The embodiment of dreams: Portraiture and the pre-Raphaelite search for the ideal (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddall, William Morris, Jane Burden Morris)

By way of a case-study analysis of Pre-Raphaelite portraiture and poetry, and by taking a critical engagement with biography as its point of departure, this dissertation proposes a revised model for participation in the scholarly debate over defining male and female subjectivities in artistic production during the Victorian era.; The social construction of British bourgeois womanhood has been a much-visited theme in nineteenth-century feminist art histories. By focusing on selected works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddall Rossetti, and William Morris, of and about Siddall and Jane Burden Morris, this project's purpose is to take this field of study beyond examining the many ways in which these works demonstrate that the women were objects of desire (and subjugated as a result) to exploring the reasons why they became such potent subjects for these male artists. From one perspective, the women and the images cemented relationships between men. From another, they functioned as unique sites of identification. Previous scholarship has focused great attention on male desire, but rarely accounted for the fact that women have desire as well. Much criticism occludes female subjectivity by focusing exclusively on the finished works of art in which women are (non-speaking) subjects. This project seeks not only to account for the desire(s) of the women, but also to explore the ways in which their subjectivities are a prominent component of the content of the works under discussion.; When viewed in the pictorial, narrative, and biographical contexts of one another, the works on which I focus construct intricate webs of human interactions and perform complex elisions of portrait and imaginary ideal. Thus, I argue that Pre-Raphaelite gender constructions of both femininity and masculinity were frequently defined through a process of interrelationship, mediated by art, in which both men and women participated.; Each individual discussed is revealed to be involved in a thoroughgoing struggle with form and content in the context of modernism and modern identity formation. In the end, each component of this project relates questions of gendered, classed, and racialized selves in the ever-shifting taxonomies of Victorian society to enable a new understanding of Pre-Raphaelite social history.