SOURCE: Starzyk, Lawrence J. “Rossetti's ‘Jenny’: Aestheticizing the Whore.” Papers on Language & Literature 36, no. 3 (summer 2000): 227-45.

In the following essay, Starzyk traces the aestheticization of Rossetti's “Jenny,” and underscores “how the painterly hand of Rossetti influenced the verbal articulation of the muted image of this Victorian whore.”

I

The most famous aestheticized object of Victorian culture is Robert Browning's Duchess, a woman whose utility as a wife has been elided with the result that all who come upon her transformed condition must disinterestedly regard her as an artifact.¹ The iconoclastic ritual Browning's Duke engages in to break his living possession divorces the Duchess's property considerations as a husband's chattel only to reconstitute the woman as a new form of property—a painting that takes possession of its possessor. The Duke's displeasure with his Duchess and with her new role as his obsessive concern, of course, explains why this...