Victorian Poetry

Aesthetic and Decadent poetry

interests - as the opening lines indicate with their grammatical parallels -
are equally distributed between two objects, sex and money, by means of a
single warm yet dispassionate verb: "Lazy, laughing, languid Jenny, / Fond
of a kiss and fond of a guinea" (36). Even the alliteration of the first line
serves to flatten out her personality, making her initially appear a mind-
lessly greedy voluptuary with no moral priorities whatsoever.
The male speaker feels superior to Jenny because of his artistic status as
well and initially declares that his visit to her rooms is nothing more than a
momentary lapse from his otherwise ascetic life of scholarship. This
absence of sexual involvement allows him at times to perceive Jenny as an
object of art, an aesthetic composition rather than a moral or sexual
commodity. Early in the poem, he describes her sensual half-dressed state in
painterly detail. Yet his reaction is not the obviously sensual one. On the
contrary, her erotic attraction leads him immediately to meditate upon the
unlikely subject of literature:

Why, Jenny, as I watch you there, -

For all your wealth of loosened hair,

Your silk ungirdled and unlac'd

And warm sweets open to the waist,

All golden in the lamplight's gleam, -

You know not what a book you seem. (37)

As he watches Jenny drowse in the enhancing "golden" light, he interprets
her meaning as if she were a "book": a subject to be discovered, learned,
and understood. His sensitivity to beauty and art, together with his total
subordination of moral and ethical issues, on occasion helps to deliver him
from the moralistic conventions that condemn Jenny's life of prostitution.
To be sure, by reading her body as a "book," the speaker may be thought to
dehumanize her flesh from his superior scholarly position. But it is the
freedom afforded by art, with its own rules of precise and objective
observation, that leads him toward a much greater understanding of this
most downtrodden and vilified type of humanity: "Our learned London
children know, / Poor Jenny, all your pride and woe; / Have seen your lifted
silken skirt / Advertise dainties through the dirt" (38). Paradoxically, his
appreciation of art and his scholarly outlook challenge those Victorian
commentators who abhor "the great social evil," and thus he produces an
altogether higher conception of the motivations and limitations of the life
of the prostitute. Certainly, he often images Jenny's body in negative terms

• at one point he visualizes her "magic purse" (the genitals from which she
  makes her money) in grotesque language, as if she were a social parasite:
  "Grim web, how clogged with shrivelled flies" (42). (As Robin Sheets

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