A Victorian Muse: The Afterlife of Dante’s Beatrice in Nineteenth-Century Literature 9781474211246, 9780826445896

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List of Figures

Figure 1.1

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882). Beata Beatrix. 1864–1870. Oil on canvas. 86 × 66 cm. Tate Gallery, London. © Tate, London 2008

Figure 2.1

Henry Holiday (1839–1927). The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice. 1883. Oil on canvas. 142.2 × 203.2 cm. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. © National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery

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Figure 2.2

Marie Spartali Stillman (1844–1927). Beatrice. 1895. Gouache on paper. 57.6 × 43.2 cm. Delaware Art Museum, Gift of Mrs Walter Reinsel, 1971. © Delaware Art Museum

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Figure 2.3

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879). Call, I Follow, I Follow – Let Me Die. 1867. Carbon print from copy negative. Victoria and Albert Museum. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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Figure 4.1

Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Salutation of Beatrice. 1859. Oil on canvas, two panels of 74.9 × 80 cm each. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © National Gallery of Canada

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Figure 4.2

Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Dante’s Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice. Watercolour on paper. 1856. 48 × 66 cm. Tate Gallery, London. © Tate, London 2008

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Acknowledgements

Support from institutions, teachers, colleagues, friends and family has made this book possible. Thanks to grants which I received from the German Academic Exchange Service (‘DAAD’) and the German National Scholarship Foundation (‘Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes’), I was able to pursue my research at the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, UK, between 2004 and 2006. I would like to thank Gabriele Rippl, Nick Havely and Trev Broughton for their invaluable advice and enthusiasm for the project. I would also like to express my gratitude to Margaret Bridges and Elisabeth Bronfen for their helpful insights and inspiring comments. Colleagues and friends have contributed in various ways to this book, by reading portions of the text, by answering my questions and by asking me others. Thus I would like to thank Alison Milbank and Matthew Bevis as well as my colleagues from the English Department in Berne, who showed interest in my work and took their time to discuss it with me. I would particularly like to thank the research assistants working on the manuscript, Melanie Martin, Petra Riedweg and Naomi Shepherd, for being sticklers in the best of all senses. A big thank you also to my friends Michelle Shepherd, Verena-Susanna Nungesser and Jolyon Pawlyn. Finally, I would like to thank my family, especially my mother, Astrid Straub, to whom this book is dedicated. *** Parts of this book appeared in previous publications and are reprinted with permission: ‘Diaphaneitè and Dante: A New Perspective on Pater’s Early Essay’. Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 67 (2008): 105–22; ‘Diaphanous Angels: Julia Margaret Cameron’s and Walter Pater’s Go-Betweens’. Textus: English Studies in Italy 21 (2008): 265–82; ‘Morphing and Mourning Beatrice: Mythopoesis in Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Julia Margaret Cameron’. Image Scapes. Ed. Christian Emden and Gabriele Rippl. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009; ‘George Eliot’s Romola and Its Shattered Ideals’. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 4.1 (2008), http:// www.ncgsjournal.com/; ‘Transmediality and Myths: Dante’s Beatrice in Victorian Britain’. Transmediality and Transculturality. Ed. Nadja Gernalzick. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2009.

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Chapter 1

Introduction: Beatrice’s Victorian Afterlife

Only a few other Victorian works of art possess an iconic quality similar to that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix (1864–1870, Figure 1.1). It depicts a woman of frail, enigmatic, elusive beauty. The woman is Beatrice, a young, blooming lady in Dante Alighieri’s (1265–1321) Vita Nuova (1292–1293), whom the Italian poet admires from afar and whose death he mourns by writing poetry in her honour. In the Divina Commedia (1307–1321), she is not only one of his guides in Paradise, his intellectual teacher, his moral judge, but also his loving protector. D. G. Rossetti’s Beatrice is absent and yet present, of and out of this world. Viewers of this painting face a not dissimilar paradoxical situation: they are confronted with this peculiar type of feminine beauty and a number of symbols, such as a sundial and a poppy flower. These they possibly recognize as symbols of death, pointing towards Beatrice’s impending demise. Intrigued as they may be by the painting’s superficial aesthetic appeal, they will have an inkling of a deeper meaning, which does not surface immediately. In fact, Beata Beatrix tells at least three stories. One springs from the Dantean subtext, which reveals itself in the symbols and other references to the Vita Nuova. The second story has been retold frequently and is biographical: that of the artist’s fateful, doomed relationship with his model, Elizabeth Siddal, fellow poet and painter, his muse and wife.1 The third story finally relates to a broader phenomenon, which this study examines: while Beata Beatrix uniquely encapsulates D. G. Rossetti’s cult of Beatrice, her Victorian afterlife has many more fascinating aspects to offer.2 The nineteenth century produced a multitude of poems, novels, prose pieces, plays, paintings, photographs, drawings and music pieces based on Beatrice. Focusing on a variety of literary texts from different genres as well as a few selected paintings, this book looks at the representational history of Beatrice in the Victorian period. It approaches Beatrice as a mythic figure and explores her afterlife, proposing a concept of the latter which moves beyond traditional notions of intertextuality. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Beatrice’s popularity intensified. It was embedded in a wider reception context provided by a reawakened British and European interest in Dante. Following a period of relative neglect and disregard in the preceding century, Dante had, ever since the late

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A Victorian Muse

Figure 1.1 Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882). Beata Beatrix. 1864–1870. Oil on canvas. 86 × 66 cm. Tate Gallery, London. © Tate, London 2008

eighteenth century, been rediscovered by Romantic writers, critics and artists.3 Beatrice occupied the Victorian cultural imagination and moved between different contexts, media of representation and even between sexes. Advancing beyond literature, Beatrice became a site of experimentation, an item which was appropriated by writers and artists. Her attraction was manifold in the sense that she embodied a gamut of idealized virtues and attributes, such as beauty, gentleness and spirituality. However, as I would like to argue, it can ultimately be pinned down to her adaptability to two entwined discourses: gender and aesthetics. Beatrice offered writers and artists the possibility of envisioning and criticizing idealized gender concepts and she allowed them to condense their ideas of what ideal aesthetic creation should be into one figure. As a quasi-saintly figure, a template of virtuosity and female sovereignty, an ethereal, passive, morbid muse, an Italian Catholic medieval woman, a Florentine

Introduction

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lady and an otherworldly presence, Beatrice is a fundamentally contradictory figure. She is not a canonized saint, as Harold Bloom argued: Nothing else in Western literature, . . . is as sublimely outrageous as Dante’s exaltation of Beatrice, sublimated from being an image of desire to angelic status, in which role she becomes a crucial element in the church’s hierarchy of salvation. (Western Canon 76–77) Beatrice is Dante’s invention and his creation of this figure was a heretical act. She is a testimony of Dante’s audacity as a poet, which also explains why she reappears in such different, sometimes transgressive contexts. As an emblem of poetic transgression, she was the ultimate muse, a touchstone against which other writers had to check their own abilities and inspiration. This is one central reason which explains her appeal. A second reason is related to the broader phenomenon of the Victorian reception of Dante. One may want to consider the warning which Arabella Shore, a feminist and the author of an introductory comment on Dante’s works entitled Dante for Beginners, issued to her contemporaries. She reminds her readers that we must remember that even the most genuine passion is necessarily coloured by the influences of time, race, climate, creed, social customs, and the conventional laws of life. The Southern nature and the poetical temperament could take fire under conditions which would chill the easier-going children of the North of modern days and business-like tendencies. (269) Shore describes Dante’s time and culture as fundamentally different from her own because of a historical as well as a geographical divide and a difference in mentality. Her caveat notwithstanding, English readerships and audiences were set on fire, so to speak, by Dante and appropriated his works in their own ways. Dante was relevant for various reasons, the principal one being that his works were seen as a point of reference representing a stable and sound world picture whose metaphysical pillars had not been shattered yet.4 As Alison Milbank, in what is the most comprehensive study of his Victorian reception, argued, he offered possibilities of ‘imposing order and design upon experience’ (30). By juxtaposing this assumption with Shore’s comment, it becomes clear that the reception of Dante during the Victorian period was fed by ambiguous impulses: while the universal value of his writings and his central position within Western cultural history were acknowledged and appreciated, his texts were submitted to historical scrutiny. His historical and biographical situation was recreated with exactitude in order to then disclose similarities and differences between his time and the Victorian present. Aspects and episodes which the Victorian reader could relatively easily identify with, as, for example, the doomed love between Dante and Beatrice in the Vita Nuova or the adulterous relationship of

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Paolo and Francesca were abundantly evoked in various medial forms.5 This reflects a dual attitude towards Dante: while writers and critics were aware of the timeless, enduring quality of his works, some of them turned him into a hero of Victorian bourgeois romance, thereby often blithely downsizing the transcendental and theological dimension of his texts, as Steve Ellis has convincingly demonstrated (102–34). The reason why Beatrice serves as a particularly good and illustrative example of these ambiguous reception processes is basically inscribed into her figure. Her love story with Dante embodies a timeless tale of redemptive love and feminine purity, echoed in innumerable ways throughout literary history, yet her Victorian representations mirror predispositions specific to this particular period. Beatrice is a beautiful woman walking in the streets of Florence, yet she is also a spiritual, transcendent muse. Herein seems to lie her charm, as especially my chapters on D. G. Rossetti and Walter Pater will show: Beatrice stands between the two levels of physicality and spirituality, and so did these writers when elaborating on their ideas of aesthetic creation. The aesthetics of Beatrice, which ultimately gave rise to a particular kind of poetics in these writers’ respective oeuvre, are one of the two important discursive fields into which Beatrice was drawn. The second field is that of Victorian gender ideology, which is interconnected with her aesthetic or poetological functions in intriguing ways. In order to understand how Beatrice tied in with debates on the latter, it is important to briefly revise what Dante had to say about Beatrice and to think about what exactly makes her a mythic figure.

The Myth of Beatrice While Beatrice appears in Dante’s Convito (1304–1307), she figures most prominently in his Vita Nuova and Commedia. In the former, Dante first meets Beatrice when he is 9 and she is 8 years old.6 She is wearing a soft crimson dress with a girdle around her waist. He retrospectively realizes that he fell in love with her at this particular moment. From this first encounter onwards he keeps thinking of her as noble, praiseworthy and endowed with divine qualities. He tells of his attempts to see her whenever possible, but no details are given of direct contact between them until their next, decisive meeting some years later. Then she is walking in the streets of Florence with some older ladies, wearing a white dress. She turns towards Dante and greets him, thereby rekindling his love for her and inspiring some of his most memorable love lyrics. One day in church, while he is observing Beatrice from afar, he notices another woman sitting in the direct line of his gaze, who believes that he is staring at her. This is the birth of the so-called screen-lady, love for whom Dante feigns in order to protect Beatrice’s honour. The first screen-lady leaves Florence, but luckily a cavalry expedition takes Dante to where she lives. On the way there, however, he meets a second screen-lady. This arouses gossip which Beatrice happens to

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hear, which is why she cuts him in the street. Her snub causes him anguish and pain, followed by brooding thoughts on love and death and the sudden awareness that Beatrice will die one day. This gloomy prophesy is fulfilled unexpectedly – Dante gives no reason for Beatrice’s death, but her loss has him and the city of Florence overcome with grief. This is the main story of the Vita Nuova as it is told in the 31 poems and interpolated prose sections. Beatrice is not given an historical identity by Dante himself; it was Boccaccio who identified her as Beatrice ‘Bice’ Portinari, the daughter of a prominent Florentine citizen, Folco dei Portinari, who married a banker, Simone dei Bardi, and died in 1290, aged 24 (11–15 and n57). Although it is a sonnet cycle dealing with earthly love, the Vita Nuova implies at several moments that Beatrice transcends her mundane identity. In section XXIV, Dante describes how he sees her walking down a street together with Giovanna, Guido Cavalcanti’s beloved lady. This sequence can be read as a typological reference to Christ, who was preceded by John the Baptist, just as Giovanna is the forerunner of Beatrice. Beatrice’s holy status is further elaborated after her sudden death by certain numerological observations based on the number 9, whose root is the number 3, symbolizing Trinity. One year after Beatrice’s death Dante arouses the compassion of a beautiful lady, the ‘donna gentile’, who has traditionally been identified either as Dante’s wife, Gemma Donati, or interpreted as an allegory of theology. In the Convito (c.1304–1308) this lady is given preference to Beatrice. In the Vita Nuova Beatrice is praised for her outstanding beauty which causes admiration and delight in every beholder. Walking in the streets of Florence, her ravishing appearance turns her into a miracle. The sonnets in sections XXVI (‘So deeply to be reverenced, so fair’; 76) and XXI (‘Love is encompassed in my Lady’s eyes’; 60) are remarkable examples of Dante’s celebration of Beatrice’s physical and moral beauty, both of which have an immediate salubrious effect on the beholder. Nobody who encounters Beatrice in the streets of Florence remains unmoved by her ‘gentleness’ and her ‘humility’ (XXI l. 9; 61), her look ‘ennobles all she looks upon’ (XXI l. 2; 60). In the Commedia, Beatrice is one of the three guides who accompany Dante on his journey to Paradise. Right at the beginning of the Inferno, in Canto II, her arrival is announced by Virgil. He talks about his encounter with Beatrice (ll. 53–57), who had been summoned by Mary to save Dante at a perilous point in his life. ‘Love prompted me, that Love which makes me speak’ (l. 72; 65): it is love that made Beatrice hurry to rescue Dante, braving the dangers of entering the Underworld.7 But there is more to Beatrice than her fearlessness. In the course of Dante’s journey through Hell and Purgatory, Virgil praises her omniscience and her power to elucidate the troubled and blinded vision of man (Inferno X ll. 130–32). Beatrice is not only Dante’s guide, but she is also his nutrix, his nurse and his magistra, an authoritative voice who disseminates her heavenly truth to Dante. She, for example, instructs him in astronomy and

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theology on most complex issues, such as the doctrine of Atonement (in Paradiso VII ll. 25–120). Dante eventually meets Beatrice in Purgatorio XXX, where she appears in a cloud of flowers, wearing the colours of the three heavenly virtues: red, green and white. The preceding cantos of Purgatorio contain repeated references to Beatrice, as her coming is announced by Virgil, who refers Dante to her as an authority on religious questions (VI ll. 44–46; XV ll. 76–78; XVIII ll. 46–48). She is able to provide those answers and truths which Virgil cannot reveal. Throughout Paradiso she rectifies views on philosophical and theological questions, criticizing traditional authorities such as Thomas Aquinas (II, VII, XXVII) or reinterpreting Plato (IV ll. 22–24). On their first encounter in the Earthly Paradise, Beatrice addresses Dante, queenly and imperatively, reciting his earthly misdeeds. Dante starts to weep, while Beatrice finishes her accusations. The image he employs to describe his shattered conscience is that of a child being scolded by his mother, used several times during their encounter (Purgatorio XXX ll. 79–80). Their disparate positions – Beatrice is the judge, Dante the accused – radically changes the image of Beatrice as a youthful beauty in the Vita Nuova, or that of her redemptive character alluded to by Virgil in Hell. Beatrice is benevolent, but she can be harsh and relentless. She accuses Dante not only of leaving the right path of reason and believing in false values, but also of relinquishing his love for her after her death (Purgatorio XXX ll. 124–32). Dante struggles with his confession. Directing his eyes towards Beatrice, he swoons, seized by remorse. Her heavenly beauty, which is still hidden behind her veil, exceeds her mortal splendour and aggravates his sense of guilt (Purgatorio XXXI ll. 82–84). Matilda then immerses him in Lethe and leads him to Beatrice. Paradiso XXX emphasizes her superhuman quality, the description of which transcends the boundaries of human language. Human language is an insufficient means for expressing the divinity of Beatrice. Loving Beatrice adequately has become God’s prerogative (ll. 16–21). In Paradiso XXXI Beatrice returns to her seat in the third circle of the Celestial Rose. Dante follows his last guide, Bernard, and Beatrice bestows a last smile on him. A first step toward a theorization of the Victorian Beatrice is to think of her as a modern or literary myth, drawing upon the European literary tradition and one of its canonical authors, Dante.8 The diversity of myths (‘myth’ is used to talk about ancient myths as well as cult phenomena of popular culture) as well as the complex discourse surrounding critical definitions of myths and their epistemological relevance make it a concept notoriously difficult to define and discuss.9 In the twentieth century, a variety of theories on myths developed within several disciplines: theology (e.g. Mircea Eliade), structuralism (Roland Barthes and Northrop Frye), ethnology (Claude Lévi-Strauss), philosophy and cultural studies (Ernst Cassirer, Hans Blumenberg) and psychoanalysis (C. G. Jung). In a functionalistic sense, myths tend to be understood as stories with the help of which human beings can order their otherwise chaotic experience of existence and overcome their fundamental anxiety of being in the world.10

Introduction

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Myths are legitimizing, world-shaping narratives in which the appearance of a saving power such as Beatrice helps human beings overcome their actual condition and approach an ideal form of existence from which they had been detached by some flaw or defect. In this respect, Beatrice resembles other figures of redemptive femininity, such as the Virgin Mary or female saints, and owns traits of the Eternal Feminine, a powerful concept in Romantic thought and writing. One could take such a psychologized reading of Beatrice further and think of her as an archetypal embodiment in a Jungian sense, figuring in the collective unconscious.11 Beatrice, promising redemption, takes over a parental function and becomes a derivative of what Jung called the mother archetype, the qualities associated with whom are ‘maternal solicitude and sympathy; the magic authority of the female; the wisdom and spiritual exaltation that transcend reason; any helpful instinct or impulse; all that is benign, . . .’ (Jung 110). Elisabeth Bronfen speaks of two ‘mothers of culture’ (Over Her Dead Body 66) from whom several feminine types are derived, the Virgin Mary and Eve, and whose legacy is carried on by female literary figures and muses in Western cultures. The Virgin Mary type, of which Beatrice is a representative, functions as a figure of promised wholeness, so that paradoxically her special sphere of influence is Purgatory’s ambivalent, liminal real. From her derives the notion of the disembodied, ethereal, non-essential muse, mediatrix and angel as bridge to the beyond, supplying knowledge of the Unknowable, of Divinity, or serving as assistance in the transport of the living to the dead. (Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body 67) These images of femininity are deeply engrained in Western cultural memory.12 They are open-ended and transformative: the convertibility of stories into images and images into stories is inscribed into myths (Assmann/Assmann 189). Looking at representations of Beatrice in the visual media of the nineteenth century one may easily be reminded of other, similar representations from other periods and cultural contexts. Beatrice is aligned in pictorial traditions which depict the Virgin Mary, female saints, medieval damozels and Renaissance beauties, all of them representing female perfection and virtuousness. Similarly, her literary reinventions sometimes border on or conflate templates of femininity which populate the Western cultural imagination. In George Eliot’s Romola, for example, the protagonist is conceived as a Beatrice, but can as easily be read as a Virgin Mary figure. A different example would be D. G. Rossetti’s depiction of woman as a spiritual counterpart love for whom completes and elevates his soul, a search for spiritual union which is also fundamental to Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Such an interpretation brings her close to the idea that woman is man’s epipsyche so popular in Romantic literature. Beatrice is a death-bound beauty, which sets her apart from the immortal

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mother of Christ. She may be the young Victorian woman beckoning from innumerable Victorian poems and novels, and yet her reclusiveness and morbidity stuns the spectator in D. G. Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix. All the writers and artists included in this study were drawn to the creative potential inherent in the multifarious significance of this figure. Beatrice is saintly and heavenly, but she is not the Virgin Mary. Her supremacy over Dante lacks the sinister, threatening aspects of other, more aggressive female figures from mythological or religious traditions, such as for example Lilith or Medusa, both of whom were also favourites with (late-)Victorian poets and artists. Myths were important in nineteenth-century literature, given its awareness of continuity with British and European literary traditions.13 In fact, the interest in myths and mythography which developed in the Romantic period is just one aspect in a wide cultural context in which the reception of Dante was embedded. Romantic and Victorian medievalism as well as the reception of the Italian Renaissance provide an important backdrop as does, more generally, the lively history of Anglo-Italian contact and exchange in the nineteenth century.14 Beatrice’s mythic status also hints at her subversive potential. In literary works of the nineteenth century, J. B. Bullen has argued, myth frequently operates in a way quite reverse of that defined by rationalist thought. . . . myth operates in such a way that far from enshrining current orthodoxies, it often acts as the vehicle for ideas or sentiments which were critical of prevailing orthodoxies or tended to subvert them. (Introduction 10) This leads me back to the second important discursive field into which Beatrice was placed besides the aesthetic: gender ideology. The Victorian discussion of gender roles and sexuality created a debate ‘which surrounds prescriptive pronouncements, protests, and imaginative literature about women’ (Helsinger, Lauterbach and Veeder xii), usually referred to as the ‘woman question’. The corpus of literature dealing with Victorian women in relation to the period’s legal, political, economical, religious, scientific and educational discourses from the 1850s onwards is vast: the ‘woman question’ was discussed in public forums, in books, pamphlets, pulpits, lecterns and periodicals. It is also important to consider the changing nature of some of the issues at stake. Men found their male self-definition increasingly threatened because of this gradual questioning of gender norms and the blurring of clear dividing lines between the sexes – the aesthete or the ‘New Woman’ are just two new sexual identities which caused irritation. As the chapters on Tennyson and Pater will demonstrate, gender (roles) and (homo)sexuality were the subjects of controversies, particularly from the 1870s onwards. While a discussion of the ‘woman question’ can be pinned down to certain historical events and political changes, it also requires a critical revaluation of the changing perceptions of women as ‘the other’ and the impact of literature and the visual arts on these shaping

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processes. Woman as the unfathomable other was cast into roles or myths by writers and artists, which were either supposed to make her a more manageable presence by either idealizing or demonizing her. Examples are the ‘Angel in the House’, that is, the loving, self-sacrificing wife and mother who provides continuity and moral strength for her family, the fallen woman, the temptress or the ‘Angel out of the House’, the philanthropic, charitable woman.15 The figure of Beatrice was used by writers whose gender concepts were conservative, as well as by those who either criticized the image of femininity which she traditionally represented or who saw in her an ideal of a, to say the least, flexible sexuality. The writers and artists included in this study appropriated her figure to envision ideals which were private, public and sometimes, peculiarly so, both.

Beyond Intertextuality: Theorizing the Concept of the Afterlife The remaining part of this chapter pursues a twofold ambition. It aims to theorize not only the reception, but also what I prefer to call the ‘afterlife’ of Beatrice. It establishes a theoretical model which accounts for the ambiguity underlying the Victorian approach to Dante and the figure of Beatrice in particular. This approach wavered between appreciation of Dante’s universality or timelessness and acute sensitivity to his historical and biographical coordinates. At the same time, by looking at Beatrice as a transmedial mythical figure who outgrows her literary origins and is appropriated by artists and writers to different ends, this chapter provides a perspective from which other, similar cases could be viewed. Beatrice was one among many figures who developed such an afterlife in the Victorian period, rich as it was in feminine and masculine myths, ancient or modern. Victorian culture abounds with representations of Antigones, Medusas, Dionysuses, Ophelias, Thannhäusers and Lauras. Thus, my study is also driven by the desire to investigate the working principles of the literary or cultural afterlife in general, in the hope of providing a model which is well applicable to other similar phenomena. As a first step, I therefore bring together the theories of intertextuality and intermediality, which lie at the heart of my textual analyses. However, in order to account for the phenomenon of the afterlife, I widen up the frame these theories provide by drawing upon Stephen Greenblatt and Aby Warburg’s writings which help understand the energies which allow these figures to persist. When old texts reappear in new texts, various forms of contact inevitably evolve. Intertextuality traditionally accounts for phenomena such as ‘interfigurality’ or ‘figures on loan’, as which Beatrice may well count given that she reappears in works and contexts created by writers other than Dante.16 Intertextuality gives a name to various theoretical concepts emerging from the late 1960s onwards and is concerned with what could broadly be understood as

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contact between texts. Divergent as critical perspectives and approaches are, for example, in their understanding of what a text is or what exactly the ground is covered by intertextuality, there seems to be minimal consensus on the assumption that no text exists in isolation and that every writer of a text is familiar with other texts.17 The concept of intertextuality which I adopt in this study focuses on the function of Dante’s texts in the Victorian ‘post-texts’ questions, their potential to emphasize, explore and add new dimensions of significance. Renate Lachmann referred to these dimensions as ‘a new textual quality that results from the relationship between the manifest text and a second text to which it refers, this relationship being guaranteed by specific signals of reference’ (31). Intertextuality, as it is understood and used in this book, does not imply repetition or even plagiarism, an erudite game or an ornamental device but is an act of literary creation driven by the friction arising when two (or more) texts are confronted with each other. Processes of intertextual reception are thus seen as productive ones, leading to the construction of a new textual meaning which resides in an autonomous text working according to its own laws. Intertextuality not only covers the wide range of contact between texts contained in this book, for example, allusions, quotations, epigraphs and direct references to Dante but also examples of structural homology (e.g. Tennyson’s In Memoriam) or similarity in genre (D. G. Rossetti’s ‘The House of Life’ and Christina Rossetti’s ‘Monna Innominata’). Yet it does not yield a sufficiently broad perspective to account for Beatrice’s varied and fluctuating presence in Victorian literature. While it explains the many ways in which Dante found entry into the Victorian literary world as well as the broader structural, generic or conceptual parallels which emerge in this study, I contend that it cannot elucidate the phenomenon of a literary afterlife entirely. One reason for this insufficiency is the inability of most intertextual theories to account for relations between texts and non-literary forms of symbolic expression, for example, painting, photography or film. Beatrice’s afterlife requires awareness of the broader cultural implications reflected in the treatment of her figure, the fact that she wandered between various media and that she was drawn into partly contradictory debates on gender, sexuality, epistemology and aesthetics. The next logical step thus is to widen the theoretical framework by considering the relevance of contact between literature and the visual media. Like ancient myths, literary myths depend on intermedial transfer. One only has to look at the Commedia, which has repeatedly been adopted and recreated by painters, sculptors and film directors. Myths easily assume different medial forms; they erode the lines between media. The difficulty of categorizing and analysing these shapeshifters with the help of purely literary theories lies in their extraliterary constituents.18 Definable as ‘any transgression of boundaries between media and thus concerned with “heteromedial” relations between different semiotic complexes or

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between different parts of a semiotic complex’, intermediality is as broad and vague an umbrella term as intertextuality and gives a name to a variety of phenomena interwoven with the subject of this book (Wolf, ‘Intermediality’ 252).19 The rise of the Victorian Dante relied on intermedial contact, examples of which are the various illustrated editions of his texts, the many autonomous paintings and drawings of scenes taken from or inspired by the works of Dante, ekphrases (e.g. D. G. Rossetti’s paraphrases of his paintings and drawings), literary means of ‘painting’ a scene or figure (e.g. in Romola), literary references to paintings, literary quotations or ‘clues’ included in works of art.20 Interactions between texts and between texts and images are important aspects of Beatrice’s representational history, which my concept of the afterlife fully acknowledges. Yet her afterlife cannot be fully explained by exclusively drawing upon the categories provided by intertextuality and intermediality. Mythic figures such as Beatrice float and become appropriable, they circulate.21 In order to account for this particular feature of myths, the concept of transmediality has been employed, which is set apart from intermediality because of its inclusion of vagrant phenomena (Wolf, ‘Intermediality’ 253). Myths are vagrant since they are not bound to a particular source text or medium. They possess a relative autonomy: Beatrice did not only undergo reinterpretations and transformations, she did so independently of Dante’s texts in that she came to embody an idea which thrived on its own energy. The following chapters reveal Beatrices who represent the Eternal Feminine or a Virgin Mary archetype on the one hand and Beatrices who, as a doting Victorian wife, a nameless and voiceless woman or a young gentleman, are obvious products of their time. The existence of these two poles of interpretation are a case in point for the open-endedness of mythic rewriting, as Hans Blumenberg argued, that is, for the openness of mythic material per se towards continual recreation or renewal in the face of their preceding variants.22 As Gabriele Rippl has argued, the reading of myths generates a fluctuating dynamic as yet insufficiently explored: ‘[r]eading texts as transformations of older texts requires a double, comparative lens, one that moves inferentially between the newer and the older text, with the latter in the role of a foil. . . . the theory of intertextuality fails to explain why specifically mythological materials have remained so influential in Western culture.’ (‘Culture and Transgression’ 169) I suggest a combination of two theoretical approaches which both answer one question differently: why do certain images, figures or episodes haunt our cultural imagination? One answer is Aby Warburg’s (1866–1929) concept of the ‘pathos formula’; the other, Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of ‘energia’. Warburg’s pathos formulae are symbolic forms bound to contexts of pictorial traditions; Greenblatt’s energies are responsible for the power of certain works of art to stir and resound in the cultural imagination. This is not to say that their

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overall outlooks and ambitions are similar: Warburg’s work, especially his pictorial atlas, the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, and Greenblatt’s New Historicism in which the idea of circulating social energies plays an important role, pursued different aims. Warburg’s project is concerned with the transhistorical survival of images, respectively the emotional power inherent in certain gestures which persists regardless of historical circumstance; Greenblatt’s historicist approach looks at the specific historical configurations in which social energies circulate. Yet out of this contrast, which mirrors the ambiguity engrained in the Victorian Dante, emerges what unites them most strongly, namely, their solidarity with the past seen as something that is relevant for the present. More importantly for the purpose of this argument, they are interested in the pathos of a work of art, that is, the emotional energies with which it is invested. The idea of ‘energia’ is an interesting link between Warburg and Greenblatt – and it helps to understand the concept of an afterlife such as Beatrice’s. Greenblatt nowhere defines what ‘energia’ means precisely.23 The ‘global circulation’ of social energies is mentioned as a requirement for all literary creativity (Greenblatt, ‘What is the history’ 476). It is elaborated on more extensively in Shakespearean Negotiations, whose first chapter discusses the circulation of social energies in detail (1–20). Here Greenblatt sketches a model of artistic creativity exemplified by Renaissance theatre and based on the assumption that the cultural achievement of a period depends on processes of representational exchange. These representational exchanges open up ‘circuitous channels through which social energy could be circulated’ (9) and, as they are performed on stage, can be thought of as various acts of borrowing and acquisition, which are continually renegotiated. The examples Greenblatt gives of these interactions which contribute towards the circulation of social energy are various forms of symbolic acquisitions as well as concrete financial purchases. Another form is that of appropriation, by which Greenblatt understands a change in ‘ownership’ which does not involve any financial transaction (9). Instead, things that can be appropriated belong to the public domain: they are ‘indifferent’, ‘there for the taking’. Language is the most obvious example according to Greenblatt since nobody can lay claim to it. Myths, I argue, can be thought of as another: they, too, circulate freely within a society and can be appropriated by writers and artists independently. In short, whatever the foundational elements of a cultural afterlife may be – textual traces, intertextual echoes, images or gestures – these are goods which transcend the frames set by a particular work of art or medium. What was referred to as the ‘transmedial’ quality of myths reflects this essential availability of ideas, forms, figures, words and images, which do not belong to a particular literary reference frame any longer. Detachment and reinvention is the only way for them to unleash their affective potential. Beatrice was appropriated and transformed in strikingly different ways. While she remained associated with Dante’s text, her representations in literature and the visual media moved beyond her literary origins. I argue

Introduction

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that Beatrice’s afterlife was energized by her strong affective radiance, a vital energy which pushed her further and further away from Dante’s text into becoming a free-standing good of circulation. That each culture has its own historically specific circulating ideas or objects is one aspect of Greenblatt’s cultural poetics. In fact, these processes of circulation and appropriation lie at the heart of literature as such: literary history, according to Greenblatt (‘What is the history’ 479), is essentially haunted by ‘ghostly presences’ of different kinds. It is infused by ‘causal speculations, cunning homologies, and intertextual organization’ (479). For Greenblatt, textual echoes and borrowings are a condition of literature and not only a particular aesthetic mode of writing. Literary history thus not only charts the development of bodies of texts, it conjures up its own phantoms. Cultural production requires these negotiations and exchanges which engage in constant movements of things from one ‘culturally demarcated zone to another’ (Shakespearean Negotiations 7). By tracing the movement of intertextual traces from one text to another, from one medium to another, it is possible to understand how ‘collective beliefs and experiences’ (5) were being made accessible since they were wrapped up in the aesthetic shapes valued at a particular time. My concept of the afterlife presupposes the phantasmal presence of textual voices long dead, which gain a compelling posthumous force and gradually evolve across media and genre norms. Greenblatt repeatedly mentions the effects particularly powerful works have and he approaches a definition of ‘social energies’ by focusing on their potential to affect people (Shakespearean Negotiations 6). This energy can evoke a whole range of emotions ranging from fear and anxiety to wonder and delight. It can not only move a small circle of people but it can also affect a wide audience. Importantly, it is adaptable and endows the literary work with the power to survive despite cultural and historical change. The afterlife of a figure such as Beatrice is only possible because these creatures possess an affective potential which allows them to persist and maybe even thrive despite the radical reconfigurations of the new historical context in which they reappear. According to Greenblatt, social energy is inherent in certain works, yet it requires particular conditions, that is, a specifically receptive historical and cultural milieu in which it can circulate. As this study suggests, the Victorian period provided a fruitful basis from which particular aspects of Dante’s texts were able to live their own afterlife. The Vita Nuova and Beatrice connected particularly well with the cultural climate of the period and thus released the powerful appeal of her figure. Greenblatt sees literary history as a reservoir of restless energy that catapults traces from the past back into life. For Aby Warburg, the Western cultural imagination is equally haunted by revenants coming back from the past.24 Like Greenblatt, he is interested in the paradoxically vital energy of dead things. Warburg’s approach to cultural history as a ghostly phenomenon derives from his understanding of art as a distancing means. Artistic representations detach

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human beings from an immediate experience of existence in a world perceived as threatening, allowing them to build a safe zone of contemplation.25 This second degree experience of reality made possible by artistic representations enables human beings to reflect and to understand existence, which is being rationalized and thus becomes manageable. However, this distancing procedure between the self and the world leaves human beings torn between a sense of alienation from reality and nostalgia for an emotional and devotional commitment to it. Given this basically ambiguous concept of art, the enduring power of artworks to return from the past in the present becomes explainable: while offering a formalized, distanced view of existence, they also contain an appealing affective excess which cannot be dealt with rationally. Warburg’s pathos formulae are codified, formulaic gestures, originating from ancient pictorial forms, which are resemanticized once they reappear. What exactly survives, according to Georges Didi-Huberman, are certain motifs affecting the human psyche: representations of ‘pathos’, the dynamics of desire, allegorical tales of morality or depictions of grief (Didi-Huberman, L’image 280). Pathos formulae played an important role for Aby Warburg’s projected Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, an exhibition project which he began in 1924 when he was living and working in Hamburg. This project consisted of wooden screens, which Warburg covered with black cloth, and on which he pinned photographs, woodcuts, engravings, posters and other pictorial material. Joined in groups, this material illustrated particular themes, drawing upon Western visual memory. Each plate was then photographed. These plates, which did not survive the library’s relocation to London in 1933, were highly provisional and presumably not meant for publication (see Warnke vii). Warburg worked with a stock of 2,000 images over the years (Warnke viii). These images lived once, were forgotten and then came back, cocooned and preserved over centuries by cultural memory. Warburg’s concept of the pathos formula was developed as part of an art historical project hoping to elucidate correspondences between images which do not reveal themselves immediately and whose interpretation requires intuition rather than iconographical knowledge. I argue that the literary part of a cultural afterlife is fed by similar impulses. Warburg’s pathos formulae throw an interesting light on the partly ‘amorphous’ representations of Beatrice, which endow her with an elusive broader significance and flexibility. His emphasis on the body gesture as particularly meaningful transmitters of pathos provides an interesting starting point with which ultra-Beatrices such as the one depicted by Julia Margaret Cameron, discussed in Chapter 2, George Eliot’s Romola or Pater’s diaphanous creatures can be approached. These are primarily bodily gestures belonging to a repertoire of pictorial forms of expression and depiction. Yet these gestures also appear in literary texts, as the topoi of medieval and Renaissance sonneteers, in the description of female beauty, as part of processes of poetic idealisation. Glimpses of Beatrice can be found in many literary

Introduction

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texts and works of art, but not always is there a name or title identifying her. A Beatrice might also appear where least expected, as in Tennyson’s elegy for a male friend. She might be the beautiful young Romola who walks in the streets of Dante’s city, like Warburg’s Florentine nymph, in Renaissance garments. These apparitions may be persistent and consistently elaborated as in Tennyson’s case, but they can also be nothing more than fugitive shadows, evoking associations and allowing conjectures, but subsiding among or joining in with other echoes. Walter Pater’s description of the Mona Lisa in his ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ essay is such a fascinating orchestration of multiple voices, echoes and faces emerging from one single canvas. Unsurprisingly, it is the chapter on Pater and its discussion of his understanding of the Renaissance as a moment of cultural eruption which will recall Warburg most vividly. As a Pagan beauty paradoxically infiltrating Christian traditions, this nymph is moving majestically and energetically, her hair and her garments are moving along with her body, the drapery of her clothes being as much in agitation as her whole being. For Warburg, this nymph was, like the Mona Lisa was for Pater, a symbol of modern life or modern dynamism (Raulff 19) and kept hold of his imagination for many years.26 What the nymph was for Warburg, Beatrice was for the nineteenth century: ‘a minor divinity without “institutional” power but agleam with a veritable potency to fascinate, to unsettle the soul and whatever may be known about it’ (Didi-Huberman, Ninfa 7; my translation).27 The nymph stands for a variety of partly contradictory emotional states, for ecstatic, bacchic passion, fury and destruction as well as dreamy, passive subliminity – Walter Pater’s diaphanous creatures discussed in Chapter 7, torn between passivity and activity, unite these contrasts.28 Warburg’s nymph thus finds sometimes unexpected personifications, in ancient mythology and Renaissance art, but also in the figure of the fin-de-siècle femme fatale. Warburg’s 1905 essay ‘On Imprese Amorose in the Earliest Florentine Engravings’ (Warburg, Renewal 169–83) discusses a representation of Lucretia by Baldini from the mid-fifteenth century and thereby enlists the fellowship of the Florentine nymph: the winged goddesses of victory, dancing maenads, passionate Judiths and dancing Salomes produced by the artists of the Italian Renaissance. They may represent contrary, even antagonizing emotions, but they can all be subsumed under the ‘collective singular’ (Raulff 26) of the nymph, or, as this study proposes, an ideal type. Warburg saw his nymph reappear randomly and unexpectedly, like a trick played by memory; similarly the Beatrices of this study reveal themselves sometimes hesitantly, at second sight only, and sometimes defiantly. This appears to me to be the great benefit of Warburg’s approach for the analysis of a cultural afterlife, opening up interesting insights for the reader of literary texts: it invites inclusiveness by association and opens up a perspective to the reader from which he or she not only traces the travels of quoted lines or words. As Warburg’s work with pictures shows, his quest for symbolic forms did not subject these images to one unified vision. Quite on the contrary, his project

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traversed ideological, generic and iconographic borders so that one and the same morphology, as Didi-Huberman calls it, may be used by artists in different, possibly antithetical contexts (Ninfa 36). Warburg’s pathos formulae evoke associations and contain semantic values that are shifting – and so are their forms: their pictorial shapes are being morphed and transformed. Warburg’s energetic symbols help contextualize and explain the Victorian Beatrice in ways in which intertextuality would be unable to elucidate the phenomenon by itself. Both as the little girl wearing a crimson dress with a girdle and as the young woman, all dressed in white, who passes Dante in the streets of Florence: like Warburg’s nymph, Beatrice, as the following chapters show, took hold of the imagination of writers, artists and readers. *** The following chapters start from common ground: Beatrice’s Victorian afterlife revolves around her status as an ideal – of virtuosity and beauty, but also of aesthetic merit. Yet the authors approach this ideal differently to create their own ideals, to criticize or subvert existing ones, or to critically examine the processes which contribute towards idealisation. Chapter 2, entitled ‘Seeing Beatrice. The Visualization of Dante’s Beatrice in Victorian Culture’, looks at how Beatrice acquired visibility in Victorian literature and painting. By becoming more Victorian, Beatrice became more real and accessible. That Beatrice was ‘seen’ in the visual arts is one aspect implied in the title: the chapter will look at several representations of Beatrice in the visual arts by artists such as Henry Holiday, William Dyce and Marie Spartali Stillman. Yet ‘seeing Beatrice’ also means that Beatrice was endowed with a face in literary texts. While this means that her function was often decimated to that of being a virtuous Victorian wife, it also led to the creation of very principled or even uncomfortable Beatrice figures. ‘Strong’ thus means virtuous and morally irreproachable, which corresponds to the descriptions the Commedia and the Vita Nuova give of her, when in the former Virgil greets her as a ‘Lady of virtue’ (Inferno II ll. 76–78; 65). Likewise, her virtue or power is mentioned in the Vita Nuova, where her virtue is being praised (e.g. in section XIX; see also Havely, Dante 179). Given the morbid tinge with which Beatrice was endowed by D. G. Rossetti, it is important to bear this essential strength of hers in mind. As Chapter 2’s discussion of the Pre-Raphaelite poet’s approach to Beatrice and a photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron will show, the Victorian Beatrice harboured a compelling gloomy potential. Chapter 3 explores the interesting, multifaceted phenomenon of what could be labelled ‘Dante, a family enterprise’. The reception of Dante in the Rossetti family is a microcosmic instance of reception history which this chapter seeks to unravel. It contains the Victorian discourse on Beatrice in a nutshell and traces the way in which Beatrice became a demarcation figure that divided the father,

Introduction

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Gabriele Rossetti, from his children. The dividing axis is the question whether Beatrice was a real, historical woman or an allegorical invention of Dante’s. An interesting intrafamilial dynamic results from this debate, which was echoed in other guerres de plume, most importantly that between Arthur Henry Hallam and G. Rossetti. Chapter 4 looks at the work of C. Rossetti and D. G. Rossetti in more detail. As the title of the chapter suggests, Beatrice engendered ‘ideal visions’ in these two writers, whose reception of Dante was intense and pervasive. For both poets, Beatrice embodied an important, ideal aspect of their respective creative projects: in C. Rossetti’s sonnet cycle ‘Monna Innominata’, Dante’s Commedia and Vita Nuova are important subtexts with which she engages through complex acts of intertextuality. She evokes several (inter)textual voices, which allows her to manifest her criticism of mid and late-Victorian gender ideology, while reaching a transcendent level of reflection. In D. G. Rossetti’s case, Beatrice had a formative impact on his poetic and artistic vision. The figure of Beatrice is not only the central object of his intermedial activities as a translator, illustrator and interpreter of Dante, but she also gave momentum to his poetological beliefs. Chapter 5 on George Eliot’s Romola will pursue some of the concerns of the preceding chapter, but will shift its focus to the genre of the novel. Eliot’s treatment of Beatrice is, not unlike C. Rossetti’s, perceptive to the flaws in her mythic status and similarly critical of it. While C. Rossetti brings to the fore the faulty parameters responsible for the sustainability of such feminine myths and calls for a critical revision of established ideals by suggesting that one half of a poetic argument has remained hidden from the public eye, George Eliot unfolds her criticism subtly by revealing the ever changing and highly subjective nature of idealization. Finally, the two chapters on Alfred Lord Tennyson and Walter Pater introduce a male Beatrice, thereby constructing new ideals rather than struggling to free Beatrice from her idealistic burdens. Modelled on male individuals, both Tennyson’s elegy In Memoriam and Pater’s essay ‘Diaphaneitè’ rely on Dante’s model of redemptive femininity to hone their respective ideals of masculinity and aesthetic creation. Both texts can be seen as portraits of male individuals as well as of an idealized type of character. The Conclusion will then summarize my results and provide an inventory of questions which remain to be answered.

Chapter 2

Seeing Beatrice: The Visualization of Beatrice in Victorian Culture

The Victorians saw many things in Beatrice: she was a beautiful, but death-bound, young girl involved in a tragic love story with Dante for some, for others a prime example of female virtuousness, for others a woman deprived of her own voice. Artists and writers alike shared a desire to endow Beatrice with a face in both a literal and metaphorical sense. While painters created a physical face for Beatrice, John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold introduced Beatrice to debates on gender and society. Translator Theodore Martin and writer Walter Savage Landor turned Beatrice into a Victorian middle-class wife, making Dante’s muse accessible and tangible. As Steve Ellis in his chapter on D. G. Rossetti and the Victorian ‘Vita Nuov-isation’ of Dante reception has shown, the secularizing and romanticizing tendencies at work in the course of the nineteenth century led to the creation of a variety of poems, plays and paintings emphasizing the mundane, domestic aspect of Dante’s relationship with Beatrice (102–34).1 She was far from dead for the Victorians: they revivified her and supplied her with a beautiful body and a personality which exuded life. While this introductory chapter is centred on what could be loosely described as Beatrice’s visualization in Victorian culture, there are two focuses. The first one, as mentioned, sheds light on Beatrice as an ideal of female virtue and behaviour. In spite of being the product of Victorian gender ideology, this Beatrice still represents a certain kind of female strength and power. Most obviously, she is alive and blooming. The other Beatrice this chapter introduces is the morbid Beatrice, whose early death is the central tragic event in Dante’s Vita Nuova. The connection between femininity, or more generally speaking, gender and death has been explored by critics such as Karl Guthke, Elisabeth Bronfen and Janet Todd as a phenomenon affecting literary, art, historical and cultural studies. While the gender ascribed to death is variable and determined by cultural, historical and linguistic factors, there was a tendency in the Romantic period not only to visualize death as a conciliatory presence, but also to eroticize death, depicting love as male and as, for example, the bridegroom of a beautiful young girl. Towards the second half of the century, this fascination with love and death becomes more intense but is now reflected in

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the association of the woman with death (Guthke 186–93). In the context of nineteenth century, that is, Romantic and Victorian, European and American literature and art, the topos of the beautiful dead woman, or the dead muse, was well established and the treatment of Beatrice, especially in D. G. Rossetti’s cult of her figure, was not unaffected by this Romantic legacy. In contrast to the virtuous, this-worldly Beatrice stands a Beatrice who is drawn to the other side, who does not dwell with the living. For the Victorians, Beatrice embodied an ideal – in life and in death.

Creating a Domestic Goddess: The Embourgeoisement of Beatrice The bourgeois Beatrice reflects aesthetic and moral preferences of the Victorian middle-class readership and audience. Within this embourgeoisement of Dante’s muse, text and image enter into a relationship of mutual illumination and cooperation; they are connected to each other through processes and effects of mirroring, reinforcing or widening what is said by the other. My first visual example is a painting entitled The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice (1883, Figure 2.1) by Henry Holiday, which hangs in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.2 In 1896 The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice was used for a tableau vivant at St. George’s Hall in Liverpool. It was the result of the painter’s meticulous research in Florence where he travelled in 1881. Holiday was keen to reproduce the urban environment in which Dante lived as authentically as possible. He also produced a portrait of Dante in 1875 and a painting inspired by the first meeting of Dante and Beatrice as children, which was rejected by the Royal Academy in 1860 and shown a year later (Parris 289). This painting depicts a Florentine street scene (set at the Ponte Santa Trinita looking towards the Ponte Vecchio) where Dante is meeting Beatrice as described in the Vita Nuova. Beatrice is the woman in white who is accompanied by Monna Vanna (or Giovanna), Guido Cavalcanti’s mistress and a maidservant. Beatrice denies Dante her greeting after she has heard gossip of his (pretended) affection for other women. Dante, in the left half of the painting, looks shy and confused; Beatrice has turned her look away from him while Giovanna is gauging his reaction to Beatrice’s denial of her greeting. The resemblance of Holiday’s Dante to the youthful Dante depicted in a fresco in the Bargello in Florence, attributed to Giotto and discovered by the Anglo-Florentine Seymour Kirkup in 1840, is remarkable. As Alison Milbank has argued, the discovery of this fresco fundamentally changed the Victorian view of Dante (4). Not only did they pride themselves on the discovery by an Englishman of such an important piece of art but the portrait’s depiction of a young, handsome Dante also displaced the hitherto prevalent, Romantic notion of a grim, exiled poet, owed to his death mask. It led to a new interest in the Vita Nuova and the creation of

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Figure 2.1 Henry Holiday (1839–1927). The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice. 1883. Oil on canvas. 142.2 × 203.2 cm. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. © National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery

a multitude of works centred on the biographical aspects of his writing. ‘This little book’, it says in Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s sonnet ‘On the Fly-Leaf of Dante’s “Vita Nuova”’ (1894), ‘is not by that stern man, / But by his younger self, such as he seems / In Giotto’s fresco, . . .’ (ll. 9–11), and this younger self of Dante is thinking of his Beatrice, ‘who, in dreams / Oft led him into Heaven for an hour.’ (ll. 13–14; Jackson 181). Holiday’s painting exemplifies the interest which the Victorians took great interest in Italy, its literature, art and music. While Italy became a favourite travel ground for English and American artists, rich expatriates and intellectual exiles, Italians became an increasingly perceptible presence in the streets of London and in the capital’s cultural life. Italian revolutionaries, such as Mazzini and Garibaldi, were welcome and honoured exiles, representatives of a country which was appreciated for ‘its past historical and imperial greatness combined with its beauty, charm, and seductive contradictions’ and the Rossetti family was, as will be shown, a famous example of the London-based ‘Italianità’ (O’Connor 4).3 As the colours of the garments of the three passing ladies – red, blue, white – suggest, they seem to ‘pass like an animated Union flag’ (Milbank 3), leaving Dante, dressed in the colours of the Italian flag, in the position of the admirer of British virtue represented by Beatrice dressed in white.

