In Christina Rossetti’s poems “In an Artist’s Studio” and “Goblin Market,” men are depicted as thieves or consumers of women’s physical beauty. Drained of this beauty, the women in these poems face two different, but similarly undesirable, fates: The model ceases to exist outside the artist’s “dream” and Jeanie dies a single woman—a fate Laura narrowly manages to escape as well (“Artist” 14).
The speaker of “In an Artist’s Studio” explicitly charges the male artist with “feed[ing] upon her face by day and night” (9). The phrase “feeds upon” suggests that the model’s beauty is something he can consume in order to sustain himself. Indeed, as an artist he makes his living off of the aesthetic objects he creates through his art. Therefore, by capturing or “feed[ing]” off the model’s beauty and using it for his art, the artist metaphorically consumes her body for his own gain. The speaker argues that the artist’s repeated use of this particular model for multiple works reduces the model to an abstract ideal, an intangible “dream” (14). In the artist’s paintings, the model appears “fair” and “joyful” (11). Yet, the speaker informs us of the model’s beauty in the paintings through negation: “Not wan with wanting, not with sorrow dim;/ Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright ;/ Not as she is, but as she fills his dream” (12-4). Though the artist’s paintings continuously depict the model as an “angel[ic]” beauty, the speaker suggests that his image of the model is merely a fantasy or memory. He sees her “not as she is, but was when hope shone bright” (13)[1]. The tense shift in this line indicates an important temporal distance between the time the painting was created and the speaker’s present viewing of the piece. Rather than concluding the poem with the artist’s romanticized image of the model, the speaker leaves her reader with an image of a “wan” and depleted woman (12).
In “Goblin Market,” Jeanie and Laura’s respective encounters with the goblin men result in a more literal loss or consumption of beauty. We learn from Lizzie’s anxious memory that Jeanie’s meeting with the goblin men led to her untimely death: “She thought of Jeanie in her grave,/ Who should have been a bride;/ But who for joys brides hope to have/ Fell sick and died/ In her gay prime” (312-16). As we have seen in our study of Victorian art, the idealized image of a woman depicted her as a young, healthy, sensuous woman in her “prime” (316). Illness would mean a loss of this standard of beauty. Laura’s loss of beauty is more overt. First, the goblin men take a “precious golden lock” of her hair (126). Then, in the aftermath of her encounter, Laura’s youthful beauty begins to fade: “Her hair grew thin and grey;/ She dwindled… To swift decay and burn/ Her fire away” (277-280). Just as the artist robbed the model of her beauty through his painting, so too do the goblin men (literally and figuratively) steal Lizzie and Laura’s beauty.
[1] Emphasis added.