Fail Better: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Form, and the Aesthetics of Successful Failure

Abstract:In this essay I argue that engaging seriously with failure—as an essential structural feature that the image-text relationship is constructed around and must navigate—enables a form of viewing-reading that is more theoretically sophisticated and attuned to the sensitivities of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s idiosyncratic double work of art form. Specifically, I propose that Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (1866– 68) double work—a composite of one of his most famous paintings and most anthologized poems—is predicated on failure and that the constant recurrence of failure in the visual-verbal work facilitates an exploration of image-text reciprocity, equivalency, or commensurability. By making the failure of reciprocity so central to the viewingreading experience of Lilith, Rossetti models a way of responding to the unbridgeable formal division that sits at the heart of the two arts, painting and poetry, that he worked in.