THE CASE OF “JENNY”: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI AND THE CENSORSHIP DIALECTIC

Abstract

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTIand his artistic circle are emerging as privileged sites of modernist genesis. Studies by Jessica Feldman (Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience) and Allison Pease (Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity) include Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne, respectively, in their reassessments of modernism. In a complementary move, Jerome McGann argues inDante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lostthat Rossetti's art anticipates Imagism (44) and is characterized by a “hyper-realism that anticipates certain Postmodern styles” (32). Such work implicitly questions, in Feldman's words, the narratives of “strife, loss, [and] rupture” (4) that have been told about modernism's relationship with its predecessors. By linking nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists in a historical trajectory of aesthetic change, as Pease does, or by effacing the historical through a “web” of Victorian modernism, as Feldman does, it becomes possible to see new relations among authors previously separated by critical practice. Rossetti and associates enjoy a new spotlight as they become modern through their aesthetic productions and domestic arrangements.