Made of Metonymy. Beguiling of the Female Body in Pre-Raphaelitism

The self-evident statement that the figuration of the female body stands out as a major source of creativity for Pre-Raphaelitism encloses a paradox. While literary critics and art historians have defined rhetorical and iconographic typologies of femininity, the conceptualisation of the female body in Pre-Raphaelitism has proceeded on less secure grounds, and the canon of the Pre-Raphaelite body still challenges literary and artistic assessment. The paradox of identifiable/elusive practices of body framing will be the focus of my enquiry, which aims to demonstrate that the beguiling of the Pre-Raphaelite body can be comprehended by studying the specific modes of construction of polysemous female features on the canvas or in verse. The Pre-Raphaelite verbal and visual aesthetics of the female body develops on a dialectics between their response to the patriarchal model of femininity and their revival of trans-cultural topoi. The Victorian moral code posited that the virgin, the prime emblem of femininity, should metamorphose into a bride or mother located within domestic walls but projected onto a heavenly dimension; the ideal-woman-to-be spoilt by sin or guilt, instead, should be expelled from the house and rejected as an outcast. The Pre-Raphaelite female body is the offspring of an imagery which takes it nurture from the 19th-century mystic of femininity interlaced with theories of art and heated social issues, but germinates its own, divergent aesthetics and ideology. The focus of my investigation is on the aesthetic categories of femininity which the Pre-Raphaelites construct in response to the triad of female types rooted in Victorian patriarchal discourse. I will concentrate on the modes of construction in order to point out how the Pre-Raphaelite tropes in poems and paintings proliferated from the clash between Victorian established canons of representation and the search for new figurative concepts and models. With this prospect, the prominence given to the figuration of women by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones aims to highlight how their creativity is empowered by the tension between the lives of their female models and their artistic metamorphoses. The first Pre-Raphaelite female portraits do not efface the “early Victorian” model of feminine beauty exemplified by the young Queen Victoria and featuring a round or oval face, pink cheeks, small lips, sweet dark eyes, thin brows, smooth, long hair raised up, a petite body and a thin waist. The young Pre-Raphaelites spiritualise this porcelain icon and heighten its ethereal component in the portraits of Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal, Georgiana Burne-Jones, the less known Julia Jackson, Anne Ryan, and Ellen Frazer. A progressive evolution from spiritualised beauty to bodily sensuality can be re-traced in the features of Fanny Cornforth, Annie Miller, Ruth Herbert and Alexa Wilding. The construction of a magnified womanhood is exemplified by Rossetti’s attraction to Herbert, a favourite model in 1858-59: woman is an eidolon made manifest in distinctive traits of physical beauty; thus, aesthetic creation identifies with the representation of a finely wrought exterior beauty the artist has located in itemised bodily features. Jane Burden and Maria Zambaco testify to the loss of centrality of the stunning beauty in the Pre-Raphaelite imagery and to the gradually re-moulding of the female body in less exposed, more mediated, cryptic forms. Gloomy, aloof, enigmatic women with long nervous fingers, thick black hair, dark brows and eyes, marked eyelids, tumid lips, and a long neck embody figurations of life as bewilderment and of art as vision and symbol. The magnetic lure of the female icons of Pre-Raphaelitism arises from the unrelenting tension between reality and mitopoiesis, metamorphosis and repetition.