Análisis de la competencia

With only a few exceptions, Rossetti never publicly exhibited his paintings. The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848-49), his first painting and the first Pre-Raphaelite work to be put on exhibition, was displayed in March 1849. Originally, he had also intended to showcase

Ecce Ancilla Domini (1849-50), a companion piece to The Girlhood, at the annual Royal Academy exhibition of 1849; however, he changed his mind and showed it at the exhibition of the National Institution. In general, however, he tended to showcase his paintings privately, to friends, family, patrons and, only rarely, at small-scale organized events (Elizabeth Prettejohn, “The Paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti” 108). Rossetti’s turn towards more private, independent projects, from the 1850s onwards, suggests his growing interests in aesthetic styles and subjects that were not always in keeping with the parameters of the initial P.R.B. program and also demonstrate his turn to other kinds of collaborative projects, such as Moxon’s Illustrated Tennyson and the Oxford Union Murals Project (1857-59) which was also something of a failure (a story I discuss, at more length, in my next Chapter, on William Morris). These two collaborative projects, along with paintings such as The Tune of Seven Towers (1857) demonstrate Rossetti’s growing fascination with the fundamental elements of drawing (line, colour, pattern, shape, and setting) and, also, show his growing preoccupation with boredom and complex renderings of time in relation to space, desire, and atmosphere.34

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For example, The Tune of the Seven Towers presents an ambiguously restless, melancholic scene (perhaps the lady of the painting is awaiting her lover who has gone off to the Crusades? Regardless of express context, she appears to be stuck in a period of waiting like Mariana and the damozel). The painting is also a gorgeous exploration of vibrant colour and repeat patterns—modeled, Helsinger suggests, by the “heraldic device embroidered on the pennant” that works as an “initiating impulse” for the complex inter-

Rossetti’s explorations of powerful feeling and complex relationships to time are, of course, as essential to many of his paintings and sketches, throughout the 1850s, as they are to his re-workings of “The Blessed Damozel” and his later project, The House of Life. As my Introduction to this Chapter notes, Rossetti’s interests in sketching Elizabeth Siddal in various repetitious and boring settings (in which she is waiting, longing, or even absent-minded) shows his interest in how boredom is a psycho-somatic, as well as temporal, problem, affecting spatial organization and renderings of the body (and its energy levels). However, his increasing interest in painting women, specifically Jane Morris, in various states of bored poses and confining settings, underscores how the problem of being-held-in-limbo, that “The Blessed Damozel” stages, reaches a new pitch from the late 1850s, onwards, when he “launched,” as Helsinger puts it, “what would become his series of paintings of women” (163). These paintings tend to depict women in confined and restless positions which are suggestive of boredom, sexual repression, and melancholia, among other things. The poses of these various women can be read as indexes to questions about desire and time that are, as I have discussed earlier, connected to the problem of boredom as theme and aesthetic process in Rossetti’s art.

In Rossetti’s work, the looming presence of discontented and confined women insist on the fundamentally, irreducible, fact of the body’s relation to boredom in his paintings. The body, itself, is the locus of meaning and signification, functioning as a kind of somatic clock (measuring out loss), a representation of potential or unexplored

weavings of colour with shape that comprise the depths of field and the arrangement of figures (Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts 9).

sexual potential, and as a material object bearing witness to the intensification of the commodification of art (and, by extension, of the very commodification of the appearances and physical identities of the women Rossetti used as models for his work) in Victorian culture. That is to say, these paintings demonstrate the ways in which such presentations and re-presentations of women in states of confinement and boredom became a kind of distilled aesthetic brand for Rossetti: his paintings, either bought or commissioned by patrons were often re-workings of almost identical settings, themes, and explorations of female beauty, power, and dissatisfaction. As a result, we can read boredom, in Rossetti’s paintings, as not only temporal and aesthetic themes but also as an index to forms of economic exchange.35 Indeed, Helsinger argues that Rossetti’s

associations with the growing link between production and reproduction that characterized the growing commodity culture of nineteenth-century England became a dividend for him. He could benefit from economic support, through this growing demand for his work, and also explore, and test, the aesthetic and affective possibilities of reproduction and re-presentation, themselves, as aesthetic processes (Poetry and the Pre- Raphaelite Arts 10, 119-150).

