Devotion and Defiance: Christina Rossetti’s Exploration of Victorian Womanhood

Torn between religious devotion and a feminist resistance, Christina Rossetti's poetry is a gold mine of spiritual tension and social critique. In this article, I explore how her poetry gives a voice to the silenced struggles of Victorian women and imagines a radical solution to their suffering.

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The Victorian period is synonymous with unprecedented scientific development that notably sees the likes of Charles Darwin publish his On the Origin of Species. Nevertheless, if scientific progress remains a constant throughout the period, social progress advances at a slower pace, particularly concerning gender equality. While men gradually gain political enfranchisement, women remain excluded from the debate, waiting until 1928 to gain equal franchise. Amongst Victorian poets, Christina Rossetti particularly captures this disparity, portraying the complex and multi layered entrapment of women by the Victorian society. The aim of this article is to understand how the English poet highlights Victorian women’s hopelessness, but also how she processes it. First, the article presents a close reading of “From The Antique” to bring out how the poem illuminates their plight and presents a physical death as the ultimate escape. Then, in a similar fashion, this article discusses “A Triad”, highlighting how it critiques the ideal of an earthly love as alternative to this death, and concludes on the same note. The nihilistic solution of these two poems brings Rossetti to dwell upon and imagine the afterlife, which what is examined in the analysis of poems like “Somewhere or Other” or “Paradise in a Dream”. Finally, while building upon these analysis, the article moves to other poems such as “The Lowest Place” or “Goblin Market” to determine whether Rossetti’s nihilistic solution simply reflects religiously motivated acceptance of women’s low status or whether it invites a rebellion.

1.Rossetti’s depiction of female misery and her nihilistic solution to it:

As stated in the introduction, “From the Antique” illuminates the place of Victorian women and suggests death to escape from their joyless lives. In her poem, Rossetti does not only use its content to convey her message, but also the form of the poem by using an incredibly precise language:

It's a weary life, it is, she said:

Doubly blank in a woman's lot:

I wish and I wish I were a man:

Or, better then any being, were not               (From “From the Antique”, stanza 1)

The 1854 poem directly sets the tone: “it’s a weary life, it is, she said”. This instance of grammatical parallelism, where the line’s subject verb construction repeats itself, works to reinforce how “blank” the lives of women are. Additionally, the repetition of “it’s” in its longer form, “it is”, suggests the impression of length caused by this weary life. If the first “[i]s” is followed by a predicative complement, the other is not, mirroring the loss of intensity experienced by Victorian women. Regardless of how ambitious they are, they grow up to be confined to the “angel of the house” role, imprisoned by strong societal rules represented in the poem by the rigid grammatical parallelism, only broken to mention how “doubly blank”  a woman’s life is which also betrays the I voice’s bitterness. However, the I voice’s longing for a more colourful life has a solution: “I wish and I wish I were a man”. Not only does this, to the same end, follow the parallelism of subject and verb discussed before, but it also brings a solution to her thirst for adventure: becoming a man. Indeed, the basic subject verb structure is altered by the subordinate clause that ends the line, suggesting how becoming a male can modify the blankness of the speakers’ life. Interestingly, this longing for manhood transcends the poem as Anne Bronte, for example, uses a male alias, Acton Bell, to be able to publish books such as The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Alternatively, another solution is, as the fourth line envisions, physically dying: “[o]r, better than any being, we [a]re not”. Similarly to the second line, this fourth one is structurally distinct, which, added to their rhyming endings, connects them. A woman’s “blank […] lot” is therefore resolved through physical death, which provides access to the afterlife. As Diane D’Amico observes, presenting “the promises of heaven” as the only solution to women’s powerlessness certainly ties in with Rossetti’s strong religious faith (qted. in Spaise 65), but that will be discussed more in depth in section four. The second stanza then further develops the idea of nothingness as it starts by stating that women “[a]re nothing at all in all the world”:

Were nothing at all in all the world,

Not a body and not a soul:

Not so much as a grain of dust

Or a drop of water from pole to pole.        (From “From the Antique”, stanza 2)

Interestingly, there is a shift in the voice of the poem, moving from the first-person singular “I” to a “we” that stands for Victorian women. Indeed, Rossetti starts the line with an oxymoron of being, “[a]re”, and not being, “nothing”, strengthening that she talks about women and their paradoxical existence. They are treated as a lifeless object, especially up until the women property acts of 1870, 1882, and 1884, despite being the ones who bring life into the world. They are dehumanised and regarded as “not a body and not a soul”, but as machines that give birth. Their dehumanisation is then intensified by similes which liken them to “not so much as a grain of dust”, “or a drop of water from pole to pole”, projecting Victorian women’s lack of agency from the human to natural world. In the last two stanzas, the I voice returns as she reflects upon her potential death while dwelling upon her double insignificance:

Still the world would wag on the same,

Still the seasons go and come:

Blossoms bloom as in days of old,

Cherries ripen and wild bees hum.

None would miss me in all the world,

How much less would care or weep:

I should be nothing, while all the rest

Would wake and weary and fall asleep.          (From “From the Antique”, stanzas 2 and 4)

She, like other women, barely exists in the natural “world [that] would wag on the same” if she died and barely exists in the human world as “[n]one would miss [her]”. Furthermore, while nature has agency, she has not. “Blossoms bloom” and “[c]herries ripen” but she “should be nothing”. Evidently, the context around the verb “should” supports an epistemic interpretation of it. Because of how she feels until this point, her conclusion is that she must die, “be nothing”. “From The Antique” thus draws a bleak conclusion to the plight of women in Victorian Britain. The solution is either to become a man, meaning the death of femininity, or to physically die. Similarly, “Sappho” also describes death as the solving of “dull day[s]” where loneliness and boredom persists:

I sigh at day-dawn, and I sigh

When the dull day is passing by,

I sigh at evening, and again

 I sigh when night brings sleep to men.

 Oh! It were better far to die

 Than thus for ever mourn and sigh,

 And in death's dreamless sleep to be

 Unconscious that none weep for me;

Eased from my weight of heaviness,

 Forgetful of forgetfulness,

 Resting from pain and care and sorrow

 Thro' the long night that knows no morrow;

Living unloved, to die unknown,

Unwept, untended and alone.                     (“Sappho”)

  Here, the loneliness and boredom seem to come from the fact that the I voice has no one to marry. Indeed, night endlessly brings “sleep to men” instead of bringing any to her. Unfortunately, Victorian norms did not offer any promise of a joyful and adventurous life to unmarried women which leads this article to its next point. The coming analysis of “A Triad” explores how Rossetti examines a third alternative to escape feminine misery: marriage.

2. Human love rather than death, another solution?

“A Triad” examines the ideal of a wedding as a potential solution to women’s earthly misery, but ultimately rejects it, strengthening the nihilistic conclusion obtained in “From The Antique”. Let us starts with the very first stanza:

Three sang of love together: one with lips

   Crimson, with cheeks and bosom in a glow,

Flushed to the yellow hair and finger tips;

   And one there sang who soft and smooth as snow    (From “A Triad”, stanza 1)

 The poem starts with a stanza describing, through colour symbolism, three women who all “s[ing] of love”. As the sister of pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, it is not surprising to see her use colours to complete their descriptions given their importance for these artists and the omnipresence of her brothers in her life. For instance, William Michael Rossetti goes as far as supressing some of her works (Spaise 53). Interestingly, the first woman sings with “[c]rimson”, suggesting her passion and eagerness to find love, and has “yellow hair” which reminds of the sun’s colour and intensity. The next one, however, is introduced via a simile describing her as “smooth and soft as snow”, which tones down the passion seen before. The whiteness of the soft snow quenches the burning red passion that the poem first describes, foreshadowing its downhearted ending. Consequently, the stanza can be divided into two parts: three first lines bringing hope, and one later line bringing despair. The following stanza, while building upon the bleakness conveyed by the snow, brings despair in its third line already:

Bloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a show;

And one was blue with famine after love,

   Who like a harpstring snapped rang harsh and low

The burden of what those were singing of.                (From “A Triad”, stanza 2)

 The third woman is “blue with famine after love”, suggesting that there is still some desire, a “famine after love”, although the passionate red is replaced by a melancholic blue that echoes the pain of starving. Then, however, the deception comes as the love they sing sounds “harsh and low” because the “burden of what they [are] singing of”, love, brings, as the two sestets discuss, misery. The inner structure of the two octaves therefore mimics the deceptiveness of love for Victorian women. Romantic[1] (I use romantic here with its modern meaning of “linked to love” and not Romantic as pertaining to Romanticism). love might sound appealing at first, full of passion, but it then quickly grows dismal, loses its intense red to become a melancholic blue as it amounts to a marriage that imprisons and objectifies women. If, as literary critic Paul Oppenheimer observes, original sonnets present a “resolution of emotional problems […] in [their] sestet” (Oppenheimer 301), Rossetti’s volta brings deceptions rather than solutions to the women’s longing for love:

One shamed herself in love; one temperately

   Grew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife;

One famished died for love. Thus two of three

   Took death for love and won him after strife;

One droned in sweetness like a fattened bee:

   All on the threshold, yet all short of life.                    (From “A Triad”, stanzas 3 and 4)

 Indeed, the first of the triad “shame[s] herself in love”, meaning that she loses her reputation, an important notion in Victorian Britain, by falling in love but not marrying. Unlike the other members of this triad, however, she survives. The second “one [g]r[ows] gross in soulless love”, suggesting that she married a man whom she is not in love with, causing her “soulless love” to rub off on her own soul as “two of three / [t]ook death for love”. However, another poem, “Love from the North”, suggests that “soulless” also means powerless to act and decide:

I had a love in soft south land,

Beloved through April far in May;

He waited on my lightest breath,

And never dared to say me nay.

(…)

He was a strong man from the north,

 Light-locked, with eyes of dangerous grey:

'Put yea by for another time

 In which I will not say thee nay.

He took me in his strong white arms,

 He bore me on his horse away

O'er crag, morass, and hairbreadth pass,

 But never asked me yea or nay.

He made me fast with book and bell,

With links of loves he makes me stay;

Till now I’ve neither heart nor power

Nor will nor wish to say him nay                   (From “Love from the North”, Stanza 1,6,7, 8)

In the poem, Rossetti describes how a “strong man from the north” takes a bride with his “strong white arms” without asking her “nay or yay”. Eventually, his strength leaves her without any “will nor wish” to take a decision, suggesting her loss of power regarding her own person’s future. The burning desire within her soul, in “soft south land”, therefore becomes colder as she loses “heart” and “power”, again displaying the fire and cold imagery seen earlier and reinforcing how soulless she becomes. Indeed, barely nothing remains of a fire’s soul if it is cold.

 Coming back to “A Triad”, the third woman is the second to die as “one famished died for love”. Unable to find love, she, like the woman in “From The Antique”, accepts death as the way to alleviate the pain of being a woman in Victorian Britain. Looking back at the whole poem, the sonnet form works towards the thematic meaning of deceptive love. The sonnet is the ideal form for a love poem, the one that Shakespeare uses, but there is a contrast between this form that hints at an ideal and the content that destroys the hope of a perfect love. Rossetti’s use of the sonnet form suggests that, as the three women of the poem exemplify, love is but a false promise of escape. Her rather unconventional use of the sonnet, the unusual volta and the ABABBCBCEFEFEF rhyme scheme that is nor Petrarchan nor Shakespearian, might first seem uncanny, but Rossetti thereby ties in with what Gilbert and Gubar’s Mad Woman in the Attic explains. Women are “locked into male texts, texts from which they [can] escape only through ingenuity and indirection” (Gilbert and Gubar 83). Interestingly then, Rossetti’s particular use of the sonnet is her way to escape these “male texts”, as sonnets were brought in England by a male, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and widely popularised by Shakespeare with his “A Lover’s Complaint”. Consequently, Rossetti alters a well-established poetic form to express the misery of her sex’s condition which demonstrates the transgressive aspect of her poetry, but that will be developed later in this article. Though a literary escape from patriarchal Victorian Britain seems possible, “From the Antique” already showed the impossibility of escaping women’s “weary” lives, except via death. By dismissing love as a possible solution, “A Triad” heads towards the same direction[1]. Moreover, love leaves the three women of the poem “short of life”, suggesting that choosing another option than dying ultimately leads to it. To use her own words: “Love, strong as Death, is dead” (Line 1 of “An End”). If Rossetti proposes an escape towards after life, it is notably because, as Sharon Smulders notes, she sees there an “essential equality” (Smulders 570).

[1] Interestingly, Rossetti, who was an Anglo Catholic, rejected the promise of love herself for a religious reason as she eventually turned down James Collinson proposal because of his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

Illustration of her famous "Goblin Market" by Florence Harrison

3.   What is there after this awaited death?

In poems such as “Somewhere or Other” or “Paradise in A Dream”, Rossetti expands on her conclusion of seeing heaven as the ultimate escape from earthly suffering by dwelling upon the representation of heaven and by emphasising its recomforting nature. Indeed, she portrays it as a place accessible from anywhere on earth and full of a flourishing nature.

Similarly to “A Triad”, the first poem explores in its first stanza how marriage leaves a woman full of regrets:

Somewhere or other there must surely be

The face not seen, the voice not heard,

The heart that not yet—never yet—ah me!

Made answer to my word.                             (From “Somewhere or Other”, stanza 1)

The speaker longs for a place where “[t]he heart […] not yet […] [m]ade answer to my word”, expressing the disappointment she feels after following, “ah me!”, the desire of her heart, symbolically love. Therefore, she desires to be “somewhere or other”.  

Somewhere or other, may be near or far;

Past land and sea, clean out of sight;

Beyond the wandering moon, beyond the star

That tracks her night by night.                            (From “Somewhere or Other”, stanza 2)

She turns towards a place “out of sight” and “beyond the wandering moon”, “far or near” that can offer her some peace. Evidently, this place, seemingly timeless and unable to be located, is heaven as like the previous paragraphs explain, Rossetti portrays it as the solution Victorian women’s plight. At the level of proxemics, it is a high place “beyond” the moon which locates it high in the sky, a feature also mentioned in the poem “Up-hill” where “the road wind up-hill all the way”, and where “comfort” is eventually found. Furthermore, it is a place from which the poem’s second voice, from the second stanza, can observe the voice of the first and third ones. Indeed, the “me” turns into a “her” suggesting that this “me” is in the second stanza subject to someone else’s glance. Then, however, the “me” voice returns as the second stanza’s “near or far” becomes “far or near” as if it were uttered by someone else. In this case, the interplay between the two voices suggests an unearthly presence in the poem, which also appears in “Up-hill” where the traveller’s anxieties are appeased by a Godlike figure who knows about heaven.  If this place is unlocatable on earth, “beyond land and sea”, it is notably because death can happen at any moment, unexpectedly, and heaven can therefore be accessed from anywhere.

Somewhere or other, may be far or near;

With just a wall, a hedge, between;

With just the last leaves of the dying year

Fallen on a turf grown green.                              (From “Somewhere or Other”, stanza 3)

Furthermore, the place in “Somewhere or Other” is associated with dead people as “leaves”, a metaphor for deceased individuals, “[fell] on a turf grown green”. This metaphor is, in “A Better Resurrection”, conveyed via a simile as the speaker’s “life is like a faded leaf” and where she asks, “O Jesus” to “quicken [her]”:

I have no wit, no words, no tears;

My heart within me like a stone

Is numb'd too much for hopes or fears;

Look right, look left, I dwell alone;

I lift mine eyes, but dimm'd with grief

No everlasting hills I see;

My life is in the falling leaf:

O Jesus, quicken me.                (From “A Better resurection”, stanza 1)

Paradoxically, the leaves fall, while heaven is high in the sky. This paradox underscores the duality or Rossetti’s Christian understanding of death. The leaves symbolise the body and the bodily, impure and bound to remain on earth, while the soul, her “life” ascends, like in “Up-hill”, to heaven. In a very Christian fashion then, Rossetti’s poetry therefore highlights that spiritual existence, the soul, is to be separated from earthly existence, the flesh and that this soul is eventually released from its earthly pain as it reaches heaven.

Like the leaf metaphor already foreshadows, Rossetti’s heaven is full of a flourishing nature, like in “Paradise in A Dream” where the speaker sees “the flowers /  [t]hat bud and bloom in Paradise” and where a “River flow[s] […] between a mossy” thus green “land” and where branches are “many leaved”:

I saw the fourfold River flow, 

And deep it was, with golden sand; 

It flowed between a mossy landWith murmured music grave and low.

It hath refreshment for all thirst, 

For fainting spirits strength and rest:

Earth holds not such a draught as this     

From east to west.                                      (from “Paradise in a Dream”, stanza 3)

Keeping the poet’s strong religious faith in mind, the earthly paradise of the garden of Eden automatically comes to mind as the fuel for her imagination. It is a place described as very fertile, green and full of vegetation where “all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food” (Genesis 2:9). If the poems mentioned in this section envision Adam and Eve’s Garden of Eden as the paradise it is because the two places “may be” similar: “I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God” (Revelation 2:7). Similarly, Rossetti’s dreamed paradise also contains “the Tree of life […] abundant with its twelvefold fruits”:

The Tree of Life stood budding there, 

Abundant with its twelvefold fruits; 

Eternal sap sustains its roots,

Its shadowing branches fill the air.

Its leaves are healing for the world, 

Its fruit the hungry world can feed,

Sweeter than honey to the taste     

And balm indeed.                                                (from “Paradise in a Dream”, stanza 4)

Furthermore, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “scriptures speak of [heaven] in images [only]”, because it is “beyond all understanding and description” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1027)[3] (Rossetti adhered to High Catholicism (later Anglo Catholicism) which differed from Roman Catholicism. Although the CCC represent the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, this applies to the present case. Indeed, the two doctrines oppose themselves regarding church and papal authority or the role of Mary but nothing seems to repudiate the idea that they both envision paradise as a place difficult to imagine). Her heaven is what Timothy Morton would label as a hyper object then. Consequently, the closest that one can get to being able to conceive what paradise looks like is by imagining it as in some way similar to the Garden of Eden, which is why Rossetti’s poems picture it as having a vibrant natural environment. It is also the case in “Dream Land”, a poem with a very revealing title, where “Led by a single star”, the poetic narrator arrives at a place where “water springs” and where the speaker has a “[s]leep that no pain shall wake”.

Thus, through poetic imagery, Christina Rossetti’s poetry describes heaven, the place of “essential equality” accessed through death, as potentially everywhere, high and with fertile vegetation. From an eco-critical point of view then, the place of ultimate solace found in her work seems to be full of a flamboyant nature, reaffirming Mother Nature’s power but also placing Rossetti within a long tradition of British nature poets such as Margaret Cavendish or even the Romantic poet William Wordsworth and his pantheistic description of the non-human other (although she is not widely included in discussion concerning Romanticism, Rossetti surely shares some similarities with Romantic writers. Not only in her use of nature, but also in her religious belief that she tends to subjectively and intimately describe like in “A Better Resurrection” (see point 4.2)).

The heavenly place that some of her poems discuss surely looks very appealing but when she writes, Rossetti is still trapped on earth where Victorian women have the “lowest place”. What I will now explore in the coming paragraph is Christina Rossetti’s ambiguous stance on the moral justification of women’s disadvantaged societal position.

4.  Towards acceptance of women’s tragic faith?

4.1 A Religiously Motivated Acceptance:

Rossetti’s emphasis on Divine love illuminates her religiously motivated acceptance of women’s low societal position, as described in “From The Antique”, which explains why the poet imagines death as the ultimate escape. As the poem also explores, this position is hard to endure, but a belief in God seems to justify women’s suffering. Like Spaise points out in his article, Rossetti’s religious belief explains the acceptance of the gender dynamics of her time that can be inferred from her poetry (Spaise 52). Indeed, one can read “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence” (Thimothy 2:12). Quite surprisingly, in “The Lowest Place”, the voice of the poem first appears as surprisingly assertive: “[g]ive me the lowest place”:

“[g]ive me the lowest place”:

Give me the lowest place: not that I dare  

Ask for that lowest place, but Thou hast died

That I might live and share  

Thy glory by Thy side.Give me the lowest place: or if for me  

That lowest place too high, make one more low

Where I may sit and see  

My God and love Thee so.                                       (“The Lowest Place” )

Nevertheless, this is paradoxical as the authoritarian tone of the command, reiterated in the second stanza, is counterbalanced by the very request it creates. It shows both agency and submission: the voice orders using an imperative form, requests to be put in a position, but in a position of inferiority where she “may sit and see [m]y God and love Thee so”. Evidently, her longing for “the lowest place” stems from the voice’s religious belief as, to quote another example from The Bible, God says the following to Eve: “your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” (Genesis 3:16). The biblical narrative therefore justifies why Rossetti’s females seem to accept their position in Victorian society, because it is what God wants. In the same vein, “A Christmas Carol” also presents a character ready to do everything to please God: “[w]hat can I give Him, [p]oor as I am […] [g]ive my heart”. “Heart” should be understood both as the voice’s most treasured possession and as a symbol of her devotion, suggesting that spiritual richness offsets material poverty through unwavering faith in God. Victorian women might have little to no right, but having faith is what makes them rich and rich enough to endure their lives as religion offers the promise of death and heaven. In “Summer is Ended”, Rossetti touches upon this “end” that comes “sooner, later, at last” and that “nothing can mar”, suggesting both its inevitability and the poet’s romanticized idealisation of dying:

To think that this meaningless thing was ever a rose,   

Scentless, colourless, this!  

Will it ever be thus (who knows ?)      

Thus with our bliss,  If we wait till the close?

Tho' we care not to wait for the end, there comes the end      

Sooner, later, at last,  

Which nothing can mar, nothing mend:      

An end locked fast,  Bent we cannot re-bend.                                  (“Summer Ended”)

Furthermore, “Endure Hardness” similarly elaborates on the consoling strength provided by the promise of heaven, expressing resilience achieved through faith:

A cold wind stirs the blackthorn

To burgeon and to blow,

Besprinkling half-green hedges

With flakes and sprays of snow.

Through coldness and through keenness,

Dear hearts, take comfort so:

Somewhere or other doubtless

These make the blackthorn blow.                                                  (“Endure Hardness”)

Indeed, “somewhere or other doubtless”, an intertextual reference to her own poem discussed in section 3, “the blackthorn blow[s]”, suggesting that the promise of heaven offers a solace and therefore explains the speaker’s resilience regarding the endured hardness. Building upon the previous paragraph’s analysis, the place where black thorns blossom is abundantly vegetated heaven, therefore portraying God’s nature as a force offering solace, mixing religious and ecocritical themes.

 Finally, the best example of Rossetti’s religiously motivated acceptance of women’s status is probably to be found in her novella Maude. As Gilbert and Gubar remark, Rossetti invents Maude, a sort of alter ego, who eventually willingly dies, showing that the “competitive” and “self-assertive poet” must die and “be replaced by either the wife [or] the nun” (Gilbert and Gubar 552), again justifying the epistemic interpretation of “should” that concludes “From the Antique” (see end of section 1). If Maude dies of an almost absurd death in a “strange cab accident”, Gilbert and Gubar suggest, it is because her attempt at being a poet is the ultimate female sin of vanity (Gilbert and Gubar 552). Consequently, Maude’s literary emancipation does not suit God nor the religious Rossetti who decides to kill Maude. The English writer might be considered cruel but just like the I voice in “A Bruise Reed Shall He Not Break”, Rossetti’s alter-ego must “accept […] [God’s] hatred and intolerance of sin”:

I will accept thy will to do and be, Thy hatred and intolerance of sin, Thy will at least to love, that burns within   And thirsteth after Me:So will I render fruitful, blessing still, The germs and small beginnings in thy heart, Because thy will cleaves to the better part.—   Alas, I cannot will.                                      (from “A Bruise Reed Shall He Not Break” stanza 1)

 Following Rossetti’s poems, the position of Victorian women, that offers but a “weary life”, is therefore compensated and explained by their religious belief. They can find solace in the thought that it is God’s will that is behind their inferiority and that their salvation will be the result of their devotion: “she shall be saved in (…) holiness with sobriety’ (Timothy 2:15). Moreover, living in accordance with God’s will opens the doors of the wonderful and soothing paradise discussed earlier. Hence, Rossetti presents death, rather than rebellion and defiance, as the mean through which women may escape feminine misery. Nevertheless, Rossetti’s apparent acceptance is perhaps, as the next paragraph discusses, a “protective camouflage” (Gilbert and Gubar 582) that hides the rebellion and feminist component of her poetry.

4.2        A Rebellion?

Christina Rossetti’s work, especially the same religious theme that justifies acceptance, also subtly invites a rebellion against women’s subjugation, thus embodying John Keats’s concept of negative capability, where opposite ideas can coexist. Indeed, Rossetti’s women’s passivity is not only a sign of subordination, but also as a token of religious devotion that enables them to transcend their position. Rossetti’s rejection of the traditional sonnet in “A Triad” (see section 2) reinforces the content of the poem that opposes itself to an earthly love, because it brings marriage which objectifies women. Nevertheless, she still strongly bases the poem on a sonnet which shows her conflicted, perhaps contradictory, thoughts. What she does with the sonnet, she also does with The Bible as Rossetti’s religiously devoted poems simultaneously show acceptance of their status, as the previous paragraph demonstrates, and rebellion. Firstly, Rossetti shows women who transcend their object status by their faith, turning their passivity into an active martyr like suffering. In poems such as “The Lowest Place”, the poetic voice’s passive acceptance of her situation permits her to get closer to “Thee”, “My God” and therefore spiritually grow towards a more intimate relationship with her Creator. In “A Better Resurrection”, she imagines herself as “a broken bowl” that must be “remoulded[ed] till it be a royal cup for Him, my King: O Jesus”, suggesting a closer link, spiritually and physically, with Christ. In other words, women’s inexistence in debates regarding the development of the world (Victorian women cannot vote) becomes the very source of their spiritual quest towards a stronger and more developed relationship with God and Christ.

