This work has been reproduced on behalf of the author for web publication with minor corrections and formatting changes, as well as the addition of hyperlinks to images of paintings and illustrations mentioned below.
Readers wishing to refer to this essay should use the original place of publication: Bentley, D.M.R. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith, Sibylla Palmifera, “Body’s Beauty,” and “Soul’s Beauty.” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies NS 13 (Fall 2004): 63-74.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI’S LADY LILITH, SIBYLLA PALMIFERA, “BODY’S BEAUTY,” AND “SOUL’S BEAUTY”
D.M.R. BENTLEY
Unlike the ballads of “Life” and “Death” with which A.C. Swinburne opened the first series of Poems and Ballads (1866), Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s most famous pair of paintings, Lady Lilith and Sibylla Palmifera, were not originally conceived as companion pieces but became so over a period of years. Whereas Swinburne’s two ballads were written in the same year (1862) and carry epigraphs that link them to and through Lucrezia Borgia, Rossetti’s paintings were begun over a year apart—Lady Lilith in 1864 and Sibylla Palmifera near the 1 end of 1865 —and remained unconnected textually until 1868, when they were drawn into conjunction by the sonnets entitled “Lilith” and “Sibylla Palmifera” that appeared together among the “Sonnets for Pictures” in Poems (1870) and as “Body’s Beauty” and “Soul’s Beauty” in the 1881 version of The House of Life. The two paintings are approximately but not exactly the same size (95.3 x 81.3 cm. versus 94 x 82.6 cm.), and Rossetti’s letters of 1866-67 to George Rae, the exceedingly patient purchaser of Palmifera (as Rossetti initially called it [Correspondence 3:376-77 and 3:505]), indicate that he considered the painting, at least for the purposes of securing its sale, a companion piece for The Beloved (which Rae already owned) rather than Lady Lilith (which Rossetti subsequently sold to F.R. Leyland).2 Cohere they certainly did, however, and not merely into a pair but into a constellation consisting of two companion paintings and two companion poems that are unique in Rossetti’s oeuvre for the mutually illuminating light that they each shed on the others. An examination of Lady Lilith and “Body’s Beauty” will establish the ground against which Rossetti set Sibylla Palmifera and “Soul’s Beauty” for comparison and contrast. [64]
I
Although Rossetti’s decision in 1872-73 to substitute the head of Alexa Wilding for that of Fanny Cornforth evidently did much to lessen the sexual impact of Lady Lilith, it did not reduce the iconographic significance that attaches the figure of a woman combing her hair while looking in a mirror, a topos that is more complex than it may first appear because it evokes at least three allegorical traditions and readings: (1) the Christian tradition, whereby such a figure represents excessive attention to the body’s appearance (the venial sin of vanity); (2) the Dantean tradition, whereby the figure of Rachel gazing at her reflection in
ROSSETTI’S LADY LILITH, SIBYLLA PALMIFERA, “BODY’S BEAUTY,” & “SOUL’S BEAUTY” Purgatorio 27 represents the contemplative life (see Bentley, “Rossetti’s Ruskinian Water-Colours”); and (3) the Classical tradition, whereby a beautiful woman looking at herself in a mirror represents incarnate Beauty contemplating itself.3 The first of these readings, which is supported by Lady Lilith’s idolatrously shrine-like vanity mirror, would be most likely to occur to a prudish and censorious viewer of the painting—to the type of person, that is, whose assumptions about female sexuality and its relation to morality Rossetti had begun aggressively to challenge with Bocca Baciata (1859; see Bentley, “Love for Love”). The second reading receives some support from the description of Lady Lilith as “subtly of herself contemplative” in “Body’s Beauty” (Sonnet 78.6) but is at odds with the tone of both the painting and the sonnet. The third, however, is much more consistent with the painting’s overall emphasis on beauty, and receives support from both the title and the contents of “Body’s Beauty.” As dictated by the accompanying sonnet, this reading is not moralistic but cautionary, for in the sonnet’s octave Lady Lilith’s complete self-absorption—her narcissistic fascination with her own appearance—constitutes a major part of the appeal that proves to be perilously alluring and ensnaring:
And still she sits, young while the earth is old, And, subtly of herself contemplative, Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave, Till heart and body and life are it its hold. (78.5-8)
