Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T10:55:32.791Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

PRECARIOUS LIVES: CHRISTINA ROSSETTI AND THE FORM OF LIKENESS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2017

Ronjaunee Chatterjee*
Affiliation:
Loyola Marymount University

Extract

In its anonymous review of Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses (1874), the Academy notes rather hopelessly: “this will probably be one of the most popular children's books this winter. We wish we could understand it” (606). The reviewer – who later dwells on the “uncomfortable feeling” generated by this children's tale and its accompanying images – still counts as the most generous among the largely puzzled and horrified readership of Rossetti's story about three sets of girls experiencing violence and failure in their respective fantasy worlds (606). While clearly such dystopic plots are not out of place in Victorian literature about children, something about Rossetti's unusual narrative bothered her contemporaries. John Ruskin, for instance, bluntly wondered how Rossetti and Arthur Hughes, who illustrated the story, together could “sink so low” (qtd. in Auerbach and Knoepflmacher 318). In any case, the book still sold on the Christmas market, and a few months later, Rossetti would publish Annus Domini, a benign pocketbook of daily prayers that stands in stark contrast to the grim prose of Speaking Likenesses. It is therefore tempting to cast this work of children's fiction as a strange anomaly in Rossetti's oeuvre, which from the 1870s, beginning with Annus Domini, to her death in 1894, became almost exclusively dominated by devotional prose and poetry. In contrast, I argue in the following essay that Speaking Likenesses points to a widespread interest throughout Rossetti's writing – but especially in her most well-known poems from Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) and A Prince's Progress (1866) – in alternative modes of sociality that refract a conceptual preoccupation with likeness, rather than difference. Following traditions of critical thought that have paid increasing attention to relations that resist oppositional logic – Stephanie Engelstein and Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick's late work comes to mind here – I establish the primacy of a horizontal axis of similarity in both Speaking Likenesses and Rossetti's most canonical poem, “Goblin Market.” For Rossetti, the lure of similarity, or minimal difference, manifests itself most often in siblinghood and more specifically, sisterhood, the dominant kinship relation throughout her lyrics from Goblin Market and Other Poems. Sisterhood anchors the title poem I will examine in this essay, as well as shorter verses such as “Noble Sisters” and “Sister Maude.” At issue in such relations of likeness is the discreteness of a (typically) feminine self. For Rossetti, shunning oppositional structures of desire and difference that typically produce individuation (exemplified in the heterosexual couple form and the titles of her uneasy lyrics “He and She” and “Wife to Husband”) allows for a new (albeit perilous) space to carve out one's particularity as a gendered being.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Trans. Ashton, E. B.. New York: Continuum, 1973.Google Scholar
Alfano, Veronica.Remembering Christina Rossetti: Dead Women and the Afterlife of Lyric.” Feminist Studies in English Literature 17. 2 (2009): 540.Google Scholar
Arseneau, Mary, Anthony, H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts. Athens: Ohio UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Auerbach, Nina, and Knoepflmacher, U. C., eds. Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.Google Scholar
Battiscombe, Georgina. Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life. London: Constable, 1981.Google Scholar
Briggs, Julia. “Speaking Likenesses: Hearing the Lesson.” The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts. Ed. Mary Arseneau et al, 212–31.Google Scholar
Bristow, Joseph. “‘No Friend Like a Sister’?: Christina Rossetti's Female Kin.” Victorian Poetry 33.2 (1995): 257–81. Web. 4 March 2012.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. Antigone's Claim. New York: Columbia UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Carpenter, Mary Wilson. “‘Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me’: The Consumable Female Body in Christina Rossetti's ‘Goblin Market.’Victorian Poetry 29.4 (1991): 415–34. Web. 5 March 2012.Google Scholar
