KAREN ALKALAY-GUTdesire as a means of resisting oppressive moral attitudes. Time and again,
their work engages with the pleasures promised by what Ernest Dowson
evokes as "wine and woman and song" (ED no): a phrase that suggests
that an intoxicated eroticism might provide the fundamental substance of a
type of poetry that existed for its own sake. Yet this stress on sensuous
pleasure in the name of an art emancipated from the customs and conven-
tions of proper conduct had a diverse range of consequences. Each poetic
example shows how and why "wine and woman and song" could drive
aesthetic and Decadent writers toward various states of ecstasy and
exhilaration as well as frustration, doom, and despair. Moreover, each
poem discussed here shows both the growing needs for fulfillment through
various types of sensuousness and sensuality and the increasing impossi-
bility of such fulfillment.
IIRossetti's work, like Swinburne's, provides some of the leading ideas about
sensuous pleasure and sexual desire that shape aesthetic and Decadent
poetry. In terms of form, "Jenny" (1870) is a poem of almost four hundred
lines that belongs to the tradition of the Victorian dramatic monologue
developed separately by Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson in the
1830s. Particularly in Browning's use of this type of poem, it is not
uncommon for a male speaker to address a female auditor, who is often
otherwise occupied, asleep or dead, and because of this lack of response the
persona frequently reveals more about his innermost psychology than he
readily understands. Rossetti's "Jenny" follows in this poetic tradition but
slightly changes the form by voicing the thoughts, rather than the dramati-
cally spoken words, of a bookish young man who has been spending the
night with the prostitute whose name titles the poem. In what might be
termed an interior monologue, the speaker develops a number of contra-
dictory ideas about both the individuality and the humanity of the kind of
figure that some Victorian moralists described as "the great social evil."
Since Jenny appears totally inert in her role as a sex worker (she falls asleep
during the poem), he takes the opportunity to muse upon her beauty and to
consider the social limitations and harsh pressures that she faces in
everyday life. Rossetti's narrator at first seems a fairly typical product of
middle-class society. He is an intellectual who claims to have found himself
by accident in her rooms, and it is clear that he perceives himself as superior
to her. After all, she is only a generic woman (it is no accident, a s definitions
in the Oxford English Dictionary make clear, that the name Jenny is often
used to denote the female of the species, including asses). What is more, her
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