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Another reason why this painting is an interesting piece of evidence for the Victorian reception of Dante is that it emphasizes the human aspect of Dante’s texts. The new image of Dante, which developed once the Bargello portrait was laid bare, is a major reason for the general popularity which Dante experienced in Europe between the 1820s and 1860s. It led to the publication of large numbers of new editions of the Commedia and the Vita Nuova in Italy and translations in other European countries, turning him into a best-selling author by the middle of the century (Caesar 66). Holiday’s painting and his choice of subject allows for the unfolding of a romantic mini-drama with which the contemporary reader could easily identify and empathize. While Beatrice deliberately cuts Dante, her friend Giovanna is more coquettish and curious to see his reaction to this ‘blow’. As this painting illustrates, Dante and his conflicts were perceived as modern, as contemporary – he appears to be human, driven by similar fears and needs as the Victorian reader. The emergence of the Beatrice–Dante relationship as the central element of Dante’s work was prophesied by Percy Bysshe Shelley in his ‘Defence of Poetry’ (1821). Shelley had stated that the Vita Nuova had an appeal to the modern reader, because it is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment and language: it is the idealized history of that period, and these intervals of his life which were dedicated to love. His apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise and the gradations of his own love and her loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to the throne of the supreme cause, is the most glorious imagination of modern poetry. (690) Shelley’s prediction and his perceptive analysis of the popular appeal of Dante’s texts and his idealization or even apotheosis of the beloved or the woman are reflected in a text by John Ruskin. John Ruskin’s (1819–1900) lecture ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, delivered in December 1864 at Rusholme Town Hall, Manchester, was published in Sesame & Lilies (48–79) in 1865. ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ is primarily about the importance of women’s education and employment. In 1969 Kate Millett brought forward harsh criticism against Ruskin’s texts, targeting his fundamental distinction between male and female attributes and areas of competence. Thus, while man ‘is evidently the doer, the creator, the discoverer’, woman is the ruler of her home and ‘home is yet wherever she is’ (Ruskin, Sesame 59–60). According to Millett, Ruskin, by defining men and women as entirely different by nature, helped to promote the Victorian doctrine of separate spheres and used ‘the posture of the courtly love encountered in Dante and the Troubadours, sworn to serve and obey a mistress’ for this purpose (101). By depicting a woman’s task as the exercise of some ‘vague and remote good influence on everyone’ and the dispensation of ‘a bit of charity from time to time’, Ruskin indulged in ‘that compulsive masculine fantasy one might call the official Victorian attitude’, namely, the creation and maintenance of a dualist concept

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of femininity, propagating openly the ‘more normative beliefs of the Victorian middle class’ while indirectly creating the ‘period avatar’ of feminine evil (Millett 89).4 Primarily concerned with the position of the British woman in her domestic environment, Ruskin draws from a range of foreign historical, literary and mythological sources and mentions the likes of Andromache, Cassandra, Antigone and Beatrice (Sesame 54–55). In ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ Ruskin emphasizes the importance of education for the development of young British girls. Even though he strongly supports women’s education, he still links a girl’s education to her future as a man’s wife. Female ignorance, the inability of a woman to ‘think for herself’, is ‘wholly undesirable’ (56). Instead, it is an ‘eternal truth – that the soul’s armour is never well set to the heart unless a woman’s hand has braced it’ (57). A woman’s function is to guide, albeit not to determine (58); her guiding function needs to be reconciled with ‘true wifely subjection’ (58). It is Beatrice’s function as moral teacher and protectrice, which makes her an immediate model for the Victorian woman: You know well the plan of Dante’s great poem – that it is a love-poem to his dead lady, a song of praise for her watch over his soul. Stooping only to pity, never to love, she saves him from destruction – saves him from hell. He is going eternally astray in despair; she comes down from heaven to his help, and throughout the ascents of Paradise is his teacher, interpreting for him the most difficult truths, divine and human; and leading him, with rebuke upon rebuke, from star to star. (54) Ruskin depicts Beatrice principally as a guide, a teacher, an interpreter and a saviour. The notion that a wife’s quasi-redemptive power and her healing influence is necessary for a man who is in need of moral orientation and rectification is one of the reasons why Beatrice was seen as utterly reconcilable with Victorian ideals of femininity. Remarkably enough, Ruskin considers the Commedia as a love poem and thereby interprets it in terms which are traditionally employed to refer to the Vita Nuova. While, broadly speaking, the Commedia is written in praise of divine love, Ruskin considers it as a mere document of mundane love between man and woman and as a source from which the Victorian woman can receive guidance for her own behaviour. ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ draws Beatrice into the woman question by perpetuating the old literary topos of female idealization and by translating it into a document of Victorian pedagogy. Ruskin’s text de-universalizes Beatrice’s function. For Dante she is a guide, teacher and nurturing presence in whom he finds ultimate reassurance. Yet Dante leaves no doubt that the Beatrice he encounters in Purgatory and who keeps him company until the final stanzas of Paradiso is more than his private

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source of consolation. The Beatrice of the Commedia has outgrown any claim to privacy, which the Vita Nuova possibly implied. In the nineteenth century Beatrice became available for idiosyncratic, private appropriations. As the texts discussed in this chapter show, she was reinvented as a Victorian wife, enmeshed in domestic conflicts or environments depriving her of her redemptive function in a broader spiritual or religious scheme. A work like Dinah M. Mulock’s bipartite poem ‘Beatrice to Dante’ and ‘Dante to Beatrice’ (1859), envisioning their first encounter in the hereafter, reads like a dialogue between two Victorian spouses. Inspired, as the author mentions, by a statue of Beatrice (possibly the one by John Hancock which was exhibited at the Great Exhibition in 1851 and is now in the V&A Museum), these two sonnets present a mutual vow of devotion between the two lovers. The first poem, in which Beatrice addresses Dante, opens with a quotation from Purgatorio XXX in Italian (‘Guardami ben. Ben son, ben son’) but then has Beatrice given a rather mundane confirmation of her love for Dante, emphasizing that much of her heavenly bliss depends on the persistence of their (earthly) love relationship even after her death: ‘Look on me, Beatrice, who stands / Before thee; by the Triune Light divine / Undazzled, still beholds thy human face / And is more happy in this happy place / That thou alone art hers and she is thine’ (lines 10–14). Dante’s persona in the second poem confirms his complete allegiance to Beatrice, for whose ‘sole praise’ he ‘lived, loved, suffer’d, sung’ (14), yet his hyperbolic expression of grief caused by her death implies that the male poet’s poetic fame depended upon the tragic experience of the loss of his muse: ‘O Beatrice, cypresses enlace / My laurels: none have grown save tear-be-dew’d – / Salt tears that sank into the earth unview’d, / And sprang up green to form a crown of bays’ (9–11). An example of a Beatrice starring as a heroine of bourgeois romance is the dialogue between her and Dante in Walter Savage Landor’s (1775–1864) Imaginary Conversations (1824–1829), in which the two lovers look back onto years of secret romance now coming to an end that Beatrice is about to get married. The piece contains many rapid dialogues such as this one: Dante. Beatrice. Dante. Beatrice.

Love me. I always did Love me? Oh, bliss of heaven! No, no, no! Forbear! Men’s kisses are always mischievous and hurtful; everybody says it. If you truly loved me, you would never think of doing so. (356)

The universe which Dante and Beatrice inhabit is built upon the emotional potential for drama which is implied in the Vita Nuova: forbidden love, jealousy and forgiveness, matrimony (another ‘imaginary conversation’ is one between

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Dante and his wife Gemma Donati), the weight of social conventions. Landor’s Beatrice knows her place: [c]asting our eyes on the ground, we [maidens] walk along the straight and narrow road prescribed for us; and, doing thus, we avoid in great measure the thorns and entanglements of life. We know we are performing our duty; . . . (359) A further domestic Beatrice belongs to Theodore Martin’s (1816–1909) translation of the Vita Nuova from 1862, published together with a lengthy introduction and a dedicatory sonnet to his wife, his own Beatrice. Martin’s introduction places emphasis on domestic romance by asserting that the Vita Nuova was ‘a record of real life, to which there is nothing superior in romance’ (vii), ‘[if] ever true passion spoke, it speaks here’ (x) and elaborates on Beatrice as ‘a perfect woman, whose influence refined and ennobled the poet’s heart, filling it with those yearnings after that ideal of beauty and goodness, which it is the peculiar office of woman to inspire’ (viii). While his understanding of Beatrice as embodying perfect femininity resembles Ruskin’s, his insistence on her historical reality anticipates a discussion which will reappear in the following chapters: The Beatrice of the Paradiso is the Beatrice whom men turned round and crowded to gaze at, as she glided past them on the streets of Florence, – the Beatrice who for that mortal has put on immortality, and is now transfigured into a semblance glorified indeed, yet scarcely more pure and saintly than that which she wore on earth. (Martin x) What Martin implies is not only that Beatrice was a stunner, whose looks, more than her miraculous nature, attracted male attention, but more significantly that her form of existence in Paradise does not differ very much from that depicted in the Vita Nuova. In other words, Martin downplays Beatrice’s position in the heavenly hierarchy and subordinates or, at least, compares her celestial status to that of the Florentine beauty she was. Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) reviewed Theodore Martin’s translation of the Vita Nuova and opted for a middle way of interpreting Beatrice, arguing neither for nor against the interpretation of her as a real or allegorical figure. This review was published under the heading ‘Dante and Beatrice’ in Fraser’s Magazine in May 1863 (Caesar 606–14). Arnold rejects attempts to allegorize Beatrice made by those ‘who mistake the supersensual element in Dante’s work, who reduce to nothing the sensible and human element’ (607). Any such attempt, he argues, does not take into account the real life conditions under which a work like the Commedia was written. Yet Arnold also condemns critics who ignore that ‘the vital impulse of Dante’s soul is towards reverie and spiritual

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vision’ (608) and who favour instead a version of Dante’s relationship with Beatrice as ‘something involving modern relations in social life between the sexes’ (610), critics ‘who see, in such a passion as that of Dante for Beatrice, an affection belonging to the sphere of the actual domestic life, fitted to sustain the wear and tear of our own ordinary daily existence’ (607). Focusing his observations on the end of Purgatorio, Arnold makes it clear that Beatrice is not the scolding wife in a Victorian marriage but that she is an ideal of spiritual and moral excellence towards which Dante aspired. The final example, John Addington Symonds’s (1840–1893) An Introduction to the Study of Dante (1872), reflects a stark reluctance to embrace Beatrice’s complexity. Symonds admits that Dante’s love for Beatrice was the product of idealization (‘Dante had always loved Beatrice more as an idea than as a reality: . . . it was not Beatrice in the flesh to whom he clung’ [51]), yet insists on her historical reality (‘Unless we can regard Beatrice and Virgil both as real persons and also as allegories, we shall not have placed ourselves at Dante’s point of view’ [133]). His approach to Beatrice, or his liking for her, is limited. He disapproves of those parts of the Commedia where she is no longer Dante’s gentle, romantic lover, but either Dante’s perceptive judge as in Purgatorio XXX or his intellectual teacher later on in Paradiso: A like confusion of the person and the symbol impairs the charm of Beatrice . . . when she begins the sermon against Dante’s sins . . ., or when she is explaining the spots on the moon and smiling in sublime contempt of Dante’s moral grossness, our interest is considerably refrigerated. She stands before us, in spite of all the poet’s pains, as a pretentious preacher or a stiff automaton – pretentious if we still regard her as a woman, stiff and cold if we accommodate our minds to the allegory. (Symonds 136) Symonds likes the Beatrice of the Vita Nuova but disfavours her reprimanding and guiding function. Her ability to make (moral) judgements and her intellectual superiority automatically diminish her desirability and femininity. Beatrice is perceived as ‘frigid’ (to stay within the semantic field which Symonds suggests) the moment she is not all sweetness and light.

Visualizing Beatrice The Victorian period saw the emergence of visual culture, a ‘visualisation of things that are not in themselves visual’ (Mirzoeff 6). Seeing and making visible became issues belonging to a broad aesthetic, technological and epistemological context: the nineteenth century was a period when ‘the visual [was] contested, debated and transformed as a constantly challenging place of social interaction’ (Mirzoeff 6). This triggered increased interest in eyesight and

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things related to vision, the latter developing rich implications due to new scientific and technological change and progress. What Kate Flint called the ‘slipperiness of the borderline between the visible and the invisible’ (2) means the questioning of human perception, its subjectivity and objectivity. The physiology of seeing as well as its metaphysical and epistemological implications became subject to scrutiny and discussion. Besides, as Deborah Cherry has shown, the use of the term ‘visual culture’ requires a broadening of the term’s definition to ‘set painting alongside sculpture, graphic and decorative art, photographs and reprographic prints, illustrated magazines’ (1). Visual culture did not only affect the high arts, but prospered mainly in popular culture. These medial forms became battlegrounds for debates on the role of women in contemporary society. The book market did not remain unaffected by the growing impact of the visual. Like the publishing industry in general, it relied on the popularity of (literary) texts which were accompanied by pictures – illustrated serial novels or graphic novels are just two examples. The Victorian reader was used to the copresence of the visual and the verbal. The rehabilitation of Dante in nineteenthcentury Britain was made possible by the publication of Dante illustrations and various translations, which determined his status as a best-selling and popular writer on a British and European scale. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were the time when the reception of Dante was strongly determined by attempts to visualize his writing, both in high and low culture (see Braida 3). The transition of Dante’s works into the British book market could not have happened without the corresponding visual representations, an easy move given the visual quality of Dante’s texts. This results from his creation of a concrete world or, as Valeria Tinkler-Villani described it, ‘the presence of a definable iconography, the statuesque nature of many of Dante’s characters, the variety and efficacy of his similes, the continuous reference to eyes and the importance of vision’ (Visions 19). At the same time as Dante was discovered by artists, the tracks were set for his lasting fame in Victorian Britain by a soaring number of published translations, predominantly of the Commedia. While the eighteenth century had seen the publication of several partial translations, mainly of the Inferno, the early nineteenth century brought forward the first entire translations of the Commedia.5 The nineteenth century also saw the publication of the first translations of the Vita Nuova.6 The shift of interest from the Commedia to the Vita Nuova affected the literary reception of Dante as well as the visual. Holiday’s painting provided one example. Yet there were other Victorian and Edwardian artists who painted Dantean scenes. The annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy in the middle years of the century presented paintings by various artists based on Italian themes. These exhibitions served as a platform for young artists looking for patrons and buyers of their artwork. The works by members of the original PreRaphaelites were represented, as well as works by lesser-known artists associated

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with them. Frederic Leighton exhibited Paolo and Francesca in 1861 and Dante in Exile in 1864. Simeon Solomon made a pen and ink drawing entitled Dante’s First Meeting with Beatrice (1859–1863), which depicts a scene of which the Vita Nuova tells us little and of which Boccaccio’s biography of Dante gives an account. Solomon’s finely executed drawing, which resembles D. G. Rossetti’s The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (Dante Drawing an Angel) (1849) in style, makes use of supplementary biographical information to create a scene which in its sheer liveliness moves beyond Dante’s sparsely described passage. While in Dante’s account this moment matters because of his sudden, prophetic awareness of Beatrice’s special status in his life, Solomon recreates it within an artfully depicted medieval environment which, and this is the genial aspect about this drawing, manages to intrigue the spectator despite the absence of those bright colour typical of the Pre-Raphaelite rendering of medieval subjects. William Dyce (1806–1864) was another artist who, although older than them, was inspired by the work of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. In addition to an unfinished study entitled Dante and Virgil he painted Francesca da Rimini (1837), thereby sticking to another Victorian favourite. His painting Dante and Beatrice (c.1850s) remained unfinished. In 1859 W. E. Gladstone, prime minister and admirer of Dante, asked Dyce to paint a picture of Beatrice. This resulted in a painting entitled Beatrice, better known as Lady with the Coronet of Jasmine. It is the portrait of a young woman who wears a plain Renaissance dress and, as the title suggests, a crown of jasmine (in the Commedia Beatrice wears a crown of olive branches). Beatrice is a simple painting: neither are there decorative details, nor did Dyce include background glimpses of a Mediterranean city or landscape as was often the case with other Dantean representations, for example, his painting Francesca da Rimini. Dyce depicts Beatrice as a young, Florentine woman whose style of representation resembles paintings by the Nazarene painters.7 Because of his minimalist iconography, that is, because of his exclusion of signs or symbols which would remind the viewer of her theological function or her superhuman status (it is only through the title of the painting that she can be indubitably identified as Beatrice), he achieves a similar effect of de-universalization which writers produced in their literary works. His neutralization of Beatrice brings about the loss of her recognizability and specificity. The painting’s most interesting aspect is an anecdote that comes with it. Gladstone had asked a prostitute, Marian Summerhayes, whom he had met through his rescue work for fallen women, to sit as the model for Beatrice (Isba 77–80). While the emotions he felt for Summerhayes became increasingly unbearable for him, which made him end their acquaintance, the picture reflects not only his private hope of finding a real-life Beatrice, but represents his ideal vision of a woman. Apart from D. G. Rossetti, the other most productive painter of Dantean motifs was a woman artist, Marie Spartali Stillman (1843–1927). British-born, but of Greek origin, she was trained by Ford Madox Brown and, later on in

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her life, mentored by Edward Burne-Jones. She had close links to the PreRaphaelites, whose thematic and stylistic preferences she partly shared, as for example their use of bright colours and their preference for subject matter from literary and mythological traditions. Coming from a cosmopolitan background and having grown up within the Anglo-Greek community in London, Spartali Stillman was one of the Victorian artists who spent a considerable period of time living in Florence (from 1878 to 1884) in the illustrious circles of the Anglo-American community of expatriates.8 Her love of this country and its art history makes itself felt in a number of Italianate paintings, among which her Dantean catalogue is outstanding. From the late 1870s onwards, since her move to Florence, Spartali regularly chose subjects from early Italian poetry, using D. G. Rossetti’s Early Italian Poets (1861, 1874) as textual basis. Her predominant source was Dante, but she also illustrated episodes from Petrarch (e.g. Petrarch and Laura at Vaucluse, 1889) and Boccaccio (e.g. The Last Sight of Fiammetta, 1876 and Fiammetta Singing, 1879). Among her Dantean paintings are works such as The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice on All Saints’ Day (1881); Dante and Beatrice, Scene from the Vita Nuova (1891); Madonna Pietra degli Scrovigni (1884), the title of which is from Dante, the translation and notes from D. G. Rossetti’s Early Italian Poets; A May Feast at the House of Folco Portinari, 1274 (1887); Dante at Verona (1888); A Florentine Wedding Feast (1890); Upon a Day Came Sorrow unto Me (1887); and A Pilgrim’s Folk (1914).9 Her precise, detailed style reflects her attachment to the Pre-Raphaelites, whose methods and techniques were characterized by the observation and rendering of small details. Many of the medievalist paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite artists were watercolour paintings and Spartali Stillman frequently used watercolour (and gouache) for similar purposes, namely, to enhance the effect of the ‘medieval’, bright colours. Yet she finely modulates them, which makes most of her paintings look softer than those of the other Pre-Raphaelite painters. Spartali Stillman’s watercolour painting entitled Beatrice (1895, Figure 2.2) is a late nineteenth-century Beatrice, yet given her interest in Dantean and Italian themes from the 1880s onwards, it needs to be seen as one link in a longer chain. In fact, her Beatrice reflects several features typical of her artistic style and her representation of femininity in particular. Her preference for medieval and early Renaissance subject matter as well as Italian subjects and settings has been mentioned; as Jan Marsh has argued, Spartali Stillman’s response to and vision of Italian art, literature and landscape shaped her pictorial aesthetic of timeless place and contemplative atmosphere (‘Tuscan Rupture’ 167). What else is remarkable about this painting is Spartali Stillman’s use of a flower symbolism, which she also employed abundantly in other paintings, such as A Rose from Armida’s Garden (1894) or A Florentine Lily (c.1885–1890). In Beatrice, the roses symbolize love and passion. After all the Vita Nuova is a collection of love poetry and the pansies are a symbol of remembrance, again a prominent theme in the Vita Nuova. The flowers, the bough of a tree in the background

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Figure 2.2 Marie Spartali Stillman (1844–1927). Beatrice. 1895. Gouache on paper. 57.6 × 43.2 cm. Delaware Art Museum, Gift of Mrs Walter Reinsel, 1971. © Delaware Art Museum

and Beatrice’s rich clothing render this painting sensual – an effect which is also achieved through the full, plastic depiction of Beatrice’s facial features. This painting lacks the two-dimensionality of some of D. G. Rossetti’s female portraits. Its Beatrice is sensual without being alluring; she radiates a sense of liveliness without being ‘fleshly’. A possible reason could be that Beatrice is depicted with a book. A woman and a book depicted in a work by a female artist: Beatrice shows that women artists in the latter part of the nineteenth century knew how to avoid a mere revival of the codes of medieval and Venetian art popular with contemporary male artists – wavy long hair, opulent costume, jewellery, emphasis of the

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lips and eyes. They developed their own style which generated an image of women as highly cultured, by avoiding a flat, decorative depiction of their physical assets, or by introducing a ‘bookish’ element into the representation of a figure like Beatrice. Beatrice is no longer a mere visual icon, but she circulates as a woman of culture.10 This is a feature which she employs in a number of paintings: Cloister Lilies (1891), A Florentine Lily, The Lady Prays – Desire (1867) and Love Sonnets (1894) all depict women with or reading books. Spartali Stillman’s paintings suggest something that this book’s chapter on George Eliot will confirm, namely, that Victorian women art historians, painters and writers made ‘use of the Renaissance to authorize and further their own emancipatory project’ (Fraser, ‘Writing’ 181), establishing themselves as makers and interpreters of culture and thereby expressing their own modern female condition. The literary text and the visual image express a similar idea, yet use their own means to express its complexity: in Spartali Stillman’s paintings, her subtle use of an iconography (emblems and books, see below) which is suggestive, but remains undetermined. A Florentine Lily resembles Beatrice not only because of the flower imagery: in this case, it is the lily, a symbol of the city of Florence and of female purity. A Florentine Lily lacks the direct reference to Dante in the title, but at the same time is closely connected to his home town. It is a painting made in honour of the city, yet it equally seems to allude to the ideal of Florentine, medieval and Renaissance femininity, which Beatrice represented and which also reappears in the chapter on George Eliot. The resulting ambiguity is typical of the representations of Beatrice included in this study and refers back to what was, in the first chapter’s discussion of Aby Warburg’s ninfa, described as the type or ‘clanship’ of Beatrice, towards which many less immediately recognizable examples could be counted. The painting depicts a young woman in a Renaissance dress in front of a partly drawn curtain which still allows a glimpse of the city of Florence, the Palazzo Vecchio. In her right hand the woman holds a lily, in her left hand, like in Beatrice, an open book. Seen as an homage to Florence, this painting encodes the city in the shape of a woman, who is not merely beautiful, but also learned. Spartali Stillman thus not only honours Florence for its cultural legacy, she also suggests that femininity, in literature and the visual arts, is not merely decorative. These Beatrices are not in a passive relationship with culture; they are not only objects in whose praise books have been written, but active participants in processes of reading and learning. In these female portraits, which could be viewed as self-portraits by the artist, Spartali Stillman not only makes a statement concerning the position of women as bearers and creators of cultural knowledge (contained in texts and images: the book in Beatrice shows a picture), but she also comments on her status as a female artist whose work is intermedial. To conclude, the Victorian afterlife of Beatrice was to a high degree shaped by a narrowing of her religious, universal significance, so as to make her fit into

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a contemporary pattern of advocated female behaviour and ideal womanhood. The discussed paintings as well as the two exemplary texts by Ruskin and Arnold, suggest that Beatrice was seen as a historical figure, a young, beautiful Florentine lady of the late Middle Ages or Renaissance, yet a suitable model for their own time. Devoid of her specifically Christian significance, she was idealized and turned into a mundane ideal of femininity, safely embedded within a heterosexual matrimonial environment, embodying moral perfection. Yet there is a darker twin to these bright Beatrice figures, who brings back to mind that Dante’s beloved and his love for her was death-bound.

On the Other Side: The Darker Beatrice Beatrice’s morbid appeal touches a completely different string of Victorian sensibilities. The Victorian obsession with death, mourning, spiritualism and the hereafter has been sufficiently discussed by critics such as Michael Wheeler and John Morley. Given the vividness with which Beatrice inhabits Dante’s mind and memory, it is easy to forget that most of his poetic praise is directed at a dead woman. Her death is the central event in the Vita Nuova and it eventually leads to the writing of the Commedia, if one believes the chronology which Dante establishes at the end of the Vita Nuova XLII.11 The Beatrice he encounters in Purgatorio is dead and trans-humanized; even though he immediately recognizes her, she is different. Connecting this assertion to what has been said above leads to a seemingly irreconcilable contradiction. How could Beatrice be a model for blooming young British girls and at the same time be the ethereal, moribund creature that she was for artists such as D. G. Rossetti and Julia Margaret Cameron? Milbank’s key thesis posits ‘that they [the Victorians] did not always merely assimilate [Dante] to a pantheon of important but unthreatening worthies but found in him internal contradictions and challenges to their own ways of thinking that both surprised and delighted them’ (4). That the Victorians met the contradictions they encountered in Dante with playful curiosity and fascination for their creative purposes is one of the assumptions of this study. Two further reasons help explain her morbid attraction. First, the case of Beatrice is just one among many. The Victorian taste for the morbid and its associated triangular connection between death, femininity and artistic representation is epitomized in a famous quotation from Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846). It claims that ‘the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world – . . .’ (680), thereby forging an alliance between female beauty, male desire and death. The latter is perceived as a presence that creates both distance and yet allows for greater proximity and intimacy between the male artist and the female, dead muse. Carol Christ has argued that necrophilia, exemplified by the Victorian predilection for portraits

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of dead women, ‘may at once defend against a fear female absorption and satisfy a desire for it’ (Painting the Dead 140). A dead woman combines the paradoxical quality of being more available for appropriation and transformation in the eyes and the art of the male beholder and artist. At the same time, she does not exert the aura of danger of a living woman. Female portraiture – either in the form of a real painting or an ekphrastic description – examples of the latter would be some of D. G. Rossetti’s poems such as ‘The Portrait’ (1847–1870), Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1842), or Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ (1842) – was closely associated with death, which was ultimately gendered in a way, as Christ concludes, ‘that suggests the desire and fear both of looking at a forbidden sexual object and appropriating its life’ (‘Painting the Dead’ 150). The second reason is entwined with the first: portraits depict individuals and by doing so they are, more than any other genre in painting, aimed at keeping a memory of the beloved as well as resuscitating their presence – absent as they are through spatial distance or death. Ever since the invention of the daguerreotype and Fox Talbot’s discovery of new methods for reproducing photographs in the 1830s, the practice of photography had remained restricted to amateurs and would experience, along with the development of new photographic techniques, an increase in popularity and professional interest in the mid-1850s (see Seiberling 1–9). The secularization of human self-perception, depriving man of otherworldly comfort and the prospect of joining the dead beloved, made forms of expression popular, which were deemed capable of ultimately immortalizing the love object. Photography not only offered a technically advanced reproduction of reality, but was also seen as able to freeze the moment. Victorian photography, however, requires a concession since not only for technical, but also for compositional reasons (i.e. preparation and organization of models) the actual shooting of a photo could take decisively longer than it would today. The desire to grasp a last ineradicable relict of the dead introduced photography to the Victorian deathbed, where a photo of the recently deceased person would be taken. In this context of mourning, photography was quickly accommodated to everyday practice, the connection between death and the new medium being close. Photography had a remarkable influence on mourning because of its paradoxical quality of being proof of a person who has ultimately disappeared, while at the same time allowing closer scrutiny of a beloved than when they were alive. But it is not only the other whom we encounter on a photograph. Writers like Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag have hinted at the morbidity of photographs, the idea that they are all memento mori (see Creekmur 73–74). The freezing of a moment always resounds with the knowledge of the fleetingness of our own time. Given the commemorative function of photography, which in its relative, split second immediacy of representation seems to outdo the old genre of painting, it is useful to turn to three works of art which all present Beatrice as an icon of ethereal, morbid femininity, dwelling on the notion of absence in

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her presence and vice versa. By looking at these three interrelated representations of a Beatrician icon, one a painting, the other a photograph and the third a hybrid medial form, it will become apparent that Beatrice travelled across the conventional boundaries between the media. The first artwork to be discussed is D. G. Rossetti’s painting Beata Beatrix (Figure 1.1), the second is a photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron entitled Call, I Follow, I Follow – Let Me Die (1867, Figure 2.3) and the third a photo/painting by D. G. Rossetti, depicting his wife Elizabeth Siddal. As will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, Dante’s Beatrice is central to Rossetti’s artistic project. Beata Beatrix encapsulates his reception of Dante in several ways.12 Its process of creation lasted several years and resulted in two versions. The first oil painting, on which the following observations are based, was begun around 1864 and completed in 1870. In 1871–1872 a replica was produced for the MP and patron William Graham, with an additional predella showing Dante and Beatrice reunited in heaven. Both versions depict Beatrice in a trance-like, transitional state expecting death, her head being surrounded by a halo-like radiation. D. G. Rossetti himself thought of this painting as symbolizing ‘a sudden spiritual transformation. Beatrice is rapt visibly into heaven seeing as it were through her shut lids’ (qtd. in Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Women 141). Its Dantean context is made clear by the title, symbols and figures appearing in the background, which serves as a shadowy backdrop to the more elaborately depicted figure in the foreground. The colours of Beatrice’s garments, red and green, correspond to the clothes she wears during her first eye-to-eye encounter with the pilgrim Dante in Purgatorio XXX. The city in the background is Florence, the two figures in the blurred background are Dante and Love personified. The sundial and the poppy flower underscore the connection between Beatrice’s entranced look and her approaching death. At the bottom of the painting’s frame is the line from Lamentations quoted by Dante in the Vita Nuova at the death of Beatrice: ‘Quomodo sedet sola Civitas!’ (section XXVIII), which translates as ‘how does the city sit solitary’. At the top of the frame is the date of Beatrice’s death ‘Jun: Die 9: Anno 1290’ (Parris 209). The painting serves at least two obvious purposes: it can be interpreted as an act of contrition and homage to Rossetti’s dead wife, Elizabeth Siddal, but it could also be understood as an attempt to retrieve his lost beloved or at least to retain her memory. Biographical anecdotes tend to stress Elizabeth Siddal’s (1829–1862) position as Rossetti’s female counterpart in a tragic, almost uncanny re-enacting of Dante’s doomed love relationship with Beatrice. Elizabeth Siddal, a poet and painter herself, was one of Rossetti’s favourite female models, who also sat for other Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Millais, Hunt and Deverell. Rossetti married her in 1860 after the zenith of their love had been reached. Siddal, whose state of health had been fragile throughout her entire life, committed suicide in 1862. Critics like Griselda Pollock and Elisabeth Bronfen have offered analyses of this relationship and the way it reflected and shaped Rossetti’s conception

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Figure 2.3 Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879). Call, I Follow, I Follow – Let Me Die. 1867. Carbon print from copy negative. Victoria and Albert Museum. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

of femininity. Pollock posits the thesis that Elizabeth Siddal was transformed into a cipher for masculine creativity, a beautiful projection screen robbed of her own historical and artistic personality (Pollock, ‘Woman as Sign’). Elisabeth Bronfen speaks of a ‘deanimation in the sense also that during her [Elizabeth Siddal’s] life she was translated into the artist’s cipher, the instrument and medium for his self-presentation as the creator of a glamorous and enigmatic feminine figure’ (Over Her Dead Body 172). In order to consolidate his threatened authority as a poet, Rossetti transformed Elizabeth into a myth. Elizabeth/ Beatrice is his female quasi-mythic muse, vital to his artistic self-fashioning. There is no explicit counterpart to Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix in the work of Julia Margaret Cameron. She did, however, produce photographs inspired by Dantean motifs, for example A Dantesque Vision (1865). Portraiture was the branch of photography in which she excelled, producing portraits of real

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people, portraits of figures from literature and history or having several people pose as part of a tableau vivant. An ambivalence of character is typical of Cameron’s work and not restricted to her representation of saintly, female types. At the same time as real people are turned into fictional characters, fictional characters are interchangeable and become available for a free play of interpretation: Her most creative pictures are those which take a sacred or legendary subject as their idea and turn it into a symbol of great reserve. The moments she chooses express a deep, brooding consciousness, reflected in the eyes, in the posture, in the hair – of men as well as of women – in which the inward feelings are manifested but cannot be specifically explained. The images take over as symbols of a mystery which is inexpressible except in Cameron’s own pictorial terms. (Weaver 26) By resisting ultimate exegesis, these ‘symbols of great reserve’ are easily appropriated by other artists. It is this sense of imprecision and vagueness which widens the possibilities of exchange between different media, resulting in the perpetuation of existing elements of a common literary and mythological tradition. Looking at Cameron’s photograph Call, I follow, I follow – let me die (1867), which particularly invokes an association with Rossetti’s painting, two things need to be taken into consideration: first, Cameron’s identifiable literary source is neither Rossetti nor Dante, but Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859, this is one of the two photographs by Cameron depicting Elaine).13 Secondly, what both works share is the predominance of the female figure in the foreground (Cameron’s model was Mary Hillier, one of her housemaids), the blurred background creating the impression of a halo surrounding the models’ head, the actual position of their heads and the look of their eyes which seem to avoid direct confrontation with the viewer’s gaze.14 Cameron’s photograph was published by the Autotype Company at the time Rossetti was working on Beata Beatrix and its morbid subject plus its technical qualities might have impressed Rossetti. In its handling of black and white effects, this photograph exemplifies Cameron’s frequently employed chiaroscuro technique, or ‘Rembrandt effect’. Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix exemplifies his specific ideal of feminine beauty, which derives its attraction from the self-absorption of the figures. Other paintings like Lady Lilith (1864), depicting a woman looking at her reflection in the mirror, introduce more explicitly the notion of female narcissism. Looking at a photograph by Cameron, the viewer may have a similar experience since many of her models eschew eye contact with the camera.15 The distancing effect is increased by the frequent shadowing or hooding of eyes. The resulting impact on the viewer is all the more unsettling and irritating since eyes are usually seen as vital physical or exterior attributes of a person’s self. Imprecision or

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ambiguity are thus to be understood as both technical effects (i.e. the haziness due to a soft focus technique), but also as parts of the expressive value of the photograph.16 The third and last example is another portrait of Siddal. Rossetti’s ‘painting’ (1861) is in fact an overpainting on a photograph of Siddal, resulting in a double materiality which itself is fascinating; especially since it was made by an artist who excelled in poetry and painting, constantly interweaving them, but who did not explore the possibilities of photography. It is one of the rare existing photographs of Siddal which was given by Rossetti as a memento to the midwife who had witnessed his wife’s stillbirth in May 1861. He later on sold it as a miniature to purchase an annuity for the old woman (Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body 177). The richly jewelled frame was added to the picture at a later point of time when it was bought by J. Pierpont Morgan for his collection of miniatures.17 The photo/painting shows Siddal in a position not dissimilar to that in Rossetti’s oil painting Beata Beatrix as far as her self-absorbed look, her clasped hands and the similar position of her head are concerned. However, while Beata Beatrix can be described as depicting Siddal as a somnambulistic, frail beauty who, in an absent state of mind, seems to be transgressing the border between the living and the dead, this photo/painting lacks any romanticized undertone and presents us with a female portrait which looks, more than anything else, sad. This intermedial triad of Beatrices, a painting, a photograph and a combination of the two, manifests Beatrice’s transmedial, symbolic energy. Each of these figures is, in her own way, ethereal, moving along the threshold of death and thus embodying the strong links between femininity and death, female beauty and morbidity. Morphed into different shapes and semantic contexts, these figures are unique while belonging to a bigger, illustrious company of frail, dying women. If Aby Warburg had conceived of a picture plate entitled ‘Beauty in death’, these Beatrices would have been pinned onto the canvas.

Chapter 3

Looking for the Real Beatrice: The Rossetti Family

The Rossetti children grew up with Dante and Beatrice as honorary family members. Maria’s (1827–1876), Dante Gabriel’s (1828–1882), William Michael’s (1829–1919) and Christina’s (1830–1894) knowledge of Dante was informed and shaped by their father, Gabriele (1783–1856) and his lifelong commitment to the poeta. Familiar with Dante as each of the family members was, their interpretations differed with respect to the one particular question which stood at the heart of the Victorian preoccupation with Dante: whether Beatrice was a real, historical woman or an abstract, possibly allegorical figure. The axis which divides the real from the unreal or the allegorical from the historical figure of Beatrice runs through this family in the same way as it runs through their century’s reception history of Dante. The Rossetti family were a vibrant nexus interconnecting traditions, cultures and strands of thinking. I argue that their partly contrasting Beatrices exemplify in a condensed form the working mechanisms of intertextuality and intermediality relevant to this book. Their Dante reception displays the Victorian Dante in a nutshell from which the following chapters can then be developed.1 Beatrice was a legacy bequeathed to the children by their father, which introduces an interesting new facet to this book’s concern with the cultural afterlife: the involuntary gift which can turn into a haunting. The popularity which the Vita Nuova enjoyed from the 1830s onwards may well have been due to its suitability to Victorian sensibilities, offering a tableau of thirteenth-century Florence drenched in young love and tragedy. The deeper reason, I argue, is its autobiographical nature: the Vita Nuova tells the life story of a young medieval man. Not only was Dante’s libello a keystone for the development of the autobiographic genre but his life was also the subject of one of the earliest documents belonging to the biographic tradition. By focusing their interest on this text, the Victorians followed the track which had been set by Dante’s first biographer, Boccaccio, who in his Trattatello in laude di Dante (1357) recounts Dante’s life with the help of information gained from Dante’s writings, from his conversations with Cino di Pistoia, Sennuccio del Bene and from Dante’s own daughter, Beatrice. Boccaccio identifies Beatrice, Dante’s beloved, as ‘a little daughter of this Folco [Portinari], whose name was Bice (although

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Dante always called her by her full name, Beatrice)’ (11), thereby securing her historical existence and mentions that ‘Dante’s relatives and friends gave him a wife so that his tears for Beatrice would come to an end’ (15), referring to his arranged marriage with Gemma Donati, with whom he had several children. Thanks to Boccaccio’s role as Dante’s biographer, Beatrice’s historical existence became more factual. However, even though her status became a crucial question to nineteenth-century readers and critics, it became a less urgent concern for twentieth-century Dante experts. While several studies on Beatrice were published in the twentieth century, the fervency with which either position was defended disappeared. For the members of the Rossetti family, Beatrice’s status was a delicate question: G. Rossetti, according to whom Dante’s works contained an occult, allegorical meaning, understood Beatrice not as a real, historical person but as a personification of ancient mysteries (see Waller 92–93). D. G. Rossetti saw her as Dante’s dead, but still desirable muse and lover, an unreachable love object whose physical existence he did not deny and whose presence in his poetry helped him elaborate his own aesthetic ideal. His other siblings, Christina, Maria and William criticized and rejected their father’s allegorical bias, tending towards a historical interpretation. Beatrice’s historical existence was the crux which separated the father from his children, but their own interpretations of Dante varied, too. The rift between the father and his children was due to a different understanding and appreciation of historical accuracy, which is characteristic of the spirit of the age. G. Rossetti’s theories ran counter to new attitudes towards science and were irreconcilable with the cultural forces at play in Victorian culture. The rejection which his theories experienced in Victorian Britain was rooted in a broader scientific context in which methods of scientific epistemology were questioned and thwarted according to their scientific value (see Tinkler-Villani, ‘In the Footsteps’ 131). G. Rossetti’s research was critically scrutinized at a time when new disciplines accompanied by new methods of literary exegesis and historical research were established. The nineteenth century was the period when knowledge was not only accumulated, but also systematized. As has been shown by U. C. Knoepflmacher in his book Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel, Positivism provided a new scientific and epistemological paradigm and had an impact on literary aesthetics and the Victorian novel in particular (see Knoepflmacher, Humanism). History became a broad intellectual concern, touching upon literary and philosophical discourses (see, for example, Peter A. Dale’s study The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History). Yet the cultivation of the ‘historical sense’ did not remain limited to the intelligentsia but turned into a broader concern. Thomas Carlyle told his contemporaries in 1830 to ‘search more and more into the past; . . ., as the true fountain of knowledge’, because ‘[a] Talent for History might be said to be born with us, as our chief inheritance’ (61). Each single biography reflects history is what Carlyle says: ‘History is the essence of innumerable Biographies’ (57).

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What is remarkable about Carlyle’s definition of history as accessible through the study of individual lives, history as a product of life writing, is that it anticipates and reflects the significance which the Victorians were to assign to biography as a literary genre – and as a way of accessing the past. Biography became one way of learning more about history because it was seen as one form of writing history. Hence the Victorians’ preference both for Dante’s autobiography, the Vita Nuova, and his biography; hence their fascination with Beatrice, the Florentine woman as opposed to Beatrice, the allegory; and hence a clash of attitudes in the Rossetti family.

Dante’s Legacy in the Rossetti Family In 1896, 15 years after Dante Gabriel’s and 2 years after Christina’s death, an anonymous reviewer of the London Quarterly Review looked back to ‘earlier years of her [Queen Victoria’s] reign’, when ‘there could be found Charlotte Street, Portland Place, London, a quiet but somehow exotic household . . . a little oasis of purely Italian life, literary and patriotic, flourishing greenly amid its alien British surroundings’ (Jones 185). The Rossetti home became an enriching institution for the London-based Italian community of the 1840s. ‘Italianità’ as a defining element of personal identity was thus upheld and perpetuated in what the reviewer describes as a strange, different English environment. The reception of Dante in the Rossetti family exemplifies a case of Anglo-Italian intertextuality at a historical moment when the relation between England and (Pre-) Risorgimento Italy bore not only political, but also cultural significance expressed in an abundance of artworks, poems, novels and travel literature. The Rossettis had an exotic status within British society as first and second-generation Italian immigrants.2 Theodore Watts-Dunton underlines the family’s, but mainly the children’s, isolation ‘from the outer English world’ (323) and hence their resemblance to another major artistic clan, the Brontës. They were cultural go-betweens and therein possibly lay their charm in the eyes of a nation which was similarly torn: Their dual nationality and ambivalent desire to belong to two empires, one of the British Crown and the other of the mind, found resonance in the way Victorian society was divided between tradition and modernity, religious belief and science, prudery and erotic longing. (Clifford/Roussillon 3–4) Born into an intellectually stimulating home, the Rossetti children grew up in an atmosphere which encouraged the development of their various artistic abilities and familiarized them with a rich, cultural heritage, whose reverberation, however, took the shape of an eerie echo: ‘Dante Alighieri was a sort of banshee in the Charlotte Street houses; his shriek audible even to familiarity,

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but the message of it not scrutinized’ (DGR: Family Letters 64), wrote W. M. Rossetti. This statement, with its comparison of Dante to the uncanny appearance of a banshee – maybe an implicit comment itself – suggests an interesting ambiguity: it not only emphasizes the children’s familiarity with the Italian poet as an everyday presence but it also signals a certain detachment or disinterest, an inability and maybe unwillingness to comprehend the deeper meaning of things that were so obviously central to their father’s life. Frances Winwar, in her biographical account of the Rossettis, mentions how G. Rossetti would come home, where his chair would be ‘waiting for him by the fireplace, the Dante tomes open where he had left his abstruse researches’ (367). D. G. Rossetti allegedly believed that there was a dark corner on the upper landing in which Dante was lurking (Thomas 28) and a copy of the Vita Nuova appeared to give off a faint light which filled him with ‘happy terror’ (Weintraub 6). Another document to look at is the Preface to D. G. Rossetti’s 1861 edition of Early Italian Poets where he clearly associates his first contact with Dante with the influence of his father: The first associations I have are connected with my father’s devoted studies, which, from his own point of view, have done so much towards the general investigations of Dante’s writings. Thus, in those early days, all around me partook of the influence of the great Florentine; till, from viewing it as a natural element, I also, growing older, was drawn within the circle. (240) Paradoxically, while Dante was omnipresent in the Rossetti household due to G. Rossetti’s scholarly immersion, the children, and particularly Dante Gabriel, only started to read Dante in their adolescence: No doubt our father’s Dantesque studies saturated the household air with wafts and rumours of the mighty Alighieri; therefore the child breathed Dante (so to speak), but he did not think Dante, nor lay him to heart. On the contrary, our father’s speculations and talk about Dante – which, although he highly valued the poetry as such, all took an abstruse or theoretic turn – rather alienated my brother than otherwise . . . . (W. M. Rossetti, ‘DGR: A Memoir’ 159) W. M. Rossetti’s statement suggests that the Rossetti children were familiar with Dante’s writings before they were fully literate, but that they did not investigate their meaning, simply because they had not read his works and, by the sound of his description, were not really keen to do so. Instead, the young D. G. Rossetti developed a penchant for books from the Anglo-Saxon rather than the Italian tradition, indulging in works by Edgar Allen Poe and Adelbert Chamisso, which he also illustrated, and prominent writers of the British literary tradition such as Sir Walter Scott, Byron and Shakespeare. It was only as a teenager that he

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developed an interest in Dante.3 Similar things have been noticed with respect to C. Rossetti.4 The way in which Beatrice became a ‘family enterprise’ was strongly determined by patterns of ‘intrafamilial’ influence. As an artistic unit, the Rossetti family provided mutual support and interest in each other’s artistic success and well-being – their family letters and memoirs document the numerous occasions when they modelled for each other, as Christina and Frances did for Dante Gabriel’s The Girlhood of Virgin Mary (1849), or helped to establish connections with publishers and other prominent individuals.5 The family was a site of literary communication and production as well as a forum for criticism, which was chaired by the father, G. Rossetti.

Gabriele Rossetti: Beatrice as Allegory Gabriele Rossetti (1783–1854) was an Italian by birth, who had fled from the kingdom of Naples to England after his involvement with the Carbonari whose aim was the demolition of a monarchical in favour of a constitutional political system. He allegedly became a Freemason in 1809. Rescued by a British admiral, G. Rossetti was taken to Malta and in 1824 to Britain. His status as a Risorgimento exile could be a reason for his anti-papal and anticlerical stance.6 It is probable that Dante became an important element in Rossetti’s life after he had left Malta and settled in England: Dante was, after all, an exile who yearned for a liberated Italy and used mystical symbolism in his writings. He assumed that Dante, like himself, was a member of a secret society (Waller 77–78). G. Rossetti’s life in England was that of an intellectual in exile. Unable to practice his real profession, that of an improvvisatore, he became an Italian teacher, quickly assembling around him fellow expatriates and British citizens in favour of Italy’s unification, its culture and language. He married Frances, who was half English, half Italian, the daughter of Anna Maria and Gaetano Polidori and niece of John Polidori, Lord Byron’s doctor and the author of a Gothic novel. In 1831 he became Professor of Italian at King’s College. His political activism and the publication of several controversial works centred on Dante eventually cost him his job in 1843 and put years of financial strains onto his wife and children who were then responsible for the family’s financial well-being. As mentioned above, Dante soon became the focus of his newly found passion: literary scholarship. For G. Rossetti, Dante was above all a political poet: events in the poet’s life such as his appointment as one of the six priors in Florence, his participation in at least two battles, one of them at Campaldino, and his function as a Florentine ambassador to San Gimignano mattered to him. This, together with his allegorical interpretation of Dante’s works as well as his belief in a secret meaning in Dante’s writings, is a major point of divergence with respect to his children’s understanding of the Italian poet. G. Rossetti was encouraged by one of his patrons, Charles Lyell, godfather of D. G. Rossetti and

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father of the famous geologist, who was strongly interested in obtaining a scholarly analysis of the Commedia, being a translator of the poems of the Vita Nuova and the Convivio himself. G. Rossetti’s interest in Dante led to the production of critical works, which were all ambitious in scope and content. The Comento Analitico sull’ Inferno di Dante (1826), his personal interpretation of the Commedia, was supposed to cover all three parts of the Commedia, but only the comments on the Inferno were published in his lifetime. His comments on Purgatorio were published after his death and those on Paradiso remained unwritten. For the publication of his two volumes on Inferno, G. Rossetti had been able to find enough subscribers, among whom were a remarkable number of high-ranking names such as Isaac Disraeli, Sir Walter Scott, Francis Palgrave, Henry Hallam and Samuel Rogers. It is here that, in the shape of abundant comments, notes and paraphrases, G. Rossetti for the first time expounds his theory of a cryptic meaning in the Commedia, which manifests itself in its interpretation as a Ghibelline allegory. The Ghibellines, according to Rossetti, were a secret society of which Dante was a member, who used conventional vocabulary (gergo) to express one thing by saying another. In other words, G. Rossetti believed in an esoteric value inherent in the big works of European literary history which contained a double meaning: the external, literal meaning accessible to the ‘profane’ reader and an internal meaning accessible only to the initiated reader, who knows how to decipher the superficial veil covering a deeper truth (Vincent 93). Dante himself had hinted at such ambiguities in his ‘Letter to Cangrande’ in Epistles 13 (1317–1320), where he claims that the meaning of his poem is ‘polysemous’, in other words comprises two meanings, a literal and an allegorical or moral one (347). G. Rossetti’s belief in hidden, transcendental truths beyond the concrete signs visible to the human was hardly reconcilable with the emerging scientific paradigm at the time, namely, Positivism, and that it was equally difficult to unite his antichristian readings with the religious atmosphere of Anglican Britain. His friend and patron, Charles Lyell, for example, felt much sympathy for most of Rossetti’s theories and supported his various publications, but the publication of Rossetti’s works caused him a certain anxiety with regard to their atheistic stance (Vincent 64–66). John Addington Symonds criticized Rossetti’s positions because of his ignoring of ‘distinct evidence and of common sense’ due to a ‘perverted desire to find political allegories in everything connected with Dante’ (40). La Beatrice di Dante (1842) appeared at a time when G. Rossetti’s theories had already been expounded in massive works of compiled knowledge. It had been intended as an introduction to Lyell’s second edition of his translation of the Vita Nuova, but given its massive bulk it was turned into an autonomous work. La Beatrice di Dante argues that Beatrice is an allegory of philosophy, symbolizing arcane wisdom which was transmitted from Egypt to Greece and from there found its way into the works of several writers, Dante being one of them (191).

