Summary
"Jenny" opens with an epigraph, which comes from William Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor and is attributed to Mrs. Quickly: "Vengeance on Jenny's case! Fie on her! Never name her, child!"
The first lines of the poem describe Jenny, who is "lazy" and "languid" (1). Over the next few lines of Stanza 1, the speaker expands his description of Jenny and relates that she is fond of both kisses and money, which already suggests to the reader her profession (she is a prostitute). The speaker then goes on to describe his relationship with Jenny and reveals that she is currently laying her head on his knee. He muses that the evening they had spent together, which was full of dances and music, had made her tired. The speaker continues describing Jenny, calling her "the thoughtless queen / of kisses" (7-8). He also describes her eyes as being as blue as the sky and her hair as being "countless gold incomparable" (11). The speaker goes on to describe Jenny as a "fresh flower" upon which the physical "signs" of her profession are invisible (12). He then corrects himself, stating that Jenny is actually a "poor flower" which has been torn from the ground, which will lose all its freshness by "to-morrow" (15). He also calls Jenny a "handful of bright spring water" which is thrown at a "shrieking" whirlpool (16-7). After all of these descriptions, the speaker goes back to considering the person he is sitting with, who is sleeping on his knee. He wonders what she is dreaming about: "Whose person or whose purse may be / The lodestar of your reverie?" (20-1).
In Stanza 2, the speaker turns his thoughts towards his surroundings—Jenny's room. He compares Jenny's room to his own and notes the difference between the two different spaces, as his is "so full of books" (23). The speaker has spent many hours in his own room with his books, and he has spent many hours of his youth with them. The speaker then moves into a lament about books, stating that they take so many hours from "the day and night" (26). These hours affect the speaker's own scholarship, as they create a standard to which the speaker's own "cherished work" aspire to but often fail to reach (27). The speaker remembers that he had left some unfinished work at home when he realized that his brain and eyes were tired from "dancing," and it was time for his feet to start moving (31). This is how the speaker first "met" Jenny (32). He remarks that it must have been hard for them to go their separate ways after dancing because they are still together, and now Jenny seems "too tired to get to bed" (35).
The speaker moves on to meditate about his past in Stanza 3. He notes that before the present, his life was "careless" and he would often frequent rooms like the one he now found himself in with Jenny (36). He wonders what caused the change from his past and present behavior, and whether it could be attributed to "many aims" or "few years" (39). Despite the fact that he has visited prostitutes in the past, this change has affected him to the point that being with Jenny is "something I do not know again" (41).
In Stanza 4, the speaker wonders a little bit more about the change that he feels within himself and goes back to regarding Jenny. He notes that the "cloud" that appeared while studying has not yet left his brain (42). This cloud is the fancy or desire to go see Jenny and leave his work at home. He looks down at Jenny and notices "all [her] wealth of loosened hair" (46). He notes that her clothing is loosened and open and that it is "golden" in the glow from the lamp (49). The speaker then compares Jenny to a book and in order to describe how little idea she has of the effect that she holds over him: "You know not what book you seem, / Half-read by lightning in a dream!" (50-1). He notes that he "should be ashamed" to say that Jenny is "worth" a kiss and returns to wondering what she is dreaming of upon his knee (53-4).
The speaker wonders whether Jenny is dreaming of him in Stanza 5. He questions whether any thoughts that Jenny might have about him are merely "conjectural" or "on sorry matters" (59-60). He then questions whether he is a heavenly figure in her dreams, "fit ... with a lure" (62). Finally, he assumes that Jenny is simply grateful that he lets her sleep on his knee rather than with some "drunk" or "ruffian" (64). This is a sad thought for the speaker, but it also ends his conjecture on how he is portrayed in Jenny's unconscious mind.
In the next stanza, Stanza 6, the speaker imagines Jenny's life as a prostitute and the struggles that she must face every day. He imagines that, truth be told, Jenny is probably "thankful for a little rest" (67). Jenny's life, he imagines, is probably full of "heart-sickness" and "din" (69). He knows that Jenny is mistreated in her day-to-day life because of her profession, as other people use "envy" and "virtue" to "mock" her (70-1). The speaker thinks of a "pale girl" who "rebuke[s]" Jenny because her "toil-worn look" reveals that she works hard for her money without resorting to sex work, as Jenny has (72-3). He also imagines an "unchildish elf" who points Jenny out to his "schoolmate" as a "thing" (76-8). He assumes that in the face of all of this hostility from others, rest would be quite sweet to Jenny: "Yes, from the daily jeer and jar, / From shame and shame's outbraving too, / Is rest not sometimes sweet to you?" (79-81). The speaker finally laments "the hatefulness of man," which would cause one of Jenny's clients to use her and then cast her aside as easily as the speaker serves dishes and wine when he dines (82).
In Stanza 7, the speaker urges Jenny in his thoughts to stop resting on his knee and instead to "sit up" (88). He wants to forget his musings on Jenny's painful life and tells Jenny to distract him as he is worried that her "shame" will become his own: "do not let me think of you, / Lest shame of yours suffice for two" (90-1). However, he quickly sees that Jenny is still tired, but urges her to move her head so that she will not drift off to sleep. He offers her a drink that will revive her spirits. He then focuses on her "lazy lily hand," which, he believes, is more "bless'd" naked and without any adornments than it is when it has rings on the fingers or is gloved (96).