The crux of these lines is the word “subtly,” an adverb that defines the nature of Lady Lilith’s self-contemplation as at once “sly” in character, “artful” in execution, “delicate” in its physical manifestations, “insidious” in its effects on the male viewer, and possibly occult in its origins and power.4 Taken together, these meanings suggest that the captivating and ultimately deadly appeal that flows from a beautiful woman’s exquisitely po[i]sed self-absorption defies explanation as other than a function of forces that are not entirely human, forces symbolized by the occult figure of “Lilith the wife of Adam” who is [64] represented by Rossetti in “Eden Bower” (1869) as entirely inhuman but “made like a soft sweet woman” (4). In addition to carrying strong sexual associations, the soft fur of Lady Lilith’s peignoir (or the covering of her chair) in the painting serves to link her with the animal realm and, though less insistently, with death. Differ as they do in certain important respects, the three readings of Lady Lilith thus far canvassed derive alike from the fact that the painting is centrally and complexly about the activity of looking at a beautiful female form both for the woman who looks at herself and for the “men” who look at her. Particularly intriguing in this regard is the painting’s illusionistic vanity mirror, which presents the viewer of the picture as a whole with three distinct sets of reflections: the two lit candles mounted on it, a rose and a rosebud in the arrangement that surrounds Lady Lilith, and a forest scene that must be visible through the window from which is coming the natural light that is illuminating her.5 The fact that both the mirror and the window are parallel to the picture space raises questions akin to those that confront the viewer of Manet’s Le Bar des Folies-Bergère (1881): should there not be a reflection of the artist in the mirror or, if the artist has elected to erase such a reminder of artifice, then a reflection of a spectator? Was/is the spectator to be understood as being in the room with Lady Lilith but slightly to the right of the window and the mirror where the painting asks the viewer to stand? By mobilizing these sorts of questions, Lady Lilith invites the (male) viewer to recognize the situation that most closely approximates his viewing situation, namely, that of a voyeur whose presence is not acknowledged by the object of his looking, either because ROSSETTI’S LADY LILITH, SIBYLLA PALMIFERA, “BODY’S BEAUTY,” & “SOUL’S BEAUTY” it is undetected or because it is detected but desired. (Of Rossetti’s interest in the theme of voyeurism there can be little doubt; among his unrealized proposals for a painting is one of “Hymen and Cupid” that would have depicted the “door of a marriage-chamber hung with garlands [with] Hymen standing sentinel, and preventing Cupid from peeping in at the keyhole” [Works 615].) When seen in conjecture with “Body’s Beauty,” which concludes with Adam’s “straight neck bent / And round his heart one strangling golden hair” (78.13-14). Lady Lilith can even be construed as a painting about the obliteration not merely of the male viewer but of the male subject, a reading supported by its suggestions of solipsism and even self-pleasuring. But Lady Lilith allows yet another construal of its implied but invisible spectator: he could be her husband, a possibility that gains credibility from several aspects of her dress and surroundings, particularly the coronel of white flowers in her lap. That she is a bride and her implied spectator her new husband is consistent with the sonnet’s identification of Lilith as “Adam’s first wife” (78.1) as well as with the time of day (early evening or early morning) indicated by the recently lit candles on the mirror and the scene [65] outside the window, the nightdress and peignoir, and by the sexual suggestiveness of her floral and decorative adjuncts, which, when read in sequence from left to right and top to bottom contain a narrative of sexual initiation: white roses and pink, protruding buds > lit and phallic candles > sealed (perfume) casket > opened foxgloves > keyhole with floral mortice > discarded coronel of white flowers > blood-red wristlet > full-blown red rose (the flower of Venus). That the redness of the climactic rose is echoed not only in the redness of Lady Lilith’s wristlet but also in the redness of her lips further reinforces the sexual significance of her floral and decorative adjuncts. A final aspect of Lady Lilith that requires attention is the almost jet black casing of the oval mirror that she holds in her left hand.6 The symmetrical obverse of the concealed reflection of her face and of almost exactly the same length as her face itself, the dark casing of Lady Lilith’s mirror also echoes the curvature of the vanity mirror, the oval of the adjacent coronel of white flowers, and the undulating wooden arm of her chair, which, in turn, echoes the shape of exposed neck, shoulder, and drawn-out hair. Nor is the dark casing of the oval mirror merely geometrically integral to the picture’s design: as a counterpoint of focus to Lady Lilith and her sumptuous surroundings, it draws the viewer’s eye into a negative space, a space of negation, where neither appearances nor subjects find affirmation or even confirmation of identity. As much as the painting’s title and accompanying sonnet, the dark, oval casing of Lady Lilith’s mirror is instinct with death, and a chilling reminder that where there is sexuality, there is also extinction. In “Body’s Beauty,” both “The rose and [the] poppy” are named as Lilith’s “flowers” (78.9). The equivalents in Lady Lilith are the roses that Rossetti famously summoned from Ruskin’s garden at Denmark Hill7 and the black spot that can lurk almost unnoticed near the centre of the picture space.
