In their study of women in Pre-Raphaelite painting, Griselda Pollock and Deborah Cherry explore the construction of Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti’s later lover, who often modelled for him. The image of Christina Rossetti, captured in The Girlhood, may provide some parallels with the later models. The writers find that Siddal becomes essentially identifiable with ‘frailty, inactivity, suffering, incapacity’. Such adjectives may be used to describe the way in which Rossetti has represented the girl Mary. Using visual description, Rossetti creates a sense of serenity and stillness which is suggested by the expression that Mary is wearing: the texture of her clothes and of the tapestry she is embroidering, are undisturbed and suggest motionless action. This implied silence makes the topic all the more touching when we realise the rather tumultuous events that await her. For Pollock and Cherry, it becomes possible to see ‘woman’ not as a ‘given’, either biologically or psychologically, but as a category created by signifying practices. For one to talk of ‘woman and sign’ in communication is ‘no longer to talk of women as the signified, but of a different signified that of the establishment/re-establishment of kinship of culture...women are, therefore, a challenge to the nineteenth century concept of masculine usurpation of activity, productivity, creativity, health’. Rossetti’s works of the 1880s attempt to define women as both ‘image’ and as being ‘visibly different’ rather than representing them as realistic subjects; they become something super-human, and other-worldly. Rossetti, therefore, is responsible for perpetuating the idealised woman, which is clearly visible in The Girlhood. Mary becomes what Pollock and Cherry call ‘symptoms of and signs for the renegotiating and redefinition of femininity and sexuality within the complex of social and gender relations...’ Visual representations in this period tended to create a virgin/whore dichotomy; a practice in which Rossetti participated. The Virgin Mary has implications of absolute purity as found in The Girlhood or The Annunciation, and may be set against the whore figure such as the prostitution in Found. Such an image, for both Pollock and Cherry, is seen to have been a result of ‘an active masculine subject inspired by a passive feminine object’.
