Glasstexts: Seeing Through Rossetti's Material Word

Abstract

Rossetti's relationship to the material has always received critical attention, most recently in the work of Matthew Polotsky and Brian Donnelly. Eric Fontana has investigated the speech acts in his poems, but no work has considered words themselves as material objects in Rossetti's poetry. Focusing exclusively on instances of glass inscription in Rossetti's poems, I show how the poet's material words recognise reading and writing as visual experiences we sometimes forget we are having. By analysing inscribed glass in three key Dante Gabriel Rossetti poems, ‘Words On The Window-Pane’, ‘Jenny’, and ‘Rose Mary’, I investigate the ways in which Rossetti's glasstexts assume the duality of the surfaces on which they appear, arguing that they draw our attention to words as both things and pictures of things. I suggest that scratched, scrawled and engraved words enhance the contradictions and complications inherent in glass, and intensify the complex interplay between transitivity and reflection that defines the experience of reading itself. I also argue that these glasstexts are of their historical moment because, as Isobel Armstrong has shown, they are preoccupied with surface markings that betray glass as visible mediation, revealing its dual function as medium and barrier.