SOURCE: Cohen, Michael. “The Reader as Whoremonger: A Phenomenological Approach to Rossetti's ‘Jenny’.” Victorian Newsletter no. 70 (fall 1986): 5-7.

In the following essay, Cohen explores Rossetti's poetic strategies in “Jenny,” focusing on the poet's combination of religious and art imagery.

The rhetorical strategy in Rossetti's “Jenny” forces the reader past sympathy with the poem's narrator to identification with him. This is an uneasy and unstable identification which alternates with a distancing of reader from speaker and with the reader's criticism and unfavorable judgment of the speaker. Nevertheless the poem's readers—including female readers—are made to share the guilt of Jenny's sexual exploitation. The reader is engaged and brought into the poem through a number of strategies of which the surface train of thought of the narrator is only the most obvious. The prudent and prudish omission of the overtly salacious and of anything which actually names Jenny's occupation...