Carroll, Lewis. The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition. Ed. Gardner, Martin. 1960. Rpt. W. W. Norton: New York, 2000.Google Scholar
Casey, Janet Galligani. “The Potential of Sisterhood: Christina Rossetti's ‘Goblin Market.’Victorian Poetry 29.1 (1991): 6378. Web. 5 March 2012.Google Scholar
Cassin, Barbara, ed. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2014.Google Scholar
Chapman, Alison. The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti. New York: St. Martin's, 2000.Google Scholar
“Christmas Books.” Athenaeum 26 Dec. 1874: 877–78.Google Scholar
Conley, Susan. “‘Poet's Right’: Christina Rossetti as Anti-Muse and the Legacy of the ‘Poetess.’Victorian Poetry 32.3/4 (1994): 365–86. Web. 24 March 2012.Google Scholar
Connor, Steven. “‘Speaking Likenesses’: Language and Repetition in Christina Rossetti's ‘Goblin Market.’Victorian Poetry 22.4 (1984): 439–48. Web. 3 March 2012.Google Scholar
Corbett, Mary Jean. Family Likenesses. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008.Google Scholar
“Current Literature: Speaking Likenesses.” Academy 5 Dec. 1874: 606.Google Scholar
D'Amico, Diane. Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender, and Time. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1999.Google Scholar
D'Amico, Diane, and Kent, David A.. “Rossetti and the Tractarians.” Victorian Poetry 44.1 (2006): 93103. Web. 27 March 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Despotopoulou, Anna. “Nowhere or Somewhere? (Dis)Locating Gender and Class Boundaries in Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses .” Review of English Studies 61.250 (2009): 414–34.Google Scholar
Engelstein, Stefani. “Civic Attachments and Sibling Attractions: The Shadow of Fraternity.” Goethe Yearbook 18 (2011): 205–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engelstein, Stefani. “Sibling Logic; or, Antigone Again.” PMLA 126.1 (Jan. 2011): 3854.Google Scholar
Elizabeth, Jay, ed. The Evangelical and Oxford Movements. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.Google Scholar
François, Anne-Lise. Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience. Stanford: Standford UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1959.Google Scholar
Rev. of Goblin Market and Other Poems . British Quarterly Review 36 (July 1862): 230–31.Google Scholar
Gray, Erik. “Faithful Likenesses: Lists of Similes in Milton, Shelley, and Rossetti.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48.4 (2006): 291311.Google Scholar
Hassett, Constance W. Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2005.Google Scholar
Helsinger, Elizabeth K.Consumer Power and the Utopia of Desire: Christina Rossetti's ‘Goblin Market.’ELH 58.4 (1991): 903–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holt, Terrence. “‘Men Sell Not Such in Any Town’: Exchange in Goblin Market.” Victorian Poetry 28.1 (1990): 5167.Google Scholar
Hu, Esther T.Christina Rossetti, John Keble, and the Divine Gaze.” Victorian Poetry 46.2 (2008): 175–89.Google Scholar
Humphries, Simon. “The Uncertainty of Goblin Market.” Victorian Poetry 45.4 (2007): 391413.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Janzen Kooistra, Lorraine. Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History. Athens: Ohio UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Jones, Kathleen. Learning Not to Be First: The Life of Christina Rossetti. Moreton-in-Marsh: Windrush, 1991.Google Scholar
Kaston, Andrea J.Speaking Pictures: The Fantastic World of Christina Rossetti and Arthur Hughes.” Journal of Narrative Technique 28.3 (1998): 305–28. Web. 2 March 2012.Google Scholar
Katz, Wendy R.Muse from Nowhere: Christina Rossetti's Fantasy World in Speaking Likenesses .” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 5. 1 (Nov. 1984): 1435. Web. 4 March 2012.Google Scholar
Knoepflmacher, U. C.Avenging Alice: Christina Rossetti and Lewis Carroll.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 41. 3 (1986): 299328. Web. 6 March 2012.Google Scholar
Lacan, Jacques. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne. Ed. Mitchell, Juliet and Rose, Jacqueline. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. New York: W. W. Norton and Pantheon Books, 1985.Google Scholar