II
The demeanor, clothing, and expression of the figure in Sibylla Palmifera differ in almost every respect from Lady Lilith: she is sitting in an upright and dignified posture, she is fully and austerely clothed in a crimson dress with a solemnly dark mantle and headdress, and she gazes off into the distance over the viewer’s left shoulder with eyes that are more introspective than externally focussed. On her left hand is a bracelet with silver pendants (or amulets) and in her right hand she holds the “sort of palm-sceptre” that Rossetti placed there, ROSSETTI’S LADY LILITH, SIBYLLA PALMIFERA, “BODY’S BEAUTY,” & “SOUL’S BEAUTY” he told Rae in a promotional letter of 19 January 1866, “to mark the leading place which [he] intend[ed] her to hold among all [his] beauties” (qtd. in Surtees 1:111). Whereas Lady Lilith is massively and sensually corporeal, the physicality of Sibylla Palmifera is de-emphasized in a number of ways. Only her hands, face, neck, and a small part of her shoulder are exposed; her hair is [66] partly covered and neatly parted; and her lips are thin, closed, and unenhanced.8 Her dress follows the contours of her shoulders and arms but shrouds her chest, resembling a religious or academic robe both in volume and colour and directing the viewer’s attention away from the natural body as an object of sexual desire to those aspects of it—particularly the eyes—that are most expressive of longing for something above and beyond the material world. In other words, Lady Lilith is “about” the manifestly present female body but Sibylla Palmifera is “about” the hidden, the innate, the partially seen, and its fascination therefore resides not so much in what it places on view and how it manipulates an insistently gendered male viewer as in the meanings that are apocalyptically concealed and revealed by the various mythical and emblematic texts of which its somberly coloured and insistently binary picture space is largely composed. Sibylla Palmifera contains mirroring architectural structures and emblematic adjuncts but no actual mirrors because the reflections with which it is concerned are neither superficial nor material but epistemological and eschatalogical. As described in “Soul’s Beauty,” the “mystic symbols” (Swinburne 15:213) and flowers in the “temple” (Marillier 143) where Sibylla Palmifera apparently serves as a prophet or an oracle9 represent “love and death, / Terror and mystery” (77.1-2), terms readily applicable to the blindfolded Cupid surmounted by a wreath of pink roses to her right and the jawless skull surmounted by a wreath of red poppies to her left. (That the same flowers appear in “Body’s Beauty” is perhaps the most obvious indication of the complex relationship that exists between and among the two paintings and two sonnets.) Also visible and readily legible to the Sibyl’s left is a representation of the Sphinx, the monster of Greek mythology with the head of a woman and the body of a lion that proposed baffling riddles to passing travellers (“mystery”). To her right is a tableau whose components are not as easy to identify and read with certainty: three faces perhaps representing the Fates who determine birth, life, and death in Greek mythology (“Terror”) and a swan-like shape that is probably merely decorative but which may allude to the story of Leda and the Swan (and, if so, to a terrifying meeting of the divine and the human in sexual love). Even without this last identification, the conception of love as a medium of interaction between the mortal and the immortal towards which it points is clearly present in the three components of Sibylla Palmifera that remain to be considered: the smoking censer and pair of butterflies to her left and the flaming vessel to her right. Since they constitute a contrasting pair on either side of the Sybil, the smoking censer and the flaming vase almost certainly represent the extinction of life and the fire of love, significances consistent with Rossetti’s use of extinguished torches to signify death and flaming torches to signify the kindling or persistence of love in The Salutation of Beatrice (1849, 1859), [67] Helen of Troy (1863), and other earlier works. But the flaming vase may come to Sibylla Palmifera and the other painting in which it appears, Sir Tristram and Iseult Drinking the Love Potion (1867), with a more complex significance derived from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a work that exerted an enormous influence on several members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, not least Rossetti, who owned copies of both the original Italian edition of 1499 