Christina Rossetti

  1. Christina Rossetti in context--discourse, power and subject

  2. Poetry of Reticence-- the women in her poems; Poems on death

  3. Poetry of Social Criticism and Sensuality--"Goblin Market"

Christina Rossetti in context

  • Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and PRB--not accepted as a member,


    • --serve as Dante Gabriel Rossetti's model for virgin
    --contradictory images produced by DGR

  • images of a timid virgin and a defensive one

  • images of a serious woman (Below) and tempestous one (Right).

    • Christina Rossetti, 1866

    by Dante Gabriel Rossetti; from Faxon p. 11.

     What do you make of this expressionless face? 

      Why are the former ones of the two more publicized?

 

Christina Rossetti in a Tantrum 1862  
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti; from Faxon p. 144

  • Regarded as a Woman Poet-- "Though evidence of [C Rossetti's and Emily Dickenson's] creative process was available in the form of drafts of poems and worksheets, the image of the inspired child/woman who does not labor over her production was more congenial to male critics" (Leder 187) e.g. Christina considered as "at best a spontaneous and at worst a naive technician."

  • Regarded as a Poet-Saint (1862-1899)--e.g. "Up-Hill"

      • Arthur Symons's review in July 1887 sees "sincere piety" in this poem (Charles 27).

  • the tradition of the Aesthetes--Christina Rossetti's medievalist combination of eros and agape, of the phenomenal and the ideal, of the sensual and the spiritual, became central to the art of the aesthetes in the 1880s and 1890s (Harrison 55).  --decadent or religious?

  • the tradition of Romantic love--Many of Rossetti's love poems, ...serve to expose misguided, that is, transient earthly ideals of love; in so doing, they savor love's absence, love's decay, or its demise; often they express the laments of love's deluded victim (Harrison 55-56)


    • Throughout much Pre-Raphaelite love poetry, a dialectic of desire and renunciation is at work thematically.  Whether a depicted passion is visceral or idealized, its object and therefore any fulfillment of desire are almost always unattainable.  [In Christina Rossetti's poems,] renunciation, or at least withdrawal from teh active pursuit of love, follows disilusionment; often the speaker craves death, either as an anodyne or as a transposition to an afterlife of absolute Love..." (Harrison 92; 102).

  • feminist readings--from poetry of renunciation and reticence, to that of exclusion, sexual fantary and social criticism.

Poetry of Reticence--Poems on death: self-renunciation or Self-preservation?

    the women

    • Many women in her poems are observed, fixed in a place and silent--e.g. "Twice," "The Prince's Progress," "Portrait."

    • The heroine's self-assertion in "The Royal Princess"

    • Her strong criticism in "The Prince's Progress," "Songs in a Cornfield" and "In the Artist's Studio"

    • Her self-preservation: she leaves an empty space in the center of her subjective lyrics so that she herself is not to be known, not to be seen. e.g. "The Bourne," "Memory" "Autumn," "Winter: My Secret," "May."

      •  

      • reticence and/or self-preservation?

May (excerpt)

"I cannot tell you what it was; 
But this I know: it did but pass. 
It passed away with sunny May, 
With all sweet things it passed away, 
And left me old, and cold, and grey" 

Memory (excerpt)

I nursed it in my bosom while it lived, 
  I hid it in my heart when it was dead; 
In joy I sat alone, even so I grieved 
     Alone and nothing said. ... 

I broke it at a blow, I laid it cold 
  Crushed in my deep heart where it used to live. 
My heart dies inch by inch; the time grows old, 
  Grows old in which I grieve. 

The Bourne

¡@

Underneath the growing grass, 
  Underneath the living flowers, 
  Deeper than the sound of showers 
  There we shall not counter the hours 
By the shadows as they pass. 

Youth and health will be but vain 
  Beauty reckoned of no worth: 
  There a very little girth 
  Can hold round what once the earth 
Seemed too narrow to contain (underline added).

    • poems on death and loss: "At Home," "Shut Out," "When I am dead, my dearest," "Dead before Death," "Up-Hill," "After Death"

      • "After Death"  as a dramatic monologue;  its use of boundaries (curtain, lattice); the speaker's attitudes toward the man (compared with "Porphyria's Lover" by Browning)

"At Home" 

Illustrated by Florence Harrison

from Poems of Christina Rossetti 

NY: Gramercy 1994: 105

"Goblin Market"--the most popular one but receiving mixed reviews by contemporary criticis (Cf. Charles 32).

  • context: written in 1859, around the time that Christina started at the penitentiary (Highgate), helping to reclaim and re-habilitate young prostitutes.

  • the first volume of her poems was published in 1862.

  • now read as "commentary on the capitalist market-place, as tale of sexual, sometimes homoerotic yearning, as feminist glorification of sisterhood; and perhaps most often as Christian allegory of temptation and redemption, 'inescapably a Genesis story.'" (Grass 356)

1. Goblins & fruits (with illustrations) 2. Women's roles
1. Goblins
"On a social/historical level, 'Goblin Market is about women's encounter with the male-dominated marketplace and their different accomodations to it.  Lizzie, Laura, and Jeanie represent scores of young country and village women whose lives were displaced by capitalism, signified in the poem by the goblin-merchant men.  (Leder 126 underlines added)

the luscious fruits
--16 kinds in the first 14 lines! a lot more various than the Apple of Eden,
--as commodities, as female sexuality,

 [Looking at goblin men] --

 

[goblin men harvesting 1]

[goblin men harvesting 2] 

  

Rossetti [Cutting a lock of hair] 

2. Women's roles 

a. "[The poem] expresses one of the nineteenth century's most vivid nightmares of female violation in the marketplace and one of the most brazen fantasies of the redemptive powers and pleasures of sisterly love.  [It] reveals Rossetti's sharp and modern insight into women's dual role in the marketplace as both objects and perpetually unfulfilled consumers" (Leder 125 underlines added). 

b. the two sisters--angel or fallen woman, same or different?

"There is no friend like a sister." 

 

D. G. Rossetti's llastration for Goblin Market, 1862

Illustrated by Florence Harrison

from Poems of Christina Rossetti 

NY: Gramercy 1994: 25.

Work Cited
Charles, Edna Kotin.  Christina Rossetti: Critical Perspectives, 1982-1982.  Toronto: Associated UP, 1985.
Grass. Sean C.  "Nature's Perilous Variety in Rossetti's 'Goblin Market.'"  Nineteenth-Century Literature 51:3 (1996): 356-76.
Harrison, Anthony H.  Christina Rossetti in Context.  Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1988.
Leder, Sharon with Andrea Abbott.  The Language of Exclusion: The Poetry of Emily Dickenson and Christina Rossetti.  NY: Greenwood P, 1987.

 (external) Literary Criticism Databank: Cultural Studies