Potential Mediation Routines and Fear of Spiritual Regression in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel (1847-1881): A Literary and Pictorial Analysis

Abstract

The imparadised woman in The Blessed Damozel undergoes a traumatic transition -from longing to desperation- in a setting seemingly indiffer-ent to her plight. The multiple perspectives and influences in the poem have received sustained attention from critics -and progressively drawn its interpretation away from strictly linear or derivative views. The bond between the verbal and the visual dimensions in this work –resulting from Rossetti’s execution of two companion oils between 1871 and 1881- has not always received the same amount of attention from re-searchers, who have sometimes disregarded the dual nature of these works by leaning more on the original literary piece or one of the cor-responding visual renditions. Combining poetic exegesis and pictorial analysis, we seek to reassert the functional relevance and iconic status of the damsel within the dominant percipient’s vision: the failed com-munication routine between her and the earthly lover does not ruin her mediatory aspirations, but puts her -tellingly- on the verge of spiritual regression through incapacitating anxiety. Seemingly defeated, she re-fers, like an emblem, to realities beyond herself: the eclectic reuse of constituents in devotional art contributes to the creation of an artistic –rather than purely religious- message concerning the conflict between faith and scepticism, the limitations of our human senses when attempting to grasp God’s nature and, more specifically, the dissonance between Divine and human love. Rossetti seems to address and redefine the latter, in fact, as an inviting way of questioning the post-mortem separation between body and spirit, which he prefers viewing as a su-pernatural fusion of both components –an unavoidable step prior to the mystical experience of meeting God.