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.

摘要

从表面上看，《Properzia Rossi》（1828）可能是一首关于单相思的诗，但更重要的是，它通过诗歌和雕塑这姐妹艺术之间建立的相互关系来提高女性作品的地位。本文旨在通过分析《Properzia Rossi》的副文本框架，进一步围绕赫曼斯的抒情诗展开讨论，并探讨这一序言内容如何有助于处理诗歌本身中的女性激情、创造力和姊妹艺术。赫曼斯在传记注释中描述了路易斯·杜西斯 (Louis Ducis) 的一幅《普罗佩齐娅·德罗西》(Properzia De'Rossi) 的画作作为其作品背后的来源，除了传记注释外，考虑这首诗在《女人记录》选集中的框架也很重要。（1828）。该诗集的开头题词引用了华兹华斯的《Laodamia》（1815）：一首质疑过度情感价值的诗。因此，本文对《Properzia Rossi》采取了新的解读方式，将其视为赫曼斯对《老达米亚》中女性激情讨论的回应。对于赫曼斯来说，艺术创作的过程是情感的出口，而由此产生的艺术品则成为引起观看者情感反应的一种手段。