In Stanza 8, the speaker alludes to a passage from the Bible: "Behold the lilies of the field, / They toil not neither do they spin; / (So doth the ancient text begin)" (99-101). This is the first stanza in which the speaker does not explicitly think about Jenny or say her name. Instead, he thinks about lilies in the natural world and gardens. Though it begins as a positive image, it soon takes a melancholy turn. Despite the efforts of "the bounteous husbandman," the lilies end up wilting away: "the lilies sickened unto death" (107-9).
The speaker addresses Jenny again in Stanza 9, asking whether her lilies are dead (110). He imagines Jenny in the "winter" of her life, during which "snow-white leaves" cover her "garden-bed" (111-2). He remembers that Jenny's "roses" weren't dead yet in the Spring (113). He questions whether Jenny's flowers must wilt away. Finally, he notes that whether or not Jenny's "lilies" and "roses" are dead, there is still a scene before him: "Even so; the leaves are curled apart, / Still red as from the broken heart, / And here's the naked stem of thorns" (117-9).
The speaker notes in Stanza 10 that the threat of withering flowers is mere conjecture, as Jenny herself still seems to be in the spring of youth: "Nay, nay, mere words. Here nothing warns / As yet of winter" (120-1). He notes, however, that signs of "sickness" or "want" could cause fear in him for Jenny's demise, and any other emotion besides "passion" would bring a tear to his eye (121-3). The speaker finds comfort in memories of the "old days" which feel, to him, as if they are "older than any history / That is written in any book" (126-8). These "old days" where when Jenny was free as a child to lie in a field "through the blown grass," away from the city (130).
The speaker laments in the next stanza, Stanza 11, that Jenny definitely "know[s] the city now" (134). In such a setting as a city, even a "child" knows about the sex economy, where time with prostitutes, such as Jenny, is bought and sold (135). The children of London recognize Jenny's profession upon seeing her, as it is immediately evident from her "lifted silken shirt" which "advertize[d] dainties through the dirt" (144-5). The speaker knows that the London children have also seen Jenny's "coach wheels splash rebuke / On virtue" (146-7). The children of London are used to Jenny, they have "learned [her] look," because she spends time outside waiting for customers (147). The final lines of Stanza 11 offer a description of Jenny as she waits for her next client: "wealth and health slipped past, you stare / Along the streets alone, and there, / Round the long park, across the bridge, The cold lamps at the pavement's edge / Wind on together and apart, / A fiery serpent for your heart" (148-53).
In Stanza 12, the speaker sends thoughts of Jenny waiting for customers out of his head. He wonders what would happen if he were to speak his musings out loud rather than just thinking them. He compares Jenny's mind to a book, which might open up at his words to her but then quickly shut again. He questions the state of Jenny's mind: "For is there hue or shape defin'd / In Jenny's desecrated mind, / Where all contagious currents meet, / A Lethe of the middle street?" (162-5). He decides that Jenny's mind has been far too damaged by the disease of Jenny's profession and is largely useless, to the point that Jenny cannot even remember "night and day" (169).
In the following stanza, Stanza 13, the speaker notices that Jenny has finally fallen asleep. Now that he is reminded of her presence next to himself, he continues to describe her appearance: "So young and soft and tired; so fair, / With chin thus nestled in your hair, / Mouth quiet, eyelids almost blue / As if some sky of dreams shone through!" (172-5).
In Stanza 14, the speaker remarks that Jenny sleeps "just as another woman sleeps!" (176). This realization threatens to create "doubt" and "horror" in the speaker's mind, as he feels responsibility like "the potter's power over the clay" (178-80). He then considers the "clay" that Jenny was made out of and another "sister vessel" that could be made from that same source (182-3). This is sets up the introduction of the speaker's cousin Nell, who will be described in the following stanza.
Nell, the speaker's cousin, appears for the first time in Stanza 15. The speaker describes her as being fond of "fun," "dress, "change," and "praise" in the first two lines of the stanza (184-5). She is just a typical woman in her manner. He notes that his cousin is "fond of love," and that it is apparent in her eyes and her lips (189). The speaker feels very fond of his cousin: "she's the girl I'm proudest of" (190). Nell's virtues bring out the best in her according to the circumstances that she faces. The years of a good life that Nell has enjoyed have "ripened" her virtues even further (199).
Following a line break, the speaker repeats the last three lines of Stanza 14: "Of the same lump (as it is said) / For honour and dishonour made, / Two sister vessels. Here is one" (202-4). This reminds the reader that the speaker is comparing Nell to Jenny, who came from the "same lump" of clay but has vastly different circumstances than Nell.
Stanza 17 is one of the shortest of the poem, as it is only one line long: "It makes a goblin of the sun" (205). This line serves to underscore the outlandish nature of the comparison between Nell and Jenny—as if one were comparing a "goblin" with the "sun."
In Stanza 18, the speaker laments what he perceives as Jenny's place in life: "So pure,—so fall'n!" (206). He wonders if it is wrong to think about "the first common kindred link" between Jenny and Nell (207). His tone then turns consolatory, and he tells Jenny that "all things take their turn" (208). There is a chance, he contends, that one day Nell's grandchildren will need the help of Jenny's grandchildren. If that were to happen, Nell's grandchildren would be "scorned" just as Jenny was scorned in her life (212). The speaker takes this thought as a warning against pride, because after death everyone faces the judgment of God.
