Jeunes filles en fleur: il nubilato come periodo di transizione

• Il concetto di romantic love esercitò grande influenza sulla cultura vittoriana e diede origine a due fenomeni:

• 1. aumento vertiginoso di narrativa incentrata su innamorati che coronano il loro segno d’amore nel matrimonio;

• 2. riscoperta di amanti leggendari vittime di amori contrastati, Romeo e Giulietta, Dante e Betarice, Lancillotto e ginevra, Tristano e Isotta

• 3. I preraffaelliti scelsero di raffigurare il nubilato come condizione transitoria ed avvilente. Cfr. Lisabetta da Messina (Boccaccio)

John Everett Millais, Isabella 1848–9,

Millais: The Bridesmaid

Burne-Jones: The Golden Stairs1866-80

The Day-Dreamby Lord Alfred Tennyson

(1809-1892)• O Lady Flora, let me speak:

A pleasant hour has passed awayWhile, dreaming on your damask cheek,The dewy sister-eyelids lay.As by the lattice you reclined,I went thro’ many wayward moodsTo see you dreaming–and, behind,A summer crisp with shining woods.And I too dream’d, until at lastAcross my fancy, brooding warm,The reflex of a legend past,And loosely settled into form.And would you have the thought I had,And see the vision that I saw,Then take the broidery-frame, and addA crimson to the quaint Macaw,And I will tell it. Turn your face,Nor look with that too-earnest eye–The rhymes are dazzled from their placeAnd order’d words asunder fly.

'The Blessed Damozel', Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1875-88

• Original text: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems (London: Ellis and White, 1881).First publication date: February 1850 Publication date note: The Germ (Feb. 1850)Composition date: 1847 Rhyme: abcbdb

• The poem was revised for publication in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine in 1856, and again before its appearance in Poems, 1870. Thirty years after its first appearance Rossetti told Hall Caine that he had written "The Blessed Damozel" as a sequel to Poe's "The Raven" (published in 1845): "I saw that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and so determined to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the yearning of the loved one in heaven." Rossetti's early study of Dante, especially the Paradiso, has influenced the general conception and many of the details of the poem.

Ford

Ford Madox Brown, Romeo and Juliet, 1870