ABSTRACT
A reconsideration of the dynamic of absence and the presence constituted through the relationship between spectator and the image, and articulated through the series of intertextual works Rossetti produced during the 1860s, is one of the central concerns of this chapter. This chapter discusses that Rossetti's floral portraits and the written texts that inform them can be situated at the forefront of shifting representations of sexuality in the 1860s and 1870s. While the commentators discussed in the chapter regarded Rossetti's Lilith as a figure who endangers the prospect of masculine progeny. The chapter discusses that this anxiety is more fully realized in the depictions of the fallen woman and the suicide narrative that dominates realist representations of urban space. The feminist program coupled a libertarian defense of the constitutional rights of working-class women with an assault on the social and sexual prerogatives of men.