Rossetti, himself, was aware of the necessary and yet problematic relationship between his art, his patrons (who were typically members of the emerging mercantile and prosperous middle-class) and himself. Speaking about some of his patrons who supported

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Zemka perceives Rossetti’s paintings and poems (especially those in The House of Life) as being representative of a kind of “melancholic hermeneutics” in which capitalistic culture and aesthetic achievements are subsumed into an inescapable relation of exchange: art becomes a “cultural object in its own right,” and then, she concludes, a form of currency (68). As the 1881 sonnet opening The House of Life attests, art is both a “moment’s monument” (“A Sonnet is a moment’s monument”1) and, as Zemka insightfully argues, a powerful form of currency and exchange (69); after all, as Rossetti himself notes, the sonnet is also a “coin” (9).

his work in the last two decades of his life, Rossetti notes that they often requested very specific settings and poses: “[t]hey are special men who buy special things and almost never effect a divergence from their limited loves” (qtd. in Dante Gabriel Rossetti 169).36

Although the specific interests and tastes of Rossetti’s patrons did certainly play a role in his painting processes, practices and interests, the repetitious and uncanny features of his work also stem from his personal history. Boredom palpably surfaces in the constrained postures and pallid complexions of red-lipped, passive women (whose combination of languid calm and sexual potency index the problem of deferred desire). Such types of women fill the canvases of Rossetti’s work throughout the 1860s and 1870s and often represent important aspects of his personal life. This is especially the case when we look at the history connecting some of the renderings of Jane Morris that Rossetti made throughout the 1860s and 1870s.

Specifically, in considering his painting, La Pia De’ Tolomei (which Rossetti began

in 1868 when he was on close and intimate terms with Jane), and his comic sketch, The M’s at Ems (1869), which recasts La Pia in even more personal terms, we can see the ways in which repetition, feelings of claustrophobia and boredom are not just aesthetic consequences of his patrons’ requests for similar kinds of work. They also suggest that

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Frederick Leyland, who was an important patron of Rossetti’s, favoured paintings of women accompanied by musical instruments and collected, among others, Monna Rosa (1867), Veronica Veronese (1872), and Roman Widow (1874) and William Graham, who purchased Mariana (1870) and commissioned The Blessed Damozel (1875-78), favoured renderings of women in still poses, saturated in rich colours. Alicia Faxon notes that Graham often hung Rossetti’s paintings besides a growing collection of Renaissance works which were complemented by the deep hues and complex renderings of light and shade that Rossetti used (Dante Gabriel Rossetti 169).

Rossetti’s continual considerations of his thwarted, though sometimes fulfilled, passion for Jane encouraged a certain repetition compulsion in his art. This thwarted desire, in turn, generates an aesthetic of boredom in which desire’s deferral is a theme as well as a catalyst for creative work. In particular, La Pia De’ Tolomei shows, I suggest, the intimate connection between Rossetti’s personal life and his exploration of similar, or overlapping, themes in his art.

The painting is an intertextual study, an exploration of Dante’s Purgatorio and a representation of Rossetti’s personal interpretation of Jane’s life as boring. La Pia De’ Tolomei, then, is also an implicit commentary, made by Rossetti, on Jane’s marriage to William Morris. This will become particularly clear, of course, when we explore the ways in which Rossetti imagines the marriage between the Morrises as a bored one in his sketch, The M’s at Ems (which directly refers to La Pia De’ Tolomei (Figure Three) for its structural organization). Located on the way up the Second Terrace of Mount Purgatory in Dante’s Purgatorio, La Piawas imprisoned by her husband in a fortress; she eventually died from neglect or by her husband’s own hand. Completed in 1880, the painting’s symbols represent imprisonment, the passing of time, and La Pia’s inability to escape her present situation and her refusal to accept it (much like Tennyson’s representation of Mariana in “Mariana” and “Mariana in the South”). As in Ecce Ancilla Domini!, the space of the picture barely affords enough room for the size of the figure. La Pia almost bursts out of the side of the painting, a fact which further underscores that her condition is both limiting and boring. Twisting her wedding ring, she passes the time by daydreaming; what exactly she thinks about is not revealed to the viewer. However, the

painting provides interpretive clues: many of its images have to do with the passing of time.