and the French edition of 1561.10 There (quoting Joscelyn Godwin’s recent translation), the emblem that teaches the dreaming hero, Poliphilo, that “Love conquers all” is labelled “AMOR VINCIT OMNIA” and consists of a “banner” on which is depicted “an ROSSETTI’S LADY LILITH, SIBYLLA PALMIFERA, “BODY’S BEAUTY,” & “SOUL’S BEAUTY” antique vase, in whose open mouth a flame burn[s]” that is linked by “a little branch” to a sphere inscribed with images of the sun and crescent moon (Colonna 284-85).11 Proof of the emblem’s truth comes to Poliphilo in the climactic episodes of the book, where he and his beloved Polia are initiated into the “mysteries” of Amor by Venus and granted their wish by “the Priestess of th[e] sacred temple” of Venus to “couple [their] souls in a single concordant will and single desire,” a state of amorous unity symbolized by the “circular wreath” of “fragrant flowers” that Polia later weaves and places on Poliphilo’s head as he “kne[els] affectionately” in front of her (459-62). Sibylla Palmifera provides no such proof that “Love conquers all,” but it does contain some consoling gestures in that direction: the upward sweep of the palm leaves beside the flaming vase, the green leaves of the plant on the same side of the picture space, and, especially, the pair of butterflies that hang suspended amid the symbols and emblems of death, “terror,” and “mystery” above the Sibyl’s left shoulder, for, as Rossetti and, no doubt, many of the painting’s original viewers were fully aware, butterflies are traditionally emblematic of resurrection, the disembodied soul, and hence, the promise of individual existence beyond death.12 It may not be too far-fetched to say that the two butterflies in Sibylla Palmifera represent the “solidly united love” that is granted “in perpetuity” to Poliphili and Polia by the “honourable Priestess of the holy temple” in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (461). As was the case with “My Sister’s Sleep” (1847, 1850, 1870), Sibylla Palmifera underwent a “revisioning shift” (McGann 101) in the late 1860s to become quite other than it had been at its inception. This is particularly evident in the significance that Rossetti ascribed to the bunch of palm leaves that gave the painting its name. When he began it in late November or early December 1865, he chose the title Palmifera to reflect his conviction that, as he told Rae on 7 December, it would “bear away the palm from all my doings hitherto,” a usage of “the palm” as an emblem of “supreme honour or excellence” (OED 3) that accords perfectly with his comment to his mother a little over a year earlier that in a recent review in Fraser’s Magazine “the palm among living poetesses is given to Christina” (Correspondence 3:184).13 As indicated in the letter of 19 January 1866, Rossetti persisted in interpreting the palm in this way [68] for advertising purposes as he continued to work on Sibylla Palmifera in the early months of 1866. By 15 March of that year, however, the painting seems to have become more than the aesthetic triumph that Rossetti had originally intended, for at that time he wrote to assure George Rae’s wife that he would soon be able to show it to her in a sufficiently finished state to “allay the disquiet which … [she] feel[s] at the description of its rather classical accessories.” By 24 August, he was describing “the Toilette picture”—Lady Lilith—as his “best picture hitherto” to his his mother (Correspondence 3:463) and over a year and a half later, in May 1868, he told Swinburne that “much that is necessary to the scheme of the Palmifera … is not yet” finished (Letters 2:656). In short, between its inception in late 1865 and its completion in the summer of 1868,14 Sibylla Palmifera ceased merely to be a product of Rossetti’s mid-career aestheticism and became instead of a work in his later symboliste vein, which is to say, a work containing an occult “scheme” of significances designed to baffle and provoke ordinary viewers and inviting interpretation as, at some level, a self-reflexive meditation on the mysteries of artistic creation. It was probably to fully imbue Lady Lilith and Sibylla Palmifera with two components of the symboliste aesthetic that Rossetti wrote “Body’s Beauty” and “Soul’s Beauty,” both of which were published for the first time in Swinburne’s and William Michael Rossetti’s Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868, the text that prompted Dante Gabriel’s 18 May letter to Swinburne. Thus, in “Body’s Beauty” the Lilith of the Talmudic tradition is evoked as a “witch” whose “enchanted hair” exercised a mysterious and fatal