The speaker goes on to think about the passing of time in Stanza 19. He believes that Jenny's time is running out. He thinks about his own role in the situation, as a stand-in for time's "dial," which must "scorn itself" because it is witness to the passing of time (219). He then contends that he and Jenny see the same sun and moon in the sky, implying that time passes just as quickly for Jenny as it does for himself. Each day that passes they are spending their "life-coins" at the same rate, or in other words, "to one tune" (224). He questions whether we are responsible for the outcome of our own lives if we have no idea what fate will bring us.
In the following stanza, Stanza 20, the speaker admires the "gilded aureole"—another term for a halo—that painters place around women's faces in paintings (228). He compares these paintings to Jenny's face, which is still resting on his knee, and he admires her "long throat" (232). He continues to gaze at Jenny's face, noting the shadows on her cheeks and her jawline. He imagines Rafael or Da Vinci—famous Renaissance painters—who used to stand "ages long" and "the whole world through" for religious sermons on the power of God (237). He then questions what man has done in creating Jenny's plight: "What has man done here? How atone, / Great God, for this which man has done?" (238-9). He believes that because of the actions of men, Jenny must be condemned to "lifelong hell" (242). The speaker then questions what chance there is for Jenny to be saved in the eyes of God: "what lullaby / Of sweet forgetful second birth / Remains?" (242-4). The answer to this question is "all dark," because there's no sign on Earth of God's will or who he will allow into Heaven (244).
In Stanza 21, the speaker wishes that a pure woman could see "such [an] erring heart" as Jenny's without getting hurt by the association with the other woman (248). He believes this contact (between two women such as Jenny and Nell) is ultimately impossible: "But that can never be" (249).
In Stanza 22, the speaker develops the claim that he made in the previous stanza as he continues to consider the contact between "pure women" and Jenny (251). He compares Jenny to "a rose shut in a book / In which pure women may not look" (250-1). This book's "base pages" ruin women's souls (252). Those who can look at the book do so with "foolish foulness" and "hard eyes" at the "decay" of the rose (259-60). That which hurts the rose is "shameful knowledge" (262). This rose, which has been destroyed, still tries to keep up appearances of what it once was. This causes a pure woman who looks at the rose to feel pity and "love roses better," which is an impossible situation (270).
The speaker returns to his own musings in Stanza 23, noting that the pure woman from before leaves his mind simply by looking at Jenny. When that happens, all that is left is what he sees as an object: "a cipher of man's changeless sum / Of lust, past, present, and to come" (275-6). Jenny becomes less of a person and more a symbol. The speaker compares her to an intimidating "riddle" (277).
In Stanza 24, the speaker introduces a metaphor of a toad trapped within a stone. The toad is unable to leave, even as "Time crumbles on" (280). This toad has been trapped in the stone for a very long time—"since the earth was cursed" by Adam and Eve's first sin (281). He has been inside the stone so long and yet he has never seen sunrise nor has he experienced the heat of summer. His entire existence is within this stone, "deaf, blind, [and] alone" (288). The speaker imagines that the toad will not be able to escape the stone until that which is binding him into place is broken apart. It will take a "Master" to do so (291). In the final line of the stanza, the speaker explains that the way that the toad is stuck into the stone is the same way that "lust" is stuck within this world (294).
In Stanza 25, the speaker questions the use of imagining the source of man's corruption in this way. He looks down at Jenny and notes that she's "good to kiss," though he never actually leans down to kiss her (296). The speaker exclaims to himself that Jenny will never know where his thoughts go. The speaker is then surprised to see that it is already dawn.
In the following stanza, the speaker describes what he can see out the window of Jenny's room now that it is dawn. He sees a wagon that's headed to the market and some sheep running with a dog. He notices that the "old streets" of daytime are back again, "through / another night that London knew" (304-5). In the light of day, that which happens in the city at night is "ghostlike" (306).
In Stanza 27, the speaker notes that his visit with Jenny is coming to a close now that it is the morning. The mood within Jenny's room changes and "glooms begin / to shiver off" (308-9). Light begins to enter the room through the window and the lamp "grows blue" (311). He notes that her lamp stayed on all night as if she were a "wise virgin" (312). The speaker looks down on Jenny's face and sees the future, once she is awake and looking at herself in her "pier-glass" (i.e. "mirror") (318).
In Stanza 28, the speaker hears sparrows outside Jenny's window "clamour together suddenly" (322). Jenny's pet bird also starts singing from within his cage, as he must take part in the sparrows' cries from outside. The cries of the birds indicate that the morning outside has become a part of the inside of the room, too.
The speaker realizes in Stanza 29 that the dawn "strikes greyly" on Jenny, who still needs sleep (328). He knows that he must leave, but he doesn't want to wake her. He asks himself whether or not she will be disturbed if he replaces his knee, which is propping up her head, with cushions. He sees himself "lay[ing] among [Jenny's] golden hair" and wonders if she dreams of him and his gold coins as she sleeps (333). The speaker assumes that even while asleep, Jenny is concerned with her client's "magic purse" and the money inside of it (338). He then disparages the system that set up his relationship with Jenny like this, calling it a "grim web" that is "clogged with shriveled flies" (339). The "threads" of this web affect Jenny's dreams without her own doing (340). The speaker then imagines what kind of world exists in Jenny's dreams, using a lot of imagery and evocative language to show the joy of freedom when she does not have to be working. In the dark, Jenny is reduced to her profession, but in the daylight, she is simply a beautiful young woman: "though in the discounted dark / Her functions there and here are one, / Beneath the lamps and in the sun / There reigns at least the acknowledged belle / Apparelled beyond parallel" (353-7). Yes, the speaker confirms to himself, we know Jenny's dreams.