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This arcane wisdom is stored in Dante’s works, yet needs to be decoded (140). G. Rossetti describes Beatrice as Dante’s brainchild (‘Figlia della mente di Dante è Beatrice’ [138]), an allegorical figure which reflects his general understanding of Dante’s method, also in the Vita Nuova, as one which aims to ‘say one thing, but mean another’ (my translation of ‘dire una cosa e intenderne un’ altra’ [193]). G. Rossetti is aware of a conflict between readers of Dante who view Beatrice in rather spiritual terms, as opposed to those who cling to her historical reality (190) but support his reading by insisting on the presence of correspondences between what is said superficially and a deeper, secret meaning (193). G. Rossetti’s writings had admirers and enemies, but in any case they generated debates. One of his admirers was Seymour Kirkup, the discoverer of the Bargello portrait of Dante, who agreed with him on Beatrice’s allegorical status. The ghost of Dante, for whom Kirkup felt ‘real friendship’, was conjured up by his mistress in a séance. Dante told him that Beatrice was ‘an idea of [his] mind’ (‘era un’ idea della mia testa’, my translation) (qtd. in W. M. Rossetti, Papers 348–49).7 A contemporary reviewer thanked Rossetti for giving ‘a clearer insight into the character of the fourteenth century’, appreciating the historical information provided by the author yet at the same time expressed a feeling of unease with regard to G. Rossetti’s attempts at fitting everything into his allegorical system, ‘when the sublime mysteries . . ., are brought down to the level of a political squib . . .’ (Merivale 541). Other writers such as Arthur Henry Hallam, inspired by the writings of Coleridge, tried to prevent Dante from being labelled ‘allegorical’, which was not reconcilable with the period’s preference for the symbol. Hallam’s position will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6, but the following quotation from his pamphlet ‘Remarks on Professor Rossetti’s “Disquisizioni Sullo Spirito Antipapale”’, published in 1832, conveys an impression of the fervency with which Beatrice’s status was treated given its defiant tone: We are ready to die fighting in the cause, rather than go the whole lengths of a theory which would have us acknowledge nothing in the ‘dolce guida e cara’, whose smile brightened the brightness of Paradise, but a mixture of a possible good Pope and a possible good Emperor! (Remains 294) Hallam’s point is clear: any reading of Beatrice which sees her no longer as Dante’s earthly beloved, who after her death becomes his spiritual guide, threatens the theological integrity of Dante’s works. The moment when Beatrice is considered as a ‘good Pope’ or ‘good Emperor’, or more generally as the allegorical embodiment of a political system, she can no longer be the ‘beatitude’ of Dante’s religious universe. This, according to Hallam, is tragic because Beatrice, as a historical woman, is the guide to Dante’s religious love. For Hallam, Dante was a Catholic writer: ‘The spirit of Catholic Christianity breathes in every line’

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(Remains 336). Beatrice is ‘the object of [Dante’s] youthful passion’ upon whom Dante had ‘concentrate[d] all his loftiest sentiments and pure ideas of perfection’ (291). She was [d]escribed throughout as most pure, most humble, most simple, most affectionate, and as the personal form in which Dante delighted to contemplate the ideal objects of his moral feelings, is it wonderful that she should become at last for him the representative of religion itself? (292) Hallam condemns G. Rossetti’s theories as a violation of the religious content of Dante’s works, but his indignation also reflects his disapproval of G. Rossetti’s epistemology. He complains that G. Rossetti ‘cares for nothing but resemblances’, that ‘he has one way, and one alone, of accounting for everything strange, or unintelligible, or doubtful, in the whole extent of history’ (275). This, he goes on, happens at the expense of scientific accuracy, provability and ultimately credibility. ‘[U]pon what foundation’, he writes, ‘does this strange fancy-castle repose? Where are the authentic documents which are to reverse the decisions of history? Where the credible witnesses . . .?’ (281). Hallam’s use of vocabulary broaches a much wider concern, an epistemological conflict arising from the emergence of a new, positivist-scientific paradigm, which affected the realm of aesthetics particularly with respect to questions of representation. As Alison Milbank has pointed out, Dante became what Eric Auerbach in the twentieth century called ‘a poet of the secular world’ (122). Although G. Rossetti’s writings were against the grain of his period’s epistemological and scientific trends, it ought to be acknowledged that they reverberate in the works of writers and scholars from several countries, such as Giovanni Pascoli, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Charles Singleton and Luis Borges.

Entering the ‘Dantesque Field’ I: Maria Rossetti Maria Rossetti wrote an introduction to Dante entitled A Shadow of Dante (1871), which is an explanatory comment on the Commedia from a Christian point of view. C. Rossetti praised and described it as ‘a work written from a fund of knowledge far wider and deeper than could be compressed into its pages, eloquent and elegant, the fruit of a fine mind and a noble soul’ (Letters C. Rossetti 124).8 A Shadow of Dante is indeed very accurate and schematic in its description of the Commedia and hence maybe closest to her father’s scholarly approach. Using William Michael’s translation of the Inferno and Longfellow’s translation of the other cantiche, Maria gives a very detailed account of the topography of Dante’s universe, providing the reader with maps and prose descriptions. She gives an explanation of what she calls ‘the physical and moral theories on which

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his Three Worlds are constructed’, with a focus on his autobiography ‘to study his character, to be spiritualized by his spirit and upborne on his wings – . . .’ (M. F. Rossetti 5). M. Rossetti is very precise in the rendering of spatial and chronological details and supplies the reader with factual information about, for example, the weight of Dante’s brain (31). There is something noteworthy about the concept of this book: M. Rossetti dwells in detail on the geographical, intellectual and spiritual world which Dante inhabited. Yet none of this will distract her from the purpose of her work: to understand all the factual details in combination with the author’s biography. Her biographical account pays justice to various aspects of Dante’s life, covering Dante’s romantic and marital situation as well as reflecting her awareness of his political activities. M. Rossetti dedicated the volume to her father. Yet for her Dante is less an Italian national poet than a universal regent, ‘the Universe, is his birthplace; not the fourteenth century, but all Time, is his epoch’ (1). M. Rossetti goes on to describe Dante rising before us and above us like the Pyramids – awful, massive, solitary; the embodiment of the character, the realization of the science, of his clime and day; yet the outcome of a far wider past, the standard of a far wider future. (132) M. Rossetti frees Dante from temporal and spatial ties. She does so possibly to underline his elusive grandeur, possibly to keep him out of reach of those who appropriate Dante in too private, individualistic ways – that she had her father in mind is plausible. By refusing to break down Dante’s status as a universal poet into portions her contemporaries would easily digest, she resists the urge to downsize the reach of Dante’s philosophical and theological dimension that can be found in other texts by contemporary writers. There is another subtle hint at her father’s theories. Avoiding his key concept of allegory, M. Rossetti acknowledges that Dante’s style is ‘elliptical’ and ‘recondite’ and warns the reader that this text is double-layered, in that ‘[a] first thought often lies coiled up and hidden under a second’ (3). Yet she eschews any more direct reference to what in her father’s interpretation was a gergo, a consistently elaborated superficial ‘veil’ of allegorical hints pointing towards a deeper meaning. M. Rossetti’s verbal balancing act impressively reflects the essentially split reactions to her and her sibling’s Dantean legacy. It represents the imbricate midway stance so typical of her siblings’ writings poising themselves between rejection and acknowledgement or denial and gratitude towards their father, thereby reflecting the conflicting voices of poetic autonomy and family loyalty. Regarding the status of Beatrice, M. Rossetti clearly states her awareness of the complexity of debates and ‘the perplexity of scholars and commentators, some regarding her as a personage from first to last purely allegorical’ (18). By adopting ‘the view of Boccaccio and the

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majority’ (18) – that is seeing Beatrice as a historical woman – she also rejects her father’s position. Yet another passage reveals M. Rossetti’s desire to combine the two interpretative views, the historical and allegorical: May it not be that after many alterations of struggling and succumbing despite his better self and his sage maxims, a most vivid sense of pollution and of peril, aided by a sudden strong imagination of Beatrice, came upon him; and that as entranced he glanced on her glorified loveliness he instinctively identified with her his Philosophy already transfigured, potent not only now to charm and soothe, potent to rule; . . .? (24) M. Rossetti leaves this question open and concludes with a quotation from the Vita Nuova’s section XVIII, stating that ‘whether or not this theory can be sustained, it is certain that in renewed and perpetual allegiance to his First-Beloved he signs and seals his Vita Nuova’ (25). This passage represents an example of her synthesizing power, presupposing a familiarity with all of Dante’s writings, a consciousness of the differences between them and her wish to unite these divergent, contradictory aspects. M. Rossetti approaches the Commedia with the scrupulous exactitude of a scholar combined with the transparency of a teacher and the neutrality of a diplomat. Motivated by her Christian faith, she did not defend a specific theory but tried to make Dante’s world, distant and different as she considers it to be, accessible to the contemporary reader. While her theological mindset as well as her method differ sharply from her brother’s, Dante Gabriel’s, she thus also put her knowledge of Dante into the service of translation.

Entering the ‘Dantesque Field’ II: William Michael, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti In 1865 William Michael Rossetti published his blank verse translation of Inferno, self-confidently entitled ‘The Hell’ (as opposed to an anglicized ‘Inferno’). Its preface is a quarry for those interested in theoretic aspects of translation. Here W. M. Rossetti expounds a methodology which is based on strict literality. According to him, two things need to be considered in the translation process: the substance and the form of the original. Thus, at the expense of originality, W. M. Rossetti favours truth, produced by ‘unconditional literality in phraseology, and a line-for-line rendering’ (Hell iii) and the adoption of the metre, even though he does not adopt the rhyme scheme of the terza rima. He mentions Beatrice in the ‘Biographical Memorandum’ which follows the Preface. It shows that W. M. Rossetti was a writer as well as a biographer: he wrote and edited several volumes on the development of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; besides editing their journal The Germ, he edited many of his family’s papers and wrote

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memoirs of his brother and sister Christina; he edited 15 volumes of Moxon’s ‘Popular Poets’ and biographies of several literary figures such as P. B. Shelley, William Blake and John Keats. In the ‘Biographical Memorandum’, W. M. Rossetti mentions that in ‘childhood also commenced the enduring passion of his life for his glorified Beatrice, whom he first met at a feast given by her father, Folco Portinari’ (Hell viii). He then goes on to wonder ‘what bar may have existed to a marriage between Dante and Beatrice’ (viii) and states that Beatrice was the wife of another man, Simon dei Bardi. This, W. M. Rossetti asserts, was a turning point in Dante’s life and determined the outcome of the Vita Nuova, which he identifies as an account of Dante’s passion for Beatrice, thereby implicitly arguing that it is based on real events and thus on real people: In 1290 she died, while Dante was still occupied in the composition of his Vita Nuova, whose prose narrative, interspersed with poems, tells the history of his passion. Poignant as was his grief, which appeared to his friends to bode imminent death, he was induced by them, in the following year, to marry Gemma Donati, by whom he had several children. There is reason for crediting Gemma with some sterling qualities, but she is accused of an uncontrollable temper. At any rate, it is Boccaccio’s testimony that Dante, ‘once divided from her, would never either go where she was, or suffer that she should come where he was’. (Hell viii) His account, despite its depiction of Gemma as Dante’s Xanthippe, does not dwell much on Beatrice and it is only in the translation, in a footnote to Canto II, that he briefly mentions the significance of certain female figures in the Commedia. The ‘gentle lady’ who intervenes on Dante’s behalf ‘is understood to be Divine Mercy; Lucia, or Saint Lucy, reference to whom occurs immediately afterwards, Enlightening Grace; and Rachel is symbolic of the Contemplative Life. Allegorically speaking, Beatrice herself is considered as the Divine Wisdom’ (W. M. Rossetti, Hell 12). W. M. Rossetti points out the possibility of an allegorical meaning but does not comment on such an approach nor does he mention his father’s writings. More outspoken criticism can be found in a preface (written in 1892) to the 1900 edition of Dante and His Circle, where W. M. Rossetti takes pains to dissociate his brother from too close an association with their father’s theories, claiming that Dante Gabriel did not ‘at any time show the least tendency towards adopting, or even towards scrutinizing, the allegorical, non-natural, or abstruse interpretations which our father put upon Dante and the Italian Medieval and Renaissance writers’ (vii). He then goes on to explain that his brother was primarily interested in the ‘sentiment’ of Dante. As mentioned above, D. G. Rossetti understood the Vita Nuova to be an autobiographic mirror of personal feeling, presuming that Dante ‘truly meant what he plainly – or sometimes what he not very plainly, yet still apparently and

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ostensibly – said’ (Preface Dante and His Circle vii). W. M. Rossetti also translated the Convito and published it together with his own comments in 1910. He shows awareness of ‘endless controversies’ surrounding Beatrice’s status and his father’s active part in them, but argues that ‘there was a real Beatrice beloved by Dante, a beautiful damsel living in Florence, and that this Beatrice may have been the same person who was born a Portinari and who married into the Bardi family’ (Dante and His Convito 7). He acknowledges his father’s contribution to the debate but then discards his theories as irrelevant to his present purpose. It seems as if he was weary of following and participating in these controversies and opts for a clear-cut standpoint from which he can then more conveniently move on with his own endeavour, which is biographical. In ‘Monna Innominata’ (1881), one of her two sonnet cycles, C. Rossetti shows her determination to free Beatrice from the allegorical aura her father had invested her with.9 By giving a voice to female muses such as Beatrice and Laura, she sees the significance of Dante’s poetry not in a cryptic undecipherable meaning but within a public, social context. As the title suggests, the nameless object of poetic praise, of which so little is known, is the central figure of her poems. Not unlike Maria Francesca in The Shadow of Dante, C. Rossetti had clearly stated her concern not to ‘touch upon the allegorical significations which meet us with more or less salience in page after page’ and not to approach ‘that more abstruse anagogical system of interpretation which, as may be inferred from the “Convito”, Dante himself suggests as applicable to the “Divina Commedia”’ (‘English Classic’ 201) in her first, earlier essay on Dante published in The Churchman’s Shilling Magazine and Family Treasure in 1867. Another essay published in 1884 in The Century is her most ambitious discussion of the Italian poet. It consists of three parts: after an introduction expounding the family relation with Dante, C. Rossetti proceeds with a discussion of the public Dante, his private life and love for Beatrice and concludes with a plot summary of the Commedia. First, however, she situates herself within a family structure: If formidable for others, it is not least formidable for one of my name, for me, to enter the Dantesque field and say my little say on the Man and on the Poem; for others of my name have been before me in the same field, and have wrought permanent and worthy work in attestation of their diligence. My father, Gabriele Rossetti, in his ‘Comento Analitico sull’ Inferno di Dante’ (‘Analytical Commentary upon Dante’s Hell’), has left to tyros a clew and to fellow-experts a theory. My sister Maria Francesca Rossetti, has in her ‘Shadow of Dante’ eloquently expounded the Divina Commedia as a discourse of most elevated Christian faith and morals. My brother Dante has translated with a rare felicity the ‘Vita Nuova’ (‘New Life’) and other minor (poetical) works of his great namesake. My brother William has, with a strenuous endeavour to achieve close verbal accuracy, rendered the Inferno into English blank verse. I, who cannot lay claim to their learning, must approach my subject

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under cover of ‘Mi valga . . . il grande amore’ (‘May my great love avail me’), leaving to them the more confident plea, ‘Mi valga il lungo studio’ (‘May my long study avail me’). (‘Poet Illustrated’ 566–67) This passage reads like a humble, understated confession of the amatory nature of her interest in Dante, which she contrasts with the scholarly approach of her siblings and her father. She opposes her father’s theories, her sister’s religious interest and her brother’s claim to literality to her own love for Dante, claiming that her motivation comes from emotion and less from scholarly competence. As Mary Arseneau has stated, C. Rossetti’s sense of belatedness stemmed not only from the unsurpassability of her predecessor Dante, but also from the immediate familial context which she summarizes (‘My Great Love’ 28). She thus carried a double burden resulting from a biological and ideal descent, the weight of her father’s and siblings’ contributions to a vast field of study and Dante’s powerful shadow. Yet the ‘little’ that she has to say on Dante becomes a piece of perceptive criticism, mainly of her father’s theories, when she turns to her observations on Dante’s private life. She blandly rejects an allegorical understanding of Beatrice. Beatrice, from C. Rossetti’s point of view, is the ‘daughter of Folco Portinari, beautiful, gracious, replete with virtue, courteous, and humble’, and as Dante’s ‘beloved object’ she helped ‘to make him what he was, to withhold him from becoming such as he became not’ (‘Poet Illustrated’ 571). Her historical reality does not prevent her from uniting earthly physical charms with unearthly grace, since for any other mortal woman ‘of mere flesh and blood’ (‘Poet Illustrated’ 571) – C. Rossetti has Gemma Donati in mind – she was tough competition given her angelic status when alive and dead. C. Rossetti seems to advocate the interests of Gemma, whose marriage with Dante, she assumes, was overshadowed by his idealization of Beatrice, when she states that ‘Gemma is truly to be pitied in her comparatively thankless and loveless lot’ (‘Poet Illustrated’ 571). But more than that, C. Rossetti also tacitly dismissed her father’s theories, his allegorical reading of Beatrice and his political theories, when she refers to ‘some students’ who speak of hidden lore underlying the letter of our poet’s writings: in Beatrice they think to discern an impersonation rather than a woman, in the Divine Comedy a meaning political rather than dogmatic, – or, if in any sense dogmatic, yet not such as appears on the surface. So obscure a field of investigation is not for me or for my readers; at least, not for them through any help of mine. (‘Poet Illustrated’ 572) Like her brother William Michael, C. Rossetti dismisses her father’s allegorical readings as unsuitable for her own work. Yet there is an edge in her phrasing which could not be found in William’s, discernible in the last clause of the quotation.

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As for D. G. Rossetti, his sonnet ‘Dantis Tenebrae (In Memory of My Father 190)’, composed in 1861 and published in 1870, comments on his relationship with two father figures and the double legacy he inherited from his biological and poetic father. He asks: And did’st thou know indeed, when at this font Together with thy name thou gav’st me his, That also on thy son must Beatrice Decline her eyes according to her wont (190)10 The poem expresses gratitude and indebtedness to his father, at the same time Dante displaces D. G. Rossetti’s father as the central authority in his son’s life. Together with this artistic lineage comes another lifelong bond, namely, his pledge to Beatrice as his muse. D. G. Rossetti aligns himself with Dante and puts himself into a parallel situation. Further on in the poem, he describes his artistic fate and his personal biography as premeditated, following a ‘foot-track’ (l. 7), an image which recalls Dante’s itinerary in the Commedia. Tantamount to a feeling of submission towards a paternal power – familial, poetic – greater than his own, is his adherence to a select group of those who ‘haunt / the vale of magical dark mysteries’ (ll. 5–6). Possibly this is an allusion to his father’s secret society activities. The poem expresses a strong sense of pride connected to his Italian roots. It considers Beatrice as a link, an umbilical cord, between biological father and son and literary predecessor and successor. In many respects, Dante functioned as an alter ego for D. G. Rossetti, being a representative of his own Italian legacy, whose life, both as an unhappy lover and an exile, mirrored his own double national identity (see Pardini-Laurent 34). That there was ground for personal identification with the Italian poet is understandable given D. G. Rossetti’s reading of the Vita Nuova as a purely autobiographic account, which he called an ‘autopsychology’ (Early Italian Poets 145) in his Introduction (Part II) to the first edition in 1861. Reading it as a mirror of Dante’s psychology, an immediate document of Dante’s emotions, D. G. Rossetti gained an authentic experience which not only made him prioritize the Vita Nuova but, as the following chapter will show, which he also wanted to create in his own writing and painting (Early Italian Poets 146).

Chapter 4

Ideal Visions: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti

While Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti made use of symbolic and allegorical techniques in their poetry and paintings, they did not embrace their father’s consistently allegorical approach to Dante. It is more appropriate to think of Dante’s texts both as foils underlying their work and as catalysts helping them establish their own niches and creative profiles which this chapter seeks to uncover. Hence its title: ‘ideal visions’. Both poets drew unique visions from their reading of Dante’s texts and Beatrice in particular: C. Rossetti’s sonnet sequence ‘Monna Innominata’ can be seen as a revisionary riposte to old poetic traditions, sketching what a rewriting of such texts as Dante’s Vita Nuova might have to consider in her own time; D. G. Rossetti contributes to the Victorian visualizing of Beatrice, as discussed in Chapter 2, by anchoring this figure deeply within his intermedial literary and artistic project. C. Rossetti’s reading of Dante inevitably brings up gender issues. John Ruskin’s dismissive verdict on Maria Rossetti’s A Shadow of Dante as ‘evangelical nonsense’, grounded in his general belief that as a ‘girl’ she was not equipped to write about Dante, provides a challenging declaration against which her intertextual procedures can be read.1 C. Rossetti was sensitive to the imbalanced relation between the sexes in literary traditions dominated by male poets and she centres her approach to Dante on this perceived inequity. Based on the conventions of the medieval Troubadour tradition, these poets grounded their veneration of the female beloved, her beauty and moral excellence bringing about a rhetorical division between the male lover, who casts himself in the role of the humble servant, and the woman, who, although she is the object of his passionate vows and praises, remains distant and intangible. C. Rossetti adopts and transforms these conventions according to her own needs. She thereby not only distances herself from her brother, who also wrote sonnets, and from her father, but also implicitly points out the deficiencies of these traditions which insist on the woman as the object of male desire and artistic potency. Her subversion of the modes and patterns of the sonnet cycle genre leads to her self-conscious self-positioning as a nineteenth-century female poet in her own right and highlights the flaws in the representation of gender roles

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both in the past and present. C. Rossetti’s poetry reflects on the potential of literary, more specifically, intertextual techniques to interact with social realities, by showing where they went wrong and by suggesting alternative models of communication between the sexes. D. G. Rossetti’s interpretation of Beatrice is more ambiguous than that of his sister. His achievement was that he developed a fruitful dynamic out of the conflict between Beatrice’s assumed reality and her spirituality, which preoccupied and possibly paralyzed some of his contemporaries struggling to win her for either side. Looking at selected examples from his poetic oeuvre and two of his paintings illustrating scenes taken from Dante, The Salutation of Beatrice and Dante’s Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice, I argue that for D. G. Rossetti Beatrice represented an embodiment of his ideal poetic and artistic vision and practice which is fundamentally intermedial.

Christina Rossetti’s Reception of Dante C. Rossetti’s life was, according to her brother William, an ‘internal’ one (‘Memoir’ lviii). She spent most of her adult life living with her mother and declined two marriage proposals. As is the case with Dante Gabriel, Christina’s life and work are frequently conflated by critics and biographers. Even William Michael, in his ‘Memoir’ of Christina, dedicates some attention to two ‘affairs of the heart’: her romances with James Collinson, affiliated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and Charles Bagot Cayley, pupil of her father and translator of the Commedia, both of whom she rejected on religious grounds (liii–liv). Cayley began his studies of Italian in 1847 with G. Rossetti and developed friendships with William and Dante Gabriel, being thus ‘drawn into the circle’ of the Rossetti family and the Pre-Raphaelites. Neither of her two suitors embraced C. Rossetti’s Protestant belief – James Collinson had even converted to Catholicism – and neither would have been adequate for a devout believer such as her. By her standards, Cayley’s religious beliefs (parts of his theology and biblical exegesis provided in the notes to the translation differed from C. Rossetti’s strict Anglican beliefs) bordered on religious unorthodoxy. In her letters and biographies and through the medium of her poetry she appears as a sober, devout, modest, selfsacrificing woman. Her poetry is one of renunciation and it is within this context of loss, loneliness, separation and abdication from the joys of earthly love in favour of an untainted religious vision that her lifelong interest in Beatrice emerges most visibly. Her sonnet cycle ‘Monna Innominata’ (1881) contains very explicit intertextual references to Dante and engages most intensively in a critical dialogue with preceding literary traditions. Apart from his conspicuous presence in ‘Monna Innominata’, which will be discussed in detail below, Dante’s presence makes

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itself felt in a number of her poems.2 ‘An Old-World Thicket’ (1881) opens with a reference to Dante’s first canto of the Inferno, evoking ‘una selva oscura’ (331) by situating the speaker ‘mazed within a wood’ (l. 2; 331). A similar theme runs through ‘The Dead City’ (1847) and its depiction of the speaker’s journey through ‘the mazes of that wood’ (l. 32; 596). Sonnet 10 of her sonnet cycle ‘Later Life’ (1881) again explicitly quotes from Dante, this time from Inferno V (ll. 82–84), where she describes souls in Paradise. Poems such as ‘Echo’ (1862), ‘Memory’ (1866), ‘The Convent Threshold’ (1862) or ‘One Day’ (1866) revolve around the notion of separation and refer to the ideal happiness found in the afterlife. ‘Isidora’ (written 1847, published posthumously) closes on the same note of yearning for a heavenly reunion with the beloved, as D. G. Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’ does, when the speaker asks: ‘Blessed Saviour, take my soul / To thy Paradise and care; – / Paradise, will he be there?’ (ll. 71–72; Collected Poetry 671). ‘One day’ takes up a similar theme when the speaker wonders ‘When shall they meet? I cannot tell, / Indeed, when they shall meet again, / Except some day in Paradise: / For this they wait, one waits in pain’ (ll. 16–19; 127). C. Rossetti also repeatedly adopts the point of view of a dead woman, as for instance in ‘Remember’, ‘Song: When I am dead’ and ‘After death’ (all published in 1862), whose octave concludes on the assumption that ‘he did not love me living; but once dead / He pitied me; and very sweet it is / To know he still is warm tho’ I am cold’ (ll. 12–14; 32). More references to Beatrice can be found in her Italian poems ‘Il Rosseggiar dell’Oriente’. Discovered after her death and published in a separate section in William Michael’s 1904 edition of The Poetical Works of C. G. Rossetti, these poems have received scant critical attention.3 ‘Il Rosseggiar dell’Oriente’ contains a sonnet which, it has been argued, forms part of a dialogue with Cayley (see Denman/Smith 332) and in which he fashions Blumine and her infatuated, yet unromantic suitor Professor Teufelsdröckh, both taken from Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1831), in the roles of a Beatrice and Dante. The sonnet, written in or before 1853, addresses Blumine, the poet’s muse, in the hope of receiving spiritual and creative inspiration from her, offering a glimpse of an afterlife spent together. C. Rossetti’s response, written in 1867, is entitled ‘Blumine risponde’ and envisions a meeting with the beloved in Heaven. Through the voice of the female beloved Blumine, alias Beatrice, C. Rossetti provides a reply to Cayley’s poem which forms a contrast with the yearning hopefulness of her male counterpart. Whereas Teufelsdröckh’s, alias Dante’s, position envisages a happy reunion in heaven and depicts the love between him and Beatrice as a source of inspiration towards which he aspires, C. Rossetti responds to the option of reunion less enthusiastically, arguing that ‘because of [him] [her] life lies half-dead’ (l. 5, 1148). Blumine’s love for Teufelsdröckh is as ambiguous as the love depicted in ‘Monna Innominata’: it is delightful, painful and disturbing at the same time, leaving her pining for a reunion and yet fearing it.

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‘Monna Innominata’: Empowering the Voiceless C. Rossetti’s poetry is densely intertextual. It explores and plays with conventional modes of expression, uses a variety of genres including fairy tales, devotional poetry and nursery rhymes as well as the Petrarchan sonnet form. ‘Monna Innominata’ contains 14 sonnets and thus contains in itself the structure of a Petrarchan sonnet. Its subtitle, ‘A Sonnet of Sonnets’, reflects this awareness of its status as a sonnet sequence. The intertextuality of the Commedia itself fascinated the poet: she described it as ‘alive with classical and historical allusions’ in her 1867 essay on Dante (‘Dante: An English Classic’ 201). It seems as if in her ‘Monna Innominata’ sequence, C. Rossetti was keen to adopt a similar sense of lively dynamic resulting from a variety of intertextual contacts and voices. Each of the 14 sonnets is preceded by two epigraphs, one each from Dante and Petrarch. All of the Dantean references are taken from the Commedia and not from the Vita Nuova, as one would expect. Nine of the fourteen epigraphs are taken from Purgatorio among which three (for the first, second and eighth sonnet) are taken from Purgatorio VIII. That Purgatorio was the major source from which Rossetti drew her quotations is not surprising given that this part of the Commedia abounds with talk about and discussions of poetry. These quotations are given without any precise reference to their source. C. Rossetti does not indicate the exact position of the quotations in the pretext making them appear detached from these poems. Yet it is obvious that both the discourse into which she places her own poems by aligning them together with these quotations and the poetological ‘framework’ which is established in Purgatorio, are male. Each epigraph imports its own speaking voice into the sonnet sequence and thus invites a dialogue with the speaking voice of Rossetti’s sonnet.4 C. Rossetti pushes her intertextuality further: it helps her define her own position within a literary tradition and envisages a rewriting of the genre’s mode through an inversion of its constitutive codes and topoi. This shows that she was fascinated ‘with the tradition that presents many a “nameless girl” as the object of her poet-lover’s rapture while keeping her “hidden” behind the screen of his words’ (Hassett 156). Her instrumentalization of intertextual techniques serves a wider reflection on relationships and the detrimental effect idealization can have – an idea which George Eliot develops in similar ways in Romola. The sonnets are preceded by a prefatory note which introduces Beatrice at the very beginning: Beatrice, immortalized by ‘altissimo poeta . . . cotanto amante’; Laura, celebrated by a great tho’ an inferior bard, – have alike paid the exceptional penalty of exceptional honour, and have come down to us resplendent with charms, but (at least, to my apprehension) scant of attractiveness. (294)

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The first part of the Italian quote is from Inferno IV (l. 80) and refers to Virgil. The second part of the quotation, ‘cotanto amante’, refers to Inferno V (l. 134), recounting the episode of Paolo and Francesca. Petrarch ranks on a lower scale than Dante; he is ‘the inferior bard’. That these two ladies, Beatrice and Laura, received ‘exceptional honour’ and utmost poetic praise, Rossetti leaves undoubted, but she challenges the topos of the beautiful and virtuous woman by asking at what price this veneration is bought. She names the penalty: they lack fervour and attractiveness. They are beautiful and virtuous, but pale and lifeless figures, because they have never spoken to us themselves. In this respect they are punished for being born late. C. Rossetti looks back to a time prior to that of Beatrice and Laura, when women were celebrated (by less renowned poets) but at the same time able to develop their own poetic voice; a time when the codes of virtue and honour applied, that is, the ‘barrier’ of the woman’s marriage to another man remained upheld. This different scenario – both the woman and the man share a ‘poetic aptitude’ when at the same time there is mutual respect – would not lead to the ‘unhealthy’ form of elevation by which Dante distanced Beatrice from his reach and the rest of womanhood, thereby disempowering her as a speaking voice in her own right: These ladies of world-wide fame were preceded by a bevy of unnamed ladies ‘donne innominate’ sung by a school of less conspicuous poets; and in that land and that period which gave simultaneous birth to Catholics, to Albigenses, one can imagine many a lady sharing her lover’s poetic aptitude, while the barrier between them might be one held sacred by both, yet not such as to render mutual love incompatible with mutual honour. (294) In the Provence of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the schools of the Troubadours, Rossetti imagines ‘a bevy of unnamed ladies “donne innominate”’, who lived and composed poetry in a climate of sexual and artistic equality. If only we had the testimony of such a voice, she says, we would have a more perceptive idea of these women’s inner lives, an understanding which would not sacrifice truthfulness to the upkeeping of an unblemished ideal: Had such a lady spoken for herself, the portrait left us might have appeared more tender, if less dignified, than any drawn even by a devoted friend. Or had the Great Poetess of our own day and nation been unhappy instead of happy, her circumstances would have invited her to bequeath to us, in lieu of the ‘Portuguese Sonnets’, an inimitable ‘donna innominata’ drawn not from fancy but from feeling, and worthy to occupy a niche beside Beatrice and Laura. (294) In ‘Monna Innominata’ C. Rossetti rewrites the relation between the sexes which had determined the tradition of the genre. As a sonnet cycle, ‘Monna Innominata’

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partakes in a long generic tradition which had developed in England from the sixteenth century onwards in the form of Renaissance sonnet cycles and was then continued by male and female sonneteers in the early modern period and beyond. Despite formal requirements such as the 14 lines length of a sonnet, there is a certain variety and flexibility with respect to a sonnet’s form and content. The sonnet tradition has ever since owed many of its vital impulses to innovation and the bending of stylistic rules (see Spiller 1–10). In the nineteenth century a number of sonnet cycles were produced, most notably D. G. Rossetti’s ‘House of Life’ (1881), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) or George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862).5 Yet C. Rossetti deconstructs the literary tradition which she evokes. Examples are her insistence on the equality of lovers in, for example, sonnet 4 and her resurrection of a time before Dante and Petrarch when sexual and literary equality between the sexes was possible in her introductory comment. By insisting on the reciprocity of love and the invalidity of rivalry in love, which means that love presupposes equality and should not lead to a competition on who loves the other better, more intensely or more truly, she subverts the Petrarchan convention. The latter sees the beloved as exalted (e.g. the goddess) and the lover as abased (sinner) and its basic pattern, a massive inequality in competence and power, is still at work in her own time. The reason for this is that all the gestures of veneration and deification which the male poets use to praise their lady are rhetorical, based on an understanding of the woman as object of poetic idolatry, whom the poet can mould according to his own ideas. C. Rossetti’s disavowal of established power relations between the sexes and her radical equalization of the male and the female as human beings and as poets challenges preceding traditions. She does not deny or downplay the redemptive function of woman, whose task is to guide her lover in secular and theological questions. But hers is a living woman who knows how to protest and to complain and whose emotions are varied and changing and therefore maybe more exciting than those of a Beatrice whose own response to Dante’s emotions is never brought to the fore. By adopting the position of a Beatrice herself, by endowing her and a series of unknown, silent ladies with a voice, the speaker turns conventional power structures upside down. Most of the sonnets, individually contemplated, adopt a position counter to the conventions of the Petrarchan tradition. The two main differences are an emancipation of the hitherto speechless female muse, traditionally celebrated as the object of male desire and poetry and as a revision of the concomitant concept of love. C. Rossetti represents love as a complex, frail, shifting and dynamic feeling experienced by two equal lovers, but persistently misrepresented. Love is no monolithic, static state of mind, as Dante has us believe when he describes how ever since he met Beatrice as a child he continuously and unfalteringly felt deepest love and admiration for her. Neither can love be objectified with the help of rigid conventions. Sonnet 1 depicts the ambiguity inherent in the

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dynamic of desire, leaving the speaker oscillating and hesitating between keen anticipation of a reunion and fearful premonition of future pain: ‘Come back to me, who wait and watch for you: – / Or come not yet, for it is over then’ (ll. 1–2; 294). The second sonnet unhinges another topical moment in a Petrarchan sonnet, the memorability of the first encounter of the two lovers, by mentioning the speaker’s amnesia. ‘I wish I could remember, that first day, / First hour, first moment of your meeting me’ (ll. 1–2; 295), she says so unlike Dante who, in the Vita Nuova, recalls how he, as a 9-year-old boy, first met Beatrice and saw the glory of her being.6 Another instance of an inversion of the genre conventions can be found in sonnet 12, where the speaker selflessly forfeits any exclusive right to her lover and rejects any claims which would secure her the position of the unique woman. Instead, she leaves it up to him to pursue ‘a nobler grace’, whose wit is ‘readier’ than her own and whose face ‘sweeter’ (ll. 4–5; 300): ‘Think not that I can grudge it’ (l. 3). The theme of equality between lovers recurs throughout the sonnets. Sonnet 7 asks whether the two lovers to ‘stand / as happy equals in the flowering land’ (ll. 2–3; 297), sonnet 11 how the world will perceive the Beatrices after their death: ‘Many in aftertimes will say of you / “He loved her” – while of me what will they say? Not that I loved you more than just in play, / For fashion’s sake as idle women do’ (ll 1–4; 299). This sonnet points towards a disparity between truth and appearance, between fact and fiction, between gossip and the private understanding of emotions, between the poet and his lover and the poet and his readership. What ‘they’ think and say, that is the outside world, is of no interest. ‘Idle women’ (l. 4) might love their lovers ‘in play, / for fashion’s sake’ (ll. 3–4) but her love is different. They don’t know ‘what we [the poet and her lover] knew / Of love and parting in exceeding pain’ (ll. 5–6). Her love, the speaker argues, is only hers, and it is not available for anybody else to change it, including her lover. It points out the imbalance of power and influence, which come with fame, and projects Beatrice clearly as a victim who has paid an ‘exceptional penalty’, and it shows the potential of literature to blur the lines between fact and fiction, of objectivity versus partiality. The last line, ‘My love of you was life and not a breath’ (l. 14; 300), reads like an attempt to rectify a traditional misunderstanding. It implies that much of what ‘people’ find interest in is temporary and fugitive, which is a notion that the epigraph taken from Purgatorio V (l.13), ‘vien dietro a me e lascia dir le genti (‘Come, follow me, and let these people talk’ [299]; Mandelbaum 235) suggests in a different context.7 What makes these epigraphs so interesting is their relevance to the themes developed in the sonnet they precede; their presence creates a tension between the semi-private, semi-public world of C. Rossetti’s love poetry and the massive canonical works they represent. Sonnet 7 resumes a theme which was introduced in sonnet 4 where the speaker deconstructs the mechanics of idealization by laying bare the misconstruction of personality taking place between lovers. True understanding is not

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possible when love is a competition, where one ‘loftier song’ (l. 2; 296) surpasses the other, where again, lovers are not equal, but measuring themselves against each other: ‘Nay, weights and measures do us both a wrong. / For verily love knows not “mine” or “thine;”/ With separate “I” and “thou” free love has done, . . .’ (ll. 8–10). Here the speaker targets the hyperbolic representation of the beloved woman in the Troubadour genre in which she outgrows her status as a human being. She is turned into poetic matter in the hands of the Promethean poet who will reshape her identity. The speaker’s ‘friendly cooings of [her] dove’ (l. 3), maybe less conspicuous, but persistent, are set against the more aggressive, rushed rhetorical gestures undertaken by the male lover who enters into a competition of ‘which owes the other most?’ (l. 4). The speaker brings forward another reproach, namely, that the lover’s desire to construe her according to his own ideas distances him from the essence of love. Whereas her lover tried to project his own ideal onto her, regardless of how suitable it was, she was prepared to love him the way he is, driven by a need to understand (‘I loved and guessed at you, you construed me/ And loved me for what might or might not be’ [ll. 6–7]). Rossetti rewrites a conventional love concept, redistributes the power balance and reorders her priorities in what appears to be a hierarchy of love, the conflict between eros and agape. Eros does not replace agape in C. Rossetti’s world, and the love for God becomes a prerequisite for the love the speaker feels for a man (‘Yet while I love my God the most, I deem / That I can never love you overmuch; / I love Him more, so let me love you too’ [sonnet 6, ll. 9–11; 297]) and ultimately the more fulfilling and adequate love for herself and for her beloved (‘And therefore I commend you back to Him / Whose love your love’s capacity can fill’ (sonnet 13, ll. 13–14; 301]). Antony H. Harrison has analyzed the use of intertextual techniques in the sonnet sequence (C. Rossetti in Context, 142–85). According to him, ‘Monna Innominata’ explores the possibilities of parody, understood in its broadest sense as a textual doubling which, in contrast to other forms such as pastiche or allusion, points out its deviance from existent models on which it is based. He examines her use of metalepsis which means that C. Rossetti’s intertextual use of Dante works as a corrective to the ‘lapsed’, that is, faulty, Dantean tradition. The effect is double: by endowing Beatrice with a voice of her own, she recreates her in a more truthful, because more original way than Dante and his successors did. Certainly C. Rossetti cannot rewrite literary history nor can she translate her poetic corrections into her present time. Her love and poetic project fail ‘because [they] are circumscribed by Victorian cultural values and informed by Victorian rather than medieval sensibilities’, Harrison argues (Christina Rossetti in Context 185). Yet C. Rossetti’s criticism of the Dantean and Petrarchan traditions implies her awareness of the unlikelihood of the change she envisions. She employs intertextual procedures to comment upon her present situation, but they appear to be a distanced method of criticism caused by perceived, acute necessity, yet (possibly painfully) aware of its limitations.

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So maybe the question should not be whether C. Rossetti’s intertextual critique of historical and contemporary gender politics succeeds or fails but whether it helps to enrich her argument and literary project and fortify her poetic voice. The latter point seems to be crucial, given that her brother’s ‘House of Life’ sonnet cycle, incomparably vaster in scope and more diverse in subjects, centres on the fragility of the self and the conflicting forces endangering the stability of the (male) ego.8 C. Rossetti’s use of intertextual procedures leads the poems’ persona to a far rounder, cohesive and settled self-expression. Because of its reversal of the poetic speaking voice – it is the hitherto nameless and mute female beloved who is speaking – her poetry manages to move beyond the moments of stagnation, respectively crisis of the self, which her brother faces and which render the speaking subjects in his poetry more fragmentary and threatened by dissolution. Whereas D. G. Rossetti’s final sonnet of ‘The House of Life’, ‘The One Hope’, closes the sequence on a note of ‘vain desire’, ‘vain regret’ (l. 1; Collected Poetry 171) and ‘unforgotten pain’ (l. 3), clinging to ‘the one Hope’s one name’ (l. 13; 172), a rather feeble prospect in the face of the overall sense of futility and morbidity which his sequence conveys, C. Rossetti’s outlook is different. Her closing sonnet reads less like a lamentation for the loss of her love than like a blissful prophesy. She defers her worldly love to a higher, divine purpose. The speaker forsakes her earthly bliss and leaves behind her youth and beauty (l. 3; 301), but this happens in a mood of reconciliation. The speaker is aware of the course of time and the change that it brings, making certain gestures unnecessary and irrelevant for her well-being (‘Leave youth his roses, who can bear a thorn’ [l. 6]). Hope resides in her memory of former times and her yearning for a transcendent, spiritual fulfilment. Such an interpretation is made plausible if the quotation from Dante’s Paradiso III (l. 85), which precedes the sonnet, is considered: ‘E la Sua Volontade è nostra pace’. The speaker delays her happiness to a state unaffected by earthly events and conflicts.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Reception of Dante In 1848, the annus mirabilis in the history of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, D. G. Rossetti came across an illustration of a dramatic scenario which took lasting hold on his imagination. Inspired by the letters of John Keats, D. G. Rossetti and William Holman Hunt had purchased a book of reproductions of the Campo Santo Frescos in Pisa.9 Intrigued by the medieval splendour of these frescoes, D. G. Rossetti would have noticed a young couple of lovers unexpectedly falling prey to death as the ultimate, winged destroyer of human happiness and earthly bliss. At a time when he was deeply immersed in his translation work of twelfth- and thirteenth-century poets such as Guido Gunizelli, Giacomo Pugliesi and Fazio degli Uberti among which Dante’s Vita Nuova was

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the centrepiece, this scene represents a moment of tragedy similar to Dante’s and Beatrice’s unhappy situation. Throughout his career, love, separation, death, loss and desire were crucial themes and moods. ‘Praise and Prayer’ (c.1848) is a poem which was published posthumously by W. M. Rossetti in 1898. It mourns the insurmountable distance between two lovers created through death and expresses the resulting desire for reunion. Given its early date of composition, it anticipates a feeling of Rossettian guilt and despair so characteristic of certain sonnets in the ‘House of Life’ cycle. The sonnet introduces the speaker’s desperate situation facing religious doubt and anxiety after his beloved’s death. The octave reveals the source of the speaker’s suffering: . . . My voice might mix With hers, but mingled not. Hers was a full Grand burst of music, which the crownèd Seven Must have leaned sideways from their seats to fix In their calm minds. The seraph-songs fell dull Doubtless, when heard again, throughout all heaven. (ll. 9–14; 344) The scenario is very similar to that of the ‘Blessed Damozel’, a poem which D. G. Rossetti began to write in its original version in 1846 but revised in various forms until its final publication in 1881. Within a heavenly environment composed of stars, music, saints and angels, the beloved has taken her place which keeps her out of her lover’s reach, barring him both from a reunion and the possibility of communication. It is the speaker’s disbelief and religious doubt, his rejection of ‘the furnished phrases smooth and blank’ (l. 7) so consolatory for others, which eventually denies him the possibility of joining in, of regaining a feeling of hope and reconciliation. ‘The Blessed Damozel’ provides a similarly dismal outlook on the lovers’ chances of reunion, focusing on the impossibility of communication. It adopts the perspective of the beloved woman in heaven, standing on ‘the rampart of God’s house . . . So high, that looking downward thence / She scarce could see the sun’ (ll. 25 and 29–30; 3). The physicality of the damozel’s description and the trans-valuation of Christian values according to Rossetti’s own androcentric needs offer instances of his secularized reading of Dante and understanding of Beatrice. Besides these thematic parallels, that is, ur-Dantean conflicts such as the separation of lovers through death, the adoration of the beloved and her redemptive power, Dante’s impact crystallizes in a multitude of paintings.10 D. G. Rossetti’s favourite episodes were those from the Vita Nuova, as, for example, The Salutation of Beatrice (1859; VN III and Purgatorio XXX), Beatrice meeting Dante at a Marriage Feast (VN XIV, 1851) or The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (Dante Drawing an Angel) (VN XXXIV, 1849). Examples of paintings illustrating the Commedia are Paolo and Francesca da Rimini (Inferno V, 1855), La Pia de’ Tolomei (Purgatorio VI,

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1868–1880) and Dante’s Vision of Rachel and Leah (Purgatorio XXVII, 1855). Besides, there are paintings which were inspired by Dante in theme or conception, such as Beata Beatrix (1864–1870) or La Donna della Fiamma (1870). Dante’s impact on D. G. Rossetti’s poetry is also reflected explicitly in the titles of some of his poems such as ‘Dante at Verona’, ‘On the “Vita Nuova” of Dante’ or ‘Dantis Tenebrae’ (all published in 1870). Apart from those poems clearly marked as referring to Dante, there are two works which stand at the centre of his engagement with the Italian poet. The first is his volume of translations of Early Italian Poets (1861); the second, ‘The House of Life’ (1881), a sonnet sequence which reflects his knowledge of Dante’s Vita Nuova in theme, conception and genre.11 Rossetti’s use of Beatrice as a subject for his poetry and paintings is persistent, yet there is a peak in the number of Vita Nuova paintings between 1849 and the mid-1850s, which could be explained in terms of his then current occupation with his translation. His representations of Beatrice provide a clear example of his need and habit to use the media of painting and poetry in order to express his artistic concepts. As Eben Bass pointed out, it seems that the importance of Beatrice could not have been adequately expressed in either of these media separately (79). Or, in the words of D. G. Rossetti: ‘Picture and poem bear the same relationship to each other as beauty does in man and woman: the point of meeting where the two are most identical is the supreme perfection’ (W. M. Rossetti, The Works of D. G. Rossetti 606). This difficult statement bears a double significance because it comments on two important aspects of Rossetti’s thought: his idea of romantic love and his understanding of the relation between images and text. He identifies the heterosexual love union as a way towards human perfection, or utmost beauty, presupposing that a point will be reached when this union results in a fusion of identical souls.12 The second significant aspect which the quotation broaches is the relation between literature and the visual media and their translatability. This comment gives insight into how Rossetti viewed his own intermedial approach. He implies that the two media are different, yet it is in their fusion that ‘supreme perfection’ lies, a statement which presupposes that structural differences between the media can and have to be overcome for the sake of artistic brilliance. Taken individually, D. G. Rossetti is saying, the two media of painting and literature are unable to unfold their full potential, which only reveals itself in their combination. As will be shown below, he believed in and practised the possibility of a ‘translational’ act dissolving boundaries between the two media. Dante’s Beatrice, unlike any other female figure from the literary tradition, embodies the fusion of spiritual and physical grandeur and beauty so typical of D. G. Rossetti’s work. This is one particular feature which Walter Pater celebrated as D. G. Rossetti’s major asset and contribution to nineteenth-century literature and art, because it happens in direct imitation of Dante Alighieri’s

