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Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson: Intersections

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Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson: Intersections UNIVERSITY OF ZAGREB FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH GRADUATE PROGRAMME ENGLISH LITERATURE SECTION Mirna Čudić Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson: Intersections Graduation Thesis Supervisor: Professor Tatjana Jukić, Ph. D. 2013 CONTENTS I. Introduction ................................................................................................................... 3 II. Rossetti and Dickinson: historical and cultural background ....................................... 5 III. Crucial preoccupations: religiosity, death, transience, afterlife .................................. 7 3.1. Christina Rossetti and her self-assertion as a poetic subject ................................. 7 3.2. Biblical allegory, carnal sin, and grace in Rossetti’s narrative poems .................. 9 3.3. Bible as Victorian Codex echoed by the verses: between transience and afterlife ......................................................................................... 18 3.4. Emily Dickinson: poetic Self and paradoxes of marketing.................................. 21 3.5. Puritan Dickinson: between tradition and rebellion, transience and Transcendentalism ......................................................................................... 23 IV. Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 32 V. REFERENCES ............................................................................................................ 35 2 I. Introduction My graduation thesis will be centred upon analysing the recurring themes and motifs in the works of the two poetesses, one English and one American, both pertaining to the Victorian period: Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson. Their respective oeuvres feature a bitter awareness of the inevitable transience and vanity of all worldly pleasures caused by sin and decay burdening the fallen humanity, potently imbued with a poignant sense of longing for afterlife. The remarkable emergence of Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson, accompanied by the affirmation of other poetesses in Victorian Britain, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Laetitia Elizabeth Landon (Rosenblum, 1986: 12-13), is to be viewed within the framework of the 19th century’s renewed interest in female poetic creation, conditioned to a great extent by the reawakening of, as Dolores Rosenblum puts it, the “spectral presence” of the mythic Sappho, a poetess of ancient Greece: as if her melancholic lute, as well as her tragic, suicidal persona (Brown, 2006: 181) had returned to haunt female verses, in spite of the fact that no Victorian woman, unless classically educated (which was very rarely the case) was capable of reading her poetry in the original (1986: ix). Even though both Rossetti and Dickinson, with their predominant themes of human as opposed to divine love, transience as opposed to transcendence, obviously partook of the common Victorian legacy, each in her own unique personality, appeared to be conditioned to a significant degree by their respective cultural and geographical backgrounds, notwithstanding the symptomatic divergence between their religious convictions, i. e. Rossetti’s Protestantism, as well as her subsequent affinity to Anglo-Catholicism (Scheinberg, 2000: 164; Hill, 2005: 456), as contrasted to Dickinson’s Puritan Calvinism (Gelpi, 1971: 50, 55; Martin, 2002: 1), as will be further duly discussed in subsequent chapters. What is more, to both Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson Cynthia Scheinberg’s claim on Victorian poetry as “essentially linked to religion” could be rightly applied (2000, 164). 3 It is perhaps partially due to this denominational diversity, and partially to their distinct personalities, that there emerges a crucial divergence in their respective attitudes towards woman’s lot and suffering conditioned by the rigid conventions of patriarchal society in the Victorian Age. Rossetti, as sustained by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, embraces woe and suffering by adhering to the “aesthetics of renunciation” “as necessity’s highest and noblest virtue” (1979: 539, 564), or, to evoke Rosenblum’s syntagm, “poetry of endurance” (1986: 5), identifying herself, despite sporadic manifestations of weariness, in an enraptured surrender akin to mysticism, with Christ’s Passion, her several devotional poems featuring a profoundly intimate and confident dialogue with Christ. Dickinson, conversely, seems to outpour in her devotional verses either a spirit of rebellion to suffering, combined with “existential dramas” featuring a constant questioning of God’s will regarding her female woe and