HT26 Gender/sexuality Essay Plan

Christina Rossetti’s ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ and Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’; Women as subjects in art

Thesis statement (3 bullet points)

• Victorian poetry aestheticises women through the interwoven languages of romanticism, art, and death, often collapsing female subjectivity into a static image designed to gratify the male gaze

• Romantic idealisation is revealed not as an ennobling force but as a mechanism of control, whereby women are rendered placid, silent, and endlessly interpretable by men who fear the instability of desire

• In the 19th century, women who wrote poetry were found to be inadequate, only useful when they inspired poetry. Thus, an immortalized woman is the most poetic subject of all.

(PARA1) analysis of Rossetti quote ‘Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright/Not as she is, but as she fills his dream’

• The anaphora in the last three lines visually portrays the stagnancy of the painting, as if it will remain in perpetuity forever. 

• The last pronoun of the poem being ‘his’ (masculine) solidifies the androcentric, self-centered nature of the artists’ desires when painting the queen.

• The notion of the narrator being unreliable is confirmed in the line ‘not as she is, but as she fills his dream’, a concession that her true form will be lost to the past, remembered only through the idyllic lens of the artist 

(PARA1) analysis of Browning quotes ‘her cheek once more/Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss’; ‘the smiling rosy little head’ 

• The narrator’s portrayal of Porphyria as seemingly placid, perhaps even aroused, in her death underlines the disregard for a true perception of women and their psychological state

• The presentation of who Porphyria is and her intentions for coming into the narrator’s cottage are quite possibly entirely imagined by the narrator who seeks to justify his androcentrism and masochistic behaviours 

(PARA1) context about Victorian death photography

• In Victorian England, posing dead family or loved ones for photographs in the form of death portraiture was normalised as a form of remembrance.

• Following Madame Tussaud’s 1835 opening, the poem’s posturing reflects that of wax sculptures, enhancing the hollow soullessness of Porphyria’s body 

(PARA2) context from Elisabeth Gitter’s essay ‘The Power of Women’s Hair in the Victorian Imagination’

‘Golden hair, through which wealth and female sexuality are inevitably linked, was the obvious and ideal vehicle for expressing their notorious – and ambivalent – fascination both with money and with female sexual power’ 

(PARA2) Browning quote about golden hair/death of Porphyria

‘In one long yellow string I wound/Three times her little throat around,/And strangled her’

(PARA2) analysis of ‘In one long yellow string I wound/Three times her little throat around,/And strangled her’

• Conflates the posited connotations of romanticism/eroticism of hair with androcentric, sadistic pleasure to immortalise a woman, for fear her love might be lost

• This is in truth indicative of a lack of faith in oneself to continually earn her love, illustrating the male’s need to have complete control indefinitely, even over another human being 

(PARA2) Porphyria’s ‘utmost will’ and the implication of Victorian connotations of hair

• In the romantic era, hair was a symbolic sign of sex, as giving sometime a lock of hair could mean giving up innocence, therefore it seems to me as if the author strangling the woman with her own lock of hair is saying that the woman had sex with the author and that is basically her demise

• See the motif of locks of hair in Emily Bronte’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, where Heathcliff replaces Edgar’s hair with his own in Cathy’s locket as a profession of possessiveness and obsessive love

(PARA2) Rossetti resisting Petrarchan conventions point

• By resisting Petrarchan conventions, she produces a poem that transcends the countless sonnets written in the same form, breaking free from the echo chamber of romanticism. 

• In this way, the poem becomes not merely a study of aesthetic fixation through the lens of gender imbalance, but a meditation on the fragility of perception itself, where love, art, and identity are each compromised by the gaze that seeks to define them.

(PARA2) quotes where Rossetti breaks the conventions of a Petrarchan sonnet

• broken within the sestet

• beginning: ‘he feeds upon her face by day and night’

• typical iambic pentameter broken in the second line of the sestet:

• ‘and she with true kind eyes looks back on him’

(PARA3) Browning quote to analyse about women being reduced to sexual objects

‘As a shut bud that holds a bee,/I warily oped her lids: again/Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.’

(PARA3) analysis of ‘As a shut bud that holds a bee,/I warily oped her lids: again/Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.’

• The image of the ‘shut bud’ connotes unrealised potential and virginity. The common colloquial description of a woman losing her virginity being that of deflowering makes Porphyria’s murder read as an attempt to maintain her virginity and consequent purity. 

• This concern with sexual morality is upheld through the presence of the ‘bee’ as all the bees which are seen outside of the hive are female, worker bees who will never mate. The ‘bee’ also suggests a sense of danger or threat to the lover, along with his ‘wari[ness]’; it is as though he is aware of the risk he is taking by killing her, but the necessity of this, in his eyes, outweighs the danger.  

• The lover’s concern for Porphyria’s purity and the immortalisation of this through killing her is furthered by his declaration that the eyes are ‘without a stain.’ Biblically, stains are used to connote sin. In Ephesians 5:27, the need for the church to be ‘without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless’ is noted. This mirrors the necessity that the lover feels for the maintenance of Porphyria’s purity and elevates this to be above himself and suggesting that the immortality which he seeks on her behalf may not be fruitless. 

(PARA3) Rossetti quote to anaylse about women being reduced to sexual objects

‘A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens’

(PARA3) analysis of ‘A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens’

• The ambiguity of the girl's identity is prolonged with the refusal to name her. Her autonomy has thus been stripped away from her, demoting her previous royal affiliations to a mere conversation starter, her status almost totally diminished to something men can gawk at. The very fact that we as readers are considering this ‘nameless girl’ means we contribute to this issue of historical female erasure. 

• The connotations of the word ‘freshest’ have somewhat sexual undertones in suggesting that she was most likely a virgin, as there is no mention of her children. This is accentuated by the idolatry position the artist has given her, as if she was still desirable when he was painting her 

• ‘Summer-greens’ may suggest that she was still in her prime in these paintings – pure, virginal