La Pia’s reclined and entrapped body is the most significant representation of the slow passing of bored time. Her unfulfilled life and desire is emphasized by the birds flying past her window; in their energetic and graceful flight, they contrast La Pia’s impoverished and claustrophobic existence. David Rodgers notes that the ivy sprawling over the fortress’ wall represents “clinging memory” (Rossetti 98). The sundial measures the wasting away of time and of La Pia’s hopes, and the nearby, though neglected, breviary, rosary beads, and letters (possibly love letters from La Pia’s former lover, now turned tyrannical husband) are more ambivalent in their significance: they appear neglected although, at certain times in her life, they were most likely sources of consolation for her. The predicament of La Pia in the painting, especially when interpreted alongside its relationship to the personal and satirical standpoint of Rossetti’s 1869 sketch, The M’s at Ems (Figure Four), indicates, among other things, how Rossetti’s aesthetic concerns rest upon the condition of frustrated desire.37

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These images, indicating the slow passage of time without reprieve, suggest that La Pia is in the Heideggerian temporal-spatial structure of limbo, a manifestation of what Phillips calls the “permanent suspended animation of desire” (On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored 78). However, it is important to qualify, here, that Heidegger’s conceptualization of limbo as a spatial-temporal problem—which has helped us read the dynamics of boredom, as mood and temporal relation, in “The Blessed Damozel”—does not provide a wide enough framework for reading Rossetti’s paintings of bored women. This is because Heidegger’s account of limbo is largely abstract; it is largely employed as a representation of the metaphysical problem of boredom throughout The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. While Heidegger noted, in his 1928 Marburg lectures discussing Leibniz, that his use of the word Dasein is neutral, standing in for both men and women (136), he does not account enough for what Iris Marion Young has called the “particular situation,” in history and socio-political contexts, of being a woman or man, in the world and in time (On Female Body Experience: "Throwing Like a Girl" and Other Essays 153).

Kevin Aho also references Young’s critique of Heideggerian phenomenology and gender neutrality, noting that Heidegger’s use of Dasein does not account for how “public patterns of gendered domination are an

Fig. Three: La Pia De’Tolomei, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1868-1880, Photo: © Spencer Museum of Art (U. of Kansas) [2014]

essential part of das Man [of the lives of men and women]” (Heidegger’s Neglect of the Body 58). As a result, even though Heidegger’s largely metaphysical approach to boredom is incredibly useful, and illuminating, for exploring the ways in which Rossetti’s “The Blessed Damozel” and, also, The House of Life, explore aesthetic attitudes towards dissatisfying relationships to time, Rossetti’s paintings are always entrenched in a powerful encounter with the face of gendered and sexual difference—especially given that almost every painting announces the curious as well as problematic fact of the (male) artist’s representation(s), and rendering(s), of the female body as inhibited and bored on the one hand and as a powerful, fleshly representative of personal history and of aesthetic theorizations and practices on the other.

While taking the baths during the summer of 1869 in the spa town of Ems, Germany with her husband, in an effort to restore her health, Jane Burden Morris received a series of letters, including some comical sketches, from Rossetti. In his letter to “Dear Janey,” from 21 July 1869, Rossetti enclosed The M’s at Ems sketch and included a little interpretation of its meaning. Rossetti imagines the scene that most likely awaited Jane Morris: she would drink of the restorative waters at Ems but become inflicted, according to the predictions of Rossetti’s sketch, by a different kind of malady: boredom. Rossetti imagined Jane’s time at Ems as being taken over by having to listen to Morris read aloud to her from his magnum opus, The Earthly Paradise, which was first serially published over the period of 1868 to 1870. Rossetti’s satirical sketch of the unromantic scene depicts Jane trapped in a bath tub; she appears a victim who cannot escape from Morris’ enthusiastic, almost pontificating, performance of his poem as he