In the following stanza, Stanza 30, the speaker underlines the point from the previous stanza that Jenny looks beautiful and radiant in the light of day while her profession speaks for itself in the dark. He notes that "even the Paphian Venus seems / a goddess o'er the realms of love / when silver-shrined in shadowy grove" (359-61). The word "Paphian," while derived from the Greek island where the goddess of love was worshipped, by Rossetti's time connotes prostitution, and Venus is the ancient Roman goddess of beauty and love. Thus, these lines speak to the fact that a prostitute can seem like a goddess in the right setting. The speaker then notes that a similar situation would occur if one were to "hide Priapus to the waist" (363). Priapus was the ancient Roman god of procreation and fertility, often portrayed as having a large phallus. If his waist were covered, however, he would be considered an "eligible diety" (365).
In Stanza 31, the speaker imagines Jenny once she has woken up and he has already left. He can picture her rubbing her eyes and shaking the gold that he leaves in her hair to the ground. The speaker imagines that at that moment, Jenny will look like Danaë, a princess from Greek mythology (373).
In Stanza 32, as the speaker prepares to leave Jenny's room, he assures her that his "love rang true" (374).
In Stanza 33, the speaker questions whether he must "mock" her until the last moment he is with her (377). He admits that he is "ashamed of [his] own shame" (378). However, he can take a lesson from his night spent with Jenny, which is that he must avoid this "dark path" now that he knows what it contains (384).
In Stanza 34, the speaker gives Jenny "only one kiss" and then leaves her room (385).
Analysis
"Jenny" is a risqué poem about a prostitute that caused shockwaves across England when it was first published in 1870. Throughout the poem, the speaker spends the day in Jenny's room as she rests her head on his knee and sleeps. As the "About" section details, many critics were put off by the subject matter in "Jenny," even though in reality, the speaker and Jenny do not engage in anything R-rated over the course of the poem. Part of the explanation for the outrage surrounding "Jenny" when it was first published is that prostitutes were very taboo in the Victorian period. Additionally, there were strict conventions about what could be written about, and prostitution, passions, or man's flesh were all certainly out-of-bounds. There are several ways that "Jenny" pushes boundaries—it causes the reader to think about their own moral character and also offers a sympathetic view of prostitution. However, there are also ways that "Jenny" reinforces stereotypes and conventions of the period, including the fact that the speaker sees Jenny as money-crazed and that she does not speak a single word (in other words, she is given no voice) throughout the entire poem.
Even though "Jenny" is one of Rossetti's longer poems—it has almost 400 lines and 34 stanzas—the poem itself is relatively straightforward. In fact, throughout the entire poem, the speaker stays in one place (Jenny's room) and thinks about one thing (Jenny). The speaker does not really change his mind throughout the poem, nor does he decide to do anything else than sit on Jenny's bed while she is sleeping. In this way, "Jenny" might be different from other Victorian poems you have read—instead of being focused on the outer or natural worlds, "Jenny" is focused on the interior world of the speaker as he reckons with who Jenny is and what she stands for. Here, we'll focus on the aspects of "Jenny" that might not be immediately apparent on the surface of this poem, including the ambiguous character of the speaker and how he perceives the woman he is with.
Formally, "Jenny" is similar to other lyric poetry from Rossetti's body of work and other lyric poems from the Victorian period as a whole. Each line is about the same length as the other lines, lines are grouped together to form stanzas, there is an underlying metrical quality to the poem, and there is a rhyme scheme. Something interesting about "Jenny"'s form is that the stanzas are not regular, meaning that they are made up of varying numbers of lines. Rossetti uses this to tell stories and build tension in "Jenny": each stanza is about a particular subject, and when the speaker has something important to say, he'll emphasize it in a shorter stanza. See, for example, the shortest stanza in "Jenny," Stanza 17, which is only one line long: "It makes a goblin of the sun" (205). In total, there are 34 stanzas in "Jenny." For the most part, the rhyme scheme is couplets, which means that every two lines rhyme with each other. See, for example, the rhyme scheme of the first four lines of the poem:
Lazy laughing languid Jenny,
Fond of a kiss and fond of a guinea,
Whose head upon my knee to-night
Rests for a while, as if grown light (1-4).
The meter is iambic tetrameter, which means that there are four sets of unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable: bum-bum, bum-bum, bum-bum, bum-bum, and so on. See, for example, the meter of line 3 (the unstressed syllables are normal and the stressed syllables are in bold): "Whose head upon my knee to-knight" (3). Overall, the meter and the rhyme work together to elevate the poem, but they also don't restrict Rossetti from allowing the speaker to make the rhetorical moves that he wants to in the poem. Because the stanzas are not regular and the rhyme scheme is relegated to couplets, Rossetti actually had a lot of freedom in writing this poem and was able to proceed with the language in a way that sounds a lot like normal speech.