ROSSETTI’S LADY LILITH, SIBYLLA PALMIFERA, “BODY’S BEAUTY,” & “SOUL’S BEAUTY” power over Adam an in “Soul’s Body” the “gaze” of the Sibyl strikes “awe” into the speaker and her “eyes” have the power to “draw, / By sea or sky or woman, to one law, / The allotted bondman of her palm and wreath” (77.6-8; and note the echoes of “The Card-Dealer,” playing her “game … with all / Beneath the sway o’ the sun,” 47-48). Moreover, and as Jerome McGann has so astutely recognized, both sonnets make “splendid play on the word draw,”15 “Soul’s Beauty” in the lines just quoted and “Body’s Beauty” in describing Lilith’s ability to draw “men to watch the bright web she can weave” (78.7), and, by doing so, accomplish the revisioning of Lady Lilith and Sibylla Palmifera as paintings that are at one level about the dynamics of artistic creation (McGann 15, 80-81). In this way, two paintings that began their journeys as representations of beautiful women in the aesthetic mode became meditations on the inscrutable mysteries of life and art in the symboliste spirit. That Swinburne’s engagement with similar themes and his mastery of suggestive poetics encouraged Rossetti on this journey seems certain. So, too, does the impact of his contributors to Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 and his arrangement of the pieces in Poems and Ballads (1866) in interrelated groups on Rossetti’s thinking about poetic and pictorial groupings [69] in the years leading up to Poems (1870) and, indeed, to his own Poems and Ballads (1881). In both the Rossetti Archive and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must Be Lost, McGann observes that “around 1870” Rossetti recorded in a notebook as a potential subject for a painting “Venus surrounded by mirrors, reflecting her in different views” (Dante Gabriel Rossetti 105, quoting Works 615). Had Rossetti executed such a picture, it would probably have been his consummate rendition of an aesthetic tableau of the sort depicted by James McNeill Whistler in Symphony in White, No. II: The Little White Girl (1864) and Edward Burne-Jones in The Mirror of Venus (1873-1877)—that is, it would have been a placing before the eyes for the pleasure of perception (aisthêsis) of a beautiful composition consisting of beautiful human and other entities that calls attention to its status as an object of pleasurable perception by containing a reflecting surface such as a mirror (Symphony in White, No. II) or a pool (The Mirror of Venus).16 That Lady Lilith contains a beautiful woman, beautiful objects, and not one but two mirrors is indicative of its proximity to the prototype implied by this heuristic definition of an aesthetic tableau. However, when placed in the context of “Body’s Beauty,” “Soul’s Beauty,” and Sibylla Palmifera (which sits further towards the periphery of the radial category of “aesthetic tableau”), it becomes part of a constellation that both evokes and questions the proposition that the function of art is to provide pleasurable experience through the perception of beauty. What the two paintings and two sonnets together provide is something very different: a potentially unsettling recognition that the superficial and material world in which perceptual beauty occurs and is created can provide glimpses of occult realms whose expressions are the scarcely understood symbols and figures of ancient myth and religions. It was surely to get intimations of such realms “into the picture,” so to speak, that Rossetti conjoined Lady Lilith to Sibylla Palmifera, “Body’s Beauty,” and “Soul’s Beauty” to produce both an aesthetic celebration and a symboliste interrogation of the materialistic, rationalistic, and male-centred assumptions of Victorian—indeed, post-Renaissance—modernity. The story of Lady Lilith and Sibylla Palmifera is thus one of singular works becoming companion pieces that are now freighted with complex significances that derive not only from themselves and each other, but also from their companion sonnets. Over the course of several years, painting came to interact with painting, poem with poem, and painting(s) with poem(s) in ways that multiply complexities, perplexities, and interpretative possibilities. Moreover, the relationships between and among the four works emerged as those of ROSSETTI’S LADY LILITH, SIBYLLA PALMIFERA, “BODY’S BEAUTY,” & “SOUL’S BEAUTY” complementarity, opposition, reflection, reversal, refraction, and répétition differente that put into circulation issues of identity—its singularity and stability, and, conversely, its instability and susceptibility to fragmentation [70] and dissolution—that had concerned