looms over her. It was a point of humour among members of the Pre-

Raphaelite circle in the 1850s that Morris, while courting Jane, used to read long excerpts to her from Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841); they, of course, deemed that an unriveting way to elicit passion. It is certainly possible Rossetti had Morris’ previous courtship habits in mind when designing the pen and ink sketch. Rossetti belabours the cartoon’s already obvious meaning, saying that “[t]he accompanying cartoon will prepare you for the worse—whichever that may be, the 7 tumblers or the 7 volumes” (Fredeman 208). Although Rossetti’s joke is a valid observation of certain points of contention and frustration present in the Morris marriage (particularly in its underscoring of Morris’s almost wholly-absorbing interest in artistic and business projects that could be mundane for others, particularly Jane, to deal with), it is also hyperbolic. Morris’ Earthly Paradise

was published serially in three volumes, not seven, and Jane’s entrapment in the bathtub as well as her reclined and frustrated, bent head is a condition that suggests Rossetti is willfully connecting her personal experience with the females suffering from frustration, boredom, and confinement who populate his paintings, particularly during the 1860s. Specifically, Jane’s posture and her vacant facial

Fig. Four: The M’s at Ems, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1869, Photo: © The British Museum [2014]

expression—which seems a form of resistance to Morris and a ‘tuning out’ defense mechanism against being further bored—is deliberately reminiscent of Rossetti’s oil painting, La Pia de’ Tolomei, which Jane modeled for. In considering that Rossetti so obviously associates Jane with the figure of La Pia in his sketch, it becomes clear that

The M’s at Ems is just as much, perhaps even more so, about Rossetti’s standpoint even though Jane’s condition and perspective is the one depicted. Rossetti’s passion for Jane, begun even while he was courting and then married to Elizabeth Siddal, greatly influenced his artistic projects, and, in the instance of this sketch, it becomes clear that Rossetti imagines Jane as a bored type because it is to his benefit that she be one: if Jane is tired of Morris, it is a possible indication that she would prefer the company of Rossetti. Considering the sketch in the context of La Pia further supports this reading; the sketch typifies, once again, how Rossetti’s unfulfilled desire was a catalyst for his artistic expression. In the next, and final, section of this Chapter, I will explore the ways in which Rossetti’s personal boredom, his unfulfilled desire, his longing for that which is absent, concretely effects his organizations and representations of time in his magnum opus, The House of Life.

3.4: Interruptions of “[L]ead [B]ound” Stasis: Boredom and Punctualism in Rossetti’s 1881 Version of The House of Life

As with “The Blessed Damozel” and his series of paintings that render women in states of boredom and confinement (from 1859 through to the 1870s), Rossetti’s The House of Life (1870, 1881) has a complex textual history. Among other things, it is a palimpsest of

various temporal registers, in which Rossetti’s past, present, and future desires and concerns coalesce and are re-presented and re-worked, leaving traces of former poetic conceptualizations and organizations made along the way. Ronnalie Roper Howard notes that the text continually reworks “typical Rossetti themes,” those “involving death as separation, the longing for union, the exalted joy of successful union” and, then, a return to the problem of frustration, yet again (The Dark Glass: Vision and Technique in the Poetry of D.G.R. 164). Re-workings of the sonnet sequence only ended in 1881, shortly before Rossetti’s death in 1882, and one senses that the project is, by nature, interminable—aesthetically against the idea of a concrete ending. McGann offers such a reading, saying there can be no “no ‘definitive’ version of the sequence . . . because, in fact, DGR left the work as he originally conceived and originally described it: as a project “Towards a Work to be Called ‘The House of Life’” (“The House of Life: A Sonnet Sequence”).

The interminable nature of this amorphous, spacious, and complex house (similar to the open-ended musings Augustine offers when he speaks of both the palace of memory and the mysterious nature of time in The Confessions) is, however, increasingly focused on expressing frustrated desire and the wearying effects of time.38 For example,

the sonnet, “Lost Days,” which played a central role in Rossetti’s Life, Love, and Death

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Rossetti’s aesthetic process is bound up with recurring, repetitious explorations of encounters with the