“O filthy grandeur! O sublime disgrace!”: the semiotics of desire in the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal and Marie Spartali

Thesis

This thesis explores the presentation of desire in the interdisciplinary, intertextual works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal and Marie Spartali Stillman. It argues that, despite considerable differences in approach, all three artists express a profound desire for something that lies beyond the scope of their means. For Rossetti, erotic gratification becomes interchangeable with a search for divinity, his double works expressing cosmic revelation through orgasm. For Siddal and Spartali, othered subjectivities seek self-expression in a representational framework that disenfranchises them in both a real and a symbolic sense, necessitating oblique, ironic, and sometimes difficult presentations of consciousness that become defined by their own indeterminacy. Lateral allusion is utilised by all three, unifying lack and abundance, rupture and absorption, to reference an unrepresentable kernel of reality-adjacent knowledge which is detectable, highly evocative, and always just out of reach.

The first chapter examines each artist’s use of the transgressive body. The second considers delimited physical and conceptual environments which contain that body. The third looks at the subject’s oscillating position between intersecting states of ‘in between’ and their nullifying consequences on the psyche. The fourth considers the artists’ attempts to transcend semiotic boundaries, adopting the philosophy of sublime aesthetics as a lens to consider how each obliquely signals an experience that sits outside of the known system of signs. Potential interrelations between the works of Rossetti and Siddal, and Rossetti and Spartali Stillman, are explored throughout, while proposing an approach to the female artists that considers them talented and estimable artists in their own right.

Authors: Hicks, D

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-daqrgbqp2
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: interart; Dante Gabriel Rossetti; gender; interdisciplinary; pre-Raphaelite; sublimity; semiotics; desire; nineteenth century; Marie Spartali Stillman; Elizabeth Siddal; sublime; aesthetics
• Subjects: Gender; Sublime, The, in literature; Pre-Raphaelites; Desire; Sublime, The, in art; Art--History; Nineteenth century; Literature; Pre-Raphaelites--Relations with women; Aesthetics