Furthermore, in “Goblin Market”, Rossetti reworks Eve’s fall and presents men as responsible for it. The first stanza directly shows the aggressivity and harassment of “goblin men”, suggesting that it this they who entice Laura, symbolically Eve, to sin.

Morning and evening

Maids heard the goblins cry:

“Come buy our orchard fruits,

Come buy, come buy:

Apples and quinces,

Lemons and oranges,

Plump unpeck’d cherries,

Melons and raspberries,

Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches,

Swart-headed mulberries,

Wild free-born cranberries,

Crab-apples, dewberries,

Pine-apples, blackberries,

Apricots, strawberries;—

All ripe together

In summer weather,—

Morns that pass by,

Fair eves that fly;

Come buy, come buy:

Our grapes fresh from the vine,

Pomegranates full and fine,

Dates and sharp bullaces,

Rare pears and greengages,

Damsons and bilberries,

Taste them and try:

Currants and gooseberries,

Bright-fire-like barberries,

Figs to fill your mouth,

Citrons from the South,

Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;

Come buy, come buy                                           (From “Goblin Market” lines 1-31)

They want to sell her fruits, which is strengthened by Rossetti’s enumeration of different sorts of fruits and the repetition of the “come buy” phrase, although she knows that she “must not look at” them. Eventually, after their many interpellations, she buys one and the goblins demand to be paid in a peculiar manner:

“Buy from us with a golden curl.”

She clipp’d a precious golden lock,

She dropp’d a tear more rare than pearl,

Then suck’d their fruit globes fair or red:

Sweeter than honey from the rock,

Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,

Clearer than water flow’d that juice;

She never tasted such before,

How should it cloy with length of use?

She suck’d and suck’d and suck’d the more

Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;

She suck’d until her lips were sore;

Then flung the emptied rinds away

But gather’d up one kernel stone,

And knew not was it night or day

As she turn’d home alone.                       (From “Goblin Market” lines 125-140)

They wish to be paid with a part of her body then, with “a golden curl”. The following verses make it quite clear that this physical transaction is in fact a metaphor for a sexual relation as Laura “sucked and sucked and sucked the more […] until her lips were sore”. Although Laura seemingly prostitutes herself, it is motivated and enforced by men, the goblins. They are the ones who lust for a bodily relationship and mischievously prey upon a young girl to fulfil their sexual appetite. Consequently, in her reworking of Eve’s fall, Rossetti frames Man as the true sinner whose thoughts lead to wander away from Christian behaviours. And because of her eating the fruit, Laura is about to die as she “knock[s] at death’s door” but is at last rescued by her sister Lizzie, suggesting the value of female sisterhood rather than religious belief. Indeed, Lizzie finds a way for Laura to heal from her “exceeding pain” by attacking the problem at its root and taking a fruit home to perform a sort of exorcism on Laura. To do so, Lizzie sacrifices herself by eating of the fruit, but the goblins want to preclude her from helping her sister:

One may lead a horse to water,

Twenty cannot make him drink.

Though the goblins cuff’d and caught her,

Coax’d and fought her,

Bullied and besought her,

Scratch’d her, pinch’d her black as ink,

Kick’d and knock’d her,

Maul’d and mock’d her,

Lizzie utter’d not a word;

Would not open lip from lip

Lest they should cram a mouthful in:

But laugh’d in heart to feel the drip

Of juice that syrupp’d all her face,

And lodg’d in dimples of her chin,

And streak’d her neck which quaked like curd.

