‘Each twin breast is an apple sweet’: D.G. Rossetti’s Cognitive Grammar of Transgressive Food

This paper takes as its starting point the conceptual metaphors “ideas are food” and “food is thought” as defined by Lakoff and Johnson (1999), as well as the cognitve linguistic notion of visual grammar in order to advance a new reading of D.G. Rossetti’s works of art, one which sees them as artistic representations of transgressive food. Such works as Bocca Baciata (1860), Monna Pomona (1864), The Loving Cup (1867), Venus Verticordia (1868), Proserpine (1872) and many others not only envision their own detailed blueprints of the Pre-Raphaelite culture of food, but are also artistic works examining the relationship between transgressive food and media. I intend to track through these references and look at the issues – the role of food in the creation of subversive ideas, the representation of alimentary perversions, symbolic transposition of forbidden desires etc. – which they raise. Crucial to Rossetti’s artistic representations of food is the idea of transgression of socio-cultural norms in order to deconstruct gender and sexual identities and thereby scandalise the Victorian audience. But my central purpose will be to re-read Rossetti’s aforementioned works from a cognitive grammar perspective. I will reflect on the iconicity and prominence of painterly and poetic food, and interpret the association of food and women, as a revolutionary project, one which projects sensuous alimentary conceptual metaphors provoking us to profoundly revalue the role of food in Pre-Raphaelite imagination. Through a process of cognitive blending, Rossetti attempts to revolutionize the role of food in artistic communication with important socio-cultural consequences for both him and his Victorian audience.