That mirror gave back all her loveliness’: Female Beauty and Power in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Lady Lilith’ and Christina Rossetti’s ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ by Jasmin Monkcom

Abstract: The focus of this article will be the construction of female beauty in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting Lady Lilith (1867) and Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘In an Artist’s Studio’, written in 1856 but unpublished during her lifetime. Traditionally a demonic figure in Judaic lore, Dante Gabriel’s Lilith is represented as an embodiment of destructive power and acts as a reflection of Dante Gabriel’s psychological interior as well as the collective reactions of his male contemporaries to the emergence of the ‘New Woman’. With an acute awareness of her brother’s complex relationship with female bodily beauty on both a personal and a creative level, Christina Rossetti’s poem directly addresses this power dynamic between the beautiful female model and the male artist, with the model being used as a vehicle onto which the artist can project his own internal fantasies. Both works demonstrate an artistic process in which female characters can be seen as mirrors that reflect the desires of the male artist.