The Characterization of Women in Pre-Raphaelite Poetry: A Look at Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Jenny”

The pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood formed in 1848, was led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and several other young painters from the Royal Academy in London (Baratte 5). This artistic movement intended to convey with its name that the great masters—Raphel, Michaelangelo, Titan— had spawned so many second rate imitators that their influence was ultimately destructive (Baratte 11). Thus the brotherhood called for a return to art pre-Raphael; a simplistic form that was devoted to nature. The goals of the pre-Raphaelites were to express genuine ideas, to study nature attentively, to be sincere rather than merely conventional or traditional, and to produce only thoroughly good pictures and statues (Baratte 12). Later this expanded to literary writing as well. One of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s most famous works, “Jenny” is characteristically pre-Raphaelite in its content and by the common characteristics of females in pre-Raphaelite poetry.
Women have an ideal in the pre-Raphaelite Brotherho...