The four women sing and dance with averted faces. Emotionally disconnected, they float down crossing planes of vision into distant space. These alienated twins exert their ominous power across a dead space of Late Romantic materiality. Rossetti repeats the same face thrice in Rosa Triplex and La Ghirlandata . In The Blessed Damozel , one face appears at different ages.
Spooked lovers stare at their doubles in How They Met Themselves.
Rossetti dramatizes the too-muchness of Romantic identity. 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.