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procedure (Pater, Appreciations 207). Or, in the words of his brother, who describes Dante Gabriel’s figurative method: This interpenetration of soul and body – this sense of an equal and indefeasible reality of the thing symbolized, and of the form which conveys the symbol – this externalism and internalism – are constantly to be understood as the keynote of Rossetti’s aim and performance in art. (W. M. Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti as Designer 108) Given her duality as a historical and a spiritual figure, Beatrice is important for D. G. Rossetti’s attempt to bridge historical and cultural gaps, as for example between erotic and poetic concepts, arising from the spiritual and intellectual discrepancy between his own and Dante’s age. D. G. Rossetti hopes to overcome the temporal and intellectual division between his age and the past, between Victorian England and medieval Italy, through various forms of translation. In his case, translation needs to be understood in a generous sense which transcends its primary meaning as an act of verbal transposition from one language into another. The figure of Beatrice helped him to organize several ‘translational’ acts which lie at the heart of his artistic endeavour: the translation of the physical into the spiritual and vice versa and the translation of an idea or concept from one medium into the other, as two equal facets or incarnations of one ideal vision. I will return to these complex acts of translation below. First, D. G. Rossetti’s obsession with femininity and feminine beauty needs to be further assessed. C. Rossetti addressed the status of women in her brother’s work in the poem ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ and thereby anticipated Jan Marsh’s diagnosis of PreRaphaelite art as obsessed with femininity, displayed in innumerable ‘depictions of figures from literature and legend, or in symbolic and metaphorical aspect as allegories and personifications of abstract qualities’ (Pre-Raphaelite Women 10). It is connected to C. Rossetti’s ‘Monna Innominata’ sequence through its description of a woman who, because of her anonymity, seems to represent a tradition in which beautiful and adored yet nameless women serve as projection screens for the male gaze and imagination.13 ‘One face looks out from all his canvases’, reads the first line of the poem, ‘[a] saint, an angel – every canvas means / That same one meaning, neither more or less’ (ll. 7–8; 796). It is not the actual woman the picture shows but an image of her ‘as she fills his dream’ (l. 14). Wrapped in a Petrarchan form, the sonnet implicitly criticizes the sort of poetic subject matter and aesthetic style her brother cultivated: the overemphasis on the woman’s constantly available physical beauty, at the expense of her true self which he ignores. Her poem concludes with a deeply significant statement on the real nature of these women: they are projections of the artist’s self, of his unfulfilled dreams and hopes. As his sonnet ‘The Portrait’ (1870) suggests, D. G. Rossetti’s idealization and celebration of female beauty

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is double-faced, reflecting male authority and the appropriation of the woman by the male artist: ‘Let all men note / That in all years (O Love, thy gift is this!) / They that would look on her must come to me’ (ll. 12–14; 132). Beatrice incarnates his idea of female beauty most clearly. She occupies a special and privileged position within his corpus of literary and mythic female figures, which includes other figures – some saintly, others demonic – such as Ophelia, the Virgin Mary, Lilith, Helen of Troy or Mary Magdalene. For D. G. Rossetti, women were externalizations of feelings: ‘Heart’s Compass’, from the ‘House of Life’ sonnet cycle views the beloved as divine, ‘sometimes thou seem’st not as thyself alone, / But as the meaning of all things that are’ (ll. 1–2; 139), and the speaker wonders ‘and is not thy name love?’ (l. 9). Beatrice seems to preside over this sonnet since Rossetti described her as an embodiment of love elsewhere. In the introduction to the second part of his Early Italian Poets, he writes that ‘the figure of Beatrice, [was] less lifelike than lovelike’ (Early Italian Poets 146). It seems as if he chose exactly this conflict between Beatrice, the earthly woman and Beatrice, the embodiment of an abstract idea, which some of his contemporaries found tedious to solve, as a creative impetus for his own works.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Victorian Beatrices In Dante in English Poetry, Steve Ellis discusses the cult of the Vita Nuova in the Victorian period and identifies D. G. Rossetti as its most important agent (102–32). Victorian readers took the Vita Nuova at face value, thus following Dante’s labelling of his libello as an autobiography, a book of personal memory. Dante and Beatrice became familiar tokens of a Victorian romantic currency, remodelled in a multitude of paintings, poems and prose pieces, which was a tendency lasting until the end of the century. C. Rossetti, for example, in a letter to Alfred Gurney from 1893, thanked the recipient for a copy of the Vita Nuova, which she describes as ‘sweet and tender and full of regret and hope’, wishing that ‘each Dante [may] join his Beatrice, and each Beatrice be or become worthy of her Dante’ (Letters 362). D. G. Rossetti was drawn to the Vita Nuova, choosing themes such as Beatrice’s greeting, her ‘cutting’ Dante in the street and her death and perpetuating an image of Dante and Beatrice which overemphasized the domestic, earthbound quality of their ‘relationship’.14 One example is the annotations he added to his Early Italian Poets. There are only few of them, but those which exist are revelatory. The question of whether the wedding which Dante attends is Beatrice’s, an assumption for which the Vita Nuova gives no evidence, elicits a longer comment, which empathetically states that ‘Dante’s silence throughout the Vita Nuova as regards her marriage (which must have brought deep sorrow even to his ideal love) is so startling, that we might almost be led to conceive in this passage the only intimation of it which

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he thought fit to give’ (Collected Poetry 261). Rossetti then discusses the question of whether Gemma Donati was the ‘Lady of the Window’, whom Dante never identifies. In the Vita Nuova, Gemma Donati is not mentioned. It was Boccaccio who included information on Dante’s marriage in his biographical account of Dante. Yet this piece of information on Dante’s marital status, coming from a source other than Dante himself, was relevant for D. G. Rossetti. He is keen to reconstruct a chronology and romantic subplot which his contemporaries and himself could easily access and identify with. For D. G. Rossetti, Beatrice is the absolute endpoint of desire. As Steve Ellis points out, ‘woman’ becomes an end in herself, a figure of salvation which no longer serves as a vehicle to divine love, because no longer invested with a theological meaning (122). She is the culmination of the poet’s artistic and religious beliefs, whose death makes her the perfect muse. In the words of Elisabeth Bronfen: As a perennial ‘loss’ she [the dead female muse] becomes the secure measure on which his interpretation of the world and his self-definition can be based, a void he can fill with explanations and poetic texts. At the same time her death endows his existence with a new meaning because it allows him quite explicitly to concentrate on where a reunion with her would lead. (‘Dialogue with the Dead’ 248) The woman’s death contains an emotional appeal on which the poet can centre his poetic creativity and his self-legitimization as a poet. Her death, the state of mourning, the life after her loss and the speculation on a future reunion all offer the potential of inspiration. ‘Dante at Verona’ (written and revised between 1848 and 1881) provides an example of Rossetti’s enthronization of Beatrice as the ultimate point of reference. Looking into Beatrice’s eyes, Dante reaches a state of bliss: Each hour, as then the Vision pass’d, He heard the utter harmony Of the nine trembling spheres, till she Bowed her eyes towards him in the last, So that all ended with her eyes, Hell, Purgatory, Paradise. (ll. 421–26; 38) While Dante’s journey ends on his arrival in Paradise and his vision of God, D. G. Rossetti devises a happy ending which follows the lovers’ reunion. The poem was intended as an introduction to his translation and in 1862 was interred together with other poems in manuscript in his wife’s grave. Yet ‘Dante at Verona’, as the title suggests, shifts the focus away from Dante’s youth in Florence to the years he spent in exile and investigates the cultural condition of Italy in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the background against

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which Dante had to establish his poetic interests and spirituality. It thus reflects D. G. Rossetti’s awareness of a different Dante apart from and beyond the Vita Nuova. Beatrice is invoked in this poem by a quotation from Purgatorio XXX: ‘Behold, even I, even I am Beatrice’. Being epigraph to the poem, this same line is repeated twice (l. 72 and l. 182). In the Commedia she uses these lines when she meets Dante for the first time on his journey, scolding him for his misdeeds. Yet whereas Purgatorio highlights her reprimanding and superhuman nature, D. G. Rossetti – predictably enough – depicts her presence as consolatory gentleness: he describes how Dante would lean his head on a ‘painted pane’ (l. 188; 32) and how he would perceive rays of sunshine as her breath on his face and hair. D. G. Rossetti returns to Purgatorio XXX in a painting which, as I argue, clearly illustrates that his interpretation of Beatrice was more varied than commonly assumed. In a diptych called The Salutation of Beatrice (Figure 4.1) which consists of two panels, The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in Florence and The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in Paradise (a central panel dividing them, entitled Dantis Amor, was left unfinished and kept separate), D. G. Rossetti merges his knowledge of Dante with his intermedial reading of the Italian’s works.15 Its original design as a pictorial sequence aimed at creating the chronological effect of a narrative which serial paintings often achieve. The diptych includes several quotations from the Commedia and the Vita Nuova, which is worth enlisting since such an overview shows the skilfulness and thoughtfulness with which Rossetti went about when structuring his painting.

Figure 4.1 Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Salutation of Beatrice. 1859. Oil on canvas, two panels of 74.9 × 80 cm each. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © National Gallery of Canada

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The painting’s title is given in Latin on the upper centre of frame (‘Salutatio Beatricis’); on the lower centre it says ‘In Terra et in Eden’. Inscribed in the left panel above Beatrice’s head is ‘Domicella Beatrix de Portinaris’ and above Dante’s head, ‘Dantes de Alghieris’. On the right panel there is an inscription above Beatrice’s head which reads ‘Beata Beatrix’; behind Dante’s head it says ‘Poeta Dantes de Alghieris de Florentia’. Above the left panel it says ‘Questa mirabile Donna apparve a me, vestita di colore bianco, in mezzo di due gentili donne di piu lunga etade (VITA NUOVA. Cap. II)’.16 Above the right panel an inscription reads ‘Sovra candida vel cinta d’uliva, Donna m’apparve sotto verde manto Vestita di color di fiamma viva. (DIV: COM: Purg: C.XXX)’.17 There is a further inscription at the bottom of the left panel, the first line of the sonnet from section XXI, ‘Negli occhi porta mia Donna amore’, which, in the chronology of the Vita Nuova, succeeds the moment of Beatrice’s greeting in section 3. Below the right panel is a further quotation from Purgatorio XXX ‘Guardarmi ben: ben son, ben son Beatrice’. Between the two panels a golden figure, Love holding a sundial, is painted on the frame. The sundial’s shadow falls on the hour of nine, which is the hour of Beatrice’s death, on 9 June 1290, which is also inscribed on top of this centre oval. Love is extinguishing his torch, which is a gesture symbolizing her death. Beneath this centre pointed oval is the quotation from Jeremiah, ‘Quomodo sedet sola civitas’, which identifies this piece as representing Beatrice’s death taking place between the incidents depicted in the two panels. The left-hand panel depicts Dante’s crucial meeting with Beatrice in a street in Florence. This is how Dante describes the moment, in Rossetti’s translation: After the lapse of so many days that nine years exactly were completed since the above-written appearance of this most gracious being, on the last of those days it happened that the same wonderful lady appeared to me dressed all in pure white, between two gentle ladies elder than she. And passing through a street, she turned her eyes thither where I stood sorely abashed; and by her unspeakable courtesy, which is now guerdoned in the Great Cycle, she saluted me with so virtuous a bearing that I seemed then and there to behold the very limits of blessedness. (251) It is important to recall that the scene in Dante’s book is a moment of revelation, the moment when Beatrice bestows her rare and precious greeting on Dante, the denial of which causes him much anguish in section 10.18 In her greeting lies ‘such an overpowering sweetness’ that Dante remains physically paralyzed (257). Rossetti’s left hand panel creates a physical dynamic: while the group of women is forming a procession, with Beatrice in the middle, Dante seems to be frozen in his pace. His eyes are magnetically drawn to her. By inserting the quotation from the sonnet ‘Negli occhi porta mia Donna amore’,

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Rossetti extends the significance of the moment and points out what Dante himself states, namely, that Beatrice was a ‘beatifier’ for everybody who met her. His (planned) triptych thus functionalizes the crucial moment of the literary narrative, the gaze or fugitive greeting between Dante and Beatrice, to represent the intensity of the love relationship between the two. The right panel depicts the second decisive moment of confrontation between Dante and Beatrice in Purgatorio XXX, their meeting in Eden. D. G. Rossetti remained faithful to Dante’s description, who recalls her appearing out of a ‘cloud of flowers’, wearing a white veil, a crown of olive boughs, a green cape and a red dress (l. 28; Mandelbaum 357). What follows this encounter is Beatrice’s admonishing speech, in which she blames Dante for his unfaithfulness after her death, when he ‘took / himself away from [her] and followed after / another’ (ll. 125–27; Mandelbaum 359). Dante adopts the position of ‘a little child, afraid or in distress’ (l. 44; Mandelbaum 357), humble and repentant. This panel depicts the moment when Beatrice lifts her veil to reveal her identity to Dante. Her announcement, ‘Guardarmi ben: ben son, ben son Beatrice’, can be understood in two different ways. Spoken at a moment of recognition, it expresses the revelation of her new celestial existence as opposed to her former earthly self. Yet given the canto’s overall concern with Beatrice’s reprimanding function hitherto unknown to Dante, her words suggest that she confronts him with this unexpected part of herself. By aligning the two salutations of Beatrice within a diptych, one taking place in the Vita Nuova, the other in the Commedia, D. G. Rossetti creates the impression of a narrative sequence. The medium of painting allows him to concentrate on his interest in this particular episode and at the same time to express his understanding of Dante’s two texts as related. In this painting, Rossetti develops his favourite Dantean theme, the continuity of love in the hereafter and the hope that love can overcome the separation inflicted upon lovers by death, yet he does this in a more learned way than in a poem such as ‘The Blessed Damozel’, which represents a distorted vision of Dante’s Beatrice, who yearns for reunion with her lover more than for God’s presence in Heaven. The Salutation of Beatrice is a complex painting whose Beatrice is a compound of Dante’s two texts, serving as a prime example of how for D. G. Rossetti a reading of Dante was only possible when carried out between various media. D. G. Rossetti’s unique contribution to the Victorian reception of Dante as a poet and painter is twofold: first, unlike any other artist or writer he elaborated his own idiosyncratic reading of Beatrice as a figure of personal and aesthetic relevance. His Beatrice is a focal point of condensation for his artistic and poetic vision, as will be shown in the following subchapter. Second, his work exemplifies the intermedial quality nature of this aesthetic vision and reception of Dante: D. G. Rossetti operated with dual means of expression when transforming this vision into matter.

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Acts of Translation D. G. Rossetti’s Early Italian Poets was one of several English translations appearing at roughly the same time. Yet it was the first large scale English anthology of the dolce stil nuovo movement. Early Italian Poets is the product of Rossetti’s youthful enthusiasm for Dante. Work on it covered a period from the mid-forties until its first publication in 1861 even though he never ceased to return to certain episodes afterwards, providing a multitude of paintings, sketches and several projected paintings.19 In 1874, a revised second edition entitled Dante and His Circle was published. The publication of a fully illustrated edition of the Vita Nuova had been one of his constant aims which he pursued throughout his life; Rossetti had planned ten illustrations, a project he never fully completed (Fredeman 1: 76). In the ‘Preface’ to the first edition of Early Italian Poets, D. G. Rossetti refers to the act of translation as ‘the most direct form of commentary’, resulting in a new artwork in its own right (Collected Poetry 239). This is an interesting definition of translation since it marks it not only as an act of linguistic transposition, but also as a transformation requiring critical agency. Translation means converting ideas into a particular form of expression and this, according to D. G. Rossetti, always presupposes some personal, individualized imprint. He makes a further insightful statement on the business of translation in the ‘Preface’ to his translation when he claims that ‘[p]oetry not being an exact science, literality of rendering is altogether secondary to the chief law. I say literality, – not fidelity, which is by no means the same thing’ (239). Arguing in favour of ‘fidelity’ as opposed to ‘literality’, he considers the first as the only means to guarantee that ‘a good poem’ is not turned into ‘a bad poem.’ Thus, a literal transcription of the original text is secondary to its faithful expression, exact identity of lesser importance than the finding of correspondences which makes the world of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries accessible for the contemporary reader. The precise equivalence of words counts less than the correct rendering of the ideas which lie behind these words. As George Steiner has argued, each period has its own ‘modes of sensibility’, different categories of the aesthetic and different verbal or semantic means to express these (18). In other words, translations are context-bound. They contain an informative quality in that they enlighten the reader about the period in which a text was translated, providing insights into the ‘internal history’ of a given period (Steiner 7). André Lefevere makes a similar point when he argues that although translators have their own goal in mind when translating, they are ‘constrained by the times in which they live, the literary traditions they try to reconcile and the features of the languages they work with’ (6). Lefevere’s statement applies well to Rossetti’s work as a literary and artistic translator of Dante, since despite being highly idiosyncratic, his translations are indicative of his period’s spiritual profile and aesthetic preferences. Rossetti approached

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the Vita Nuova as a text with an autobiographical meaning, a text which recounts parts of Dante’s life. The way the Victorians preferred their Dante, as a medieval man who courts a beautiful Florentine woman, suggests something similar – it reflects their broader turn towards the (auto)biographic genre and their understanding of the medieval period as accessible through such individual, private accounts. Rossetti’s Early Italian Poets, and also for example Theodore Martin’s translation, stresses the Vita Nuova’s autobiographical element; they consider the Vita Nuova as the stepping stone from which Dante then moved onwards to the Commedia and without which the latter could not have been written – they thought of the Vita Nuova as an early life and not so much as a new one. In Rossetti’s case, literary translation functions comparably to the concept of the ‘double work of art’, an expression often used to describe his dual artistic units constituted by a painting and poem. His literary translations and his intermedial double works of art requires the translational act of moving one concept or idea from one medium into another. These ‘double works of art’, of which ‘Mary’s Girlhood (For a Picture)’ (1848–1849) and ‘The Blessed Damozel’ are two prominent examples, function in different chronological orders (painting preceding poem / poem preceding painting), even though the vast majority of his double works use the ‘painting preceding poem’ scheme, with the poems either containing a reference to the painting in their title, appearing as inscriptions or within the space of the picture. They are ekphrastic poems. Yet ekphrasis does not presuppose an identical authorship of painting and poem, so that all those poems fall under this category which he wrote about paintings by other artists, for example ‘The Holy Family by Michelangelo’ or ‘For Spring, by Sandro Botticelli’ (both published in 1881). D. G. Rossetti also provided numerous illustrations for the literary texts by other writers, such as Edgar Allen Poe or Alfred Lord Tennyson. My discussion of one of his paintings, entitled Dante’s Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice (1856; Figure 4.2) will, as did my previous comments on The Salutation of Beatrice, reflect the complexity of D. G. Rossetti’s reception of Dante. Yet it also aims to render clear the complex layers of his translational work which make his enterprise not only intermedial but also transmedial. He conceived his ideas in which ways which did not bind them to any particular medium. In this particular painting, translations take place on various levels: first, language is translated into an image, that is, this painting is an illustration of a passage from the Vita Nuova. Secondly, it is a painting representing a literary text which Rossetti had translated from the Italian into the English. And thirdly, it reads like a comment on his aesthetic ideals, namely, his belief that the physical and the spiritual are entwined with each other and that both are necessary for his artistic and literary self-expression. At the centre of this dense argumentative web stands Beatrice. Dante’s Dream illustrates one particular episode in the Vita Nuova, which D. G. Rossetti reworked several times. The lines which this painting illustrates

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Figure 4.2 Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Dante’s Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice. Watercolour on paper. 1856. 48 × 66 cm. Tate Gallery, London. © Tate, London 2008

are the following, recounting how Dante has a premonition of Beatrice’s mortality and death: And so strong was this idle imagining, that it made me to behold my lady in death; whose head certain ladies seemed to be covering with a white veil; and who was so humble of her aspect that it was as though she had said, ‘I have attained to look on the beginning of peace’. (271) There are two main versions of this painting, the 1856 original water colour version done for Ellen Heaton and a replica in oil commissioned by William Graham in 1869 (the largest of his works: the figures are life-size). For Graham, Rossetti then produced a smaller replica between 1878 and 1880 accompanied by two predellas. Both the water colour and the oil version depict Dante being led forward by Love in a box-like chamber, where Beatrice is laid upon a bier. She is guarded by two women. The figures form a frieze in front of the room’s back side, which allows views onto the medieval landscape of Florence on either side and which is open at the top where a host of angels are bearing Beatrice’s soul away. Dante is the dream traveller, the bystander guided by Love, who leans over the dead Beatrice and gives her, as Rossetti puts it in his ekphrasis, the kiss

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Dante never gave her. Two women are lowering a pall on which red flowers are put; red poppies cover the floor. The textual basis for this painting is the canzone in the Vita Nuova, which Rossetti translated as ‘A very pitiful lady, very young’ (272), in which Dante describes how he is woken up by some young ladies while he is dreaming of Beatrice’s death, a vision that leaves him in a state of physical and spiritual turmoil. Lines 64 to 70 are of central importance because Rossetti quotes this passage at the head of his prose ekphrasis, which he probably wrote in 1874 to accompany the large oil painting, providing a second, verbal, description of the painting in addition to Dante’s original text.20 I would like to complement my discussion of the 1856 watercolour version of this painting as it is reproduced in this book with a look at two predellas (see Surtees’ Catalogue 1: 46, no. 81 R. 2. A and B) which accompany the mentioned smaller replica for William Graham (Surtees no. 81 R. 2). While not technically connected to each other, the different versions of the painting and their supplementary predellas still form one intriguing complex of continuous revision work, developed over several years and to be seen in its entirety. The one predella shows a grief-stricken, delirious Dante, lying on his bed, his individual sorrow mirroring the greater dimension of mourning which Beatrice’s death causes; the other how he is telling his dream to a group of young ladies. In their projected form, the paintings would thus have consisted of the main painting, depicting the dead Beatrice and how Love kisses her, and the two predellas, one of them showing Dante in clear physical distress while dreaming about Beatrice’s death, the other in the role of the poet, recounting his dream vision to a group of female listeners. While the main painting is obviously centred on a spiritual event, a dream, the two predellas take both the viewer and Dante back to an earthly realm, showing the birth of new poetry through the medium of the dreaming, visionary poet.21 In his Vita Nuova, Dante’s account of his dream vision underscores the physical, palpable effects Beatrice’s death has on him: his poetic sensitivity does not remain unaffected by his terror in the face of his dream. One could thus argue that D. G. Rossetti’s oil replica together with its predellas is about the impact of a dream on the poet, whose emotional and physical suffering leads to the production of poetry.22 This is the unique quality of the situation which D. G. Rossetti’s painting and the ekphrasis revolve around: the moment when the spiritual and physical meet contributing towards the creation of great art. It is his vision of the dead Beatrice that according to D. G. Rossetti gives Dante divine inspiration: ‘now shall all things be made clear’, the ekphrasis of the painting explains. As a reader, translator and painter, D. G. Rossetti relives Dante’s experience in its physical and spiritual intensity, but also as a pivotal moment when poetry is born. He translates Dante’s account three times, into English, into a pictorial form and into a statement bringing his own notion of artistic creation to the point. He thereby underscores the importance he assigned to this particular scene (not only did he translate it verbally and from one medium into another, but he also

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repeated the painterly act twice by producing replicas) and has Beatrice emerge as a phenomenon with far wider implications than being merely the dead beloved whose earthly presence is craved. The figure of Beatrice is D. G. Rossetti’s key to an understanding of Dante’s aesthetics and provides a template for his own artistic and poetic concepts in which the physical and spiritual are blended. John Addington Symonds commented on Dante’s depiction of Love in the Vita Nuova as resembling the art of a painter, ‘carefully tracing on his canvas the form he has imagined’ (43). According to Symonds, Dante externalized his inmost feelings in language, and this is what makes him, a poet, a myth-maker, ‘for after no other fashion but this of fervent poetry did myths begin and take their imperishable shapes in Greece’ (43). Symonds’ analysis of Dante’s craft puts into words what the ‘Dante’s Dream’ complex expresses on a visual level. D. G. Rossetti owed his concept of art, be it poetry or painting, to this particular timeless, but also intermedial quality of Dante’s poetry: its translation of experience into a visible shape, of ideas into matter.

Chapter 5

Deconstruction of an Ideal: George Eliot’s Romola

Romola occupies an awkward position in George Eliot’s work. It is a unique novel if compared to her others, sometimes said to mark a transition in her work and publishing career. No other novel was accompanied by such meticulous research as Romola; it was her first and only novel to be published in instalments (in Cornhill Magazine from July 1862 to August 1863), before appearing in three volumes in 1863.1 Romola is George Eliot’s only novel whose title refers to its eponymous heroine and it is her sole novel situated entirely in a foreign country, taking its reader to a remoter past than in her other works.2 Still Romola’s relative uniqueness does not make it irreconcilable with her other novels or differ radically from them. Most of Romola’s themes reflect persistent interests which Eliot also pursued in her other works. Conceived as a ‘historical romance’ Romola is hybrid by nature: it aims at producing a historically accurate account of Florentine life in the late fifteenth century and at the same time tells a romantic love story (Haight 3: 295). More awkward than the novel’s production and setting, however, is its protagonist. Her main problem is that she transgresses the novel’s generic and historical limitations. As R. A. Maitzen argued, Romola appears to be misplaced in her historical situation and to not fit into her environment, which consists of overabundant details (103–34). Eliot was at pains to depict her Florence as truthfully as possible, paying attention to smallest details in speech and clothing. She succeeded in creating a novel which captures the cultural climate of its period – Florentine life abounds with talk on the visual arts; the rebirth of classical scholarship is a prominent issue; the religious and political conflicts of the time are paid full attention.3 Amidst this conscientiously researched environment, there is Romola. She is more than a young woman in Florence since she transcends her historically specific framework. On this numerous critics agree: Romola has been identified as a learned woman or female intellectual (David 177–196 and S. Simpson), a feminist heroine (Paxton, ‘Feminism’ 149), a Madonna figure (K. V. Adams 164–95), a forerunner of Victorian social reformers (Booth 115–34), as an apocalyptic figure (Carpenter 113) and most prominently, as will be shown below, as a Positivist figure. These repeated

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critical attempts to accommodate Romola within a conceptual context echoes a tendency in Eliot’s writings themselves to search for authoritative tales: ‘Every narrative, Eliot seems to be saying, needs a founding legend to lend provisional legitimacy to the accidents it records’ (Winnett 514). Without submitting the novel to a deconstructive reading, this chapter argues that Romola is a deconstructive novel in the basic sense of the word. Jonathan Culler’s definition of a deconstructive text is that it ‘undermines the philosophy it asserts, or the hierarchical oppositions on which it relies, by identifying in the text the rhetorical operations that produce the supposed ground of argument, the key concept or premise’ (86). Eliot critically revises the social and cultural ties, the patterns of affection and idealization which are Romola’s doom throughout the novel, yet she also suggests that they are inevitable. These patterns are not only grounded in medieval and Renaissance literary traditions, but also reflect a discourse on ideal Victorian femininity which is as much of a canvas to Romola as the Dantean legacy. The full extent of Romola’s dilemma – the idealist burden she carries versus the historical specificity of her conditions – becomes clear when read as a Beatrice figure, whose development in the novel is a site of combat between the processes of idealization and their applicability and survivability in ‘real’ life. Eliot’s Beatrice figure calls for a critical revaluation of prevalent gender ideals of her own period. Eliot depicts Romola not only as a Beatrice, but also as the dutiful daughter, the well-educated girl, the devoted wife, the charitable woman of faith, the philanthropic carer, the benign mother. Yet the underlying tenor is one of scepticism towards all these ideal roles which spring from what the novel depicts as inevitable processes of idealization governing human relationships.

George Eliot’s Reception of Dante George Eliot’s work has been put into a European context by several recent studies which pay tribute to her familiarity with and debts to Continental literature, philosophy and art.4 Eliot travelled to Italy on six occasions, spending a total of 6 months in Italy. Not only did she learn the language (she started learning it in 1839 and read several works in Italian) she also developed a strong interest in the contemporary political situation in Italy and was familiar with its music and visual arts.5 Even though it is impossible to establish when exactly Eliot first read Dante, we can presume that Dante had got a firm grip on her imagination from 1860 onwards (see Thompson, George Eliot and Italy 30–49). Her later novels such as Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda and Felix Holt contain a remarkable number of Dantean references. It is also safe to assume that she continued her reading of Dante over the years, especially in the late 1870s. Her relationship with James Cross was infused by their shared appreciation of Dante – she famously signed a letter to him as ‘Beatrice’ (Haight 7: 211–12).

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Eliot valued the Commedia above the Vita Nuova (see Thompson, ‘George Eliot’s Borrowings’ 34–67). There is only one direct quotation to be found from the Vita Nuova, which is used as an epigraph to chapter 54 of Middlemarch, the sonnet from the Vita Nuova section XXI, ‘Negli occhi porta la mia donna Amore’. In her letters, George Eliot does not comment on the Vita Nuova until 1868. This, however, does not rule out an earlier reading of Dante’s sonnets. In 1861, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translation of the Vita Nuova, included in his translation of Italian poets called Early Italian Poets, was published and Eliot was offered a copy as a present by George Smith in July 1862 (Haight 4: 48). It is highly improbable that she would not have been at least familiar with the content of the Vita Nuova by the time she wrote Romola. She spent a considerable amount of time roaming the streets of Florence and its many bookshops in 1860 and 1861.6 It is known that Eliot read some of Inferno and reread Purgatorio in Italian between autumn 1862 and January 1863 as she was writing Romola (Thompson, George Eliot and Italy 27). It is probable that she would have needed knowledge of the Vita Nuova to fully comprehend Beatrice’s significance. In Romola, the total number of direct references to Dante, in the form of, for example, direct quotations from his works or allusions to his person, is moderate, and his presence in the novel is less immediately perceptible than one could expect given the firm alliance of the city of Florence with his life and works and Eliot’s heavy use of Dantean images in her other texts.7 Yet despite the relatively small number of readily identifiable references in the novel, Eliot’s engagement with Dante’s works is intense and manifests itself subtly in a web of allusions and through the use of codes which describe the type of femininity embodied by Beatrice and Romola. George Eliot’s novel and her heroine feed on gestures of mythic femininity as I described them in my discussion of Aby Warburg’s concept of the pathos formula: nowhere named or explicitly introduced as a such, Romola is an ultra-Beatrice, who combines features and aspects of a whole gallery of powerful female myths, who shift or morph from one into the other effortlessly. Dante is a twofold authority in this novel. He helps to authenticate the historical context which Eliot sketches meticulously: Dante’s time is conjured up to make the cultural climate of Renaissance Florence appear credible. But Dante also lends a moral perspective to the action and the characters. There is, for example, a wide range of correspondences between Tito’s moral decline and Dante’s catalogue of sins in which a very detailed categorization of treachery is elaborated and where treason is considered as the gravest sin. Besides, Eliot’s moral stance is that of a humanist: she has her protagonists practice self-abnegation and renunciation for the sake of the general good. The subordination of individual needs and desires to humanity’s sake is a recurrent theme in her novels and the process of self-refinement and painful learning bears certain similarities to Dante’s notion of purgatorial rectification. The connection between Dante and Eliot’s notion of moral growth and refinement is obvious and identifiable not only in Romola, but also in Middlemarch,

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Daniel Deronda and Felix Holt. The ‘Proem’ in Romola is an epic gesture by which Eliot conjures up the cultural legacy of the Italian Renaissance and the presence of Dante and Homer: by inviting Dante’s ghost into her novel, she not only authenticates the context and the moral substrate of the novel she also suggests that she partakes in such grand traditions.

Romola and the Visual Arts Romola appears relatively late for the first time; the first few chapters are devoted to the depiction of buzzing everyday life in Florence. She is standing in her father’s library, surrounded by books and disparate parts of statues such as a ‘beautiful feminine torso’ (47) and a ‘headless statue, with an uplifted arm wielding a bladeless sword’ (48).8 Amidst this rather gloomy atmosphere, her hair appears as the ‘only spot of bright colour in the room’ (48). Of a reddish gold, it is ‘enriched by an unbroken small ripple’ (48) setting Romola apart from her surroundings. The colour of her hair forms a contrast to the plain black of her dress, the ‘black fillet above her small ears’ from underneath which her hair ‘rippled forward again’, making a ‘natural veil for her neck above her square-cut gown of black rascia, . . .’ (48). She is reading a book, one white hand lying on a reading desk, the other clasping the back of her father’s chair. George Eliot had a particular artistic model in mind when she was writing this passage, influencing Romola’s physical attributes as well as the choice of traditional Florentine clothing of the period. These were the frescoes by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494) in the Basilica Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Romola embodies an ideal of Renaissance femininity of which Ghirlandaio’s women in, for example, La Nascita della Vergine or La Visitazione di Maria Vergine a S. Elisabetta, give a good idea. George Eliot relied on the visual arts for her accounts of Florentine dresses, a source for which were costume books. This is suggested by her correspondence with Frederic Leighton (1830–1896) who was responsible for the illustrations which accompanied the instalments in Cornhill Magazine.9 Leighton was highly interested and experienced in Renaissance art and had already painted several Renaissance subjects before starting work on these illustrations. His expertise notwithstanding, or maybe even because of it, Eliot was careful to safeguard the superiority of the verbal text as opposed to the visual one, sometimes interfering with his artistic process.10 Leighton’s illustrations reflect Romola’s deep engagement with the visual arts as background information and as a thematic or structural device. Romola is rich in references to artists and works of art and interconnects them with the setting and characters. Nello’s barber shop, ‘the focus of Florentine intellect, and in that sense the navel of the earth’ (33) as its owner calls it, hosts several discussions on the state of the arts and Piero di Cosimo’s studio with its ‘pen and oil sketches of fantastic sea-monsters; dances of satyrs and mænards; Saint Margaret’s resurrection out

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of the devouring dragon; Madonnas with the supernal light upon them; studies of plants and grotesque heads’ (184) enhance the zeitgeist of Renaissance Florence. Eliot includes allusions to both real and imagined painters and their work and by doing so mirrors her own creation of characters, some of which are historical (e.g. Savonarola); others, allegedly public figures such as Tito, are imaginary.11 The initial description of Romola has evoked comparisons with the representations of female beauty found in numerous Pre-Raphaelite paintings, most importantly so Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sumptuous portraits from the 1860s, such as Monna Vanna, Sibylla Palmifera or Aurelia. As is the case with Pre-Raphaelite art and its depiction of overabundant auburn or golden hair, Romola is momentarily turned into the focus of attention, emerging against the sombre background. Romola has been referred to as the most Pre-Raphaelite of George Eliot’s novels given the masses of historical and cultural detail which she employed to enhance the authenticity of her representation, an ideal towards which the Pre-Raphaelites aspired.12 But this depiction of Romola is of interest not merely because it allows a cross-reference to the most influential painterly school in the 1860s, but also because it represents two methods which Helena Michie in The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies describes as relevant for Victorian writers to handle the challenging task of representing women, and especially their sexual allure. Michie identifies three representational codes used ‘to describe and conceal the female body’, namely, dead metaphor, such as for instance the Victorian metaphor of the angel used to refer to the ideal woman, synecdoche and metatrope (86). Synecdoche refers to ways of introducing sexuality by implication: the woman’s presence is conjured up by the reference that is made to a part of her body, which is thus an act of fragmentation or fetishization. Her hair momentarily replaces Romola, the whole person. Synecdoche reduces the woman’s sexuality to a manageable size by focusing on just one part of her body. In Romola’s case, her hair makes her appear as a lively, colourful attraction in a moribund, sterile world of patriarchal social organization and scholarship. Metatrope needs to be understood as a double metaphor, a linking of several metaphorical processes to which the female protagonist is subjected (87). As Michie argues, Victorian literature abounds with comparisons that are made between women and paintings, sculptures, books or pieces of music. But what at first sight seems to be an erudite gesture proves to be a distancing procedure which leads the woman through several stages of metaphorical framing. This passage in particular offers an example in which synecdoche and metatrope are combined. Typical examples of metatrope in novels are the repeated comparisons which associate the heroine with female figures taken from the visual arts or mythology. Metatrope means that these women are framed or cast into a certain role (Michie 109). In this passage, it is Romola’s role as Ariadne, fashioned as such by Tito, but as will be shown below, Romola also appears in the shape of a ‘Visible Madonna’

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and there are, of course, the literary references to Dante, which turn Romola into a Beatrice.

Romola as Beatrice: A Florentine Nymph Like Beatrice, Romola has a close relationship with her city, Florence. She is a citizen of Florence and she cannot entirely cut off the ties which connect her to it even though she is appalled by the political intrigues and degenerating customs of the powerful and feels the need to leave her Florentine existence behind. Like Beatrice, Romola is a Florentine lady who is renowned and admired for her beauty.13 The novel’s first chapters depict amorous infatuation and budding love which recalls the romantic aura of the Vita Nuova. The intertextual techniques which Eliot uses to model her heroine upon Beatrice are subtle and indirect. Eliot does not identify Romola explicitly as a Beatrice figure, yet she uses gestures and codes to spin a web of parallels. These gestures and codes refer to both Romola’s and Beatrice’s physical appearance and the effect it has on the beholder, the feelings they inspire in other people and more generally to the type of redemptive femininity which both exemplify. Romola is repeatedly described as not only beautiful, but also as majestic and queenly: ‘Romola walked . . ., with the queenly step which was the simple action of her tall, finely wrought frame, without the slightest conscious adjustment of herself’ (49). Those who see her feel inferior: ‘But as he [Tito] imagined her coming towards him in her radiant beauty, made so lovably mortal by her soft hazel eyes, he fell into wishing that she had been something lower’ (174). Throughout the novel, Romola’s beauty is associated with moral goodness, intelligence and virtuousness: For it was pleasant to look at Romola’s beauty; to see her, like old Firenzuola’s type of womanly majesty, ‘sitting with a certain grandeur, speaking with gravity, smiling with modesty, and casting around, as it were, an odour of queenliness;’ and she seemed to unfold like a strong white lily under this genial breath of admiration and homage; it was all one to her with her new bright life in Tito’s love. (189) She embodies the kind of Neoplatonic ideal of femininity which was based on a fusion of beauty and moral goodness, gentleness and strength, praised by poets and writers such as Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499). Romola’s looks reflect the ideal of female beauty as it shaped Renaissance female portraiture with its penchant for long necks, golden hair, pearly white skin, blue eyes and rosy lips – an ideal which was itself derived from the literary models of Dante and Petrarch and works such as Agnolo Firenzuola’s Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne

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(1548) (see Ames-Lewis/Rogers). Had Romola been a historical woman, her situation would have been shaped by the needs and expectations of the male lineage, the republican state, the Christian Church, and the humanist and vernacular cultures that provided admired exempla for this society that revived and revered the art and literature of antiquity, and whose governors, like Lorenzo de’ Medici, wrote love poetry in the ‘sweet style’ of the creators of the Tuscan language, the three crowns of Florence: Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. All these forces combined to represent chastity as the chief virtue of women, and their idealized beauty as ideally residing in the possession of this virtue, essential to the honor of their men. (Dale Kent 43) This conjunction of female beauty and moral excellence was as praised in the Renaissance as it was at the time when Eliot was writing Romola.14 As will be discussed below, virtue became increasingly depoliticized towards the end of the eighteenth century: it was no longer seen as a requirement determined by birth and class, but something that could be acquired (Poovey 10). As Lynda Nead has pointed out, ‘ethics and aesthetics were part of the definition of respectable values and the categorization of acceptable and non-acceptable codes’ – it was no longer enough to be beautiful, unless beauty was coupled with moral excellence and virtue (9). Romola selflessly tends the sick in Florence; she is committed to saving her godfather from punishment and bestows greatest care on her father, who praises her exalted character and unique virtues, thereby aligning her in a long literary tradition of idealized femininity: For thou art not like the herd of thy sex: thou art such a woman as the immortal poets had a vision of when they sang the lives of the heroes – tender but strong, like thy voice, which has been to me instead of the light in the years of my blindness. (128) This reference to the literary tradition is self-reflective since it positions the novel’s heroine within a literary mode whose basic strategies of idealization the novel undoes. Similarly, Tito’s arrival seemed to be prefigured by Romola’s poetic experience, but never sincerely expected by her. ‘The poets’, and that is those of the dolce stil nuovo, had given her an idea of love, but she had ‘never dreamed that anything like that could happen to . . . [her] here in Florence in . . . [their] old library’ (178). The two features most often referred to are Romola’s eyes and her voice. Like Beatrice’s voice (in Purgatorio Dante mentions Beatrice’s voice for the first time; in the Vita Nuova she remains silent) it is loved and feared at the same time and enhances the woman’s saintly and

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imperious appearance. After he has sold her father Bardo’s library and committed a major breach of trust, Tito undergoes Romola’s interrogation: At first, Tito felt horribly cowed; it seemed to him that the disgrace he had been dreading would be worse than he had imagined it. But soon there was a reaction: such power of dislike and resistance as there was within him was beginning to rise against a wife whose voice seemed like the herald of a retributive fate. (286) When Tito’s mistress Tessa meets her for the first time, she feels that ‘suddenly a gentle hand was laid on her arm, and a soft, wonderful voice, as if the Holy Madonna were speaking, said, “Do not be afraid; no one shall harm you.”’ (430). Romola’s saint-like, unworldly appearance is epitomized in the description of her wedding day when she appears in radiant beauty, . . . all white and gold, more than ever like a tall lily. Her white silk garment was bound by a golden girdle, which fell with large tassels; and above that was the rippling gold of her hair, surmounted by the white mist of her long veil, . . . . (197) She is one of Warburg’s Florentine nymphs, whose walking pace combines grace and indefinable energy, as do the folds of her dress. The contrast to her husband’s morality could not be any starker. Throughout the novel, Romola’s noble character is played off against Tito’s moral corruption, so that her virtuousness is increasingly perceived as threatening by her husband. Initially Romola seemed to be the perfect match for him. The love Tito felt for her was identified with his ‘larger self’ (151), thus with an ideal aspect of his character. She was the promise of a greater potential in his life; when he was with her he felt a moral elevation similar to that Dante feels when seeing Beatrice (118). Yet she gradually loses her appeal: Tito fears that her flawlessness could be an ‘alarming touchstone’ (301). The more deeply Tito gets involved in crime, the more his love and admiration are mingled with feelings of guilt and inferiority; in the course of the novel, Tito’s love for Romola is replaced by fear of condemnation. The moral conflict carried out between the two spouses is exacerbated by Eliot’s introduction of the peasant girl Tessa, the ‘other woman’ with whom Tito begins a clandestine relationship, starting with a sham wedding and resulting in two children. Whereas Romola remains childless, Tessa bears Tito’s children and offers him an alternative home, ‘a refuge from the threatened isolation that would come with disgrace’ (145). Tito’s encounters with Tessa are mainly physical: they repeatedly feed each other and Tito wonders ‘when Romola will kiss . . . [his] cheek in that way?’ (111). Tessa embodies a different type of womanhood compared to Romola’s excessive beauty, elegance and education. When Tito meets her first he is attracted by her

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large blue eyes and the childlike impression of her face. Tessa is a woman who is neither demanding nor judgemental (145). She is Romola’s double. Tito’s dual relationship with Tessa brutally parodies Dante’s invention of the so-called screen ladies and his affection for the mysterious ‘Woman of the Window’, whom he meets 1 year after Beatrice’s death. Tito puts Romola on a pedestal, but maintains a dual, secret relationship. Deeply frustrated and disillusioned by the course events have taken in Florence, Romola turns her back on her city and embarks on her own, independent journey. Romola’s ‘drifting away’ in chapter 61 not only marks a break with her former life but also with the realistic conventions the narrator pursues up to this point.15 She reappears in chapter 68 when she wakes up on a deserted beach. Meanwhile Savonarola is discredited and Tito and Baldassare have their final confrontation. Romola’s second escape from Florence is an act of egoism, motivated by a suicidal yearning. Romola wakes up and finds herself in a plaguestricken village. She takes care of a Jewish baby, the only survivor of the pestilence. The other inhabitants are bewildered by her presence and regard her as a superhuman being, a selfless and self-sacrificing Madonna. For Romola ‘a new life’ begins here, her waking up on unknown shores is like a second Baptism, an immersion into oblivion not unlike the effect of forgetfulness a bath in the river Lethe has in the Earthly Paradise. Romola not only deliberately frees herself from the constraints of social life in Florence but she also abandons old beliefs and principles in favour of new ones. Her actions are no longer dictated by patriarchal dogmatism. She turns means into ends by adopting the positivist creed that the certainty in life is the suffering of others which needs to be cured. Romola is strongest as an earthly Madonna by the time she no longer needs metaphysical justifications or familial bonds for her deeds: All that ardour of her nature which could no longer spend itself in the woman’s tenderness for father and husband, had transformed itself into an enthusiasm of sympathy with the general life. She had ceased to think that her own lot could be happy – had ceased to think of happiness at all: the one end of her life seemed to her to be the diminishing of sorrow. (388) This passage explains why many readings of Romola put the novel in a positivist light.16 Eliot became familiar with Auguste Comte’s (1798–1857) writings in the early 1850s, and her interest in Positivism left its traces in this particular novel. A positivist reading of the novel unravels Romola’s life as a microcosmic embodiment of the three stages which Comte assigned to the development of mankind – from Polytheism to Monotheism to the last and ultimate stage of Positivism. Comte tried to establish Positivism as a formally constituted religious system in which the worship of God was to be replaced with that of Humanity. If such a scheme was applied, classical polytheism would coincide with Romola’s youth. She spends her time studying classical literature with

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her father. Tito’s appearance introduces the jovial, sensual aspect of Paganism. Romola becomes Ariadne, Tito is Bacchus.17 Romola’s second, monotheistic stage would then begin with the gradual disenchantment she experiences in her marriage and which culminates in her submission to Savonarola’s instructions which she receives on her journey out of Florence. The third positivist stage finally would find its realization in Romola’s rebirth as an earthly Madonna. Romola eventually lives up to a positivist ideal of selfless, ‘earthbound’ charity. She embodies an ideal of female philanthropy characteristic of another heroine of Eliot’s, Dorothea Brooke. As such, Romola is in good company since the philanthropic heroine became something like a literary convention in the Victorian period, blurring the boundaries between the public and the private spheres and those between classes (see D. Elliott 26). Like Beatrice, who leaves her heavenly throne to save Dante and braves the dangers of the underworld, Romola is not afraid of the consequences of her love: ‘Do not fear. Fear rather to deny food to the hungry when they ask of you’, is what she tells one of the scared peasants on the island (556). With the baby in her arms she is perceived as the Blessed Lady carrying Christ. Leighton’s illustration entitled At the Well accordingly depicts her as a statuesque, almost Wagnerian heroine, clutching a baby to her breast while on her way to the village’s well. This engraving represents Romola in striking contrast to those of preceding chapters. While The Blind Scholar and his Daughter, illustrating chapter 5, and The First Kiss, illustrating chapter 12, show Romola in the company either of her father or Tito (the same goes for most other illustrations – Romola is usually in the company of a man), she, as an earthly Madonna, is surrounded by children, gently touching a little girl on her forehead. During her stay in the village she exerts a ‘peculiar influence’ (558) on the people and is commonly thought of as ‘a human being whom God had sent over the sea to command them’ (558). After her departure from the island, a legend is born: Every day the padre and Jacopo and the small flock of surviving villagers paid their visit to this cottage to see the Blessed Lady, and to bring her of their best as an offering – . . . . It was a sight they could none of them forget, a sight they all told of in their old age – how the sweet and sainted lady with her fair face, her golden hair, and her brown eyes that had a blessing in them, lay weary with her labours after she had been sent over the sea to help them in their extremity, . . . . (558) Within this circle of outcasts, a castaway from society herself, Romola’s presence becomes mythical. This short passage describes the basic components and origins of a legend or myth and introduces a metafictional note critical of the novel’s central theme of idealization and disillusionment. The irony lies in the fact that just as Romola aimed to break free from age-old roles, she brings about the creation of a new idealized tale. Even amid her new reclusive community of

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outsiders, Romola remains an ideal. No longer the desirable wife, dutiful daughter or devout believer she was before, she remains caught in a circle of idealization. After her return to Florence, Romola stands on her own. Bardo, Bernardo, Dino, Tito and Savonarola, the men who had determined her life, are dead; her father’s intellectual and material legacy is lost and with it also the pressure of complying with his final wish. The novel’s final tableau shows her as a stoic figure: she is surrounded by her newly created family of choice: Tessa, the fallen woman, Tessa’s two children fathered by Tito and Monna Brigida, her cousin. Romola’s return to the domestic hearth, her decision to adopt Tito’s illegitimate children and to take care of Tessa could be read as an anticlimactic ending to a story tentatively exploring the possibilities of unleashed female potential.18 This situation is not dissimilar to Middlemarch, where Dorothea Brooke eventually abandons her financially secured widowhood and the prospect of large-scale charitable projects, in favour of a second marriage. Yet while Romola’s ending could be read as a regressive step backwards to formerly critically assessed social and familial models, it nonetheless contains an implicit affirmation of an alternative feminist model of social organization beyond that of the nuclear family. Both Dante and Eliot see femininity as most powerful when freed from romantic notions and repositioned within the larger context of humanity. Yet even though Romola is no longer the product of male projection and desire, freed from traditional literary codices, she remains a mirror of her period’s quest for benign female figures. A fascination with female figures from mythology or religion mirroring its own ideal of female virtuosity is characteristic of the Victorian period. Visual and literary representations of women had a strong impact on middle class notions of home, class and gender. Protestant readers liked mythical, literary or religious figures congruent with their own ideals of female chastity and fecundity, a paradox uniquely unified and exemplified by the mother of Christ. As Kimberly VanEsfeld and Anne Hogan have shown, the Virgin Mary, Beatrice and other female saints became perfectly reconcilable with Victorian norms and conventions.19 Eliot repeatedly takes recourse to mythological, religious or literary female figures when describing her characters for various purposes. Her allusion to St. Theresa at the opening of Middlemarch is a well-known example. Such comparisons endow her characters with an aura of spiritual grandeur, thereby consolidating their significance within their narrative universe: ‘It is as though the only discourse which George Eliot can trust when she seeks to express the vision of woman coming to authority is that of the saint’s legend’ (Beer 123). These intertextual comparisons might not only grant the female protagonists authority but they also pull them down with the weight of old traditions. In Romola there is a plausible reason for modelling the heroine upon Beatrice, who, as Booth argues, resembles other mythical heroines who came to life in the nineteenth century and perpetuates ‘a series of chivalrous ideals of feminine perfection – Laura, Beatrice, the Lady of Shalott, the Lady with the

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Lamp – a series eventually building to a tradition of great women’ (112). As the highly self-conscious Proem suggests, Romola partakes in a great tradition of epic storytelling and romantic love poetry. Homer, Virgil and Dante, who are all mentioned in Romola, produced world visions and Eliot tried to follow up these epic traditions. By modelling her characters upon such precursory figures, Eliot invites manifold voices – literary, mythological and religious – to enter her narrative universe. This procedure creates ambiguity and tension by implicitly pointing out the differences between her own heroine and these ‘figures on loan’, to use Ziolowski’s term again. By describing Dorothea as a St. Theresa in Middlemarch, Eliot underlines her protagonist’s saintly qualities, above all her altruism. At the same time, the novel shows that the comparison does not really work because set in the nineteenth century a St. Theresa is not able to develop her full potential. In Romola, the tension arises from the novel’s critical revision of patterns of idealization. These intertextual ‘loans’ lay bare the dissonances underlying superficially coherent social structures at the same time, thereby allowing criticism of the contradictions and tensions within her culture’s attitude towards women. Thus, while lending authority and credibility to her heroines by establishing cross references to a cultural tradition, Eliot simultaneously produces a clash of conflicting strains imposed on these figures. She maximizes her protagonists by comparing them to, for example, a saint, yet at the same time she evokes a contrast between the respective religious, mythological or literary backgrounds of each of these models and the environment into which they are reborn. They often conflict with the ‘real life’ conditions under which her characters live. In the best of cases, Dantean love appears ridiculously unsuited within a prim Victorian context; in the worst of cases these references depict the ugly face of idealization, that is, the price at which it comes when it is not safely embedded within the transcendental realm of human faith or imagination.20 Escape is one means of solving such tension: Romola not only wants to break away from the confinement of the city walls and the oppressive political and private situation but she also needs to break away from a male, patriarchal cultural tradition.21 Like Beatrice, Romola is bound to Florence, but her development reflects a changing relationship with the city and her social ties to it. This is made clear indirectly by Savonarola, who keeps her from leaving the city and warns her of the consequences of breaking with the past: ‘Then, since that tie is snapped, you are without a law, without religion: you are no better than a beast of the field when she is robbed of her young’ (359). Romola turns her back on these urban, religious, social and private constraints, but then returns. Gillian Beer brought it to the point when arguing that George Eliot ultimately valued ‘interdependence’ over ‘independence’ (14). The ending brings the novel’s humanistic intent, as proposed in the Proem, full circle, in that it reintegrates the individual within her social context and places humanistic interests above egoistic concerns. Sympathy for the general good is valued higher in a woman

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than her self-fulfilment taking place outside society. Romola registers the shifts in the protagonist’s social and private identities brought about by the changing ideals she is submitted to, but although it points out the need for change, it does not offer radical solutions or prospects of change. While Romola shows no utterly convincing way out of women’s restrictive situations, it nonetheless shatters its ideals by laying bare the processes which produce them.