Rossetti since at least the middle ‘fifties. In “The Landmark” (1854), it may be recalled, the speaker tosses “pebbles” into a well “to send its imaged skies pell-mell” and observes that they have the same effect on his “own image” (67.5) and in St. Catherine, “the only oil picture [that he] painted … between 1853 and 1858” (Surtees 1:50), the subject is not St. Catherine herself but a model (Elizabeth Siddal) posing as the saint for an artist, while behind her a young male model undercuts the gravitas of the situation by gnawing on a biscuit and a group of men—presumably other artists—peer at a design for a picture of St. Sebastian. From the late ‘sixties onwards, these concerns would become more manifest in the fluid and hallucinatory identities of the “Willowwood” group (1868), in the conception of the soul as a drama with numerous characters (“dramatis personae”) in The House of Life as a whole (Letters 2:850, 21 April 1870), and in the obsessive replication with variations of the same or similar images of women. Reflection, reversal, refraction, fragmentation, dissolution, repetition … perhaps nothing less should have been expected from the painter and poet whose dining room at his death contained at least eight convex mirrors, including “a set of five … put together … by himself” in an “ebony and gilt frame” of his own design (Valuable Contents 10-11).17
NOTES
1 S ee Virginia Surtees 1:111-12 and 116-17 and, for the inception of Sibylla Palmifera, Rossetti’s letter of 1 December 1865 to William Blackmore stating that he has begun a new painting for which he will want five hundred guineas and his letter of 7 December 1865 to George Rae stating that he is beginning a new painting to be entitled Palmifera for which he will want five hundred and fifty guineas (Correspondence 3:352; 3:354-55). 2 A s Surtees observes, “Sibylla was an afterthought” (1:111). 3 I n Filippo Pistrucci’s Iconologia, a book of “coloured allegorical designs” with which Rossetti was familiar as a boy (see William Michael Rossetti 1:62), the plate (No. 37) representing Heavenly and Earthly Beauty depicts the latter with a mirror in her hand. 4 W ebster’s Dictionary (1828), an 1832 edition of which was owned by Rossetti (see Valuable Contents 25), defines “subtly” as “[1.] Slyly; artfully; cunningly … [and] 2. Nicely; delicately,” citing Milton’s “Thou seest how subtly to detain thee I devise” for 1. and Pope’s “In the nice bee, what sense so subtly true” for 2. In its definition of “subtly” as “Delicately, finely,” the OED cites George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (“This subtly-poised physical susceptibility”) and in defining it as “In a manner that defies observation” Henry Hart Milman’s Latin Christianity (“subtly-corporeal race between angels and men”). Also brought to bear above is the OED definition of “subtle” as “Working imperceptibly or secretly, insidious.” The “subtle body” is, of course, an alchemical/mystical term and concept. 5 I n his “Notes of Some Pictures of 1868,” Swinburne places great emphasis on the scene outside the window but contradicts himself in the process: “Outside, as seen in the glimmering mirror, there is full summer; the deep and glowing leaves have drunk in the whole strength of the sun. The sleepy splendour of the picture is a fit raiment for the idea incarnate of faultless fleshly beauty and of pleasure unavoidable. For this serene and sublime sorceress there is no life but of the body … So, rapt in no spiritual contemplation, she will sit to all time, passive and perfect: [71] the outer light of a sweet spring day flooding and filling the massive gold of her hair. By the reflection in a deep mirror of fervent foliage from without, the chief chord of stronger colour is touched in this picture” (15:212). A mirror partially reflecting the contents of a room first appears in Rossetti’s mature poetry in “My Sister’s Sleep” (1847) and in his mature painting in Lucrezia Borgia (1860-61), probably evincing a debt in both places to Jan van Eyck’s Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini, which was acquired by the ROSSETTI’S LADY LILITH, SIBYLLA PALMIFERA, “BODY’S BEAUTY,” & “SOUL’S BEAUTY” National Gallery in 1842 and known to Rossetti before October 1849 (see Correspondence 1:128 and Bentley “The BelleAssemblée Version of ‘My Sister’s Sleep’” 328-29). It is possible that William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853-54) furnished Rossetti with the idea of depicting the outside world in a mirror to the rear of the picture space and that Lady Lilith is in part a response to the moralism of Hunt’s painting. 