Sculpting Emotion: Female Passion and the Paratextual Framing of Felicia Hemans’s “Properzia Rossi” (1828)

Abstract

ABSTRACT On the surface, “Properzia Rossi” (1828) may be a poem about unrequited love, but more importantly it works to raise the status of women’s work through the reciprocal relationship established between the sister arts of poetry and sculpture. This article aims to further the discussion surrounding Hemans’s ekphrastic poetry by analysing the paratextual framing of “Properzia Rossi”, and interrogate how this prefatory content contributes to the treatment of female passion, creativity, and the sister arts within the poem itself. Aside from the biographical headnote, in which Hemans describes a painting of Properzia De’Rossi by Louis Ducis as the source behind her work, it is also important to consider how the poem is framed within the collection, Records of Woman (1828). The opening epigraph for the collection is a quotation from Wordsworth’s “Laodamia” (1815): a poem that questions the value of excess emotion. This article, therefore, adopts a new approach to “Properzia Rossi” by considering it as Hemans’s response to the discussion of female passion in “Laodamia”. For Hemans, the process of artistic creation is an outlet for emotion, whilst the resulting art object becomes a means of eliciting an emotional response from the beholder.