scale exhibit since 1883 devoted solely to this founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite