4/14/09 Christina Rossetti

Rossetti, "The Blessed Damozel"

<http://www.abcgallery.com/R/rossetti/rossetti45.html>

• As I said last time, Rosetti's poetry in general, and this poem in particular, was attacked by Robert Buchanan as an example of "the fleshly school of poetry": Heaven is occupied by material objects like a gold bar and physical bodies, which Buchanan associated with lewdness and sensuality. What's "fleshly" about this poem? What do you think Rossetti was getting at in portraying the damozel this way?
• What does this poem imply about heaven? About love?
• From what you've heard about PR art, does this seem like an poetic equivalent?
  • revolt against convention?
  • fidelity to nature as opposed to idealization of the subject?
  • anti-modern undercurrent?
  • tendency towards symbolism?
  • unity of visual and poetic arts?
  • undercurrent of eroticism and aestheticism?

Christina Rossetti

We've talked before about the difficulty of negotiating between the role of a woman and the role of a poet. In the case of Rossetti, these issues are especially complicated.

Let's start with her relationship with the Pre-Raphaelites. Although her brother Dante Gabriel argued to have her included in the PRB, the other members did not want her to be included and she was in fact not officially one of the original seven. Many contemporary readers saw her as a Pre-Raphaelite, however, because of some affinities her poetry has with the PRs: her pictorialism and rich imagery, her fondness for medieval settings, and, up to a point, her spiritual symbolism. She published seven poems in The Germ, the short-lived journal that the PRB established for disseminating their work.

Within the PR circle, she had at least four overlapping but not identical roles: she was an artist, she was Dante Gabriel's sister, she was a woman, and she was a model.

If that isn't complicated enough, she was also an extremely devout Christian, who twice refused propositions of marriage on religious grounds (the first because he converted to Roman Catholicism--she was an Anglican herself--and the second because he didn't seem sufficiently Christian), spent a great deal of her life doing charitable work and caring for ailing parents, and pasted paper strips over the antireligious parts of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon but enjoyed the poem anyway. Note that there are contradictions here even without factoring in her art: she wanted to be a wife and mother, but she never married.

Those who do NOT place her in the PR camp, in fact, generally do so because she seems to be too devout; Dante Gabriel certainly painted and wrote about religious themes, but his religion is subordinated to his art; that is not true of Christina. And one would think one would hardly need to mention Swinburne, that PR fellow traveller if not outright pre-Raphaelite; except that, for the second half of his life, Swinburne was nearly as much on an ascetic as Christina was--Anthony Harrison calls them both "ascetic aesthetes"--and they were friends.

In practice, Christina Rossetti's poetry tends to get read in three ways, these days--in the context of the Pre-Raphaelites, as the poetry of a woman who was questioning and testing the relationship of women to art, and as expressions of a curiously aesthetic brand of Christianity.

"In an Artist's Studio"

The reference here is to Elizabeth Siddal:

as Ophelia: http://www.abcgallery.com/M/millais/millais22.html

as Beatrix: http://www.artunframed.com/images/artmis60/ross23.jpg

She was an artist herself, albeit an unschooled one:

<http://msnhomepages.talkcity.com/DharmaDr/helena_anderson/ladyofshallot.jpg>

http://www.artmagick.com/paintings/siddal/siddal5.jpg

and a poet:

Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal
Worn Out

Thy strong arms are around me, love
My head is on thy breast;
Low words of comfort come from thee
Yet my soul has no rest.

For I am but a startled thing
Nor can I ever be
Aught save a bird whose broken wing
Must fly away from thee.

I cannot give to thee the love
I gave so long ago,
The love that turned and struck me down
Amid the blinding snow.

I can but give a failing heart
And weary eyes of pain,
A faded mouth that cannot smile
And may not laugh again.

Yet keep thine arms around me, love,
Until I fall to sleep;
Then leave me, saying no goodbye
Lest I make wake, and weep.

Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal
The Lust of the Eyes

I care not for my Lady's soul
Though I worship before her smile;
I care not where be my Lady's goal
When her beauty shall lose its wile.

Low sit I down at my Lady's feet
Gazing through her wild eyes
Smiling to think how my love will fleet
When their starlike beauty dies.

I care not if my Lady pray
To our Father which is in Heaven
But for joy my heart's quick pulses play
For to me her love is given.

Then who shall close my Lady's eyes
And who shall fold her hands?
Will any hearken if she cries
Up to the unknown lands

• What's Rossetti's claim about the woman as model?
• What place does Rossetti establish for herself as female artist? (Why is this a sonnet, of all possible forms?)

"Goblin Market"

• This poem is often read as a kind of Christian allegory about temptation and redemption. Read along these lines, what does the poem say?
  • what's it about?
  • who is Laura?
  • who is Lizzie, the redeemer? (Christ, but note also the lily reference in 409)
  • who are the goblin men?
  • why is Laura unable to hear the goblin men after she has given in? (228 ff.)
  • How does Lizzie manage to save Laura, specifically, and how would we interpret that in Christian terms?
  • What is the coin that Lizzie attempts to pay, and why do the goblin men accept only hair?
  • why does the fruit burn when Laura eats it the second time, 493 ff.? why does "gorging on bitterness" cure her?
  • What is "life out of death," 524?
  • At first, Lizzie protects herself by stopping her ears; to save her sister, however, she must go out into the world to listen and look. What does this imply?
• The problem with this interpretation is that it completely ignores gender in the poem.
  • why is the Christ figure female?
  • 464 ff. why is Lizzie's redemption of Laura so sensual?
  • what does Rossetti mean by "sisterhood" at the end? Is the conclusion adequate to the tale, or is it, like the mariner's moral at the end of the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," somehow suspect by virtue of being too simple?
  • who is the hero(ine) of the poem? what sort of figure is she? what is implied about female protagonists in general?
  • If this is a poem about women, then who are Lizzie/Laura/the goblin men?
  • sexual imagery: note that the goblins try to force Lizzie (422 ff.); why does this sound like attempted rape? If this is sexual, then is the scene where Laura sucks the juices from Lizzie's face sexual? If so, how do we reconcile this with with Rossetti's devout Christianity?
• literary connections:
  • The imagery in the poem is as rich as that in any in a poem by Keats, Tennyson, or Dante Gabriel.
  • Laura pays for the fruit with a lock of her hair. If this is a Victorian female reply to Pope, what does it say?
  • similarities to "Rime of the Ancient Mariner": supernatural elements, tale of redemption, ends with rejoining of community (families, in this case). If this is a reply to Coleridge, what does it say?
  • inversion of "La Belle Dame Sans Merci": in both poems, a human has a kind of implied sexual union with a supernatural creature, but the genders are reversed. What would Rossetti say to Keats?
  • connections with pre-Raphaelites: the goblins are brothers; fruit commonly appear in pre-Raphaelite paintings; the goblins invite the sisters to taste--which accords with the lush imagery of their works. If the goblins are male artists, what does the poem say about women and art?
  • there are strong resonances in this poem with children's tales--the play of rhyme and meter, the fantastic setting. Why?

Janet Camp Troxell cites a passage from Rossetti's Letter and Spirit in which "we get an idea of the compensation she expected to receive for [her various] renunciations: 'For the books we now forbear to read, we shall one day be endued of wisdom and knowledge, for the music we will not listen to, we shall join in the song of the redeemed. For the pictures from which we turn, we shall gaze unabashed on the Beatific Vision. For the companionship we shun, we shall be welcomed into angelic society, and the communion of triumphant saints. For the amusements we avoid, we shall keep the Supreme jubilee. For the pleasures we miss, we shall abide, and forever abide, in the rapture of heaven'" (Three Rossettis, 148).