The Sonnet that I like the most out of this packet was : In an Artist's Studio, by Christiana Rossetti. The author talks about a man who draws non-stop a picture of a young, beautiful girl. This artist seems to be in love with this young girl.
This Sonnet talks about empty love. At a first read I though this poem was romantic. There are many indications that make it seem like it is a passionate love. To begin with the fact that, he draws her and only her, then he compares her to a “saint”etc... But then I re-read and realized that the artist was not in-love with the young girl. It is an empty love. He is not in love with the girl but of the image of the girl. We see this because he does not give her a name “the nameless girl”, because he does not make any attempt to talk to this girl, or try to find this amazing girl in the outside world he just “feeds upon her face day and night”.
«In her poem, "In an Artist's studio," Christina Rossetti responds to the tendency of Victorian poets to objectify women in their experiment with aestheticism.»* I read this on a site (link below) and immediately thought of your post. I agree with you on the aspect of the "empty love" in this poem and I would like to take that concept a bit further and say that it is not only an attempt to create the image of the perfect women but it is practically a "defeminization" of the subject matter. By defeminization I do not mean in any way that the artist is attempting to make the women appear less female physically. I mean that he is pushing the concept of 'woman' to the extreme so that she appears to be some kind of "saint". This unearthly creature is plunged so deep in the realm of perfection that she no longer seems to be a human being but rather an ideal. We can see irony in the gradation of the names bestowed upon this faceless maiden which helps us see the painters true infatuation with this non-existent figure: "queen"; "saint"; "angel". This poem reminded me of a book I read by Emile Zola named “L’Oeuvre”. This book is about a man who becomes so obsessed with this one painting of his wife that he forces her to pose for him for long and painful hours. He grows to love the painting more than the model and finally commits suicide because he is incapable of rendering the woman in the painting as perfect as she is in his dreams. This book parallels (with a much darker undertone) Christina Rossetti’s poem with the concept of the painter who comes to love the dream of the ideal woman. In fact in the poem itself Rossetti claims that the painter portrays his subject: “Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.” Therefore we can truly see that this poem criticizes the way one comes to idealize a subject to the point where the real object or person is forgotten and we are left only with empty passion.
ReplyDelete*http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/byecroft7.html
I agree to some extent; indeed, this poem does evoke an “empty love” but also is associated to art. The woman is simply an ideal: “A saint, an angel” (l.7). Therefore, this woman described as a “queen in opal or in ruby dress” (l.5) doesn’t exist, which we can also see through the vague description of her non-existent identity: “A nameless girl” (l.6). She simply is something that “fills his dream” (l.14) which may appear optimistic but is implicitly negative. Indeed, the fact that she doesn’t exist implies that the narrator will never find such a love, which creates some sense of despair. Rossetti not only evokes a woman, but also a painter. This sonnet could also be a critique of the artists of her time, during the Romanticism. Romanticism is a movement where feelings are emphasized and perhaps exaggerated. Thus, she suggests that male artists, at the time, couldn’t make a difference between their fantasies and reality. Furthermore the male point of view could also bring out the poet’s feminist side. There are several other interpretations for this poem, one of the being that Rossetti is talking about her brother’s affair with a woman named Lizzie Siddal.
ReplyDeleteI can see how this sonnet would suggest a shallow love. Indeed the woman is described only physically, the poet speaking of her "loveliness" and comparing her to "a queen in opal or in ruby dress," and the fact that she remains a "nameless girl" only adds to the emptiness of the painter's feelings. It would seem he cared only about her appearance rather than her as a person. However, this sonnet is a description of a painting, justifying somewhat the shallow, superficial description. Also, there seems to be a sudden change in the ninth line of the sonnet, going from the description of a series of paintings to the description of an almost obsessive love for the woman in the paintings. In line 9 the poet says the painter "feeds upon her face by day and night." In the two last lines, the painter is also described as seeing her as she "was when hope shone bright" and "as she fills his dreams." The fact that uses a term designating a vital function and the uses of words such as "dream" seems to extreme for these feelings just to be based on physical attraction or fascination. They invoke in my opinion a much deeper relationship between the painter and the girl in the painting. This idea is also supported by the use of the verb "was" in the thirteenth line, which seems to imply a common past which the painter cannot forget and desperately lingers on. Thus, though the idea of a critic of man's shallow view on women seems quite plausible, I believe more in the theory of it being a description of the poet's brother with a certain Lizzie Siddal, as suggested by Laura.
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