During the Victorian Era, there is a common misconception, or notion, that they were prudish and unable to talk about sex or lust. This is then directly juxtaposed by Christina Rossetti in her poem “In an Artist’s Studio”. With an omnipresent narrator, they (the narrator) have a bird’s eye view of a male artist painting the name woman, over and over in various dresses and poses. And in that, he lusts over his subject of the painting “feeding” on her face while she looks with “kind eyes”.
In “In an Artist’s Studio”, about three quarters down the stanza, Rossetti writes “He feeds upon her face by day and night, /And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,/Fair as the moon and joyful as the light…Not as she is, but as she fills his dream”. Rossetti’s strong start to the sentence, “feed”, immediately draws the reader in and depicts an almost animalistic view the painter has on his subject. By “feeding upon her face” he (the artist) acts like an animal on prey, like a lion and a zebra. The woman is then painted as having “true kind eyes” insinuating that no matter what he does to her, or how he views her, she is forever painted as present and enjoying him and what he does. By following her facial depiction with a comparison of her body as “fair as the moon”, her pale body insinuates the purity and undisturbed body Victorian Women were almost required to have. The male artist also paints her as “joyful” without “waiting” or “sorrow”; he paints her as always happy and willing to observe whatever it is he does, as she “fills his dreams”.
This poem is written by Christina Rossetti about her brothers (Dante Gabriel Rossetti) infatuation with his wife Elizabeth Siddal, who is the woman posing in “Ophelia”. And although “Ophelia” is painted by Sir John Everett Millais, not Dante, the fact she (Christina) is able to write an entire poem on her brother’s sexual desire for his wife is quite strange, and unsettling. In the painting “Ophelia” she is painted as a woman in water surrounded by flowers, green trees, and sunlight. Her skin is pale with a white dress embroidered in gold, looking up almost dazed. Like the woman in “In an Artist’s Studio” “Ophelia” is depicting the perfect Victorian woman. Her eyes are “kind” her skin is “fair as the moon” and although she may not have filled the artists dreams, she certainly was the main focus of Dante, the artist in the poem. Both of these pieces of art, the poem and painting, show the picture-perfect Victorian Woman, of sensuality and desire without having a say in what they believe. The animalistic behavior both portrayed in the poem as well as the painting show the way in which women were treated, as objects of desire instead of a sentient being.