Romola’s Critique of Idealization George Eliot’s concern with morality, guilt, contrition and redemption is detectable in most of her works. It is a feature which has repeatedly been considered to be her heaviest Victorian burden, most famously by Friedrich Nietzsche, who derided her moral values as basically Christian without the sanction of faith (45). Romola presents the fascinating portrayal of Tito’s moral decline, drawing him gradually deeper into a self-perpetuating system of lies and treachery. Ever since the publication of the novel, he had enthralled readers and critics alike, who sometimes preferred his figure to the protagonist.22 Tito’s downward spiral automatically conjures up the visual idea of a moral descent, the topography of which was provided by Dante’s Commedia. A strong Dantean image, yet only recognizable for a reader familiar with Dante’s text, is the fatal embrace of Tito and his patron Baldassare, the latter driven by the desire ‘to die with his hold on this body’ and to ‘follow the traitor to hell that he might clutch him there’ (548). Tito’s final punishment comes in the form of a contrapasso, the deadly embrace of Baldassare unites the traitor and his victim (see also Milbank 85–86). It vividly recalls the final posture of Count Ugolino and the treacherous bishop Ruggiero, at whose head Ugolino gnaws while they are stuck in the frozen lake of Cocytus (Inferno XXXII-III). Moral responsibility is an issue between the two lovers in the first place – Tito’s and Romola’s unsuccessful marriage is just one of Eliot’s doomed marital bonds which will prove to be refining, purgatorial processes. But the moral dimension of the novel reaches beyond the couple’s private situation. Romola is not the only one to fall prey to Tito, ‘who made almost every one fond of him, for he was young and clever, and beautiful, and his manners to all were gentle and kind’ (583). He possesses the allure of a semi-God in the eyes of one person, Tessa. Naïve as she may be by nature, she is also kept in entire ignorance about her ‘husband’s’ public identity. After Tito has rescued her from the hands of a conjurer in the streets of Florence, she regards him as her saviour, as a heavenly messenger who is in charge of her: He had impressed her too differently from any human being who had ever come near her before, for her to make any comparison of details; she took no note of his dress; he was simply a voice and a face to her, something come

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As her saviour from Paradise, Tito assumes traits of a male Beatrice figure: he is a ray of light, whose bodily form matters less than his heavenly voice and his beautiful face. For Tessa, beauty is a sign of extraordinary virtue. Tito asks her at an earlier point why she felt so safe with him and her response is that it is because of his beauty – ‘like the people in Paradise; they are all good’ (106). The irony created by the girl’s unclouded perception of Tito does not go unnoticed since the reader knows about his secret doings. Put into the novel’s perspective on the inherent problems of female idealization, this passage and the language used make clear that Tessa’s notion of Tito as a heroic guardian angel is subjective and relative, as is the whole phenomenon of idealization. Tito is as easily transformed into a Beatrice in Tessa’s eyes as Romola is, regardless of his sex or his actual merits. His angelic quality expands for Tessa who thinks of him as ‘much more beautiful than the Archangel Michael, who was so mighty and so good that he lived with the Madonna and all the saints and was prayed to along with them’ (145). Again this very explicit and specified angelic comparison to one of the highest angels in the Divine Hierarchy creates a certain irony by forming a contrast with the other side of Tito’s character. After all he refers to himself as the ‘Great Tempter’ (178). The versatility of his facial expression is most clearly seen in the novel by Piero di Cosimo, the painter, when he states that a perfect traitor should have a face which vice can write no marks on – lips that will lie with a dimpled smile – eyes of such agate-like brightness and depth that no infamy can dull them – cheeks that will rise from a murder and not look haggard. (42) Or, as the narrator remarks with respect to Tessa’s stupefaction caused by Tito’s stunning beauty, ‘was it that Tito’s face attracted or repelled according to the mental attitude of the observer? Was it a cipher more than one key?’ (102). Tessa’s blind trust in his moral integrity goes to prove that not only beauty, but also virtue seems to lie in the eye of the beholder and that the seductive power of an ideal often resides in its persuasive force. Thus Romola’s and Tessa’s need to give and receive love, to trust and lovingly admire that person are set against a male-dominated world of imposture, manipulation and intrigue. Later on in the text, Romola will no longer be blinded by her husband’s handsome features. This stands in marked contrast to her initial understanding of him as ‘the warm stream of hope and gladness’ (175) and ‘sun-god’ (177) which characterizes their first private meeting in Chapter 17. This particular scene captures the rare moment of mutual idealization at its peak, presenting Romola as Tito’s ‘goddess’ and him being in ‘paradise’ (175) and culminating in a highly

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aesthetic tableau of their embrace, ‘she with her long white hands of dark-brown curls, and he with his dark fingers bathed in the streaming gold. Each was so beautiful to the other; each was experiencing that undisturbed mutual consciousness for the first time’ (175). This pattern of idealization and disillusionment is mirrored elsewhere in the novel. The two male characters who rely most heavily on the power of words are Tito and Savonarola, the secret of whose influence ‘lay in the highly mixed character of his preaching’ (234). As Tito’s case suggests, the issue of responsibility in the novel expands and touches upon further social circles, including the familial and the civic, as well as temporal aspects such as the moral legacy of the past. But in the end Savonarola lets Romola down by refusing to spare her godfather’s life and makes her rethink her own moral position in the world. The novel’s setting provides an idea of how charged the religious atmosphere in late fifteenth-century Europe was. Savonarola’s condemnation of luxury and materialism was a deliberate regression back to the stern morality and theocratic worldview of the Middle Ages, at a time when man’s awareness of his intellectual and spiritual autonomy was awakened. The figure of Savonarola, however, incorporates certain moralistic interests, above all the relation between individual and civic responsibility. Romola is forced to rethink her stance towards duty and obedience (457) feeling a strong aversion against fanaticism, but at the same time aware of the necessity and legitimacy of action (‘. . . the law was sacred. Yes, but rebellion might be sacred, too’ [468]). The issue of morality is not only transferred into a larger context but it also brings up the question of whether morality is gendered or not. In Romola, Eliot is mainly concerned with female moral superiority. Whereas male characters experience moral refinement and painful learning processes in, for example, Middlemarch, Romola rules any such possibility out. The connection between moral issues and the novel’s gender politics crystallizes in a particular point, namely, the destabilization of power relations between man and woman, a process which results from a moral and intellectual imbalance between the two. Female moral superiority is double-faced in Romola, attractive and repellent at the same time. Eliot’s message seems to be that a woman’s moral and intellectual superiority is hardly compatible with a patriarchal social system. It is at this point that Eliot provocatively goes beyond Dante, questioning the practicability of his idealized vision of love. By adopting the viewpoint of an idealized woman, by giving her a voice, the novel suggests that any such attempt of putting theory into practice is doomed to failure and leads to mutual disenchantment. This is not dissimilar to Christina Rossetti’s endeavour in ‘Monna Innominata’ where the speaker, a Beatrice, is empowered with speech and points out the deficiencies inherent in the traditional, one-sided representation of romantic love in Troubadour poetry. Romola tells the story of a woman’s emancipation, but at the same time questions the possibility of translating literary ideals into a social context. The female protagonist’s moral charms, her analytical intelligence and beauty are seen as

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assets, which turn into a burden by the time they no longer sustain Tito’s courtship fantasies and become a reality which unpleasantly impinges on his egoistic course. In fact, Tito repeatedly tries to distance the real Romola from his life not only by leading a clandestine double life, but also by framing her within mythological patterns. Her husband not only deceives her but he also tries to keep her ignorant of the impact of political events on her life and shamelessly abuses his marital rights. Tito is no adequate partner for Romola and the repulsion against her which he develops stems from his awareness of his unbridgeable inferiority.23 In the novel, not only fathers, lovers, husbands, but also abstract authorities like religious and social ideologies tend to misinterpret, abuse or limit the potential and liberty of the woman whom they idealize. In Romola the heroine is granted certain educational privileges by her father, but at the same time her development is limited because of her sex. Bardo repeatedly mentions how badly he lacks male assistance for his work because women do not live up to the requirements (51). Women’s potential and its repression through male forces is a constant theme in Eliot’s novels even though it is often accompanied by the idea that it can only be discovered and promoted by a man’s interference. Thus in Romola, the heroine’s abilities seem not to have been developed fruitfully yet, since she ‘had had contact with no mind that could stir the larger possibilities of her nature; they lay folded and crushed like embryonic wings, making no element in her consciousness beyond an occasional vague uneasiness’ (246). Gender-related boundaries within intellectual, social and cultural discourses and their transgression are a constant theme in Eliot’s writing and her biography. Eliot was well aware of the limitations imposed upon women by their social situation and Romola implicitly responds to some major points of the debates on ‘the woman question’, such as the status of a divorced woman and her right to material property. Her novels reflect her awareness that most women’s lives were shaped by external factors and not by an innate lack of certain qualities.24 Literary-historical critics such as Nancy Armstrong and Mary Poovey have shown that representations of gender, particularly of femininity and female desire in mid-nineteenth-century literature, were ‘sites on which ideological systems were simultaneously constructed and contested’, that is, where middle class subjectivity was shaped (Poovey 2). The organization of British society in the 1850s and 1860s was dependent on monogamy, the sexual division of labour and specific economic relations between the sexes (Poovey 8). Marriage and the nuclear family were vital for the establishment of a bourgeois society and the overall welfare of a nation which was involved in a huge industrial and imperial endeavour. This privileging of heterosexual marital bonding was accompanied by a revaluation of the ideologies of gender, that is, a shift in the understanding of what the feminine ideal was supposed to be. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the notion of virtue was increasingly articulated upon gender. Virtue became depoliticized, it was no longer a question

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of inherited class positions but became a moral, domestic and therefore feminine issue (N. Armstrong 14–15). The affectionate, faithful and housewifely woman was supposed to be standing aloof from the public sphere, without any considerable economic power on her own (see Poovey 91). Woman was turned into an emotional but equally economic reward, which would crown a man’s tenuous, toilsome way to wealth and respectability. Poovey’s account serves as a foil for Romola: Eliot’s novel mirrors the patterns Poovey has extracted from her reading of Victorian novels. Even though Romola is not the best financial match (‘There might be a wealthier alliance within the ultimate reach of successful accomplishments like this’ [118]), she is Tito’s key to Florentine society and will help to consolidate his social status in the city. Nello introduces Romola and her father to Tito by pointing out the benefits he could draw from Bardo’s social contacts and the pleasure he could take from looking at Romola, whose beauty, as he puts, is old Bardo’s gold (91). Tito’s marriage with Romola not only confirms his social status within the city of Florence but it also solves the problems related to his problematic origin. As a shipwrecked Greek denying his past to himself and the world, he has forsaken his origins and lacks the roots which he so badly needs to pursue his ambitions. By marrying Romola, he not only gains a wife but he also replaces Bardo’s lost son, Dino. As Dianne F. Sadoff states in her analysis of Dickens’s novels, the daughter ‘effaces origins, redeems temporality, and undoes genealogy through repetition’; she ‘binds together father, daughter, and husband’ (52–53). She creates the desired structure of a new family in which love is equally divided and, because of her ability to restore familial and genealogical wholeness and to complete the male individual, elicits an even deeper feeling of idealization: ‘Her [the daughter’s] redemptive skills reach beyond the hearth to redeem the abstract concepts and structures of genealogy, lineage, and descent’ (Sadoff 54). Romola in return, Sadoff argues, is driven by her search for ersatz-fathers and her reluctance to forsake them (97). As Poovey makes clear, there are certain restraints imposed on women’s eligibility as middle class wives, and among several specific class values chastity would be one crucial criterion. David Copperfield is eventually matched up with angelic Agnes because she values self-discipline above self-indulgence and, unlike other female characters in the novel, is neither sexualized nor vain. In Romola, as has been argued above, the peasant girl Tessa becomes Romola’s double: she is ineligible as a wife given her social status, yet she also embodies a completely different conception of femininity because of her strong physical attachment to Tito. She is a site of extrapolation, allowing Tito to escape from the constraints of his urban and marital identity. While the ending, Romola’s return to the hearth, remains debatable, Eliot’s criticism of social, heterosexual conventions works more convincingly on a meta-level: Romola follows certain conventions for the representation of gender roles and stereotypes but at the same time anticipates deconstructive readings.

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The text dismantles itself: its action follows established narrative pathways (e.g. the heroine’s flight from her environment, her ‘lesson’, her return to the old structures) but corrodes the psychological patterns which lie underneath them. Understood as a psychological, intersubjective phenomenon, idealization and its concomitant emotions such as trust, belief and admiration are repeatedly represented as highly subjective processes and the source of continuous disillusionment. As a literary convention or topos, idealization proves to be a burden for Romola. A preconceived pattern for the organization of heterosexual love, it is oppressive and needs to be discarded by the heroine for the sake of her development. Romola revolves around Dante’s concepts of love and femininity but gains its compelling strength from its attempt to find more sufficient and sincere alternatives for the diffusion of female love and potential than being a clone of Beatrice.

Chapter 6

Mourning a Male Beatrice: Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam

Alfred Lord Tennyson’s (1809–1892) In Memoriam A. H. H., the elegy he wrote for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam (1811–1833) after his unexpected death in 1833, gives ample evidence of Tennyson’s familiarity with Dante. First published in 1850, it was the result of a composition process which lasted for 17 years undergoing revisions in later editions. Described by Tennyson as ‘a kind of Divina Commedia, ending with happiness’ (H. Tennyson 1: 304) – at its end, in the Epithalamion, stands the wedding of Edmund Lushington and Tennyson’s sister Cecilia in 1842 – In Memoriam mirrors Arthur Henry Hallam’s reading of Dante, Hallam being a mediator between Tennyson and Italian literature.1 In Memoriam is not only a complex poem, a private elegy written for a friend, but also a ‘poem of its time not just in the anxieties about science and revolution, but in its whole construction of sexuality and self’ (Sinfield 153). It is tempting, but not easy, to establish a teleological reading of In Memoriam in analogy to the Commedia. Structurally, although Tennyson’s poem moves forward, there are many circular as well as regressive elements in the poem, such as its stanza form whose structure refers the end back to its beginning and is more static than progressive; its temporal ordering in annual cycles; its separation of a past before Hallam’s death and the time after and its nostalgic dwelling on memories of an irretrievable past. It is also difficult to ascertain whether its final sense of optimism represents a final resolution given the poem’s ‘moving double life of wandering irresolution and wilfully advancing optimism’ and ‘intricate, paradoxical relationship with changefulness’ characteristic of the elegiac genre (Perry 129–30). Tennyson uses the genre of the elegy and its standard expression of over-abundant feeling to model his dead friend upon Beatrice. This enables him to express a kind of love which may be hard to categorize. The clarity and certainty of his admiration and idealization of Hallam as opposed to the more complex, painful and contradictory emotional states the speaker finds himself in forms a fascinating contrast. This chapter analyzes Hallam’s construction as a male Beatrice figure and argues that his ‘Beatrification’ organizes the transition from a real to a symbolic level of masculinity, which culminates in his transformation into an ideal type of man. The poem’s male Beatrice is the

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poem’s switchboard, if you like, mediating between the poem’s elaboration of private bereavement and its formulation of a grander, inclusive vision. In this respect, Tennyson can be aligned with most of the writers and artists discussed in this book, as again, Beatrice represents a certain duality, combining earthly, individualized virtue and beauty with a superhuman, generalized notion of perfection. This became particularly clear in my previous discussion of D. G. Rossetti’s poetry and painting and will return in the following chapter on Pater since both of these writers understood Beatrice as an emblem of their respective aesthetic and poetic ideals for exactly this ambiguity inscribed in her figure. In contrast to these stable readings of Beatrice, my analyses of George Eliot’s novel as well as C. Rossetti’s sonnets came to the conclusion that female writers saw this duality as impracticable and unsustainable, turning it into their main focus of critique. In Tennyson’s case, using Beatrice’s gestures, so to speak, when talking about his dead friend gives the poet a ground from which he can develop his ideal vision of his friend as well as a concept of ideal masculinity. He thereby creates a larger than life Hallam off which the poem ricochets whenever his earthly qualities are summoned up.

Dante, Hallam and the Cambridge Apostles In the 1880 edition of Ballads and Poems, Tennyson published a poem which he had written as early as in 1865. Lady Emily Tennyson, his wife, who owed her own acquaintance with Dante’s writings to her husband, mentions in her diary entry for 7 May 1865 that the lines were offered to the city of Florence as a tribute to the 600th birthday of its great son, Dante Alighieri. The poem ends on a humble note: the speaker, ‘wearing but the garland of a day’ throws a flower at Dante’s feet ‘that fades away’. This tone of humility might to a certain degree be rhetorical – he himself became Poet Laureate in 1850 and attained a highly prominent status in Victorian society. The ironic twist to this anecdote is that, 15 years later, Tennyson had completely forgotten about the poem’s existence of which he had to be reminded by a friend.2 The intertextual connection between Tennyson’s poem and the Commedia as well as, to a lesser extent, the Vita Nuova, is obvious and affects several levels of the poem – linguistic, structural and conceptual.3 Sometimes simple images, such as ‘the path of life’ in sections 22 and 25, the depiction of a landscape redolent of the Earthly Paradise where Hallam has found his ‘full new life’ (86) or topoi such as the inexpressibility of his feelings and the inadequacy of language direct our attention to Dante (section 95).4 The statement that ‘Death has made / His darkness beautiful with thee’ (74, ll. 10–11) echoes a passage in the Vita Nuova XXIII (‘Sweet Death, I’ll cherish thee, / For thou art now a thing of graciousness / Since in my lady’s bosom thou hast been, . . .’; 69). Sometimes these references can be explicit and recognizable, as for example in the last

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stanza of the Epilogue and its emphasis on divine love ‘[t]o which the whole creation moves’, which recalls the last line of the Commedia. While from a linguistic point of view it would be interesting to examine Tennyson’s use and appropriation of Dante’s style, it is the structural and, even more so, the thematic parallels between the Commedia, the Vita Nuova and In Memoriam this chapter will concentrate on. Tennyson’s notion of love, religion and transcendence, his concern with spiritual ascent and his speculations on the state of the soul and the individual’s place in a cosmic order stand in interesting, complex relations to Dante’s works. However, by looking at these parallels it will become apparent that In Memoriam cannot be read in analogy to the Commedia, despite its author’s declaration and certain remarkable similarities in themes (e.g. loss and mourning of a love object, the elevation of the beloved in the memory of the bereaved) and, arguably so, structure. The thematic tension between Dante’s texts and Tennyson’s poem is double: Tennyson applies elements of Dante’s texts to an intellectual and religious environment which is unsettled and sceptical, and he models his journey on a Beatrice who is male. Thus there are interesting digressions from the literary model and dissonances which the presence of Dante’s text causes in Tennyson’s poem. Another intertextual foil against which In Memoriam can be read are Arthur Henry Hallam’s works. One episode in In Memoriam returns to Tennyson’s and Hallam’s days in Cambridge and their shared reading of Italian poets: ‘O bliss, when all in circle drawn / About him, heart and ear were fed / To hear him, as he lay and read / The Tuscan poets on the lawn’ (89, ll. 21–24).5 Hallam’s interest in Italy, its language and literature, had taken hold on him before he matriculated at Trinity College in 1828. He had travelled to Italy in 1827 with his father and perfected his Italian so as to be able to write sonnets in Italian. Even before that, in 1824, at the age of 13, he had translated the Ugolino episode into Greek iambics (Toynbee, Dante in English, 2: 416–17). His intellectual faculties and his knowledge of foreign languages and philosophy were outstanding, and his friendship and presence were keenly sought by his fellow students, particularly those belonging to the exclusive circle of the Cambridge Apostles.6 Before his death in Vienna, he wrote not only poetry, but also several essays, some of which earned him high academic praise. His writings not only give an insight into his philosophical concepts and that of his fellow Apostles but they also show the extent to which Hallam was inspired by Italian literature. Among his works immediately concerned with Dante is his autobiographical poem ‘A Farewell to the South’ (1828), which describes his youthful passion for Anna Mildred Wintour whom he met and fell in love with during his stay in Italy in 1827–1828. The speaker celebrates Dante as ‘heir / Of a world’s wonder, whom the Almighty gave / To be an earnest of His power to erect / Our souls above themselves’ (ll. 241–44; Writings 15). Further works related to Dante are his partial translations of the sonnets of the Vita Nuova in 1829, an essay called ‘The Influence of Italian upon English Literature’, which he presented as a declamation on

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Trinity College Commemoration Day in December 1831, and his Remarks on Professor Rossetti’s ‘Disquisizioni Sullo Spirito Antipapale’ (1832), a critical response to Gabriele Rossetti’s highly allegorical reading of Dante’s writings. Connected to Dante is his essay ‘Theodicaea Novissima’, which he read to the Apostles on 29 October 1831. Due to Hallam’s father’s intervention in the editing and publication of his dead son’s literary material, Hallam’s fame and reputation during the nineteenth century did not reach the heights it might have under different conditions. This becomes clearest with respect to the translations of the Vita Nuova sonnets, which Henry Hallam withheld from the 1834 edition of the Remains describing them in the Preface as too literal and too harsh (xxxii). A poem such as ‘A Farewell to the South’ could not have been written without the knowledge of Dante’s love for Beatrice, which he gained from his immersion in the Vita Nuova. The Cambridge Apostles were a secret society founded in 1820 under the name ‘Cambridge Conversazione Club’.7 What earned them the title ‘Apostles’ was their habit of keeping the number of their members down to 12. Most of them became influential figures of public interest. Their exclusivity, combined with unconditional loyalty and friendship, turned Apostlehood into an essential part of their carefully selected members’ lives. Tennyson and Hallam, for instance, were not only closest friends during their studies but they also hoped to be united through family bonds (Hallam got engaged with Tennyson’s sister Emily). Unlike other University clubs, the Cambridge Apostles’ main intention was to pursue intellectual purposes and to do so in a sceptical, anti-authoritarian way.8 Fervent defenders of philosophical and political liberalism, they were opposed to religious dogmatism and nationalist ideologies. In religious matters, this meant a profound disagreement with the teachings of orthodox Anglican theology prevalent at Cambridge and a propagation of German biblical criticism and Coleridge’s religious and political thought instead. Members used their classical learning, and more specifically philosophical idealism, to train the imaginative power they deemed necessary for self-improvement. They were susceptible to influences from British and Continental philosophy and contemporary literature, mainly the Romantic poets ( J. Beer 106–33). It is important to see that the kernel of nineteenth-century discussions concerning Beatrice’s ontological status was formed in these hotbeds of academic discussion.

In Memoriam and Arthur Henry Hallam’s Writings Hallam’s ‘The Influence of Italian upon English Literature’ contains several self-reflective passages on the phenomenon of intertextuality avant la lettre. He talks of a ‘commerce of mind’, which takes place between different literatures and insists that it would be delusive to think that any literature could prosper without external influence (Writings 213–34: 214). He values the ‘Roman’ tradition above the ‘Teutonic’, praises Italian for its capacity to absorb

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‘the whole height, breadth, and depth of human knowledge’ (223) and considers the Roman Catholic faith as a fruitful influence because of its aesthetic appeal (224). Dante occupies an elevated status among Italian poets because he epitomizes a movement within Italian literature in which the Troubadour tradition is blended with elements from Christianity and Platonism (224). Love, and in the Troubadour tradition this means love for an earthly woman, is the unifying power under which these three traditions can be subsumed, ‘love as at once the base and pyramidal point of the entire universe’, which teaches man to regard ‘the earthly union of souls . . . as the best and the appointed symbol of our relations with God’ (224–25). Like Dante, Hallam insists that love for a human being will lead to higher, divine love. The need of and strife for a union of souls is reflected in his other writings, such as his essay ‘On Sympathy’ (read to the Apostles on 4 December 1830, then published in Remains [159–71]), and it becomes the central theme in ‘A Farewell to the South’, which is the poetic rendering of his observations presented in his ‘Influence’ essay. In this poem, the speaker introduces a Beatrice figure called Nina who combines all the characteristics of Dante’s muse, except for the fact that she is not dead. This does not prevent the speaker from embarking on a rhetoric of spatial separation (ll. 10–13; Writings 8–27). Nina fulfils all the redemptive functions of a Beatrice, she is his ‘lodestar’ on which he fixes his look (l. 13), and ‘all she gazed on seemed to grow more fair’ (l. 14). He is outspoken on how similar Nina’s ennobling love is to that of Beatrice, who is ‘incarnate poetry’ (l. 15) and to whom he dedicates the poem’s central passage (ll. 241–316). The words he puts into Beatrice’s mouth reiterate the theme of woman’s improving influence on man, which he then takes up again later (ll. 425–26): ‘That Woman’s Love was sent / To heal man’s tainted heart and chasten him for Heaven’ (l. 20). The importance of love is further explicated in the ‘Theodicaea Novissima’, which was published posthumously in the edition of Hallam’s Remains in 1834 (111–51). A number of critics have discussed the impact of the ‘Theodicaea’ and, more generally, Hallam’s writings on Tennyson, with special focus on In Memoriam.9 An amalgamation of different influences such as Plato, Dante, Coleridge medieval philosophy, rationalism and Christianity, this work is, as its title suggests, concerned with the justification of God’s existence given the presence of evil in the world. Hallam ultimately gives an answer to this problem – evil is a necessary means for the perfection of Christ as the embodiment of the Divine on earth (Remains 122) – but he also elaborates on the theme of the ennobling quality of human love which he regards as vital for the human relationship with God. In fact, Hallam sees love as the central purpose of man’s existence in the world. Basing his observations on Bible passages which represent God as love, Hallam defines love and not intellect as the central characteristic of God (Remains 114). Love made God create the universe and mankind in his image, and God’s love for mankind made him send Christ to earth. Through Christ’s coming to earth God has taken a step towards humanity and man can be led to God’s love.

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But Hallam’s writings not only provide a theoretic and highly abstract background to Tennyson’s poetry. He is also a prominent reinventor of Beatrice, being one of the first nineteenth-century writers to appreciate this figure and to partake in the discussion of her status in Dante’s works. Hallam did not tire of defending Beatrice’s status as a real, historical figure against attempts to turn her into an entirely abstract concept. Possibly the foremost promoter of strictly allegorical readings of Beatrice and Dante’s works in general was Gabriele Rossetti. As has been shown, his reading of Beatrice as an allegory of theology or philosophy, with an implication of political harmony, is elaborated mainly in two of his works, La Beatrice di Dante (1842) and Lo Spirito Antipapale che Produsse la Riforma (1832), the latter of which elicited Hallam’s reply. In these works, Gabriele Rossetti embarks on a reading of Dante’s Commedia, the Vita Nuova and the Convito, as cryptic texts whose real, Freemasonic meaning has been hidden beneath the gergo of a religious framework, Catholicism and the generic conventions of love poetry. Thus works such as the Commedia are said to veil another truth underneath their literal surface. According to Hallam, this literal level had to be defended because for him truth lay precisely there. The antiallegorical position taken by Romantic writers such as S. T. Coleridge, who was a popular figure with the Cambridge Apostles, contributed towards a climate in which Rossetti’s theories were met with hostility.10 Hallam’s condemnation of Rossetti’s allegorical mode as an aesthetic device thus falls within a broader aesthetic programme. According to Hallam, theories can be helpful, yet they do not ultimately lead to the truth which sometimes lies in the ‘darkness’ (Remains 269–340: 274) provided by nature, which scholars such as Rossetti try to light up with their hypotheses: ‘To every man, worthy the name of poet, the first object is always the Beautiful. No allegory, however wise and profound, can distract him from it!’ (317). In his ‘Remarks’, he argues for the compatibility of seeing Beatrice both as the Florentine woman of the Vita Nuova – ‘the personal form in which Dante delighted to contemplate the ideal objects of his moral feelings’ and as a symbolic figure as which, according to him, she appears mainly in the Paradiso (Remains 292). In a woman generally he sees ‘innocence’ and ‘wisdom’ which has been preserved because she was protected from the corruptive effects of science and learning (ll. 539–46), an idea which Tennyson also uses in In Memoriam (sections 32 and 33). Considering her purity, humbleness and simplicity, Hallam argues, Dante saw Beatrice eventually as a symbol of religion, but holds on to her historical reality. Upon Beatrice as ‘the object of his youthful passion’ Dante had ‘concentrate[d] all his loftiest sentiments and pure ideas of perfection’, and she was [d]escribed throughout as most pure, most humble, most simple, most affectionate, and as the personal form in which Dante delighted to contemplate the ideal objects of his moral feelings, is it wonderful that she should become at last for him the representative of religion itself? (Remains 292)

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There are several broad parallels between Hallam’s writings and Tennyson’s poetry, such as the divinization of mundane love, a concern with transcendence, the immortality of love or the desire to communicate and reunite with the dead. Hallam provided the fundamental theoretical background for his own apotheosis in Tennyson’s poem. The arguments Tennyson used to flesh out his ideal – his friend’s ennobling influence on fellow human beings, the encouragement which Hallam provides to aspire towards his condition, the link between the earthly and the divine, invaluable wisdom as opposed to utilitarian knowledge – had been anticipated by Hallam. The divergence in their overall religious creed is probably the most fundamental difference between Hallam’s and Tennyson’s texts. While Hallam’s theodicy is stabilized by a sense of optimism in the ‘Theodicaea’, Tennyson struggles to achieve any such reconciliation in In Memoriam.11 This contrast becomes clearest when considering Tennyson’s concept of Heaven. He did not warm to theocentric concepts of Heaven presupposing the loss of individual identity. James Knowles remembered that ‘[h]is belief in personal immortality was passionate – I think almost the strongest passion that he had’ and that one of his main tenets was that individuality persisted after death (Knowles 169). According to Hallam, man ultimately strives to be one with God (Remains 131). Even though Tennyson situates Hallam as part of the Godhead in the closing lines of In Memoriam, speaking of ‘[t]hat friend of mine who lives in God’ (Epilogue, l. 139) and thinks of those as blessed ‘[w]hose loves in higher love endure’ (32, l. 14), there are other moments in the poem when his love for his friend as a human being and his androcentric idea of Heaven surface clearly and his personal struggles of faith shine through. Section 13 describes Hallam as ‘The human-hearted man I loved, / A Spirit, not a breathing voice’ (ll. 11–12) and section 24 describes their first encounter when ‘This earth had been the Paradise’, l. 6). His concept of Heaven is one that resembles Purgatorio more than Paradiso. His fear of the dissolution of the self is epitomized in section 47, where he describes as ‘faith as vague as all unsweet’ (l. 5) the idea that the souls of dead people should ‘[r]emerg[e] in the general Soul’, losing their earthly individuality. This fear of losing his earthly identity stems from the speaker’s hope of being able to resume a friendship with Hallam in the hereafter. Tennyson hopes that he and Hallam will eventually be reunited ‘as a single soul’ (84, l. 44). In contrast to Dante’s text, where Beatrice withdraws towards the end of Paradiso as Dante’s guide and where the endpoint of the journey is God, this scenario’s emphasis lies less on an eventual union with Jesus, than on Hallam and Tennyson making this last journey together. This situation is similar to D. G. Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’ where the dead damozel imagines how Mary will guide the united couple towards a blissful life spent together in Heaven. In the words of T. S. Eliot, ‘[Tennyson’s] desire for immortality never is quite the desire for Eternal Life; his concern is for the loss of man rather than for the gain of God’ (334).

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In Memoriam: A Divine Comedy? Dante’s journey is well-structured; his descent into hell is followed by a gradual, but persistent movement upwards to Paradise. In Memoriam partly follows this scheme, partly deviates from it. It begins with deep grief and ends on a note of hope and reconciliation, but the numerous moments of doubt and the relapses into despair which occur throughout the poem render this final optimism less convincing.12 In Tennyson’s poem, grief is depicted as double-faced in that its impact, devastating as it is, can be conquered by love. Besides, his grief is countered by a belief in spiritual progress (‘I held it truth, with him who sings / To one clear harp in divers tones, / That men may rise on stepping-stones / Of their dead selves to higher things’, 1, ll. 1–4). After Hallam’s death the speaker finds himself ‘wander[ing] on a darkened earth’ (85, l. 31), going through a cleansing process which makes him ready for something new (‘Ring out the old, ring in the new’, 106, l. 5) and preparing him for his reappearance in the social world (‘I will not eat my heart alone’, 108, l. 3). The memory of his dead friend is joyful (‘surely we / Will drink to him, what’er he be, / And sing the songs he loved to hear’, 107, ll. 22–24). But this recognition does not take shape smoothly. What lies between despair and reconciliation, and what makes In Memoriam a complex poem whose course is difficult to follow, is an oscillation between these opposed emotional states. This is due to the speaker’s religious doubt which is not convincingly resolved and to the kind of affection felt for Hallam. The speaker finds it difficult to accommodate his feelings for Hallam, which shows itself in the use of ambiguous images and the partly unpredictable movement between grief, hope and feelings such as jealousy. In Memoriam is a ‘massive double poem’, as Isobel Armstrong has put it: the poet is uncomfortable with his feelings and equally ‘uncomfortable and transgressive’ is the text (Victorian Poetry 256). In Memoriam evokes several of Beatrice’s most significant gestures as well as themes connected to her figure as they are mentioned in the Vita Nuova: it highlights the mourner’s perception of time which is now split between a before and an after, the one only available in memories (a ‘fading legend of the past’, 62, l. 4), the other now turned into poetry (‘Words must bring aid, as weeping did before’, VN XXXI; 82). Like the Vita Nuova, where Dante commemorates the first anniversary of Beatrice’s death by drawing an angel (XXXIV), the recurrence of certain important dates, is an important structural feature. A very obvious parallel to the Commedia is that In Memoriam is not only based on the death of a beloved person, but that it even requires it. Both works were intended to commemorate and to honour the dead beloved: In Memoriam as an elegy to a dead friend; the Commedia as the fulfilment of a vision Dante had at the end of the Vita Nuova.13 Dante, grief-stricken as he is by Beatrice’s death, knows that Heaven is the more appropriate place for her to stay. After all Beatrice was called ‘to partake of glory under the banner of the blessed Queen’

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(VN XXVIII; 79) and she has now attained ‘glory as befits her state’ (VN XXXI; 83). Dante appears to be pacified. Tennyson’s response, in contrast, is bitter: he emphasizes that Hallam was superior to the rest of mankind and mourns not only the loss of a friend, but also the tragic loss of ‘the pillar of a people’s hope, / The centre of a world’s desire’ (64, ll. 15–16), thereby alluding to the brilliant career which lay ahead of Hallam. The speaker visualizes the possibilities that a life with Hallam would have offered, namely, Hallam’s earthly fame and the children whose uncle he would have been (84). As much as he is disconcerted by the actual loss, he is also plagued by his ignorance concerning his friend’s otherworldly form of existence. In contrast to the Commedia, there is a profound sense of insecurity in In Memoriam as to the afterlife of the human soul. The question of what Hallam looks like in Heaven is a recurrent one: ‘What art thou then? I cannot guess’, he asks in section 130 (l. 5) and shudders at the idea that his appearance might have fundamentally changed, that ‘. . . thou art turned into something strange’ (41, l. 5). This serves as an example of the Victorian need to humanize abstract notions of heaven, the human soul and its life after death. The resulting androcentric notions of life after death, partly inspired by Swedenborg’s vision of a materialistic Heaven in which earthly love continued to be cultivated, turned it into a concrete place where the broken earthly continuum of familial love could be restored.14 Dante learns of Beatrice’s status and well-being in Heaven. In Purgatorio XXX and XXXI he sees that Beatrice and her physical shape, except for an increase in beauty, has not changed (Purgatorio XXXI ll. 82–84). Even when she is veiled, there is never any doubt for Dante that he is in Beatrice’s presence (Purgatorio XXX ll. 36–39). As strong a source as Dante might have been for the poem’s visualization of Paradise, In Memoriam contains too many speculative notions on human immortality to fit into a coherent system of faith. This becomes clearest in sections 41–44, where several models of post-mortem life are suggested but none is consistently pursued. The question of individuality and its dissolution is brought into play (45–47) as well as the fears or hopes of those alive that the dead possibly might be with them (50–51). The speaker is haunted by the fear of estrangement between him and his dead friend, a fear bordering on jealousy that ‘mixing with his proper sphere’ Hallam would discover ‘the baseness’ of the earthly ‘lot’ (60, ll. 5–6) and that ‘[he] shall be [Hallam’s] mate no more’ (41, l. 20). The speaker fears that his Beatrice might live in an infernal sphere, surrounded by ‘gulfs beneath’, at whose imagining he ‘shudders’, and ‘howlings from forgotten fields’ (41, ll. 15–16). This nightmarish landscape evokes the speaker’s own metaphysical doubts and the horror which his disbelief exposes him to. Not only does the notion of ‘gulfs’ and ‘howling from forgotten fields’ haunted by ‘spectral doubts’ recall Dante’s Inferno but it is also reminiscent of D. G. Rossetti’s drama of separation enacted in ‘The Blessed Damozel’ in which the unbridgeable abyss between the two lovers in heaven and on earth rules out any communication.15

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A similarly vexed question reflecting Tennyson’s anxiety and uncertainty is whether communication between the two friends is possible at all. In section 82, the speaker accuses Death of having made contact impossible: ‘He put our lives so far apart / We cannot hear each other speak’ (ll. 15–16). The theme of desired, but impossible communication is eventually settled in section 95, where the longed for contact takes place, at least momentarily. While reading Hallam’s letters, the speaker undergoes an experience which can be read in terms of an ecstatic spiritual contact, an epiphanic vision, in which he is one – not with God, but with Hallam: So word by word, and line by line, The dead man touched me from the past, And all at once it seemed at last The living soul was flashed on mine, And mine in this was wound, and whirled About empyreal heights of thought, And came on that which is, and caught The deep pulsations of the world. Tennyson’s account of this particular moment is vague: there is a sense of insecurity in his use of the verb ‘to seem’. This together with the ambiguity of the verb ‘touched’ (is it a real, physical touch or a metaphor?) clouds a too optimistic reading of the passage and makes a simplified comparison with Dante’s experience and style difficult. Yet there is nonetheless a Dantean quality to this scene, in that the reunion of souls takes place in an environment redolent of Paradiso, its huge spatial dimensions and divine order.16 Even though Tennyson neither quotes from Dante nor makes an explicit reference to his works, he manages to evoke a Dantean environment with the help of certain metonymical expressions which trigger associations. ‘Whirl’ is a reminder of Inferno V, where the damned souls of Francesca and Paolo are caught in an eternal whirlwind as punishment for their illicit love.17 A similar example of Tennyson’s use of language which evokes a Dantean scenario is section 85, where the speaker is accompanied by ‘great Intelligences fair’ (l. 21) through an epistemological process at the end of which he will have ‘[a]ll the knowledge that the sons of flesh / Shall gather in the cycled times’ (85, l. 28). This conjures up a Dantean notion of the Empyrean as encountered in Paradiso XII and described later on in Paradiso: heavenly wisdom is revealed in the presence of God; with it comes the fulfilment of any desire and a timelessness which enables people from different periods of the past to gather. The amazed Dante is surrounded by hosts of angels on his journey, a pilgrimage following ‘a path now up, now down, now circling round’ (Paradiso XXXI l. 48; 528). With the help of some expressions such as ‘cycled times’ or ‘great Intelligences fair’, Tennyson evokes Dante’s language and his topography of Heaven.

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Introducing a Male Beatrice Reading Hallam as a male Beatrice figure has far-reaching implications. As shown above, Tennyson’s ‘Beatrification’ of Hallam reflects two tendencies: on one hand he clings to the status quo of their friendship before Hallam’s death, on the other hand he idealizes a transhumanized Hallam. It seems as if Tennyson was unwilling to forsake the earthly nature of his friend in favour of an abstract concept; nonetheless he constructs a larger than life Hallam. One way by which this ‘othering’ and aggrandizing Hallam comes about is his equation with Christ. In order to pass as a Christ and Beatrice figure, Hallam needs to possess divine qualities. He is, for example, referred to as ‘[t]he man I held as half-divine’ (14, l. 10) and the epilogue identifies him as ‘a noble type / Appearing ere the times were ripe’ (Dante calls Beatrice ‘noble thing’ and ‘noble soul’ in VN XXXI; 83). Tennyson’s son Hallam recalls his father’s admiration of what he called ‘the man-woman’ in Christ, that is, the union of tenderness and strength, his ‘purity and holiness and . . . His infinite pity’ (Memoir 1: 326). Tennyson’s construction of a male Beatrice is based on Hallam’s association with Christ, Christ’s androgyny (as well as Beatrice’s Christological implications) serving as a connective hinge.18 Androgyny has a long cultural history and figures strongly in literary and religious traditions (see the overview given by Busst). Dante, for example, discovers the feminine side of the Divine because of his love for Beatrice who in return appears in the unconventional role as a preacher or a female religious teacher. Part of her function is to show Dante the female side of God, an idea which was not unusual in medieval thought, with ‘Wisdom’ (sophia) being commonly regarded as female (Ferrante 90).19 Androgyny implies the perfect balance between the feminine and the masculine and was important in Romantic and Victorian literature. Romantic poets had productively perpetuated existent traditions, using androgyny, similarly to the concept of the Eternal Feminine, to ‘valorize the appropriation of female qualities by male heroes’ and to create the Romantic symbolic woman (Hoeverler 1–2).20 At the same time androgyny appealed to writers and artists because it was suitable for an elaboration of liberal concepts, for example, with respect to the struggle for sexual equality. The construction of Hallam’s androgyny in In Memoriam is made possible by Tennyson’s use of certain features of the elegiac genre. There were two strands of this tradition which Tennyson combined: the English elegy, a poem of lamentation composed on occasions of public and private bereavement, and the Latin tradition represented by poets such as Catullus, Ovid, Tibullus, whose amatory elegies covered a great variety of subjects and presented a selfconscious analysis of complex emotions.21 Even though Tennyson did not adopt the elegiac metre of the Roman poets, he discusses his emotions in an extremely self-reflective way and introduces a variety of subjects. Besides, he includes a number of themes which are characteristic of the genre, as for

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example the topos of the ‘dark house’ (paraclausithyron) (sections 7 and 119), which depicts the speaker standing outside Hallam’s house (an adaptation of the lover waiting outside of the house of his mistress at night lamenting that the door is closed for him); or the propemptikon, the farewell to a departing traveller (section 9); or the prosponetikon, a speech of welcome given to a traveller who has just arrived (sections 14 and 17) (Shatto/Shaw 27). The elegiac mode enables the speaker to adopt the rhetoric of heterosexual emotion within a context of male friendship. While this allows him to unfold his grief and to celebrate his friend, it introduces ambiguity to the poem. This is explainable in terms of a general vagueness of the concepts of ‘friend’ and ‘lover’ in the early modern period (see Hammond 18). Today’s distinction between male friendship and homosexuality was unknown in the Renaissance and developed in Western culture within the last 200 years (see Edmondson/Wells 68). Like Shakespeare’s sonnets, Tennyson’s poems subject ‘this word [love] to an intense re-imagining, working out a newly-felt definition of love’ (Hammond 151). As Harold Bloom put it: ‘The death of a beautiful young man strikes our social sense as a less appropriate theme for poetry than Poe’s pervasive theme but is of course much more traditional than Poe’s preference in corpses’ (Ringers 149). Tennyson’s delicate style, combined with a rhetoric of excessive feeling was read as unmanly in the Victorian age.22 His preference for the expression of refined emotions, which could be seen as overtly feminine and, especially in his early poetry, his attempts to appropriate a female point of view, earned him the label as one of the most effeminate writers of the Victorian period.23 This becomes clearest in his so-called ‘lady poems’, with revealing titles such as ‘Isabel’, ‘Claribel’ or ‘Adeline’ and other poems such as ‘The Lady of Shalott’ or ‘Mariana’, which deal with abandoned women and associate women with loss and mourning. The speaker is aware of the mockery which his outbursts of excessive grief might provoke (‘I sometimes hold it half a sin / To put in words the grief I feel’, 5, ll. 1–2). Section 21 reflects his awareness of the disapproval some contemporaries felt towards his outward expression of mourning (‘He loves to make parade of pain’, l. 10) and of their doubts concerning his poetic sincerity. In Memoriam’s construction of gender identities is further complicated by Tennyson’s repeated adoption of male and female personae. The speaker uses images referring to different sorts of family relations to phrase his feelings, adopting the perspective of the mourning widow and widower (13), his friend’s spouse (97), a brother of Hallam (9) or the father and mother of a bride (40). He frequently employs images of heterosexual relations to describe his feelings for Hallam. Sometimes his wording suggests an awkward sense of physicality or even sexuality and makes the images appear inadequate because sexually allusive, as for example in section 6, where he indirectly compares his sister’s ‘perpetual maidenhood’ (l. 43) to his state of loneliness after his friend’s death. By describing the Hallam-Tennyson relationship as an ‘unclassified affection’,

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Elaine Jordan circumnavigates the controversial discussion of homosexuality in the poem which follows these observations and which has been so prevalent in recent Tennyson criticism (14).24 Whereas Alan Sinfield argues that it is a poem about homosexuality, mid-twentieth-century criticism vehemently denied any such charges; other critics have tried to discuss the issue more delicately (127).25 It is certainly a fair judgment on In Memoriam to state that it is flexible with regard to the models of human love it depicts. The Tennysonian object of desire can, after all, be ‘homo-gendered as in In Memoriam, sometimes bi-gendered as in The Princess . . ., sometimes constructed as a woman and mythically unitary . . ., and sometimes aligned with the maternal body as in the Idylls of the King’ (Joseph, Tennyson and the Text 4). Richard Dellamora argues that the comparison with Beatrice is, like the ‘idealizing rhetoric of androgyny’ in In Memoriam, or the association with Christ, a means for Tennyson to create an intermediary poem situated between idealized homosocial eroticism and explicit sexual discourse (Masculine Desire 109). But attempts have been made to ultimately free In Memoriam’s overall message from the constraints of a sexually focused, biographic reading – and thereby do justice to Tennyson’s own understanding of his poem as ‘not an actual autobiography’ (H. Tennyson, 1: 304; emphasis in the original).26 The poem receives its final sense of tentative optimism from the love for Hallam in which lies a greater potential transcending individual happiness and pointing towards a greater reward. This greater reward is obtained by the poem’s movement between the levels of the real and the ideal: As much as In Memoriam is a private elegy mourning the loss of a dear friend and a public poem mirroring mid-Victorian doubt and scepticism, it is concerned with the construction of an ideal, for the purpose of which Dante’s Beatrice serves as an important model.

