ABSTRACT
There is quite an industry working away on the drawings, paintings and poems of the English nineteenth-century artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti,3 all seeking a key to explain a body of works which is remarkable for its repetitious preoccupation with woman and desire. Few investigations address the question why woman and desire in those forms and at that date. Instead various ‘Rossettis’ are constructed from the contemporary and later accounts, memoirs, diaries, letters to secure the necessary and unified image of a creative genius expressively endowing his work with meanings. The fact that the images employed to do this are all of or about woman is too obvious to require explanation. I want to argue precisely the opposite. The fancy dress in which Rossetti dressed up obsessive themes is less important then their central problematics, woman as visibly different, yet woman as fantasy, sign of masculine desire. Furthermore, interrogation of this unremarkable oeuvre labelled ‘Rossetti’ raises crucial questions for feminist theorization of ‘images of women’ and the gaze.
