Burne-Jones inherited Rossetti's perversities. But all of Rossetti's women are hermaphrodites. She is like Shelley's android Hermaphrodite, murmuring and smiling to itself with sealed eyes. As I said of Nefertiti, impersonality or emotional lifelessness in a woman is an masculinizing abstraction. Siddal's Decadent androgyny resides in her solipsistic self-embowerment, her eeri aura.
Decadence is about dead ends.
The one medievalism Rossetti retains in his late period is Dante's grandiose cultism of dead Beatrice. In the sexual hierarchy of the Vita Nuova, Dante subordinates himself to a cooly narcissistic female adolescent, who I bet no one else in Florence thought was anything special. Western artists ritualize sex, because Western art ritualizes nature. All his personae, male and female, have Elizabeth Siddal's face. He is invaded and saturated by Rossetti's monomania.