Hallam and Ideal Masculinity Tennyson leaves no doubt as to Hallam’s ideal qualities. He dwells on Hallam’s superiority to himself and the rest of mankind and refers to his friend’s exquisite charms (‘a soul of nobler tone’, 60, l. 1) and intelligence. Tennyson’s praise of Hallam uses some of the topoi which were used by Dante. The speaker unabashedly expresses his own inferiority (42) and his inability to love him adequately (‘I cannot love thee as I ought, / For love reflects the thing beloved’, 52, ll. 1–2). The passage which best sums up Hallam’s elevated status within the divine creation are sections 109–114. Here the speaker once more celebrates Hallam’s virtues: his ability to converse, his critical capacity, his love of virtue, his love of freedom and England (119). Records of their years at Cambridge emphasize Hallam’s appeal to other students whom he attracted because of his intelligence and charisma, as reflected in section 111. Hallam’s virtues are not an end in themselves, however. His position in this world is that of a Christlike

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redeemer, pushing mankind towards self-improvement, ‘a lever to uplift the earth / And roll it in another course’ (113, ll. 15–16). Hallam’s benign influence reaches a more universal significance by morally improving fellow human beings (‘The stern were mild when thou wert by, / The flippant put himself to school’, 110, ll. 9–10) and restoring an order to things out of joint (112). The way Hallam is sketched in the poem recalls the rhetoric and affective gestures of idealization the preceding chapters in this book showed are recurrent elements of Beatrice’s Victorian afterlife. Passing by ‘the stern’, Hallam exerts a salubrious influence similar to Beatrice’s miraculous effects on bystanders, when she is walking in the streets of Florence (of her it is said that ‘[h]er presence brings them such felicity / They render thanks to God for his sweet grace’; she is ‘[a] thing from Heaven sent, to all she shows / A miracle in which the world may share’, VN XXVI; 77), or George Eliot’s Romola when tending to the poor. Tennyson describes his own better self which he owes to his friend. In sections 50–58, grief and despair is contrasted with the influence of ‘the sweetest soul / That ever looked with human eyes’ (57, ll. 11–12), whom the speaker entreats to save him in his hours of physical and spiritual pain (50). Similarly, Dante, in the Vita Nuova, evokes the presence of Beatrice in his memory when he feels lonely and desperate: ‘Then in my solitude, I call, distraught, / On Beatrice, and say: “Are you then dead?”/ And while I call on her, I’m comforted’ (VN XXXI; 84). Hallam is depicted as an example of human self-improvement which he invites others to aspire to. Like Beatrice, he is a pivotal figure between the human and divine; like her he occupies a realm in which earthly temporal and spatial conditions are suspended. But he fulfils more secular criteria by being a gentleman, Hallam ‘not being less but more than all / The gentleness he seemed to be’ (111, ll. 11–12). As a gentleman, Hallam combines the intellect, behaviour and self-discipline (131) traditionally considered as masculine with a capacity for empathy associated with femininity. This is a basically androgynous combination of virtues ascribed to the feminine respectively masculine which was not uncommon in bourgeois culture of the mid-nineteenth century. The gentrification of Victorian bourgeois society redefined gender concepts: virtue and refined behaviour were not only female assets, but also required of men (Davidoff/Hall 397).27 However, there is a slippage between the celebration of noble gentlemanliness and the contempt which the poet fears the public parading of ‘effeminate’ emotionality might have to face.28 By praising his friend Hallam’s androgynous qualities and by doing so in overtly sentimental ways, the public poet situates himself at the margins of respectability. One could argue that this, in return, has the effect of consolidating his position as a visionary poet, who remains misunderstood and possibly ridiculed by his lay audience. After all, Tennyson, like Dante, has exclusive wisdom to impart. This wisdom, rejected by a scornful outside world, makes both poets fulfil the function of a vates, of a prophetic poet, who has penetrated into the ‘divine mystery’ and

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‘is to reveal that to us – that sacred mystery which he more than others lives ever present with’ (Carlyle 96).29 Carlyle’s 1840 lecture On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, published in 1841, bases its announcement of a new ‘hero’ on a similarly perceived need to cure the wounds inflicted upon mankind by utilitarianism and thereby introduced a shift in the perception of heroism. Carlyle’s rediscovery of the poet as a prophet, privileged in his access to hidden, divine truths, is accompanied by a rejection of a warrior ideal, thereby privileging ‘man’s sincerity and depth of vision’ (99) above martial valour and the mere force of intellect.30 Hence it is no surprise that Tennyson prioritizes wisdom above the bleakness of utilitarian knowledge (‘May she mix / With men and prosper!’ – ‘She is the second, not the first’ [114, ll. 2–3 and l. 16]) and states that it is only wisdom which can save man from the dangers of purely of intellectual achievement (‘A higher hand must make her mild’), which is cerebral, but not spiritual. Knowledge as belonging to ‘reason’s colder part’ (124, l. 14) is opposed to the human capacity of feeling. Knowledge needs wisdom as a corrective which keeps man from ‘submitting all things to desire’ and pursuing a mad ‘onward race / For power’ (114, ll. 14–15). Hallam is a model to humanity since he ‘[grew] not alone in power / And knowledge’ but also ‘[in] reverence and charity’ (114, l. 28). By describing wisdom as Hallam’s greatest virtue, Tennyson simultaneously feminizes him and likens him to Beatrice whose function in Paradiso is that of an intellectual guide.31 This book can only sketch the complex changes affecting Victorian concepts of masculinity and femininity, suggesting that In Memoriam reflects ongoing debates against this unstable backdrop. It would be wrong to automatically assume that Tennyson radically challenged prevalent notions of ideal masculinity by casting Hallam as a Beatrice figure combining feminine and masculine traits. What we sometimes like to think of as very rigid categories for male and female gender identities in the Victorian period was in fact more malleable and less incontestable at the time when he wrote his poem. Monolithic views of Victorian masculinity, looking at the Victorian man as a despot aggressively pursuing a public career while his wife remains a meek angel in the house, have come under attack over the last 10 or 20 years. The period ranging from the 1830s to the 1860s has been a focus of research showing how new formations of the masculine were represented in literature and the visual arts in order to find a new gender poetic for an age undergoing massive social changes. The studies by Herbert Sussmann, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall and John Tosh, focusing on the middle classes, have illustrated the necessity of pluralizing our view of ‘the Victorian man’, to move beyond the convenient but limiting division between the private and the public realm and to be aware of the dynamics at work over the century. Awareness of the instability of certain terms means considering for example that in its specifically early Victorian context, which is the time when Tennyson wrote his poem, the adjective ‘manly’ meant something more than masculine: it contains a connotation of ‘humane’

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and emerged as a new anti-utilitarian ideal (Hilton 66). Another example is the Victorian use of ‘effeminacy’, which had its root in eighteenth-century discourses on classical republicanism and warrior ethos. In this classical context, effeminacy was broadly associated with an absence of martial valour, ascribed to women, children, slaves, eunuchs and hermaphrodites (Dowling, Hellenism 5–8). It was only later on in the nineteenth century that effeminacy became automatically associated with homosexuality, which reflects a roughening up of attitudes towards forms of masculinity that were not easily categorizable. This sharper demarcation of gender distinctions in the second half of the century brought about more aggressive ideals heterosexual manliness, which became better known as Kingsleyan manliness or Muscular Christianity.32 Such nuances of meaning are very subtle, but revealing of attitudes towards what was seen as desirable in a man or not – and these attitudes changed well within a decade, which makes it almost impossible to speak of one ideal concept of masculinity applicable to period as extensive and complex as the Victorian age. To round off my discussion of the poem, I would like to look at section 128, where a self-reflective comment on artistic creation is made. Approaching the end of the poem, the speaker claims that ‘all, as in some piece of art, / Is toil coöperant to an end’ (ll. 22–24). After the depiction of his own internal conflicts following Hallam’s death, of his cycles of mourning, a grief-stricken and doubtful mind finds some reassurance in his belief in the inclusiveness of God’s creation. Having caught glimpses of an internal world in turmoil and an external world in the throes of impending chaos, so to speak, the speaker seizes the comfort offered by a teleological vision in which Hallam foreshadows a notion of fulfilment to come as part of a divine providence, ‘appearing ere the times were ripe’ as a ‘noble type’ (ll. 138–39). The poem obtains this final prospect of consolation through the comparison of the human condition with an artwork, in which each single element contributes towards the overall effect of unity and wholeness. Tennyson thereby reflects on his own work as a poet creating ‘some piece of art’. As such, In Memoriam is not a systematic account given its inclusion of a variety of themes, movements, speculations and allusions. While so many aspects of the poem, that is, the sincerity of its religious feeling or its negotiations of sexuality, remain debatable and open, its ultimate achievement is the impressive and comprehensive portrait it gives of an individual. It gains its compelling beauty from its delineation of a real Hallam, which blends with his ideal self. The presence of Beatrice unlike any other figure enhances this fluctuation between this-worldly grief and desire that outlasts death.

Chapter 7

Construction of a New Ideal: Walter Pater’s ‘Diaphaneitè’

Similarly to the apotheosis of Arthur Henry Hallam in In Memoriam, the exaltation of an androgynous Beatrice in Walter Pater’s (1839–1894) early essay ‘Diaphaneitè’ (1864) aims less at the imagining of ‘men-who-would-bewomanly’ than at the introduction of a type of ‘men-who-would-be-anotherkind-of-manly’ (Morgan, ‘Reimagining Masculinity’ 152). Allegedly a portrait of Charles Lancelot Shadwell (1840–1919), a pupil and friend of Pater’s, the essay contains references to the young man’s intellectual qualities as well as to his physical beauty.1 As in In Memoriam, Beatrice personifies attributes belonging to a male individual and, in Pater’s case, to an ideal of aesthetic masculinity. This chapter will discuss Dante’s impact by focusing on ‘Diaphaneitè’, examining it in the context of Pater’s other works. The preceding chapter on Tennyson paved the way for my central argument: that in Pater’s essay Beatrice’s original femininity is overshadowed and eventually surpassed by the simultaneously envisaged representation of a particular kind of masculinity. But her function in this essay and by implication in the broader context of Pater’s writings extends beyond the articulation of ideal masculinity. I argue that Pater was drawn to Dante and Beatrice for similar reasons as D. G. Rossetti. For both she becomes an emblem of their idea of what constitutes poetic and artistic brilliance. It is Beatrice’s dual nature, her position between the spiritual and the physical, which attracted Pater to her since it reflects his own ideal of aesthetic creation. Pater’s reception of Dante and his diaphanous Beatrice is closely linked to his aesthetic principles and his concept of culture. Walter Pater is a writer renowned for his commitment to Continental and British philosophy, art and literature. As one of the ‘great intellectual synthesizers’ of the Victorian period, Pater absorbed ‘many of the cultural and intellectual currents of the last half of the century’ and his interests moved far beyond contemporary literature and art (McGrath I). Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and myth, medieval and Renaissance culture as well as eighteenth-century Continental literature and art criticism were among his interests and provided rich material for his own fictional and non-fictional works. Pater formalized his productive interest in the past in the concept of the

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‘House Beautiful’, by which he envisions a storehouse of cultural meaning emblematic of his own creative project: the formation of an indissoluble link between history and art, the past and the present.2 An Oxford don, Pater first became known as the author of Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), whose second edition (1877) appeared under the title The Renaissance; Studies in Art and Poetry. It caused a scandal inside and outside the university because of its celebration of hedonism, postulating in its ‘Conclusion’ that ‘to burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life’ (152). His emphasis on the materiality and sensuality of our impressions and sensations, combined with the insight that given the fleetingness of time humans need to fully seize the day, made him a pioneering figure of the Aestheticist and Symbolist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both in Great Britain and on the Continent. Two things make The Renaissance an outstanding work of its time. First, its unabashed advocacy of aesthetic pleasures as the only epistemological source in a world of constant change and flux in which neither external objects nor the self are stable. Secondly, as will be shown below, Pater’s concept of culture as he further elaborated it in his various essays and imaginary portraits. ‘The Child in the House’ followed in 1878 (first published in Macmillan’s Magazine) and his first and only completed novel, Marius the Epicurean, was published in 1885. The former and the latter, a fictional biography set in the days of Marcus Aurelius, are personal writings which refer to Pater’s own childhood and spiritual search. His Appreciations: With an Essay on Style was published in 1889. With Plato and Platonism (1893) Pater was able to deepen the philosophical basis and Hellenist streak underlying his works. In addition, Pater wrote two short historical romances and begun a second, unfinished novel called Gaston de Latour (1896).

Pater as Cultural Critic Pater’s interest in Dante is grounded in the larger and more complex dimensions of his approach to cultural history, in the context of which medieval and Renaissance Italy are prominent periods. Abstracting from Italy as his travel ground, it emerges as the imaginative site on which Pater’s concept of the Renaissance was developed. It is the place, Pater writes in the ‘Preface’ to his Renaissance, where ‘the interest of the Renaissance mainly lies’, the home of those fifteenth-century ‘works of art’, ‘special and prominent personalities, with their profound aesthetic charm’ and a ‘general spirit and character’, which turned this period into ‘one of these happier eras’, ‘an age productive in personalities, many-sided, centralised, complete’ (xxix–xxxiii: xxxiii). To understand the significance of the Renaissance for Pater, it is necessary to consider his concept of culture in more detail.

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According to Pater, the culture of any given period draws its vitality from the past: the most illustrious example is the imaginary portrait ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ where the rebirth of Dionysus as a young man in the French town of Auxerre entails an overall sense of renewal and reawakening (Imaginary Portraits 45–62). Pater was obsessed with the past – but not as an antiquarian whose preoccupation with history presupposes an intellectual and emotional detachment. This is a point he makes clear in ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ where he states that ‘[i]n handling a subject of Greek legend, anything in the way of an actual revival must always be impossible. Such vain antiquarianism is a waste of the poet’s power’ (Essays 93–102: 100). The past provides vital clues for the understanding of our present time because there is continuity between various periods. In Pater’s concept of history, nothing is lost, as this passage from ‘Pico della Mirandola’ suggests: For the essence of humanism is that belief of which he [Pico della Mirandola] seems never to have doubted, that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality – no language they have spoken, nor oracle beside which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate, or expended time and zeal. (Renaissance 20–32: 32) Just as there is a sense of modernity in past ages, there are elements of the past which persist in the present. The ultimate threat is death, the destroyer of cultural achievement, Pater writes in the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance: ‘we are all under sentence of death . . . we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more’ (153). In ‘Winckelmann’, Pater points towards the ‘mouldering of bones and flesh’ which ‘must go on to an end’; the ‘inevitable shipwreck’, the fear of which lies at the heart of religion (Renaissance 114–49: 129). Aware of their mortality, human beings turn to religion in hope of regaining belief in his immortality. The same function is fulfilled by myth, ritual and art. Informed by an understanding of history and art deeply influenced by Hegel, Pater ascribes to the latter the power to create testimonies of human culture which, without the existence of cultural artefacts, would remain impalpable and perishable. The ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance provides clues for a better understanding of Pater’s definition of the Renaissance. Pater argued for the dissolution of the period’s conventional temporal categorization. Whereas contemporaries such as John Ruskin advocated a strict historical and cultural division between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Pater consciously sought for an alternative model of temporal reference, turning the Renaissance into a highly flexible state of individual and collective consciousness which erupts at certain points

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of time. Thus, according to Pater, Europe witnessed several rebirths, happening as early as in late twelfth-century France or later on in eighteenth-century Germany.3 Pater’s mollification of traditional chronological boundaries was a way of revolting against the condemnation of the Renaissance on moral grounds by Ruskin and fellow apologists of the Middle Ages and aligns Pater with writers such as Vernon Lee or John Addington Symonds, who praised the liberating forces of the Renaissance and met the Middle Ages with hostility (Fraser, The Victorians 230). Ruskin’s Stones of Venice (1851–1853) reads like a long defence of the Middle Ages against the growing moral corruption of the modern world, which set in with the transition from the Gothic period in architecture to the Early Renaissance, mirrored in the development of Venetian architecture. For Ruskin, the Middle Ages were the apogee of Western culture; the Renaissance did not induce a movement of intellectual, artistic and spiritual liberation but was a step towards individual and collective corruption. Dividing the Renaissance into three parts – Early, Central and Grotesque – Ruskin arrives at a general conclusion, namely, that ‘the manner of the debasement of all schools of art is in all ages the same; luxuriance of ornament, refinement of execution, and idle subtleties of fancy’ (Stones 271). Ruskin objects to the ‘over-luxuriance’ and ‘over-refinement’ (both products of human and especially artistic pride) which led to the corruption of the Venetian Gothic (272). He contrasts the artificiality of Renaissance art with the ‘magnificence of sturdy power’ and ‘sternness and rudeness’ of the Northern Gothic which reflects a ‘noble character’ and deserves ‘profoundest reverence’ (134–35). There is one particular Renaissance artwork which, according to Pater, encapsulates the spirit of past ages in the portrait of a woman and that is Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ (1503). She embodies the eclecticism and syncretism characteristic of Pater’s own style of writing by magnetically attracting and combing traces of past cultures which reappear in a new guise. She mirrors Pater’s concept of culture, his belief in a cultural continuum in which there is no death and in which certain energies persist, ready to be reactivated at some later point. This is the description he gives in his ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ essay: Hers is the head upon which all ‘the ends of the world are come’, and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she

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sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea. (Renaissance 63–82: 80) Mona Lisa is a revenante; she remains unaffected by the power of death, being a somnambulistic wanderer crossing boundaries of time. Like a vampire she absorbs the life and the vitality of a given age, in order to add it to the potion of historical, mythological and cultural saps she has extracted in the course of history. She is the embodiment of cultural memory, who unites in her beautiful, yet enigmatic and morbid shape traces of the past. She represents an anachronism characteristic of Pater’s own style of argument and so typical of Warburg’s pathos formulae. Pater’s Mona Lisa is a symbol of historical, geographical and religious transcendence, which explains why Pater’s ekphrasis of her portrait makes the reader forget that it is a woman he is describing.4 She possesses powerful energies, neutralizing inner contradictions, and is therefore similar to Aby Warburg’s figures possessing symbolic energies responsible for their afterlife. While the nymph embodied the dynamism of modernity for Warburg, the Mona Lisa is Pater’s emblem of modern life. Her eclectic, synthesizing potential not only reflects the heterogeneity or hybridity of Pater’s concept of the Renaissance, but also the ‘modern idea’.5 Being a physical woman and yet so much more, she resembles Dante’s Beatrice. Besides, like Beatrice’s transcendent splendour, the beauty of Pater’s Mona Lisa renders the original medium in which she is being described inadequate. While Dante is repeatedly speechless when confronted with Beatrice, Pater pushes the boundaries of ekphrastic language, distancing his verbal interpretation from the actual painting. The result is an ekphrasis which is no longer concerned so much with the actual painting than with the elaboration of an abstract idea. The Mona Lisa is an icon of Pater’s concept of culture, as reflected in the passage’s emphasis on the transcendent and circular, its inclusiveness and amalgamation of the seemingly dissimilar. Pater grants us glimpses of the diaphanous ideal in his depiction of the Mona Lisa, since at moments he is evoking a sense of delicacy and fragility which echoes his descriptions in ‘Diaphaneitè’. The Mona Lisa passage is the more mature, sounder version of an idea which was born at an early stage in his career.

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Walter Pater’s Reception of Dante In the ‘Preface’ to his Renaissance Pater situates himself in opposition to John Ruskin by characterizing the Renaissance as a ‘centralised’ movement (xxxiii). The word ‘central’ and its derivatives has a particularly Ruskinian taste, after it all was Ruskin who coined the idea of the Middle Ages as central in human history and of Dante as its central man. In Modern Painters II (1843–1860), Ruskin ascribed the ‘highest imaginative faculty’ to Dante which discards any ‘outward images’ and ‘plunges into the central fiery heart’ (313). The Stones of Venice include the crucial nomination of Dante as the ‘greatest writer of the middle ages whose Commedia represents the ‘central year’ of the Middle Ages, namely, the year 1300 (244).6 As Alison Milbank has argued, Dante provided an episteme for Ruskin, a way of seeing and knowing and ‘a way of imposing order and design upon experience’ (30) – and this episteme emerged from the centrality which Dante embodied for Ruskin. Dante and his world embodied a notion of original perfection and unity which the Victorians had deemed lost (Milbank 1). Similarly, Thomas Cooksey argues that Dante became an ‘integral player in a myth of unity and wholeness’ which made him so popular with Romantic and Victorian writers alike, driven by a sense of nostalgia for the secure world view of the Middle Ages (151). Pater’s use of centrality as a feature of the Renaissance seems to be deliberately provocative, challenging Ruskin’s consideration of the Middle Ages and Dante as central. However, it needs to be pointed out that Pater in the ‘Introduction’ to Shadwell’s English translation of Purgatorio describes Dante as the ‘central embodiment’ of the medieval spirit, thus claiming him for the Middle Ages (xiii). Pater’s inconsistent temporal order suggests that he was less interested in winning Dante for either of the two periods than in arguing for Dante’s centrality which he gained from being visible against ‘a background of “absorbed” historical reality’ (C. Williams 129). Dante is central because he appears in clear outline or relief in front of a historical background which needs to be understood in order to understand him and which in return becomes understandable only through the work and personality of Dante. A closer analysis shows that there were particular elements in Dante which Pater was drawn to. References to Dante occur at an early stage in Pater’s career and it can be assumed that Pater started to read Dante before he was a published writer (Inman 26). While so many of his contemporaries felt drawn to the Vita Nuova, Pater gives preference to the Commedia, the ‘peculiar and perfect flower of the Middle Age’ (Introduction xxvi); the Vita Nuova becomes a vanishing presence which Pater only mentions en passant, praising it for Dante’s ability to ‘describe subjectivities’, by which he possibly means its autobiographical dimension (xix). In ‘Diaphaneitè’ (1864) and in another essay contained in The Renaissance, ‘Michelangelo’ (1871), Dante’s presence takes shape in the figure of Beatrice. The former essay introduces Beatrice as an ideal type of person characterized

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by a peculiar delicacy and transparency, subsumed in what Pater calls ‘diaphanous’. The diaphanous character represents what Michelangelo, Leonardo and Plato meant to Pater as artists: ‘Diaphaneitè’ is echoed in most of Pater’s works either implicitly or by the use of very similar quotations and phrases (thus a case of intertextuality within the same author’s work). The continuous presence that Dante was, it seems a bit odd that Pater never wrote an essay entirely dedicated to him. There is no essay called ‘Dante Alighieri’, while there are essays on Michelangelo or Botticelli. However, in a letter to Henry John Cockayne Cust (late 1892?) Pater mentioned that he was writing an article on the Italian poet (Letters 164). It is not clear if he thereby refers to the Introduction to C. L. Shadwell’s English translation of Purgatorio, which was published in 1892, or if he had in mind an essay on Dante and medieval art, an incomplete draft of which is among the Pater Harvard manuscripts (‘Dante’). Fragmentary and elliptical, this manuscript might have achieved a synthesis of Pater’s main ideas concerning Dante if completed and furthermore might have established Dante as a pivotal figure in Pater’s history of the arts. In its present form, it offers some interesting, albeit not very elaborate, ideas concerning the development of Gothic art, Dante and the pictorial quality of his work, seen as a symptom of his interest in the visual arts, and also some speculative observations on his friendship with Giotto. Besides, it contains references to the Vita Nuova, particularly the episode when Dante is drawing an angel on the anniversary of Beatrice’s death, which he takes as a sign of Dante’s talent as a painter (VN XXXIV). Thus, a more systematic approach to Dante took place towards the end of Pater’s artistic life: in 1892, as mentioned, Pater wrote the ‘Introduction’, producing a eulogy of Dante and recapitulating the decisive elements of his Dante reception. A good point of departure for an exploration of Pater’s interpretation of Dante is the already mentioned ‘Introduction’ to Shadwell’s translation (xiii–xxviii), in which the two major threads of his interest in Dante concur. Pater gives a self-reflective explanation of Dante’s popularity in his own age, putting it into sharp contrast with a generally negligent or even spiteful attitude towards Dante in the eighteenth century (xviii). Mentioning the ‘“historic sense”’ (xv) of the nineteenth century and its receptivity for eclecticism, Pater elaborates on why Dante hit the nerve of this period: A minute sense of the external world and its beauties, a minute sense of the phenomena of the mind, of what is beautiful and of interest there, a demand for wide and cheering outlooks in religion, for a largeness of spirit in its application to life: – these are the special points of contact between Dante and the genius of our own century. (xxiii) But Dante’s true significance stems from his ‘deep personal originality’ (xv), his ‘urbanity and composure’, ‘deliberate evenness of execution’ and ‘sense of unity and proportion’ (xvi) – just to mention a few of the qualities which make

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Dante ‘a great poet, one of the greatest of the poets, great like Sophocles and Shakespeare by a certain universality in his appeal to men’s minds, and independent therefore of the special sensibilities of a particular age’ (xxiii). Most important, it is Purgatorio’s promise of hope which Pater believes appeals to his own age, when people tried to encounter the prevalent religious scepticism with belief and hope: An age of faith, . . ., our age is certainly not: . . . – in its religious scepticism, however, . . ., an age of hope, we may safely call it, of a development of religious hope or hopefulness, similar in tendency to the development of the doctrine of Purgatory in the church of the Middle Age . . . . (xx) Pater shares his preference of Purgatorio to the other two parts of the Commedia with Thomas Carlyle, who in ‘The Hero as Poet’ considers it as the ‘noblest conception’ of Dante’s age because of its description of ‘never-dying Hope’ (93–134: 112). According to Pater, it is Dante’s ‘largeness of hope’ which, as Pater states in his ‘Style’ essay (1888), makes the Commedia ‘great art’ (Appreciations 5–38: 38), and he quotes from and refers to the beginning of Purgatorio several times in his ‘Introduction’ to Shadwell’s translation (xvi, xxi, xxiv). But Dante’s appeal is also aesthetic: Pater emphasizes the ‘minuteness of handiwork’ (‘Introduction’ xvii), Dante’s eye for the particular as a trait popular at his own present time. He thereby resumes an argument he had already brought forward in ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’ (1883), where he stated that ‘for Rossetti, as for Dante, without question on his part, the first condition of the poetic way of seeing and presenting things is particularisation’ (Appreciations 205–18: 208). Giotto and his followers found it hard to illustrate the Commedia, Pater argues in ‘Botticelli’, since they did not know how ‘to put that weight of meaning into outward things, light, colour, everyday gesture, which the poetry of the Divine Comedy involves, . . .’ (Renaissance 33–40: 34). In contrast, Botticelli’s artistic project resembles Dante’s: To him, as to Dante, the scene, the colour, the outward image or gesture, comes with all its incisive and importunate reality; but awakes in him, moreover, by some subtle law of his own structure, a mood which it awakes in no one else, of which it is the double or repetition, and which it clothes, that all may share it, with visible circumstance. (Renaissance 35) It is Dante’s emphasis on visibility and visual detail which elevates him above other artists and turns him into a transitional figure between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; Pater thereby follows Jacob Burckhardt’s positioning of Dante between these two periods.7 Dante, Pater writes in ‘Two Early French Stories’, is the chronicler of the materialization of love, recording ‘how the tyranny of that “Lord of terrible aspect” became actually physical, blinding his

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senses, and suspending his bodily forces’ (Renaissance 1–19: 15). For this reason the Botticelli essay speaks of the artist as a ‘poetical painter’, who blends ‘the charm of story and sentiment . . . with the charm of line and colour’ and who is able to illustrate the Commedia (Renaissance 34). Yet the Botticelli essay also includes Pater’s only derogatory comment on Dante, when he praises Botticelli for his ability to resist Dante’s tendency for moral categorization, ‘referring all human action to the simple formula of purgatory, heaven and hell’, which lends his poetry ‘an insoluble element of prose’ (Renaissance 35). Botticelli turns to the ‘middle world’, the realm inhabited by the moderate, undecided and passionless for his artistic creation and thereby pursues the quest for objects between established orders of things so important for Pater (36). This ‘middle world’ is reminiscent of Dante’s Ante-Purgatory, which accommodates ‘the sorry souls of those / who lived without disgrace and without praise’ (Inferno III ll. 35–36; 69). The exactitude of Dante’s visual imagination and manner of representation is one of the points of interest which Pater broaches in his ‘Introduction’ to Shadwell’s translation. The second point is Dante’s fusion of physicality with spirituality. Pater praised Dante in ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’ for overcoming the strict separation of the bodily from the spiritual: And yet, again as with Dante, to speak of his ideal type of beauty as material, is partly misleading. Spirit and matter, indeed, have been for the most part opposed, with a false contrast or antagonism of schoolmen, whose artificial creation those abstractions really are. In our actual concrete experience, the two trains of phenomena which the words matter and spirit do but roughly distinguish, play inextricably into each other. Practically, the church of the Middle Ages by its aesthetic worship, its sacramentalism, its real faith in the resurrection of the flesh, had set itself against that Manichean opposition of spirit and matter, and its results in men’s way of taking life; and in this, Dante is the central representative of its spirit. To him, in the vehement and impassioned heat of its conceptions, the material and the spiritual are fused and blent: if the spiritual attains the definite visibility of a crystal, what is material loses its earthiness and impurity. (Appreciations 205–18: 212) In Dante Pater sees a writer who embodied religious feeling before this strict separation between mind and matter was enforced. According to Pater, Dante represents a concept of religiousness which requires bodily as well as spiritual feeling (one may think of Dante’s repeated swooning on his journey when confronted with human tragedies as signs of his bodily reaction to mental events) and stands for a stage in religious awareness when the body was not bedevilled by Christian doctrine. In ‘Michelangelo’, Dante is associated with ‘sweetness’ and ‘pensiveness’, the stylistically perfected conjunction of mind and body, of thought and feeling (Renaissance 47–62: 52). This is connected to

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a certain sense of morbidity, ‘for, like Dante and all the nobler souls of Italy, he [Michelangelo] is much occupied with thoughts of the grave, and his true mistress is death’ (57). For Pater, Beatrice, whose passage to Heaven does not change her physical appearance, evokes a notion of Heaven which is materialistic and androcentric, opposed to a Platonic understanding of the afterlife which is based on the survival of the soul: Dante’s belief in the resurrection of the body, through which, even in heaven, Beatrice loses for him no tinge of flesh-colour, or fold of raiment even; and the Platonic dream of the passage of the soul through one form of life after another, with its passionate haste to escape from the burden of bodily form altogether; are, for all effects of art or poetry, principles diametrically opposed. (Renaissance 55) Given her earthly appearance in a heavenly environment, Beatrice exemplifies an aesthetic ideal which appealed to D. G. Rossetti and Pater and which fuses the ethereal with the solid, the physical with the spiritual, the ephemeral with the eternal, life with a sense of deathliness. It is for the same reason that Pater associates the city of Florence with a strong sense of physically perceptible morbidity, dwelling on the Florentines’ preoccupation with ‘the thought of death’ as a consequence of their city’s gloomy atmosphere, in which they had seen ‘life stricken down, in their streets and houses’ (Renaissance 59). Florence exemplifies the connection between beauty and death in Pater’s concept of art. In ‘Aesthetic Poetry’, Pater establishes this association as a major aesthetic principle: ‘This [the shortness of life] is contrasted with the bloom of the world, and gives new seduction to it – the sense of death and the desire of beauty: the desire of beauty quickened by the sense of death’ (Essays 102). His whole fiction is driven by a sense of nostalgia for an irretrievable state of childlike repose ultimately to be found in death, hence the depiction of the child’s house (in ‘The Child in the House’) as the ‘material shrine or sanctuary of sentiment’ in which ‘rest and security can be found’ (Imaginary Portraits 1–20: 6). The diaphanous character has overcome this stage of yearning for completion – he or she embodies timelessness, self-sufficiency and the innocence of a child.

Pater, Shadwell and the Oxford Dante Society However preoccupied with European mythology, literature and history Pater was, he did not travel as extensively on the Continent as some of his contemporaries. He visited France and Germany and travelled to Italy three times. Together with his friend Shadwell he went to Ravenna, Pisa and Florence in 1865. His second trip to Italy with his sisters Hester and Clara followed in 1889, taking the Paters to Milan, Bergamo and Brescia, and finally he returned there

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in 1891, again with his sisters, this time probably staying in Florence for two days, among other places (see Seiler xii–xxii). The inclusion of Ravenna on the 1865 itinerary might have been motivated by his and Shadwell’s shared admiration of Dante. Given that they travelled in summer they would not have been able to witness the massive festivities in honour of the sixth centenary of Dante’s birth held in Florence in May.8 Still it does seem likely that the mere physical proximity to such prominent sites of the Italian cultural legacy stimulated Pater’s fascination and interest in Italian literature and art. As one of his biographers put it, ‘the experience was a revelation, a glimpse of more liberal intuitions than Pater had ever known’ (Donoghue 31). It is possible that Pater’s understanding of Dante was moulded during this stay in Italy and that Shadwell exerted an influence on Pater’s interpretation of Dante. It is also tempting to read their friendship in terms similar to that of Tennyson and Hallam, lacking of course the tragic dimension, but similar in the artistic benefit gained from shared literary interests. There are, however, two reasons which speak against a precipitate drawing of parallels between the two pairs of friends. The first reason is that there are certain lacunae in the life of Walter Pater, undocumented periods or contradictory information given by biographers or their sources (see Brake 44–45). From the existent material it is difficult to judge in how far the friendship between him and Shadwell was constant and equally reciprocated. Michael Levey claims that Shadwell never responded fully to the admiration he received from Pater in their early years and that their friendship was rather ‘decorous, indeed unremarkable’, eventually superseded by Pater’s introduction to the more flamboyant social circles of Algernon Swinburne or Simeon Solomon (103–06). The second reason, similarly speculative, relates to Pater’s reclusive personality, which allowed only a limited degree of social proximity and a very restricted amount of biographical information in his writings.9 The grandson of Sir Lancelot Shadwell, the last vice chancellor of England, Shadwell was educated at Westminster School and became a junior student at Christ Church, Oxford in 1859. He was a fellow of Oriel College from 1864 to 1898 and lecturer in jurisprudence from 1865 to 1875, before he became the college’s treasurer. Heavily involved in Oxford academic life and devoted to the history and administration of Oriel, he pursued his literary studies only as a pastime. Wright, in his biography of Pater, claimed that Shadwell was ‘undoubtedly the handsomest man in the University – with a face like those to be seen on the finer Attic coins’ (Wright 1: 218). One year younger than Pater, he was his pupil as an undergraduate at Christ Church in 1863 and became his closest friend in adult life; the Studies in the History of the Renaissance was dedicated to him. Unfortunately, only a short note remains as the only piece of documented communication between the two friends (Pater, Letters 4).10 An eager student of Dante, Shadwell not only published his translation of Purgatorio, but also became an early member of the Oxford Dante Society in 1877. Pater joined the Society in December 1890 and it is probable that Shadwell forged this link. Founded by

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Edward Moore in 1876, the Oxford Dante Society consisted of 15 members, who would meet on the fifth Tuesday of term, read a paper and two or three passages from (mainly) the Commedia, followed by discussion (Toynbee, Dante Society 5). Pater did not present a paper, but attended their meetings regularly. Reuniting leading Dante scholars such as Edward Moore himself, Thomas Herbert Warren, Paget Toynbee and honorary members such as John Ruskin, William Gladstone, John Addington Symonds and Charles Eliot Norton, it promoted and institutionalized Dante research in the academic climate of Oxford University and helped to push what often originated in private obsessions into a public arena of intellectual discourse. Edward Moore published his talk on Beatrice, held in honour of the 600th anniversary of her death on 9 June 1890, first in 1891, then as part of his Studies in Dante series (1896–1917) in 1899. Expounding these partly divergent positions at the end of the century in a meticulous manner and opting for a reconciliatory compromise, Moore concludes, but not firmly resolves, the central debate within Dante studies during the nineteenth century: I fully admit a very large admixture of allegory and idealization to be infused into the historic narrative of the Vita Nuova, but I could never believe . . . that the book is ‘essentially an allegory’, or that the question of its having an historical basis is wholly secondary and unimportant. Quite as soon could I believe In Memoriam to be a poetical exercise on an imaginary name, as, no doubt, before it is as old as the work of Dante, will one day be confidently asserted. (Moore 115) According to Toynbee’s record, Pater did not attend this particular meeting of the Society and thus did not hear Moore’s extensive summary of various theories of Beatrice; yet he might have got in contact with its first published form. He was not concerned with the querelle carried out by Gabriele Rossetti and others, and it seems plausible that Moore’s essay contains signs of a fatigue with this question which, at the end of the century, came to a close.

Beatrice in ‘Diaphaneitè’ ‘Diaphaneitè’, published posthumously in 1895 but composed in 1864, is one of Pater’s earliest works. It is possible that Pater read a version of the essay to the Old Mortality Society, an essay club which flourished between 1856 and 1866, in Oxford in February 1864 and that parts of it reappeared in the first and following versions of ‘Winckelmann’ from 1867 onwards.11 It was due to Shadwell’s initiative as literary executer in preparing it for publication that this essay became publicly known at all. ‘Diaphaneitè’ is a short essay and both its conditions of composition and the fact that Pater apparently never intended it for

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publication and thus probably never revised it, explain its fragmentary nature. The reader, especially if they are familiar with Pater’s other writings, faces a paradox: this essay provides some sort of initial pattern, or as Carolyn William has argued, a ‘key-signature’ of Pater’s work, because of its delineation of the Paterian hero (173). Named ‘aesthetic’, ‘transparent’ or ‘crystal’ by various critics, the diaphanous hero recurs in many forms as Pater’s protagonist: as, for example, the German art historian Winckelmann in the eponymous essay; as Michelangelo; in the shape of Antoine Watteau in the imaginary portrait ‘A Prince of Court Painters’; as Duke Carl of Rosenmold in the eponymous tale; or most elaborately as Marius in Pater’s only completed novel Marius the Epicurean.12 G. C. Monsman labelled it as an ‘ur-portrait’ in Pater’s fiction (Pater’s Portraits xiv). At the same time, despite its crucial status within Pater’s oeuvre, ‘Diaphaneitè’s’ stylistic fissures and inconsistencies in the argument leave the reader baffled. Agreement is relatively easy to find on the essay’s overall purpose, the elaboration of Pater’s concept of ideal man. The use of ‘man’ should not be misleading, since it is more generic than gender-specific. Pater gives male and female examples of his basically androgynous figure. The essay’s discussion of a character type whose vocation lies in the transmission and revelation of a divine truth, was inspired by a number of writers and philosophers, such as Fichte, Hegel, Carlyle and Novalis on the grounds of their appreciation and celebration of the poet as hero.13 In ‘Diaphaneitè’ Pater contrasts his diaphanous character, ‘rare’ and ‘precious to the artist’, with three other ‘moral types’ (Renaissance 154–58: 154), who despite their ‘unworldliness’ are appreciated by the world mainly because they lend themselves easily to categorization. These are the saint, the artist and the speculative thinker, whose characters are general and broad and who attract attention and sympathies partly because of their self-conscious complaints about ‘some great sickness and weariness of the heart in itself’ (154). Widely ignored by the world is ‘another type of character’ (154), of which Beatrice is the first example. Pater describes her ‘supreme moral charm’ (154) with the help of a light metaphor. When Pater speaks of that ‘fine edge of light, where the elements of our moral nature refine themselves to the burning point’ (154), he refers to Beatrice as focused, maximally intensified light. As such she embodies the clarity and purity of vision characteristic of the diaphanous type. Pater is probably alluding to an image from Purgatorio, describing the sunrise which Dante perceives on the shores of Purgatory, which becomes obvious in ‘Winckelmann’ (1867), an essay closely related to ‘Diaphaneitè’.14 In ‘Winckelmann’ Pater returns explicitly to light imagery to convey the notion of spiritual rebirth and purification, when he speaks of how Dante is passing from the darkness of the Inferno, . . . filled with a sharp and joyful sense of light, which makes him deal with it, in the opening of the Purgatorio,

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in a wonderfully touching and penetrative way. Hellenism, which is the principle pre-eminently of intellectual light, (our modern culture may have more colour, the medieval spirit greater heat and profundity, but Hellenism is preeminent for light,) has always been most effectively conceived by those who have crept into it out of an intellectual world in which the sombre elements predominate. (Renaissance 122) Pater’s equation of purgatorial elucidation with the intellectual enlightenment both of the individual and of an age is a key element in his reading of Dante; it reappears several times in the ‘Introduction’ to Shadwell’s translation, where cantos II and III of Purgatorio are quoted from (xx and xxii). It is worth remembering that Beatrice’s appearances in the Commedia and in the Vita Nuova are frequently accompanied by references to her lucidity or radiance (this is the case throughout Paradiso and for example in Inferno II l. 55 or Purgatorio XXIX ll. 16–18). Its radiant clarity and its lucid refinement explain Pater’s description of the diaphanous as crystalline: ‘Over and over again the world has been surprised by the heroism, the insight, the passion, of this clear crystal nature’ (Renaissance 157–58).15 Pater defines the ‘the veil or mask of such a nature’ (156) as characteristic of the particular, relative form of transparency typical of diaphaneity. Diaphaneity works in two ways, allowing ‘the transmission from without of light that is not yet inward’ (156) as well as radiation from the inside to the outside. Diaphaneity depends on the existence of a veil which functions as a filter: only ‘all that is really lifegiving in the established order of things’ can permeate the veil, the osmosis taking place is selective. In ‘Winckelmann’, Pater resumes the image of the child by defining the diaphanous nature, in a passage which shows how closely related the two essays are. Here Pater refers to ‘diaphaneity’ as [t]his colourless, unclassified purity of life, with its blending and interpenetration of intellectual, spiritual, and physical elements, still folded together, pregnant with the possibilities of a whole world closed within it, is the highest expression of the indifference which lies beyond all that is relative or partial. Everywhere there is the effect of an awaking, of a child’s sleep just disturbed. (Renaissance 140) This childlike innocence and self-awareness is also typical of Raphael, who ‘stood still to live upon himself, even in outward form a youth, almost an infant, yet surprising all the world’ (Renaissance 157). As a child-artist, Raphael possesses a comprehensive moral spectrum which is a gift and curse at the same time, because it allows this character to be so easily misunderstood. In him, ‘gift[s]’, ‘virtue[s]’ and ‘idea[s]’ (Renaissance 157) are united so as to create the impression of a colourless neutrality or even of indifference, when, as it were, it is the ideal equipoise of elements which allows perfection. Beatrice’s innocence is one aspect of her childlike nature. After all, when Dante speaks of Beatrice,

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then he refers to an 8-year-old girl in the first place. Dante and his relationship with Beatrice is also mentioned in Pater’s essay ‘The Poetry of Michelangelo’, where the Vita Nuova and its fusion of the spiritual with the physical and visible, are set against the abstract principle of love in Platonic thought. Here, again, Beatrice is described as ‘a child, with the wistful, ambiguous vision of a child, with a character still unaccentuated by the influence of outward circumstances, almost expressionless’ (Renaissance 47–62: 55). Her childlike innocence represents something which in ‘Diaphaneitè’ is described as simplicity, bearing Christological connotation (Renaissance 154). Simplicity implies a lack of purposefulness in actions, a non-judgmental, non-utilitarian approach to life. Impartial and unselfconscious, the diaphanous person refrains from active interventions in the course of events. Possibly the most enigmatic and controversial sentence in the essay defines ‘a moral sexlessness, a kind of impotence, an ineffectual wholeness of nature, yet with a divine beauty and significance of its own’ (157) as a constitutive element of Pater’s ideal. It represents one of the best examples of Pater’s ambiguity, ‘double-coding’ (L. Dowling, Hellenism 94) or ‘aesthetic minoritizing discourse’ (Morgan, ‘Reimagining Masculinity’ 147): his downplaying of potentially transgressive thought. ‘Moral sexlessness’ could be read as a definition of male sexuality at odds with Victorian notions of it as an innate heterosexual energy. However, I argue that ‘moral sexlessness’ does not primarily refer to the lack of male or female sexual drives, but describes an inclusive character, somebody who combines qualities ascribed to the male and the female sex. The ability of the diaphanous individual to see things clearly has interrelated ethical and epistemological implications. The privileged, superior access to knowledge and wisdom which they have entails a moral imperative, elevating diaphanous individuals above the masses. Yet the diaphanous ideal is not granted the public appreciation necessary for the initiation of social change. Pater mentions that unlike the artist, the saint and the speculative thinker, the diaphanous individual not only stands apart from the world, but is denied acceptance and appreciation. This lack of affection is explainable in terms of his or her resistance to categorization. Diaphanous individuals occupy the niches provided by types of character and hence, one could argue, are less of a type and more of a fluctuating presence hard to locate and definable only negatively. Pater calls these beings ‘evanescent shades, which fill up the blanks between contrasted types of characters’ (Renaissance 154). Colourless, unclassified and pure as they are, they are of no apparent use to society and not recognizable as heroes or heroines.

The Diaphanous Ideal and Walter Pater’s Notion of Culture In ‘Diaphaneitè’ lies the key for an understanding of Pater’s concept of art, in a more abstract sense also of aesthetic existence. The ideal artist lives a life culminating in the merging, or at least the approximation, of inside and

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outside: ‘The artist and he who has treated life in the spirit of art desires only to be shown to the world as he really is; as he comes nearer and nearer to perfection, the veil of an outer life not simply expressive of the inward becomes thinner and thinner’ (Renaissance 155). Artistic perfection lies in the gradual dissolution of the veil which separates interiority from external life: it lies in the immersion of the individual within the historical conditions of his time. The transparent hero becomes a medium, a filter, through which the outward circumstances become visible and understandable. Yet ‘Diaphaneitè’ hints at the asymptotic relation between the two and insists on the persistence of a veil, which is not said to entirely disappear, becoming only ‘thinner and thinner’. This implicitly elitist conceptualization of Pater’s ideal becomes explicit when he further specifies simplicity as the ‘repose of perfect intellectual culture’, strongest as ‘a phase of intellect, of culture’ (Renaissance 155). He aligns it together with language and art as an expression of the highest product of the intellect. At this point Pater’s essay is particularly dense, because he moves away from his initial demarcation of the diaphanous hero against other heroic or ideal types and locates him within a vision of art, history and culture which took take him several years and works to elaborate more extensively. In ‘Winckelmann’ Pater develops some of the themes he had prepared in ‘Diaphaneitè’. ‘Winckelmann’ has received far more critical attention, not only because it is the longer and more elaborate of the two texts, but also because it grants the reader a deeper insight into Pater’s cultural criticism within a more specified historical framework than his short, elusive 1864 essay. This historical framework is the rediscovery of Hellenism in eighteenth-century Germany; Winckelmann, ‘that transparent nature, with its simplicity as of the earlier world’, is both its discoverer, the art critic (‘this key to the understanding of the Greek spirit’) and at the same time the object (‘his own nature, itself like a relic of classical antiquity, laid open by accident to our alien, modern atmosphere’ [Renaissance 141]).16 ‘Winckelmann’ contains Pater’s Hellenism and concept of cultural development in a nutshell. It displays his Hegelian fusion of art and history for the sake of individual and collective identity-building. ‘The general history of the mind’ is the agitation of humanity by ‘the spiritual forces of the past, which have prompted and informed the culture of a succeeding age, live indeed, within that culture, but with an absorbed, underground life’ (Renaissance 127). Hellenism thus never faded. It led an ‘underground life’, punctuated by spasmodic eruptions on the surface. In such passages it becomes clear that Pater’s literary endeavour is always a cultural one and that literary creation for him is less an act of unprecedented artistic creativity, than an act of imaginative memory. As a ‘poet of reminiscence’ Pater excels in possibly the only artistic procedure left for the late born artist, the (re)interpretation of material based on critical reception.17 Remembering the past is essential for the individual’s self-understanding in the present, since artworks are seen as

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synecdoches, selected evidence of a phase in the development of the human mind. Within collective memory, Pater’s ‘House Beautiful’, that is, an archive of human memory, mankind finds both detachment but also self-knowledge (Iser, Aesthetic Moment 82). Pater’s desire to uncover the deeper layers of culture and its origins explains his erosion of boundaries between disciplines. The image of the relic in ‘Diaphaneitè’ and ‘Winckelmann’ with its quasi-religious power and subdued potential of transformation illustrates what Linda Dowling has described as a challenge to the Anglo-Saxon philosophical and religious tradition of introspection and continuous self-analysis. Pater, according to Dowling, localizes spirituality not so much in interiority, but restores the significance of external, material manifestations of religiousness in, for example, rituals (‘Matter of the Self’ 64–65). He moves far beyond the traditional disciplinary limits of literary studies or philosophy and turns instead towards those human sciences which emerged in his own age, that is, mythography, archaeology and ethnography. From this results his highly cultivated eclecticism, which makes his texts rich in quotations, allusions, references and echoes. By calling the diaphanous type a relic, Pater expresses the difficulty of accommodating it in ‘modern’ culture. He evokes the relic’s helplessness, its bleak exposure to a new and strange environment. It bears the innocence of a lost culture being reborn into the modern world. This act of cultural archaeology interconnects two different historical periods, creates continuity by recalling to life a phase, by (metaphorically) laying bare the traces of the past. As he puts it in ‘Winckelmann’: The supreme artistic products of succeeding generations thus form a series of elevated points, taking each from each the reflexion of a strange light, the source of which is not in the atmosphere around and above them, but in a stage of society remote from ours. (Renaissance 128) Hence derives the calm expectancy and the unselfconsciousness of the diaphanous. Untroubled by ‘the shallowness of taste’ and ‘a longing after what is unattainable’ (Renaissance 154), diaphanous characters own a sense of personal pride (‘khlide¯’), which also explains their revolutionary potential.18 As a ‘relic’, these figures possess the revolutionary nature of a person ‘who has slept a hundred years’ (Renaissance 157). Their activism, the revolutionary’s zeal, has been softened by their knowledge of the course of things and their certainty of eventual change. Again, Pater uses a metaphor of light to describe the tranquillity of their intellectual repose and their anticipatory perception, as ‘he who is ever looking for the breaking of a light he knows not whence about him, notes with a strange heedfulness the faintest paleness in the sky’ (Renaissance 156). Their susceptibility makes them perfect transmitters of elements which usually remain hidden from human perception.

