Elizabeth Lee’s article “The Femme Fatale as Object” focuses on how women were portrayed in art and poetry in the 19th century. She states
Such a treatment, therefore, not only objectified the woman, but also dismembered her body and her identity; the artistically rendered woman is no longer an individual person but really the pleasing arrangement of shapes and light, easily allowing “peaches and pears” to substitute for flesh. (Lee)
Looking at Christina Rossetti’s poem “In an Artist’s Studio”, Lee’s description of how women were viewed and portrayed and encapsulated perfectly by Rossetti’s commentary on her brother’s studio and what occurs inside it. She states “A nameless girl in freshest summer greens,/A saint, and angel…” (Rossetti lines 6-7). This girl’s body and identity have been separated, or as Lee calls it, dismembered. The fact that she is nameless means that her identity has been lost. She is also not a person anymore. She is both a saint and an angel, which implies a form of death that has occurred. To be a saint and to be an angel, or both as this girl is, means she has to have died. In Rossetti’s poem, it’s a symbolic death. She is no longer a person to the artist, she is just a muse, something to paint. Her identity and her personhood are lost to the artist.
Rossetti continues by later stating “He feeds upon her face by day and night,/And she with true kind eyes looks back on him” (lines 9-10). The act of feeding calls to mind the act of consuming. The artist is consuming the woman’s image and using it for his art. Meanwhile, the woman looks back ignorantly, not knowing how the artist is using her. This connects with Lee’s claim that a woman’s image becomes just an assortment of shapes pleasing to the eyes “easily allowing “peaches and pears” to substitute for flesh” (Lee). The woman in Lee’s piece is being likened to a piece of fruit, something naturally sweet. The transformation from woman to food allows for her to be consumed by the artist, something Rossetti is commenting on in her poem. The artist is “consuming” the woman’s personhood and rather than spitting out seeds, he is spitting back out an image that leaves her without her identity or even her body, as even that, the artist had full control over how it is portrayed just like the woman’s unnatural body in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in La Grande Odalisque.