privation (White, 2002: 91), either a bitter, dejected resignation to pain and suffering, as part of divine decree and thus unavoidable (Humiliata, 1950: 148). The oeuvres of the two secluded poetesses seem to reveal, according to Dolores Rosenblum, each in its own right, a peculiar response to woman’s position in the predominantly patriarchal 19th century society, both in Britain (even though ruled by a female monarch), and in the rigidly Puritan New England. It is this Victorian decorum, as Rosenblum claims, that is simultaneously embraced and resisted by Christina Rossetti on one hand, as well as embodied and mocked by Emily Dickinson on the other (1986: xi). Furthermore, I will venture to argue that, unlike Dickinson’s disinterested detachment from the outside world, accompanied by her sense of aristocratic superiority (Erkilla, 2002: 23), Rossetti, however paradoxically, uses her strict adherence to the orthodoxy of faith proclaimed in her poetry, to resist and overtly fight rigid, often pitiless judgments of the Victorian society, reserved mainly for strayed women deemed beyond redemption, unmasking them as downright disregarding, even opposing, the essential commandment of Christian charity. 4 II. Rossetti and Dickinson: historical and cultural background In order to do justice to the artistic contribution of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894), one ought to take into account the peculiar historical circumstances which helped to mould her poetics. It is along these lines that I would like to situate her oeuvre in its proper historical, cultural, and religious context, so as to account for potent echoes of intertextuality in her verses. Christina Rossetti matured, both as a woman and artist, surrounded by an equally artistically inclined family: with John Polidori, her maternal grandfather, being a famous translator of Milton, her father Gabriele, an Italian immigrant and a prominent intellectual as well, and, last but not least, her brother, the celebrated painter and poet, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a pictorial school which drew inspiration from the Italian painting style preceding Raphael (Rosenblum, 1986: xii). Furthermore, Christina Rossetti, although baptised as an Anglican and brought up by her mother as such (Rosenblum, 1986: 29), in 1843 began to adhere strongly to the intensely catholicised liturgy (Anglo-Catholic or High Church rite) promoted by the Oxford Movement, led by John Henry Newman (later converting to Roman Catholicism), John Keble and Isaac Williams, also known as the Tractarians. It is the strong urge of the Movement to facilitate the return of the Church of England to the accentuated sacramentalism of the belief in Christ’s Real Presence in the Holy Eucharist, which came to permeate, as I intend to demonstrate, Rossetti’s poetry (D’Amico, Kent, 2006: 93, 96). What is more, the revival of female religious communities within the Tractarian Movement, after the Roman Catholic model, as Herbert Sussman argues, came to seriously threaten the masculine integrity of the Brotherhood (qtd. in Jukić, 2008: 26). Rossetti, therefore, even though largely contributing to the artistic life of the Brotherhood through her publications in the Germ magazine, came to be excluded from the male-centred society, even though it was to her poetry, among other things, that her brother and his peers owed their popularity. Moreover, Dante Gabriel Rossetti ventured to justify such a denial of the honorary membership as her voluntary withdrawal, although hailed by Algernon Swinburne as having “led, like Jael (the Old Testament heroine) their hosts to victory” (qtd. in Rosenblum, 1986: xii-xiii). It was precisely this exclusion of women, sisters as opposed to the brethren, which defined Christina Rossetti’s poetry as being, paradoxically enough, “produced within yet outside Pre-Raphaelitism”, or else within and yet outside of masculinity (Jukić, 2008: 24), insofar as the sisterhood of solidarity within Rossetti’s poetry, 5 cf. “there’s no friend like a sister”, (Goblin Market, 1862: 562, qtd. in Rosenblum, 1986: 83) proves crucial for the reputation of the Brotherhood. Christina Rossetti’s poetry or, as argued by Isobel Armstrong, Victorian female poetry in general, might thus be viewed as a sort of rereading the legacy of Romanticism: as almost an oxymoronic synthesis of Romantic sentimentalism and its repression by the strict tenets of Victorian morality, the Victorian society itself being uneasily concerned with the rapid changes in both economic and scientific area, accompanied by a dissipation of the Romantic ideals (1993: 6, 333). Rossetti’s verses appear to echo, apart from the Italian literary legacy of Dante, Petrarch and Tasso (which she both considered her own because of her ancestral homeland, and felt irrevocably alienated from (Rosenblum, 1986: 50), the influences of the
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