{"id":2194,"date":"2025-03-20T12:57:09","date_gmt":"2025-03-20T12:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/?p=2194"},"modified":"2025-03-20T12:57:09","modified_gmt":"2025-03-20T12:57:09","slug":"mirror-mirror-but-like-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/2025\/03\/20\/mirror-mirror-but-like-not\/","title":{"rendered":"Mirror Mirror (But Like…Not)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Dante Gabriel Rosetti\u2019s poem \u201cThe Portrait\u201d there is a repeated theme of burial, both literally in the model\u2019s death, but also metaphorically in the poet\u2019s return to images of incarceration, suffocation and looking through.\u00a0 Christina Rosetti\u2019s \u201cIn an Artist\u2019s Studio\u201d speaks back against these images of confinement and locates their cause.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The poem\u2019s first quatrain is scanned as iambic pentameter, the meter which corresponds to walking or breathing, but the subject is eerily inanimate:<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOne face looks out from all his canvases,\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One selfsame figure sits of walks or leans:<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We found her hidden just behind those screens,<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That mirror gave back all her loveliness.\u201d (\u201cArtist\u2019s\u201d l. 1-4).<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Alongside the steady beat of the scansion, \u201cOne\u201d is repeated in parallel to capture both the subject\u2019s \u201cface\u201d and \u201cfigure\u201d creating a preoccupation with the body.\u00a0 There is also something interesting happening with the rhyme scheme: ABBA.\u00a0 Since \u201cwe\u201d find the \u201cher\u201d in question \u201c<\/span>behind<\/span><\/i> those screens,\u201d behind the surfaces of the painting, the speaker also metacognitively embeds the suggestion in the contained \u201cB\u201d lines: she \u201cleans\u201d on the \u201cscreens,\u201d waiting to be let out of the \u201ccanvases\u201d that are only interested in her external \u201cloveliness,\u201d and not her personhood.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Moving into the second quatrain delivers similar information, but with a new twist from the speaker: \u201cA saint, and angel \u2013 every canvas means, \/ The same one meaning, neither more nor less.\u201d (\u201cArtist\u2019s\u201d l. 7-8).\u00a0 Again, the parallel pattern of descriptors trundles on, until the middle of line 7 with the emdash where the narrator explodes, making even further explicit what the parallelism suggests.\u00a0 The monotonous iambic pentameter certainly mocks the meaninglessness of each creation, but the word \u201cone\u201d recalls the woman\u2019s description from the first quatrain.\u00a0 Here, the speaker criticizes both the artists\u2019 monolithic conception of the woman\u2019s personhood, and his compulsion to return to the same subject (either from inability to invent or obsession with a single rendering).<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0The poem\u2019s criticism then turns vampiric: \u201cHe feeds upon her face by day and night, \/ And she with true kind eyes looks back on him\u201d (\u201cArtist\u2019s\u201d 9-10).\u00a0 Jan Marsh writes that \u201cwomen are rendered decorative, depersonalized;…reduced to an aesthetic arrangement of sexual parts, for male fantasies\u201d (Lee).\u00a0 In these lines, the sestet begins, and the rhyme scheme begins to indicate that the subject and artist are out of sync.\u00a0 The consonance of \u201cfeeds\u201d and \u201cface\u201d and parallelism of \u201cday and night\u201d suggest an uneven exchange where violence is done on the woman who can but passively \u201clook back on him\u201d with \u201caesthetic[ally] arrang[ed]\u201d <\/span>
\n\u201ctrue kind eyes.\u201d Even before the artist\u2019s \u201cdream\u201d is mentioned in the final lines, the speaker hints at the fantasy of consumption whether that be in a sexual or metaphorical way.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The final lines are also resonant with Marsh\u2019s criticism: \u201cNot as she is, but was when hope shone bright; \/ Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.\u201d (\u201cArtist\u2019s\u201d 13-14). The artist\u2019s \u201cdream\u201d ultimately results in a Platonically dangerous echo-chamber where the artist is more interested in copying his idea of her (\u201cNot as she is, but <\/span>was<\/span><\/i>\u201d) and his paintings of her than the woman herself.\u00a0 This is perhaps why in the first quatrain discusses the surface of the paintings rebounding \u201cloveliness\u201d – the paintings are the mirrors to one another, not to the woman, and so the woman is lost.\u00a0 But not completely.\u00a0 The repetition in the final three lines of \u201cnot as\u201d resists his categorization of her identity, and the final line is unrhymed, resisting the traditional sestet resolution to show that the speaker recognizes that the artist\u2019s \u201cdream\u201d is out of constancy with who she \u201cis.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Works Cited:<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Rossetti, Christina. \u201cIn an Artist\u2019s Studio.\u201d <\/span>The Poetry Foundation<\/span><\/i>, [1896] 2025, https:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/poems\/146804\/in-an-artist39s-studio. Accessed 12 March 2025.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. \u201cThe Portrait.\u201d <\/span>The Poetry Foundation<\/span><\/i>, [1870] 2025, https:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/poems\/45023\/the-portrait-56d22459825d7. Accessed 12 March 2025.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Lee, Elizabeth. \u201cThe Femme Fatale as Object.\u201d <\/span>The Victorian Web<\/span><\/i>, 1996, https:\/\/victorianweb.org\/gender\/object.html. Accessed 12 March 2025.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Dante Gabriel Rosetti\u2019s poem \u201cThe Portrait\u201d there is a repeated theme of burial, both literally in the model\u2019s death, but also metaphorically in the poet\u2019s return to images of incarceration, suffocation and looking through.\u00a0 Christina Rosetti\u2019s \u201cIn an Artist\u2019s Studio\u201d speaks back against these images of confinement and locates their cause.\u00a0 The poem\u2019s first … Continue reading Mirror Mirror (But Like…Not)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4758,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[135984],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4758"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}