Readers and scholars are often most intrigued by the character of the speaker when reading "Jenny." This is because, despite the fact that we are given almost 400 lines in his voice, it is somewhat hard to characterize the speaker and judge his moral character. We know from the first few stanzas that the speaker is an educated, upper-class man because he compares his room, which is "so full of books," to Jenny's barren one (23). The speaker also shows himself to be sympathetic to Jenny, and he seems to understand the nuances of what it takes for a woman to get to the position that Jenny is in. We know that the speaker first approached Jenny so that she would go dancing with him: "Until I vowed that since my brain / And eyes of dancing seemed so fain, My feet should have some dancing too:— / And thus it was I met with you" (30-3). When it comes to this issue, the speaker has a positive view of himself, and he sees himself as different from Jenny's other clients who are just using her for sexual pleasure. He is steadfastly against those men who abuse Jenny and use her to their liking:
But most from the hatefulness of man
Who spares not to end what he began
Whose acts are ill and his speech ill
Who, having used you at his will,
Thrusts you aside, as when I dine
I serve the dishes and the wine (82-7).
In these lines, the speaker sees himself as separate from the "hatefulness of man" and he is disgusted by Jenny's usual clients. In this way, the speaker shows himself to be an ally to Jenny as he laments how society treats her on a day-to-day basis. He compares the way that other men objectify her to the way he moves around dishes on a dinner table.
Be wary, however, of assuming that the speaker is completely benign in this poem. It is easy to think of the speaker as a "good guy" who only cares about Jenny's wellbeing, but the truth is actually more ambiguous. For example, the speaker reveals to us early in the poem that he used to visit prostitutes as a younger man: "It was a careless life I led / When rooms like this were scarce so strange / Not long ago" (36-8). The fact that this admittance is in past tense suggests that the speaker sees himself as having grown from that earlier behavior. However, there is a bit of irony beneath the words, because he is currently in a room with a prostitute. What is different about this current encounter with Jenny that makes it more "moral" than his previous ones? Additionally, whether or not the speaker's night with Jenny is more moral, he still feels "shame" at the end of the poem: "And must I mock you to the last, / Ashamed of my own shame,—aghast / Because some thoughts not born amiss / Rose at a poor face like this?" (377-80). In these lines, the speaker is ashamed of the "thoughts" that he has about Jenny and the way he has "mock[ed]" her. If he has supposedly been sympathetic to her throughout the poem, why is this so?
Another indicator of the speaker's true character is how he describes Jenny. The speaker is very enamored with Jenny's beauty, but his description of her character is hardly flattering. First of all, the speaker thinks that all of Jenny's thoughts and dreams are about money. For example, in his introduction to Jenny at the opening of the poem, the speaker describes Jenny as "fond of a kiss and fond of a guinea" (2). Later, the speaker assumes that Jenny is dreaming about her clients or the money they pay her: "Whose person or whose purse may be / The lodestar of your reverie?" (20-1). Finally, near the end of the poem, the speaker imagines that he himself and his money is the subject of Jenny's dreams: "there's your bed, / My Jenny, while you dream. And there / I lay among your golden hair / Perhaps the subject of these dreams, / These golden coins" (331-5). These examples show us that the speaker is unable to see Jenny as a person outside of her profession as a prostitute. He assumes that her every thought is about her clients or money, even when she is asleep. In this way, he reduces Jenny to her profession and thinks that the fact that she is a prostitute says something intrinsic about Jenny's personhood and character.
In a similar vein, the speaker has an unflattering view of Jenny when it comes to her mental capacities and her agency. The speaker sees Jenny as mindless compared to himself, and he describes her as "the thoughtless queen / of kisses" (7-8). Similarly, in Stanza 12, he imagines that Jenny's profession has ruined her brain, almost as if she has contracted an STI that has impaired her thinking: "For is there hue or shape defin'd / In Jenny's desecrated mind, / Where all contagious currents meet, / A Lethe of the middle street?" (162-5). In the speaker's imagination, the "contagious currents" that Jenny must reckon with in her day-to-day life have spread to her "desecrated mind." This has ruined Jenny's cognitive functions to the point where cannot even tell the difference between "night and day" (169). Additionally, an early description of Jenny underlines the fact that the speaker sees Jenny as a person who has little agency. He imagines her as a "poor handful of bright spring-water" which is "flung in the whirlpool's shrieking face" (16-7). In this image, Jenny has little chance against the "whirlpool" and instead, she is thrust around, "thrown" by an invisible hand into danger, and she has little say in the matter.
On the other hand, the speaker's descriptions of Jenny are not purely negative. In a famous set of lines, he compares Jenny's face to Renaissance representations of pious women: "Fair shines the guilded aureole / In which our highest painters place / Some living woman's simple face" (230-2). An "aureole" is a kind of halo that was painted around women's heads in Renaissance paintings that suggested they were innocent and had a close relationship with God. By imaging Jenny in this situation, the speaker implies that beautiful Jenny herself is pious and connected to God. Similarly, the speaker ironically compares Jenny's lamp burning all night to that of a "wise virgin": "Your lamp, my Jenny, kept alight, / Like a wise virgin's, all one night!" (311-2). The speaker also spends a lot of the poem describing Jenny's physical beauty and understands how her physical qualities add to her value in society's eyes. For example, he describes Jenny's hair as "countless gold incomparable" (11). Additionally, he also refers to all of Jenny's "wealth of loosened hair" (46, emphasis added). In this way, the speaker does not see Jenny as completely abhorrent or destitute. Sometimes, his descriptions of Jenny see her as a person with agency, comparable to a pious woman, who uses her physical attributes to her advantage.
