‘[S]elling old lamps for new ones’: D. G. Rossetti’s Restructuring of Oriental Schemas

The first chapter outlines Rossetti’s fascination with the East, as exemplified by his illustrations and paintings remediating the stories of the Arabian Nights. Rossetti illustrated the stories of Aladdin, Sinbad, Amine and Princess Parisad by employing the magical lamp of translation, fostering cultural diversity and Oriental pluralisms. By conceiving the East as a blended space, he produced Oriental ‘double works of art’ that blend together poetry and painting, East and West, and experiment with forms of Turkish and biblical Orientalism. Such conceptual metaphors as East is violence and love is destruction are projected on to Cassandra (1861) and Helen of Troy (1863), examples of Turkish Orientalism that remediate Oriental schemas by applying a tuning approach. Other Oriental double works of art, such as The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849), Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1849–50), The Beloved, or The Bride (1865), Astarte Syriaca (1876) and Mnemosyne (1881), represent Rossetti’s mental picture of biblical Orientalism. By restructuring a few variables of the Oriental biblical schema, and by blending Western female beauty with Eastern symbology, Rossetti creates an entirely new vision of the East.