6 I am grateful to Ryan Chen for the insight that started this train of thought. See also Bram Dijkstra’s provocative suggestion that the moon-like, “vulval ovoid shape” of the hand-held “‘mirror of Venus’” in numerous fin-de-siѐcle works of art is a “symbolic statement about the inscrutable self-contained nature of woman” that “came to be regarded as the central symbol of feminine narcissism” (141, 133, 129, 144). 7 U ntil the sonnet entered the proof stage for Poems (1870) in 1869, Lilith’s flowers were the “Rose, foxglove, [and] poppy” (see Delsey 254; [if the climactic flower is a poppy that does not alter the significance of its being full blown]). It is also notable that before revision Lilith’s “web” was a “net” and her “kisses” were “fingers.” See Surtees 1:117 for H.T. Dunn’s account of the provenance of the roses. 8 I n his “Notes,” Swinburne describes Sibylla as “the type opposite to” Lady Lilith: “a head of serene and spiritual beauty, sever and tender, with full and heavy hair falling straight in grave sweet lines, not, like Lilith’s, exuberant of curl and coil; with carven column of throat, solid and round and flawless as living ivory; with still and sacred eyes and pure calm lips; an imperial votaress truly, in maiden meditation: yet as true and tangible a woman of mortal mould … as her softer and splendid sister” (15:213). 9 C iting Lemprière, Webster’s Dictionary states that “in pagan antiquity, the Sibyls were certain women said to be endowed with a prophetic spirit … It is pretended that they wrote certain prophecies on leaves in verse, which are called Sibylline verses or Sibylline oracles.” 10 S ee Valuable Contents 23 (items 453 and 454) and, for a preliminary discussion of the importance of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili to Rossetti, William Bell Scott, and others, my “Rossetti and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.” 11 T his last component of the emblem may lie in the background of Rossetti’s Dantis Amor (1860). 12 S ee also the “transparent Psyche-wings” of “Jenny” (1.258) and the “Soul, represented by the butterfly” (Letters 4:1760) in the “Sonnet on the Sonnet” with which Rossetti prefaced the final version of The House of Life. 13 I n his “Notes,” Swinburne describes the palm in Sibylla Palmifera as “a sceptre of peace and of power” (15:213) and, of course, the palm branch in Rossetti’s Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849-50) is an emblem of the Virgin’s “great reward” and the “dust of palm” that Queen Blanchelys finds in the pilgrim’s scrip in “The Staff and Scrip” (1850-53) is a further indication that he is a “pilgrim or crusador” (Webster)—a palmer—returning from the Holy Land (Collected Poetry and Prose, 185, 1.10; 23, 1.190). 14 A letter of 6 August 1868 to Rae indicates that by then the only issue remaining with respect to Sibylla Palmifera was the cost of the frame. 15 A s a supplement to McGann’s insight, it is worth noting five of the meanings for “draw” listed by Webster: 6. To attract; to cause to move or tend towards itself; as a magnet or other attracting body is said to draw it. 7. To attract; to cause to turn towards itself; to engage; as, a beauty or a popular speaker draws the eyes of an assembly, or draws their attention … 19. To run or extend, by marking or forming; as, to draw a line on paper, or a line of circumvallation. Hence 20. To represent by lines drawn on a plain surface; to form a picture or image; as, to [72] draw the figure of a man; to draw the face. Hence 21. To describe; to represent by words; as, the orator drew an admirable picture of human misery. 16 M y conception of the aesthetic tableau has been partly shaped by Robin Spencer’s “Whistler, Swinburne and Art for Art’s Sake,” especially 61-66. See also my “From Allegory to ROSSETTI’S LADY LILITH, SIBYLLA PALMIFERA, “BODY’S BEAUTY,” & “SOUL’S BEAUTY” Indeterminacy” for a discussion of the relationship between and among Rossetti’s works in the allegorical, aesthetic, and symboliste modes. 17 O ther recent critics who have fruitfully examined the “mirror relations” between works by Rossetti include Gail Lynn Goldberg, Catherine Golden, Nancy Klenk Hill and G.L. Hersey. Despite Rossetti’s reference to “the old verse-inscribed Emblems of a whole school of Dutch and English moralists” (Works 633) in his 1973 review of Thomas Gordon Hake’s Parables and Tales, no critic appears to have examined the relationship between his work and—to pick the most obvious example of the tradition to which he refers—Francis Quarles’s Emblems, Divine and Moral.
WORKS CITED
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