In fact, the theme of purity arises several times throughout the poem—both in terms of how Jenny lost her purity, and how she might still have it. The symbol of flowers is closely related to this theme. Interestingly, Rossetti uses flowers as a symbol of purity and innocence in this poem even though they were traditionally a symbol for sensuality and passion in Victorian literature. The flowers appear several times throughout the poem. In fact, the speaker compares Jenny to a flower twice in the first stanza alone: "Fresh flower, scarce touched with signs that tell / Of Love's exuberant hotbed:—Nay, / Poor flower left torn since yesterday / Until to-morrow leave you bare" (12-5). In these lines, the speaker first imagines Jenny as a "pure" flower who has not been tainted by the dangers of her profession, "Love's exuberant hotbed." However, he immediately changes his mind and compares her to a flower that has been cut off from its bush and left to die. It is clear to the speaker that Jenny is in a precarious situation even though her exterior features try to convince him that she is pure and beautiful. The speaker repeats this line of reasoning later in the poem:
Like a rose shut in a book
In which pure women may not look,
For its base pages claim control
To crush the flower within the soul;
Where through each dead rose-leaf that clings,
Pale as transparent psyche-wings,
To the vile text, are traced such things
As might make a lady's cheek indeed
More than a living rose to read (150-9).
In these lines, Jenny is compared to a "rose" that is being "shut in a book"—the book is her profession and the life of sin and lust that surrounds her. She is trapped in this book and in a perilous situation. Roses are only pressed between the pages of a book when they are already cut off from the stem, reinforcing the idea from the previous stanza that Jenny's purity and innocence are close to death. This book is so dangerous that "pure women" cannot look at its pages, because they, too, will get stuck in its pages and their purity will be threatened.
A recurring metaphor throughout "Jenny" is that of Jenny as a book. This metaphor is separate from the passage from a few paragraphs above ("Like a rose shut in a book...") in which the book was a metaphor for Jenny's lustful and sinful profession. In other instances of the poem, Jenny is described as a book herself. As Celia Marshik argues in "The Case of 'Jenny': Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Censorship Dialectic," the speaker "treats Jenny as a text that can be read and interpreted throughout the monologue." For example, the speaker addresses Jenny directly in Stanza 4: "You know not what a book you seem, / Half-read by lightning in a dream!" (50-1). Similarly, the speaker compares Jenny to a book when he thinks about talking to her out loud instead of merely thinking about her: "Why, as a volume seldom read / being opened halfway shuts again, / So might the pages of her brain / Be parted at such words, and thence / Close back upon the dusty sense" (157-61). These comparisons of Jenny to a book come alive when one considers the fact that the speaker is a scholar who has spent "many captive hours" reading (25). By imagining Jenny as a book, the speaker is trying to "read" her, which is what he does throughout the entire poem as he imagines her life and what she goes through on a day-to-day basis. Marshik emphasizes the danger of this metaphor: "If Jenny is a book, she cannot speak for herself—her content only becomes apparent when a reader analyzes her text and communicates a reading." In this way, the speaker places himself in a necessary position within the poem as the "reader" of Jenny, who offers us, the readers of the poem, access to her contents.
The speaker spends a good portion of the poem wondering what happened to Jenny to make her lose her purity in such a way. He considers Jenny to be in the "winter" of her life even though "spring" was just a moment ago: "What, Jenny, are your lilies dead? / Aye, and the snow-white leaves are spread / Like winter on the garden-bed" (110-2). In these lines, the "lilies" stand for Jenny's purity and freshness. In the speaker's eyes, her profession as a prostitute has killed them. The speaker goes on to emphasize that Jenny's descent happened rapidly because she still had flowers in the spring: "But you had roses left in May,— / They were not gone too" (113-4). On the other hand, the speaker also imagines Jenny's past as being so long ago it cannot be recorded in any history books. Literary critic Lise Rodgers touches on this hyperbole in her essay "The Book and the Flower: Rationality and Sensuality in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 'Jenny.'" "Jenny's past occurred too long ago to be recorded in history—or so it seems to the narrator and must seem to Jenny as well," she argues, "The fact that it cannot be found in any book shows that it cannot be comprehended rationally." In this sense, the speaker is so distanced from Jenny's past and the decisions that brought her to the events of the poem that he cannot "comprehen[d] [them] rationally." This suggests a fundamental distance between Jenny and the speaker. Because of their different backgrounds, the speaker will never truly understand Jenny, even though he sympathizes with her.