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A passage taken from ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ dwells on the diaphanous appearance of Leonardo’s ‘Daughters of Herodias’, who exemplify the artist’s sense of ‘curious’ beauty (Renaissance 73): They are the clairvoyants, through whom, as through delicate instruments, one becomes aware of the subtler forces of nature, and the modes of their action, all that is magnetic in it, all those finer conditions wherein material things rise to that subtlety of operation which constitutes them spiritual, where only the finer nerve and the keener touch can follow. It is as if in certain significant examples we actually saw those forces at their work on human flesh. Nervous, electric, faint, these people seem subject to exceptional conditions, to feel powers at work in the common air unfelt by others, to become, as it were, the receptacle of them, and pass them on to us in a chain of secret influences. (74) With ‘chain of secret influences’ Pater found an ingenious expression to describe the odd impact these figures have on their environment, combining activity with stoic passivity. Pater mentions that da Vinci’s original version of ‘The Daughter of Herodias’ has been lost, but that ‘the lost originals have been re-echoed and varied upon again and again by Luini and others’ (Renaissance 75). There are, in fact, at least four paintings by Bernardino Luini (1480–1532), one of da Vinci’s followers in Lombardy, which depict the scene. I will concentrate on one of them, the Louvre version entitled ‘Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist’. It depicts the daughter of Herodias, Salome, who, according to the New Testament, had asked her father for the head of John the Baptist in return for her dance. All the paintings show her receiving or holding John’s head on a plate and in each of the paintings Salome has got long, wavy, blond hair and is wearing a Renaissance style dress. The focus of all the paintings is dual: there is the spectacle of John’s severed head and the beautiful young woman vying for the viewer’s attention, forming a remarkable contrast itself. For Pater, the depiction of Salome was of central interest. In all the paintings her posture is almost identical: she is holding the plate on which John’s head rests or is being placed, yet her body speaks the language of rejection. Especially the Louvre and the Uffizi versions show her body turned away from the object she is holding and emphasize her gaze’s diversion from it. These Salomes, whom one could see as very remote relatives of Beatrice because of a similar ‘genetic make-up’, combine an expression of activity and passivity. Holding on to the plate with the head they had desired, they at the same time appear stand-offish, distanced from what is happening, almost reluctant to engage with their environment, which, however, is at their command. In this respect, they strongly resemble Julia Margaret Cameron’s female portraits or D. G. Rossetti’s ‘Beata Beatrix’, which engage with the spectator while eschewing direct contact, creating a peculiar form of halfway interaction.19

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Their intermediate state between activity and passivity turns them into transmitters, placed between their rather brute environment and a spiritual, detached realm. The Uffizi painting, with its inclusion of two figures in the background (one of them obviously the executioner placing the head on the plate, the other an old man), both of them comparatively rough creatures compared to the beautiful and fragile appearance of Salome, represents her detachment from the outer world, of which, at the same time, she forms part. She is entranced, ethereal and at the same time knowing, aware of the situation she is in and its ‘exceptional conditions’. These figures are as ‘unfathomable’ as the Mona Lisa and her smile, ambiguous and, despite their visible, physical and traditional attributes of female beauty – regular features, youthful appearance – they seem elusive, their beauty suggesting ambiguity and secrecy. It would not be far-fetched to argue, especially in the light of the attribution of Luini’s painting to da Vinci, that these Salomes resemble the ‘Mona Lisa’ and that they represent a kind of female beauty which is typical of Pater’s diaphanous type. They tease the spectator because they are all examples of beautiful female portraiture, yet they subtly signal that they are more than what they seem to be and that no painting is able to capture precisely these qualities. It has been agreed upon by several critics that ‘Diaphaneitè’ revolves around the construction of a new ideal of masculinity. Linda Dowling has argued that ‘Diaphaneitè’ was used to create a new, homoerotic counter discourse to the Hellenism prevalent at that time, which needs to be seen as closely interwoven with the intellectual academic climate of Oxford in the 1860s. This period of university reform saw the revival of the college tutorial as conducive to an intimate relationship with the secular purpose of ‘producing a new civic elite to lead Britain out of sociocultural stagnation and into a triumphal age of imperial responsibility’ (L. Dowling xiv). Hellenism, the systematic study of Greek history, philosophy, literature, provided an ideal scheme for ‘mental illumination’, and the tutorial system was considered as a most fruitful way of fostering intellectual and personal growth, restoring the Socratic bond between teacher and pupil as a means of educating a new generation of aspiring young men, leading ultimately to a new form of intellectual regeneration (L. Dowling, Hellenism 80). Yet Pater, among others, developed out of this same Hellenism a homosexual counter discourse, stylistically achieved through ‘a daring texture of covert allusions’, which justified and idealized male love which was no longer viewed as effeminate and thus detrimental to the nation’s well-being (L. Dowling, Hellenism 94). Herbert Sussman argues that Pater celebrates a frail sort of men whose withdrawal from the realm of sexuality, as exemplified most strikingly in the cult of monasticism, needs to be understood as a necessary condition for their artistic creativity (184). Pater’s use of the metaphor of disease in his essay ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ suggests the same, when he states that ‘that monastic religion of the Middle Ages was, in fact, in many of its bearing, like a beautiful disease or disorder of the senses’ (Essays 97). The inner stress created

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by the constant restraint of male (homo)erotic desire thus emerges as the crucial psychic practice of the male artist. In Pater’s own words, referring to D. G. Rossetti’s poetry, male creativity requires that ‘life is a crisis at every moment’ (Appreciations 211). James Eli Adams has shown how Pater’s creation of the diaphanous hero engages with the other Victorian ideals of masculinity promoted by Carlyle and Ruskin, the hero and respectively the gentleman. The paradoxical fusion of passivity with unconscious activity in the diaphanous type, the gentleman and the Carlylean hero, he argues, ultimately leads to the creation of icons of gender transgression vital for Pater’s critical enterprise (Adams, Dandies 186–96 and ‘Gentleman, Dandy’). Like the diaphanous individual, both hero and gentleman condemn an overt display of self-consciousness. At the beginning of his essay Pater alludes to this when he speaks of those who theorize about the ‘unsoundness’ of the world (Renaissance 154). Pater, like Tennyson, was concerned with the idea of the gentleman and, as the figure of Marius in Marius the Epicurean suggests, he was aware of the moral implications of aestheticism. By endowing his hero with both physical and moral exquisiteness, Pater mirrors Ruskin’s concept of the gentleman, as presented in Sesame and Lilies (‘Of King’s Treasuries’, 1865 1–47) and ‘Of Vulgarity’ in Modern Painters V (1860).20 In both these texts Ruskin emphasizes the gentleman’s physical and intellectual refinement. Ruskin’s vocabulary, his stress on sensitivity and intellectual superiority, echoes Pater’s descriptions in ‘Diaphaneitè’. Pater makes the strongest and most argumentative points for his ideal at the beginning and towards the end of the essay. It is here that he articulates their potential for transformation, which is ambiguous and reluctant at best. He specifies the change brought about by the diaphanous ideal as unobtrusive, ‘softened, harmonised as by distance, with an engaging naturalness, without the noise of axe or hammer’ (Renaissance 158). Pater finishes his essay stating that ‘a majority of such would be the regeneration of the world’ (158). His choice of words is significant. Pater denies the progressive potential of the diaphanous character aligning progress with a violence alien to them. Instead he speaks of a ‘regeneration’ launched by this rare species. Similarly to ‘relic’, ‘regeneration’ implies the restoration of a forgotten state. The diaphanous type is able to lead it towards convalescence by bringing back to life the ‘clear ring, the eternal outline of the antique’ (156). However, it is the same last two paragraphs which introduce and highlight the inconsistencies in Pater’s concept. At the beginning of the essay, for example, he speaks of the diaphanous character as ‘rare’ and unrecognizable to the broad masses and of ‘diaphaneitè’ as a gift of grace reserved for a few chosen ones. Yet he seems to be unsure about its exact forms of appearance, speculating that ‘perhaps there are flushes of it in all of us; recurring moments of it in every period of life’ (158), a statement which contradicts his claim to exclusivity. But things get more complicated by the time he speaks of it as the only eligible ‘basement type’ (158) for society. Does this mean that diaphaneity is a mass phenomenon? Even more confusing

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is, earlier on in the essay, Pater’s description of diaphaneity as something that works most powerfully not in an individual, but as a ‘phase of intellect, of culture’ (155), a ‘mental attitude, the intellectual manner of perfect culture’ (156). Diaphaneity is described as ‘a happy gift of nature’ (155), yet some strive for it in vain: Pater describes this life as ‘the long struggle of the Imitatio Christi’, implying that diaphaneity does not fall upon an individual that easily (154). Pater mentions Savonarola, whose mind had been ‘subtly traced by the author of Romola’, as one of those people eager to attain the simplicity, but failing (155). Savonarola appears in several of his other writings, but nowhere else in such explicit connection with George Eliot’s Romola. It would, in fact, be plausible to regard Romola as a precursory diaphanous figure in a novel.21 Yet Pater’s text both invites and rejects attempts of concrete identification, wavering between its nomination of a select few and its sketch of a more general ‘type’ of man. Then there remains the question of the visual form in which we are to imagine these characters. Their transparency and ‘colourless, unclassified purity’ seems to clash with his naming of real, historical figures. To recapitulate: what Pater appreciated so highly in Dante is his reunion of the spiritual with the physical, the insistence on visibility and materiality, as epitomized in the figure of Beatrice. Furthermore, the crystal metaphor presupposes a clearcut outline and most importantly solidity of substance. How can we arrange this with the description he, for example, gives of the ‘clairvoyants’ in the Leonardo essay? The physiology of these figures suggests that the diaphanous people need to be seen as phantom-like ‘anti-bodies’, rather than substantial human beings (Khalip 239). This becomes obvious in another passage, taken from the essay ‘Aesthetic Poetry’, in which he describes ‘people of a remote and unaccustomed beauty, somnambulistic, frail, androgynous, the light almost shining through them’ (Essays 97). These eternal contradictions enhance the elusiveness of a character whose appearance is amorphous and whose essence erodes spatial, temporal, spiritual and intellectual categories. While it is not possible to resolve these conflicts, it is possible to summarize the reasons for Pater’s interest in Beatrice. ‘Precious to the artist’ as the diaphanous character is, Beatrice as Dante’s muse, beloved and spiritual redeemer, epitomizes what Pater appreciated most in Dante’s writing, namely, the latter’s fusion of the spiritual with a strong sense of the material. Both Pater’s and Tennyson’s portrayal of a male friend confers a transcendent significance onto what in its beginning is the celebration of an individual – to memorize and to immortalize this precious person. The genre of the philosophical essay, or in Tennyson’s case, the elegy, provides a formal frame which allows experiments in the literary expression of emotions and male desire surprisingly bold in their outcome. How bold a move is it – and the same question applies to Tennyson’s equation of Hallam with Beatrice – to conjure up this female presence in a little essay so undeniably concerned with the depiction of male intellectual and physical excellence? I would argue that it is the sense of poetic audacity to be found

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in Dante himself which explains why writers in his wake would feel tempted to transgress conventions and thereby be encouraged to resume, develop and change his themes. Beatrice exemplifies the Paterian hero as a figure of ultimate transgression, combining the feminine with the masculine and being superior to the rest of humanity because of this. Beatrice also transcends the boundary between the living and the dead and travels between Heaven and Hell, freed from the strains of time and space. She for this reason anticipates and resembles the revenant as an agent in Pater’s cultural criticism, epitomized in his description of the Mona Lisa in ‘Leonardo da Vinci’. Her enigmatic smile is as bewildering and significant as that of Beatrice and her presence as elusive as that of the diaphanous type. To view ‘Diaphaneitè’ as indicative of and functional within Pater’s concept of culture provides a plausible interpretation of this early text. Pater’s view of history as conservative has been mentioned above: the spirit of an age will not get lost as long as it is preserved in religion, myth, ritual and art. Even though there is constant change in time, elements of the past re-emerge in the hands of an artist who is aware of the slumbering potential of ancient thought. Pater as a ‘late age’ artist seizes the treasures stored in the ‘House Beautiful’, the store house of human memory, and uses them for his own purpose. By embracing the concept of ‘tradition’ as desirable and even necessary for his own artistic self-expression and creativity, he rejects the notion of the autonomous, Promethean artist so popular with Romantic poets and writers and he frees himself of the anxiety of influence that Modernist artists would face. Yet Pater’s insistence on historical continuity is difficult to reconcile with his concept of the self as fragmentary and transitory – one trait of his thought which undoubtedly turns him into a forerunner of Modernist aesthetics. The ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance contains a summary of Pater’s Heraclitean idea of persistent change and transformation. ‘Each object’, Pater writes, is loosed into a group of impressions – colour, odour, texture – in the mind of the observer. . . . the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the mind. Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. (Renaissance 151) A person’s impressions are transitory and unstable, but they constitute the self. There is thus no such thing as a unified self, because there are no cohesive forces in a world of constant change. How, then, it could be asked, if each individual is caught up in his or her own solipsistic universe, separated ‘by that thick wall’, is it possible for Pater to bring this understanding of the human mind in agreement with his concept of culture which is based on tradition, an act of intersubjective communication? The answer lies in ‘Diaphaneitè’.

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The processes of receptivity and emission enable the diaphanous character to engage in a dialogue which spans human history. Hence the diaphanous character makes the perfect artist, whose sensibilities are sharpened and who is more able than others to coordinate impressions and ideas as they emerge from what he sees as a pulsating flow of life. As such, Beatrice is again a propelling force which elevates man above his human condition.

Chapter 8

Conclusion

Walter Pater described the eighteenth-century German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann as ‘a relic of classical antiquity, laid open by accident to our alien, modern atmosphere’ (Renaissance 141). Read against ‘Diaphaneitè’, Pater’s Beatrice emerges as another such relic: she survived historical and cultural change and re-emerged in a different period, centuries after she had first been the object of Dante’s poetic praise. The chapter on Pater thus came full circle with a question asked at the beginning of this book: why do certain images, figures or themes survive and prosper within a remote historical environment? This book suggests one approach towards an answer. Focusing on the exemplary case of Dante’s Beatrice, I argue that the afterlife of figures from mythology, religion or literature cannot be adequately explained by theories of intertextuality and intermediality alone. Given Beatrice’s mythic status it is appropriate to think of her afterlife not only as a literary, but also as a cultural one. This becomes even more obvious once the imaginative verve with which such figures are constantly refashioned is taken into consideration. Figures such as Beatrice are not definable by mere reception processes, since they occupy the cultural imagination. Again, one may turn to Pater, who was a writer excelling in converting sparse biographical information into plastic historical reliefs when composing his ‘imaginary portraits’. If he had written such a portrait of Beatrice, the inarticulate endeavour or impetus underlying the texts and debates sketched in this book would have materialized. The plasticity of the ‘portraits’ which I discussed in this book is due not only to the poetic qualities inherent in Dante’s works, but more fundamentally derives from an affective potential belonging to Beatrice. It is because of her emotional appeal that her figure was able to traverse different historical and cultural contexts. Hence I suggest a dual approach to soundly theorize her afterlife, combining a reading of Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of social energies with Aby Warburg’s concept of the pathos formula. Although there are differences between the two critics’ scholarly projects and notions of energy which require more intense elaboration in the future (one major discrepancy being Greenblatt’s historicism versus Warburg’s transhistorical interests), they are united by their interest in forms of cultural survival. Beatrice gained autonomy as a figure of thought as

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well as a very human woman embodying diverse emotional states. Stephen Greenblatt’s notion of social energies can be used to describe the dynamics of myths as transmedial goods. As such circulating items, they do not lose, but loosen their ties of adherence or ownership so as to become relatively autonomous and available for appropriation. Aby Warburg’s pathos formulae, as exemplified by his Florentine nymph, provide an interesting and complementary foil, whose transdisciplinarity and relevance for the study of literary texts, I argue, remain underexplored. A thorough methodological examination of the validity of Warburg’s concept for the interpretation of literary texts, that is, their capacity to represent and convey the affective potential inherent in Warburg’s gestures and to thereby explain their persistence in the cultural imagination, remains to be done. Even though the term ‘pathos formula’ may imply that the expressive forms Warburg was interested in boil down to mere formulaic schemata, he circumvented, as his work on his Bilderatlas showed, rigid or formalist categorizations when choosing among his pictorial material. Similarly to his picture plates, which harbour unexpected juxtapositions, the visual and literary portraits of Beatrice included in this book provide a survey of the Victorian Beatrice which is manifold and heterogeneous. This book investigates interconnections between the ideas, ideals and responses Beatrice inspired, drawing upon literary texts of various genres as well as examples from the visual arts. While it is apparent that writers such as George Eliot or Alfred Lord Tennyson read a lot of Dante, this remains largely predictable given their educational status and their cultural milieu. It is more interesting to see what kind of Beatrices they imagined. What crystallizes as their common denominator are the rhetorical as well as the emotional strategies of idealization her figure elicited: she was either cast into idealized roles, or liberated from such patterns of idealization. Beatrice served as a site of experimentation, enabling writers to envision or criticize ideals of gender identity; the death of a young beautiful woman caused as much anguish as that of a young beautiful man. Dante’s texts thus provided patterns or models to facilitate the expression of uncomfortable or transgressive feelings. She was used as an aesthetic and intellectual scaffolding upon which ideals could be fixed and fleshed out. Dante’s texts offered a language as well as stories and images which nineteenth-century authors quoted, echoed, criticized, rewrote and subverted. Firmly engrained in the Western cultural imagination, Beatrice easily transgressed ideological differences and boundaries set by gender, age and nationality. The figure of Beatrice exemplifies the survival of pictorial forms and gestures, a re-enactment of which can be found in literary texts. Image and text enter into a complicit relationship of mirroring and reinforcing what is indicated in the other. This is clearest in the work of D. G. Rossetti, who developed his vision of Beatrice in equally intense forms in poetry and painting. My juxtaposition of his Beata Beatrix with Julia Margaret Cameron’s photograph in

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Chapter 2 epitomizes the transmedial development of Beatrice’s myth, illustrating how a particular gesture and affective expression can be shifted not only from text to another, but also from one medium to another. D. G. Rossetti’s project of translating Dante effectively required both painting and poetry in order to succeed, in full awareness of each medium’s limitations and possibilities. It also contributed toward the visualizing of Beatrice in Victorian culture. A brief discussion of John Ruskin’s lecture ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ revealed a Beatrice who was moulded according to contemporary gender norms. Ruskin’s text, among other literary examples, reflects a preference for the earthly, virtuous Beatrice, which went hand in hand with a collective prioritization of selected episodes or figures from the Commedia and the Vita Nuova. Henry Holiday’s painting serves as an interesting example of how eagerly Dante’s texts and biography were transformed into stories: his painting produces a narrative flow of events, focusing on a moment in the Vita Nuova which could be used as a hinge from which a story of doomed love could be spun. This tendency to interweave Dante’s texts with speculative approaches to his biography, thereby focusing on the romantic content of his work and life, was also reflected in the texts by William S. Landor and Dina M. Mulock, both of which represent the Dante– Beatrice relationship as a matrix on which Victorian spousal life could be patterned. Marie Spartali Stillman’s artwork, on the other hand, visualizes another kind of story in which Beatrice emerges as a central actor. A woman artist, she creates a Beatrice who embodies female virtue and beauty coupled with learnedness. Years after George Eliot’s Romola was published, Marie Spartali Stillman produced the kind of paintings which would have illustrated Eliot’s novel to perfection. The repercussions of female potential bound to remain unexplored within a patriarchal society can be detected in Eliot’s novel as well as in the works by this late Pre-Raphaelite painter, who had to develop her own female artistic vision amid a circle of predominantly male colleagues. In contrast, my discussion of D. G. Rossetti’s portraits of Elizabeth Siddal and their darker connotations of death, desire and separation uncovered the morbid face of the Victorian Beatrice. However, the majority of textual and visual examples revolve around what could be called ‘the strong Beatrice’, as opposed to the ethereal, passive one. For Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Walter Pater, Beatrice embodies an ideal derived from their notions of human strength and excellence. Even for D. G. Rossetti, Beatrice is not exclusively a frail creature of morbid beauty, but more profoundly an embodiment of his aesthetic principles. Beatrice’s secularized afterlife also reflects the Victorian historicist bias and the popularization of the biographical genre in literature, reflecting a new scientific and aesthetic paradigm. Beatrice became an apple of discord for the Rossetti family, dividing the father and his allegorical reading of Dante from his children who inherited Dante from him. As with a financial or material heritage, there are several possibilities of treating and (ab)using such an intellectual

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legacy: one can preserve it by leaving it untouched, one can squander it, one can increase its value or one can transform it into something better, staking a critique of its former uses. Christina Rossetti’s poetry provides such a case of corrective writing: she widens her reading of Dante by pointing out the flaws inscribed into ensuing traditions. She restructures the flawed relation between the sexes characteristic of medieval love poetry and adopts the persona of Beatrice in order to express her ideal of equality between the sexes and a concept of love which, both in its insistence on equality and the importance of religious love, is different to that proposed by her literary precursors. Similarly, George Eliot is ultimately concerned with women’s potential and the best ways of using it. She revises the Dantean model of female idealization to lay bare its flaws when put to the test of real life. Romola comments on the consequences which romantic and spiritual idealization imposes on the individual. Idealization, as a pattern of heterosexual power distribution propagated by literature, proves to be the frame within which woman is trapped and barred from using her intellectual and moral prowess for herself and for the benefit of others. The final two chapters of this book then outline very complex responses to Dante whose implications are rich and, at the time of their publication, had a provocative potential. Leaving aside the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) subtext of homoerotic fascination with another man, in their treatment of Beatrice neither Tennyson nor Pater deviated from their contemporaries’ understanding of this figure. In fact, my reading of Tennyson’s poem against the works of Arthur Henry Hallam, a keen defender of Beatrice’s earthly nature, showed how closely connected In Memoriam was to the central question concerning Beatrice’s status as either an allegorical brainchild of Dante’s or a historical woman. While this dichotomy between the real and the allegorical or spiritual provided grounds for a gnawing conflict irreconcilable for scholars such as Arthur Henry Hallam and Gabriele Rossetti, it was a repository of inspiration for D. G. Rossetti, Pater and also Tennyson. Pater and D. G. Rossetti regarded Beatrice as the embodiment of this dichotomy, from which sprang their respective poetic, and in Rossetti’s case artistic, impetus. Even in Tennyson’s poem, this duality reverberates in the poem’s negotiation of Hallam’s standing in the world as an earthly, embodied friend and also as a representative of a higher, transhumanized vision of what a man could be. Thus, while the two most prominent female writers included in this book, George Eliot and C. Rossetti, developed their own distinctive critical approaches to Dante’s texts and the ensuing traditions, Tennyson and also Pater basically re-gendered a feminine myth which in itself remained intact. Tennyson, through his apotheosis of a human beloved, and Pater, driven by his belief in an aesthetic kind of existence, follow Dante’s example by exalting individuals who are able to propel humanity towards perfection. Certainly the relevance which Dante enjoyed in the nineteenth century resulted from the historical situation, which shaped the European attitude

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towards Italy as a country whose political identity and future were in the process of being forged. However, it would be wrong to assume that Dante stopped haunting the Western cultural imagination with the transition into the modernist era and the traumatic events lying in wait during the first part of the twentieth century. Quite the opposite: Dante was a writer whom the most conformist of Victorian readers enjoyed reading; at the same time he was an untiring source of inspiration for modernist writers who, in their endeavour to make things new, could not abandon Dante. The programmatic nature of modernist aesthetics dismantled or, in the words of W. B. Yeats, ‘defeated’ the Victorian heritage (xi). Modernist poets got rid of Victorian chintz – ‘everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went mad’ (Yeats xi). Yet Dante remained high up on the agenda of writers such as Joyce, Beckett and Eliot and underwent an equally compelling modernist transformation.1 The canonicity of the discourse surrounding Dante in the works of the period’s most prominent voices speaks for itself. My choice of texts underlines the centrality of Dante, to return to Ruskin’s terminology, by bringing together some of the period’s highest ranking and influential literary voices on the issue of Beatrice. This book concentrates on the work of well-established literary figures. It does not take into account those fields of literary, artistic and material production which were excluded from the canon. Dante in popular culture or Dante for children are among the aspects of his Victorian afterlife which are gradually being discovered and brought to the fore.2 Bearing in mind Dante’s capacity to stir the Victorian cultural imagination, it remains up to future research in the field to establish how exactly the Victorian infatuation with Dante spilled over and developed at the ‘margins’ of Victorian culture. Dante and Victorian material culture is an as yet neglected field of research. Here, too, one is confronted with reception processes and the translation of literary stories and texts into new forms, materials and functions. The reason why ‘margins’ requires inverted commas is that in the form of diaries, prayer books or calendars, Dante was anywhere but at the margins of human life. Far from it: Dante ventured forth to the heart of the Victorian hearth. Symbolic of Dante’s conquest of the British home is a washstand from 1880, now held by the V&A London (museum number W.4-1953), designed by William Burges and called ‘New Life’. While mentioning the connection between Dante and Victorian sanitation may be an odd reference, it points towards Dante’s move across spheres of cultural production traditionally thought of as ‘high’ or ‘popular’ and the interesting questions raised when reception also comes to mean commodification. Exploring the afterlife of Dante’s texts in any given period thus means widening the methodological scope proffered by traditional theories of literary reception and negotiating the tension which is being generated when canonical texts emerge against the particular mental backdrop of a period – texts whose appeal is perennial.

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Beatrice appears in works focusing on Pre-Raphaelite art and literature, particularly those dealing with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s life and biography or Pre-Raphaelite femininity (see Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Women, Pearce, Daly [31–94] and Pollock, ‘Woman as Sign’ and Vision and Difference [91–114]). The reception of Dante in the Victorian period and beyond has been the subject of several books and articles. Alison Milbank has provided the most comprehensive study with Dante and the Victorians. Hers is a long Victorian period, beginning with Romantic writers and reaching into the early twentieth century and the modernist reading of Dante by Eliot, Joyce and Pound. Even though Milbank is mainly concerned with Dante’s impact on Victorian aesthetics, her book hints at the other dimensions of the Victorian Dante (as for example the political Dante) or his impact on Victorian theological debates. She discusses the Dante interpretations of well-known authors such as George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Rossettis, John Ruskin and of minor figures. A concise overview of Dante’s critical reception can be found in Nick Havely’s Dante (226–232). The Romantic reception of Dante shaped the parameters of Victorian readings. It has most recently been covered by Antonella Braida in Dante and the Romantics (2004). Braida’s monograph concentrates on English translations, particularly Cary’s translation of the Commedia from 1814 and illustrations of the Commedia from the late eighteenth century onwards in an interdisciplinary effort to elucidate the impact of Dante in the Romantic period in ‘high’, ‘popular’ and visual culture. Other studies which examine the impact of Dante on Romantic literature have been provided by Valeria Tinkler-Villani (Visions of Dante) and Ralph Pite. Dante was introduced into Romantic culture by artists and connoisseurs before his influence then spread and reached a broader readership. Coleridge’s 1818–1819 lectures on Dante, Ugo Foscolo’s articles in the Edinburgh Review (1818) and Thomas Warton’s mentioning of Dante in his History of English Poetry (1774–1781) are usually brought forward as catalysts in his Romantic renaissance (Pite 1 and 12 and Havely, ‘Introduction’). The influential illustrations of Dante’s works which circulated in Britain from the late eighteenth century onwards were those by Sir Joshua Reynolds (whose painting Ugolino and His Sons was exhibited in 1773), John Flaxman (1792–1793), William Blake (1824–1827) and Henry Fuseli (1776, 1786, 1808). See Nick Havely’s Dante, which contains a useful Dante chronology covering the years 1322 to 2006 (213–25), including the landmarks of Dante’s international reception. In the same book, an overview of the visual and performed Commedia is given (233–42).

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Whether Dante needs to be counted towards the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, or whether his position is transitional, has been a controversial question both for Victorian and contemporary critics. Umberto Eco argues that Dante belonged to a period of transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance when it was ‘artists, ranging all the way from Dante to the troubadours, filled with a sense of their power and displaying a new and proud individualism, who added to the history of aesthetic feeling and theory’ (91). On the afterlife of the Paolo and Francesca episode, see Alison Milbank’s chapter, ‘Moral Luck in the Second Circle: Francesca and the Victorian Fate of Tragedy’ (150–61). Steve Ellis’ Dante and English Poetry (1983) contains an insightful chapter on Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s secularized reading of Dante. His main thesis, that Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s work inspired a ‘Vita Nuov-isation’ characteristic of the Victorian reception of Dante (and different to the Romantic image of a Byronic hero), has served as a valuable cornerstone from which several ideas in this books were expanded and developed. The translation of the Vita Nuova used in this book is the one by Barbara Reynolds. All subsequent references to the Vita Nuova refer to her translation, unless stated otherwise. The Italian edition used is the one edited by Gustavo Adolfo Cervello. For a brief, but comprehensive summary of Beatrice’s status in Dante’s writings see Ferrante and Marina Warner’s chapter ‘Dante, Beatrice, and the Virgin Mary’ (160–74). The translation of the Divina Commedia used in this book is the one by Allen Mandelbaum. All subsequent references to the Commedia in the text refer to his translation, unless stated otherwise. The Italian edition used is the one edited by Bosco and Reggio. See Assmann/Assmann for a discussion of various concepts and kinds of myth. Understood as a figure of thought, ‘myth’ has, from the Enlightenment onwards, traditionally been set in opposition to ‘logos’, thereby used as a polemic term referring to a previous stage of cultural development which has been overcome. Ernst Cassirer, in the 1920s, established myth as a symbolic form in its own right and equal to language, history, art and scientific knowledge as epistemic forms of cultural achievement (in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms). For Cassirer, myths reflect the human capacity of thinking symbolically, of communicating experience in encoded form. The cultural relevance of myths as indicators and carriers of meaning has ever since become increasingly prominent. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz elevated it to the status of an epistemological source vital for our self-understanding: ‘In order to make up our minds we must know how we feel about things; and to know how we feel about things we need the public images of sentiment that only ritual, myth, and art can provide’ (82). The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg proposes such an understanding of myths, arguing that they help overcome the state of angst experienced by human beings in the modern world, who experience helplessness in the face of an amorphous, nameless reality. Myths create a link between humans and the absolutism of reality, as Blumenberg names this anxiety (4), by providing tales which seem to secure their sense of identity. Blumenberg’s approach to myth presupposes a negative attitude towards human existence as one that is fundamentally instilled with fear.

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In ‘The Worship of Woman and the Worship of the Soul’ (1921), Jung refers explicitly to the example of Dante and Beatrice in order to show how myths can be understood with the help of psychoanalysis (Aspects of the Feminine 5–24). Jan Assmann defines cultural memory as a cultural sphere in which myths, tradition and human self-definition are interlaced, subject to historical change: ‘The concept of cultural memory comprises that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch whose “cultivation” serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image’ (132). ‘Romantic mythopoesis always moves with an extraordinary sense of alliance and debt to its great predecessors – to Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and the Old Testament especially. As the romantics read these poets – or others like them, such as Dante or Aeschylus – they could find a poetry of vision and prophecy, sublime power and epic scope, the supernatural wedded to the natural, or what might loosely be called a poetry of myth’ (Feldman and Richardson 366). See Bullen, Myth of the Renaissance, Fraser, The Victorians and Law/Østermark for discussions of the Victorian interest in the Renaissance. Victorian medievalism has been examined in the studies by Chandler and Morris. Interesting insights into the Victorians’ relation to Italy in the nineteenth century are given by Ross, Ellis/Porter, Pemble and Churchill. Victorian concepts and images of femininity have been examined by, for example, Linda Nead and Jan Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Women. ‘Interfigurality’ is a neologism coined by Wolfgang G. Müller. It refers to the reuse of a literary figure in another literary work (Müller 101–21). Likewise, Theodore Ziolowski has identified the insertion of a literary character into a new literary context as one of the most important instances of intertextuality (123–51). A very broad understanding of intertextuality was propagated by Julia Kristeva and other poststructuralist critics, who eroded the boundaries between the traditional understanding of a text as verbal (literary or oral) and the culture which produced it, which becomes decipherable as another form of ‘text’. Julia Kristeva discarded the use of intertextuality in the sense of source studies and replaced the term with ‘transposition’ (59–60). By understanding intertextuality as a transfer of sign systems, Kristeva moves away from the subject-oriented level on which theories of influence and source studies were based. Such wide models of intertextuality tend to destabilize meaning and present each text as part of a universal intertext. In contrast, a structuralist understanding of intertextuality as developed by Gérard Genette serves more practical needs: it re-establishes literature as one particular group of texts which can be methodologically assessed and criticized. Whereas the poststructuralist model perpetuates an understanding of meaning as constantly deferred and indefinable, the structuralist, hermeneutical model makes the individual text the home of a detectable meaning available for analysis and explanation. Gérard Genette’s concept of the palimpsest, as developed in Palimpsests, regards the intertext as a concealed, stored layer of significance, which suspends ‘original’ meaning by triggering new semantic processes, superficially erased and lying underneath the manifest (post-) text, but nonetheless present.

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Heinrich Plett regards the relation between the media as a subcategory within the field of intertextuality (20). Peter Wagner remarks that intermediality has been a ‘sadly neglected but vastly important subdivision of intertextuality’ (17). However, theorists of intertextuality have traditionally found it hard to accommodate intermediality in their definitions despite a pictorial turn in Western cultural theory during the twentieth century. Gérard Genette, in the early 1980s, argued that a different set of instruments was required in order to pay justice to what he perceives as grave ontological and material differences between the media (91). Graham Allen, in his chapter on ‘Intertextuality in the non-literary arts’, pointed out that Lessing’s differentiation between painting as atemporal and literature as temporal led to an isolated critical approach to each of them (176). Awareness of the problem is noticeable, but it remains marginal. Remediation is a concept discussed by Jay D. Bolter and Richard Grusin. Remediation refers to the different relations between the old and new media, such as refashioning, rivalry or paying homage. It reflects the authors’ belief that ‘no medium today . . . seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media’ (15). Fed by the ‘twin logic’ (4) of hypermediacy, that is, the co-presence of several media in one work of art, for example, and immediacy, that is, the denial of the presence of the medium, remediation has certain overlaps with intermediality. Focusing on the new digital media, Bolton and Grusin show awareness of the historical dimension of processes of remediation. However, for my present purpose I prefer the concept of intermediality respectively transmediality as the more neutral terms, since less concerned with questions of authenticity of representation. James A. W. Heffernan defines ‘ekphrasis’ as follows: ‘I propose a definition simple in form but complex in its implications: ekphrasis is the verbal representation of visual representation’ (3). There are a number of figures which developed an afterlife comparable to that of Beatrice in the Victorian period. See, for example, Kimberly Rhodes’ study on the visual afterlife of Ophelia. Blumenberg discusses the (im)possibility of bringing myth to an end (627–37). He questions the existence of a final version of myth on which no further ‘work’ will be done, a myth which knows ‘no Sabbath’ (633). In the Introduction to Practising New Historicism, which he co-authored with Catherine Gallagher, the New Historicist project is described as concerned with the detection of a culture’s ‘inventive energies’ (12). Their approach seeks to follow ‘the social energies that circulate very broadly through a culture’ (13). For an overview of Aby Warburg’s work, life and impact on today’s art historical and cultural studies see Forster. In the introduction to Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Warburg elaborates on this distancing procedure: ‘The unconscious creation of distance between the self and the external world may be called the fundamental act of civilisation. Where this act conditions artistic creativity, this awareness of distance can achieve a lasting social function.’ (English translation in Gombrich 288). In 1900, Warburg and his Dutch friend Jolles maintained a correspondence in which Jolles pretended to be in love with the nymph ever since she passed him in

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the street. In a letter from 23 November 1900 he writes that he sees her in several works of art, as a Salome, then again in ‘the boy-like grace of little Tobias’ or in a seraph (Gombrich 107). It is interesting that the main inspiration for the friends’ infatuation with the nymph were Ghirlandaio’s frescoes in Santa Maria Novella in Florence – the same frescoes which George Eliot had in mind when creating the figure of Romola (see Chapter 5). ‘Nymphes: divinités mineures sans pouvoir “institutionnel”, mais irradiantes d’une véritable puissance à fasciner, à bouleverser l’âme et, avec elle, tout possible savoir sur l’âme.’ As a symbol or ‘engram’, the nymph is ‘a charge of latent energy, but the way in which it is discharged may be positive or negative – as murder or rescue, as fear or triumph, as pagan maenad or Christian Magdalen’ (Gombrich 248).

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This was a tendency which lasted well into the early twentieth century. The following list, which is by no means comprehensive, aims to give an idea of how versatile artists were in their treatment of Beatrice: John Hancock (1825/26–69), one of the few sculptors affiliated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, made a sculpture entitled Beatrice in 1850, exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London probably one of his better known works. The statue is now held in the V&A. Wiley Sara King’s Dante and Beatrice: A Play in Verse (1909) is an example of a dramatic adaptation of the story, as is Thomas Gwynn Jones and Daniel Rees’ Dante and Beatrice: A Play (1903). As for music, Sir Granville Bantock’s Dante and Beatrice: Poem for Orchestra (1911) provides a later example; another one would be Stephen Rowland Philpot’s Dante and Beatrice: Opera in Three Acts (1893). Elizabeth Kerr Coulson, alias Roxburghe Lothian, wrote a romance based on Dante and Beatrice in 1876 entitled Dante and Beatrice, From 1282 to 1290: A Romance. The Walker Art Gallery website contains ample information on the painting’s genesis. See also E. Morris (218–23). Maura O’Connor argues that the English in the nineteenth century were not only fascinated with Italy, but that their vision of Italy was shaped by their cultural imagination. This one-sided understanding of Ruskin as a theoretician of women’s petrifaction within rigid social structures is the result of reception history and does the author injustice (see O’Gorman). Some contemporary (feminist) responses to ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ were even rather positive: early feminists such as Anna Jameson and Barbara Leigh Smith were drawn to this text because it contains the key principles and the rhetoric of Jameson and her circle of feminist friends, advocating above anything else educational reform and an acknowledgement of the importance of women’s work for the public sphere (see Peterson). In 1802 Henry Boyd published the first complete translation (his translation of the Inferno had been published in 1785), followed by Henry Francis Cary’s 1814 translation, which was to become a bestseller by modern standards and

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represented a new phase in the reception of Dante’s text in Britain. Between Cary’s complete translation of the Commedia in 1814 and the late 1860s, some 20 translations into English in whole or in part were published (see Caesar 66–69). Until the mid-nineteenth century the Vita Nuova had been unavailable in full translation; it was the Anglo-Indian Joseph Garrow, who published the first complete translation in Florence in 1846. Arthur Henry Hallam had worked on a translation of the Vita Nuova, yet because of his death in 1833 he only finished 25 sonnets; Charles Lyell, D. G. Rossetti’s godfather, had translated the poems of the Vita Nuova and those of the Convito, published in 1835, but not the prose passages. Other translations included those by Charles Edward Norton, who finished it in 1853, but published it only in 1893; Ralph Waldo Emerson’s (c. 1843), which remained unpublished during his lifetime; and Theodore Martin’s from 1861, the same year which saw the publication of D. G. Rossetti’s Early Italian Poets (1861, 1874). A contemporary Dante scholar wrote a letter to Dyce, claiming that this painting represented ‘a perfect Florentine type’ (Pointon 166). Marsh gives an account of Spartali Stillman’s relation with Italy in Chapman and Stabler (159–82). Around seventy out of Spartali Stillman’s over 170 works have Italianate themes or subjects. For a list of Spartali Stillman paintings and a biographical sketch, see D. B. Elliott (231–35). Cherry has argued that artists such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Marie Spartali Stillman generated ‘high-cultural imagery of women’ and that ‘woman as sign is re-signed from visual icon to woman of culture’ (199). In contrast, Pollock famously described Pre-Raphaelite female portraiture as producing female ciphers, redefining women as images, consisting of several graphic signs, such as lowered head, upturned lips, softly falling hair (‘Woman as Sign’ 223). ‘Thus, if it shall please Him by whom all things live that my life continue for a few years, I hope to compose concerning her what has never been written in rhyme of any woman’ (Vita Nuova XLII; 99). Elizabeth Siddal has become the best-known Beatrice model, but was interchangeable with other models for this purpose (see Taylor). An account of the painting’s genesis is given by Debra Mancoff. The actual lines from Tennyson are the following: ‘I fain would follow love, if that could be; / I needs must follow death, who calls for me; / Can I follow, I follow! let me die’ (Poems 3: 450; ll. 1009–1011). Elaine’s love for Lancelot is doomed to stay unrequited for good. These few lines illustrate her despair and desire to die. Michael Bartram (133) has juxtaposed these two images for his discussion of female portraiture in Victorian photography. Schapiro (38–39) describes the painterly portrait as ‘the grammatical form of the third person, the impersonal “he” or “she”’, which explains the portrait’s intermediate position between inwardness and outwardness, engagement with the viewer and elusiveness. I owe this reference to Graham Smith, see also Smith 37. MacKay uses the term ‘creative negativity’ to refer to a set of aspects which she considers characteristic of Cameron’s photographic art. One of them is her use of soft-focus techniques. Soft focusing produced the possibility of unstable

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readings. Cameron’s photograph elides any attempt of interpretation which would reduce it to the representation of a positively definable literary or mythological model (1–16). Rossetti Archive. Ed. Jerome McGann. , accessed on 17 December 2008.

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Alison Milbank’s chapter on the Dante reception of the Rossetti family is an excellent starting point for an exploration of their familial reception of Dante (117–49). In his Memoir of his sister Christina, W. M. Rossetti describes himself and his siblings as ‘a little different from British children’ and Dante Gabriel and Christina as ‘somewhat devious from the British tradition and the insular mind’ (Poetical Works xlviii). See W. M. Rossetti, ‘Prefatory Note’. He identifies May 1843, when Dante Gabriel was 14 years old, as the crucial moment, but at the same time questions his deeper knowledge of Dante’s works apart from the Commedia and the Vita Nuova. Marsh doubts that C. Rossetti’s reading of Dante as a child was profound (Christina Rossetti 37). Bell, her first biographer, identified the year 1848, when she was 18 years old, as the starting point of her reading of Dante, even though she was bilingual (14). See for example Dante Gabriel’s letters to Christina from 28 January 1861 and 8 February 1861, in which he both praises her poems and urges her to have them published (Fredeman 2: 346 and 348–49). Valerie Sanders’ work on the nineteenth-century ‘brother-sister culture’ argues that the relation between siblings of the opposite sex engendered numerous examples of what she calls ‘collaborative relationships’ between brothers and sisters (esp. 1–10 and 32–33). In the words of W. M. Rossetti ‘he was an ardent lover of liberty, . . . In religion he was mainly a freethinker, strongly anti-papal and anti-sacerdotal, but not inclined, in Protestant country, to abjure the faith of his fathers’ (DGR: Family Letters 12). Letter from Seymour Kirkup to William Rossetti, written in Florence on 23 March 1868. Letter to Olivia Frances Madox Rossetti (her niece), dated 14 February 1889. The edition of ‘Monna Innominata’ used in this book is the one by R W. Crump and Betty S. Flowers (Complete Poems 294–301). Page numbers indicated in brackets refer to this edition. The edition of D. G. Rossetti’s poetry used in this book is the one by Jerome McGann. Page numbers indicated in brackets refer to this edition, unless stated otherwise.

Chapter 4 1

Unpublished letter to Constance Hilliard, dated 31 October 1877, quoted in Milbank 132.

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Mary Arseneau discusses Dante’s presence in C. Rossetti’s art and life (‘May My Great Love’). Subsequent references to and quotations from C. Rossetti’s poetry will be indicated in brackets in the text and are taken from The Complete Poems, edited by R. W. Crump and Betty S. Flowers. They were recently discussed by Valeria Tinkler-Villani (‘Christina Rossetti’s Italian Poems’). The poems were written in response to Charles Cayley’s The Purple of the West (1863) between 1862 and 1868 (See Complete Poems 1146). Cayley proposed to Christina in 1866. In addition, each of the poets mentioned in the Dante quotations introduce a further intertextual dimension, as William Whitla pointed out (103). This external speaking voice can be that of Dante, the pilgrim, that of one of his fellow poets (e.g. Casella, Guinizelli, Statius), or an allusion to the god of poetry, Apollo. Christina Rossetti’s sonnet cycle engages with preceding male sonneteers such as Dante and Petrarch as well as with her contemporaries Elizabeth Barrett Browning and D. G. Rossetti, who shared her fondness of the Petrarchan sonnet form. See Hassett’s chapter ‘Influence and Restraint: Victorian Women Poets and the Rossettis’ on D. G. Rossetti’s and C. Rossetti’s relation to the work of contemporary poets like Barrett Browning, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon (64–116) and Marjorie Stone’s discussion of ‘Monna Innominata’. ‘The moment I saw I say in all truth that the vital spirit, which dwells in the inmost depths of the heart, began to tremble so violently that I felt the vibration alarmingly in all my pulses, even the weakest of them’ (VN II; Reynolds 29). At the beginning of Purgatorio V Dante receives attention from souls who stare at the shadow which his body casts. Virgil urges him to move on and ignore their chatter. Unless otherwise stated, this and the following quotations (page numbers indicated in brackets) from D. G. Rossetti’s ‘House of Life’ and other poems are taken from Collected Poetry and Prose (ed. Jerome McGann). In a letter to W. M. Rossetti from August 1848, D. G. Rossetti mentions that Keats ‘seems to have been a glorious fellow, and says in one place (to my great delight) that having just looked over a folio of the first and second schools of Italian painting, he has come to the conclusion that the early men surpassed even Rafael himself!!!’ (Fredeman 1: 68). That the engravings of the Campo Santo frescoes made by Carlo Lasinio were the catalyst which triggered the foundation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was recorded by W. M. Rossetti (DGR: Family Letters, 1: 125–26). Paget Toynbee’s list (Chronological List) of D. G. Rossetti’s works related to Dante has 96 items. Florence S. Boos has examined Rossetti’s intertextual use of Dante in detail (260–66). There are certain basic structural and thematic differences between the Vita Nuova and the ‘House of Life’, starting with their respective length, narrative order, choice and variety of subjects and mood. Some points of resemblance are the omnipresence of love (both as theme and personification from the first sonnet onwards), the veneration of a woman’s moral and physical excellence (‘Lovesight’), the idealization of the beloved beyond her humanity (‘Heart’s Compass’) and the destructive power of death as enemy to the blessing of

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fulfilled love, loss and desire. Robert Zweig sees a fundamental dichotomy between the spiritual and the physical at work in both sequences and consequently speaks of Dante Gabriel’s as ‘a kind of Vita Nuova, a questioning of perspectives by which to unite material desire and spiritual salvation’ (179). This point can be illustrated with the help of the ‘Willowwood’ cluster (sonnets 49, 50, 51 and 52; 149–50) in the ‘House of Life’ sequence which depicts the gloomy atmosphere of a wood where all those lovers walk who are no longer with their beloved and hence have lost a part of their soul (‘What fathom-depth of soul-struck widowhood’ [l. 3; 150]). W. M. Rossetti identified the nameless girl of this poem as Elizabeth Siddal (Hassett 155). It is interesting that Seymour Kirkup made a tracing and a watercolour sketch of the Bargello portrait of Dante, which he gave to Gabriele, who then bequeathed it to Dante Gabriel. It remained in the latter’s possession until his death (see Fredeman 2: 58, letter 55.41 n3). The central panel was replaced by a partition in the middle onto which Dante Gabriel painted another version of Dantis Amor (see Parris 179). In D. G. Rossetti’s translation: ‘the same wonderful lady appeared to me dressed all in pure white, between two gentle ladies elder than she’ (251). ‘. . . above / a white veil, she was crowned with olive boughs; / her cape was green; her dress beneath, flame-red’ (ll. 31–33; Mandelbaum 357). The importance of the beloved’s greeting is characteristic of stilnovisti poetry; it is her appearance and not so much the communication between the lovers which is crucial because of its ability to save the beloved, giving ‘salute’ in both senses of the word (Spiller 30). W. M. Rossetti states that D. G. Rossetti began his work on the translations in 1845, see DGR: Family Letters, 1: 105. ‘Then Love said: “Now shall all things be made clear: / Come and behold our lady where she lies.” / These ‘wildering fantasies / Then carried me to see my lady dead. / Even as I there was led, / Her ladies with a veil / were covering her / And with her was such a humbleness / That she appeared to say, I am at peace.’ Quoted from the Rossetti Archive. Ed. Jerome McGann. 17 December 2008 (). The document title is ‘Dante’s Dream on the Day of the Death of Beatrice: 9th of June, 1290’ (Flysheet Printing, 1881). D. G. Rossetti also wrote two ekphrastic texts to describe the predellas. They are called ‘For the Predella of the Picture, Dante’s Dream’ and were probably written in 1880. They were published in the 1911 edition of The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, edited by W. M. Rossetti: ‘No.1. – Dante, being sick and crying out in a dream of his lady’s death, is bewept by his near kinswoman; whom other ladies lead thence, by reason of her grief, and awaken him. No.2. – Dante recounts his dream to the ladies who have awakened him; whereto his grieving kinswoman also hearkens apart’ (643). The difference in style and technique between the original version and the 1871 oil painting is interesting given that these paintings stem from different creative periods in Rossetti’s career. They mirror a different aesthetic approach, the latter version providing a richer decorative background, offering a glimpse of Florence and a much more sensual rendering of details and colouring. An

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extensive comparison of the two versions would provide a revealing case study of D. G. Rossetti’s changing style over the decades, leading him from his medievalist, Art-Catholic tendencies towards the more sensual, ‘fleshly’ aspect of his artworks in the more opulent manner of the old Venetian artists from the 1860s onwards. Beatrice, for whom Jane Morris sat model, is turned into a very beautiful, radiant corpse, who invites Love’s kiss more than the Beatrice in the earlier painting, whose hands folded in prayer create a visibly distancing effect. The Rossetti Archive’s scholarly comment for the Dante’s Dream complex argues that the picture ‘is an elaborated interpretation of the relation between dream and art.’: http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/23p-1881.s81.raw.html (17 December 2008). Rossetti Archive. Ed. Jerome McGann.

