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Catherine Maxwell
Queen Mary & Westfield College, University of London

It once should save as well as kill': D. G. Rossetti and the Feminine

This paper considers critical work on Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the feminine from the last twenty years and aligns Rossetti with the pattern of male feminisation described in my recent book The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing Blindness (Manchester University Press, 2001). After demonstrating how some of the symbolic paradigms of the post-Miltonic poetic tradition are oddly literalised in Rossetti's biographical life, the paper examines these paradigms as they inform his poetry, with special reference to 'Aspecta Medusa' and 'Willowwood'.