Week 5 – Rossettis

The Victorian Poet-Painter/The Victorian Illustrated Book

Today we covered the works of Dante and Gabrielle Rossetti siblings. For the first half of the class, we discussed Dante Rossetti’s archive. We looked at the painting of the Young Virgin Mary shown above. We talked about the sonnet, and how it was annoyingly didactic in that it laid everything out so there was no room for misinterpretation. The author imposes the “right” interpretation by not allowing for more than one.

For the second half of the class, we headed to the special collection area of the library for Mary’s presentation on Christina Rossetti. She discussed the many adaptations of the poem. The work falls under various literary genres, such as children’s literature and even erotica.This work contrasts what we had discussed earlier with the Young Virgin Mary, that only contained one interpretation rather many like the Goblin Market.

We were passed around the many published versions of Globin Market. I was handed one in particular that was evidently designed for children, since it included the didactic message of the three wise monkeys: “see no evil”.