Embodying Herethics: Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses

Abstract

Jenkins demonstrates how Speaking Likenesses supports the recognition of the abject other, whether within the self or with another, that enables compassion rather than fear, possibility rather than paralysis, through literary transference. Rossetti offers readers the opportunity to experience an ethical process, one that builds upon dismantled binaries of difference and demonstrates Kristeva’s Herethical model. Herethics compounds the biological and conceptual, the literal and the abstract, to illustrate the dynamic relationship that builds from the body metaphorically but resides in the human body as an affective experience of love that propels compassion rather than narcissistic desire. Engaging in the process of a Herethical dynamic, the individual gains access to abjection’s sublime to create, imagine, and thrive.