Ch 6. Woman as Sign- Psychoanalytic readings. Are Rossetti's paintings meaningless?
"mask of beauty"
"these were not faces, not portraits but fantasy" p168
"which function as a screen across which masculine fantasies of knowledge, power and possession can be enjoyed in a ceaseless play on the visible obviousness woman and the puzzling enigmas reassuringly disguised behind that mask of beauty" p170
"not as she is but as she fills his dream."- last line of Christina Rossetti poem (1856) p175
On Rossetti's 'Venus Verticordia':
'Flowers have often been used as a metaphor for women's sexuality, or rather their genitals. Here I suggest they function as a mataphor which simultaneaously acknowledges and displaces those sexual conotations covering or masking the sexualised parts of the body which are traditionally erased in the representation, even of Venus in western European art. But by covering up so excessively, the flowers draw attention both to what is absent and to the anxiety presence / absence generates in a masculine producer / viewer.' p186
'The meaning signified by this painting is not what is there but what is not, what cannot be articulated.'
'sexuality is vividly represented but in a displaced and over-anxious profusion of honeysuckles and roses which distract, mask, but signal what cannot be shown' p190
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