Chapter 5 1

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George Eliot sums up the preparation process as follows: ‘I began it a young woman – I finished it an old woman’ (Cross 352). See also her letter to Richard Holt Hutton from 8 August 1863: ‘Perhaps even a judge so discerning as yourself could not infer from the imperfect result how strict a self control and selection were exercised in the presentation of details. I believe there is scarcely a phrase, an incident, an allusion, that did not gather its value to me from its supposed subservience to my main artistic objects.’ (Haight 4: 97). The origin of the name ‘Romola’ has been put to debate and could be understood as the feminine version of ‘Romolus’, one of the legendary founders of Rome. This is the explanation given by Eliot herself (Haight 5: 174). Further suggestions mention a diminutive of ‘Rome’ or the name of a hill outside Florence (Ellis/Porter 57). The notebook which she used while preparing Romola is full of notes on Florentine and Italian history, descriptions of buildings such as San Marco, Italian names, transport and clothing habits, see Ms. 40768, ‘Florentine Notes’. See the studies by Guth, Rignall and Thompson, George Eliot and Italy. A summary of her relation to Italy is given by Margaret Harris. In a letter to John Blackwood from 28 May 1861, George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) mentions that Eliot was ‘drinking in’ (Haight 3: 420) Florence during her preparation of Romola. For a comprehensive account of Dantean references in Romola, see Thompson’s chapter ‘Dante in Romola’ in George Eliot and Italy (84–97). Florence had become the preferred setting for ‘Italianate’ novels from the 1840s onwards, leading to the emergence of the ‘Florentine novel’ as a sub-genre to the Italian novel (Ellis/ Porter 49). The edition of Romola used in this book is the one by Dorothea Barrett. All subsequent references in brackets refer to this edition. In a letter to the artist she claimed that ‘[she] wish[ed] [he] could especially notice if the women in his [Ghirlandaio’s] groups have not that plain piece of opaque drapery over the head which haunts the memory’ (Haight 4: 43). On Leighton’s illustrations see Malley.

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Leonee Ormond has analyzed Eliot’s use of real and invented paintings in Romola, arguing that these references function also as an important structural device. Naturalistic accuracy was the crucial claim made by the Pre-Raphaelites in accordance with John Ruskin’s theories of truth and realism set out in Modern Painters, the third and fourth volumes of which Eliot reviewed in 1856 (see Murdoch and Andres). The most extensive study on George Eliot and the arts has been carried out by Hugh Whitemeyer (George Eliot and the Visual Arts). He views her attitude towards the Pre-Raphaelites critically and claims that her fascination with both Pre-Raphaelite and late medieval artworks was not as profound and sustained as her interest in Renaissance and seventeenth-century Dutch art. Her full name, Romola dei Bardi, suggests descent from the historical Beatrice Portinari, daughter of Folco Portinari, who became the wife of Simone dei Bardi, who came from a banker family (see Ferrante 89). Margaret Homans argues that the Florentine Renaissance was the time when those cultural myths were born which would determine and limit women’s position in Victorian England (189–222). Caroline Levine is a critic who pleads for Romola as a realist text in the mould of Ruskin’s Modern Painters and argues that the aim of the novel’s realism aims at teaching both readers and characters the ‘fact’ of moral responsibility. See ‘The Prophetic Fallacy: Realism, Foreshadowing and Narrative Knowledge in Romola’ in Levine/Turner 135–63. Several writers have examined the influence of Comte’s theories on Eliot’s writing, especially Romola. Whereas critics such as J. B. Bullen embrace a full Comtean reading of the novel, others have tried to either reduce it to certain aspects or to prove that Eliot tried to undermine Positivist concepts. As Barrett points out some of these readings set out from the misconception that Eliot’s works passively mirror the ideologies of the men by whom she may have been influenced, that is, Comte, Feuerbach, Spencer, Mill or Lewes. She adopts the viewpoint that Eliot ‘found Comte’s tripartite vision appealing as a firm structure in which to ground her own very different speculations as to human possibility’ (‘Romola: Woman as History’ 77). See also Bullen, ‘George Eliot’s Romola as a Positivist Allegory’ and Knoepflmacher. Nancy Paxton argues that Eliot tries to undermine Comte’s logic in Romola; she herself considers Romola as a feminist heroine who is unable to find happiness in domestic life (‘Feminism’). For a discussion of the Bacchus and Ariadne imagery in Romola see Gilbert/ Gubar (526–28). Andrew Thompson suggests that as a foster mother, Romola becomes ‘a Beatrice, a nurturing “Italia” figure looking after her children, and a positive icon to set against so many despairing ones from Italian literature’, whose depiction brings to a close the epic vision of Eliot’s novel (Thompson, George Eliot and Italy 96). As Linda Nead argued, ‘[t]he image of the Madonna and Child was a paradigm of maternal devotion and purity and during the nineteenth century the image could be drained of its associations with Catholicism and taken up within English ruling-class culture as a sign of respectable, Protestant value’ (26). Barbara Hardy mentions Eliot’s awareness of the deficiency of her Dantean troubadour quotes when contrasted with the reality her novel depicts: ‘worship,

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adoration, higher love-poetry, queens, and footstools are inappropriate images for love in the quotidian world of Middlemarch’ (98). Nancy Paxton argues that Eliot herself found it hard to free herself from the cultural legacy Dante represents (see ‘George Eliot and the City’). See, for example, R. H. Hutton’s review of Romola in the Spectator from 18 July 1863: There is not a more wonderful piece of painting in English romance than this figure of Tito. Of Romola it is less easy to say whether one is absolutely satisfied or not. . . . Our feeling is that Romola is the least perfect figure in the book, though a fine one, – . . . (Carroll 198–205; 203–04)

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Dorothea Barrett claims that Eliot never intended to create fit mates for her heroines and that even if one was found, this would in no way constitute an adequate answer to their potentials (22). However, Eliot’s idea of femininity was not entirely constructivist. In a letter to Emily Davies, dated 8 August 1868, she sympathizes with men who are opposed to emancipatory movements, which promoted the ‘unsexing’ of the female sex: ‘We can no more afford to part with that exquisite type of gentleness, tenderness, possibly maternity suffusing a woman’s being with affectionateness, which makes what we mean by the feminine character, than we can afford to part with the human love, the mutual subjection of soul between a man and woman – which is also a growth and revelation beginning before all history’ (Haight 4: 468).

Chapter 6 1

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The importance of Hallam’s writings and thought for Tennyson’s understanding of Dante has been acknowledged by many critics. See, for example, Pitt (114). For an account of this anecdote see Warren (259), the poem is quoted from there. Emily Tennyson’s fascination with Dante and the role her husband played in introducing her to his works is mentioned in her biography by Anne Thwaite (149). I owe this reference to Grace Timmins. The most extensive account of Dante’s influence on In Memoriam has been given by Gordon D. Hirsch, who argues that Tennyson adapted Dante’s text by subjecting the Tennyson–Hallam relationship to Victorian scepticism and by turning Hallam into an internalized Beatrice. The edition of Tennyson’s poetry used in this chapter is the one edited by Christopher Ricks (2: 304–459). The numbers given in brackets in the text refer to the section of the poem that the quotation is taken from. The Tennyson Research Archive in Lincoln holds a 1809 copy of Dante’s poetry (Canzoni e Sonetti di Dante Alighieri) which must have been Hallam’s according to the two name inscriptions: ‘A. H. Hallam 1828’ and ‘Alfred Tennyson’. Hallam ‘could take in the most abstruse ideas with the utmost rapidity and insight, and had a marvellous power of work and thought, and a wide range of knowledge’ (H. Tennyson 1: 45). The two most extensive studies on the Cambridge Apostles have been provided by Peter Allen and W. C. Lubenow.

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Richard Dellamora argues that the Cambridge Apostles fostered physical intimacy between its members that may have led to ‘sexual experimentation’ (Masculine Desire 19). See Mattes, the chapter on ‘Hallam and Erotic Devotion’ in Joseph, Tennysonian Love 55–74, Hirsch and Flynn. See Kelley for a discussion of allegory in Romantic aesthetics and philosophy (esp. 93–175). Hallam’s conclusion is rather positive: ‘Let us cease then to complain of the hard condition of this world, and to draw from it arguments against the existence of Overruling Goodness: for, if the positions I have endeavoured to establish are, as I believe, the most probable that our reason presents to us after a full survey of all the facts we can command, ought we not to acquiesce with cheerfulness in the sight of calamities which alone render the existence of happiness possible, of iniquity, without which the very being of a holy God would be a contradiction?’ (Remains 128). The recuperation of wholeness as the guiding theme and principle of In Memoriam has been discussed by some critics. James W. Hood has described Tennyson’s poetry as based on a ‘grammar of longing’ which articulates ‘the never satisfied human desire for the imagined perfect stasis of divine knowledge and being’ (31). Arguing against a reading of In Memoriam in terms of a homosexual love poem, Marion Shaw claims that what is at stake in In Memoriam is not so much the loss of the painfully desired male friend, as the loss and retrieval of the wholeness created by woman, who embodies and possesses everything man cannot achieve (143). ‘After this sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous vision in which I saw things which made me decide to write no more of this blessed one until I could do so more worthily’ (VN XLII; 99). The seminal studies on the Victorian concepts of Heaven and life in the hereafter were provided by Michael Wheeler (esp. 119–74) and Bernhard Lang and Colleen McDannell (esp. 228–75). The pilgrim Dante finds himself ‘upon the brink / of an abyss, the melancholy valley / containing thundering, unending wailings’ at the beginning of his journey through Hell (Inferno IV ll. 7–9; 72) and is constantly surrounded by the suffering of uncountable others: ‘Here, more than elsewhere, I saw multitudes / to every side of me; their howls were loud / while, wheeling weights, they used their chests to push’, (Inferno VII ll. 25–27; 87). Paradise is described as a harmonious, intelligently structured place, ‘where Love made everything that wheels through mind and space / so orderly that one who contemplates / that harmony cannot but taste of Him. / Then, reader, lift your eyes with me to see / the high wheels; gaze directly at that part / where the one motion strikes against the other; / and there begin to look with longing at / that Master’s art, which in Himself he loves / so much that his eye never parts from it’ (Paradiso X ll. 4–12; 423). It can be reasonably argued that the three volumes of a 1818–1819 edition of the Commedia (Paris: Dondey-Dupré), held in the Tennyson Research Archive Lincoln, was Tennyson’s favourite edition, given the amount of marginalia included, and an inscription on the front board of volume one which says ‘Alfred Tennyson,

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favourite Dante’. The marginalia and marks which Tennyson added to this edition of the Commedia not only show the extent to which he hoped to gain a precise linguistic understanding of the Italian text (by writing down translations of words and expressions he probably found either alluring and difficult), but they also give evidence of his endeavour to clearly visualize the topographical descriptions provided by Dante. Little sketches come with the first canto of Paradiso, which illustrate ll. 37–42 and Purgatorio II. His comments on Paradiso XXIII, mainly on ll. 112–18, suggest that he was very interested in the topography of Paradise. Just how pervasive the attraction of an androgynous Christ was becomes clear when looking at one of the best-known works of the Pre-Raphaelite school and the best-known religious Pre-Raphaelite painting, William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World (1851–1853). Christ’s stately, embroidered garments identify him as the Saviour. Due to the fall of the light, his face remains shadowy. Clearly it is not the face of a suffering Christ, but a very soft and gentle face. Its traits and its expression are feminine, almost vulnerable. In fact, Holman Hunt used a female model for Christ’s face: Christina Rossetti (Weintraub 65). The Light of the World contributed towards an understanding of Christ which unites his victorious male energy with gentleness and softness deemed female. This is pursued in the Commedia through the usage of both masculine and feminine attributes when the Divine is mentioned. Beatrice speaks, for example, of ‘provedenza’ (Paradiso I l.121), ‘la mente profonda’ (II l. 131) and ‘la divina bontà’ (VII l. 64). On androgyny in fin-de-siècle literature see Morgan, ‘Reimagining Masculinity’. See Susan Shatto’s and Marion Shaw’s edition of In Memoriam (esp. ‘Introduction’ 26–32). See for example Leigh Hunt’s review of the 1842 Poems where he describes Tennyson’s mind as living ‘in an atmosphere heavy with perfumes. He grows lazy by the side of his Lincolnshire water-lilies’ (Jump 128) and further on he mocks Tennyson’s ‘seraglio’ of women, who remind him, however, rather of ‘the fine young ladies in souvenirs and beauty-books, with rapturous eyes, dark locks and tresses, . . .’ (130). J. Sterling commented on the same collection and Tennyson’s style as smelling ‘of musk’ and ‘not without glimpses of rouge and pearl-powder’ ( Jump 115). See also Christ, ‘Feminine Subject’ and Shires. The problem of effeminacy as a mock term applied to Victorian, in this case Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetry, has been discussed by Thaïs E. Morgan, ‘Victorian Effeminacies’. On Tennyson and the question of homosexuality, see Kolb, Craft’s chapter, ‘“Descend, and Touch, and Enter”: Tennyson’s Strange Manner of Address’ (44–70), Curr, Nunokawa, Sedgwick, Adams, Dandies (esp. 107–47). Christopher Ricks argues for an intense, but not sexual friendship between Hallam and Tennyson. Those ‘disconcerting turns of speech’ such as ‘mate’ or ‘dear(est)’ in In Memoriam, which could produce charges of homoeroticism, are consequently described as ‘naïve, perhaps, but not tonally suggestive of homosexuality’ (217). Dellamora states that Tennyson’s involvement with the Cambridge Apostles makes it likely that, given their partly highly liberal views on gender relations and their homosocial closeness, Tennyson was aware of

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homoerotic possibilities (Masculine Desire 16–19). On male friendship in the Victorian period, see also Richards. Timothy Peltason, for example, claims that Hallam leads the poet not to God but brings him closer to an enlarged being which is synonymous with his own generative power as a poet (155). The concept of the gentleman itself was of course much older; it originated in the Middle Ages and was perpetuated over the centuries and across different countries. The emergence and revaluation of this ideal took place within the complex context of nineteenth-century medievalism, not only in literature, but also in the visual arts, architecture, historiography, social and aesthetic criticism. For Tennyson’s role in the development of Victorian medievalism see A. Harrison, ‘Medievalism’, Bryden, Chandler and R. Simpson. An inclusive and intricate movement, ‘medievalist discourse employed an array of conceptual terms that devoted particular belief in systems and modes of conduct wholly integrated into middle and upper-class culture’, among which were ‘such patriarchal ideas as chivalry, manliness, selflessness, gallantry, nobility, honor, duty, and fidelity . . .’ (A. Harrison, ‘Medievalism’ 220). On this ideal of the gentleman, see also Girouard (esp. 61–62). Richard Dellamora argues that In Memoriam and its male Beatrice owed its acceptability and popularity to its intermediate position ‘between an idealized homosocial eroticism and the explicitly sexual discourse dealing with desire between members of the same sex penned by Whitman and Swinburne in the following years’ (Masculine Desire 31). Besides Shakespeare, it is Dante whom Carlyle chooses as a representative of the prophetic poet. In him the characteristic qualities of the poet-hero are unified: his sincerity and sympathy (110), his ‘great power of vision’ (109), his ‘intensity’ and ‘pictorial quality’ (109) and ‘tenderness’ (112). Dante is ‘deep, fierce as the central fire of the world’, to which he has brought ‘Faith or soul’ and with the Commedia ‘the sincerest of all Poems’ (108; emphasis in the original). Carlyle views Dante as ‘the spokesman of the Middle Ages’ (115). Interestingly, Carlyle figures him as essentially sorrowful and grim, but at the same time as a ‘soft ethereal soul’, deeply determined by ‘the softness, tenderness, gentle affection as of a child’ (102). Tennyson read Carlyle’s works during the 1840s (see Timko [61] and Pitt [174–78]). In philosophical and theological traditions wisdom, sophia, is often regarded as female and represented as such allegorically. Wisdom is important in the Commedia, particularly in Paradiso. Wisdom could also be viewed as another version of the Eternal Feminine in the Commedia (Pelikan 135). Charles Singleton understands Beatrice as embodying Wisdom or ‘sapientia’ (Journey to Beatrice [133–38]). Thus, in Canto II, line 11, Dante speaks of the ‘bread of angels’ (384) and thereby refers to heavenly wisdom. He calls it ‘the true manna’ (Paradiso XII l. 84; 435) and the ‘perfected vision’ of ‘the never-ending light’ granted to Beatrice (Paradiso V ll. 5 and 8; 398). From Aristotle, Augustinus and Boethius Dante gained an understanding of wisdom as both a corrective and an expansion, a necessary third component in the otherwise unbalanced binary of power and knowledge. Equally important is the notion of love, under whose reign Tennyson

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positions himself (see section 126). Love stands in an opposition to intellect, as wisdom does to knowledge. For extensive accounts of Muscular Christianity see Vance and the volume edited by D. Hall.

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A. C. Benson was the first biographer to suggest that the diaphanous character had been modelled upon Shadwell (10). ‘But in that House Beautiful, which the artists and those who have treated life in the spirit of art – are always building together, for the refreshment of the human spirit . . .’ (‘Postscript’ in Appreciations 241–61; 241). Pater’s concept of the Renaissance has been discussed by J. B. Bullen, see ‘Walter Pater’s Renaissance’ and Myth. See also the volume edited by Law and Østermark-Johansen. For Aleida Assmann the painting is a palimpsest of cultural periods and an enigmatic example of the cumulative memory. In Mona Lisa’s face different cultural stages are condensed without belonging to the memory of a ‘conscious tradition’ (229; my translation). Pater, Assmann argues, aligns the feminine, the ‘Ewig-Weibliche’, with the transcendent, the persistent, the before and after of history (231). Pater’s concept of the Renaissance anticipated Warburg’s understanding of it as ‘a process of cultural remembrance rather than simply . . . the revival of a lost tradition’ (Rampley 90). Interestingly Pater, in his unpublished essay on Dante and medieval art, makes a similar point and emphasizes the significance of the year 1300 for the history of art. See Pater’s ‘Dante’ manuscript. ‘Dante’s large-minded treatment of all forms of classic power and achievement marks a stage of progress, from the narrower sentiment of the Middle Age, towards “humanism”, towards the mental attitude of the Renaissance and of the modern world’ (‘Introduction’ xxii–xxiii). Burckhardt emphasizes Dante’s individualism (135), his cosmopolitanism (132–33) and his interest in classical literature and philosophy (204) as characteristics of Renaissance thought before its time. See Caesar (70–72) for a description of the ‘Festa di Dante’. See A. C. Benson’s comments: ‘Pater was always apt to be reticent about his own interior feelings’ (3) and even after entering university life ‘there was no impulse to fling himself into the current of the world, to taste the life of the cities, where the social eddy spun swift and strong; he was to be austere, self-centred, silent and still’ (31). This one note is a letter to Shadwell dated 31 December 1865. The essay’s genesis has been explored by Anne Varty and G. C. Monsman, ‘Old Mortality’. Elsewhere Monsman claims that the essay which Pater read to the Old Mortality Society at Oxford in February 1864 provided an early version of ‘Diaphaneitè’ (‘Pater, Hopkins’). Richard Dellamora discusses Pater’s time in Oxford and relation to ‘Old Morality’; he also considers Pater’s equation of

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Shadwell with Beatrice, arguing that what Pater liked best about her was that she reflected the ‘body-centered aspect of Dante’s devotion’ (Masculine Desire 29). G. C. Monsman has considered the diaphanous hero as an aesthetic hero (‘Pater’s Aesthetic Hero’). Carolyn Williams has discussed Pater’s transparent hero (172–83); Harold Bloom named the diaphanous hero a ‘crystal image’ (‘Crystal Man’ x). Monsman briefly discusses Coleridge’s theory of art as source (‘Aesthetic Hero’ 143). Ulrike Stamm has shown that Novalis was another possible source. ‘And just as Mars, when it is overcome / by the invading mists of dawn, glows red / above the waters’ plain, low in the west, / so there appeared to me – and may I see it / again – a light that crossed the sea: so swift, / there is no flight of bird to equal it’. (Purgatorio II ll. 13–18; 221). Apart from Pater’s ‘hard, gem-like flame’ of the ‘Conclusion’ (Renaissance 152) and the quoted passage from ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, Pater uses the metaphor in Plato and Platonism (1893) in reference to Plato and Dante in whose conceptions ‘the material and the spiritual are blent and fused together’ producing the ‘definite visibility of a crystal’ (135). One of the significant inconsistencies between ‘Diaphaneitè’ and ‘Winckelmann’ lies in their respective definition of an ideal individual as rare in the former and as ‘general’ or broad (Heiterkeit and Allgemeinheit [Renaissance 137]) in the latter. By calling Pater a ‘Spätzeitliterat’ (‘late age’ artist), Claus Uhlig offers an alternative categorization to Wolfgang Iser’s claim that Pater is a liminal figure in a transitional period between Victorianism and Modernism ‘Walter Pater und T. S. Eliot’). Harold Bloom considers Pater as ‘a kind of hinge upon which turns the single gate, one side of which is Romantic and the other modern poetry’ (Bloom, Ringers 186–87). ‘Khlide¯’ translates as ‘pride of life’, yet in Plato it adopts the darker connotations of ‘delicacy’, ‘luxury’ and ‘effeminacy’ (L. Dowling, Hellenism 83). I have discussed the diaphanous quality of Julia Margaret Cameron’s work, especially in the form of angels, in my article ‘Diaphanous Angels’. See Bizup and, for an extensive discussion of the complex relation between Ruskin and Pater, Dayley’s book. It is possible that Pater knew Eliot’s Romola, which was published in 1863, and that he developed an interest in this novel because Romola is rich in allusions to Renaissance figures which reappear in Pater’s texts, such as Pico della Mirandola, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci (see Delaura and Hill).

Chapter 8 1

Studies on the reception of Dante in modernist literature have been provided by Manganiello, Boldrini and Caselli. The collection of essays edited by Nick Havely entitled Dante’s Modern Afterlife (1998) as well as Dante on View (2007), edited by Antonella Braida and Luisa Calè, is concerned with Dante’s presence in modern and contemporary literature, theatre and the visual arts, painting as well as film.

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In early 2006 an exhibition at Cambridge University was held named ‘Visible Language: Dante in Text and Image’, which traced the connection between the visual and verbal Dante over several centuries. This exhibition put on display the cult of Dante as a European phenomenon which erupted around the years of 1865 and 1921, the centenaries of his birth and death respectively. From the end of the nineteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth, there was increasing appetite for popular objects based on the now fashionable Dante, such as diaries, calendars, prayer books or several books retelling (see the exhibition catalogue published by the Cambridge University Library). One ‘Dante for kids’ example is Mary McGregor’s Stories from Dante.

Bibliography

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Index

Adams, James Eli 126 Dandies 126 Addington Symonds, John 25, 42, 72, 110, 118 An Introduction to the Study of Dante 25 ‘Adeline’ see Tennyson, Alfred, Lord Aesthetic Moment see Iser, Wolfgang ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ see Pater, Walter afterlife 1, 9–15, 30, 47, 53, 99, 104, 116, 130, 132–4 Alighieri, Dante see Dante, Alighieri androgyny 101, 103 Andromache 22 Antigone 9, 22 Appreciations see Pater, Walter Aquinas, Thomas 6 Ariadne 77, 82 Armstrong, Isobel 98 Victorian Poetry 98 Armstrong, Nancy 88–9 Arnold, Matthew 18, 24, 25, 31 ‘Dante and Beatrice’ 24 Arseneau, Mary 49 ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ see Rossetti, Christina Auerbach, Eric 44 Aurelia see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Bacchus 82 Ballads and Poems see Hallam, Arthur Henry dei Bardi, Simone 5, 47, 48 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth 56 Sonnets from the Portuguese 56 Barthes, Roland 6, 32 Bass, Eben 61 Beata Beatrix see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel

Beatrice see Dyce, William La Beatrice di Dante see Rossetti, Gabriele Beatrice meeting Dante at a Marriage Feast see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel ‘Beatrice to Dante’ see Mulock, Dinah M. Beer, Gillian 83, 84, 94 del Bene, Sennuccio 37 Bilderatlas Mnemosyne see Warburg, Aby Blake, William 47 ‘The Blessed Damozel’ see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel The Blind Scholar and his Daughter see Leighton, Frederic Bloom, Harold 3, 102 Western Canon 3 Blumenberg, Hans 6, 11 ‘Blumine risponde’ see Rossetti, Christina Boccaccio 5, 27, 28, 37, 38, 45, 47, 64, 79 Trattatello in laude di Dante 37 Borges, Luis 44 Bronfen, Elisabeth 7, 18, 33–6, 64 Over Her Dead Body 7, 34, 36 Brown, Ford Madox 27 Browning, Robert 32 ‘My Last Duchess’ 32 Bullen, James B. 8 Burckhardt, Jacob 114 Burges, William 134 ‘New Life’ washstand 134 Burne-Jones, Edward 28, 117 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 40, 41 C. Rossetti in Context see Harrison, Antony H.

172

Index

Call, I follow, I follow – let me die see Cameron, Julia Margaret Cambridge Apostles 92–6 Cameron, Julia Margaret 14, 16, 31–5, 124, 131 Call, I follow, I follow – let me die 33–5 Carlyle, Thomas 38, 39, 53, 105, 114, 119, 126 ‘The Hero as Poet’ 114 Sartor Resartus 53 Cassirer, Ernst 6 Cavalcanti, Guido 5, 19 Cayley, Charles Bagot 52, 53 Chamisso, Adelbert 40 Cherry, Deborah 26 ‘The Child in the House’ see Pater, Walter Christ, Carol 31, 32 ‘Painting the Dead’ 32 Christ 5, 8, 82, 85, 95, 97, 101, 103 ‘Claribel’ see Tennyson, Alfred, Lord Cloister Lilies see Stillman Spartali, Marie Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 43, 94–6 Collinson, James 52 Commento Analitico sull’Inferno di Dante see Rossetti, Gabriele Comte, Auguste 81 ‘The Convent Threshold’ see Rossetti, Christina Convivio see Dante, Alighieri Cooksey, Thomas 112 Cornhill Magazine 73, 76 di Cosimo, Piero 76, 86 Cross, James 13, 33, 59, 74, 77, 84, 111, 134 Culler, Jonathan 74 ‘Culture and Transgression’ see Rippl, Gabriele D. G. Rossetti as Designer see Rossetti, William Michael Dandies see Adams, James Eli Daniel Deronda see Eliot, George Dante, Alighieri 1, 39, 40, 92, 113 Convivio 4, 5, 42, 48, 96 Divina Commedia 1, 39, 40, 92, 113 Inferno 5, 16, 26, 42, 46, 48, 53, 60, 75, 85, 99, 100, 115, 119, 120

Paradiso 6, 22, 24, 25, 42, 59, 96, 97, 100, 105, 120 Purgatorio 6, 23, 25, 31, 42, 54, 57, 60, 61, 65, 66, 67, 75, 79, 97, 99, 112–14, 117, 119, 120 Vita Nuova 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 13, 16–28, 31, 33–40, 42, 43, 46–8, 50, 51, 54, 56, 57, 59–69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 78, 79, 88, 92–6, 98, 104, 109, 111–13, 118–21, 126, 132 ‘Dante: An English Classic’ see Rossetti, Christina ‘Dante and Beatrice’ see Arnold, Matthew Dante and Beatrice see Dyce, William Dante and Beatrice, Scene from the Vita Nuova see Stillman Spartali, Marie Dante and His Circle see Rossetti, William Michael ‘Dante at Verona’ see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Dante at Verona see Stillman Spartali, Marie Dante for Beginners see Shore, Arabella Dante in English Poetry see Ellis, Steve Dante in Exile see Leighton, Frederic Dante’s Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Dante’s First Meeting with Beatrice see Solomon, Simeon Dante’s Vision of Rachel and Leah see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel ‘Dante to Beatrice’ see Mulock, Dinah M. ‘Dantis Tenebrae’ see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel ‘Daughters of Herodias’ see da Vinci, Leonardo David Copperfield 89 Davidoff, Leonore 104–5 da Vinci, Leonardo 15, 110, 124, 125, 128 ‘Daughters of Herodias’ 124 ‘Mona Lisa’ 15, 110, 111, 125, 128 ‘The Dead City’ see Rossetti, Christina ‘Defence of Poetry’ see Shelley, Percy Bysshe Dellamora, Richard 103

Index ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ see Pater, Walter Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne see Firenzuola, Agnolo ‘Diaphaneitè’ see Pater, Walter Didi-Huberman, Georges 14–16 L’image 14 Ninfa 15, 16, 30 Dionysus 9, 109 Disraeli, Isaac 42 Divina Commedia see Dante, Alighieri Donati, Gemma 5, 24, 38, 47, 49, 64 La Donna della Fiamma see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Dowling, Linda 106, 121, 123, 125 Hellenism 106, 120–5 Dyce, William 16, 27 Beatrice 27 Dante and Beatrice 27 Dante and Virgil 27 Francesca da Rimini 27 Early Italian Poets see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel ‘Echo’ see Rossetti, Christina ekphrasis 69–71, 111 Eliade, Mircea 6 Eliot, George 7, 14, 17, 30, 54, 73–7, 83–5, 104, 131–3 Daniel Deronda 74, 76 Felix Holt 74, 76 Middlemarch 74, 75, 83, 84, 87 Romola 7, 11, 14–17, 54, 73–90, 104, 127, 132, 133 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 44 Ellis, Steve 4, 18, 63, 64 Dante in English Poetry 63 energia see Greenblatt, Stephen Essays see Walter, Pater ‘A Farewell to the South’ see Hallam, Arthur Henry Felix Holt see Eliot, George Fiammetta Singing see Stillman Spartali, Marie Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 119 Ficino, Marsilio 78 Firenzuola, Agnolo 78 Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne 78

173

The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (Dante Drawing an Angel) see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel The First Kiss see Leighton, Frederic The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies see Michie, Helena Flint, Kate 26 A Florentine Lily see Stillman Spartali, Marie A Florentine Wedding Feast see Stillman Spartali, Marie ‘On the Fly-Leaf of Dante’s “Vita Nuova” see Lee-Hamilton, Eugene Francesca da Rimini see Dyce, William Fraser’s Magazine 24 Frye, Northrop 6 Garibaldi 20 Gaston de Latour see Pater, Walter George Eliot and Italy see Thompson, Andrew ‘George Eliot’s Borrowings’ see Thompson, Andrew The Germ 46 Ghirlandaio, Domenico 76 La Nascita della Vergine 76 La Visitazione di Maria Vergine a S. Elisabetta 76 Giotto 19, 20, 113, 114 Giovanna 5, 19, 21, 77 Gladstone, William 27, 118 Graham, William 33, 70, 71 Greenblatt, Stephen 9–13, 130, 131 energia 11, 12 New Historicism 12 Shakespearean Negotiations 12, 13 ‘What is the history’ 12, 13 Gunizelli, Guido 59 Gurney, Alfred 63 Guthke, Karl 18, 19 Hall, Catherine 105 Hallam, Arthur Henry 17, 42, 43, 91–107, 107, 117, 127, 133 ‘A Farewell to the South’ 94, 95 ‘The Influence of Italian upon English Literature’ 93, 94 Remains 43, 44, 94–7

174

Index

Hallam, Arthur Henry (Cont’d) Remarks on Professor Rossetti’s ‘Disquisizioni Sullo Spirito Antipapale’ 43, 94 ‘On Sympathy’ 95 ‘Theodicaea Novissima’ 94, 95 Hancock, John 23 Harrison, Antony H. 58 C. Rossetti in Context 58 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 109, 119, 122 Helen of Troy 63, 111 Hellenism see Dowling, Linda ‘The Hero as Poet’ see Carlyle, Thomas On Heroes, Hero 101, 105, 121 Hogan, Anne 83 Holiday, Henry 16, 19–21, 26 The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice 19, 20 Holman Hunt, William 59 ‘The Holy Family by Michelangelo’ see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Homer 76, 84 ‘The House of Life’ see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Idylls of the King see Tennyson, Alfred, Lord L’image see Didi-Hubermann, Georges Imaginary Conversations see Savage Landor, Walter Imaginary Portraits see Walter, Pater Inferno see Dante, Alighieri ‘The Influence of Italian upon English Literature’ see Hallam, Arthur Henry intermediality 9, 11, 37, 130 intertextuality 1, 9–11, 16, 17, 37, 39, 54, 94, 113, 130 An Introduction to the Study of Dante see Addington Symonds, John Iser, Wolfgang 123 Aesthetic Moment 123 ‘Isidora’ see Rossetti, Christina Jesus see Christ John the Baptist 5, 124 Jordan, Elaine 103 Jung, Carl Gustav 6, 7

Keats, John 47, 59 Kirkup, Seymour 19, 43 Knowles, James 97 Lachmann, Renate 10 ‘The Lady of Shalott’ see Tennyson, Alfred, Lord The Lady Prays – Desire see Stillman Spartali, Marie Lady with the Coronet of Jasmine see Dyce, William Beatrice The Last Sight of Fiammetta see Stillman Spartali, Marie ‘Later Life’ see Rossetti, Christina Laura 9, 48, 44, 55, 83 Leda 111 Lee-Hamilton, Eugene 20 ‘On the Fly-Leaf of Dante’s “Vita Nuova”’ 20 Lee, Vernon 110 Lefevere, André 68 Leighton, Frederic 27, 76, 82 The Blind Scholar and his Daughter 82 Dante in Exile 27 The First Kiss 82 Paolo and Francesca 27 At the Well 82 Levey, Michael 117 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 6 Lilith 8, 35, 63 Lorenzo de’ Medici 79 Love Sonnets see Stillman Spartali, Marie Luini, Bernardino 124, 124 ‘Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist’ 124 Lushington, Edmund 91 Lyell, Charles 41, 42 Macmillan’s Magazine 108 Madonna Pietra degli Scrovigni see Stillman Spartali, Marie Maitzen, Rohan A. 73 ‘Mariana’ see Tennyson, Alfred, Lord Marius the Epicurean 108, 119, 126 Marsh, Jan 28, 33, 62 ‘The Old Tuscan Rupture’ 28 Pre-Raphaelite Women 33

Index Martin, Theodore 18, 24 Mary Magdalene 63 ‘Mary’s Girlhood (For a Picture)’ see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Matilda 6 A May Feast at the House of Folco Portinari, 1274 see Stillman Spartali, Marie Mazzini 20 Medusa 8, 9 The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice see Holiday, Henry The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in Florence see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in Paradise see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice on All Saints’ Day see Stillman Spartali, In Memoriam see Tennyson, Alfred, Lord ‘Memory’ see Rossetti, Christina Meredith, George 56 Modern Love 56 ‘Michelangelo’ see Pater, Walter Michie, Helena 77 The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies 77 Middlemarch see Eliot, George Milbank, Alison 3, 19, 20, 31, 44, 85, 112 Millett, Kate 21, 22 Modern Love see Meredith, George Modern Painters see Ruskin, John Mona Lisa 15, 110, 111 125, 128 ‘Mona Lisa’ see da Vinci, Leonardo ‘Monna Innominata’ see Rossetti, Christina Monna Vanna see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Monsman, Gerald Cornelius 119 Moore, Edward 118 Studies in Dante 118 Morley, John 31 Mulock, Dinah M. 23, 132 ‘Beatrice to Dante’ 23 ‘Dante to Beatrice’ 23 ‘My Last Duchess’ see Browning, Robert Naples 41 La Nascita della Vergine see Ghirlandaio, Domenico

175

Nead, Lynda 79 Nietzsche, Friedrich 85 New Historicism see Greenblatt, Stephen ‘New Life’ see Burges, William Ninfa see Didi-Huberman, George Norton, Charles Eliot 118 Novalis, Georg Friedrich, Freiherr von Hardenberg 119 nymph see Warburg, Aby ‘An Old-World Thicket’ see Rossetti, Christina ‘One Day’ see Rossetti, Christina Ophelia 9, 63 ‘The Oval Portrait’ see Poe, Edgar Allen Over Her Dead Body see Bronfen, Elishabeth Ovid 101 Oxford Dante Society 116–18 ‘Painting the Dead’ see Christ, Carol Palgrave, Francis 42 Paolo and Francesca see Leighton, Frederic Paolo and Francesca da Rimini see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Paradiso see Dante, Alighieri Pascoli, Giovanni 44 Pater, Walter 4, 8, 14, 15, 17, 50, 61, 62, 107, 108–28, 130, 132, 133 ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ 109, 116, 125, 127 Appreciations 62, 108, 114, 115, 126 ‘The Child in the House’ 108, 116 ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ 109 ‘Diaphaneitè’ 17, 107, 111, 112, 113, 118–22, 125–8, 130 Essays 109, 116, 125, 127 Gaston de Latour 108 ‘The House Beautiful’ 108, 123, 128 Imaginary Portraits 108, 109, 116, 130 Marius the Epicurean 126 ‘Michelangelo’ 112, 113, 115 ‘Pico della Mirandola’ 109 Plato and Platonism 108 ‘The Poetry of Michelangelo’ 121 ‘A Prince of Court Painters’ 119

176

Index

Pater, Walter (Cont’d) The Renaissance; Studies in Art and Poetry 108, 117 Studies in the History of the Renaissance see The Renaissance; Studies in Art and Poetry ‘Two Early French Stories’ 114 ‘Winckelmann’ 109, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 130 pathos formula see Warburg, Aby Petrarch 28, 54–8, 62, 78, 79 Petrarch and Laura at Vaucluse see Stillman, Marie Spatali ‘The Philosophy of Compotition’ see Poe, Edgar Allen La Pia de’ Tolomei see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel ‘Pico della Mirandola’ see Pater, Walter A Pilgrim’s Folk see Stillman Spartali, Marie Plato 6, 78, 95, 113, 116, 121 Plato and Platonism see Pater, Walter Poe, Edgar Allen 31, 40, 69 ‘The Oval Portrait’ 32 ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ 31 The Poetical Works of C. G. Rossetti see Rossetti, Michael William ‘The Poetry of Michelangelo’ see Pater, Walter Polidori, John 41 Pollock, Griselda 33, 34 ‘Woman as Sign’ 34 Poovey, Mary 79, 88, 89 dei Portinari, Folco 5, 28, 37, 49 ‘The Portrait’ see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Pound, Ezra 44 ‘Praise and Prayer’ see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Pre-Raphaelite Women see Marsh, Jan Pre-Raphaelites / Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 28, 46, 52, 59, 77 ‘A Prince of Court Painters’ see Pater, Walter The Princess see Tennyson, Alfred, Lord Pugliesi, Giacomo 59 Purgatorio see Dante, Alighieri ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ see Ruskin, John

Raphael 120 The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity see Warburg, Aby Remains see Hallam, Arthur Henry Remarks on Professor Rossetti’s ‘Disquisizioni Sullo Spirito Antipapale’ see Hallam, Arthur Henry Renaissance 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 27, 28, 30, 31, 47, 56, 74–9, 102, 107–24, 126, 128, 130 The Renaissance; Studies in Art and Poetry see Pater, Walter Rippl, Gabriele 11 ‘Culture and Transgression’ 11 Rogers, Samuel 42 Romola see Eliot, George A Rose from Armida’s Garden see Stillman Spartali, Marie ‘Il Rosseggiar dell’Oriente’ see Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Christina 10, 37–9, 41, 46, 47, 51, 52, 58, 87, 132 ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ 62 ‘Blumine risponde’ 53 ‘The Convent Threshold’ 53 ‘Dante: An English Classic’ 54 ‘The Dead City’ 53 ‘Echo’ 53 ‘Isidora’ 53 ‘Later Life’ 53 ‘Memory’ 53 ‘Monna Innominata’ 10, 17, 48, 51–5, 62, 87 ‘An Old-World Thicket’ 53 ‘One Day’ 53 ‘Il Rosseggiar dell’Oriente’ 53 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 1, 2, 37, 39–41, 46, 47, 51, 52, 59, 62, 63, 65, 70, 75, 77, 114, 115 Aurelia 77 Beata Beatrix 1, 2, 8, 33–6, 61, 66, 124, 131 Beatrice meeting Dante at a Marriage Feast 60 ‘The Blessed Damozel’ 53, 60, 67, 69, 97, 99 ‘Dante at Verona’ 28, 61, 64

Index Dante’s Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice 52, 69, 70 Dante’s Vision of Rachel and Leah 61 ‘Dantis Tenebrae’ 50, 61 La Donna della Fiamma 61 Early Italian Poets 28, 50, 61, 63, 68, 75 The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (Dante Drawing an Angel) 27, 60 ‘The Holy Family by Michelangelo’ 69 ‘The House of Life’ 10, 61 ‘Mary’s Girlhood (For a Picture)’ 69 The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in Florence 65 The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in Paradise 65 Monna Vanna 77 Paolo and Francesca da Rimini 60 La Pia de’ Tolomei 60 ‘The Portrait’ 32, 62 ‘Praise and Prayer’ 60 The Salutation of Beatrice 52, 60, 65, 67 Sibylla Palmifera 77 ‘For Spring, by Sandro Botticelli’ 69 Rossetti, Gabriele 17, 37, 41–4, 48, 94, 96, 118, 133 La Beatrice di Dante 42, 96 Comento Analitico sull’Inferno di Dante 42, 48 Lo Spirito Antipapale che Produsse la Riforma 96 Rossetti, Maria Francesca 44–6, 48, 51 A Shadow of Dante 44, 48, 51 Rossetti, William Michael 37, 44, 46–50, 53 D. G. Rossetti as Designer 62 Dante and His Circle 47, 48 , 68 The Poetical Works of C. G. Rossetti 53 Ruskin, John 18, 21, 22, 24, 31, 51, 109, 110, 112, 118, 126, 132, 134 Modern Painters 112 ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ 21, 22, 132 Sesame & Lilies 21, 22, 126 Stones of Venice 110, 112 Sadoff, Dianne F. 89 ‘Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist’ see Luini, Bernardino

177

The Salutation of Beatrice see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Sartor Resartus see Carlyle, Thomas Savage Landor, Walter 18, 23, 24, 132 Imaginary Conversations 23 Savonarola, Girolamo 77, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87, 127 Scott, Sir Walter 40, 42 Sesame & Lilies see Ruskin, John A Shadow of Dante see Rossetti, Maria Francesca Shadwell, Charles Lancelot Sir 107, 112–18, 120 Shakespeare, William 40, 102, 114 Shakespearean Negotiations see Greenblatt, Stephen Shelley, Percy Bysshe 21, 47 ‘Defence of Poetry’ 21 Shore, Arabella 3, 81, 119 Dante for Beginners 3 Sibylla Palmifera see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Siddal, Elizabeth 1, 33, 34, 36, 132 Sinfield, Alan 105 Singleton, Charles 44 Solomon, Simeon 27, 117 Dante’s First Meeting with Beatrice 27 Sonnets from the Portuguese see Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Sontag, Susan 32 Spartali Stillman, Marie 16, 27–30, 132 Cloister Lilies 30 Dante and Beatrice, Scene from the Vita Nuova 28 Dante at Verona 28 Fiammetta Singing 28 A Florentine Lily 28, 30 A Florentine Wedding Feast 28 The Lady Prays – Desire 30 The Last Sight of Fiammetta 28 Love Sonnets 30 Madonna Pietra degli Scrovigni 28 A May Feast at the House of Folco Portinari, 1274 28 The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice on All Saints’ Day 28 Petrarch and Laura at Vaucluse 28 A Pilgrim’s Folk 28

178

Spartali Stillman, Marie (Cont’d) A Rose from Armida’s Garden 28 Upon a Day Came Sorrow unto Me 28 Lo Spirito Antipapale che Produsse la Riforma see Rossetti, Gabriele ‘For Spring, by Sandro Botticelli’ see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Steiner, George 68 Stones of Venice see Ruskin, John Studies in Dante see Moore, Edward Studies in the History of the Renaissance see The Renaissance; Studies in Art and Poetry Sussmann, Herbert 105 Swedenborg, Emanuel 99 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 117 ‘On Sympathy’ see Hallam, Arthur Henry Talbot, Fox 32 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 7, 8, 10, 15, 17, 35, 69, 91–107, 126, 127, 131, 133 ‘Adeline’ 102 ‘Claribel’ 102 Idylls of the King 35 ‘Isabel’ 102 ‘The Lady of Shalott’ 102 ‘Mariana’ 102 In Memoriam 7, 10, 17, 91, 93–107, 118, 133 The Princess 103 Tennyson, Emily, Lady 92, 94 Thannhäuser 9 ‘Theodicaea Novissima’ see Hallam, Arthur Henry Thompson, Andrew 74, 75 George Eliot and Italy 74, 75 ‘George Eliot’s Borrowings’ 75 Tinkler-Villani, Valeria 26, 38 Visions 26 Todd, Janet 18 Tosh, John 105 Toynbee, Paget 93, 118

Index Trattatello in laude di Dante see Boccaccio ‘Tuscan Rupture’ see Marsh, Jan ‘Two Early French Stories’ see Pater, Walter degli Uberti, Fazio 59 Upon a Day Came Sorrow unto Me see Stillman Spartali, Marie VanEsfeld, Kimberly 83 Victorian Poetry see Armstrong, Isobel Virgil 5, 6, 16, 25, 55, 84 Virgin Mary 7, 8, 11, 41, 63, 83 Visions see Tinkler-Villani, Valeria La Visitazione di Maria Vergine a S. Elisabetta see Ghirlandaio, Domenico ‘On the “Vita Nuova” of Dante’ see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Vita Nuova see Dante, Alighieri Warburg, Aby 9, 11–16, 30, 36, 75, 80, 111, 130, 131 Bilderatlas Mnemosyne 12, 14 nymph 15, 16, 80, 111, 131 pathos formula 11, 14, 16, 75, 111, 130, 131 The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity 15 Warren, Thomas Herbert 118 Watteau, Antoine 119 Watts-Dunton, Theodore 39 At the Well see Leighton, Frederic Western Canon see Bloom, Harold ‘What is the history’ see Greenblatt, Stephen Wheeler, Michael 31 William, Carolyn 119 ‘Winckelmann’ see Pater, Walter Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 130 Wintour, Anna Mildred 93 Winwar, Frances 40 ‘Woman as Sign’ see Pollock, Griselda Yeats, William Butler 134