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 \u201cIn an Artist\u2019s Studio\u201d. With an omnipresent narrator, they (the narrator) have a bird\u2019s 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 \u201cfeeding\u201d on her face while she looks with \u201ckind eyes\u201d.<\/p>\r\n
In \u201cIn an Artist\u2019s Studio\u201d, about three quarters down the stanza, Rossetti writes \u201cHe 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\u2026Not as she is, but as she fills his dream\u201d. Rossetti\u2019s strong start to the sentence, \u201cfeed\u201d, immediately draws the reader in and depicts an almost animalistic view the painter has on his subject. By \u201cfeeding upon her face\u201d he (the artist) acts like an animal on prey, like a lion and a zebra. The woman is then painted as having \u201ctrue kind eyes\u201d 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 \u201cfair as the moon\u201d, her pale body insinuates the purity and undisturbed body Victorian Women were almost required to have. The male artist also paints her as \u201cjoyful\u201d without \u201cwaiting\u201d or \u201csorrow\u201d; he paints her as always happy and willing to observe whatever it is he does, as she \u201cfills his dreams\u201d.<\/p>\r\n
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 \u201cOphelia\u201d. And although \u201cOphelia\u201d is painted by Sir John Everett Millais, not Dante, the fact she (Christina) is able to write an entire poem on her brother\u2019s sexual desire for his wife is quite strange, and unsettling. In the painting \u201cOphelia\u201d 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 \u201cIn an Artist\u2019s Studio\u201d \u201cOphelia\u201d is depicting the perfect Victorian woman. Her eyes are \u201ckind\u201d her skin is \u201cfair as the moon\u201d 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. <\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 \u201cIn an Artist\u2019s Studio\u201d. With an omnipresent narrator, they (the narrator) have a bird\u2019s eye view of a male artist painting … Continue reading AITH: I (29F) wrote a poem about my brother (35F) and his weird desires for his wife and now he’s mad<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5608,"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-2272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2272","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\/5608"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}