Rossetti Critical Notes
Victorian Interpretations:
Rossetti was a poet who was extremely celebrated in her own time. Victorian critics tended to celebrate her poetry for two reasons: firstly, as conjuring artistic and natural freedom, reflecting the Pre-Raphaelite movement as a whole. Secondly, Rossetti’s poems were seen as reinforcing Victorian moral and religious ideals (which modern critics may later interpret differently). These dual values were summed up by Alice Meynall in 1895: ‘how spiritual and how sensuous’.
Athenaeum review of Goblin Market (1862):
This review celebrated the organic beauty of the poems, but interpreted GM’s moral as ‘the reward of toil and duty’ – a typically Victorian assumption, as it ignores the patriarchal and capitalist dangers perceived by later critics.
‘To read these poems after the laboured and skilful [sic], but not original, verse which has been issued of late, is like passing from a picture gallery with its well-feigned semblance of nature, to the real nature out-of-doors which greets us with the waving grass and the pleasant shock of the breeze.’
‘Goblin Market’ has ‘an inner meaning for all who can deserve it … Lizzie, however, desires to pay for the dainties which her sister had taken as a gift: a subtle hint, we suppose, that the pleasures which are noxious when unearned may fairly be enjoyed as the reward of toil or duty.’
Saturday Review review of Goblin Market (1862):
Like the Athenaeum, this review celebrates the ‘labour’ of Rossetti’s work, but when it comes to GM it interprets the moral as ‘the cultivation of family affection and trust’ (again very Victorian, but ironic given R’s own rejection of this in her life).
‘It is a pleasure to meet an authoress who has obviously given such conscientious labor to the task she has set herself to accomplish, and who has succeeded so frequently’
‘It may be presumed to be in some sense or other an allegory. But what the allegory is … we cannot undertake to say’
‘Laura used to call their little ones round her, and tell them in sober seriousness of her own adventure and Lizzie’s devotion, as an inducement to the cultivation of family affection and trust. Where the moral inculcated is so excellent and proper, it may seem ungracious to complain of the unreal texture through which it is conveyed.’
Algernon Swinburne (not sure of date, quoted in Woolf’s ‘I am Christina Rossetti’)
‘I have always thought that nothing more glorious in poetry has ever been written’
Sir Walter Raleigh (lecturer, not the sixteenth-century explorer and statesman, writing in a letter in 1892):
At the end of Rossetti’s life, Raleigh celebrated the purity and emotiveness of her poetry.
‘I think she is the best poet alive...The worst of it is you cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water – it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures. The only thing that Christina makes me want to do, is cry, not lecture.’
Theodore Watts, ‘Reminiscences of Christina Rossetti’ (1895 – 1 year after R’s death):
In many tributes following her death, Rossetti’s poetic power was attributed to her piety.
Rossetti ‘seemed to breathe a sainthood that must needs express itself in poetry’
Her poetry was ‘the inspiration of the religious devotee’
Alexander Smellie, ‘Christina Rossetti and her message’ (1895 – 1 year after R’s death):
Rossetti’s ‘inspiration had its roots in her piety’
Ellen Proctor, ‘A brief memoir of Christina Rossetti’ (1895):
Proctor remembered asking R, ‘Are you Miss Rossetti? Did you really write Good Friday (“Am I a stone and not a sheep?”)’ – clearly Rossetti really was renowned most for her devotional poems!
Arthur Christopher Benson (1896 – 2 years after R’s death):
(https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/literary-analyses/the-poetry-of-christina-rossetti-a-19th-century-analysis/)
‘Her fervent religious faith, inspired and matured by desolate experience, had nothing dreary or undecided about it; it issued in a sedulous dutifulness and a patient devotion that were the best proof of its sincerity.’
‘There was a certain taint of doom about her writings from the first, and something of the hollow-eyed listlessness of low vitality.’
‘She does not sing as a caged bird, with exotic memories of freedom stirred by the flashing water, the hanging groundsel of her wired prison, but with a wild voice, with visions only limited by the rustic conventionalities of toil and tillage.’
‘Miss Rossetti’s poems are so passionately human a document as to set one tracing by a sort of inevitable instinct the secrets of a buoyant and tender soul, sharpened and refined by blow after blow of harsh discipline.’
‘As a rule, her thoughts of love are clouded by some dark sense of loss’
Modernist Interpretations:
Following scientific movements like Darwinism and social movements like feminism, the authority of the church was increasingly being questioned and modernism emerged in the early twentieth century with an emphasis on secularism, especially after the First World War. Interpretations from this era tended to relegate Rossetti’s faith and emphasise the artistic quality of her work.
Virginia Woolf, ‘A Writer’s Diary’ (1918):
‘It is melancholy reading. First she starved herself of love, which meant also life; then of poetry in deference to what she thought her religion demanded.’
‘Poetry was castrated too. she would set herself to do the psalms into verse; and to make all her poetry subservient to the Christian doctrines. Consequently, as I think, she starved into austere emaciation a very fine original gift, which only wanted licence to take to itself a far finer form than, shall we say Mrs. Browning's. She wrote very easily; in a spontaneous childlike kind of way one imagines, as is the case generally with a true gift; still underdeveloped. She has the natural singing power. She thinks too. She has fancy. One could say she is profane enough to guess, have been ribald and witty. And, as a reward for all her sacrifices, she died in terror, uncertain of salvation.’
Virginia Woolf, ‘I am Christina Rossetti’ (1930):
(https://www.literaturecambridge.co.uk/news/woolf-rossetti)
‘She dwelt in some curious region where the spirit strives towards an unseen God—in her case, a dark God, a harsh God – a God who decreed that all the pleasures of the world were hateful to Him.’
‘You had a keen sense of the visual beauty of the world’
‘Your eye, indeed, observed with a sensual pre-Raphaelite intensity that must have surprised Christina the Anglo-Catholic’
Feminist and Marxist Interpretations:
Feminist literary criticism grew out of second-wave feminism, originating in Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970). Through the next few decades, Rossetti’s poetry was reevaluated according to its value in expressing the female experience of the Victorian era. These often intersect with Marxist frameworks (e.g. Holt) and can intersect with queer readings (e.g. Mermin).
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979):
‘...the confinement of these women, a confinement that was inescapable for them even at their moments of greatest triumph, a confinement that was implicit in their secretness. This confinement was both literal and figurative. Literally, women like Dickinson, Bronte, and Rossetti were imprisoned in their homes, their father’s houses; indeed, almost all nineteenth-century women were in some sense imprisoned in men’s houses. Figuratively, such women were, as we have seen, locked into male texts, texts from which they could escape only through ingenuity and indirection. It is not surprising, then, that spatial imagery of enclosure and escape, elaborated with what frequently becomes obsessive intensity, characterizes much of their writing.’
‘Almost always, it seems, the veil is a symbol for women of their diminishment into spectral remnants of what they might have been. Therefore Christina Rossetti, whose role as a “model” made her extremely sensitive to her entrapment in male “frames,”- writes of more than one heroine whose “strength with weakness is overlaid ;/ Meek compliances veil her might”...’
Dorothy Mermin, ‘Heroic Sisterhood in Goblin Market’ (1983):
‘Goblin Market’ ‘is not a poem of bitter repression but rather a fantasy of feminine freedom, heroism, and self-sufficiency and a celebration of sisterly and maternal love. It is a dream or a vision of the Pre-Raphaelite world from a woman's point of view.’
‘Relationships between mothers and babies and between women, usually sisters, are central to her poems and stories, whereas men are generally peripheral or absent; often the relationship is the darker side of the sisterly coin, competitiveness and envy, but even then it is a source of dramatic excitement and energy. Marriage is seldom depicted as wholly desirable.’
‘Maude Clare is strong, proud, and bold, while a good wife is humble, unambitious, uncensorious, and loving, like Nell: virtues that most of Rossetti's speakers find almost impossible to attain and hard even to praise, although admitting that in fact they lead to happiness.’
‘A world of female potency and exclusively female happiness appears in Rossetti's works only covertly, as fantasy, and in clearly unrealistic modes: ballads, fairy tales, and legends of saints. Her lyrics generally keep to conventional lyric themes, and when women in her narrative poems lose or leave their lovers, religion is usually their only solace.’
Dolores Rosenblum, Christina Rossetti: The Poetry of Endurance (1986):
The motif of the dead lady (e.g. ‘Song’, ‘Remember’, ‘Echo’) in Rossetti ‘represents the female poet’s power to reclaim this image of herself from the male tradition’.
Sharon Leder and Andrea Abbott, The Language of Exclusion: The Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti (1987):
Rossetti and Dickinson were ‘public poets seriously engaging the major issues of their day’.
Rossetti ‘expressed [her] gender exclusion in historical, economic, and political terms’ and ‘embeds a radical, feminist critique of society’.
K. J. Mayberry, Christina Rossetti and the Poetry of Discovery (1989):
For Rossetti, ‘poetry must operate as an analogue of the ordered, moral universe that was the basis of Anglo-Catholic belief’.
For Rossetti, ‘poetry and prayer are virtually synonymous’.
Claims ‘Goblin Market’ argues that ‘selfless, devoted love is a wonderful, powerful force’.
‘The act of turning her experiences into poetry enabled Rossetti to achieve desperately needed distance from her difficult discoveries about the role of love in her life.’
Loss was ‘the well-spring of [her] creativity, and creativity a method of discovery.’
Rossetti provided a ‘social vision ... in which ... women [were] powerful and self-sufficient’ in a society ‘that makes an assertion of female independence more unthinkable than death’.
Terrence Holt, ‘“Men Sell Not Such in Any Town”: Exchange in Goblin Market’ (1990):
‘That the goblins are costermongers, economic creatures as well as sexual ones, suggests that sexual and economic systems of relation may intersect in other ways as well.’
‘The market is dangerous to maids, who belong safely at home.’
‘In Goblin Market, "sisters" become "wives" - become defined not in relation to other women but in relation to men.’ [Interesting comparison to ADH to be made, where wives (i.e. Nora) become sisters/human beings in relation to themselves (although Christine perhaps follows the Goblin Market paradigm more closely)]
Virginia Sickbert, ‘“Beloved Mother of Us All”: Christina Rossetti's Eve’ (1995):
Rossetti ‘ingeniously and rigorously interprets Scripture. She also raises Eve to a position of dignity, minimizing her sinfulness and her punishments and emphasizing her reward - the gift of giving life’.
BBC Radio 4 Adaptation (2020):
During Lockdown, BBC Radio 4 produced a radio dramatisation of ‘Goblin Market’ that interspersed Rossetti’s writing with recorded testimonies of two real-life sisters who had both been caught in cycles of substance abuse to explore the aspects of addiction in the poem, and the power of sisterhood to overcome it. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kwbs)
This is also present in scholarship, as Richard Walker argues that ‘the compulsive, repetitive nature of the addict is present in Laura's reiterated act of sucking’ (Labyrinths of Deceit, 2008).