Jenny

Quiz — Jenny by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

1. Recall – Form & Structure: What type of poem is Jenny in terms of its narrative form, and roughly when did Rossetti write the first draft?

1. Recall – Speaker & Situation: Who is the speaker in Jenny, and what is the basic situation at the start of the poem?

1. Recall – Key Image: What Victorian folk-science oddity does Rossetti use as a symbol, and what is the creature said to have endured?

1. Recall – Symbol: What does the gold coin (guinea) repeatedly represent throughout the poem, and what broader system does it symbolize?

1. Comprehension – Tone: How would you describe the poem's overall tone? Identify at least two contrasting emotional qualities present in the speaker's voice.

1. Comprehension – The Sleeping Jenny: Why is it significant that Jenny remains asleep and silent for the entire poem? What does her silence allow the speaker to do, and what does Rossetti critique through this device?

1. Comprehension – Moral Pivot: At one point the speaker shifts focus away from Jenny and onto himself and men in general. What accusation does this moment level, and why is it considered the moral turning point of the poem?

1. Analysis – The Halo / Aureole: The speaker draws on imagery borrowed from religious painting. What question does this image raise, and what does Rossetti ultimately suggest about the boundary between the sacred and the profane?

1. Analysis – Dawn / Morning Light: The poem ends as daylight arrives — a symbol conventionally associated with redemption in Victorian moral writing. How does Rossetti subvert this expectation, and what effect does this have on the poem's moral resolution?

1. Analysis – Historical Context: How does Jenny differ from the typical Victorian literary treatment of the "fallen woman," and what was the critical response to the poem after its publication in 1870?

Answer Key

1. Jenny is a lengthy dramatic monologue; Rossetti wrote the first draft around 1848, revising it before the poem appeared in his 1870 Poems collection.

1. The speaker is a man who has spent the night with Jenny, a London prostitute; the poem opens with Jenny having dozed off on his shoulder while he remains awake and reflective.

1. The toad-in-stone — a creature Victorian folk-science believed could survive alive inside solid rock for centuries — is used to symbolize Jenny's entrapment: alive yet unable to grow, change, or escape her circumstances.

1. The guinea symbolizes how the economic system transforms human intimacy into a commodity, repeatedly defining Jenny's existence and tainting every relationship she has.

1. The tone is meditative and restless, combining genuine tenderness toward Jenny with guilt, self-blame, and sudden bursts of anger directed at society; the speaker's self-awareness prevents sentimentality, producing an overall mood of unresolved moral unease.

1. Because Jenny never speaks, she becomes a blank canvas for the speaker's own projections about women, poverty, and sin. Rossetti critiques the way men — and by extension society — reduce women to symbols or problems rather than recognizing them as full human beings.

1. The speaker implicates himself, other clients, and the broader economic and social system as collectively responsible for Jenny's situation; this shift makes the poem's moral focus about male complicity rather than female shame, marking it as the poem's ethical turning point.

1. The halo imagery asks whether beauty like Jenny's is sacred or profane, and Rossetti suggests that this distinction is not inherent but socially constructed — determined by context rather than any essential quality of the person.

1. Rossetti withholds the conventional promise of dawn-as-redemption; the morning light simply signals that the night has ended, offering no comfort or moral resolution and leaving the poem's difficult questions unanswered.

1. Rather than punishing, pitying, or redeeming Jenny — the usual Victorian formulas — Rossetti shifts moral responsibility onto the men and structures that create her circumstances. After publication, critic Robert Buchanan attacked the poem in 1871, labeling it part of the so-called "Fleshly School" of poetry.