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Matthew Potolsky
University of Utah

How to Look at a Medusa: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Mirror for Teachers

This essay examines Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem 'Aspecta Medusa' (1870) as an instance of Rossetti's complicated relationship to nineteenth-century ideas about the educational value of poetry. Divided between Victorian notions of poetry as improvement, and the continental model of l'art pour l'art, Rossetti seeks to have it both ways. The poem ostensibly teaches a lesson about the dangers of forbidden knowledge; but it also questions the possibility of using poetry to teach any lesson. And as such, it raises significant questions about Rossetti's relation to Victorian poetic and pedagogical theory.

Rossetti's poem is constructed according to a parabolic model of example and precept, where the poetic image illustrates a discursive lesson. The first stanza depicts Perseus bowing to the curiosity of his bride Andromeda, and showing her the head of the Medusa reflected in a fountain. The second stanza draws a lesson from this depiction: 'Let not thine eyes know / Any forbidden thing itself.' The conventional way of interpreting this precept is moral, as a warning against seeking forbidden knowledge. I argue, however, that Rossetti's allusion in the poem to two traditional figurative mirrors-the Mirror for Princes and the Platonic mirror of mimesis-points to a pedagogical 'lesson' that shadows the more obvious moral lesson of the poem.

Rossetti makes reference to the Mirror for Princes tradition by means of an allusion to Dante. The poem, I argue, is modeled on a crucial moment from the Inferno, in which Dante and Virgil confront the Medusa. Virgil covers the pilgrim's eyes, and, in a rare direct address to the reader, which distinctly recalls that of Rossetti's poem, Dante warns against privileging the letter of his poem over its spiritual message. Rossetti's own address to the reader exactly reverses Dante's advice, telling us not to look beyond the 'shadow' to the thing itself. This aestheticist lesson questions both the allegorical model of Dante's work, and the parabolic model of the poem itself. For both models rely upon the reader's ability to look beyond the example to its meaning.

Rossetti also questions the possibility of teaching through poetry in his allusion to two key analogies for mimesis from Plato's Republic. These two analogies compare mimesis first to a mirror, and then to the reflections in water. According to the Platonic model, mimesis presents merely the form of things and not their reality. As such, it is a threat to knowledge. Rossetti's 'depiction' of the Medusa, by contrast, implicitly argues that mimesis constitutes an independent order of knowledge, for according to ancient myth, one can only know the Gorgon's head as a reflection. The same thing is true, I argue, of the mythic scene Rossetti's poem depicts, which is in fact Rossetti's own invention rather than a retelling of an existing story. In both cases, the poetic image cannot be reduced to a prior 'original' that defines its lesson; instead, the image presents something that cannot be seen or known in any other way.

According to both sets of allusions, poetry for Rossetti offers a unique form of knowledge, which cannot be reduced to a lesson it bears or to the world it depicts. Like the aesthetes, Rossetti insists upon the specificity of the artwork; but like Victorian poets such as Arnold and Tennyson, he also paradoxically insists on its ability to teach a lesson--even if that lesson teaches the impossibility of teaching lessons.