Lysack, Krista. “Goblin Markets: Victorian Women Shoppers at Liberty's Oriental Bazaar.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 27 (June 2005): 139–65.Google Scholar
MacCannell, Juliet Flower. The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy. London: Routledge, 1991.Google Scholar
Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Marsh, Jan. “Christina Rossetti's Vocation: The Importance of ‘Goblin Market.’Victorian Poetry 32. 3/4 (1994): 233–48. Web. 4 April 2012.Google Scholar
Mason, Emma. “Christina Rossetti and the Doctrine of Reserve.” Journal of Victorian Culture 7 (2002): 198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGann, Jerome J. “Christina Rossetti's Poems: A New Edition and a Revaluation.” Victorian Studies 23. 2 (1980): 237–54. Web. 13 March 2012.Google Scholar
Mendoza, Victor Roman. “‘Come Buy’: The Crossing of Sexual and Consumer Desire in Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market .” ELH 73. 4 (2006): 913–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mermin, Dorothy. “Heroic Sisterhood in ‘Goblin Market.’” Victorian Poetry 21.2 (1983): 107–18. Web. 20 Jan. 2017.Google Scholar
Michie, Helena. The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Michie, Helena. “‘There Is No Friend Like a Sister’: Sisterhood as Sexual Difference.” ELH 56. 2 (1989): 401–21. Web. 10 March 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michie, Helena. Sororophobia: Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Juliet. Siblings: Sex and Violence. Cambridge: Polity, 2003.Google Scholar
Norton, Caroline. “‘The Angel in the House’ and ‘Goblin Market.’Macmillian's Magazine 8 (Sept. 1863): 398404.Google Scholar
Packer, Lona Mosk. Christina Rossetti. Berkeley: U of California P, 1963.Google Scholar
Packer, Lona Mosk, Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, and Macmillan, Alexander, eds. The Rossetti-Macmillan Letters. Berkeley: U of California P, 1963.Google Scholar
Palazzo, Lynda. Christina Rossetti's Feminist Theology. New York: Palgrave, 2002.Google Scholar
Rappoport, Jill. Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Rappoport, Jill. “The Price of Redemption in ‘Goblin Market.’” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 50.4 (Autumn 2010): 853–75. Web. 3 May 2012.Google Scholar
Reynolds, Margaret. “Speaking Un-likeness: the double text in Christina Rossetti's ‘After Death’ and ‘Remember.’Textual Practice 13.1 (1999): 2541. Web. 4 March 2012.Google Scholar
Roe, Dinah. Christina Rossetti's Faithful Imagination. New York: Palgrave, 2006.Google Scholar
Rogers, Scott. “Re-Reading Sisterhood in Christina Rossetti's ‘Noble Sisters’ and ‘Sister Maude.’” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 43:4 (2003): 859–75. Web. 5 June 2012.Google Scholar
Rossetti, Christina. Commonplace and Other Short Stories. London: F. S. Ellis, 1870.Google Scholar
Rossetti, Christina. The Complete Poems. Ed. Crump, Rebecca W. and Flowers, Betty S.. London: Penguin, 2005.Google Scholar
Rossetti, Christina. Poems and Prose. Ed. Humphries, Simon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Rossetti, William Michael, ed. The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti. New York: Scribners, 1969.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky. Tendencies. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Sickbert, Virginia. “Christina Rossetti and Victorian Children's Poetry: A Maternal Challenge to the Patriarchal Family.” Victorian Poetry 31.4 (1993): 385410. Web. 4 March 2012.Google Scholar
Smulders, Sharon. “Sound, Sense, and Structure in Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song .” Children's Literature 22.1 (1994): 326. Web. 4 March 2012.Google Scholar
Watson, Jeanie. “‘Men Sell Not Such in Any Town’: Christina Rossetti's Goblin Fruit of Fairy Tale.” Children's Literature 12.1 (1984): 6177. Web. 3 March 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weathers, Winston. “Christina Rossetti: The Sisterhood of Self.” Victorian Poetry 3.2 (1965): 8189. Web. 3 March 2012.Google Scholar
Woolf, Virginia. The Second Common Reader. Ed. McNeillie, Andrew. New York: Harcourt, 1986.Google Scholar
Zaturenska, Marya. Christina Rossetti, a Portrait with Background. New York: Macmillan, 1949.Google Scholar