In the speaker's mind, Jenny's circumstances have shaped who she is. While the speaker muses on Jenny's past, he imagines that she grew up innocent in the country and eventually moved to London where she was corrupted. In Stanza 10, he pictures Jenny lying in a field wondering about the city but still separate from it and its grasp: "When she would lie in fields and look / Along the ground through the blown grass, / And wonder where the city was, / Far out of sight, whose broil and bale / They told her then for a child's tale" (129-33). Jenny, who has lost her innocence, "know[s] the city now" (134). This is because she is part of the underground economy of the city and was forced to learn how to navigate it in order to survive as a prostitute. This city, which the speaker and Jenny both live in, is different at night than it is in the day, as the speaker notes when it is already dawn at the end of the poem: "And the old streets come peering through / Another night that London knew; / And all as ghostlike as the lamps" (304-6). The night becomes "ghostlike" in the day as the "old streets" of normal life are reinstated. The speaker can effortlessly move between London at night and London in the day, but Jenny is stuck in the night: "A child can tell the tale there, how / Some things which are not yet enroll’d / In market-lists are bought and sold / Even till the early Sunday light, / When Saturday night is market-night / Everywhere, be it dry or wet, / And market-night in the Haymarket" (135-41). In this way, part of Jenny's fall is that she is part of the urban nightlife and she no longer lives in the sunny countryside. She is stuck in this setting while the speaker has the freedom to move between all of them. The speaker's emphasis on the difference between the city and the country is one that arises frequently in 18th- and 19th-century literature. This is because industrialization was quickly expanding cities like London and there was an awareness that life in urban areas was different from rural existence. Several poets from that time period touch on the difference between the city and the country, for example, Robert Lloyd in "The Cit's Country Box" (1756), William Wordsworth in "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" (1798), and William Blake in "London" (1794).
An important part of "Jenny" is the character of Nell, who the speaker introduces at the climax of the poem as a foil to Jenny. Because Nell is such a contrast to Jenny, her character highlights how far Jenny has fallen from grace. The speaker imagines what would have happened if someone who came from a similar background as Jenny chose a pious life instead of a life of sin, in Stanza 14: "Of the same lump (it has been said) / For honour and dishonour made, / Two sister vessels" (181-3). Nell and Jenny both started with a clean slate, but Nell chose a life of "honour" while Jenny chose a life of "dishonour." The speaker describes his cousin Nell with pride: "she's the girl I'm proudest of" (190). She is so different from Jenny, however, that even if they came from a similar origin, comparing Nell and Jenny "makes a goblin of the sun" (205). Nell's presence in the poem highlights the fact that Jenny is not an honorable character. In fact, she has fallen from grace to such an extent that she is incomparable to other women. The speaker, and the rest of London society, see Jenny this way. However, as Marshik argues, this moment, which comes at the climax of the poem, makes a subtle point about the injustice that Jenny faces on a day-to-day basis. "These lines assert that Nell and Jenny are formed from the same material," Marshik argues, "and Rossetti's poem thus makes an implied argument about the inequality of a social system that treats the two women so differently." Not only are Nell and Jenny incredibly different, but they can never come into contact with each other, for fear that such contact would ruin the pure woman's reputation: "If but a woman's heart might see / Such erring heart unerringly / For once! But that can never be" (247-9). Nell's presence in this poem shows us that the speaker sees Jenny as almost less than a woman, or a different species of woman, who can "never" come into contact with her normal counterparts. Society has pushed down Jenny to such an extent that she is on the outskirts looking in. All of her relationships are tinged with what she does for a living, making it impossible for her to make a genuine connection with anybody else.
As we already know, "Jenny" was quite taboo when it was published, even though it is consistently PG-rated. Critics have often disagreed with each other as to whether "Jenny" is a sexual poem. Those who believe that it is sexual, even though no sex has occurred, point to several points in the poem to back themselves up. For example, the speaker describes Jenny as "good to kiss" in Stanza 25, and then actually does kiss her at the end of the poem (296). Others argue that the fact that the speaker pays Jenny before he leaves her room creates a sexual element in the poem. Marshik underlines this point: "because the speaker is a young man who has paid for Jenny's company, the situation of the poem is explicitly sexualized: economic exchange makes the poem sexual even though intercourse never takes place within its lines." Rodgers argues that this sexual undercurrent is exactly what makes "Jenny" so "radical": "The radical nature of 'Jenny' lies in its potent sensuality: the sensual, in fact, is the prime moral standard within the world of this poem."
Sometimes sex isn't only about the act itself but can also be about subtler things, like the way one character looks at another. One aspect of the speaker's relationship with Jenny that is always present in the poem is the male gaze. In feminist theory, the "male gaze," a term coined by critic Laura Mulvey, is "the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and in literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of a male viewer" (Wikipedia). The male gaze is very present in Rosetti's "Jenny," as the speaker spends the entire poem looking at a sleeping and inanimate female body. The reader, in turn, looks out through his eyes. Martin Danahay argues in “Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Virtual Bodies" that the male gaze is the "key to the economic system that Rossetti describes in 'Jenny.'" In other words, the speaker's act of looking at Jenny is another facet of the theme of sexuality in this poem. As Danahay argues, the speaker "pays [Jenny] at the end of their encounter not for actual sex, but rather for displaced sexual gratification obtained by the opportunity to gaze on her face while she is sleeping. Since she is asleep, she cannot gaze back at him, and so the narrator enters into a sexual exchange in which the woman is constructed as an object of beauty to be gazed upon, but not as an actual sexual agent herself."
