SOURCE: "D. G. Rossetti's 'Jenny': Sex, Money, and the Interior Monologue," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer, 1984, pp. 197-215.

In the following essay, Harris focuses on Rossetti's critique of Victorian culture through a poetic representation of silence, sexuality, and economic exchange in "Jenny."

Rossetti's indictment of prostitution and male attitudes toward sexual exploitation in Victorian England is also the first interior monologue in English literary tradition unrecognized as such;¹ the poem (1848-1870) breaks the ground for Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Molly's effusions in Ulysses, and Bernard's concluding monologue in Woolf's The Waves. Rossetti's protagonist names his discourse an interior monologue as he imagines addressing Jenny directly: "Suppose I were to think aloud,—/ What if to her all this were said?" (ll. 156-157). This unsounded self-questioning transforms his preceding language into silent thought and interiorizes what follows. Rossetti thus marks the speaker's ethical crisis—is...