At last the evil people,

Worn out by her resistance,

Flung back her penny, kick’d their fruit

Along whichever road they took,

Not leaving root or stone or shoot;

Some writh’d into the ground,

Some div’d into the brook

With ring and ripple,

Some scudded on the gale without a sound,

Some vanish’d in the distance.                            (From “Goblin Market” lines 422-446)

They start to “coax and f[i]ght her” but she resists, her rebellious feelings are stronger than their mischief and they are eventually “worn out by [her] resistance”. Now in possession of the fruit, she rushes home and, her mouth spread of the fruit, kisses Laura who shakes “with anguish, fear and pain” and whose “lips begin to scorch”.

Her lips began to scorch,

That juice was wormwood to her tongue,

She loath’d the feast:

Writhing as one possess’d she leap’d and sung,

Rent all her robe, and wrung

Her hands in lamentable haste,

And beat her breast.

Her locks stream’d like the torch

Borne by a racer at full speed,

Or like the mane of horses in their flight,

Or like an eagle when she stems the light

Straight toward the sun,

Or like a caged thing freed,

Or like a flying flag when armies run.

Swift fire spread through her veins, knock’d at her heart,

Met the fire smouldering there

And overbore its lesser flame;

She gorged on bitterness without a name:

Ah! fool, to choose such part

Of soul-consuming care!

Sense fail’d in the mortal strife:

Like the watch-tower of a town

Which an earthquake shatters down,

Like a lightning-stricken mast,

Like a wind-uprooted tree

Spun about,

Like a foam-topp’d waterspout

Cast down headlong in the sea,

She fell at last;

Pleasure past and anguish past,

Is it death or is it life?                                (From “Goblin Market” lines 493-523)

While this allows Laura to be saved, it is “life out of death”, it also symbolically suggests a rejuvenated Eve, saved by a female, whose biblical sin comes as a consequence not of her greed, but of men’s perverted minds.

Moreover, Rossetti thereby portrays feminine Christ figures whose suffering and marginalization critiques societal norms. As Simon Humphries points out, “Lizzie’s bravery should be read as a solemn Christlike self-sacrifice” (Humphries 394), thus highlighting how Rossetti portrays her miserable women as Christ figures. More broadly, her poetry often describes the Victorian woman as such, suggesting their utmost importance in a still religiously defined society. Just like Rossetti’s women, Jesus is marginalised “despised and rejected by men” and this marginalisation makes “acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3), like the women in “A Triad” or “From The Antique”. Then, in spite of his suffering, Jesus, like Rossetti’s women in “The Lowest Place” or “A Christmas Carol”, still obeys God until death: “he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:8). Through her poetry then, not only does Rossetti reclaim the spiritual significance of women by transcending passive acceptance through active religious devotion, but she also critiques the societal norms that confine them by rewriting Eve’s fall. Her revised version of the myth presents men as accountable for the original sin, and portrays women as Christ figures, inviting her contemporaries to rethink gender dynamics and rebel against societal structures of the Victorian period.

5.   Conclusion:

If Christina Rossetti’s poetry is still discussed today, it is not only because she poignantly renders Victorian women’s struggles, but also because it offers a realistically nuanced view, often oscillating between religious faith and feminist conscience. In “From The Antique”, Rossetti elaborates on the hopelessness of being a woman in a patriarchal society, suggesting death as the only viable path to end her misery. In the same vein, “A Triad” reflects upon the deceptiveness of love and marriage, as it eventually leads to the same conclusion. Rossetti’s poetry therefore readily rejects earthly solutions to women’s plight, envisioning divine love and the promises of heaven as the only answer to the “woman question”. This heaven is touched upon in “Somewhere or Other” or “Paradise in a Dream” where Rossetti envisions it as a sort of Eden. Moreover, as the thematic differences notably between “The Lowest Place” and “Goblin Market” exemplify, her poetry is torn between religious devotion and feminist tendencies but also seems to reconcile both. On the one hand, her work justifies Victorian women’s societal position by referring to the authority of The Bible, but on the other hand, this same faith evidently enables Rossetti’s female characters to reject this position. Ultimately, the moral tension present in Rossetti’s poetry reflects the complexity of the period and justifies her relevance for modern day readers as it keeps provoking reflection on gender, power and spirituality. More than that, her work stimulates readers’ empathy, which constitutes one of Romantic writer Percy Bysshe Shelley’s arguments in favour of literature in A Defence of Poetry. Indeed, the development of empathy is an essential step towards changing human relationships for the better. For all these reasons, Christina Rossetti’s poetry continues to deserve, and demands, serious attention.

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