Discuss treatment of the body in D.G. Rossetti's 'Jenny'.

Rossetti’s Jenny materialises the male gaze through its speaker who is scrutinising a prostitute, or a ‘fallen woman’, through his inherently patriarchal lens. The audience immediately get a sense of the power struggle, although power submission might be the more appropriate term, within the complex relationship between customer and vendor. In a heavily patronising and condescending manner, the speaker states ‘Jenny, as I watch you there’, referring to the subject who is asleep on his knee. Here we see the female body being depicted in sleep, symbolically suggesting the passivity of women as the subject is unable to talk and hence defend herself. This contrasts to the male speaker who takes the active role of a voyeur, ‘watch(ing)’ his purchase with sexual infatuation. However, this phrase does more than establish a dichotomy between the docile woman and domineering man, it places the former and the latter in two juxtaposing spatial realms. The adverb ‘there’ highlights that Jenny and the speaker are distant from one another which is more true from a metaphorical perspective than a physical one since the former is laying on the latter. it can be arguPeed that the male speaker is placing himself in an exalted and more moral place which is out of the subject’s reach. Just as Jenny is literally in a lower position than the speaker, she is also socially perceived to be in a lower sphere characterised by corruption and sin. 
This idea is echoed further on in the poem through the subject’s body being repeatedly collocated with images of decay and disease. Whilst the speaker for example proclaims ‘Behold the lilies of the field’, the subject is asked ‘are your lilies dead?’. The fact that both phrases serve as the opening line of a stanza (the former in stanza 9, and the latter in stanza 10) reinforces their contrast, making the vastly incongruous settings a sick parody of one another. The ‘lilies’ present where the speaker stands connote life and vitality, juxtaposing the ‘lilies’ surrounding the subject which are suggestive of decay and infertility. Not only does this juxtaposition again place the two bodies in different spatial realms, reinforcing the hierarchy which dominates their relationship, it also reflects notions of impurity and fault apparent in the speaker’s mind. Lilies are largely symbolic of purity which therefore shrouds the customer in innocence, and the vendor in guilt and corruption. This reflects the hypocritical and unjust social consequence of prostitution in which men retain their honour and reputation, whilst woman are thrust aside as lecherous and unclean. Female sexuality is barely acceptable in society even if it is aiding and enhancing the male orgasm, meaning that sexual identity cannot survive on its own accord in the context of an androcentric society.