Jenny is, then, a sexual poem even though, as Marshik emphasizes, "intercourse never takes place" in the poem. Another aspect of this sexual undercurrent is the power dynamics between the speaker and Jenny. We have discussed above how the speaker's character is ambiguous even though he purports to be sympathetic toward Jenny. Their relationship is also complicated by the sheer power he holds over her within this poem. Because he is a man, he already holds more social power over Jenny in Victorian England. Additionally, the speaker comes from a higher class than Jenny and he exhibits superiority over her because of his (supposedly) higher moral position. As Marshik argues, the speaker uses this economically, physically, and socially superior position over Jenny to "exercise his mind, instead of his body, on Jenny." In this way, the speaker relates to Jenny in a similar way as many of Jenny's other clients, even though he sees himself as very different from them.
Some academics point to the speaker's desire to keep Jenny awake as evidence of this power dynamic. The speaker notes that Jenny is in need of sleep very early in the poem: "And now, sweetheart, / You seem too tired to get to bed" (34-5). A few stanzas later, the speaker emphasizes, again, that Jenny must be exhausted: "For sometimes, were the truth confess'd, / You're thankful for a little rest,— / Glad from the crush to rest within, / From the heart-sickness and the din" (66-9). In these lines, the speaker congratulates himself for allowing Jenny to sleep when she is so clearly exhausted. Despite this, the speaker considers waking Jenny up throughout the poem. In Stanza 7, the speaker tries to convince Jenny to "sit up" (88). In Stanza 25, the speaker tries to wake her again: "Jenny, wake up . . . Why, there's the dawn!" (300). These lines show us that the speaker is not above using Jenny for his own purposes—he would wake up Jenny to spend the evening with him, if he could. How is the speaker any different from Jenny's other clients, when he holds so much power over her?
Another important aspect of this power dynamic is the fact that Jenny does not say a single word over the course of the poem. The speaker spends the entirety of the poem silently regarding Jenny as she sleeps on his knee. It is because of this, Rodgers argues, that "Jenny" is technically a "dramatic monologue": "the narrator rarely asks Jenny what she is thinking, and when he does it is obviously not in anticipation of an answer." The way their bodies are positioned—with Jenny laying down and the speaker bending over her—speaks to the power dynamics in this scene. It is not immediately apparent that the speaker is not saying anything out loud, either, until he brings our attention to it in Stanza 12: "Suppose I were to think aloud,— / What if to her all this were said?" Rodgers argues that the speaker's silence emphasizes the sheer power that the speaker holds over Jenny in this scene: "That he never even makes a sincere attempt at communication is evidence of how deep-seated his arrogance and prejudice are—of how cognizant he is of his own intellectual and moral superiority to Jenny (a distinction that only a 'civilized' or sophisticated human being could make)." Daniel A. Harris has similar thoughts about the power dynamic between Jenny and the speaker in his essay, “D. G. Rossetti's ‘Jenny’: Sex, Money, and the Interior Monologue.” "The participants in this deathly still life cannot or do not engage each other, linguistically or sexually," Harris argues, "The prostitute sleeps; the protagonist keeps silence. Only money links them." This perspective of "Jenny" is a far cry from one a reader might have after reading the poem for the first time, but is an important aspect of how the poem works, and why it was so controversial when it first came out.
Finally, as Harris argues, the fact that Jenny does not speak throughout the poem objectifies her: "Jenny's unconsciousness renders her an object having a merely animal or natural existence; deprived of speech both by sleep and by generic function, she has, like the female culture she represents, 'no voice'; her bodily passivity precludes even the gestural language given to auditors in place of speech." Thus, the situation between the speaker and Jenny silences Jenny and contributes to her oppression, despite the fact that the speaker sees himself as separate from the rest of society that objectifies her. See, for example, how he sympathizes with Jenny when the "wise unchildish elf" calls her a "thing" (79). Another piece of evidence of Jenny's objectification in this poem is the passage in which the speaker compares Jenny to a Renaissance painting: "Fair shines the guilded aureole / In which our highest painters place / Some living woman's simple face" (230-2). As discussed above, "aureole" means "halo," but it also has a secondary meaning of "gold coin." As Harris points out, this means Jenny is literally being commodified in this moment as she becomes an "economic emblem of male desire." Finally, on a meta level, the poem itself is called "Jenny," which turns Jenny into a piece of writing rather than a living, breathing human being.
Several critics have speculated about Rossett's goal in writing "Jenny" because it is such an ambiguous poem. It is clear that "Jenny" was important to Rossetti because he chose to publish and champion it despite the fact that it received so much negative feedback. Why was this the case? Marshik argues that Rossetti's ultimate goal was to "depict prostitution in a new light," but that he ultimately fails, because "Rossetti was far from abandoning his culture's mores and indeed encoded them within his verse." Rodgers argues that the point of the poem is to make a statement about the difference between the passions and intellect: "The point of the poem is . . . that civilized man is fated to live with his intellect—with the high premium he places on the intangible and abstract at the expense of the passions, or the flesh and all its inherent beauty." Danahay emphasizes lines 339 through 342, in which the speaker pays Jenny even though no intercourse has taken place and places this moment among the evidence of Rossetti's own anxiety and conflicted attitudes towards money and sex. In this way, he understands "Jenny" as Rossetti's way of working out these issues for himself: "The poem 'Jenny' records some of Rossetti's deepest anxieties about the status of his art in an economy increasingly dominated by the conjunction of sex and money, and saturated by the fetishistic representation of women's bodies." After reading "Jenny" and this guide, why do you think Rossetti wrote this poem? Does this give you any new insight into Rossetti himself or the Victorian period?
